The Forbidden Universe (26 page)

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:

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.

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 embarrassing. 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:

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

Luckert shows that Plotinus derived his ideas from traditional Egyptian spirituality. For example, he taught that the human soul comprises of both the high soul and the low soul. Not only is there nothing that corresponds to this idea in the Greek religion, but Plotinus’ description matches exactly the well-known Egyptian concept of the
ka
and
ba
. The
ka
is a kind of astral double, the life force that is born with the individual and which returns to the gods at death; the
ba
is the spiritual part of the personality, the
ka
’s manifestation in the physical world. The latter is more like the traditional Western concept of the spirit body, but in the Egyptian system both make up the human soul.

Luckert goes on to show that many of Plotinus’ concepts – the nature of the godhead, the human soul and its relationship to the divine – are directly lifted from Ancient Egypt. While Plotinus did use Platonic ideas, he only did so to present Egyptian traditions in a way that was familiar to his scholarly readers:

Further evidence of the Egyptian origins of Neoplatonism
can be seen in the career of the philosopher Antoninus, who died shortly before the suppression of the pagan cults in the 390s. Again, very little is known about him – the only source is a summary of his life written by Eunapius, an Athenian physician and philosopher, in a work dating from about a century later.

Like Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus, Antoninus was secretive and evasive about the religious element of his beliefs. Eunapius tells us that after teaching at the Serapeum in Alexandria, Antoninus went to the coastal town of Canopus in order to devote himself to its ‘secret rites’. Eunapius also says that because of the growing imperial hostility to the religion, while Antonius was in Alexandria he would only ever answer people’s questions using Plato’s philosophy, and would flatly refuse to discuss the divine or theurgy. This is enough to label him a Neoplatonist as far as history is concerned. But clearly Antoninus was something else, something Egyptian and secret – something that
was not incompatible
with Plato, but equally not necessarily actually Plato. As Eunapius writes of Antoninus: