THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

and mysterious texts of Egypt must have obsessed the inquiring Greek mind. 3
The
obvious sociological hypothesis here is that Cleopatra’s mastery of Egyptian
represents the tail-end of a religious participation which began among the lower
classes, eventually extending even into the inner circle of the Lagid rulers.
It should also be remembered that in the Ptolemaic era there was a turning
inward by the various temples in the development of various scripts, unlike the earlier
Dynasties when temple inscriptions appeared throughout Egypt in more or less
standardised forms. The combination of this “turning inward” with a pro-Ptolemaic
stance by the priesthood in Memphis provides fertile possibilities for the development
of Coptic there.
A number of thematic links with Gnostic thought shall be discussed in Part III;
for now we shall make a number of general observations.
In the first instance, the theurgic applications of the magical papyri, also found
in the Chaldean Oracles for example, manifests the archaic, hierarchic, text-bound
and externally active aspects of Gnosis. Hans Lewy, in treating the Chaldean Oracles,
essentially defines the theurgic essence of Archaic Gnosis:
The basic principle of the system... represents the entities that accomplish the
theurgical operation as identical with those that rule the Universe; the selfsame
power is drawn upon in the practice of magic and in the organisation of the
Cosmos. Believing this, the Chaldeans could not but regard a full understanding
of the forces of the Universe as a necessary preliminary to theurgy, which aims
at dominating those forces. Accordingly, their exposition of the system of the
Cosmos has a preeminently practical object, manifested in the choice of the
various themes and in the way in which these are dealt with. 4
The true “underworld of Platonism” exists in the Chaldean Oracles, as
opposed to Gnostic thought in general, both for the later intense appropriation of the
Oracles made by Platonic philosophers, and for their less sophisticated, more
mechanistic view of the cosmos. The point to be made here is that there is no
difference at all, either in overall thrust, or in the cosmological details (the names are
different but they amount to the same worldview), between the Chaldean view and
Archaic Gnostic which shall be detailed further in the next chapter. The theurgic
represents the bottom-end, practical approach to divine knowledge, where the effort is
not made for a detached love of the arcane, of secret knowledge itself, but for sensible
results. Gnosis and Philosophy manifest themselves as the occupations of the elite.
Philosophy is curiously and uneasily wedded to Gnosis in Egyptian Gnostic
thought, for the two endeavours often have entirely antithetical aims depending upon
who is at the helm. On the other hand, there is a simpatico in mood and method that
goes quite deep, and one is witness to an interpenetration of thought that bespeaks a
large social interaction of Egyptian and Greek intelligentsias for which we have little
direct evidence. In Chapter 3 we noted a differentiation made by Xenocrates between
“knowledge” (epistême) and sense-perception (aisthêsis); in the Trimorphic
Protennoia we also have this distinction: “I am the perception (aisthêsis) and the
3
Many Greeks were themselves involved in building these Egyptian temples and, although
there are references to Greek temples, none have thus far surfaced.
4
Hans Lewy, Chaldaean Oracles and Theurgy: Mysticism, Magic and Platonism in the Later
Roman Empire (1956; reprint, Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1978), 157.