The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God
Page 18
Another clue comes from the astrology and astronomy described in the Hermetica. The Egyptians divided the night sky into thirty-six parts or decans, each linked to a prominent constellation or star. During the Greek period, the more familiar twelve-sign zodiac took over, but the astronomy described in the Hermetica sticks to the thirty-six-decan system, so at least the origin of the Hermetica in this one major respect was truly Egyptian.3
A more important clue comes from the attribution to Hermes, the Greek deity who was always associated with the Egyptian wisdom-god, Djehuty, or Thoth in its Greek rendering. He ruled over learning and was the inventor of writing and the calendar and ‘keeper of the divine words’,4 hence his titles, ‘Lord of Time’ and ‘Reckoner of Years’.5 A minor function was his association with healing: he was, for example, credited with inventing the enema.
Hermes and Thoth are by no means direct parallels, though. In the Greek pantheon, Hermes was the patron deity of many aspects of life, but not of knowledge and learning. He was the god of cunning and cleverness, but that isn’t the same thing. It is thought that the association developed as a result of Hermes’ more significant role as guide of dead souls, which oddly echoes Thoth’s rather secondary job as helper and guide of the deceased, specifically the dead Osiris.6 The telling fact is that the characteristics of Hermes Trismegistus as portrayed in the Hermetica are more in line with those of Thoth, not the Greek Hermes, strongly suggesting that the cult or school behind the Hermetica was Egyptian.
Then there is the famous epithet for Trismegistus, ‘Thrice Great’, which only makes sense as a Greek translation of a typical Egyptian honorific. For emphasis Egyptians repeated the glyph for ‘great’, literally saying ‘great great’. But in cases of truly mind-blowing greatness, they would use it three times, as in the all-important ‘great great great Thoth’. The most natural Greek translation would be ‘three times great’. More significantly, this practice seems to have been specifically reserved for Thoth, which seems to be the origin of ‘Thrice Great Hermes’.
In 1965 an inscription was found dating from around 160 BCE, written by a priestly scribe named Hor (Horus). Inscribed in the late form of Egyptian script known as Demotic, it appeals to ‘Isis, the great goddess, and Thoth, the three times great’7 – the last phrase simply repeating the Demotic character for ‘great’ three times. This is the earliest known use of this form of address. In his account of this inscription, Egyptologist J. D. Ray makes the following highly pertinent observation:
It is not the point of least interest in our document that they should provide the earliest clue to the origins of a most remarkable figure in the history of thought, a philosopher, whose reputation as the sage ‘Trismegistus’ was transmitted through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to influence even such forerunners of modern thinking as Bruno and Copernicus.8
In fact, the mindset behind the Hermetica as a whole is Egyptian. The authors ‘think in terms of a whole milieu populated with ancient Egyptian gods and sages’.9
The other characters in the dialogues are a mix of Egyptian – including Isis and Thoth himself, who appears under the name of Tat – and Greek. But even the Greek characters have specifically Egyptian associations. Agathodaimon (or Agathos Daimon), a minor god in the Greek pantheon, became patron deity of Alexandria, where he was associated with Osiris and his Hellenised semi-alter ego, Serapis. More central to the Hermetica is the character of Asclepius, a supposed descendant of the Greek healer-god, who appears in several books. But even here there is an important clue to the origins of the Hermetica. The Greeks identified Asclepius with the Egyptian god of healing and medicine, Imhotep, who was a rare example of Egyptian deification of a living person.10 In Asclepius, Hermes declares that the eponymous main character’s illustrious ancestor was a man who became a god. Imhotep was vizier to the pharaoh Zoser and architect of the first of the great pyramids, the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, built around 2620 BCE. The cult of Imhotep clearly survived into classical times: our priestly scribe Hor records in 160 BCE that he was instructed by the ‘priest of the chapel of Imhotep’ in the sacred city of Heliopolis.11
For all these reasons, there is no doubt that the minds behind the Hermetic books were Egyptian, even if they chose to express themselves in the lingua franca of the day. But who were they?
In the second half of the twentieth century a number of historians began to argue that the Hermetica are the ‘bible’ of an Egyptian mystery cult.
In recent decades a new theory of the Egyptian origins of the Hermetica has emerged. Rather than simply being the sacred books of a mystery cult, they were part of a concerted, and perhaps desperate, effort to preserve its teachings in the face of the great threat to their culture posed by the Greek hegemony. This anxiety found its ultimate expression in the Asclepius’ Lament. By expressing their beliefs in the language and style of their cultural oppressors, there was a chance that the Egyptians’ precious ideas would survive. This was all the more urgent because of the myriad streams of thought flooding together in Alexandria, threatening to submerge Egypt’s own religious and philosophical traditions. Fowden points to the cities of Panopolis and (for obvious reasons) Hermopolis as centres of the Hermetic cult.12
By the time the Romans took control of Egypt, the Greeks had been in charge for generations, so their culture was already entrenched at the top echelons of society. But the conquerors and conquered largely kept their distance. The Greeks regarded their culture as more advanced, while the native Egyptians saw their civilization as older and wiser. The religious and cultural resistance to the Greeks was embedded in the city of Memphis, the ancient capital, whose western plateau was the ‘Libyan mountain’ mentioned in the Lament, site of a great necropolis that includes Saqqara where it was believed Imhotep himself was buried.13
The native Egyptian cults survived until Christianity became the dominant religious force in the Empire. Although the Emperor Constantine famously gave it imperial recognition, it was only in 380 CE, more than fifty years later, that Theodosius I declared it to be the one legitimate religion of the Empire. Eight years later he ordered the pagan temples of Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East to be closed down forever, a task enthusiastically overseen by Theophilus, the Christian patriarch of Alexandria.
The Hellenic period also produced some hybrid cults that adapted traditional Egyptian worship to be more Greek-friendly. A major example of this is the cult of Serapis, a new version of Osiris worship – ‘Serapis’ being a conflation of the Egyptian Asar (Osiris in Greek) and Apis, the bull-god assimilated to him. The origins of the cult are controversial: was it, as long believed, a complete invention of Greek times or, as evidence now suggests, a pre-existing religion that was merely adapted for the purpose? Wherever it came from, the early Ptolemaic rulers adopted it as the official cult that could be practised jointly by their Greek and Egyptian subjects. The main temple, the Serapeum, was located in the new coastal city of Alexandria, which was founded by the Greeks in honour of Alexander the Great. However, Theophilus’ overzealous thugs destroyed it during the anti-pagan pogrom of 392 CE.
For several reasons, the cult of Serapis is a good candidate for the school that produced the Hermetica. The writers would have been associated with a temple, since in Egypt not only did learning and religion go together, but so did temples and libraries. The ‘daughter’ library of Alexandria’s celebrated library was housed in the Serapeum – revealing the extent to which the cult valued the preservation of knowledge. The appearance in the Hermetica of Agathodaimon, the patron god of Alexandria associated with Serapis, also suggests that there was a connection with the same cult.
There certainly were some Egyptian priests who made an effort to explain their religion to the Greeks, probably in an attempt to preserve it. The major example of this is the Heliopolitan priest Manetho who, in the early third century BCE – under the first Ptolemaic rulers – wrote a history of his people, the Aegyptica, which is still a particularly useful sourcebook on the reigns
of the various dynasties (a term he invented). Manetho is a Greek rendering of his name, but the syllable ‘tho’ probably derives from Thoth (perhaps ‘Beloved of Thoth’), perfect for a scribe and historian of the great wisdom-centre of Heliopolis. Manetho was apparently also a key figure in establishing and promoting the Serapis religion, such was his desperation to make his people’s traditions understandable to Greeks.14 If they knew them they might like them, and if they liked them enough, they just might want to conserve them.
Manetho’s agenda was the same as the one Garth Fowden ascribes to the authors of the Hermetica, which at the very least shows that some Egyptian priests were proactively trying to preserve their traditions.
In an ironic twist, a text ascribed to Manetho may – if genuine – contain the earliest reference to Hermes Trismegistus. This is found in a dedication to the ruler Ptolemy Philadelphus at the beginning of the astronomical Book of Sothis, which is attributed to Manetho. Although this would make a particularly satisfying connection between the great Egyptian chronicler and the Hermetica, unfortunately most historians regard the book as a later work and the dedication a forgery because, following Casaubon, the term ‘Trismegistus’ is thought to have been invented in the early centuries CE, and therefore Manetho could never have used it.
If an attempt to preserve the Egyptian traditions was what underpinned the Hermetica, then clearly its religious and cosmological ideas would hardly have been new. They must have been the key philosophy in a belief system that predated the Greek conquest, perhaps by many centuries. Evidence for this is found in the works of the Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus of Syria (c.245–c.325 CE) who studied in Athens before founding his own academy in Antioch. His major work On the Egyptian Mysteries (De mysteriis Aegyptiorum) opens with the words:
Hermes, the god who presides over rational discourse, has long been considered, quite rightly, to be the common patron of all priests: he who presides over true knowledge about the gods is one and the same always and everywhere. It is to him that our ancestors in particular dedicated the fruits of their wisdom, attributing all their own writings to Hermes.15
So Iamblichus understood that not only did the priests attribute their books on the nature of the gods and universe to Hermes, but also that this was already a venerable tradition that dated from the era of the ‘ancestors’. As Iamblichus lived very close in time to the writing of the Hermetica – which he frequently references – he is unlikely to have been fooled by an unashamed recent fabrication.
The Iamblichus connection is, to us, particularly satisfying. Modern academia labels him a Neoplatonist, but the opening of his masterwork, with words of praise for Hermes, suggests that his philosophy was in some way related to Hermeticism. He also ‘made use of Hermetismin formulating his own widely influential doctrine’.16 But the relationship has even more to reveal about the antiquity of the Hermetic cosmology.
‘THE DIVINE IN THE ALL’
Neoplatonism was another product of Greek-and Roman-dominated Egypt. As with Hermeticism, the pro-classics bias meant that the fact that Neoplatonism developed in Egypt was considered irrelevant. Instead, scholars assumed that it was actually built on Greek ideas. However, recent studies have shown that Neoplatonism, too, owed far more to Egyptian traditions than previously acknowledged.
The ‘neo’ or ‘new’ part of the entirely modern term Neoplatonism refers to the re-establishment of Plato’s Academy in Athens by fourth-generation followers of the Egyptian philosopher Plotinus. The original academy provided a meeting-place for philosophers in a grove sacred to the goddess of wisdom Athena, a mile outside Athens, for 300 years until it was destroyed by the Romans when they besieged the city in 86 BCE. With their usual disregard for local sensibilities, they cut down the sacred trees to make siege engines.
Five hundred years later, in the early years of the fifth century CE, a group of philosophers led by Iamblichus’ pupil Plutarch of Athens, who considered themselves Plato’s intellectual heirs, founded a new Academy in Athens. This became a renowned centre for learning in its own right, but being a pagan school it was closed down on the orders of the Emperor Justinian in 529.
The revived Platonic academy was particularly interested in exploring and developing some of the metaphysical aspects of Plato’s teaching. Following his own mentor Socrates, Plato distinguished between the material and spiritual worlds, arguing that the material world, which is knowable through our five senses, is basically an illusion. Everything belonging to the material sphere is a kind of shadow of a perfect, ideal form – an archetype – that exists in the spiritual realm. Plato thought that it is possible for human beings, through intellectual effort, to transcend their perception of this world and gain experience of the spiritual realm, thus becoming enlightened.
In Timaeus, written around 360 BCE, Plato also introduced the concept of the Demiurge, the creator-god of the material universe. Just as everything in the physical world is a reflection of its eternal ideal, so the Demiurge is a lesser version of the one great God who created everything – including the Demiurge himself, whose power is necessarily constrained by the limitations of matter.
It was these aspects that the revived Academy was most interested in, focusing especially on the process of enlightenment through direct experience of the normally hidden spiritual realm. Rather than purely intellectual exercises of the kind advocated by Plato, the new wave of philosophers attempted to develop rituals and other practices (‘theurgy’) to enable the human soul to find its way back to its divine source during life rather than after death, aiming at ‘the purification of the soul from the barnacles of matter’.17 This objective was encapsulated in the last words of Plotinus (c.205–270), who is regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism: ‘Strive to give back the Divine in yourselves to the Divine in the All’.18
Plotinus is an odd character. All he allowed to be known about himself comes from his pupil and biographer, Porphyry of Tyre, who also organized his fifty-four treatises into six collections of nine, hence the ‘Enneads’, or ‘group of nine’. Plotinus was born and lived in Egypt until he moved to Rome at the age of about forty; he never revealed even to those closest to him anything about his origins or parentage. He no doubt picked up the habit of secrecy from his own master Ammonius Saccas – Ammonius the Porter – who tutored him for eleven years in Alexandria. It was from Ammonius that Plotinus learned his ‘Neoplatonism’.
Unsurprisingly, Ammonius is another oddity. Described by one modern historian as ‘the most shadowy figure in the chronicles of Hellenic philosophy’,19 virtually nothing is known about his life except his name, which was derived from the god Ammon, strongly suggesting he was a native Egyptian. Ammonius was known as theodidaktus, ‘God-taught’, which might be another way of saying he was divinely inspired. In any case, it suggests that his knowledge owed no debt to any formal school of philosophy recognized by the Greeks.
Ammonius Saccas set down nothing in writing, as was the custom for Egyptian priests, and placed his students under a vow of secrecy not to publish his lectures. But he had two disciples who left their mark on history, Plotinus and the Christian philosopher and theologian, Origen. It was through the latter – who apparently broke his vow – that Neoplatonic ideas were imported into Christian theology.
Mystery man he may have been, but it is still clear that Plotinus’ philosophy owed more to an indigenous Egyptian source than it did to Plato. But this background cut little ice with historians of philosophy, again because of the scholarly bias in favour of the classical world. The logic behind the label ‘Neoplatonist’ is that Ammonius Saccas taught Plotinus, who taught Porphyry, who taught Iamblichus, who taught Plutarch of Athens, who re-established the Platonic Academy – so they all must have been Platonists, mustn’t they? And in any case they were all Greek(ish), or at least very Hellenized and admirers of Plato, who was definitely Greek.
However, in the early decades of the twentieth century the avoidance of Egyptian tradition was becoming embarra
ssing. Even the most conservative academics had to acknowledge that large parts of Plotinus’ work had no parallels with earlier Greek thought and seemed to derive from some other tradition entirely. While it is true that his writing does contain many references to Greek philosophical concepts, particularly Plato’s, when these are removed, his basic principles and reasoning hold their own internal logic.20 In other words, he may have used the Greek concepts to bolster his philosophy, but didn’t derive it from them.
French historian of philosophy Émile Bréhier was one of the first to suggest in the early 1920s that Plotinus wasn’t purely inspired by Greece – causing a huge furore among the ranks of venerable beards. At the end of his life in the 1950s, in an introduction to an English translation of his original papers, Bréhier cheekily dropped in a quote from Asclepius, hinting that he recognized a relationship between Plotinus and the Hermetica:
After Alexander the Greeks, without doubt, did ‘Hellenize’ the Orient; but, inversely, Egypt, ‘the land where gods are invented’, stamped its powerful imprint not only upon the customs but upon the ideas of the Greeks, in spite of the efforts of the rulers of Egypt to keep the Egyptians in a subordinate state.21
But even once the non-Greek origin of much of Plotinus’ work was recognized, historians still tried to ascribe his source to Iran or India – anywhere but Egypt. One might have thought that Plotinus being an Egyptian taught by an Egyptian in Egypt might have been a clue to the source of the non-Platonic parts of his philosophy.
More recently a dose of objectivity, not to say common sense, has been injected into this unnecessarily complicated subject. Karl W. Luckert, the German-born American professor of the history of religion at Southwest Minnesota State University, has strongly and persuasively argued that Plotinus’ philosophy should not be called Neoplatonic at all, but ‘neo-Egyptian’.22