THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

Part II - Historical Manifestations of Emanationist and Dualist Thought in Egypt
Chapter Two: Emanationist Theologies and Proto-dualism in Egypt
Egyptology has gone through many changes in the last one-hundred years or
so in its appreciation of Egyptian conceptions of the divine. The modern definitions of
monotheism, henotheism, pantheism and polytheism, have shaped long debates as to
the essential nature of Egyptian religion. Of course the same hermeneutic is at work
in defining Hinduism, for example, where the abstract and remote monotheistic nature
of Brahman is appreciated by Sanskrit scholars and Hindu theologians rather more
than it is for the layperson practising an ostensible “polytheism”. We may likewise
presume that abstruse theological issues, as we perceive them in Egyptian thought,
were more the concern of a temple elite than the layperson, or at the very least that
this elite comprised the main formulators of Egyptian cosmology. 1
Certainly the
number of people who were literate at any given phase in Egypt’s history was
relatively small. 2
In treating the written records of this elite we have a most essential
problem in defining ntr as “god” which, for the Egyptians, simply meant “whichever
god you wish”. 3
A neo-monotheist interpretation might be derived from the fact that
this “god-ness” is used by the Egyptians as a common denominator upon which
various divine entities subsist, however the over-riding Egyptian emphasis upon the
genealogy of their gods simply cannot allow for Egyptian religion to be interpreted as
monotheistic in the modern occidental sense. 4
There is, then, the fundamental
question of a theogony, or genealogy of the gods, which can be traced back through
ever diminishing numbers of divine personages to a Source that is itself only
ambiguously singular.
At the outset we can note in passing that the Egyptian Gnostic of 200 C.E.,
likewise a member of a literate elite, was both “neo-monotheistic” and “neopolytheistic”,
when pressed, as much as was an Egyptian priest of Amun some 2000
years earlier. For both, the conception of a Primal Source, in itself necessary and
good, still required a principle of Disorder or perversity in its very depths, and both
developed an acute emphasis upon a plurality of divine personages which functioned
1
Gertie Englund, “God as a Frame of Reference,” in The Religion of the Ancient Egyptians:
Cognitive Structures and Popular Expresssions, ed. Gertie Englund (Uppsala: Acta
Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1989), 8: “The thoughts that emanated from the temples and the
temple schools were all-embracing and explicating. They constituted a systematic thinking
and this system of thought was normative. Those thoughts represented the Egyptian way of
thinking. Actually it represented the thinking of the elite and it is still an open question to
what extent it permeated the entire society.”
2
See John Baines and C.J.Eyre, “Four notes on literacy,” GM 61 (1983): 65-96. The authors
estimate that 1% of the population at any given time was able to read and that the nature of
this literacy was multi-leveled.
3
Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, trans. John
Baines (1971; reprint, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 59.
4
Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, 53: “One must note that Egyptian religion,
which retained its plurality of gods to the end, never became a monotheistic faith, even in its
most ‘philosophically’ tinged utterances.”