Introduction
Kek personifies the darkness that existed before the sun's light, one of the four conceptual pairs making up the Hermopolitan Ogdoad.
Family
- Spouse: Kauket (married)
Darkness Before Light
Kek and his consort Kauket represent the formless dark that the sun god's first rising was understood to dispel. As with the other Ogdoad pairs, they had little independent narrative beyond their symbolic role in cosmogony, chiefly attested in Hermopolitan theology and in later hymns describing creation.
Ancient Egyptian religion spanned three millennia and many regional cult centers, so parentage, roles and even gender pairings for a given deity often differ between the Heliopolitan, Hermopolitan, Memphite and Theban theological systems; the account above follows the most widely attested classical version.