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The doctrine of “pŒmandres” compared with that of its prototype
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THE DOCTRINE OF “PŒ MANDRES” COMPARED WITH THAT OF ITS PROTOTYPE
Nevertheless, our inscription is not only of general use, but of special use for an elucidation of the main elements in the “Pœ mandres” cosmogony. Any attempt to translate the ideas of the Atum-Ptah-Thoth combination into Greek could have resulted in no other nomenclature than θ έ ο ς (God)—δ η μ ι ο υ ρ γ ὸ ς or δ η μ ι ο υ ρ γ ὸ ς ν ο ῦ ς (Demiurge or Demiurgic Mind)—ν ο ῦ ς
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and λ ό γ ο ς (Mind and Word), as is the case in our treatise.
This argument is all the stronger if we reflect that if Thoth, after the ordering of the cosmos, at-oned himself again with Ptah, then he must have completed this ordering which was emanated from Ptah. It is thus that the writer has brought to clear expression the conception that the Word is the Proceeding Thought of Ptah, and that both are inseparably united with one another.
So, too, we find in the “Pœ mandres” that the Logos, after the completion of the cosmic ordering, returns to the Demiurgic Mind and is at-oned with him.
This similarity of fundamental conception cannot be due to chance, and we must therefore conclude that a doctrine essentially corresponding with the theology of our inscription is the main source of the “Pœ mandres” cosmogony. This fairly establishes the main content of our cosmogony on an Egyptian ground.
If to this we add the general Egyptian belief that a man’s soul, after being “purified” in the after-death state, goes back to God, to live for the eternity as a god with the gods, 1 then we have established the chief part of the “Pœ mandres” treatise as the Hellenised doctrine of the Egyptian priests—the mystery-tradition.
With all of this agrees the thought that the God as Mind dwells in the pious, as we learn from the Hermes Prayers. So also it is Ptah in our inscription who gives life to the pious and death to the impious. In very early accounts we find Ptah, the Mind, is the
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imparter of the gnosis for the gods—that is, as a Greek would say, he was the inventor of philosophy, as indeed Diogenes Laë rtius tells us (Proœ m. 1): “The Egyptians declare that Hephaistos was the source of philosophy, the presidents of which are priests and prophets. ” Ptah, the Mind, reveals himself to his own and gives them good counsel; “Ptah hath spoken to thee, ” Suidas tells us (s. v. ), was a Greek-Egyptian saying, which is best elucidated by the Stele of Intef, which tells us that the people say of the heart of Intef: “It is an oracle of the god which is in every body. ” 1
All of this and much more of a like nature make it indubitably clear that the fundamental conceptions of the “Pœ mandres” are Egyptian, and that the theory of Neoplatonic forgery must be for ever abandoned; so that even the dreams of Dé vé ria are nearer the truth than the confident assertions of many a great name in scholarship.
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THE MAN-DOCTRINE
But what, says Reitzenstein (p. 69), is not Egyptian, is the doctrine of the Man, the Heavenly Man, the Son of God, who descends and becomes a slave of the Fate-Sphere; the Man who, though originally endowed with all power, descends into weakness and bondage, and has to win his own freedom and regain his original state.
This doctrine seems to have been in its origin part and parcel of the Chaldæ an mystery-tradition; but it was widely spread in Hellenistic circles, and had analogies in all the great mystery-traditions, as we shall now proceed to see, and chiefly by the analysis of what has hitherto been regarded as one of the most chaotic and puzzling documents of Gnosticism.
Footnotes
130: 1 Zeitschr. f. ä g. Sprache (1901), pp. 39 ff.
130: 2 “Sur la Tout-puissance de la Parole, ” Recueil des Travaux rel. à la Phil. . . . é gypt., xxiv. 168 ff.
130: 3 The God of Fire and Mind.
131: 1 An epithet of Ptah. But compare the Hymn to Rā given by Budge (op. cit., i. 339): “Praise to thee O Rā, exalted Sekhem, Ta-thenen, Begetter of his Gods. ” Sekhem is vital “power”; Tathenen is, therefore, presumably Creative Life, or the Demiurgic or Creative Power. On page 230 Budge tells us that Tathenen is elsewhere symbolised as a fire-spitting serpent armed with a knife.
131: 2 The Heaven is the Great Heart of the Great Cosmos; in man the little cosmos, the heart, was the seat of the true understanding and will.
131: 3 Shu generally represents the dry air between the earth and sky. Cf. the Hymn to Amen-Rā: “Thou art the One God, who did’st form thyself into two gods; thou art the creator of the egg, and thou did’st produce thy Twin-gods” (Budge, op. cit., ii. 89). Shu’s twin or syzygy is Tefnut, who in terrene physics represents the moist air; but Shu is elsewhere equated with the Light.
131: 4 The Ocean of Heaven.
132: 1 The life or breath of the Creator.
132: 2 Sc. the water of the Great Green.
132: 3 Paut, sphere, or group, or company, or hierarchy, or pleroma, —here an Ogdoad.
132: 4 Namely, Thoth and Horus.
133: 1 That is, the heart (Horus) rules action by fingers (and toes), by means of the ducts or vessels (arteries, veins, and nerves) leading to them, and all that these mean on the hidden side of things; while the tongue in the mouth (Thoth), by means of teeth and lips, is the organ of speech, or intelligent or meaning utterance.
133: 2 This appears to be a mistranslation; it seems by what follows to mean “commands” or “gives expression to. ”
133: 3 Not being; that is, brings them into manifestation. He is the Demiurge.
133: 4 R. glosses this as hieroglyph; but it should perhaps mean “word of the language of the gods”—the language shown by action in the world.
133: 5 That is to say, apparently, the fruit of actions on which gods and men feed. Cf. Hermes-Prayer, II. 2, where Hermes is said to “collect the nourishment of gods and men. ”
134: 1 That is, as we have seen above, Ptah as the Demiurgic Power.
134: 2 Hieroglyphics; showing that the oldest hieroglyphics were symbols of the words of action—that is to say, modes of expression of being in action.
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134: 3 Lit., copper.
134: 4 That is, the worlds of gods, or immortals, and of men, or mortals. But Reitzenstein says: “Thus the God of Memphis [i. e. Ptah] is the divinity or ‘the God’ of all Egypt”—meaning thereby the physical upper and lower lands; but I prefer a wider sense.
137: 1 This does not mean, I hold, that there was no “reincarnation, ” that is, that the “being” of the man did not emanate other “souls, ” but that the “soul” of a particular life did not return—that all of it deserving of immortality became a god with the gods, or “those-that-are, ” and do not only ex-ist.
138: 1 Cf. Breasted, Zeit. f. ä g. Spr. (1901), p. 47.
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