THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

We are able then to recognize that the eternal Unground out of Nature is a will,
like an eye wherein Nature is hidden; like a hidden fire that burns not, which
exists and also exists not...
For all is comprised in the will, and is an essence, which, in the eternal
Unground, eternally takes its rise in itself, enters into itself, grasps itself in
itself, and makes the centre in itself... 49
Böhme elsewhere refers to the first principle as “the Abyss, the Nothing, and
the All”, out of which proceeds “the Will of the Abyss... the Father of all
Beings”. 50
Schelling, too, is no pantheist in seeing the essence of freedom as a
dark principle in the Godhead. Like Böhme, passages in his writings have been
labeled “gnostic” for their depiction of an umbral and irrational divine abyss
that precedes being. One cannot escape the connection, however we can see
that Gnostic thought is but a conduit in this regard, one through which the
ancient Egyptian view of Nun is drawn:
Following the eternal act of self-revelation, the world as we now behold it, is all
rule, order and form; but the unruly lies ever in the depths as though it might
again break through, and order and form nowhere appear to have been original,
but it seems as though what had initially been unruly had been brought to
order... Without this preceding gloom, creation would have no reality; darkness
is its necessary heritage... This primal longing moves in anticipation like a
surging, billowing sea.... 51
49
Six Theosophic Points (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), 6, 8.
50
“Four Tables of Divine Revelation,” in Jacob Boehme Essential Readings, ed. Robin
Waterfield (Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1989), 215.
51
F.W. Schelling, Philosophical Enquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, 34-35.