Atum-Ra: Possibly the Most Powerful God in All of Mythology

In mythology, creating the world, ruling the world, and destroying the world are almost always attributed to different gods, monsters, or phenomena. Using Norse mythology as the point of comparison, the quickening of the first life comes from the intermingling of fire and frost in the void - fire coming from Muspelheim, a realm of fire, and frost coming from Niflheim, a realm of ice. The world is ruled over by Odin, the king of the Norse pantheon. And the destruction of the world is brought about by an amassing horde of monsters: Fenrir, the World Serpent, a great host of undead, frost giants, fire giants, etc. Using Greek mythology as the point of comparison, creation begins with the emergence of the first primordial deities, the likes of Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros. The kingship, though first held by Uranus and then seized by Cronus, is maintained by Zeus. And as for the end times, the Greeks didn't even have apocalyptic myths that prophesied the eventual destruction of the world. Atum-Ra, in the context of the bygone pantheons of the ancient world, is a singular entity, for he did create the world, rule the world, and it was prophesied that he would also destroy the world, returning it to the waters of chaos, the next cycle of creation beginning at a later time.Atum was a creator god who brought himself into existence in the Waters of Nun, basically the Egyptian equivalent of Chaos. Ra was the sun itself and generally the most important god in Egyptian mythology. He was the first king of the universe and the sustainer of life. Atum and Ra were combined into the syncretic fusion Atum-Ra, a compound deity that combined the power and purview of its two constituents: Atum the creator aspect and Ra the solar aspect. It was commonplace in Egyptian mythology to combine gods in this way, and Ra especially became incorporated into these sorts of divine amalgamations. Other examples include: Amun-Ra (Amun another creator deity), Sobek-Ra (Sobek the most powerful of the crocodile gods), and Ra-Horakhty (Horakhty, another name for Horus, the last god to rule the earth directly before the time of the pharaohs).