Hermetic Receptivity to Egyptian Abstract Concepts

"This study analyses Hermetic literature and focuses on the seventeen treatises of the so-called Corpus Hermeticum, with support of other philosophical Hermetica as well. As will be demonstrated, Hermetic literature helps our understanding of how reformulations of symbolic universes led to a specific Graeco-Egyptian mentality. The Hermetica will be treated as the result of cross-cultural exchange between Greek and Egyptian symbolic universes. This literature is here analysed according to its historical context, i.e. as part of a Greek-Egyptian dialogue."

Annals of the Sergiu Al-George Institute of Oriental Studies vol. IX-XI/2000-2002, 2006

Centro de Estudios del Egipto y del Mediterráneo Oriental CEEMO. Buenos Aires - ARGENTINA. , 2022

This interpretation essay intends to investigate the nature of the Egyptian cosmotheology that underlies the theological discourse of the priestly texts of all ages. We turn to the notion of the Egyptian demiurge as: “The one in the multiple”, that we consider to be proper to the Egyptian monism of all its historical eras, which contrasts with the cosmovision of the dualistic classical philosophy which poses a different vision of the universe than the classical one that can be summed up in the phrase: “The one and the multiple”; summary of an entire equivocal position with regard to the Egyptian cosmovision, based on assigning an implicit platonic dualist worldview. This situation is exacerbated by a radical difference, not always assumed, founded in the contrast between the Egyptian inclusive multipurpose logic and the western a disjunctive causal logic that flies over the interpretations of Egyptian religion. What is striking in this cosmovision is that it presents a radicalized immanentist ontology and transnatural significance of the demiurge, synthesizable as a single substance; a single attribute of an eternal living one divided as their ways and forms in the cosmos; a single ontology. One of their core foundations is the concept of transformation–emanation as an expression of the demiurge and its creation that poses an ontological continuum without rupture characteristic of this cosmotheology and their religiosity. This essay is the attempt to revalue a paradigm of interpretation of the ancient Egyptian religious cosmovision, the monistic or unitarian cosmovision and its derivations, drafted in the 1980s by Nordic Egyptologists -Symposia of Uppsala (1987) and Bergen (1988)- and that projects the scholar to a divergent perception of the Egyptian experience of the sacred in respect of the interpretations currently in vogue

THE ARTS OF MAKING IN ANCIENT EGYPT, 2018

The first question in this contribution is a methodological one: how can we disclose the ancient Egyptian conception of knowledge? As with all abstract categories, the Egyptian sources keep silence on this. In my opinion, the methodological problem is in fact an epistemological one. We have – as in “Actor-Network-Theory” (ANT) – to abstract such Egyptian conceptions from a praxeological point of view. The astounding result is that the Egyptian writings themselves expect the praxeology as a basic condition of every form of knowledge. The key for opening that black box is to describe how the epistemological community, the “knowledge elite”, negotiated, attacked, and defended themselves in the time of hegemonic disorientation. Beside the secrecy of knowledge and the basic condition that it had only to be experienced, Egyptian sources tend to a naturalistic description of Creation, in which both the world and the creator arise from one and the same substance. The hierarchy of the existence leads to a dynamic Ontology in which every element could be the starting point of Creation at any moment. Egyptian hieroglyphs, like the Egyptian syncretism of gods and creatures, are the representations of a diffusional monistic atomism, familiar to modern scholars of the early Greek natural philosophy. Not only Pythagorean, Orphic or Platonic currents, or hermetic mysteries and the Gnostics, evoke Egyptian thoughts, but also the late antique Arab mystics and alchemists. Both the materialism and mysticism of things and its agency are rooted, in my view, in the theology of the Theban god Amun, which developed at the beginning of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, and is having an effect down to Bruno Latour’s metaphysics of things in our own time.

2015

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2011

This paper approaches de historical context of social and cultural interactions between Greeks and Egyptians from the Macedonian conquest to the Roman rule over Egypt. It aims to understand the formation of cultural Greek and Egyptian self-perceptions during that period, as well as the symbolic relations between their counterparts in that society. For that purpose, the Greek concept of Nomos is proposed here in articulation to Egyptian religiousness as key makers to better understand the complex matter of cultural idenity in Hellenistic Egypt.