THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

with Sodom and Gomorrah; as well, flood, conflagration, famine, and plague appear
because of the race of Seth. Seth appeals to the higher powers for protection for his
race on earth and divine intervention occurs on their behalf.
There are simply too many echoes of the Egyptian god Seth for the Seth figure
in this tractate to be identified solely with the Jewish son of Adam, a point originally
made by Wisse and Böhlig. 18
Seth exists somewhat apart from the normal order
although he plays an active role; he is associated with Sodom and Gomorrah which
alludes to Seth’s homosexual act with Horus 19
; the main theogonic function of Seth in
The Gospel of the Egyptians is sexual, specifically concerned with generation; the
result of this activity is the appearance of a race of Seth in a lower realm setting off a
host of “dysteliological” phenomena. The book of Seth, as the text refers to itself as,
was placed “in high mountains on which the sun [Re] has not risen, nor is it possible”
(68.3-5) 20
, and the association of Seth with the underworld and desert is here
maintained. Apart from these specific points, Seth’s equivocal role is everywhere
apparent, as disturber and protector of the theogony.
Sophia desires to “know the father” in “Valentinian” myth, and her incest
likewise disrupts the sexual/theogonic process. The result is an abortive chaos that the
aeon Horus must delimit from the agitated Pleroma. The Sethian Gnostics, as reported
by Hippolytus, likewise posited sexual dysfunction within the theogony as the
precondition for the creation of mankind and the lower world:
After, then, the light and the spirit had been received, he says, into the polluted
and baneful (and) disordered womb, the serpent – the wind of the darkness, the
first-begotten of the waters – enters within and produces man, and the impure
womb neither loves nor recognises any other form. 21
The critical feature of a water-snake performing a theogonic function in the
disorderly waters is clearly derived from the serpent Apep in Nun, although the new
twist of Apep as the progenitor of humankind is nowhere to be found in Egyptian
thought. “The Paraphrase of Seth”, referred to in Hippolytus, presumably the source
he is working from, displays a number of conceptual overlaps with the Nag Hammadi
tractate “The Paraphrase of Shem” (NHC VII.1), although a close identification
between the two has been ruled out by some. 22
The depiction of the dark waters as
the womb, the “great dark water... wrapped in vile ignorance” in Para. Shem (2.22),
and “the dark, and formidable, and bitter, and defiled water” in Hippolytus, both seen
to be womb from which humankind are produced obviously suggests a shared
theology. 23
18
Ibid., 35
19
Ibid., 35
20
Ibid., 162.
21
Refutatio V.XIV, trans. J.H. MacMahon, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. V, 66.
22
M. Roberge, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 341.
23
Also shared to some extent by the Nicolaitans (ca. 90 CE) of Pergamum and Ephesus
attacked by John. Epiphanius mentions their belief that the spirit separated darkness, depth,