Atum, Great He/She

Central to an understanding of the Egyptian creation myth is the very nature of Atum. His appearances portrayed as a man with the double crown of Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt and wearing the royal head-cloth. Sometimes he is also shown as a primeval serpent, lion, bull, lizard or scarab.

Atum was the first God to exist on the earth from waters of Chaos and he created all the Gods and the universe. Atum also spelled as Tem, Temu, Tum, and Atem whose name means “Complete” or “Perfection”. Atum” also means the “Great He/She”. Atum was even called the father to the king. In the old Kingdom, the Egyptian believed that Atum who lifted the dead king to the starry heavens and protecting him in the Underworld. The title “Son of Atum” was included in the many titles of the king.

Atum is one of totality. As the sun god he is the Monad, the supreme being and quintessence of all the other forces and elements of nature. He contains within himself the life force of every other deity yet to come into being.

Atum is “the one who came into being by himself”, and everything else came
into being from him. The cosmos ‘emanated’ from Atum, Atum “turned
himself” into the cosmos. Atum was not the creator, but rather the origin:
everything ‘came into being’ from him”

Atum is the god who “in the beginning was everything”, complete in the
sense of being an undifferentiated unity and at the same time nonexistent,
because existence is impossible before his work of creation. He is the god of pre-existence. His name means both “to be nothing”, and
"to be everything": he is the All in it condition of not-yet.

Thus Atum can be seen as being essentially both male and female in one form. He/she represents totality. This dualism inherent in the Monad allows for the future birth of a constructive goddess such as Isis, as well as a god of chaos and confusion such as Seth.

The nontemporal existence, of Atum, is a state outside of our understanding of the material, temporal universe. So, in essence, this myth explains that from the vast sea of the unmanifest; the sea of non-temporal existence, the divine became aware. And through this awareness, it emerged from the sea of Nu, Nun

This emergence in turn gave raise to all temporal existence. At this point, the legend describe how Atum create Shu and Tefnut with his semen or from his spittle.

because Atum was the first created he has within him the essence of both male and female the motif of Ra masturbating is an act of creation using both the male and female elements of the divine while retaining the idea of one force.