A listener's guide to Egyptian mythology

Ra. Isis. Anubis. The names may be familiar. Their stories give you more to follow: families, rivalries, and different accounts of how the world began.

Meet the gods through their stories. This listening guide gives you a place to begin and a way to follow the connections between them.

Start with the cosmology before the gods

Egyptian mythology does not have a single creation story. It has several, depending on the temple you visited. That is a feature, not a bug.

The Heliopolis tradition starts with Atum rising out of the waters of Nun. Atum sneezes Shu and Tefnut into existence. They produce Geb and Nut. Geb and Nut produce Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. That family is the engine for the next two thousand years of stories.

The Memphite tradition has Ptah speaking the world into being. The Hermopolitan tradition has eight gods in pairs swimming in the dark before anything else. Pick a tradition. They all work.

The names you already know, and what they actually do

Ra is the sun god, yes, but the more interesting fact about Ra is that he goes underground every night and fights a serpent to come back at dawn. The boat of millions of years carries him through twelve hours of darkness. The whole solar disc is a daily contest.

Osiris is the god of resurrection. His brother Set kills him. His wife Isis searches for the pieces. She finds all but one and conceives Horus from the missing parts. That single arc is the load-bearing myth of the whole pantheon. Once you have heard it the rest of Egyptian myth makes sense.

Isis is the most important goddess in the world by the end of the Ptolemaic period. Her cult travels to Rome, to Britain, to every corner of the Mediterranean. The grieving wife who reassembles her husband becomes the model for a kind of religious devotion you can still find traces of in modern faiths.

Set is a complicated villain. He is the god of storms and the desert and the outside. Sometimes he is a defender of Ra. Sometimes he is the murderer of Osiris. The Egyptians lived with this contradiction for centuries without resolving it.

Anubis is not actually the god of death. He is the god of embalming. He prepares the body so it can move into the next world. The job is more dignified than the museum signage tends to suggest.

The afterlife is the part most listeners want

The weighing of the heart is the most famous Egyptian story you have probably never heard told in full. Your heart is placed on a scale opposite the feather of Ma'at, the goddess of truth and balance. If your heart is heavier, Ammit eats it. If it balances, you proceed to the field of reeds.

The field of reeds is what most Egyptians actually pictured when they pictured paradise. It looked like Egypt. There were rivers, fields, and family. The Egyptian afterlife was not exotic. It was a continuation of the life you had.

The Book of the Dead is not a book. It is a collection of spells written on papyrus and tucked into a tomb. Every spell is a key for a different door on the way through. Listening to selections is more like hearing a prayer book than reading a narrative.

The figures you should follow next

Hathor is the goddess of love, music, and the sky. She is older than most of the rest. She is sometimes the daughter of Ra and sometimes his lover and sometimes his eye. Pantheons rarely have a figure who folds in this many ways.

Thoth is the god of writing and wisdom and the moon. He keeps the records. He stands beside Ma'at at the weighing of the heart and takes notes. He is the god you would want as a witness.

Bastet is the cat goddess, but the older version of Bastet is a lion goddess and a fierce one. The pet-friendly version is the polished form, not the original.

How to listen your way through it

Egyptian myth rewards the listener who follows the family. Start with the Osiris arc. Then the figures who circle him. Then the cosmologies. Then the afterlife. By the end you have a working map of three thousand years of religious life and you have not opened a single textbook.

Use this guide to choose a listening order, then search HearLore for the figures that interest you. Isis, Horus and Set are one suggested route through the mythology. The app does not automatically queue those figures in that order. Add available stories to a playlist if you want to follow your own sequence.

A quieter thought

The Egyptian pantheon outlived most of the cultures that came after it. It is still the pantheon people get tattoos of, dress as for Halloween, name their cats after. There is a reason. The stories are good. Find a quiet hour and start with the figure you want to know more about.

Follow the story.