If man takes upon him in all its fullness the function assigned to him, that is, the tendence which is his special task, he becomes the means of right order to the Kosmos, and the Kosmos to him.68
Despite the protests of scholars that there is no clear link between the Hermetica and the religion of ancient Egypt, the pharaohs too believed that it was their function, and the function of their divine land, to interact in the correct manner with heaven and thus to serve as a force for the maintenance of right order (Ma'at) in the universe.69 Indeed the pharaoh was a Hermetic king par excellence and we've suggested that one of the ways that he could fulfil his responsibility to cosmic ‘right order’ would have been to build a temple, or even a city, ‘in the image of heaven’. We've shown specific textual authority for such a course of action in the Book of What is in the Duat of the 14th century BC. Likewise in the highly enigmatic Building Texts inscribed at the Temple of Edfu in Upper Egypt in the third century BC the following words are put into the mouth of the god Thoth-Hermes himself: I will cause its [i.e. the temple's] long dimension to be good, its breadth to be exact, all its measurements to be according to the norm, all its sanctuaries to be in the place where they should be, and its halls to resemble the sky.70
Dedicated to Horus, the golden son of Isis and Osiris, the Edfu temple was built in several stages between 246 BC and 51 BC by pharaohs of the Graeco-Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty on a site that had been sacred since before 3000 BC. Although there is no doubt that they took their conversion to the ancient Egyptian religion extremely seriously, the Ptolemies were newcomers, having ruled Egypt only from the late fourth century BC following the conquests of the god-king Alexander the Great.
Before his premature death in 323 BC Alexander founded a great city on Egypt's Mediterranean coast that would ever afterwards bear his name – Alexandria. A few centuries later it was here that Christian Gnosticism and its pagan Hermetic twin would emerge phoenix-like from the ashes of the ancient Egyptian religion and begin to wing their way silently towards the modern world.
CHAPTER TEN
CITY OF THE GOD-KING
The city still shall follow you …
Constantine P. Cavafy, Alexandrian poet (1863 – 1933), ‘The City’
Alexandria, the capital of memory !
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
When alive, Alexander had founded a city; when dead? He gave birth to the universal metropolis …
François de Polignac, L’Hombre d’Alexandre
In the autumn of 332 BC, Alexander the Great marched triumphant into Egypt at the head of his Macedonian army after it had crushed the Persians at the Battle of Issus in Syria. The Egyptians had been under much-detested Persian occupation for nearly two centuries, and Alexander was now hailed as their liberator. He entered the Nile Valley at Memphis and was immediately crowned pharaoh and legitimate successor of the pharaohs – the divine solar kings who had ruled this ancient land since time immemorial.
Alexander's behaviour at this point tells us much about his state of mind. His very first act as pharaoh was to order the complete restoration and restitution of the famous twinned temples of Karnak and Luxor in Upper Egypt (about 500 miles south of Memphis) which had suffered damage and degradation under the Persians. Why did Alexander give this matter such priority? The answer is to be found in the strange circumstances of his birth in 356 BC.
Alexander's mother, Olympias, was the daughter of the king of Ipirus (today part of northwestern Greece), and a high-priestress of the Temple-Oracle of Zeus-Amun at Dodona located southwest of the modern city of Ioannina. This oracle was one of the most revered in the ancient world and the story of its foundation was linked to the Temple of Amun at Karnak-Luxor in Egypt; it was also considered to be ‘twinned’ to the Temple-Oracle at the Oasis of Siwa in Egypt – which was likewise dedicated to Zeus-Amun. The Hellenic scholar Joan Wynne-Thomas, presents us with a concise overview of these connections: During the fourth century BC there were public sacrifices in Athens to Zeus-Ammon, whose original cult was at the Siwa Oasis in Egypt. The cult was, of course, Egypto-Greek, as Ammon or Amun, also in Egyptian Amun-Ra, was the all powerful god of the Egyptian pantheon, whom the Greeks equated with their own great god, Zeus.1
Any attempt to explore in detail how and why the Egyptian solar cult of Amun (Zeus-Amun) came to mainland Greece is outside the scope of this book. But the legendary background is given by the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC, a century or so before the birth of Alexander the Great. This is the story as he reported it: About the oracles – that of Dodona in Greece and of Ammon in Libya [Western Egypt or Siwa] – the Egyptians have the following legend: According to the priests of the Theban Zeus [priests of Amun-Ra at Karnak-Luxor], two women connected with the service of the temple [Karnak-Luxor] were carried off by the Phoenecians and sold, one in Libya [Siwa] and one in Greece, and it was these women who founded the oracles of these two countries. I asked the priests at Thebes what grounds they had for being so sure, and they told me that careful search had been made for the women at the time, and that though it was unsuccessful, they had afterwards learned that the facts were just as they had reported them.
At Dodona, however, the priestesses who delivered the oracle had a different version of the story: two black doves flew away from Thebes [the district of Karnak-Luxor] in Egypt, and one of them alighted in Dodona, the other in Libya [Siwa]. The former perched on an oak, and speaking with a human voice, told them that there, on the very spot, there should be an oracle of Zeus. Those who heard understood this to be a command from heaven, and at once obeyed. Similarly, the other dove which flew to Libya [Siwa] told the Libyans to found the oracle of Ammon – which is also an oracle of Zeus. The people who gave me this information were the three priestesses Dodona … 2
Also according to Herodotus, it was the Egyptians who originated and eventually taught the Greeks to use ‘ceremonial meetings, processions and liturgies’. He said that the Greeks had even modelled their gods on those of the Egyptians.
Dodona, Olympias, Egypt and the Persians
Nowadays such views are scoffed at by Hellenistic scholars and Egyptologists alike. Despite the well-known tendency of the Greeks to ‘identify’ their gods with specific ancient Egyptian deities – e.g. Zeus-Amun or Hermes-Thoth – the academic concensus is that the two pantheons as structurally unrelated. Yet it seems beyond doubt that the cult of Amun-Ra did find its way into Greece at least as early as the fifth century BC, perhaps even much earlier, and was somehow involved with the Temple-Oracle at Dodona.
Dodona itself is located in the lovely pastoral and mountainous region of Ipirus adjacent to the ancient kingdom of Macedon where Alexander the Great was born. No one really knows the truth about exactly when or why it was consecrated, but according to consensus: The original shrine of the oracle probably existed before 2000 BC, and was dedicated to the ‘Earth-mother’ or goddess. This was a cult of southern Greece which had, like the cult of Zeus, originated in the East. Archaeological finds date from the Early Bronze Age, approximately 2500 BC, and are in the Museum of Ioannina. There is a mention of the shrine by Homer, in the Iliad, which is the earliest reference known …3
The priests of Dodona were known as the helli or selli, and it was they who interpreted the proclamations and prophecies made at the oracle. This they did by listening to the rustling of leaves from an oak grove within the sanctuary. Legend had it that it was from the wood of this sacred grove that a figurehead was fashioned to the prow of Jason's ship carrying the Argonauts (hence the Argo’s gift of speech and prophecy).
The Dodona temple-oracle was held in particular reverence by Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, who had consulted it on numerous occasions. But Philip's links with the oracle were to go much deeper when he married Olympias. The latter, as we have said, had been a priestess at Dodona and is known to have been a zealous devotee of the god Amun of Egypt.
Philip met Olympias whe
n he was 26 years old and she 16. The fateful encounter took place on the island of Samothrace, off the Thracian coastline of Greece. Philip and Olympias had both come independently to the island in order to attend the religious celebration of the Cabeiri, a curious festival where violent fertility and sexual rituals were performed in various mythical settings. It was during one of these events that Philip and Olympias fell in love, and thus began that potent union that was to change the course of world history.
Endowed with a deep and mystical nature, the young and lovely Olympias was obsessed with the idea that she was destined to bear a divine child in the likeness of the god Dionysos – in Greek mythology the handsome and heroic son of Zeus, who had been born from the womb of the mortal Semele. Dionysos literally means ‘Son of God’, and Olympias would certainly have been acquainted with the works of the Greek historian Herodotus who, a century earlier, had identified Dionysos with the Egyptian god Osiris.4
When Olympias became Philip's queen in 357 BC, Egypt was under assault by the Persians, the most bitter enemies of the Greeks and Macedonians. In 525 BC Cambyses, the son of the legendary Cyrus I, had occupied Egypt and thus widened his already vast empire. His successor, Darius I, consolidated Persian rule in the Nile Valley after suppressing a major Egyptian revolt there. Then he took his army north across the Mediterranean and occupied Thrace and Macedon before being decisively defeated at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. A decade later the Persian king, Xerxes, invaded Greece and brought terrible destruction on Athens, but he too was eventually defeated in 479 BC.
Even though Darius and Xerxes had failed in Greece, the fear that a new Persian invasion would be attempted at some point was a very real one. Neighbouring countries were also targets. By 356 BC, when Alexander was born, Egypt had freed herself from Persian rule but was under attack again and was finally reoccupied in 350 BC. Humiliated and defeated, Egypt suffered heavily under the new ‘King of Kings’ of Persia, Artaxerxes III, who was a brutal and merciless oppressor – as was his equally vicious son, Oarses. So despised was their rule that they were eventually poisoned by one of their eunuchs called Bogoas, who offered the throne of the King of Kings of Persia to Darius III. Bogoas was duly ‘rewarded’ by being forced to swallow his own poison.
Nectanebo, Osiris, and the ancestry of Alexander
For a brief period Egypt managed to oust the Persians yet again, and the last native pharaoh to rule there was Nectanebo II, who had usurped the throne from his brother Teos in 358 BC – two years before the birth of Alexander. There is a tale told of Nectanebo II that seems worth recounting, even though it is almost certainly fictional, in view of its association with the strange circumstances surrounding Alexander's birth. But first we should place Nectanebo II in the correct historical setting.
After initial successes in resisting the Persians, Nectanebo II was hailed by his people as a great hero and liberator. Much loved for his military deeds and for his devotion to the supreme god Amun (whose ‘son’ he deemed himself to be) he was also renowned as a powerful magician 5 – a reputation that was taken very seriously in ancient Egypt. As Alexander was to do some years later, Nectanebo marked his coronation by ordering a massive restoration programme for the many sanctuaries of Amun that had been destroyed or desecrated by the Persians. He paid special attention to the restoration of the temple complex of Karnak-Luxor. It had been Nectanebo's own father who had been partly responsible for the magnificent Avenue of Sphinxes (a segment of which survives to this day) that joined Karnak with Luxor. Nectanebo also restored the existing temples of Amun at the Oasis at Siwa, and built a magnificent new one there, the remains of which still stand at the Umm Ubaydah area of the modern oasis.6
Married to Philip or not, we may imagine that the association of Nectanebo II with the Temple-Oracle of Amun at Siwa must have impressed the young Olympias who, as we recall, harboured dreams of giving birth to a ‘son of Amun’. Surely the idea of being seeded by a pharaoh in whose veins flowed the blood of the god Amun, and who had such close links with the oracular centre of Amun at Siwa as well as Luxor, would have been one of the wild fantasies of this very impressionable and very young queen? In this respect, the strange stories reported by some of Alexander's biographers might contain an element of truth in them. According to one such account found in Pseudo-Callisthenes, Nectanebo fled Egypt after the Persian invasion that ultimately dethroned him, and made his way to Macedon in Greece. There he was received at the court of Philip II to whom Nectanebo presented himself as a magician and astrologer. At night, however, the exiled pharaoh turned into a huge snake, a symbol of Amun, and in this form seduced and impregnated Olympias .7
Another legend, this time associating the royal ancestry of Alexander the Great with the god Osiris of Egypt, is told by the Greek chronicler Diodorus Siculus who lived in the first century BC. In Book I of his famous Bilbiotheca Historica, Diodorus recounts the mythical origins of the non-Hellenic and Hellenic people of Greece up to the destruction of Troy. It is in this first book, that the story of Macedon, a mysterious ‘son’ of Osiris, is narrated.8
According to Diodorus, Osiris left Egypt with his brother Apollo on a universal mission to teach men to plant the vine and sow crops of wheat and barley: … two sons of Osiris, Anubis and Macedon, … took the field with him … Osiris also brought Pan [the Egyptian Min] on this expedition.
[After visiting the countries of Africa and Asia] Osiris … crossed over into Europe at the Hellespont. In Thrace he slew Lycurgos, a barbarian king who opposed his plans … And he left his son Macedon behind as king of Macedonia, which was named after him …
Diodorus does not give us his sources. It is generally thought that for the part of his Bibliotheca dealing with Greek history, he drew from the works of earlier writers such as Ephorus and Hieronymus of Cardia. For his Egyptian material the evidence suggests that Diodorus relied heavily on Hecataeus of Abdera.
Hecataeus (365 – 270 BC) lived in Alexandria – the prototypical city of the classical world founded in Egypt by Alexander the Great. There Hecataeus benefited from the liberal protection of Ptolemy I Soter, the general in Alexander's army who set himself up as pharaoh of Egypt in 305 BC after Alexander's premature death. As a foreign traveller who reached as far south as the temples of Karnak and Luxor, Hecataeus was an eyewitness to the early stage of Greek and Egyptian fusion in Egypt. He produced a rather idealised account, the Aegyptiaca, aimed at Greek readers, and it was this text that was to serve as Diodorus's source when he came to write his own history of Egypt 200 years later.
Let us look at the context when Hecataeus was in Egypt. First, it is well known that Ptolemy I Soter was extremely keen to promote any idea that would integrate his newly founded ‘pharaonic’ Macedonian dynasty with that of the true Egyptian solar pharaohs whose divine lineage was believed to extend back to the god Osiris. It is, therefore, quite possible that Hecataeus made up the story of Osiris's journey to Greece and the founding of Macedon by one of his ‘sons’ – Macedon – in order to create a link between the Macedonian ‘pharaoh’ of Alexandria and the mythical ancestry of Egyptian pharaohs.
In Egyptian mythology Osiris had only one son, Horus, whose sacred animal was not the wolf, as Diodorus says, but the hawk or falcon. It is easy to see how such a mythological association between Osiris and the origin of the Macedonian royal family, when it is also coupled with the strange tales told by Pseudo-Callisthenes about the pregnancy of Olympias, would create a belief that Alexander was somehow linked by birth to the gods of Egypt and, by extension, would add legitimacy to the Macedonian claim to pharaonic kingship in Alexandria. This strange belief and, especially, as we shall see, the persistent theme of a symbolic sexual union between the god Amun and Olympias, would have untold repercussions on the future history of Egypt and, by cultural osmosis, the rest of the Hellenistic world.
Lightning seed and the star Sirius
Legend has it that when Olympias gave birth to Alexander the two stone eagles that decorated the roof of he
r apartments were struck by lightning. Other accounts speak of living eagles that came to perch there. Others say that at that very same moment the Temple of Diana-Artemis at Ephesus was destroyed by fire while the goddess herself was in Macedon attending Alexander's birth. This link involving Diana-Artemis, eagles and the lightning bolt is most interesting. For Diana-Artemis was worshipped at Ephesus in the form of a sacred omphalos – a conical or pyramid-shaped stone which had supposedly ‘fallen from the sky’ as though ejected from a lightning bolt It was also said that the foundation of the Oracle of Apollo in Delphi occurred when two eagles sent from Zeus alighted near the omphalos there. Meanwhile in Egypt a pyramid-shaped ‘stone from heaven’ called the Benben had formed the central symbol of religious worship at the sacred city of Heliopolis since before history began.9 Indeed such baetyls and omphali played a significant role in many ancient religions, and were typically associated with fertility and the birth of divinities.
According to Plutarch, Olympias claimed that she had become pregnant when lightning had struck her womb and fertilised her with the seed of Zeus-Amun – thus siring Alexander.10 Elsewhere Plutarch narrates how the womb of the sacred cow-goddess of Egypt (a form of Isis) was also seeded by the god's lightning in order to create the new Apis calf, symbol of the ruling solar pharaohs, i.e. the Horus-king.11 In Egyptian religious iconography, the goddess Isis was often represented by a cow with a five-pointed star above her head, the latter being the star Sirius, called Sothis by the Greeks. Traditionally the heliacal (dawn) rising of this star denoted the moment of the divine birth of the solar kings of Egypt. It is therefore notable that many classical authors fix the birth of Alexander at 20 July in the Julian calendar, a date that would have been on or near the heliacal rising of Sirius in that epoch. The implication is that this star must have played an important role in his birth-myth. As French author Jean-Michel Angebert points out, it even led Alexander to abandon the old Greek calendar and replace it with one like that of the Egyptians that was based on the heliacal rising of Sirius. He did this some time before his armies reached Egypt: The doors of Egypt now lay open for him. But Alexander met up with further resistance at the port of Tyre, the siege of which lasted for six months, from January to July 332 BC, which Alexander did not want to leave behind. There occurred, then, an extraordinary event: the taking of the city corresponded to the astronomical date of the heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog-star, which meant that the star, after having been absent in the sky for a part of the year [70 days], reappeared in the east horizon to mark the victory of Alexander and to announce that he would soon be wearing the crown of pharaoh … [thus] Alexander the Great, pious son of Amun, modified the Greek calendar such that henceforth the rising of Sirius would mark the New Year, as it was done in Egypt …12