THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

The existence of dualist groups in Egypt ca. 100 B.C.E. - 400 C.E. is well
established. The Gnostics, Hermeticists, Middle-Platonists, Manichaeans, and those
who shared in the demonised Lebenswelt of the Greek, Coptic, and Demotic magical
papyri have all received serious study from various academic quarters. I want,
however, to develop a historical and philosophical pan-optic with which to appreciate
the common political and religious factors that unite these groups in Egypt. This study
therefore proceeds firstly as a “history of philosophy” to detail the genealogy of
dualist/emanationist thought in Egypt from the Old Kingdom to the Graeco-Roman
era, condensing a vast period of early Egyptian history in an attempt to thread out the
emanationist trajectory and then develop its final manifestations in the period 100
B.C.E. to 400 C.E.. I also attempt to develop a socio-historical picture at various
junctures with which to underscore certain key aspects of emanationist/dualist
thought. Part II presents a diachronic study of dualism in Egypt; that is, a basic
following of emanationist and dualist thought in chronological order although it is
essentially philosophical in its interpretative focus. This is seen to be a necessary
preparation with which to then delve into the internal patterns, the structure, of what
shall be loosely defined as Egyptian Gnostic thought as opposed to the everaugmenting
scholarly construct of a Gnostic-ism, at present only vaguely connected
with Egypt. The focus of Part III is essentially synchronic in analysing Gnostic
thought through various thematic filters, all of them pertaining to traditional Egyptian
thought, while again drawing in various socio-historical considerations where
appropriate. The Gnostics are centre-stream in the development of Hellenistic Gnosis
and can be seen to merge their boundaries into a diverse array of associated kindred
speculations at the time; likewise, the essential Egyptian religious/philosophical
outlook, detailed in Part II, permeates beyond its geographical/cultural boundaries and
is as readily discernible in the writings of the Greek philosophers Plutarch and
Plotinus, as it is in the Egyptian Gnostics Basileides and Valentinus. However,
Plotinus was born and raised in Egypt, Plutarch very sympathetically disposed
thereto, and Valentinus and Basileides, both Egyptians, had the benefits of Greek
educations. A critical hermeneutic problem, and one that must be addressed in its full
historical breadth, is the issue of what “Greek” and “Egyptian” means in the context
of Graeco-Roman Egypt. Given the perforated cultural boundaries of Hellenistic
Alexandria it would be foolish to argue an exclusive cultural rootedness in any
specific direction, but we can at the outset surely suspect a very strong Egyptian
presence in Gnostic thought for social, linguistic, philosophical, and obvious
geographical reasons. This thesis sets out to demonstrate the Egyptian foundations of
Gnostic thought within all the above scholarly parameters.
It must be said that my initial explorations within the Gnostic labyrinth were
almost entirely philosophical and literary-critical. I believed that the whole problem of
“Gnostic origins” was largely a creation of the scholarly hermeneutics brought to bear
upon the phenomenon of Gnostic thought, and that the issue, for lack of textual,
sociological, and archaeological evidence, was in any event unresolvable. 11
In its
turn, the theory of a largely Greek, Persian, Jewish, and purely Christian genealogy
for the appearance of so-called Gnosticism, usually placed in the second century C.E.,
has attained some level of consensus among scholars since the last century although it
must be said that many of these hypotheses appear to proceed, a priori, from the
11
See Geo. Widengren, “Les origines du gnosticisme et l’histoire des religions,” in Le Origini
Dello Gnosticismo:Colloquio di Messina, 13-18 Aprile, 1966, 28-60.
10