Now let us see how the ancient Egyptians personified these into gods, and what were the corresponding moral or spiritual ideas of which each nature-power spake to their souls. We shall find the mythology easier to remember and understand if we group the personifications round the natural objects whose aspects inspired them, instead of enumerating them in their proper order as first, second, and third class divinities. So for the present we will class them as Sun-gods, Sky-gods, Wind-gods, etc.; and we will begin with the sun, which among ancient Egyptians occupied the _first_ place, given, as we shall see, to the sky among our Aryan ancestors. The sun, indeed, not only occupies the most conspicuous position in Egyptian mythology, but is presented to us in so many characters and under so many aspects that he may be said to be the chief inspiration, the central object of worship, nothing else, indeed, coming near to his grandeur and his mystery. It is to be remarked, however--and this is a distinctive feature in the Egyptian system of worship--that the _mystery_ of the sun’s disappearance during the night and his reappearance every morning is the point in the parable of the sun’s course to which the Egyptians attached the deepest significance, and to the personification of which they gave the most dignified place in their hierarchy of gods. Atum, or Amun, ‘the concealed one,’ was the name and title given to the sun after he had sunk, as they believed, into the under-world; and by this name they worshipped the concealed Creator of all things, the ‘Dweller in Eternity,’ who was before all, and into whose bosom all things, gods and men, would, they thought, return in the lapse of ages. The figure under which they represented this their oldest and most venerable deity was that of a man, sometimes human-headed and sometimes with the man’s face concealed under the head and horns of a ram--the word ‘ram’ meaning ‘concealment’ in the Egyptian language. The figure was coloured blue, the sacred colour of the Source of life. Two derivations are given for the name Amun. It means that which brings to light; but it also expresses the simple invitation ‘Come,’ and in this sense it appears to be connected with a sentence in the ritual, where Atum is represented as dwelling alone in the under-world in the ages before creation, and on ‘a day’ speaking the word ‘Come,’ when immediately Osiris and Horus (light and the physical sun) appeared before him in the under-world. [Sidenote: Osiris.]