CCD HISTORY 101 - History of Western Civilization 1
Egyptian origin myth from early 1st dynasty. The universe was created by the God Khepera
I had union with my hand, and I embraced my shadow in a love embrace; I poured seed into my own mouth, and sent forth from myself issue in the form of the gods Shu and Tefnut.
Camil Paglia says E.A. Wallis Budge (The Gods of the Egyptians, London, 1904, pp. 297) calls the Khepera masturbation myth “gross,” a “brutal example of naturalism” that “can only be the product of a people at a low level of civilization”. It must be a survival of one of the ‘course habits of the predynastic Egyptians, that is to say, one of the indigenous African tribes from which dynastic Egyptians were partly descended”.
Beware of presentism - projecting the ideas of the present onto the past. Wallis Budge's racism and contempt for the past is a judgment based on his time and place - not the values of the Egyptians whose texts he was translating.