THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

of the temples. 72
This socio-economic disenfranchising of large numbers of priests,
the rise of “magical” procedure and individual experience beyond the temple walls,
along with a markedly increased hostility to the oppressiveness of historical process,
all define the socio-historical rise of Gnostic thought in Egypt. Moreover, one can
think of no more suitable image of Gnostic forlornness in Egypt, of a sense of being
alien, a stranger in a strange land, than the widespread phenomenon of insolvent
Egyptians turned fugitive under the pitiless scourge of Roman over-taxation. For these
people, abandoning their traditional link with temple and hearth, the teachings
espoused by Gnostic theologians to the effect that the physical realm was itself
inimicable could hardly have sounded radical.
Indeed, there is a strong sense of the existential experience of despair,
especially among the recalcitrant Egyptians, responsible for this revolt against the
Heimarmene. Over 600 years of foreign occupation had, at the commencement of the
Roman period, brought the Egyptian populace to its lowest depths in its experience of
an alien economic and cultural tyranny. Roman soldiers garrisoning the conquered
province were the tangible and unmasked face of Roman rule in Egypt, and a
“veritable ancient apartheid” resulted from the Roman orientalising disdain for
Egypt. 73
This notching up of oppression and misery in Egypt quite obviously fuelled
dualist speculation: here was a palpable force of evil set loose in the Two Lands. Of
critical importance at this juncture was the overthrow of the high priests of Memphis
who had maintained and greatly increased their hereditary hold on theological power
throughout the entire Ptolemaic period. 74
Expressed in the language of the Egyptian
priesthoods of the time, one might say that the perennial Egyptian experience of
Ma’at had fled upwards to become a feminine power untainted by a desacralised
Egypt and its demonic overlords. A lower feminine deficiency, left behind, became
the wandering lamenting Isis, equated with the cosmos itself, with Fate, expressed by
the feminine noun Heimarmene. 75
The Hermetic text Asclepius, a version of which
was found in the Jebel al Tarif, goes on at great length describing an apocalyptic
vision of a desecrated Egypt within which the Gnostics appeared:
Or are you ignorant Asclepius, that Egypt exists as the image of heaven? If it is
fitting that we speak the Truth, our land is the temple of the cosmos. It is proper
that you not be ignorant that a time will come about (when) Egyptians will
appear to have served the Godhead in vain, and all their practice in their Faith
will be despised. For all Faith shall leave Egypt and flee upwards to heaven.
72
Lewis Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule, 98.
73
Ibid., 19, 34.
74
Jan Quaegebeur, “The Genealogy of the Memphite High Priest Family in the Hellenistic
Period,”in Studies on Ptolemaic Memphis, Studia Hellenistica 24, ed. Willy Peremans
(Louvanii 1980), 74.
75
Martin, Hellenistic Religions, 161: “By late antiquity, the centrifugal force of Hellenistic
expansion extended the locus of deficiency to the outer bounds of the cosmos itself. The
necessary conclusion to this cosmic revaluation was that the totality of the finite cosmos,
together with its predominantly feminine attributes, was considered to be deficient.” Kákosy
attributes this development in Egyptian thought to Pythagorean influences, “Gnosis und
Ägyptische Religion,”242.