Mnevis
Egyptian · deity · old kingdom · deity
Mnevis is the sun with hooves. He is Ra's living body at Heliopolis, and the strongest evidence of how seriously that was meant is that Akhenaten — who shut everything else — specifically provided for a Mnevis burial at his new city. The Heliopolitan priests spent the Ptolemaic period trying to argue their bull up the ranks, and the claim they landed on was that Mnevis had fathered Apis, which is a fairly transparent piece of institutional positioning and also, as theology, quite neat.
Domains
- divination
Relations
Sources
- Reference treatments of the Mnevis bull and of the Egyptian bull cults.