THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

was increasing. The Egyptian king Psammetichus I (664-10 B.C.E.) employed Greek
mercenaries in his army and allowed for the settlement of the first Greek communities
in Egypt by rewarding these soldiers with two pieces of land for their services.
According to Diodorus, Psammetichus encouraged trade with Greece, and “was so
great an admirer of the Hellenes that he gave his sons a Greek education”, 4
Herodotus
records that the Greeks were well-treated and respected by the king, who also founded
a school of interpreters. 5
Whether or not the influence of dualist Greek philosophy
arrived in this period cannot be proven on the basis of extant texts. In any case it is a
moot point, for the conquest of Egypt by Alexander in 331 B.C.E. irrevocably brought
the entire array of Greek religious and philosophical thought to Egypt where it was to
increasingly interact with the Egyptian worldview.
In this section I shall be focusing upon the following philosophers:
Presocratics:
Parmenides (c. 500-450 B.C.E.)
Empedocles (c. 484-424 B.C.E.)
Heads of the Athenian Academy:
Speusippus (c. 367 B.C.E.) in Athens
Xenocrates (c. 356 B.C.E.) in Athens
We turn to the fifth century B.C.E. for the first clear examples of a
philosophical exploration of dualist cosmologies involving demiurgic activities.
With Parmenides one is immediately struck by the role of a goddess figure in
the formation of the cosmos, one who notes that the opinions of men are affected by
“the deceiving structure of my words”. 6 This goddess, according to Simplicius’
account of Parmenides, created the other gods and has power over “the souls of men,
which she sends now from the visible towards the invisible and then the other way
round” 7
and she is directly responsible for “gruesome birth”. 8
There is, as Mansfeld
points out, a suggestion that we might be dealing with a different goddess, possibly
Ananke (Necessity) who could be associated with Dike (Justice). This goddess guards
the “Gates of Night and Day” through which the soul, called the poet, must ascend.
The goddess must be persuaded to let the poet by and Mansfeld is quite correct is
associating this with Egyptian religious views on the ascent of the soul. 9
Mansfeld
lists out a number of other antecedents to Gnostic thought in Parmenides:
4
Diodorus Siculus I. 67.9, trans. C.H. Oldfather (1933; reprint, Loeb Classical Library, 1989),
235.
5
Boardman, The Greeks Overseas, 131.
6
Fr.28B8, 53f; J. Mansfeld, “Bad World and Demiurge: A ‘Gnostic’ Motif from Parmenides
and Empedocles to Lucretius and Philo,” in Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions,
eds. R. van den Broek and M.J. Vermaseren (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981), 265.
7
In Phys.39, 20f; Mansfeld, “Bad World and Demiurge,” 266-67.
8
Fr. 28B10,4; Mansfeld, “Bad World and Demiurge,” 268.
9
Mansfeld, “Bad World and Demiurge”, 274-75: “We are not told what it is that they (the
poets) say, but the implication is clear: they know what they have to say. This is a
remarkable incident, which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been the study of scholarly