Why Philosophy Comes from Egypt

In the Renaissance it was thought that Philosophy came from Egypt. This is because the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum were thought to be the work of Hermes Trismegistus, who, according to some at least, was the teacher of both Moses and the Greeks. This it turns out was incorrect. The Hermetic texts were the product of a Hellentistic environment that post-dated the Common Era. By a delicious irony, however, it has turned out that the Renaissance was right after all. Philosophy (in our hemisphere at least) does indeed come from Egypt and it is just such a Philosophy as we find in the Hermetic tradition. We know this because of a text discovered in the 19th century and deciphered in the last one called the Memphite Theology which, though the language is poetic, is clearly a work of speculative theology and indeed the oldest expression of what we might call speculative idealism: the idea that mind is the root of all phenomenal reality. This is a remarkable achievement indeed and it is only centuries of Orientalist bias that have prevented students of Classics and Philosophy from seeing the evident truth: Egypt articulated the first speculative theology in the western world and set the pattern for all subsequent ones. I say this even though the theology of the Memphite priests is still couched in imagery and metaphor sometimes of a rough and ready sort. The content of the work is clear even if its imagery sometimes is crude: from the hiddenness of mind comes the creative word that orders time and space and the realm of sense. It orders the gods and emergence and decay of all natural things. It articulates the principles of moral and civic order. In fact, it is the principle underlying all iterations of order. This is what makes it a theology and one of the highest order: it affirms an ‘order of orders’ or as later authors might put it ‘a form of forms’. Each kind of order, divine, natural, civic and moral manifests the on ultimate principle which is mind expressed.

“There came into being as the heart and there came into being as the tongue…” are the first words of our ‘myth’. This ‘coming into being’ is a reference not to a temporal beginning which is not specified but to the mythic time, the ‘once upon a time’ which is every time and no time. This is to say there is no ‘coming into being’ at all in play though the theologians of Egypt may have lacked any vocabulary for this. At any rate ‘there came into being’ may be taken as equivalent to ‘there is’ EXCEPT that it also refers to some form of emanation or generation and if something happens it must be figured, at least, as happening in time. However one resolves this point, what has ‘come to be’ from its ground is a polarity of heart and tongue. The heart is what is inward to itself and the tongue is what speaks or reveals the inward. We may take the heart to signify the inward conception and the tongue to signify what is expressed outwardly. The ground conceives itself to itself as the heart and expresses what it conceives as the tongue. This coming to be of the heart and tongue together is the coming to be of the ‘Atum’ or creator: the self- generated principle of external visible reality. Now we have a remarkable formulation: “the mighty great one is Ptah, who transmitted life to all the gods, as well as to their ka’s”. the ka is the vital spirit. The mighty great one, Ptah is the ground, the hidden essence of deity who guards life within himself yet gives to the gods, of himself, the life he has. Their life is the life of Ptah and this confirmed in the following: “…through this heart by which Horus became Ptah and through this tongue by which Thoth became Ptah.” As Ptah is the ground the heart is Horus and the tongue Thoth yet each is Ptah. The ‘substance’ of Ptah is one with itself in its diffusion. Ptah comes to be thought as Horus yet remains Ptah as Horus retains the substance of what he has been given. Ptah comes to be expression as Thoth yet remains Ptah as Thoth as Thoth retains the substance of what he has been given. Horus and Thoth are Ptah in the modes of thought and conception and the three together are the Atum or self-originate.

One thing notable here is that the emanation of Ptah as Horus and Thoth and the establishing of the Gods in their kas presumes no other. It is a free self-production for Ptah produces himself, by no other principle or external compulsion, as Horus and Thoth and the gods. He does not, as an artist does, produce himself in an ‘other’ such as a material substrate. He generates himself out of himself as the other. Unlike the Gods of Mesopotamia or Babylon there is no mythic battle with the forces of chaos but simple emergence into the light. Of course, the second stage of the process of the creation is the transition to the material determinations of nature. The heart and the tongue of Ptah are the archetypal conception of the world but it does not remain within itself but passes over into the sensible: “….he is in every body and in every mouth of all gods, all men, all cattle, all creeping things and everything that lives…”. Our anonymous theologian has placed Ptah in the mouth of all things and this is a nice touch. As Ptah speaks the inner word of his being so do all things speak their own ‘word’ which is both their word and the word of Ptah: they are the word of Ptah repeated or spoken again as man, visible god or animal. Plus, the speaking of Ptah, the word in their mouths, is also the word they themselves speak. They speak their own word as the word of Ptah in them and this they do by being the particular thing they are. Now Ptah as Horus and Thoth has “gained control over every other body”. He is the principle that determines how the gods, men and cattle disport themselves. The text tells us how this is so:”…by thinking and commanding everything he wishes.” It is by thinking and by willing that Ptah moves the powers of nature and there seems no violence or struggle in this. The word each being speaks of itself is also the word of Ptah in them: one thought and one dynamism determines each thing to its characteristic action. The world is radically the product of thought: the original first thought or intelligible archetype. Moreover, this first thought is immanent in the life and movement of all things and sustains the sensible world amidst its changes.      

The Memphite theologian gives us a rather crude metaphor for this. “The Ennead of the Gods is before him in the form of lips and teeth”. The Ennead or nine-fold of the gods are the visible powers that unfold the conception and expression of Ptah. We must remember that for the Egyptians the Gods are not hidden but fully and freely manifest as natural powers. It is not the nature of any god to conceal or hide from the top of the divine hierarchy down. All is manifest in some form even the most hidden. One would like to add that what is hidden to sense reveals itself to thought though I am not sure the text fully supports this. However, as we have a chain that descends from conception, to expression to the visible instruments of expression so we descend from Ptah to Horus and Thoth to the Ennead of the visible gods. The Memphite has considered his analogy very closely and worked it out in detail. If one were writing a history of foundational images we would include this one as perhaps our first. Speaking of metaphors however we now find one that is grossly physical to express such rarefied conceptions! The Atum or self-originate generates another. By what metaphor can we signify this self-generation of the unoriginated? The text gives us the easiest and most obvious one: “That is the equivalent of the semen and hands of Atum.” Not knowing Ancient Egyptian, I would not know how far to push the word ‘equivalent’ here but it at least seems to indicate that the author is aware that he is pushing an image to its logical conclusion. The first generates in an act equivalent to auto-eroticism except that this act is, unlike among humans, productive rather than sterile. What it is productive of is the divine totality which, we might say, is self-produced (though this act is still figured as in some sense erotic). The Ennead of Ptah however is specified as ‘the teeth and lips’ or the material cause (to use a later terminology) of his creative action. It is through the lips and the teeth that the tongue expresses the conceptions of the heart. This power operates through pronouncing the “name of everything”. As a thing is named, say the Goddess Tefnut (or Thales’ water!), that thing emerges as named. We thus have the conception not only of a material medium through which the first thought is manifest but a conception of form by which what is manifest is manifest by kind. This procession of kinds comes forth from the first yet also returns. The gods are a kind of sensorium reporting back to Ptah what they perceive: “The sight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears and the smelling the air by the nose, they report to the heart.” Their interaction is both an outgoing and a return and the flow between them is cyclical.     

Thus, the completed conception of the universe is figured as a great or macrocosmic body exactly as in the later Hermetic tradition. The speculative theologians of the renaissance such as Pico or Bruno would have been pleased with this work had they known of it. It is not only a ‘metaphysical’ or ‘scientific’ text however but also a political one. This is a very Egyptian concept: the order of society is also the order of nature. All things human, divine and natural flow in accordance with Maat or justice. The rising and falling of the Nile is according to Maat. The word of the Pharaoh is Maat as are the customs and manners of society. All are expressions of the underlying order of things. We might say that Maat has range of meanings comparable to the Greek word ‘Logos’ and performs the same function of an irreducible principle of order: “Thus the Ka spirits were made and the Hemsut spirits were appointed, they who make all provisions and all nourishment, by this speech. Thus, justice was given to him who does what is liked and injustice to him who does what is disliked.” Maat then is the principle of retributive justice. It is the source of political and religious order as well: “He had formed the gods, he had made cities, he had founded nomes, he had put the gods in their shrines, he had established their offerings, he had founded their shrines, he had made their bodies like that with which their hearts were satisfied.” Ptah’s speech is also the principle behind the arts: “Thus were made all work and all crafts, the action of the arms, the movement of the legs.” The arts and crafts, political and civic order, religious ritual, the orderly movements of the body are all “in conformance with this command which the heart thought which came forth through the tongue, and which gives value to everything.” With this order Ptah, like Yahweh in Genesis, rests satisfied for all is in accord with what he conceives.

We may sum this up as follows. There is order and value in the world insofar as what is, is in accordance with thought or, as Hegel might say, insofar as the real is rational. Religion, politics, craft, nature itself and even the human body manifest an underlying reason in which the principle of all recognizes his own reason and in which we too can recognize our own. With reason, understood as concrete visible order, we also have the axiological principle or form of the good. Ptah is the founder and giver of all these though this is much as to say that the principle of all these activities is thought. Of course, thanks in large part to the Hebrews, we now view the Egyptian image of divine order as tyrannous and oppressive. In so far as it folds political order directly into nature it is, for the institutions of Pharaonic Egypt are no more questionable than the winds and the tides. From the perspective of Genesis and Exodus the embodiment of reason in the immediate form of nature and society is the very bottom of the Platonic cave. There is in this text no religion or metaphysic of protest nor even the means to conceptualize one. This is not true of Exodus of course nor even of the Epic of Gilgamesh though the Babylonian hero’s protest has no objective resolution. Nor would Aristotle and his successors be satisfied with a theology built on images, as the Memphite Theology still is, to some degree, poetry rather than rational argument. Still, this wonderful text gives us the building blocks of a rational, speculative theology even if they have not quite fallen into form. We can see myth in the process of becoming thought which lends the Memphite Theology its own interest and excitement. One can tell a proper Whiggish story about this if one thinks the victory of logos over mythos complete: the Memphite Theology may take its place as a foreshadowing of Hellenic metaphysics and modern rationalism. If not, one might raise the theological problematic once again from its very beginnings.

For now, though, we might conclude with the following reflection. Our concern as explorers of this kind of cosmogonic poetry is not for the literal truth of any one world picture whether Egyptian, Hebrew, Ptolemaic, Newtonian, Relativistic or other. These are ALL images in succession and our concern after the fact is the dialectic that produces them which might be quite ‘objective’ even if the image itself is outdated. Our concern is with the free play of thought that produces and sustains each icon of nature. As this play has produced images in the past so it will do in the future: we shall have new icons accompanied by their own set of ‘self-evident facts’ known to every child. The point of looking at the old icons is that we can see them as icons. We cannot easily see this of our own world picture because, of course, we are in it. “What we are in” is what is for, us, the simple, natural truth. We can only see the world constructing function of the poetic icon in the constructions we have ceased to inhabit or that others inhabit. It is only in the poetic constructions of the past that we can see poetic construction in its true perspective and that is why we must forever read texts like the Memphite Theology or the Book of Genesis or any great cosmogonic statement.