THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

autochthonic expression that this was changed, and it was felt that the body must be
cast off on the road to salvation.
Emanationist thought is imbued with two seemingly incompatible tensions, the
dualist and the monist. The monist is in a difficult position here, for all the “slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune” must be reconciled with a Perfect Will which, while
somewhat diminished in this lower realm, is still inexplicably all-powerful and is “as
it should be”. In the ancient Egyptian view, the goddess Ma’at manifests this principle
of correct order in the cosmos and pharaonic rule was seen to be the executor of
Ma’at. The inconsistency of a perfect Source and imperfect world, of “otherness”, to
adopt Rudolf Otto’s expression, and the natural world, was never reconciled in the
thought of Plotinus, a most vigorous and systematic proponent of this view. This is
certainly an indication – for he was a most able philosopher and thinker in his time –
that emanationism implicitly verges on dualism. 8
Plotinus, himself a Graeco-
Egyptian protégé of the Persian dualist-influenced philosopher Ammonius Saccas in
his earlier days in Egypt, and who had many Gnostics appearing in his classes,
represents the classic Egyptian struggle with this ancient problem; his was an attempt
to re-establish an idealised Egyptian emanationism, one free from the darkness that
occluded it in the centuries of subjugation in the Late Period. Plutarch, Numenius,
Valentinus, Basileides, Carpocrates, Plotinus, and the Hermeticists, all on a direct
philosophical trajectory traceable to the earliest Heliopolitan priesthoods, were
essentially working on the same theological problems, and approaching them with the
emanationist theogony and various dualisms, explicit or implicit, as “givens”. 9
For the dualist, the patent impracticality of monist idealism requires a
definition of a more radicalised evil that accords it an autonomous life of its own,
possible precisely because of the established distance from the Source. This distance
often moves this realm into the vicinity of Chaos, Dis-Order, the Depths, or the
Abyss, a common feature in all systems which likewise derive from the ancient
Egyptian concept of the Primeval Creator effecting his own creation out of the
undifferentiated waters of Nun with which Creation remains forever bounded. The
8
With regards to the two Plotinian concepts of the soul’s descent into an “inferior” world, and
the rather Stoic praise given to the excellence of the cosmos, J.M. Rist makes the following
observation: “The two positions may be incompatible, the result of conflicting pressures
which Plotinus was never able to resolve,” Plotinus:The Road to Reality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1967), 112.
9
S.S. Jensen, Dualism and Demonology: the Function of Demonology in Pythagorean and
Platonic Thought (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966), 13, gives a pedantic discussion of
dualism in Greek thought, replete with such over-rationalised conceptions as “pure reason”,
“purely intellectual motives”, “the psychological background of the mechanism of
predisposition”, and whose view of the ancient world apparently drops off entirely before
500 BCE, as the first-line in his book indicates: “The doctrine of demons as mediators
between God and man seems to originate about 500 B.C. in the Pythagorean school.” One
must suppose that he has not heard of the Book of the Dead, or the Coffin Texts: even if one
is to argue their status as formal “mediators”, there is no escaping the intermediary realm of
demons in the Egyptian afterlife, or their functions which are seen to be critical in the soul’s
attempts to reach the divine. See Dimitri Meeks, “Génies, Anges, Démons en Égypte,” in
Génies, Anges et Démons, Sources Orientales VIII (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971).