The Forbidden Universe (27 page)

Eunapius tells us that Antoninus’ followers understood this as an oracle, which came to pass very shortly after he died in the persecutions ordered by Emperor Theodosius. His prediction echoes the Lament, although Antoninus could not have been its author as it was being quoted by Christian writers from the start of the century. However, he could
well have used the Lament as the basis for his own
prediction
. At the very least this shows that the ‘Neoplatonist’ Antoninus shared the attitudes and anxieties of the Hermetic writer of
Asclepius
.

As with Hermeticism, the Neoplatonic trail leads to native Egyptian traditions connected with the Serapis cult. In fact, Neoplatonism and Hermeticism were natural bedfellows – they are simply two sides of the same coin.

However, the Serapis cult itself was a relatively new innovation, created or adapted for the all-conquering Hellenic world, just as Alexandria was a new city built by the Greeks. Therefore any traditions transmitted via the cult to the Hermetica must have originated with some other cult from some other place. But what was it and where did it come from?

Karl Luckert traces the origins of the wisdom tradition of which Plotinus was heir not just a few centuries back into Egypt’s past, but all the way to its beginning. And, if Luckert is right, given that Neoplatonism is the twin of Hermeticism, then wherever one is found, inevitably the other will be also.

After comparing Neoplatonic spirituality with the
traditional
Egyptian religious schools, Luckert identified its origin as the theology of the major cult centre of Heliopolis. This discovery leads us to another: that strangely evocative but mysterious city also holds the key to the wisdom of the Hermetica. Even the name ‘Heliopolis’ is tantalizing, being Greek for ‘City of the Sun’, which is probably why the term appealed so much to Renaissance Hermeticists such as Tommaso Campanella.

The golden city was the centre of the cult of the sun god Ra, or Re (associated with the Greek Helios). Even during the era of Greek domination the city still hosted a great
annual ceremony in his honour. Sadly, this sacred place is now submerged beneath a largely industrial suburb in the north of Cairo (although confusingly not the district called Heliopolis, which is in quite another part of the city), where a three-and-a-half-thousand-year-old temple was
discovered
beneath the market in 2006. The ancient Egyptians called it Iunu, which means ‘pillars’, a reference to the many obelisks that poked their phallic fingers at the sky, only one of which now remains – and it appears under the name of On in the Old Testament. The matching pair of red granite obelisks in New York and London (the anachronistically named Cleopatra’s Needle) also came from Heliopolis. It was the most renowned centre for the preservation of Egypt’s wisdom tradition, and the most ancient. Its
reputation
is attested by the fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, who visited the city ‘where the most learned of the Egyptians are said to be found’, and met its priests.
²⁵

In fact, Egypt has always exerted a powerful hold over the imagination, certainly because of its literal magic and mystery but also possibly simply because its civilization endured virtually unchanged for a staggering length of time, from the unification of the two kingdoms of the Nile, Upper and Lower Egypt, around 3100 BCE. Within a mere five hundred years it had reached the level of architectural and engineering genius embodied in the great pyramids of Giza, Saqqara and Dahshur. To put these staggering achievements in perspective, this was about four thousand years before the building of the great Gothic cathedrals in European cities such as York in the north of England and the French capital.

Yet the essential aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization – its political and social structure, culture, symbolism and religion – remained more or less the same for over two millennia. Although throughout its remarkably long history there were periods of foreign occupation, the culture always
rose again with its traditions basically intact. Indeed, when the Greeks took over in the fourth century BCE Egyptian culture was still recognisably the same as it always was. Even then, it continued beneath a veneer of Hellenization for another seven centuries until finally being wiped out by the Christians.

The earliest known religion of Egypt, the one that inspired the pyramid builders and other Egyptian geniuses, was that of Heliopolis. Over the course of the civilization’s lengthy history other cults and religions came to the fore at different times. A particularly strong challenge was posed in the fifteenth century BCE by the religion centred in Memphis that featured Ptah as its creator-god. But the Heliopolitan theology influenced all those that came after it – it was ‘the dominant strain of thought by which subsequent Egyptian religious notions and rites were oriented’.
²⁶
The Ptah cult, for example, assimilated the Heliopolitan tradition rather than attempting to displace it. Although, like every other system of belief, it went through changes and evolved, the essential ideas remained unchanged over time. Only one attempt was made to eradicate the Heliopolitan religion completely. In the fourteenth century BC the ‘heretic pharaoh’ Akhenaten tried to replace it with the cult of his single solar god Aten, who was in many respects his divine alter ego.

The great genius Imhotep was a priest of Heliopolis – his cult was still practised in Heliopolis in the second century BCE, an astonishing two and a half millennia after his earthly life – and so was Manetho some 2,300 years later. Both show that Heliopolis was both a religious centre and a place of learning and science. Both priests also have a connection, albeit indirect, with the Hermetica. The prominence in the texts of Asclepius, a thinly-disguised Imhotep, suggests an association with Heliopolis. And given that Manetho was a priest of Heliopolis and
instrumental in founding the Serapis cult – with which the Hermetic works seem connected – one can clearly see a bridge between the two cults.

Although the Heliopolitan religion was complex and sophisticated, nowhere in its lengthy history did its priests record its basic theology and practices. This was not the Egyptian way. Apart from an apparently engrained instinct to maintain secrecy – possibly because only the worthy could be initiated into the mysteries – priests preferred to express their religion through ritual and symbols and myths, the best-known of which is the story of Isis and Osiris.

The supreme expression of the Heliopolitan religion is the Pyramid Texts, which were inscribed in hieroglyphs on the walls of the burial chambers of the pyramids of seven pharaohs and their queens, between about 2500 and 2200 BCE. The inscriptions consist of a series of several hundred incantations relating to the afterlife journey of the deceased. However, even though the inscriptions are the most ancient religious writings known from anywhere in the world, unquestionably they derive from even older texts, dating from the very beginning of the Egyptian civilization.
²⁷

Yet although even the Pyramid Texts fail to set out the beliefs of Heliopolis systematically, why should we expect them to? After all, the people who mattered – the priests and worshippers – were already familiar with their own religion. The Texts do, however, allow the core theology and cosmology behind them to be reconstructed. The most successful attempt is found in Karl Luckert’s
Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire
(1991), which isolates two related aspects: the overall understanding of the origins and nature of the cosmos, and its relationship to human beings.
²⁸

The religion centres on nine major gods, who became known later in Greek as the Great Ennead (a group of nine). The Nine – along with a multitude of lesser gods – were all
considered manifestations of the one great creator-god, Atum. The other god-forms are convenient symbols for his different aspects.

As might be expected of such a red-blooded ancient people, the Heliopolitan creation myth – or metaphor – is highly charged sexually. Luckert describes it as ‘
pornographic
theography’.
²⁹
In the original version of the creation myth Atum masturbated, his explosive climax shooting the universe out into space. Later this description was modified in order to appease the easily offended, having him spit or merely cry out – an image of a god creating the world through his divine word that was borrowed by both Old and New Testaments.

At first the image seems crudely schoolboyish, but it actually possesses rather more sophistication than meets the eye. For a start, it is a pretty good analogy for the ultimate act of creation and certainly conjures up an irresistibly lasting image, unlike those contained in dry-as-dust astronomical textbooks. And like many belief systems, the Heliopolitan religion saw everything in creation in terms of a yin yang-like complementary polarity – positive-negative, light-dark and so on – which is most often experienced at a human level as the relationship between male and female. In the original myth of Atum, his phallus is the male principle and his hand the female, and the first things they make are the goddess Shu and god Tefnut, their embodiments.

Some authorities, such as German specialist on myth and symbols Manfred Lurker, prefer the description that Atum ‘copulates with himself using his hand’.
³⁰
Although to the uninitiated this may sound like much of a muchness, the essential difference is that masturbation doesn’t normally generate life. The point is that Atum contains within himself both male and female. And the metaphor of ejaculation encapsulates the notion of the universe as having a single
point of origin in space and time, from which everything explodes outwards – a very modern image for the beginning of the universe. One Egyptologist even uses the word ‘singularity’ to describe this concept.
³¹

So the universe expands outwards from Atum’s own big bang, becoming not just larger but ever more complex and multidimensional, each level being represented by new pairings of deities. The first new gods or forces that come into being are the female Shu (corresponding to life) and the male Tefnut (order), who are locked in ‘perpetual sexual union’.
³²
This produces their more visible
manifestations
– in sharper focus, as Luckert puts it – the Earth-god Geb and Sky-goddess Nut. They in turn give birth to two pairs of twin gods, Osiris and Isis, and Set and Nephthys. All together they make up the Great Ennead, arranged in four levels of being, beginning with Atum. As Luckert notes:

This is by no means the end of the process, however, as the system is repeated on a lesser octave, beginning with the child of Isis and Osiris, the falcon-god Horus, who occupies a transitional space between the Great Ennead and the Lesser Ennead, the nine gods of this world (which includes Thoth). Horus’ relationship with the material universe is the same as Atum’s with all creation, making him therefore the god of the material world (besides being ‘a son of God and savior of humankind’),
³⁴
the equivalent of
Plato’s Demiurge and the Hermetic second god, while (like his father Osiris, who died and rose again), also bearing some comparison with Jesus.

As we have seen, according to Heliopolitan beliefs, the material universe that we perceive through our senses is only part – the outer edge, as it were – of an unimaginably vaster creation, much of which is hidden from us. Again, there is an obvious parallel with Plato’s later concept of spiritual and physical worlds, which is why the last heirs of Heliopolis, the Neoplatonists, found his philosophy so suitable for their purposes.

In his book, Luckert makes a detailed comparison of the Heliopolitan theology in the Pyramid Texts and the
principles
of the Neoplatonists, particularly Plotinus, and finds the two are identical. Given the overwhelming evidence that Plotinus derived his teachings from secretly-taught Egyptian traditions, there seems to be no other explanation than that the Heliopolitan system was transmitted down the ages until it reached Ammonius Saccas and other Egyptian sages.

Given the close relationship between the inaccurately named Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, the Heliopolitan system must therefore also underpin the latter. And an examination of the basic ideas of Hermeticism bear this theory out. The language may be different, but the
fundamental
principles are the same.

In the world accessible to human perception, the sun god Ra was deemed to take a role analogous to Atum’s in relation to the universe as a whole, and was even known by the composite name Atum-Ra. (For the same reason Ra was also equated with Horus, as Ra-Horakhty.) It is not known when or how this conflation of the two great gods took place, only that they were being associated in the very
earliest days of the Egyptian civilization. Atum was a hidden, invisible god; Ra, the golden royal sun, is his visible manifestation. This reveals a connection with the words of
Asclepius
quoted by Copernicus, namely that the sun is a ‘visible god’, which of course implies the existence of one that is invisible. This has an important implication: if Atum is the centre of creation, then the sun is the centre of the cosmos that humans can perceive.