THE EGYPTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT

modern rhetorics of inclusion which would ameliorate these figures, bringing them
into the fold as overly imaginative early Church theologians, serving them up as
opaque objects of study beneath the rubric of “influences”. For Flaubert these voices
tantalise because they have been given back their time and place; they are historically
enabled persons not at all lacking in either flair or mundanity, or dedication to strange
– dare we say, Oriental – causes and systems of thought. Flaubert persuades us that
with genuine socio-historical apperception a certain romantic excess and lack of
accuracy can be easily forgiven; no amount of accurate detail, however, can mask an
insufficiency of connection or “feel” for the historical period in question. 3
One of the main effects of this study is to dilate the notion of “Hellenistic
syncretism” in order to show that Gnostic emanationist mythologies, expressly
dualist, drew much of their essence from ancient Egyptian emanationist theologies,
themselves implicitly dualistic in nature. 4
Although traditional Egyptian cosmologies
were much mitigated by exposure to diverse influences in the Hellenistic and Roman
era, a basic insight about theogony obtained great systematic clarity, as well as
fantastic obscurity, in a broad array of sects, many of which survived until the
conquest of Egypt by Islam. The scholastic dichotomy so often encountered in
Comparative Religious Studies, at least until quite recently, is that of oriental
syncretism existing as the antithesis to occidental system. This supposedly “main
characteristic feature of Hellenistic religion” 5
,result of Alexander’s conquest, is now
being appreciated by some scholars more for the undergirding cohesive structures, for
their synergism or fusion, as opposed to mere conglomeration or sedimentation. 6
With respect to an entire array of emanationist thought in Egypt, Hellenistic
cosmogonic structures must be viewed as a continuation of ancient Egyptian models. 7
Egypt in the Graeco-Roman era shared in the broader apprehension of
Heimarmene, and the proto-Gnostic revolution in thinking now saw Egypt ruled by
3
As Schopenhauer was to put it: “People who pass their lives in reading, and have acquired
their wisdom from books are like those who learn about a country from travel descriptions:
they can impart information about a great number of things, but at bottom they possess no
connected, clear, thorough knowledge of what the country is like. On the other hand, people
who pass their lives in thinking are like those who have visited the country themselves: they
alone are really familiar with it, possess connected knowledge of it and are truly at home in
it.” Parerga and Paralipomena, vol.2, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1974), §262.
4
5
6
We are speaking here of ontological and ethical dualisms; that is, of a view of reality that
posits two different orders of beings, in terms of their “beingness” and split embodiment of
Good and Evil.
Frederick C. Grant, Hellenistic Religions: The Age of Syncretism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1953), xiii.
Luther H. Martin, Hellenistic Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 10: “It is
not useful to understand any coherently identifiable cultural form as grounded in superficial
borrowings occasioned by circumstantial contact.”
7
L. Kákosy is one of the few Egyptologists directly concerned with this problem: “Everything
points out that a new examination of Egyptian influences upon Gnosis be established on the
grounds of the historical circumstances and the evolution of Egyptian religion in the later
period.” In Le Origini Dello Gnosticismo: Colloquium of Messina, 13-18 April, 1966, ed.
Ugo Bianchi (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970), 240.
6