THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

encountered. This, too, was a later Gnostic and Chaldean preoccupation. In the New
Kingdom the “Livres” depict a subterranean realm of the dead in which the sun
traverses twelve divisions from west to east (representing the hours of the night)
above an underworld river. In both Middle and New Kingdom texts there are gates
guarded by serpents Old Kingdom texts demonstrate the Egyptian desire to free
themselves after death from the gods of the earth (3kr.w), Geb, and even the word t3
(lit. “earth” or “ground”) is used as the inhibitor of supernal flight. The hostile actions
of demons are to be found in all descriptions of the Egyptian underworld and it is this
feature that supplies us a clear lead in developing the precursors of Gnostic thought in
ancient Egyptian cosmologies. As such we shall return to the subject of Egyptian
demonology at the end of this chapter. Another important feature, later reflected in
Gnostic thought, is total destruction through fire of the dead whose crimes are judged
to be beyond redemption. The Am Duat depicts the enemies of Chepri being burned
by nine serpents. The Egyptian concern was with total elimination of unredeemable
elements, precisely the same soteriological end-game developed in Manichaeism. The
immortal powers of evil, in the Egyptian view, are confined to the extreme
cosmogonic depths where they fulfil their function of bounding and revivifying
Order. 25
A distinction between physical death and spiritual death in Gnostic thought
can also be seen to have its Egyptian roots. Papyrus Smith, a 17th century BCE
medical text, its original conception perhaps dating back to the early Old Kingdom,
shows that physical affliction and death was not simply viewed as resulting from
bodily decay, but was attributable to demoniac or pneumatic influence.
As for ‘something entering from the outside,’ it means the breath of an outside
god or death, and not the introduction of something which his (own) flesh has
produced. 26
For all Gnostics, radical or mitigated, the world represents a tyrannical powersystem,
a virtual prison within which the pneuma or spirit of Anthropos has been
incarcerated. Set against this much polarised Late-Period struggle of good vs. evil, the
Egyptian-Gnostic attitude towards death can be seen to embody the traditional
Egyptian view of death as an existential tripwire beyond which hostile powers lurked.
The sharp division between fertilised land and desert had cosmogonic repercussions
in the Egyptian psyche one might say, and the Egyptian ideal of Order always had
edgy undertones as a result of this fear of immanent Disorder. 27
The implicit monism
of the Egyptian pharaonic/Creator ideal was never able to overcome this essential
25
Erik Hornung, “The Discovery of the Unconscious in Ancient Egypt,” in Spring: an Annual
of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, 16-27 (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications,
1986), 24: “They [the powers of evil] have a place in the underworld; and this makes sense
because confrontation with the powers of destruction and disintegration, with the
disorganized chaos before creation, and with the threat of total destruction belongs with
regeneration.”
26
Papyrus Edwin Smith, trans. John A. Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt (Chicago:
Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1951), 57-58.
27
See Günther Roeder, “Kosmogonische Vorstellungen in Ägypten – Die Kosmogonie von
Hermopolis,” Egyptian Religion 1 (1933), 2.