THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

individual involved the “discovery” of women as individuals in power-politics and in
religion. 27
The expression of this sentiment perhaps found its apotheosis in the works
of the epigramist Meleager of Gadara (Jordan, c. 100 B.C.E.), most of whose poems
are about love. In the variegated forms his epigrams take (one hundred have
survived), his love for womanhood attains almost the level of a religious panegyric.
Hellenistic art revealed a new interest in the eroticism of women. In conjunction with
the influence of Ptolemaic royal women, the courtesan class of sophisticated women
also influenced perceptions of women and female sexuality. While a certain frank
libertinism in Ptolemaic times manifested in the Dionysian festivals at Eleusis near
Alexandria perhaps finds its parallel in the rise of the later libertine Gnostic sects, 28
a
more important connection is found simply in a focus upon the individual which
included male and female sexuality. Many Gnostic sects took the crucible of malefemale
sexuality as the most critical component for spiritual salvation. Madeline
Scopello details the similarities between heroines in the Gnostic novel and the
Hellenistic novel, noting that “in the gnostic novels, there is a tension between
prostitution and virginity which is unknown to Hellenistic novels”. 29
A strong
connection is made in this regard with Jewish wisdom literature and her overall
conclusion is that Gnosticism involved cultivated women in its circles, in particular
the courtesan class.
For all this, Alexandria reflected the general widespread decline of Greek
culture in the late Hellenistic age; at least such is the picture drawn by some
Classicists. 30
Putting aside such Hellenocentric optics which sees this Graeco-
Egyptian cultural fusion as a “decline” we now focus upon the Egyptian side of the
cultural equation.
27
superior status of Egyptian women was a widespread historical reality in Egypt: both factors
found their later expression in the Gnostic movement.
Michael Grant, From Alexander to Cleopatra: The Hellenistic World (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1982), 204: “The cultural background for this shifting of attitudes was a
tremendous new discovery, strongly reflected both in literature and art, that women were
actually interesting, not merely as remote figures in tragedies, but as real and attractive
persons: and preoccupation with their looks, and with feminine standards of beauty,
increased out of all recognition.”
28
The heresiologist Epiphanius’ testimony overall is rather dubious in its specific details, but
there is no reason to doubt that he had some sort of encounter with “liberal” Egyptian
Gnostic women (Panarion XXV 2,7).
29
Madeline Scopello, “Jewish and Greek Heroines in the Nag Hammadi Library,” in Images
of the Feminine in Gnosticism, 81.
30
The thesis of Fraser, in Ptolemaic Alexandria, is that the “golden age” of Alexandrian
creativity was a product of the Greek immigrés in the 3rd century B.C.E. Following this,
“the immigré was being replaced by an inferior, locally-bred intellectual class,” (717). Yet, it
should be noted, Fraser is largely arguing e silentio (that no great works of Alexandrian
poetry survive from the first and second centuries B.C.E. ergo there were none, for example
[607]). The “revival” (as Fraser phrases it) of certain philosophical schools in the mid-1st
century B.C.E. in Alexandria indicates an obvious continued creativity associated with a
library that remained intact even following the Roman conquest. For a complete refutation
of the traditional view that Caesar inadvertently burned a substantial portion of the library in
Alexandria, see Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1987), 81-82.