THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

Part III – The Egyptian Foundations of Gnostic Thought
Chapter Ten: The Primacy of Nun and the Emanationist hierarchy of
Monad, Dyad, and Triad
I propose to begin by reviewing the direct evidence for Nun available to us in
texts ranging from Old Kingdom to Graeco-Roman times. It will be of particular
interest to see if an evolution or pattern can be drawn out from this immense period of
time (ca. 2500 B.C.E. - 400 C.E.).
The earliest body of texts we have concerning Nun comes to us from the
Pyramid texts. It is notable that Faulkner, in relying upon Sethe’s transcriptions,
translates the group of signs for Nun, variations on , as either the
capitalised “Abyss” or as a personified god Niu, according to his reading of the
context. 1
“The King’s meal is in the Abyss”; the king departs to the flood, avoiding
the “wrathful ones”, and Niu and Nenet (Nun and Naunet) protect him. Nun is also
mentioned as being at the head of his “Chaos-gods”. Now, apart from the hermeneutic
problem involved in deciding when Nun is “Abyss” and when he is himself as it were,
we also have the problem created by Faulkner in calling the Heh gods the Chaos gods,
as there is no specific word for chaos in Egyptian per se. 2
I shall later suggest that as
the creation of these eight gods is a diachronic development in the theogonic process,
they only transmit the original Ur-prinzip through themselves, that as hypostases they
were not regarded as being completely synonymous with that original state. In fact
precisely the same ambiloquoy exists between Nun and the Abyss as exists between
the Heh gods and Chaos gods. It is seen by some Egyptologists that it is our own
interpretative insistence upon a sharp division between personification and principle
which likely creates this interpretative problem: undoubtedly the Egyptians had no
such difficulty – Nun was both a principle of primeval water, and a personal god. That
said, there is in fact an ambiguity in Nun and the Heh gods which goes back through
the earliest texts. Their shared equivocal stature has to do with their close proximity to
disorder and the inimical forces that are to be found in Egyptian thought. Nun and the
Heh gods are valorised to the extent that they are seen to hold this tendency towards
dissolution in check, providing the most fundamental ontological frame for the
initiation of the theogony, graphically depicted as a mound rising up out of the watery
abyss; as well, the determinative employed in writing Heh depicts the figure of a god
with arms upraised in order to support the sky: . 3
In this light they are
1
The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 173. The phrase that Faulkner renders as “born in the
Abyss,” (PT Utt. 486), Lichtheim translates as “born in Nun”, Ancient Egyptian Literature,
vol. 1, 47.
2
So ingrained is the Greek word in our own collective psyche that even Hornung slips into
using it routinely in Conceptions of God.
3
Barta, “Die Bedeutung der Personifikation Huh im Untersheid zu den Personifikation Hah
und Nun,” 7.