THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

alienness in this sense, as well, perhaps, as a need on their part to be seen as alien.
Their obscurity, mythopoeic extravagance, and historical affronts to Roman rule, both
political and ecclesial, were deliberate, the very message, at least in part, of the same
rhetorical medium which generated The Acts of the Pagan Martyrs, or the Hermetic
Asclepius . Behind such revolutionary posturings, however, are the traditional
Egyptian aspirations for the salvation of the soul, and we cannot but believe that the
Gnostic perpetuation and revivification of the ancient oriental emanationist
theogonies were genuinely held to. The Gnostics in Egypt were, afterall, heirs to a
millennia of religious thought focused, like no other before or since, upon a wordempowered
afterlife. Egyptian Gnostic thought could not help but build upon and
embellish the textual foundations of this antiquity: schooled in Egyptian wisdom and
having learnt such wisdom from them, they bore this sort of fruit.