Ancient Egyptian God as Many Gods

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Variant, individual forms of the sun god Ra from "litany of Ra"
inscribed in New Kingdom tombs exemplify the differentiating
aspect of Egyptian theology. 18th Dynasty. Tomb of
Tuthmosis III, Valley of the Kings, Western Thebes. Egypt.

In the Egyptian texts the gods are often said to be 'rich in names', and the multiplicity of names (and therefore manifestations) exhibited by individual deities provides an important example of the prin­ciple whereby one god may be seen as many. In the New Kingdom text known as the Litany of Re the solar god is identified in 'all his evolutions' as 75 different deities - including not only common forms of the sun but also female deities such as Isis and Nut. Osiris received prayers and litanies of praise under many names, and the mythological story explaining how his body was torn into pieces and scattered throughout Egypt provides an exam­ple of how one god could become many. Yet this example is unique and such a physical explanation for multiple instances and locations of a deity was not necessary for the
application of the principle. In the Ptolemaic temple of Edfu we find that the goddess Hathor is represented by as many forms as there are days in the year (and each of these is actually named as two variant forms), but there seems to have been no mythic backdrop to this sit­uation which would have required the Egyptians to posit many independent forms of the goddess. Perhaps the ultimate example of the multiplicity of divine names is to be found in the great god Amun, who was given so many names that the number was said to be unknowable.

Another aspect of the multiple names of individual Egyptian gods can be seen in those cases where a given deity was regarded as the ba or manifestation of another. Of the god Khnum, for example, it was often said that he was the "ba of Ra" or of Osiris and so on, so that a given deity was not only associated with another, but also took further names and identities in this manner. As several scholars have pointed out, the form, name and epithets of Egyptian deities seem to have been variable almost at will, and are often interchangeable with those of other deities. But while it could be argued that in almost all these cases the various names and manifestations of deities are simply forms of the same underlying god or goddess, individual deities were manifest in often increasingly diverse ways showing a basic Egyptian predilection for the concept of one god as many.

From The Complete Egyptian Gods and Goddesses

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