THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

The Books of Jeu, whose mind revels in the repetition of formulae, in the twists and
turns of a ritualised passage through the underworld maze where diabolical forces are
to be confronted with magical names and passwords. The difference in form and
substance between the two passages, I would suggest, is on par with any passage from
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the rulebook to Dungeons & Dragons, the
modern gothic role-playing game. 21
Lest the image seem overstated, it should be
mentioned that the Egyptians in fact had a board game named “passage” in which the
player had to find a path through 30 inimical realms to attain the sustenance and
justification of a god. 22
The question of whether Valentinian Gnostic thought with its
thirty aeons was itself directly descended from an Egyptian board game must be left
open given the lack of hard evidence.
The “archaic” approach to divine knowledge has its roots in the Egyptian
religious tradition of elite priesthoods who alone possessed the ability to read sacred
texts and utter the requisite formulae, incantations, and sacred sounds used to appease
or simply affirm the gods, more critically a distinct hortatory view towards
cosmogonic manipulation which can be traced back to the Old Kingdom Pyramid
texts. In the following the king addresses Nun:
O Nu, let these (gates) be opened for me, for behold I have come, a god-like
soul (PT Utt. 360, §603). 23
The mere possession and use of this “divine discourse” was a mode of
political power in itself, as evidenced by the priesthood’s immense influence
throughout Egypt’s long history, and we are dealing more with class distinctions as
opposed to the more individualistic attainment of insight, a hallmark of Hellenistic
Gnosis. The tendency in this mode of religiosity is to form a hierarchy of 1) Principle
Teacher or revelation 2) Inner elite 3) Auditors or Simple believers. In conjunction
with this, there is a general preoccupation with the notion of “sacred space” (who’s
rhetorical intent on the part of gnostic writers which could be said to be deconstructive. We
say this in the loose sense of a shared attitude toward meaning (as context-bound), which is
rejected as ultimate. Yet Gnostic philosophy does not “celebrate the abyss” or crumple its
own epistemological-discursive underpinnings into nihilistic “vain agitation”; rather,
reference is made to otherness, an extraperspectival omega point for the historical self.
There is no attendant deconstructivist mystical drought – context (time and space itself), for
the Gnostic, is essentially pernicious, and the indeterminacies inherent in our use of
language reflect our Fall: “Utopia does not require rhetoric.”
21
Jan Assmann, “Death and Initiation in the Funerary Religion of Ancient Egypt,”in Yale
Egyptological Studies 3: Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt, ed. William Kelly
Simpson (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1989), 143-44: “The topography of the
hereafter [the Coffin Texts] described in these spells is so full of dangers because of the
demonic creatures inhabiting it. The netherworld appears therein first and foremost as a
social sphere, in which the deceased must move and, eventually, integrate himself by means
of the spoken word: by appealing, conjuring, intimidating, beseeching, threatening,
answering, etc... The accumulation of such an enormous body of knowledge based on pure
speculation and meant to insure individual salvation (i.e. in the sense of overcoming death)
reminds one of the Gnosis and must surely represent one of its roots.”
22
Assmann, “Death and Initiation,” 148.
23
Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 117.