The Original Book of Moses Cosmology

At the end of my last post I threw in Morton Smith’s hypothetical original Book of Moses cosmology, and I realised I was being a bit lazy for not actually presenting it in infograph form.  So here it is.

Briefly, the original pairs identified by Smith are:

1. Phos (male, light) – Auge (female, radiance)
2. Earth (female) – Water (male)
3. Nous (male, mind) – Phrenes (female, wits)
4. Genna (female, creative power) – spora (male, procreation)
5. Moira (female, fate) – Hermes (male)
6. Kairos/Helios (male, time/the sun) – Basilissa/Selene (the Queen/moon)
7. Psyche (female, soul)- Pythian Serpent (male)

In addition to these, Phobos (fear) was created to fix everything in place.

Looking at it now, it seems a) a lot less interesting than the final version and b) a bit arbitrary.  Hermes and Moira and Psyche and the Pythian Serpent don’t make particularly obvious  pairs; I’d say it’s more likely that, if the original system did involve syzygies, Hermes-Nous-Phrenes was probably one being, partnered with Moira-Psyche; the Pythian Serpent and Phobos would have been part of some other mythic fragment that was tagged on the end.  Why?  Because the identification of Hermes/Thoth with the mind (nous) of god is pretty common in late antique thought, and Moira is closely related to Hekate, the World Soul (Psyche) of the Chaldaean Oracles; with God they’d then correspond to the God-Nous/Aion-Hekate/Psyche triad of the Neoplatonist/Chaldaean system.  But it’s just a thought.

(I realise that the last paragraph may make very little sense, but this is a just follow up post; keep reading the cosmologies series and eventually all will become clear.)

Source: Morton Smith, ‘P Leid J 395 (PGM XIII) and Its Creation Legend’ in Studies in the Cult of Yahweh, Volume II, Shaye J D Cohen (editor), E J Brill, Leiden, 1996 (1986), pp.227-234

The Cosmology of the Eighth Book of Moses (PGM XIII 1-646)

Today’s cosmology comes from the Greek Magical Papyri, specifically PGM XIII lines 1-646, from two versions of a spell titled ‘The Eighth Book of Moses.’  But don’t let the title fool you; while this has a few Jewish elements it’s actually a late Egyptian work, written in Greek and with heavy Greek influences.  The version we have was probably found in a tomb near Thebes, and dates from the fourth century AD, but its contents are certainly older. The spells give instructions for summoning a god for the purposes of divination, and part of the spoken formula includes an account of creation; this is what I’ve tried to  capture in the infographic above.  The two versions are slightly different, and not entirely clear; I’ll give an account of the synthesised creation myth I read from it, and then discuss what the original version might have been.

The creator god isn’t explicitly named in this account; the scholar Morton Smith thinks it’s the Egyptian sun god Harpocrates (‘Horus the Child’), but other parts of the spell seem to be addressed to Aion (a vaguely defined but powerful god in late antique religion), so either are options; I’ve just opted to call him ‘God’, we should probably imagine him as being a traditional Egyptian creator god like Atum-Re. He laughs seven times, creating a god each time.  The first laugh creates Phos-Auge (‘Light-Radiance’) who illuminates everything as the god over the cosmos and fire.  The second laugh creates Water; the Earth heaves and splits the water into three parts.  Although only one of these is named – the Abyss (the Waters below the Earth) – the other two are probably the Waters of the Earth and the Waters of the Heavens (the source of rain).  A god appears to govern the Abyss, and his name is given as either Eschakleô or Promsakha-Aleeio.

The third laugh creates Nous-Phrenes (‘Mind-Wits’), who is named Hermes or Semesilam (‘Eternal Sun’, an old Semitic deity).  This god holds a heart, which was the seat of cognition according to Egyptian thought.  We should probably think of him as Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and the moon, who was often called ‘the Heart of Re’.

The fourth laugh creates Genna (‘Creative Power’) who controls Spora (‘Procreation’.)  Then the god laughs a fifth time, but is gloomy; the goddess Moira (‘fate’) appears, holding a set of scales to symbolise her power over justice.  Hermes fights her for control of justice, but God intervenes and says that both will control justice, but everything in the world will be subject to Moira, who is the first to receive the sceptre of the world.

Gladdened, God laughed a sixth time, and this time Kairos (‘time’) comes forward holding a sceptre to indicate his kingship.  Kairos gives his sceptre to Phos-Auge, who wraps Kairos in his glory.

Weeping now, the God laughs for the last time, and Psyche (‘soul’) came into being; there may be a reference here to the older Egyptian creation myth in which mankind was created from the sun god’s tears.  Psyche sets the world in motion, and seeing this the God hisses – hissing, and making popping sounds, were two techniques used by magicians to avert evil.  This hiss causes the Earth to heave and give birth to the Pythian Serpent, which has foreknowledge of everything.  The Serpent frightens the God, who makes popping sounds, and Phobos (‘fear’) comes into existence, armed and terrifying.  Frightened once again, God speaks the name “Iao”, and the great god Iao comes forth from the echo.

This is one of the most interesting parts, since this god, better known by the modern transliterations Yahweh or Jehovah, is the Jewish god.  He pops up quite often in the Greek Magical Papyri, and Morton Smith, the scholar mentioned earlier, sees this not as a direct Jewish influence, but as evidence of an Egyptian Yahweh-cult, which grew out of the polytheistic Jewish religion attested in the Egyptian settlement of Elephantine from as early as the fifth century.  The Jewish elements in the Papyri are very different from the Rabbinic and Biblical Judaism we know of elsewhere, and the transliteration Iao wasn’t used by the Judaean Jews; the Greek translation of the Bible they used, the Septuagint, used the term Kurios ho Theos (‘The Lord God’) in its place.  I don’t think there’s been enough research done to definitively confirm this hypothesis, but it seems quite reasonable to me.

Back to the story: Phobos and Iao fight over which should have precedence, but God says that both may have command, and they fix the world in place.

As I’ve said both versions are very slightly different, and Morton Smith has attempted to piece together the original version.  In this reconstruction, each laugh creates a pair of deities, one male, one female. This system of ‘yoked-pairs’ (syzygies) is very common in late antique cosmologies, and may have originated in Egypt where the Heliopolitan creation myth begins with the god Atum creating Shu (the male light-filled air) and Tefnut (the female moisture), who then produce Geb (the male earth) and Nut (the female sky).

So the original pairs identified by Smith are:

1. Phos (male, light) – Auge (female, radiance)
2. Earth (female) – Water (male)
3. Nous (male, mind) – Phrenes (female, wits)
4. Genna (female, creative power) – spora (male, procreation)
5. Moira (female, fate) – Hermes (male)
6. Kairos/Helios (male, time/the sun) – Basilissa/Selene (the queen/moon)
7. Psyche (female, soul)- Pythian Serpent (male)

In addition to these, Phobos (fear) was created to fix everything in place; Iao was added later, repeating Phobos’ actions.

Sources:

Hans Dieter Betz (editor), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation including the Demotic Spells, Volume One: Texts, University of Chicago, 1992

Morton Smith, ‘P Leid J 395 (PGM XIII) and Its Creation Legend’ in Studies in the Cult of Yahweh, Volume II, Shaye J D Cohen (editor), E J Brill, Leiden, 1996 (1986), pp.227-234

Morton Smith, ‘Jewish elements in the Magical Papyri’ in Studies in the Cult of Yahweh, Volume II, Shaye J D Cohen (editor), E J Brill, Leiden, 1996 (1984), pp.242-256

The Tebtunis Cosmology

Although it’s only known from a few first century papyrus fragments found in the village of Tebtunis in the Fayum, aspects from this cosmology crop up in the Greek Magical Papyri (specifically PGM IV.1596-1715), written about 300 years later at the opposite end of Egypt, making it likely that this cosmology represents more broadly one of the final developments of Egyptian theology, the culmination of a tradition at least 3000 years old.  It’s a fascinating piece of work, an attempt to meld together several originally separate mythologies, and I’ve had to simplify it a bit in this infographic.

First of all, it’ll make things a bit simpler if I tell you that the Egyptian word for ‘the’ was p or pa; like several other languages (modern Greek, for example) they used this word in instances where we wouldn’t, but there you go.  For the Egyptians, the universe began with Nun, the watery abyss.  In the Nun was the god Pshai Pa Nun.  Pshai means, simply, ‘the Shai’, and shai was the Egyptian concept of fate; everyone had a shai,who functioned like a guardian angel, but Shai himself was a deity associated with Agathos Daimon (the ‘good demon’), the patron god of  Alexandria, and was quite important in the Greek and Roman period.  He was usually pictured as a serpent, often with a human head.  Pa Nun is, obviously, ‘the Nun’, and taken together Pshai Pa Nun means ‘Shai, the Nun’ or ‘Shai in the Nun’; we don’t know which.

Pshai came to rest upon a reed thicket upon the sand: this part drawns onthe creation myth of Heliopolis, in which the creator god Atum-Re raises a primal mound from the Nun and stands upon it to create the cosmos.  Pshai, like Atum, masturbates and scatters his seed as his first act of creation, but in the Tebtunis cosmology the seed becomes Ptah, the creator god of the city of Memphis.  Ptah fashions eight eggs from his thoughts, and scatters them; these hatch into the Ogdoad (‘Eight Gods’), the four primal gods and four primal goddesses of the creation myth of Hermopolis, representing the attributes of the Nun; they are Amun and Amaunet (deities of invisibility), Nun and Naunet (wateriness), Kuk and Kauket (darkness), Huh and Hauhet  (endlessness).  They are usually imagines as snakes (in the case of the goddesses) and frogs (in the case of the gods).  The Egyptian word for Ogdoad is khemeniu, and Ptah makes a pun on this calling them khem meniu (little images’).

The little images then merge into two deities, one male and one female, who merge again to produce Amun, the god of Thebes, in the form of a black bull with eight hypostases (or aspects).  He seems to create, or become, the four winds, which then merge into one wind, which separates the earth from the sky, allowing the cosmos to come into existence.

Pshai has been hidden until now in the Nun, but Amun fertilises an egg, and from it Pshai is reborn as the sun god Pre (‘the Re’).  Pre speaks Thoth, the god of the moon and wisdom, into existence.  Then there is a sequence of events I haven’t shown on the infograph, but you can read about in the Book of the Heavenly Cow: Pre grows old, mankind rebels against him, he sends his Eye against them in the form of a lion goddess, but repents and saves mankind from total destruction.  Then he rises into the sky to leave mankind behind.  The Ogdoad die and their burial rites are performed by Thoth; in ancient times you could apparently visit the graves of these eight gods in Hermopolis.

The cosmology then talks about the birth of Horus, and how he is protected by his mother Isis until he grows old enough to become king.  This seems to presuppose the Heliopolitan creation myth, which is what I’ve inserted into the bottom of the diagram: Pre creates the Ennead (‘Nine Gods’), starting with Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture), who give birth to Geb (earth) and Nut (sky); their children are Osiris, Isis, Nephthys (who I’ve called by her Egyptian name Nebt-Het for space reasons), Set and Horus.  Isis and Osiris together are the parents of Horus.  Now if you’ve been paying attention you’ll have noticed that there are two Horuses; in the diagram I call one Hor-Wer (‘Great’ or ‘Elder’ Horus); he is better known by his Greek name Haroeris, while the other Horus is often called Harsiese (‘Horus son of Isis’).  In some myths, like that written on the walls of the temple of Edfu, they are treated like two different deities, but the right way of thinking about them is probably to say that they are both hypostases (or expressions) of the one Horus.

There is an interesting bit that then discusses the forces of life and death; the breath of life emanates from the Nun, and causes growth, while the breath of death emanates from ‘the Serpent’, who I think is probably Apep/Apophis, the enemy of Re. There aren’t many myths explaining his origins, but I’ve chosen to make him an emanation of the Nun; he’s probably best understood as a representation of ‘uncreation’, the chaotic force of nothingness outside the created order.  The third breath, the breath of the Nun, also comes from the Nun, and seems to be responsible for regenerating hills and mountains; ancient Egyptians seem to have believed that the earth itself, the rocks in it and so on, grew like living things;  Plotinus tells us that rocks continue to grow  until they are pulled out of the earth.

Source: M Smith, ‘A New Egyptian Cosmology’ in Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Egyptologists, C J Eyre (editor), Uitgeverij Peeters, Leuven, 1998, pp. 1075-1080

The Cosmology of Plotinus

So apart from my job, I’ve spend most of this year writing and researching my honours year thesis on the Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri.  Along the way I’ve encountered a lot of fascinating religious and philosophical movements, and it occurred to me that one of the best ways to understand their relationships would be to visually map out their cosmologies (this also has the advantage of indulging in my love of 50s style infographics and the font Hypatia.)

This is the first of what will hopefully be a series: it’s from the philosophy of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism and one of the greatest thinkers of late Mediterranean paganism; he deserves to be better known than he is, but his work in reformulating Platonism means that even if you’ve never heard of him, his ideas, mediated through Saint Augustine and incorporated into Christianity, have probably infiltrated your own thinking.  Basically, his view of the world was centred on a threefold god: the ineffable Father (or the One), the Divine Intellect and the World Soul; the divine essence flowed outward without diminishing itself, until it somehow reached its limits, and it was in the borderline of the divine and the uncreated that matter, and the perceptible universe, existed (if you’ve read that email forward about evil being the absence of good, that’s lifted from Plotinus).  But every human soul had a part of the divine in it, and by contemplation the philosopher  could achieve unity with God (Plotinus’ biographer, Porphyry, tells us that Plotinus experienced this himself on four occasions).  His is an austere and majestic intellectual mysticism, and it’s easy to see why it was embraced by those most famous late antique monotheists, the Christians, in their quest for intellectual respectability.

Source: Plotinus, The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna, 3rd Edition revised by B S Page, Faber and Faber Ltd, London, 1962