THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

Let us note the remarkable link between two relative adjectives: “that which is
[and] that which is not (intt wtt)”. This means “everything” and takes account
formally of what does not exist in a way which would do credit to Greek
philosophy. But the Egyptians did more than supply the linguistic prerequisites
for philosophical thinking; we also encounter genuine philosophical modes of
reasoning and posing problems. 19
This is one of the stronger statements to be found among Egyptologists concerning
the philosophical status of Egyptian thought and is an apposite point with which to
mention a number of inherent dualisms in Egyptian thought. 20
The separation of
Horus and Seth, delimiting heaven and earth (and foreshadowing the Gnostic function
of Horus – Limit – and demiurgic vicissitudes beyond the Pleroma as we shall later
see 21
), earth and underworld, and most strikingly in the black and the red, the essential
dualism of the long-standing Egyptian world-view:
Looking across the Nile, for most of its length they [the ancient Egyptians]
could see the boundaries of their world in the rich red-brown mud that was
deposited each year. Beyond this narrow fertile belt was tawny desert, mostly
sterile, inhospitable and dangerous. The division between cultivation and
wilderness, fecundity and barrenness, life and death, good and evil, was
therefore clear and complete, and gave the Egyptian his characteristic awareness
of the essential duality of his universe. 22
Egyptian thought, which was much preoccupied with death and the soul’s journey
thereafter, focused upon heaven and the realm of the dead, the latter being a sort of
archetypal “twilight zone” linked with chthonian deities, geographically associated
with the necropolises located along the edge of the western desert 23
, but also with the
primeval ocean Nun which extends under the disk of the earth. 24
The Middle
Kingdom Coffin Texts at times amount to a guide for the dead in the netherworld,
delimiting paths and supplying passwords for the inimical forces that are to be
with the genesis of evil, and that his thought is highly reminiscent of Basileides of
Alexandria (ca. 132 CE) who, in turn, espoused a system which shows numerous derivations
from the Memphite theology as we shall later examine.
19
Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion, trans. Ann E. Keep (1960; reprint, London: Methuen
& Co Ltd, 1973), 10.
20
See also Erik Iverson, Egyptian and Hermetic Doctrine (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum
Press, 1984), 17 and passim.
21
A point anticipated by J.Gwyn Griffiths, Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, 60: “it is the elder
Horus that is originally implicated in the struggle against Seth-Typhon.... The elder Horus as
the picture and vision of the world to come (54, 373c) is perhaps a Gnostic feature.”
22
Cyril Aldred, The Egyptians, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 71.
23
Morenz, Egyptian Religion, 207.
24
Jan Zandee, Death As An Enemy: According to Ancient Egyptian Conceptions (Leiden: E.J.
Brill, 1960), 94.