the celestial cow births the sun every morning (Nut, Hathor, and the sky-herd)

To the Egyptians the sky was a cow — Hathor, or Nut in bovine form — swallowing the sun each night and giving birth to it again at dawn, her belly the field of stars. The most fundamental fact of existence, that the light comes back every morning, they understood as a cow calving. We have better astronomy now and worse cosmology. They knew who was carrying us.