The Egyptian Priesthoods and Temples

Chapter 9 The Egyptian Priesthoods and Temples

Thessalos goes to Thebes in order to seek out a specific brand of ritual expert, the Egyptian priest, whom he supposes might help him encounter the deity by means of the institutionally transmitted art of magic. Much debate on the text has centered on the location of the divine encounter of Thessalos. Festugière noted that οἶκος καθαρὸς might mean a room in a temple, but here probably referred to a hut constructed for the occasion. Jonathan Z. Smith famously used the text to exemplify the shift from locative to utopian modes of religiosity in Hellenistic times, and accordingly considered that the divination simply took place in a privat home, purified for the occasion.1 As noted by Smith, all three options, hut, house, or temple, are possible readings of the text, and so we must decide what is the most likely reading. Since the diviner is presented as a high- priest, we can assume that temple facilities would have been available to him, and it is therefore in my view unlikely that a home or hut would need to be prepared ad hoc. László Kákosy suggested that the divination took place in the Karnak temple of Ptah,2 while David Klotz recently advanced the more likely hypothesis that it took place in the sanctuary at Deir el-Bahari associated with both Imhotep and Amenhotep son of Hapu. This shrine featured dark cham- bers for incubation rites, and the many Greek graffiti indicate that it was ac- cessible to non-Egyptians.3 A Greek dipinto written by a Roman soldier called

1 Smith, “The Temple and the Magician.” 2 László Kákosy, “Thessalos in Thebes,” in Hommages à Fayza Haikal (ed. Nicolas-Christophe Grimal, Amr Kamel, and Cynthia May-Sheikholeslami; Cairo: IFAO, 2003), 161–64. 3 Klotz, “Kneph,” 36. A tempting solution would be to interpret the οἶκος καθαρὸς prepared for Thessalos with the wꜥb.t, “the pure place,” which has the “house” determinative and is thus a direct parallel (Wb 1:284). The wabet was a specialized chapel found in late period temples well into the Roman period, though it is not attested in the Deir el-Bahari sanctuary. It was an open-air chapel where the statues of the gods would be taken at the beginning of the new year to unite with the sun-god, and thus be rejuvenated for the new year. However, there is no indication that visionary rituals or rituals of rebirth were preformed in these chapels. Cf. Filip Coppens, The Wabet: Tradition and Innovation in Temples of the Ptolemaic and Roman Period (Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology, 2007). On the sanctuary at Deir el-Bahari, see now Gil H. Renberg, Where Dreams May Come: Incubation Sanctuaries in the Greco-Roman World (2 vols.; RGRW 184; Leiden: Brill, 2017), 448–83. Renberg points out that oracular dream- visions of Amenhotep, but only possibly Imhotep, are attested in the sources for this sanctuary. A synodos of worshippers of Amenhotep is attested in Thebes, which likely held some

Athenodorus in the second century claims that after he came to the sanctuary and prayed to Asclepius together with Amenhotep and Hygieia, he received a nocturnal vision of the god (likely Asclepius), opening the inner sanctuary for him.4 The parallel makes it plausible that the ritual encounter between the Egyptian priest and the educated Greek took place within the confines of an Egyptian sanctuary. It remains to be considered what role the Egyptian priests and temples might have played in the Hermetic tradition.

9.1 Egyptian Priests as Purveyors of Native Tradition

We have already referred to Egyptian priests several times in our account, but it is now time to consider if the priestly milieu is indeed a likely Sitz-im-Leben for our Hermetic treatises. This was the controversial and quickly abandoned thesis of Reitzenstein in his Poimandres, which has only recently been some- what rehabilitated. Fowden notes tentatively that Egyptian priests are possible authors of, or audiences for, the treatises, but his influential work tends rather to treat Egyptian priestly literature as one of many currents that influenced the Hermetica, and the Egyptian temple is treated more as a background than as a place of origin. There is still an unfortunate tendency, I think, to expect from priestly authors only “traditional” Egyptian material. In this respect Jacco Dieleman’s work, Priests, Tongues and Rites, is extremely important, as it demonstrates that bilingual Egyptian scribes were quite conscious in their use of script, and made use of Greek and Egyptian for different purposes.5 We now know that when Egyptian priests wrote in Greek, they expressed themselves in an entirely different idiom from when they wrote in Demotic or other Egyptian scripts. Another important recent contribution is David Frankfurter’s work, Religion in Roman Egypt, in which he explains the Greek Magical Papyri as the response of an Egyptian priesthood that was increasingly dispossessed by the Roman temple-administration.6 Forced to fend for themselves, the priests made use of their reputation as supreme sages and magicians in order to carve out a niche for themselves as religious entrepreneurs, a process that Frankfurter calls

of their meetings at the sanctuary (p. 482). Another possibility for the location of Thessalos’ vision is an unknown temple of Imhotep at Karnak (p. 482–83). 4 Renberg, Where Dreams, 458–60, n. 36 for the likelihood that Imhotep/Asclepius is the god appearing. 5 Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 103ff. 6 Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, 225ff.