A time of change
In the years after the coronation of Ptolemy I Soter as the successor of Alexander the Great, the city of Alexandria began to flourish. First a magnificent tomb was built to house Alexander's coffin and then various monumental and religious projects were planned. Most notable among these were the Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the great temple and library complex of Serapis – the Alexandrian Serapeum – and, of course, the legendary Library of Alexandria.
It was at the Alexandrian Serapeum that the Ptolemies regenerated the cult of Serapis, the supreme universal god, and where a huge statue of the Serapis was erected. And at the Pharos, as we have already seen, was raised a great temple dedicated to Isis, ‘consort’ of Serapis, but now specially designated in this new maritime city as Isis-Pharia.
As for the famous library, this was dedicated to the seven muses or sisters, patrons of music and the arts. It is most likely that much of the library's original collection was derived from stocks brought from other parts of Egypt, especially Heliopolis and Memphis, which had been preserved since time immemorial in the temple-libraries of the ancient Egyptians. Also literary works of philosophy, religion, science and the arts were imported from other parts of the world, especially Greece. Ptolemy I Soter, moreover, took a great personal interest in having brought to him a copy of the Old Testament of the Hebrews and, for the first time ever, had the latter translated into Greek, making it available to the non-Jewish world. Thus an incredible intellectual and spiritual vortex began to swirl in Alexandria, and the result would be the creation of an even more powerful magical religious philosophy which was to be attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the name given to the Egyptian wisdom god, Thoth, by the Graeco-Egyptian population of Alexandria.
Over the coming centuries, as we shall see, the ancient Egyptian magical tradition was to dress itself in Greek garb and subliminally inject itself into Western Europe.
Metamorphosis
In 586 BC, the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, captured Jerusalem causing a mass expulsion of Jews, many of whom found their way into Egypt. Evidence of a Jewish presence in Egypt in those times is widespread from the Nile Delta area in the north to the distant south at Elephantine near Aswan. Also two centuries later, when Ptolemy I Soter took control of Palestine and Jerusalem, he brought back Jewish mercenaries and encouraged Jews to settle in his newly founded city of Alexandria. By the first century BC and the reign of the fabled Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemaic rulers, a large segment of the population of Alexandria was made up of Jews who had adopted Greek language and customs. And there can be no doubt that it was with the Jews of Egypt that a patriarchal monotheistic religion that abhorred idols and graven images began to take hold in the ancient land of the pharaohs.
In 30 BC the Roman legions of Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) reached the gates of Alexandria to challenge his arch-rival, Mark Antony. Inside the virtually defenceless city there was panic and pandemonium. The armed forces commanded by Antony and Cleopatra had been decisively defeated at the naval Battle of Actium and now any resistance to Octavian would simply be foolish bravado. Indeed, earlier Mark Antony, in a moment of heroic folly, had attempted a valiant charge against Octavian's Roman legions only to find himself deserted by his own men who hailed Octavian as their true leader. Thus abandoned but still unable to face defeat, Mark Antony committed suicide, begging the last of his loyal soldiers to finish him off. When the news reached Cleopatra, she became determined not to be captured alive by Octavian, and committed the most famous suicide in history by being bitten by a deadly asp.
Thus 3,000 years of pharaonic civilisation came abruptly to an end. Octavian immediately declared Egypt to be a province of Rome, and the might of the Caesars fell on this ancient and sacred land like a gigantic sledgehammer. Within years Egypt was reduced to nothing more than a granary to feed Rome's legions.
Alarmed at changes they saw being introduced all around them, what the Egyptian priests undoubtedly feared most was the extinction of their magical religion. Throughout the three centuries of Ptolemaic rule, the ancient Egyptian temple-cult had not only survived but had received active state sponsorship and had boomed everywhere. This was because its timehonoured antiquity had a powerful, almost enchanting appeal for the Ptolemies who found that it meshed perfectly with their own mythologies and ideas of the divine. Indeed, the ancient Egyptian magical religion was seen as a boon for the universal dream of the Ptolemies and, like many other things, fitted the city of Alexandria like Cinderella's slipper. The Romans, on the other hand, saw the connection simply as another source of political power to run Egypt and its resources efficiently. It is true, of course, that Roman emperors appointed themselves as ‘pharaohs’ and even adopted the religion of Serapis and Isis. They also restored temples and built new ones in honour of the Egyptian deities – the famous Temple of Dendera was restored to its present-day appearance by Emperor Tiberius.60 None of this, however won over the Egyptians let alone the Egyptian priests. They knew that under the Romans, things would inevitably be very different. The enlightened Ptolemies saw themselves as successors to the Egyptian pharaonic tradition, whereas the Romans had come as conquerors and masters. As the Coptic scholar Dr. Jill Kamil points out: The institution of sacrosanct monarchy, a cardinal feature of Egyptian life in pharaonic times which had been maintained by various later dynasties (the Ptolemies, for example), was lost in Roman times. The emperors may have claimed to be divine but it was their prefects who ruled Egypt, reduced the prestige of the priests, and exerted pressure on the people. They siphoned off the wealth of the land to Rome and recruited Egyptians to fight Roman wars in other countries. The Egyptians, who had accepted Ptolemaic rule, resisted Roman. It is not difficult to see the difference between them. Under the Ptolemies, Egypt had retained its integrity and had a stable economy. Under the Romans the country was shorn of identity and impoverished. It was no more than a private estate for the emperor and a pleasure-ground for the Roman upper classes.61
There was at first some semblance of prosperity and even a sense of protection under the Romans,62 but on the whole it did not benefit the Egyptians themselves. The wealth extracted from agriculture fed the Roman garrisons and filled the treasury of Rome; and if any new temple or hydraulic project was built by the Romans it was done for strategic reasons and to strengthen their political and military hold on Egypt. Soon the Egyptians – now a people mixed with ‘Egyptian’ Greeks and Jews – began to revolt. In AD 115 a huge revolt, apparently led by the Jews, was brutally crushed by the Romans. Another massacre was to take place in Alexandria during the visit of the mad Emperor Caracalla in AD 215, after he was accused by the rash Alexandrians of his brother's assassination. And an even more serious revolt took place in AD 297, this time firmly put down by Emperor Diocletian who recaptured Alexandria after a siege of eight months.
But not all imperial visits were aggressive. There was the time when Emperor Vespasian had come to Alexandria and, like Alexander the Great before him, was proclaimed ‘son of Amun’ and even the ‘reincarnation’ of Serapis. So seriously did Vespasian take this that he apparently went through the streets of Alexandria performing ‘miracles’, and on one occasion restored the sight to a blind man.63
Then there had been the relatively peaceful visit of Emperor Hadrian to Alexandria and to Thebes in Upper Egypt in AD 130. Whilst in Egypt Hadrian's favourite companion and lover, a youth called Antinous, drowned in the Nile whereupon Hadrian promptly ordered that a city be founded near the tragic spot to be called Antinoupolis. Hadrian also left us an observation of very great value concerning the worship of Christ and of Serapis in Alexandria when he wrote as follows to Servianus, the governor of the city: So you praise Egypt, my very dear Servianus! I know the land from top to bottom … In it the worshippers of Serapis are Christians, and those who call themselves Bishops of Christ pay their vows to Serapis … Whenever the patriarch himself comes to Egypt he is made to worship Serapis by some and Ch
rist by others.64
Amid such alarming religious syncretism, and constantly threatened by the temperamental debaucheries and cruelty of the Roman emperors, the Egyptian priesthood must have paused to reflect. So far they had succeeded, beyond their wildest dreams, in ensuring the survival of their age-old magical religion by accommodating and converting the Ptolemies. Now, however, they saw the Romans as a much more serious and perhaps even insurmountable danger. When the Romans had arrived in Egypt in AD 30 an intellectual and literary osmosis had long taken place between the Greeks and the educated Egyptians, many of whom were priests, scribes and functionaries associated with the temple-cult. As Dr. Kamil explains: The languages in official use in Egypt were Greek and Egyptian, Greek being the more widely used. Egyptian literates had learned Greek long before the conquest of Alexander. They also realised that if they transcribed their own language in the Greek alphabet, which was well known among the middle classes and was simpler to read than demotic (the cursive form of hieroglyphic writing in its latest development), communication would be easier. Scribes started translating Egyptian sounds in Greek, adding seven extra letters from the demotic alphabet to accommodate the sounds from which there were no Greek letters. The emergence of this new script, [is] now known as Coptic …65
There had been much encouragement in the exchange of ideas and written works, and the first Ptolemies, such as Soter and Philadelphus, would actually issue decrees that important Egyptian writings from the temple libraries should be translated into Greek, the lingua franca of Egypt and its neighbours.66 As noted above, tradition has it that Ptolemy I Soter also commissioned 72 erudite Jewish scholars to translate the Old Testament into Greek, a version now known as the Septuagint which was to serve as the basis for future Latin translations.
Not surprisingly a very powerful spiritual and intellectual mutation began to occur in Alexandria which ended up producing a ‘neo-Egyptian’ wisdom philosophy that was readily embraced by the cosmopolitan inhabitants. One element of this was Christian Gnosticism, which we have examined at length in Part I, and which is represented most strongly today in the surviving Nag Hammadi texts. Another, closely linked but with its own distinct character, was the ‘pagan’ Hermetic literature we've explored in Chapters Eight and Nine. Also compiled in Alexandria in the first three centuries AD, it is these Hermetic texts, claims Jill Kamil, that most perfectly sum up the intellectual and spiritual yearnings of the period: Although, therefore, Egypt was ruled by a Greek speaking elite, and the bulk of the population was largely illiterate, there was a bilingual community that was multinational. This is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in a collection of syncretistic treatises known as the Corpus Hermeticum. The corpus was purportedly written by Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom who, under his Greek name Hermes Trismegistus, gave the compilation its name. The Hermetic texts, some composed in Greek, some translated from Egyptian into Greek, were a blend of semi-philosophical treatises on the divine, ancient Egyptian wisdom and literature, and esoteric teachings including cosmological conceptions and mysticism. Through such literature, one can best appreciate the varied and subtle ways in which the consciousness of the divine manifested itself among the whole cultural amalgam in Egypt.67
In the Chapter Eight we saw the effects of this strange and mysterious Hermetic literature after it burst upon the European scene in 1460. Let us now place it at its origins into is proper intellectual and cultural setting alongside the emergent force of Christianity in both its Gnostic and its ‘literalist’ forms.
The three major players
Around the year AD 30, some sixty years after Octavian invaded Egypt, it is claimed that a man called Jesus from the town of Nazareth was crucified in Jerusalem. This claim – that Christ was indeed man as well as god – is central to the doctrine of Roman Catholicism. On the other hand the reader will recall from Part I that the Gnostics held an entirely different view which did not admit the physical incarnation of Christ. Who is to say, at this remove of 2,000 years, which side was right and which was wrong, whether or not Christ was a man, or an apparition, or ever existed at all? Christianity exists, of that there is no doubt. It has shaped the world we live in. But Christ himself still proves elusive and nothing about the story of his life and death, or even about what happened to his followers during the first 30 or so years after his death, can honestly be said be to confirmed as solid historical fact.
Tradition has it Saint Mark went to Rome and in that city wrote his famous ‘Gospel’. Then, during the reign of Emperor Nero at about AD 60, he left Rome and travelled to Alexandria on his apostolic mission to convert the Egyptians. The great persecution of the Christians had already begun in Rome under Nero, and thus Egypt was not only a safer place to be but, and perhaps more important, was ripe for such a mission to succeed. And succeed it did, well beyond the wildest of Saint Mark's expectations.
According to Egyptian-Coptic tradition the first person in Egypt to be converted to Christianity by Saint Mark was a Jewish shoemaker from Alexandria. Whether this is historically true or not is unimportant, but it does emphasise the fact that the large Jewish population of Alexandria would have been an obvious target for such conversion to a new Judeo-Messianic cult. It is possible, indeed very probable, that some of the early followers of Jesus – whoever this mysterious figure really was! – found refuge in Egypt and formed the first nucleus of proto-Christian adepts in Egypt. Conversion thus naturally began within the existing Jewish population and then gradually spread to the indigenous as well as to the Graeco-Roman populations.
This process, almost organic in its progress, had the inevitable effect of producing a variety of religious factions in Alexandria. Right from the outset two key players were the Christian Gnostics on the one hand, who frequently interpreted the scriptures symbolically and allegorically, and ‘literalist’ Christians on the other who interpreted the scriptures literally. We have considered both at length in Part I.
A third major player resisted the Christian tide and remained ‘pagan’, retaining many original ancient Egyptian beliefs but now expressed in Greek, with rituals structured for Greek-speaking adepts. These were the Hermetists – so called, as we know, because they followed the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, the alter ego of the ancient Egyptian wisdom god Thoth. Vilified and hated by the Catholic Church, the Gnostics and Hermetists found in each other a common bond – this being the search for salvation and spiritual illumination through divine knowledge, that is to say through gnosis. And although the Gnostics were labelled ‘heretics’ by the Church and the Hermetists were branded as ‘pagans’, both were perceived as equally dangerous enemies and were, accordingly, persecuted with equal ferocity.
We've seen in Chapter Five how the persecution reached a point in the late fourth century AD when the Christian Emperor Theodosius closed all the ‘pagan’ temples in Egypt. Gnostics and pagans alike were hounded into the desert and their places of worship either destroyed or ‘converted’ into Catholic churches, while their books were seized and burnt. It seems, however, that both groups had previously taken precautions to ensure that their sacred texts and ancient traditions would not be completely erased.
We followed the story of Gnosticism in Part I and how it survived as a living tradition until the destruction of the Cathars and the Bogomils in the 13th and 14th centuries. We also reported the story of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts in Part I, their loss to the world for sixteen centuries, their miraculous recovery in 1945, and their implications for our understanding of Christianity.
The Hermetic texts, the so-called writings of Hermes Trismegistus, came to light rather sooner. Copies had been smuggled out of Egypt, probably during the fifth or sixth century AD, with some reaching Byzanthium and Macedonia. One complete collection would pass from hand to hand, albeit recopied several times but nonetheless remaining essentially the same for a thousand years until, as we described in Chapter Eight, an aging Italian monk found it, recognised it for what it was, and brought it to
Cosimo de’Medici.
The man of his epoch best suited to respond to such a discovery, Cosimo's early sponsorship launched the Hermetic message on a glittering Renaissance career that saw it infiltrate its symbolism into the very apartments of the pope before the end of the 15th century. Where Christian Gnosticism had been utterly crushed in Occitania after its re-emergence as Catharism, is it possible that the ‘pagan’ branch of the Alexandrian gnosis – i.e. Hermeticism – was about to succeed in overthrowing the hated tyranny of the Catholic Church?
In the later part of the 16th century, in a Europe devastated by the awful wars and persecutions arising from the conflict between Reformation and Catholic reaction … men turned to the Hermetic religion of the world to take them above these conflicts …
Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
Perchance your fear in passing judgement on me is greater than mine in receiving it…
Response of Giordano Bruno to the cardinals of the Inquisition after they sentenced him to be burnt at the stake. Reported in January 1600 by Gaspar Schopp, an eyewitness of his trial.
Some say the Renaissance ended with his death.
About Giordano Bruno, in Kenneth J. Atchity's The Renaissance Reader
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE PROPHET OF HERMES
During the Cathar crisis of the 12th and 13th centuries the Roman Catholic Church was obliged to compete with the high standards of behaviour and morality set by the Cathar perfecti. But after the heretics had been crushed the pressure was off and by the 16th century the reputation of the Vatican had once again become severely tarnished. Not only were there the ongoing excesses and horrors of the Inquisition – which was passing through a phase of renewed frenzy. Also there had been the numerous scandals of the ‘bad popes’. Amongst these, as we saw in Chapter Eight, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI stands out for his bizarre behaviour, not to mention the intrigue and homicidal cruelty of his two children, Cesare and Lucretia Borgia, and the wild parties and orgies that took place at the Vatican.