Tefnut is moisture in a country that has almost none. Egypt gets its water from a river, not from the sky, and rainfall in Upper Egypt is close to negligible; what the atmosphere does provide is dew, and the damp of the early morning, and the corrosive humidity that mattered to anyone storing grain. She is that, personified as a lioness-headed goddess, and she is also — in a combination that looks contradictory until you know the pattern — one of the fiercest figures in the pantheon.
She is the first female deity in the Heliopolitan sequence, produced together with her twin Shu from Atum's own body, and with him she parents Geb and Nut. The family tree places her in the second generation of the Ennead, and the pairing of air with moisture as the first two products of creation is one of the neater pieces of Egyptian systematising: the two components of a breathable, liveable atmosphere.
The distant goddess
Her one substantial myth is not really about moisture at all. It belongs to a pattern Egyptologists call the Myth of the Distant Goddess, and it goes like this: the daughter of the sun god quarrels with her father, leaves Egypt in a rage, and goes south into Nubia, where she lives as a wild lioness, killing. Without her, something essential is missing — and the sun god sends an emissary to persuade her home.
In the fullest surviving version, a demotic composition of Roman date usually called the Myth of the Eye of the Sun and preserved principally on the Leiden papyrus, the emissary is Thoth in the form of a small monkey. He cannot compel her and does not try. Instead he tells her fables — beast tales, with morals, one after another, over the course of a very long text — flattering her, arguing with her, coaxing her, until she agrees to come back. Her return is celebrated with music, drink and processions along the river.
This is a remarkable document for two reasons. It is one of the largest surviving works of Egyptian narrative literature, and its content is animal fable of a kind that overlaps with the Greek Aesopic tradition, raising real and unresolved questions about influence in both directions. And it makes storytelling the instrument of theology: the world is repaired because a god was a good enough narrator to talk a lioness out of the desert.
The same distant-goddess pattern attaches to Hathor, to Mut, and above all to the goddess of the Elephantine region, and it is bound to the festivals of the returning Nile flood, which arrives from the south. A goddess who goes to Nubia and comes back bringing life is not an arbitrary story in a country whose water comes down from Nubia once a year.
The Eye of the Sun
Tefnut is one of the goddesses who holds the role of the Eye of Ra — the sun god's own eye sent out as a separate goddess to carry out his violence, and requiring appeasement before she will come back. Sekhmet, Bastet, Wadjet, Hathor and Mut all occupy the same office at different times and places. This is a role, not a birth, and it explains why so many otherwise unrelated goddesses share the same lioness form and the same solar disc with a rearing cobra.
It also explains the apparent contradiction in her character. Moisture and rage are not two aspects of a personality; they are two functions attached to the same name by different theological systems — the Heliopolitan cosmogony needing a moisture principle, and the solar-eye complex needing a fierce daughter. Egypt attached both to her and did not reconcile them.
Where she was worshipped
Her cult is thin. Leontopolis in the Delta, Tell el-Muqdam, is the main site associated with her and Shu as a divine lion pair, and the Ptolemaic and Roman period saw the lion cults there attract real attention. She appears in the shrines of others and in the great separation image, and no Egyptian temple has her as its principal deity.
She is shown as a lioness, as a lioness-headed woman with a solar disc and uraeus, and occasionally as a full woman. Where she and Shu appear as the double lion of the horizon, back to back with the sun between them, she is the one facing west.
Amarna is again the exception to her low profile. Akhenaten's theology kept her and Shu, and Amarna art identifies Nefertiti with Tefnut and the king with Shu, which gave a very obscure goddess an unexpected moment at the centre of the state religion — for about two decades.
Questions the distant goddess raises
Where does Tefnut end and Sekhmet begin?
No, though they are often confused because they share the lioness form, the solar disc, the uraeus and the Eye of Ra role. Sekhmet has a Memphite cult, a consort in Ptah, a son in Nefertem, hundreds of statues and a plague portfolio; Tefnut has a position in the Ennead, a twin, and one great story. Where Egyptian texts identify them, they are asserting that the same office is being held, which is not the same as saying it is the same goddess. This is the single hardest thing about Egyptian religion for readers accustomed to pantheons with fixed rosters.
What is the "Nubia" of the myth?
The region south of Egypt's first cataract at Aswan, and it functions in the story as the place the goddess goes to be uncivilised — hot, remote, outside the ordered world, and also the direction from which the inundation arrives. Egyptian attitudes to Nubia were a mix of contempt, fear, extensive trade and long periods of conquest and occupation in both directions, and using it as the wild elsewhere in a myth reflects a political geography as much as a mythological one.
Are the Leiden fables really related to Aesop?
Some of the individual tales have close analogues in the Aesopic corpus, and the manuscript dates from the Roman period, when Greek and Egyptian literary culture in Egypt were thoroughly entangled. The direction of influence cannot be established from the surviving evidence: the demotic text is late, but demotic texts routinely preserve much older Egyptian material, and beast fable is widespread enough across the ancient Near East that a common pool is plausible. The safe statement is that the parallels are real and the genealogy is not recoverable — the sort of case our method is designed to leave open rather than to resolve prematurely.