THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

I prefer to be ignorant of than to be informed. For what can be right in a system
which is propounded with such absurd particulars? 11
It might ultimately be as fruitless to attempt a definition of the Four Zoas of
Blake as it would be to characterise or philosophically justify each individual member
of the Valentinian Ogdoad, although a whole arsenal of methodologies might be
brought to bear here, from structuralism to Jungian analysis; however, as one moves
from the context of Egyptian theogony to mythological particulars, one begins to see
that “the medium is the message” if it can be put that way. For while the individual
goddess/aeon is important, as with Portia in The Merchants of Venice, this importance
is mythopoeically layered, text, or in this case, theogony-bound, as there is a larger
role to be played. The overarching pattern of the ennead in Egyptian thought, for
example, is of far greater theological magnitude than the individual members, hence
we have no less than 84 known variations on the theme of “ennead”; this adherence to
the ancient pattern in Gnostic thought likewise explains the proliferation of variations
beneath the “constant” rubrics of enneads, ogdoads, hebdomads and the like.
Hippolytus, at the beginning of his anti-Gnostic polemic written around 222
C.E., significantly offers a lengthy primer in Greek philosophy by way of
demonstrating his own philosophical credentials before attempting to detail Gnostic
derivation and absurdity. Yet Hippolytus came to believe that there was something
else going on in this bizarre constellation of teachings. Unlike his heresiological
predecessors, Irenaeus and Tertullian, Hippolytus recognised Basileides as a
proponent of ancient Egyptian theology: “These are the myths that Basileides tells
from his schooling in Egyptian wisdom, and having learnt such wisdom from them he
bears this sort of fruit”. 12
This is no idle hearsay or slander from Hippolytus, for he is
quite able to describe in some depth the Egyptian insight about their emanationist
theology:
Do not the Egyptians, however, who suppose themselves more ancient than all,
speak of the power of the Deity? ...they asserted that the Deity is an invisible
monad, both itself generating itself, and that out of this were formed all things.
For this, say they, being unbegotten produces the succeeding numbers; for
instance, the monad superadded into itself, generates the duad; and in like
manner, when superadded (into duad, triad, and so forth), produces the triad and
tetrad, right up to the decade, which is the beginning and end of numbers... and
the elements themselves, when computed and resolved by subtraction of
enneads, terminate properly, some of them in the masculine number, and others
of them in the feminine. And, again, the ennead is subtracted for this cause,
because the three hundred and sixty parts of the entire (circle) consist of
enneads. 13
11
De Praes. Haer. IV.XXXV, 519
12
Refutatio 7.27; Catherine Osborne, trans., Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy, 309.
13
Refutatio IV.XLIII, trans. J.H. MacMahon, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. V (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 40