THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

The Egyptian netherworld is filled with a myriad number of inimical beings
(demons or evil spirits) with names like “evil-doers” (isfty.w), “slaughterers” (‘dty.w),
“torturers” (i3y.w), “lords of the netherworld” (nb.w d3.t), “rebels” (snt.w), “enemies”
(tsty.w), and “evil one” (nbd) to name but a few. Osiris and Seth, along with
numerous other major gods, have demoniacal minions working in this realm to
obstruct and torment the dead souls. Numerous funerary texts detail the names of
demons and the passwords required to disarm them as the situation for the dead
person was seen to be perilous indeed. The “enemies” in this realm, are both
masculine and feminine demons (hfty and hft.t), whose eternal task it would seem is to
waylay and snare the k3 (spirit, soul) of the dead person. 95
While life is imbued with
ma’at, death is closely associated with injustice in the Egyptian mind. 96
The evil
actions of men and gods, are seen to reach their culmination and resolution in the
afterlife. This resolution involves the dispensation of punishment and a division of all
into that which is redeemed, and that which is to be held in check, sometimes
destroyed, as unredeemable. Apart from the specifics of the overarching emanationist
systems already looked at, this strong feeling in the Egyptian view pertaining to the
status quo of a cosmology eternally battling on the cusp of light and darkness, good
and evil, has to be seen as the kernel of later Egyptian Gnostic expression. 97
While
not predisposed towards passive meditation, the ancient Egyptian evinced at once a
scepticism and faith which proceeded from strong feelings about death and the
afterlife. 98
In line with this, Egyptian art, architecture, and the inscriptions thereupon,
can be seen in a very obvious way as an attempt to overcome time, and therefore
death. In the Heliopolitan theology the ascent to heaven is enacted against the
panorama of an underworld filled with spirits and ruled over by Osiris. The sun, in
passing beneath the earth every day into night, was seen to pass through this realm,
and even the sacred barque of Re was attacked and threatened nightly on its
underworld traverse. As Re rose anew each morning with his powers intact, so the
individual was expected to be preserved qua individual, with various “substances of
the soul” (3h, b3, and sw.t for example: the spirit, soul, and shadow) able to function
in the afterworld. The ascent from nhh eternity to the dt eternal, from this world to the
other, begins with death, and it is at the moment of death that the life of the spirit must
be affirmed anew as it surmounts the ennead:
I am the son of Atum, the companion of Ma`et; I have come that I may climb
up, I go forth upon the vertex of the Ennead. 99
The primary dualism at work in Egyptian thought considers death to be an
enemy insofar as its effects – motionlessness, termination of consciousness, decay of
the body, are seen to be permanent nhh manifestations, without recourse to a higher
supernal dt realm. The possibility of this afterlife is attained through close
95
Zandee, Death as an Enemy, 218-19.
96
Morenz, Egyptian Religion, 189.
97
See Ringgren, “Light and Darkness in Ancient Egyptian Religion.”
98
Morenz, Egyptian Religion, 196.
99
CT II Spell 121. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, 111.