THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

wished to make a world. I say ‘he wished’, he says, for want of a word, wish,
intelligence, and perception being excluded. By ‘world’ (I mean) not the flat,
divisible world which later divided itself, but a world-seed.
Basileides (according to Hippolytus) 15
Again when you reach the rank of the three amens, the three amens will give
you their seal and their mystery. And again they will give you the great name,
and you will pass through to their interior.
When you go to the rank of the child of the child, they will give to you their
mystery and their seal and the great name. Again you will go to their interior.
When you reach the rank of the twin saviours, they will give to you their
mystery and their seal and the great name. Again you will go to its interior to
the rank of the great Sabaoth, he of the Treasury of the Light. When you reach
his rank, he will seal you with his seal and he will give to you his mystery and
his great name.
Again you will go in to its interior to the rank of the great Jao the Good, he of
the Treasury of the Light. He will give to you his mystery and his seal and the
great name.
Again you will go in to its interior to the rank of the seven amens. Again they
will give you their mystery and their seal and the great name.
The Second Book of Jeu (119.1-21) 16
The above text continues with twenty-one more passages beginning with “Again” and
well illustrates the point in its emphasis upon seals, names, and external procedure.
The passage by Basileides is one of the most important secondary sources we have
with which to appreciate the nature of Gnostic thought in Alexandria. No extant
Gnostic tractate exhibits this reflexive sophistication with language outside of the
more poetically-conceived Thunder, Perfect Mind.
I would briefly digress so as to draw out the subtlety of the Basileidean
theogony. The text can be philosophically paraphrased as follows: the words
“vacuum” and “space” are intended to refer to something, no less so than “planet”,
“sun”, or “asteroid”. Consider for a moment that this something is defined as nothing,
with no substance, indeed no spatial or temporal referents in itself – it exists only in
relation to that which is not void. If all that is supposedly “material” in the universe
were to be removed (planets, suns, asteroids etc.) there would be a “pure” void, a state
that can be philosophically postulated, yet must be immediately negated insofar as
language cannot contain it. For void exists in this situation inasmuch as it “exists” as a
concomitant of all physical elements in the cosmos. “Pure Void”, as I would call it, is
free from this commitment and must therefore exclude language which is itself based
referentially upon the cosmos. One might be tempted to think that it is possible to
conceive of the void without physical referents, yet this is only theoretically possible,
for by insisting that pure void can be conceived (by human intelligence) the objector
has in fact placed himself within the void, philosophically speaking, and so it is no
longer a “pure void” but one contaminated by a perceiving referent. Pure void,
15
Hippolytus, Refutatio VII 20.2. Foerster, Gnosis: A Selection of Gnostic Texts, vol. 1, 64.
16
Coptic transcription from the NHS, vol. XIII, 166.