Next comes Kneph, or God as Spirit,—­the Spirit of God, often confounded with Amn, also called Cnubis and Num.  Both Plutarch and Diodorus tell us that his name signifies Spirit, the Num having an evident relation with the Greek [Greek:  pneuma], and the Coptic word “Nef,” meaning also to blow.  So too the Arabic “Nef” means breath, the Hebrew “Nuf,” to flow, and the Greek [Greek:  pneo], to breathe.  At Esneh he is called the Breath of those in the Firmament; at Elephantina, Lord of the Inundations.  He wears the ram’s head with double horns (by mistake of the Greeks attributed to Ammon), and his worship was universal in Ethiopia.  The sheep are sacred to him, of which there were large flocks in the Thebaid, kept for their wool.  And the serpent or asp, a sign of kingly dominion,—­hence called basilisk,—­is sacred to Kneph.  As Creator, he appears under the figure of a potter with a wheel.  In Philae he is so represented, forming on his wheel a figure of Osiris, with the inscription, “Num, who forms on his wheel the Divine Limbs of Osiris.”  He is also called the Sculptor of all men, also the god who made the sun and moon to revolve.  Porphyry says that Pthah sprang from an egg which came from the mouth of Kneph, in which he is supported by high monumental authority.

The result of this seems to be that Kneph represents the absolute Being as Spirit, the Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters,—­a moving spirit pervading the formless chaos of matter.

Perhaps the next god in the series is Pthah, by the Greeks called Hephaestus, or Vulcan, representing formation, creation by the truth, stability; called in the inscriptions, Lord of Truth, Lord of the Beautiful Face, Father of the Beginnings, moving the Egg of the Sun and Moon.  With Horapollo and Plutarch, we may consider the Scarabeus, or Beetle, which is his sign, as an emblem of the world and its creation.  An inscription calls him Creator of all things in the world.  Iamblicus says, “The God who creates with truth is Pthah.”  He was also connected with the sun, as having thirty fingers,—­the number of days in a month.  He is represented sometimes as a deformed dwarf.

The next god in the series is Khem, the Greek Pan,—­the principle of generation, sometimes holding the ploughshare.

Then come the feminine principles corresponding with these three latter gods.  Amun has naturally no companion.  Mut, the mother, is the consort of Khem the father.  Seti,—­the Ray or Arrow,—­a female figure, with the horns of a cow, is the companion of Kneph.  And Neith, or Net, the goddess of Sais, belongs to Pthah.  The Greek Minerva Athene is thought to be derived from Neith by an inversion of the letters,[189]—­the Greeks writing from left to right and the Egyptians from right to left.  Her name means, “I came from myself.”  Clemens says that her great shrine at Sais has an open roof with the inscription, “I am all that was and is and is to be, and no mortal has lifted my garment, and the fruit I bore is Helios.”  This would seem to identify her with Nature.