THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

appear. Nun is to be seen as the very upholder of consciousness and light as manifest
in the daily periploi of Re in his barque, but he also contains the writhing presence of
disorder and evil in his depths – the serpent Apep. The concept of the primeval waters
is common to all Egyptian creation-models. 86
It is interesting and significant that a recent work by Robert Wild, Water in the
Cultic Worship of Isis and Sarapis, 87
contains virtually no references to the primordial
Ur-God Nun, or to his consort Naunet. It is an example, by no means rare, of the
peculiar position Nun occupies in the modern Egyptological assessment of Egyptian
religious thought: there, but not completely there, one might say. 88
Wild is by no
means alone in this. Siegfried Morenz’s critical work Egyptian Religion does not
mention him as a major god in his appendix listing out the characteristics of the gods,
although of course Nun appears throughout the work, such appearances being
otherwise noted in the index. The presence of Nun is so ubiquitous in all periods of
Egyptian history that it is taken for granted and perhaps this in part accounts for a
certain lack of emphasis placed upon this figure. Nun’s presence was primordial and
therefore required less articulation, yet when the Egyptians dug down for water it was
in search of Nun, when the king sets sail into the realm of the afterlife it is to Nun that
he appeals: this presence was actively sought in temple and field as the basis for life,
religious and mundane.
At the outset I wish to justify my view that Nun is one of the more important
philosophical insights contributed by Egypt to the Occident. It is surely no
overstatement to say that the Presocratic Thales of Miletus was rather derivative in
claiming that the ontological ground of being was water, and it cannot be considered a
coincidence that this insight forms the veritable starting point for Greek philosophy as
has been taught in the West for centuries. It was Plotinus of Egypt who first wrestled
with what were essentially the philosophical contradictions of Nun in developing a
set-piece theodicy of a One that contains all within it: goodness and light, as well as
the somewhat less than perfect. The essential insight about Nun, as developed by the
Egyptians over millennia can be traced through to Jakob Böhme’s “Unground” and
further to F.W. Schelling’s “will of the depths” 89
: an initial state of chaotic
formlessness contained the latent seed of a theogony within it, one which was itself
86
One notes then with interest the first Milesian philosophers in Greece, among whom Thales
(ca. 585 BCE), according to Aristotle, speculated that “the first principle and basic nature of
all things is water,” and “the earth rests upon water.” Diogenes Laertius reports that Thales
“went to Egypt and spent some time with the priests there,” trans. R.D. Hicks (Diogenes
Laertius, vol. 1; Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 29;
Proclus (On Euclid) claims that “Thales was the first to go into Egypt and bring back
scientific knowledge into Greece,” trans. Philip Wheelwright The Presocratics,
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), 49.
87
Robert A. Wild, Water in the Cultic Worship of Isis and Sarapis (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981).
88
No better illustrated than in te Velde’s remark that “Nun is sometimes called the father of
the gods, but there is no question of a relation between Nun and Atum, for Nun is not real,”
“Relations and Conflicts between Egyptian Gods, particularly in the Divine Ennead of
Heliopolis,” in Struggles of Gods. Papers of the Groningen Work Group for the Study of the
History of Religions, ed. H.G. Kippenberg (New York: Mouton Publishers, 1984), 247.
89
Schelling influenced the early Egyptologists von Strauss and Torney, with respect to a
“mythological monotheism” with NUN at the head.