Herodotus informs us that the gods of the Egyptians were in three orders; and Bunsen believes that he has succeeded in restoring them from the monuments.  There are eight gods of the first order, twelve gods of the second order, and seven gods of the third order.  The gods of the third order are those of the popular worship, but those of the first seem to be of a higher and more spiritual class.  The third class of gods were representative of the elements of nature, the sun, fire, water, earth, air.  But the gods of the first order were the gods of the priesthood, understood by them alone, and expressing ideas which they shrank from communicating to the people.  The spiritual and ideal part of their religion the priests kept to themselves as something which the people were incapable of understanding.  The first eight gods seem to have been a representation of a process of divine development or emanation, and constituted a transition from the absolute spiritualism of the Hindoos to the religion of nature and humanity in the West.  The Hindoo gods were emanations of spirit:  the gods of Greece are idealizations of Nature.  But the Egyptian gods represent spirit passing into matter and form.

Accordingly, if we examine in detail the gods of the first order, who are eight, we find them to possess the general principle of self-revelation, and to constitute, taken together, a process of divine development.  These eight, according to Bunsen, are Amn, or Ammon; Khem, or Chemmis; Mut, the Mother Goddess; Num, or Kneph; Seti, or Sate; Phtah, the Artist God; Net, or Neith, the Goddess of Sais; and Ra, the Sun, the God of Heliopolis.  But according to Wilkinson they stand in a little different order:  1.  Neph, or Kneph; 2.  Amun, or Ammon; 3.  Pthah; 4.  Khem; 5.  Sate; 6.  Maut, or Mut; 7.  Pasht, or Diana; and 8.  Neith, or Minerva, in which list Pasht, the Goddess of Bubastis, is promoted out of the second order and takes the place of Ra, the Sun, who is degraded.

Supposing these lists to be substantially correct, we have, as the root of the series, Ammon, the Concealed God, or Absolute Spirit.  His titles indicate this dignity.  The Greeks recognized him as corresponding to their Zeus.  He is styled King of the Gods, the Ruler, the Lord of Heaven, the Lord of the Thrones, the Horus or God of the Two Egypts.  Thebes was his city.  According to Manetho, his name means concealment; and the root “Amn” also means to veil or conceal.  His original name was Amn; thus it stands in the rings of the twelfth dynasty.  But after the eighteenth dynasty it is Amn-Ra, meaning the Sun.  “Incontestably,” says Bunsen, “he stands in Egypt as the head of the great cosmogonic development.”