Yarinareth, Yarinareth, Yarinareth

B: but how will that help anyone?

A: you really dont fucking get it, do you, you selfish asshole: real ppl are literally dying in excruciating agony!! do you need me to draw a picture for you? its as bad as it gets, smth you perhaps dont appreciate while insulated in yr comfortable little bubble. this isnt some sort of abstract debate club proposition except for you, for them its real life. now get with the palm slices, chop chop!

I’m not an expert on Egyptian religion, so I’m not the best person to ask this question to. I'll do my best to give a rundown on how we tend to view them.

As far as I’m aware, they’re all roughly concurrent in the sense that they all exist at the same time and share similar themes (cosmic egg, rising from the waters of Nun etc) but are also contradictory. This isn't really so much of a problem because each one of the Cosmogonies deals with a different aspect or theme of creation, so the minor contradictions don't really matter. They've all got the same themes and motifs. These myths also deal with deities that belong to the main pantheon, of which the worship belonged to the King only and he delegated this to priests. According to Ma'at, it was the King's job to maintain balance and keep the gods happy. One man cannot do this alone, so it gets delegated to priests, and you find these cosmogonies in temples on the walls of the main temples. Astonishingly enough (not), the chief deities of these temples are the ones who end up with these myths attached to them.

Hermopolis (the 8 gods of the Ogdoad): was most prominent in the Old Kingdom, and these are the gods you find in the Pyramid Texts, which, you guessed it, come from the Old Kingdom. (It gets renewed attention during the Roman period but the myth was already cemented by then)

Heliopolis (Atum and Ra): Also Old Kingdom but later. This myth gives rise to Shu/Tefnut and Nut/Geb, which in turn gives us Osiris/Isis, Seth/Nephthys and Horus. These are the Ennead and continue to be popular gods in mythology)

Memphis (Ptah): Again it began in the Old Kingdom wherein it is said that it was Ptah who created things (this later becomes Khnum). This one coexists with Heliopolis because it was said that Ptah's thought and speech gave Atum the idea to create the world.

Thebes (Amun): Amun is part of the Ogdoad, but as Amun gained prominence during the Middle Kingdom and then into the New Kingdom to become the chief deity (ousting Ra) a mythology developed that it was him who created the Ogdoad and the Ennead, the secret force behind it all. He is the secret part of all gods, just hidden from the world, which is why, when you get to the New Kingdom, there are so many gods with Amun in their name. Amun-Ra, Amun-Min etc etc.

So they're all connected, they just change by who was the most important deity at the time, and should give people an idea of how powerful the High Priests of Amun were that a different cosmogony didn't develop after this point. Akhenaten (plus his father and grandfather) tried to place the Aten as the chief god, and if that had stuck then I think we might have seen another, but Akhenaten didn't want slow change, so we never really got a full fledged myth for the Aten.

But I won't lie to you, I can't really say there was a 'consensus' on them being important one way or the other outside of a temple context. This is because we're not really aware of the common folk caring much about them outside of minor things like Khnum making people on his potter's wheel, or the land rising from chaos. Most of the 'creation' cosmogonies stem from the Pyramid Texts, which are a set of texts that were purely for the King and the priests. They weren't for the common folk and thus the common folk don't appear to (we lack evidence to say otherwise) get involved with them. Common folk are more preoccupied with other things and worship household deities.

You have to remember that a lot of what you're looking at is only accessible to those who can read, which was less than 2% of the Egyptian populace. Then you have to think of who would actually even come across these cosmogonies, and it's not a farmer or a stonemason. These texts were only seen by priests and the King, so it boils down to 'which god is chief of the pantheon at the minute and which myth fits into that narrative?' That's it.

"They've got nobody in the Odyssey?"

"No I'm saying they don't got nobody."

"Nobody's there?"

"Nobody's not there!"

"So everyone's there?"

"Everybody but nobody!"