Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

If to this we add the general Egyptian belief that a man's soul, after being " purified " in the after-death state, goes back to God, to live for the eternity as a god with the gods,1 then we have established the chief part of the " Poemandres " treatise as the Hellenised doctrine of the Egyptian priests — the mystery-tradition.

With all of this agrees the thought that the God as Mind dwells in the pious, as we learn from the Hermes Prayers. So also it is Ptah in our inscription who gives life to the pious and death to the impious. In very early accounts we find Ptah, the Mind, is the imparter of the gnosis for the gods — that is, as a Greek would say, he was the inventor of philosophy, as indeed Diogenes Laertius tells us (Prooem. 1) : " The Egyptians declare that Hephaistos was the source of philosophy, the presidents of which are priests and prophets." Ptah, the Mind, reveals himself to his own and gives them good counsel; "Ptah hath spoken to thee," Suidas tells us (s.v.), was a Greek-Egyptian saying, which is best elucidated by the Stele of Intef, which tells us that the people say of the heart of Intef : " It is an oracle of the god which is in every body." 1

1 This does not mean, I hold, that there was no "reincarnation," that is, that the "being" of the man did not emanate other " souls," but that the " soul " of a particular life did not return — that all of it deserving of immortality became a god with the gods, or " those-that-are," and do not only ex-ist.

All of this and much more of a like nature make it indubitably clear that the fundamental conceptions of the " Poemandres " are Egyptian, and that the theory of Neoplatonic forgery must be for ever abandoned; so that even the dreams of DeVeria are nearer the truth than the confident assertions of many a great name in scholarship.

THE MAN-DOCTRINE

But what, says Reitzenstein (p. 69), is not Egyptian, is the doctrine of the Man, the Heavenly Man, the Son of God, who descends and becomes a slave of the Fate-Sphere ; the Man who, though originally endowed with all power, descends into weakness and bondage, and has to win his own freedom and regain his original state.

This doctrine seems to have been in its origin part and parcel of the Chaldsean mystery-tradition ; but it was widely spread in Hellenistic circles, and had analogies in all the great mystery-traditions, as we shall now proceed to see, and chiefly by the analysis of what has hitherto been regarded as one of the most chaotic and puzzling documents of Gnosticism.

i Cf. Breasted, Zeit.f. ag. Spr. (1901), p. 47.

VII
THE MYTH OF MAN IN THE MYSTERIES

THE GNOSTIC TRADITION

" BUT All-Father Mind, being Life and Light, did bring forth Man (" A.v6 pooirov) co-equal to Himself." 1

So runs the opening paragraph of what we may call the soteriological part of the " Pcemandres " treatise of our Trismegistic literature. This Man or Anthropos is the Spiritual Prototype of humanity and of every individual man, and is a technical term found in a number of the early Christianised Gnostic systems.

For instance, in a system some outlines of which are preserved in the polemical Refutation of Irenseus,2 and which the Bishop of Lyons seems to associate with an Ophite tradition, while Theodoret3 ascribes it to the Sethians, we are told that in the Unutterable Depth were two Great Lights, — the First Man, or Father, and His Son, the Second Man ; and also the Holy Spirit, the First Woman, or Mother of all living.

In this tradition, moreover, the Son of the Mother — the chief Formative Power of the seven Demiurgic Potencies of the sensible cosmos — is called laldabaoth (? the Child of the Egg), who boasts himself to be

1 C. H., i. 12.

2 Contra Om. Hcer., I. xxx. ; ed. A. Stieren (Leipzig, 1853), i. 263 ff.

3 fleer. Fab., I. xiv.

supreme. But his mother, Wisdom, reproves his pride, saying unto him : " Lie not, laldabaoth, for above thee is the Father of All, First Man, and Man Son of Man." *

THE " PHILOSOPHUMENA " OF HIPPOLYTUS

But the main source of our information on this
Anthropos tradition, in its Christianised Gnostic form,
is to be found in Hippolytus' Philosophumena ; or,
Refutation of all Jleresies.