The Ennead

The Ennead ('the Nine') are the nine great gods of Heliopolis, the divine family through which the Egyptians told the origin of the world. From the self-created Atum came Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture); from them Geb (earth) and Nut (sky); and from these the four protagonists of the Osiris myth — Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys.

This genealogy, descending from a single source through successive generations to the gods who touch the human world, gave Egypt a structured theogony — a procession of the divine from the One toward the many that the Greek theologians, from Hesiod's Theogony to the Neoplatonists, would recognize in their own systems.