CNOUPHIS-NILUS
Most Eastern cosmogonies admit that water existed before the material organization of other parts of the globe, whose germs were confused and intermingled in this fluid. Several Greek philosophers have also systematically maintained that water was the principle of all things; this doctrine came, in all appearance, from the sanctuaries of Egypt, where it was professed even in the most remote times.
The ancient Greeks gave to the primordial fluid, to this humidity (Ὑγρόν) mother and nurse of beings, the name of Ocean ; and the Egyptians, following the formal testimony of Diodorus Siculus, called this same principle Nile (Νεῖλος), a name directly applied to the great river which watered their country .
The Nile was, in fact, at all times, for the land of Egypt, the true creative and preserving principle: it is to the silt annually brought by its waters that this rich country owes its existence; it is the Nile which maintains and renews its inexhaustible fertility; also this beneficial river was not only nicknamed the Most Holy , the Father and the Preserver of the country , but it was also regarded as a God , and had, in this capacity, a cult and priests.
There is more: the Egyptians considered the Nile as a sensible image of Ammon-Knouphis , their supreme divinity: the river was for them only a real manifestation of this God who, in a visible form, vivified and preserved Egypt. From this comes that the Greeks, imbued with Egyptian doctrines, called the Nile , the Egyptian Jupiter , and that Homer qualifies it of ΔΙΙΠΕΤΗΣ, that is to say, A Jove fluens .
This ancient assimilation of the Nile with the Egyptian Jupiter, Ammon-Cnouphis, first explains some passages of Greek and Latin writers on the religion of Egypt, and then gives us the understanding of a host of monuments.
We then understand, for example, why Cicero affirms that Phtha or the Egyptian Vulcan, the Egyptian Hercules and the Egyptian Minerva, are sons of the Nile, while all the other authors give them as the children of the Egyptian Jupiter or Ammon-Cnouphis . It is in the same sense that Diodorus tells us that all the Egyptian Gods drew their origin from the Nile, Νεῖλον πρὸς ᾧ καὶ τὰς τῶν θεῶν γενέσεις ὑπάρξαι; It is finally because he was the earthly image of the Egyptian Demiurge, Cnouphis , that the Nile received the beautiful titles of Savior of the region above , of Father and Demiurge of the region below.
