Egyptian Deities (Blogpost #6)

A god is described as a supernatural being and the principal object of faith that is being worshiped by people.  There are three different concepts on how people see a God and these are theism, deism and pantheism. In Theism, God is realistic on human thought, God created everything, God is eternal and God can help humans through prayers. Deism believes that God created the universe but is not answer prayers or is not aware of humanity. In Pantheism, God is the universe or God is the universe itself. Even though there are three concepts of a God there are many who have developed arguments against the existence of God.

Egyptian Deities are gods and goddesses worshiped by the ancient Egyptians. Deities represent their religion and natural forces, the Egyptians supported them through offerings and rituals to continue the function of these deities. Their gods were believed to exist throughout the world and are capable of influencing natural events and human lives. Egyptians would pray to them for help and do rituals or call upon them for advice. A list of major gods and goddesses is included in the article Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt by N.S Gill from ancienthistory.about.com.

Gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt looked partly like humans and some deities had animal features like a cat or a lion. An example is Anubis, the god has a head of a jackal and his task is to weigh the heart of the soul against a light feather.

 Another is Bast or Bastet, the god of cats who is described to have a feminine body with a head of a cat.

Next is Bes, who has an appearance of a dwarf sticking out his tongue and was a protector god of childbirth and fertility. He was a guardian against snaked and misfortunes. 


Geb or Keb, the god of earth, laid the egg from which the sun was hatched and was known as the Great Crackler because the goose was Geb's sacred animal. His laughter was believed to cause the earthquakes and he was often shown witnessing the heart during the judgement.

Hathor was known as the music and cow-goddess, she has horns of a cow and a sun disk.

Neith was drawn like a weaver and she is a weapon-bearing war goddess. She wears a red crown and a mortuary god connected to the woven bandages of the mummy.

Isis, wife of Osiris, the goddess of the dead and magic who is associated with life, the winds, heavens, beer and abundance.

There were a lot of gods that were not mentioned just like the god of destruction, Sekhmet, who has a head of a lion. Another is Nut the god of sky and Seth, god of the desert, who has an animal head with long curved snout.

Gods complete the belief of every religion, they serve as the supernatural being or the highest that created the start of something from a religion. Some believes in God because they assume that he created everything we see and feel. The article Why do we believe in God? by Satoshi Kanazawa from psychologytoday.com tells further why some believe in god.

It was said that every human practice some type of religion that is why they believe in God. Religion is part of the human nature and humans are designed to be religious. Natural forces like the wind can cause a human to imagine that something that is not seen could exist. Like when an apple accidentally fell from a tree so a human would assume this was done by a supernatural being or maybe by the force of gravity. This could be called as a false-negative error or a false-positive error and people get this not to be sure but to make them think that even though it is false it could be positive. Humans have the tendency to commit false-positive error rather than false-negative error and this is where the supernatural belief came from. It was also said that being paranoid because of this unexplained happenings has a bigger percentage that this the cause why we believe in supernatural beings rather than religion.