The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim (11 page)

Growing up in the royal palace in Thebes, Moses would have known this place well and worshipped in its sacred halls. It was here that Moses was raised in his early years and spent the first 40 years of his life. He would have been taught not only the mathematics and sciences afforded a royal education in the courts of 18th Dynasty Egypt, but also would have experienced the worship and religious practices of the day.

The Ogdoad is the Egyptian creation myth that Moses would have been very familiar with and that some say laid his basis for writing about the creation in the Book of Genesis. The Ogdoad myth originated in Hermopolis and consisted of eight personified primeval forces, each of which was represented in the four couples of deities. In Egyptian cosmology, the number 4 represented the number of totality and completeness. The significance of these four primeval couples is not easy to understand today, for they lack any greater mythological context, and neither is there much substantive personification of the four couples of deities.
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The couples of the Ogdoad:

Nu and Naunet
, representing the primeval waters.

Heh and Hauhet
, signifying boundlessness.

The Inner Gate of the Ramesseum, in Luxor, Egypt. The Ramesseum is the temple complex of Ramses III, built on the site of what is now known as Medinat Habu, “The House of a Million Years.” On this same site are the ruins of a much more ancient temple in which Moses would have learned of the Ogdoad
.
Photo courtesy of Dr. John T. Ward and Dr. Maria Nilsson, The Sirius Project copyright 2011. Used with permission.

Kek and Kauket
, signifying darkness.
Amun and Amaunet
, signifying air.

The four couples of the Ogdoad are less about their personalities and characteristics than they represent elemental forces in the creation of the world. The cosmogony they represent are the primeval physical matters of existence rather than the actual springing to life of the organic world, and of these eight deities, only Amun developed into a remarkable status and moved to Thebes with his female counterpart, Amaunet. These four pairs of deities also complement each other: For every “male” deity is the “female” counterpart, to make up a whole, according to the ancient Egyptian complementary way of thinking. The males are shown with the heads of frogs and the females with heads of snakes; such physical attributes are frequently said in ancient texts to inhabit the primeval waters.

At el-Ashmunein were unearthed only very scant inscriptions of the Ogdoad, telling us very little about this cosmogony, but they appear ever so subtly in the writings of Moses. The main part of evidence is taken from Theban monuments, which were pieced together in 1929 by Kurt Sethe in his survey,
Amun und die Acht Urgotter von Hermopolis
,
⁵
but the earliest references to the Hermopolitan cosmogony is found in the Pyramid Texts:

You have your offering-bread, O Niu and Nenet, you two protectors of the gods Who protect the gods with your shadow. You have your offering-bread,
O Amun and Amaunet
, You two protectors of the gods Who protect the gods with your shadow. You have your offering-bread, O Atum and Ruti, Who yourselves created your godheads and your persons. O Shu and Tefenet who made the gods, Who begot the gods and established the gods….
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These deities were said to comprise the very substances out of which creation was brought to the universe. At Hermopolis, the opinion was that at some point these eight primeval beings interacted, whereupon
a great explosion occurred, which somehow laid free the Primeval Mound. The mound later became Hermopolis, though at first it was called the Isle of Flame, as the sun god was said to be born and to rise there for the very first time. Hermopolis claimed to predate the cosmogony of Heliopolis. Just as other creation centers maintained that their location was the original place where creation first had come into being, so was also the case at Hermopolis.

The Ogdoad were the fathers and the mothers who came into being at the start, who gave birth to the sun and who created Atum. From there on the rest of the cosmos is developed. But there are some twists to the story in which the eight divinities of the Ogdoad are thought to jointly have created what is known as the “cosmic egg” out of the primeval waters
(Nun)
. This egg was invisible as it was created already before the sun came into being. From this egg, according to some sources, the bird of light, an aspect of the sun-god, burst. Other sources say that the egg was filled with air, the association of the elemental couple of Amun and Amaunet. According to the Coffin Texts, this is the first act of creation:

O Atum give me this sweet air which is your nostrils

for I am this egg
which is in the Great Cackler,

I am the guardian of this great prop which separates
the earth from the sky.

If I live, it will live; if I grow old, it will grow old;

if I breathe the air, it will breathe the air.

I am he who splits iron, I have gone round about the egg,

(even I) the Lord of Tomorrow.
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In another version of this myth, the egg is laid by a goose, the Primeval Goose, or the
Gengen Wer
, with which Amun was associated as the creator. The goose is thought to carry the egg out of which creation comes. This myth is only given in fragments, but obviously it states that the sun in the form of a bird came out of the egg that the Primeval Goose laid in the waters of creation. It is also a form of Amun in his creator-god aspect.

The act of the creation, as performed by the Ogdoad, takes this basic chronological order:

1. The Ogdoad created existence in the form of the Primeval Mound or in the form of the cosmic egg.

2. The cosmic egg was created by the Primeval Goose.

3. The cosmic egg held air, or

4. The cosmic egg held a bird.

5. And the bird was a form of the sun.

To sum it all up, all forms of initial creation happened in the darkness of the primeval waters. Creation was circular, as was the egg. Birth led to decline-death-rebirth-renewal of the cyclic existence. The significance of all this is that some things existed before existence. One of these in preexistence was
Nun
. Another was primeval beings such as frogs and snakes, frogs being associated with fertility, snakes being associated with circularity and rebirth (that is, they shed their old skin). The first creator-god is created out of
Nun
by some interaction between all these primeval creatures. Then the creator-god creates the rest of the cosmos.

These are the things Moses would have experienced in his religious training, growing up in the royal courts of Egypt. But how are they applicable to our study of the Nephilim, and why are these backdrops important to their study? Because the setting of a solid foundation is critical to an examination of the words he wrote in the Book of Genesis. As I stated earlier, it is important to sludge through some of what seems to be mundane history in order to understand why certain things were said in certain ways. Understanding what motivated Moses to write the things he did is an all-important step to understanding the
objectives
of the things he wrote about.

Let’s look at how the Egyptian myth of creation was a foundation for what Moses wrote in the Book of Genesis.

A great source for this examination of the influences on the writing of Moses are the writings of Irenaeus, a second-century Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, then a part of the Roman Empire (now Lyons, France). He was an early church father and apologist, and his writings were formative in the early development of Christian theology, which at the time was indistinguishable from Catholic theology. Irenaeus’s best-known book,
Adversus Haereses
, or
Against Heresies
, was written around 180
CE
, and is a detailed attack on Gnosticism, which was at the time considered to be a serious threat to the Church.
⁸
As one of the first great Christian theologians, Irenaeus emphasized the traditional elements in the church, especially the episcopate, scripture, and tradition. Irenaeus wrote that the only way for Christians to retain unity was to humbly accept a single doctrinal authority, and that was the episcopal councils in union with the bishop of Rome. Against the Gnostics, who said that they possessed a secret oral tradition from Jesus himself, Irenaeus maintained that the bishops in different cities are known as far back as the Apostles, and none of
them
were Gnostics. He also maintained that the bishops provided the only “safe guide to the interpretation of Scripture.” His writings, with those of Clement and Ignatius, are taken to hint at papal primacy—the infallible word of the pope in all matters ecclesiastical and scriptural. Irenaeus is the earliest witness to recognition of the canonical character of all four gospels, and is really the precursor to the Constantinian Councils that established canonical rules for the bible.

The Gnostics claimed to possess the “hidden mysteries” as relayed to them by Jesus Christ himself. And according to their “heretical” teachings, Moses constructed the entirety of the Genesis account of creation on his early influence in Egyptian teachings of the Ogdoad. Irenaeus sets about in his writings to present and dissemble the writings of the Gnostics regarding Moses and creation, first referring to them as the development of “mighty fictions.”
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According to Irenaeus, Moses followed the pattern of the Ogdoad in the fashion in which he wrote the account of creation. This can get a little sticky, so stay with me here….

At the beginning of Moses’ account of creation in the Book of Genesis, he starts out in verse one of Genesis chapter one, by saying that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). And by creating a numerical number of four elements to the first staement of creation—God, created, heavens, earth—Moses was establishing the first
Tetrad
(grouping of four) of the Gnostics and hailing back to the initial four elements of the four god couples of the Egyptian Ogdoad. See where this is going, now? Fascinating stuff! Read on….

Moses went on in his creation account by stating that the creative act was invisible and hidden nature—a reference to the “invisible egg” of creation; a visible physical creation birthing from an invisible spiritual dimension: “Now the earth was invisible and unformed” (Genesis 1:2). Then, by naming an abyss and darkness, in which were also water, and the Spirit moving upon the water, Moses is referring to the second
Tetrad
that births out of the first: “invisible, unformed, Spirit, moved.”

Then, proceeding to mention the Gnostic
Decad
, Moses names light, day, night, the firmament, the evening, the morning, dry land, sea, plants, and, in the 10th place, trees all as a part of the initial creative act. Thus, by means of these 10 names, he indicated the 10 Æons of the Gnsotic structure, again based on the Egyptian Ogdoad.

Moses then reiterates the power of the Gnostic
Duodecad
and names the sun, moon, stars, seasons, years, whales, fishes, reptiles, birds, quadrupeds, wild beasts, and, after all these, in the 12th place, man. In this, the Gnostics taught that the
Triacontad
(the Triacontad (30) exist in a tripartite division of an Ogdoad (8), Decad (10), and Duodecad (12)) was spoken of through Moses by the Spirit. Further, man was also being formed after the image of the power above, had in himself that ability that flows from the one source: the invisible force. This ability was seated in the region of the brain, from which four faculties proceed, after the image of the Tetrad above, and these are called sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Moses also hails to the Ogdoad in stating that man has four sets of two: two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, and two senses of taste: bitter and sweet.

Moses continues on with his Ogdoad construct in that the sun was created on day four; the tented courts of the Tabernacle were made of fine linen, blue, purple, and scarlet. Again, the long robe of the priest falling over his feet, was adorned with four rows of precious stones. Moses also shows the influence of the Ogdoad, again, in that man was formed on the eighth day, his earthly part was formed on the sixth day, but his fleshly part on the eighth. Multiples of four.