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The Egyptian Foundations of Gnostic Thought

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The Egyptian Foundations of Gnostic Thought THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT by Daniel Richard McBride A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Department of The Centre for the Study of Religion University of Toronto © Copyright by Daniel Richard McBride (1994) ii ABBREVIATIONS AJSL American Journal of Semitic Languages BD Book of the Dead BES Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar of New York BIFAO Bulletin de l’institut d’archéologie orientale BSFE Bulletin de la société française d’Égyptologie CdE Chronique d’Égypte CR Christian Religion CT Coffin Texts Ench. Enchoria EV Evangelium Veritatis FENHC Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices GM Göttinger Miszellen HTR Harvard Theological Revue JARCE Journal of the American Research Centre Egypt JEA Journal of Egyptian Archeology JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies JRS Journal of Roman Studies JSSEA The Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities JTS Journal of Theological Studies Keph. Kephalia MB Münchener Beitrage MDÄIK Mitteilungen des deutschen Instituts für ägyptische Altertumskunde MH Manichäische Handschriften MIFAO Memoires de l’institut français d’archéolgie orientale NHC Nag Hammadi Codex NHS Nag Hammadi Studies NT Novum Testamentum NTS New Testament Studies OMRO Oudheidkundige Mededelingen het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden te Leiden Or. Orientalia PB Papyrus Berolinensis 8502 PDM Papyri Demoticae Magicae PGM Papyri Graecae Magicae PT Pyramid Texts RdÉ Revue d’Égyptologie RT Recueils et Travaux iii VC Vigiliae Christianae ZÄS Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache ZDMG Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 4 These are the myths that Basileides tells from his schooling in Egyptian wisdom, and having learnt such wisdom from them he bears this sort of fruit. Hippolytus, Refutatio 7.27 5 Part I - Problems of Interpretation Chapter One Introduction and Hermeneutic Prospectus He thinks he is in Alexandria on the Panium, an artificial mountain coiled round by a staircase, rising in the centre of the town. In front of him stretches Lake Mareotis, to the right the sea, to the left open country – and just beneath his eyes a confusion of flat roofs, cut through from north to south and from east to west by two intersecting roads which display down their entire length a series of porticoes rich in corinthian capitals. The houses overhanging this double colonnade have coloured glass in their windows. A few of them are fitted externally with enormous cages of wood where the outside air rushes in. Monuments quite various in their architecture crowd close together. Egyptian pylons loom above Greek temples. Obelisks emerge like lances between red brick battlements In the middle of squares appear the pointed ears of a Hermes or a dog-headed Anubis. Antony can see mosaics in the courtyards, and carpets hanging from beams in the ceilings. I then decided to study under good old Didymus. Blind though he was, no one could master his knowledge of the Scriptures. When the lesson was over he would request my arm to lean on. I would walk him to where, from the Panium, one can see the Pharos and the high sea. We would come back by way of the harbour, elbowing men of every race, from Cimmerians wrapped in bearskins to Gymnosophists of the Ganges rubbed over with cow-dung. But there was always a fight going on in the streets, on account of Jews refusing to pay tax, or of seditious parties who wanted to expel the Romans. The town is in fact full of heretics, the followers of Mani, of Valentine, of Basilides, of Arius – all of them accosting you to argue and convince Their talk now and again crosses my mind. Try as one will to pay no attention, it’s unnerving. 1 Gustave Flaubert The “orientalising” glosses and historical liberties in Flaubert’s description of 2 Egypt and the denizens of Alexandria during this time period are obvious ; yet apart from the excesses, perhaps, of surrealism and lyricism which enliven this work, there is something quite fresh and authentic about the scene that he describes. Both in the strokes with which he effects the temptations of Anthony, and in the honest expressions of his own inner ambiguity, Flaubert’s “savage sensuality” is well read, obsessed with history, and therefore mythopoeically entitled. Lacking even a fraction of the resources possessed by modern Gnostic Studies, Flaubert approaches the “heretical” Sitz with a keener sense of Egypt and the Orient, one uncompromised by 1 Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Antony, trans. Kitty Mrosovsky (London: Penguin Books, 1983), 77, 63. 2 “Nerval and Flaubert continually elaborated their Oriental material and absorbed it variously into the special structures of their personal aesthetic projects. This is not to say, however, that the Orient is incidental to their work... their Orient was not so much grasped, appropriated, reduced, or codified as lived in, exploited aesthetically and imaginatively as a roomy place full of possibility. What mattered to them was the structure of their work as an independent, aesthetic, and personal fact, and not the ways by which, if one wanted to, one could effectively dominate or set down the Orient graphically.” Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 181. 6 modern rhetorics of inclusion which would ameliorate these figures, bringing them into the fold as overly imaginative early Church theologians, serving them up as opaque objects of study beneath the rubric of “influences”. For Flaubert these voices tantalise because they have been given back their time and place; they are historically enabled persons not at all lacking in either flair or mundanity, or dedication to strange – dare we say, Oriental – causes and systems of thought. Flaubert persuades us that with genuine socio-historical apperception a certain romantic excess and lack of accuracy can be easily forgiven; no amount of accurate detail, however, can mask an 3 insufficiency of connection or “feel” for the historical period in question. One of the main effects of this study is to dilate the notion of “Hellenistic syncretism” in order to show that Gnostic emanationist mythologies, expressly dualist, drew much of their essence from ancient Egyptian emanationist theologies, 4 themselves implicitly dualistic in nature. Although traditional Egyptian cosmologies were much mitigated by exposure to diverse influences in the Hellenistic and Roman era, a basic insight about theogony obtained great systematic clarity, as well as fantastic obscurity, in a broad array of sects, many of which survived until the conquest of Egypt by Islam. The scholastic dichotomy so often encountered in Comparative Religious Studies, at least until quite recently, is that of oriental syncretism existing as the antithesis to occidental system. This supposedly “main 5 characteristic feature of Hellenistic religion” ,result of Alexander’s conquest, is now being appreciated by some scholars more for the undergirding cohesive structures, for 6 their synergism or fusion, as opposed to mere conglomeration or sedimentation. With respect to an entire array of emanationist thought in Egypt, Hellenistic 7 cosmogonic structures must be viewed as a continuation of ancient Egyptian models. Egypt in the Graeco-Roman era shared in the broader apprehension of Heimarmene, and the proto-Gnostic revolution in thinking now saw Egypt ruled by 3 As Schopenhauer was to put it: “People who pass their lives in reading, and have acquired their wisdom from books are like those who learn about a country from travel descriptions: they can impart information about a great number of things, but at bottom they possess no connected, clear, thorough knowledge of what the country is like. On the other hand, people who pass their lives in thinking are like those who have visited the country themselves: they alone are really familiar with it, possess connected knowledge of it and are truly at home in it.” Parerga and Paralipomena, vol.2, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), §262. 4 We are speaking here of ontological and ethical dualisms; that is, of a view of reality that posits two different orders of beings, in terms of their “beingness” and split embodiment of Good and Evil. 5 Frederick C. Grant, Hellenistic Religions: The Age of Syncretism (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1953), xiii. 6 Luther H. Martin, Hellenistic Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 10: “It is not useful to understand any coherently identifiable cultural form as grounded in superficial borrowings occasioned by circumstantial contact.” 7 L. Kákosy is one of the few Egyptologists directly concerned with this problem: “Everything points out that a new examination of Egyptian influences upon Gnosis be established on the grounds of the historical circumstances and the evolution of Egyptian religion in the later period.” In Le Origini Dello Gnosticismo: Colloquium of Messina, 13-18 April, 1966, ed. Ugo Bianchi (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970), 240. 7 underworld demonic forces. A fragmentary magical papyrus very succinctly illustrates the overriding concerns about a world encircled by Uroboros the time- snake. A two-column list of the baneful effects appears following a magical appeal that has not been preserved: death rudeness darkness evil mental illness the evil eye grief debauchery fear slavery illness indecency poverty lamentation disturbance troublesomeness emptiness malignancy bitterness 8 arrogance (PGM CXXI.1-14) Amongst numerous other examples that might be given, this represents a comprehensive compendium of underworld experience, a litany of Hellenistic anxiety that prompted a turning to new cosmogonies, new divine models that could be fitted into the old religious architectonics. All of this, it is posited here, began to occur within a segment of the Egyptian priesthood and their ancillary classes. The very “magicians” who felt the need to propitiate the ancient Egyptian gods near Thebes, evidenced in the magical papyri, had access to the still thriving and popular Egyptian temples of the day.
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