THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

evolution, a priori or posteriori as the case may have been. What it undertakes is a
sort of cosmogonic surgical operation in which a procreative initiative has been
subsumed by a principle of intellection. Politically, of course, this would have set up a
more effective consensus-making body with which to affect policy decisions, military
and economic, as well as spiritual. The growing power of the priesthoods and the
dawning Great Age of the Middle Kingdom is the sort of result one would expect.
I am working from the hypothesis that the Memphite theology was part
philosophical treatise, part political manifesto. In the latter instance we detect an
effort being made to remove the theogonic justification for absolute power
manifesting itself in the king and his family. A principle of accountability was
established in a transference of power made manifest in the word; the custodians of
the word thus made themselves an intermediary, a rhetorical arena within which
kingly power and its divine genealogy were to be contextualised or shared. In effect
the king became partially accountable to the priesthood in a way that the American
president is accountable, at least in theory, to the Congress. The dynamics of
accountability here are purely rhetorical, theological consensus being the necessary
social aperture to encompass the evolution of creative human thought.
The evolution of the Memphite theology, or something similar, was perhaps
inevitable in the development of religious thought in Egypt. Following the demise of
the Old Kingdom autocracy, the new power-groups would have seen the advantages
of a cosmogony that diluted the nepotistic droit de seigneur of the king’s family. 84
If
the earlier Heliopolitan system can be said to have had its roots in the literal soil of
Egypt, in its geography and cult of kingship, the Memphite Theology symbolises a
subsequent partial emancipation of the Egyptian mind itself from the stasis of absolute
pharaonic rule. Likewise, the paralysing inertia of Akhenaten’s “atheism” required the
reinstatement of such a priestly intelligentsia. 85
The much-discussed “democratisation
of the afterlife” which arose following the collapse of the Old Kingdom--although this
is likely not a neat division--literally found its voice in this nuance of Egyptian
theological expression, for it empowered the literate who had access to the special
knowledge contained in the texts. The roots of Gnostic thought are to be found here,
and their claim of absolute access to the divine, and afterlife return to the Pleroma
through gnosis, represents the supreme apotheosis of Egyptian aspirations in this
context.
We turn now to examine the very foundation out of which all divinity is seen
to appear, the primordial waters of Nun within whose depths the so-called chaos gods
84
John Baines, “Restricted Knowledge, Hierarchy, and Decorum: Modern Perceptions and
Ancient Institutions”, notes the privileges of the Ptah priesthood in the Fifth and Sixth
Dynasties: “By claiming ‘priesthoods’of rare separable aspects of Ptah, these men asserted
special religious privileges. So far as the evidence goes, they were the only people who had
those privileges (apart from the king, who would probably have had them as of right),” 8.
Yet we must ask: how much respect, ultimately, would these high-priests have had for kings
who possessed the right without possessing the actual knowledge?
85
Donald B. Redford, Akhenaten: the Heretic King (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984), 234: “Such documents as the Memphite Theology and the New Kingdom hymns to
Ptah and Amun are philosophical treatises of the highest achievement. What did Akhenaten
substitute for them, once he had declared them anathema? Nothing! If mythology (in the
broadest application of the term) is the only means of divine revelation, apart from the vision
of the mystic, then what Akhenaten championed was in the truest sense of the word,
atheism.”