THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

... I restored the Eye after it had been injured. (CT Spell IV 335, lines 184-
231.) 42
The sense here is of a conflation of gods that focus down upon the soul of a man,
imbuing him with their numinous powers, and aiding him in the struggle against evil.
The Gospel of the Egyptians presents a very similar picture:
For this Adamas is a Light which shone from the Light, for he is the Eye of the
Light. For he is the First Man: because of him all things are, to him all things
are, and without him they are as nothing, [he being] the Parent who came forth,
inaccessible and unknowable. He came down from above for the eradication of
the Defect.
Then the great divine self-begotten Word and the incorruptible man Adamas
became a mixture which is man. And man came into being through a word.
(NHC IV, 61.8-22) 43
In both texts, humankind is identified with the divine power of speech, and with a
fusion of various divine figures that shall aid in the struggle with evil. Both texts go
on to entreat numerous other divine figures to perform soteriological functions in the
theogony. In Spell 335, the salvation of the soul after death through its mirroring of
the theogonic process; in The Gospel of the Egyptians, the furthering of the theogonic
process as mirrored in the First Man. The divine power of speech in this process, the
Eye of Re, and the fusion of human and divine in both texts, vouchsafe the
quintessentially Egyptian pedigree of The Gospel of the Egyptians. As well, in both
versions of The Gospel of the Egyptians, the verb shope appears at various junctures,
as in (NHC IV,2 61.20) 44
, and the idea of
transformation can be etymologically linked in these two texts, for shope comes from
hpr 45
, used in the opening lines of Spell 335: hpr mdw nnk tm wnn.i w’ kwi. 46
Hellenistic Gnosis tends towards the more radically subjectivistic, as
undoubtedly influenced by Sophistic, Skeptical, and Euhemerisian relativisms to be
found in Alexandria. The word in this context is more purely individuative, free from
nomos-oriented religiosity and textual hierarchy. Unto the Gnostic alone, literally “the
one who knows” is the true power of transforming gnosis free from the encumbrances
of world-generated episteme. In this sense The Thunder Perfect Mind represents the
supreme literary attempt to generate this subjectivist stance.
The Thunder: Perfect Mind is a difficult work to place historically. Among the
collection of Gnostic tractates found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, this work is
unique in a number of regards. While the work is certainly Gnostic in many ways, its
distinct allusiveness does not allow it to be linked with any particular Gnostic system;
rather it seems to embody a wider appeal which stems from its basis in the Isis/Sophia
42
Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, 262-63.
43
Coptic transcription from NHS, vol. IV, 93, 95.
44
Ibid., 93.
45
Cerný, Coptic Etymological Dictionary, 249.
46
Walter Federn, “The ‘Transformations’ in the Coffin Texts – A New Approach,” JNES 19
(1960): 241-57.