THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

so arbitrary to Irenaeus is also one of the key numerological characteristics of
Egyptian religion. Irenaeus is correct in ascribing these ideas to pagan thought, and in
noting the Greek resonances in this exemplar of Hellenistic Gnosis, however the
deepest mythological and theological attributes of so-called Valentinian thought are
Heliopolitan and Hermopolitan. We note in particular that Sophia was the thirtieth
aeon and that the number thirty had great significance in Egyptian thought. Besides
the 30-year Sedfest period, there is the compelling image of a board game, already
mentioned, in which players had to negotiate a passage through 30 inimical realms to
attain spiritual succour. 29
A good textual example to put forward here is the Instruction of Amenemope
mentioned above. This work is organised into 30 sections and the closing chapter
presents a curiously clear anticipation of the Gnostic sense of completion and
“fullness” as achieved in the banishment of ignorance, notions which would seem to
inform the Valentinian Gnostic view:
Look to these thirty chapters,
They inform, they educate;
They are the foremost of all books,
They make the ignorant wise.
If they are read to the ignorant,
He is cleansed through them.
Be filled with them, put them into your heart,
and become a man who expounds them,
One who expounds as a teacher. 30
This text, as Lichtheim notes, stresses “contemplation and endurance” and an “overall
regrouping of values and a redefinition of the ideal man” over worldly success. The
worth of the text, for Lichtheim, lies “in its quality of inwardness” 31
, all of which
anticipate the essentials of Gnosis.
In the end, in detailing the aeonial derivations, the theogonic architectonic, the
very foundations of Valentinian thought can be seen to be essentially Egyptian,
enough so to vindicate Amélineau who wrote over a century ago, that “Valentinus...
had only to cast his eyes upon the monuments which surrounded him in Egypt, to
listen to the divine legends, and he found the largest part of his theology”. 32
There is,
however, an equally important precursor of Gnostic thought to be found in the
Egyptian goddesses who combine to become the Valentinian Sophia.
29
Assmann, “Death and Initiation,”148.
30
Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II., 162.
31
Ibid., 146.
32
M.E. Amélineau, Essai sur le gnosticisme égyptien, ses développements et son origine
égyptienne, Annales du musée Guimet, vol.14 (Paris: Ministère de l’instruction publique,
1887), 293..