THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

In addition to the above we have W. Westendorf’s theory that nhh and dt
should be viewed as categorising notions: 14
nhh dt
masculine feminine
(father/son/husband) (mother/daughter/wife
phallic uterine
dynamic static
day/sunlight night/darkness
order chaos
conscious unconscious
Re/Horus/living king Osiris/king’s mummy
ba-soul corpse
Jan Assmann’s study 15
offers a particularly effective philosophical
appreciation of the Egyptian distinction here. The Egyptian word for time ‘h’w
pertains to the idea of a lifetime as the existential yardstick by which it is measured –
the period of time between birth and death. The opposite idea to ‘h’w, as Assmann
points out, is that of immortality on this side (Diesseits), as nhh, pertaining to the
king, the state, the forces of nature, “the perpetuity of discontinuity, the unities of
countable aspects of time”. Time and life in this view cannot be divided. Dt represents
an underlying, or overarching, archetype on the other side (Jenseits), one which
eternally endures in a state of static unchangableness, complete and immutable,
generating what Assmann describes as “the unlimited nature of the continuous aspects
of time”. The modern literary-critical theorist Paul de Man has noted the difference
between symbol and allegory as essentially one of diachronicity vs. the synchronic.
The allegory relies upon the “void of temporal difference” wherein the story is
historically unfolded, whereas the symbol is synecdochic (embodying all within
itself), and aims at evoking immediate sympathies or affinities. 16
One might say that
the nhh-eternal, at work in the endless play of allegorical signification, aims at
representing the story in human existential terms, whereas the dt-eternal is the very
archetype of time, immutable and ineffable, attainable perhaps through insight or
gnosis sparked on the symbolical level of representation.
It has been observed that, “primeval time may be described as the time before
duality had arisen in the land”. 17
Atum, whose name is imbued with the notion of
“everything” and “nothing” from the word tm, begins the process of differentiation
with the creation of Shu and Tefnut. The result is the appearance of duality, including
eternity split into dt and nhh. G. Englund notes that the Heliopolitan system is
essentially nhh in its desire “first and foremost to show the dynamics of the
14
Wolfhart Westendorf, “Zweitheit, Dreiheit, und Einheit in der altägyptichen Theologie,”
ZÄS 100 (1974): 136-41.
15
Assman, Zeit und Ewigkeit im Alten Ägypten, 11-14.
16
Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Critical Theory Since 1965, eds. Hazard
Adams and Leory Searle (Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Press, 1986), 209-10.
17
te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion, 27