Ra as the God of Transition: A Processual Ontology of Light and the Liminal Structure of Being

This article proposes a fundamentally new philosophical interpretation of ancient Egyptian cosmology based on a processual ontology of transition rather than on solar symbolism or the conventional history of religion. It argues that Ra should not be understood as the physical Sun or merely as a solar deity, but as the ontological operator of manifestation through which Being passes from concealment into appearance. Within this framework, the lunar principle emerges as the complementary operator of return, preserving and regenerating form within the hidden dimension of reality. Through a hermeneutic analysis of ancient Egyptian religious texts, interpreted in dialogue with contemporary process philosophy and philosophical ontology, the paper reconstructs Egyptian cosmology as a unified system of continuous transitions between manifestation and concealment. Light is redefined not as a physical substance nor as an attribute of a celestial body, but as an ontological event occurring at the boundary between different modes of Being. The study suggests that ancient Egyptian thought contains one of the earliest known formulations of a process-oriented ontology in which transitions, rather than stable entities, constitute the primary structure of reality. This interpretation opens new perspectives for the philosophy of religion, symbolic anthropology, comparative cosmology, and the metaphysics of process. Author portal: https://sites.google.com/view/yermakov-orcid