Religio Duplex E-Book

Jan Assmann

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 495

Beschreibung

In this important new book, the distinguished Egyptologist Jan Assmann provides a masterful overview of a crucial theme in the religious history of the West - that of 'religio duplex', or dual religion. He begins by returning to the theology of the Ancient Egyptians, who set out to present their culture as divided between the popular and the elite. By examining their beliefs, he argues, we can distinguish the two faces of ancient religions more generally: the outer face (that of the official religion) and the inner face (encompassing the mysterious nature of religious experience).

Assmann explains that the Early Modern period witnessed the birth of the idea of dual religion with, on the one hand, the religion of reason and, on the other, that of revelation. This concept gained new significance in the Enlightenment when the dual structure of religion was transposed onto the individual. This meant that man now owed his allegiance not only to his native religion, but also to a universal 'religion of mankind'.

In fact, argues Assmann, religion can now only hold a place in our globalized world in this way, as a religion that understands itself as one among many and has learned to see itself through the eyes of the other. This bold and wide-ranging book will be essential reading for historians, theologians and anyone interested in the nature of religion and its role in the shaping of the modern world.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Foreword

Abbreviations

Introduction

1: Egyptian Foundations: The Dual Meaning of Signs

Religio Duplex and the Endgame of Egyptian Culture

Sacramental Interpretation: The Dual Meaning of Signs

The Two or Three Scripts of the Ancient Egyptian Culture of Writing

2: From the Dual Meaning of Signs to Dual Religion

Verba Duplicata: Moses Maimonides

Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Mosaic Laws: John Spencer

The Platonic Construction of Dual Religion: Ralph Cudworth

3: Religio Duplex and Political Theology

John Toland and the Critique of Political Theology

William Warburton and the Redemption of Political Theology

Secrecy under the Banner of Morality and Politics

4: Religio Duplex and Freemasonry

Secret Society Novels

Secrecy under the Banner of Nature and Revelation

Ignaz von Born and the Vienna Mysteries Project

Subterranean Egypt

The Magic Flute: Opera Duplex

5: In the Era of Globalization: Religio Duplex as Dual Membership

Globalization, Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Memory

Moses Mendelssohn and the Idea of a ‘Religion of Mankind’

Patriot and Cosmopolitan: Lessing's ‘Ernst and Falk’, with a Glance at Herder and Wieland

Homo Duplex

Prospectus: Religio Duplex Today?

Retrospectus: Are There ‘Dual Religions’?

Noah and Moses

Visible and Invisible Religions

Bibliography

Index

Amicis caris

Martin Mulsow, Sarah and Guy Stroumsa

First published in German as Religio Duplex © Verlag der Weltreligionen im Insel Verlag Berlin 2011. All rights reserved by and controlled through Insel Verlag Berlin.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2014

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6842-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6843-7(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8149-8(epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8148-1(mobi)

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Foreword

This study investigates the differences between public and arcane doctrine, freely available and restricted ideas about the divine, profane and initiated forms of social life, the God of the Fathers and the philosophers’ god. My interest in these matters has two roots. Both reach a long way back in my intellectual biography, and they also have something to do with my own ‘double life’ as Egyptologist and cultural scientist. The first goes back to the project on the topic of ‘secrecy’ that Aleida Assmann and I (in my role of cultural scientist) investigated in a series of conferences organized some fifteen to twenty years ago by the research group, Archaeology of Literary Communication; the proceedings were subsequently published in three volumes (Veil and Threshold, vol. 1: Secrecy and the Public Sphere, 1997; vol. 2: Secrecy and Revelation, 1998; vol. 3: Secrecy and Curiosity, 1999). The second, Egyptological aspect derives from the friendly debate, carried out in the 1980s between Erik Hornung and myself, about the problem of an ancient Egyptian monotheism, a debate in which the question of an esoteric tradition of mono- or pantheistic ideas in the context of ancient Egyptian polytheism also played a role (Monotheism and Cosmotheism: Ancient Egyptian Forms of ‘Thinking the One’ and their European Reception History, 1993). This interest was sustained throughout my research on the reception of Egypt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, documented in Moses the Egyptian (1997/98) and The Magic Flute (2005). Above all, it was my preoccupation with Mozart's opera and an important aspect of its cultural-historical environment, Viennese freemasonry, which first opened my eyes to the immense importance assigned to Egypt in late eighteenth-century masonic circles as the (supposed) prototype of a culture split between public sphere and mystery cult, exoteric and esoteric religion. I coined the term religio duplex to indicate this entire complex of ideas, interpreting The Magic Flute as an opera duplex. In my book on Mozart's opera, I lacked the space to retrace in any detail the history of this idea from antiquity through to Mozart's lodge and masonic investigations into Egyptian and other mysteries. This study will endeavour to make good that omission.

My work on the study began in early 2004 at the International Research Centre for Culture Sciences (IFK) in Vienna. At the Austrian Grand Lodge, I am deeply indebted to Dr Rüdiger Wolf for placing rare archival materials at my disposal. The study was completed in early 2010 during a two-week stay at the research library in Friedenstein Castle. The library's director, Prof. Martin Mulsow, kindly placed at my disposal the arcana of his private library as well as the riches of the Gotha collection, drawing my attention to many passages and byways in the labyrinth of baroque erudition that would otherwise have escaped my notice. That is why I dedicate this book to him, alongside my friends in Jerusalem, Sarah and Guy Stroumsa, with whom I proposed some years ago (and subsequently researched) the thesis that the history of religion was discovered in the seventeenth century (ARG 3 [2001]). In April 2010 I was invited to present the most important findings of this study during a short guest professorship at Graz University, and to discuss them with colleagues and students there; for that opportunity, I am deeply grateful to Prof. Irmtraud Fischer. I also extend my heartfelt thanks to Hans-Joachim Simm and Claus-Jürgen Thornton for originally accepting this study for publication in the Verlag der Weltreligionen, and especially to Claus-Jürgen for the extraordinary care he took in editing the manuscript. I owe many references and comments in this book to his scrutiny, and it is only at his express wish that they have not been individually acknowledged.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used in the endnotes:

ARGArchiv für ReligionsgeschichteJEAJournal of Egyptian ArchaeologyJFJournal für FreymaurerKVKöchelverzeichnis                                      RACReallexikon für Antike und Christentum

Introduction

Should we not say that Spinoza took his [doctrine] from these Egyptians?

P. E. Jablonski1

To introduce the theme of dual religion, I want to bring two scenes to mind. The first took place in the year 1654. On 11 November of that year, the thirty-one-year-old Blaise Pascal, a mathematician of genius and seeker after God who was suffering from deep depression at the time, and probably tuberculosis as well, had a religious experience that fundamentally changed his life. Wanting to hold fast to this experience under all circumstances, to preserve it from the vicissitudes of memory and fortune, he noted the essentials on a piece of parchment, which he then sewed into his coat so that it would always lie close to his heart. The note was discovered after his death by his manservant. It reads:

In the year of Grace, 1654,

On Monday, 23rd of November, Feast of St. Clement, Pope and Martyr, and of others in the Martyrology,

Vigil of St. Chrysogonis, Martyr, and others,

From around half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve.

                                FIRE

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

God of Jesus Christ

Deum meum et Deum vestrum.

‘Thy God shall be my God.’ [Ruth 1:16]

Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God.

He is to be found only by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Greatness of the human soul.

‘Righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee, but I have known Thee.’

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

I have separated myself from Him

Dereliquerunt me fontem aquae vivae [They have abandoned me, the source of the living waters.]

‘My God, wilt Thou leave me?’

Let me not be separated from Him eternally.

‘That is the eternal life, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and the one whom Thou has sent, Jesus Christ.’

Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

I have separated myself from Him; I have fled from Him, denied Him, crucified Him.

Let me never be separated from Him.

We keep hold of Him only by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Renunciation, total and sweet.

Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my [spiritual] director. Eternally in joy for a day's training on earth.

Non obliviscar sermons tuos. [I shall not forget what you have taught me.] Amen.2

In the course of two hours of intense religious turmoil, Pascal thus threw himself into the arms of the God of the Fathers and turned his back on the philosophers’ and scholars’ god.

The second scene played out 126 years later, in July 1780, in the house of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Wolfenbüttel. He had just been paid a visit by the young businessman and writer Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Lessing welcomed his fellow freemason as a brother. The following morning, Lessing sought to entertain his guest; Jacobi was still busy and gave his host something to read while he was waiting. It was Goethe's poem ‘Prometheus’, not yet published at the time. Questioned on it afterwards by Jacobi, Lessing confessed: ‘The orthodox concepts of the divine are no longer for me. I cannot stand them. Hen kai pan! I know nothing else. That's where this poem is tending, too; and I must confess I like it a lot.’ Jacobi: ‘Then you would be more or less in agreement with Spinoza.’ Lessing: ‘If I am to call myself by anybody's name, then I know none better.’3 Lessing thus rejects the God of the Fathers (if we are permitted to identify ‘the orthodox concepts of the divine’ with this idea of god), declaring his allegiance to the philosopher's god instead. This split, this tension, this either/or stamped the religious history of the European Enlightenment. Jacobi himself suffered from it throughout his life, and spoke of a salto mortale that he had to make in order to be able to think the one God and the other god.4

The tension between two notions of god – the philosophers’ god and the God of the Fathers – was encapsulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the opposition between natural religion and revealed (or positive) religion, between reason and faith. What was understood by natural religion was a kind of monotheistically or rather pantheistically conceived primordial religion, a Spinozism avant la lettre. The scholars’ and philosophers’ god, far from having sprung fully formed from a modern, secular age, was thus deemed the most ancient knowledge of humankind; it was certainly anything but a pallid philosophical construct. The formula hen kai pan – literally, ‘one-and-all’ or ‘all-one’ – is generally traced back to Heraclitus, who reportedly taught that ‘all is one’.5 But another antecedent lay closer to hand in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: many scholars thought they could demonstrate this pantheistic primal religion of all-oneness in ancient Egypt, a ‘discovery’ to which Lessing's Hen kai pan possibly alludes.6 In his imposing work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, the Cambridge Platonist and Hebraist Ralph Cudworth had drawn on hundreds of sources to reconstruct all the theologies of the ancient world, including the theology of ancient Egypt. His aim was to prove that all religions essentially boil down to a monotheism of all-oneness.7 Although he wrote the work in English, a language that few scholars could understand at the time, it was translated into Latin in 1733 by no less a figure than Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, and so made accessible to the European scholarly world.8 In this work, Cudworth presented the idea of all-oneness as the quintessence of ancient Egyptian religion and theology, or rather: one Egyptian theology, for there were two: a ‘publick’ and an ‘arcane theology’. According to Cudworth, all ancient religions are two-faced, as it were. They have an outer face, in the form of the official religion, and an inner face, in the form of mysteries, and the original model or prototype of all these dual religions is the religion of the ancient Egyptians. It was from them that Heraclitus borrowed the idea of all-oneness.

Cudworth's may be considered the classic account of the idea of religio duplex. The expression itself does not occur in his writings, however. As Martin Mulsow pointed out to me, it was first coined by Theodor Ludwig Lau (1670–1740), who introduced it in his text Meditationes, Theses, Dubia philosophico-theologica to refer to the distinction between rational religion (religio rationis) and revealed religion (religio revelationis).9 Like Cudworth before him, Lau begins by making clear that there has never been any such thing as atheism; an awareness and veneration of god are basic endowments of humankind. In principle, only one religion exists, since there is only one reason and only one god.10 There is no end to philosophical and theological statements, however, and these represent modifications of the one truth and theology. They are all more or less true (plus vel minus veriores) and differ from each other only in degree, not in kind, insofar as they all bear some relation to the one truth, from which they deviate to a greater or lesser extent. The ‘first, oldest, most general and most rational religion is belief in god (Deismus).’11 Religions like ‘Judaism, paganism (Gentilismus), Christianity, Islam and countless other forms of divine knowledge and religious sects’ have emerged from this primordial religion over the course of time. In spite of all their historically conditioned differences, they all concur in affirming: ‘Deus est! Deus existit!’ (Thesis X); ‘God was when no religion yet existed. For god is of eternity, but religion is temporal, historical, and accidental in relation to god’ (Thesis XI).12 And with that, he arrives at Thesis XII: ‘Religio duplex: Rationis & Revelationis’ – ‘Religion is dual: as religion of reason and as religion of revelation’. Reason teaches that god exists and is one in his being. This form of divine knowledge is simple: it satisfies reason. ‘Reason worships god as the creator, conserver and governor of the universe through a cult that is as inward as possible. Its book is this universe.’13 Whoever worships god in this way, reading his signs in the universe, will think and live in peace. ‘Here there is no perturbation of the spirit due to sins and eternal fire.’14 Hell and the devil are equally unknown. Death does not exist, for all things come from god, and since god is eternal, so too are things. Souls migrate from bodies and are united with the world-soul.15 So much for the religion of reason. The religion of revelation, by contrast, teaches that both Testaments, the Old and the New, are the book of God. God is three-in-one (triunus). Adam and Eve, the first humans, fell after they tasted of the forbidden fruit and were exiled from Paradise. That is how sin entered into the world (Peccatum hinc intrasse Mundum). God's son, born of a virgin, died on the cross to save us from sin. This Gospel is preached to all. Those who accept it will gain entry into heaven; those who reject it will be consigned to hell (Recipientibus illud, Coelum: Spernentibus, Infernum). So much for the religion of revelation. One religion is simple and transparent (plana et perspicua), the other more difficult and mysterious (difficilior et mysteriosa). Both are true, but they are perfect in varying degrees. The most perfect and excellent religion, however, is the ‘Religio quia Dei, & Christi’, the religion of God and Christ, which ought by rights to designate the religion of revelation, but which Lau, after everything that has gone before, evidently takes to mean the religion of reason.16 Thinking back to Pascal's nocturnal epiphany, one could connect the first religion to the philosophers’ and savants’ god, the second to the God of the Fathers.

The thirteenth thesis further refines the idea of God's two books, an idea which underlies the conception of both religions or of religio duplex.17 God manifests himself in the world in two ways: universally and particularly. Universally in creation: that is the basis of rational religion, and it is common to all peoples. Particularly through ‘divine speeches, angels, appearances, visions, inspirations, dreams, oracles, predictions, prophecies, miracles, Holy Scripture: those are the foundations of revealed religion and reserved for particular nations, especially the Jewish and the Christian.’18 The fourteenth thesis pursues the principle of division into the human world. As God's creatures, all humans are his people. This people, however, can be separated into two categories: the unknown and the known. The unknown people inhabit the visible and invisible spheres of the universes, whereas the known people have our globe as their temporary dwelling place. The known people are split, in turn, between the chosen people and the other nations. The Jews and Christians are the elect. The remaining nations, although not chosen, are still God's people; for they recognize and worship God from creation, whereas the chosen (double) people recognize him from revelation. Knowledge from the book of nature comes earlier, however; the book of scripture appeared later.19 Natural religion, supported by the book of nature, is thus older and more primordial than revealed religion, which draws from the book of scripture. The latter is twofold as well, being divided into the Old and the New Testaments. ‘Now, in a general and abstract sense, all are believers in god (Deistae), worshippers and adorers of god, lovers of religion!’20 This great text from the beginning of the eighteenth century already gives almost exactly the same meaning to the idea of dual religion as that which our investigation, steering a path through Lessing, Mendelssohn, and various more recent positions, will arrive at. It is an idea which still offers a highly topical contribution to peace and understanding between religions.

The duplex in Lau's twelfth thesis is to be understood predicatively, not attributively. He is not talking about a twofold religion, but saying that religion exists in two forms: as (natural) religion of reason and as revealed religion. When Lau typifies one as coming earlier and the other as coming later, he anticipates the distinction between primary and secondary religions introduced by the Heidelberg scholar of religion, Theo Sundermeier.21 We are dealing here with two different forms of religion, rather than with one religion that has two different faces or two religions coexisting within one and the same culture.

In this latter sense, however, the idea makes an appearance at roughly the same time as Lau's thesis, in a work by the polymath Jacob Friedrich Reimmann, entitled Idea Systematis Antiquitatis Literariae Specialioris sive Aegyptiacae Adumbrati.22 He summarizes his comprehensive enumeration of the various disciplines of ancient Egyptian science in the sentence: ‘Suffice it to say that the philosophy of the Egyptians as a whole was twofold (duplex): exoteric and esoteric.’23 Here, too, duplex is predicative, not attributive. But the predicate of duality in this passage refers not to two separate forms of philosophy, but to philosophy in two forms: one public and visible, the other secret and accessible only to the initiated (although here, too, the distinction between reason and faith or nature and revelation always resonates more or less discernibly).

It might be supposed that the God of the Fathers and the philosophers’ god could perhaps also be accommodated in such a philosophy or religion – one on the exoteric level, the other on the esoteric. In the context of the religio duplex model, then, the secret or esoteric side of religion does not simply represent one ‘heterotope’ among other heterotopes segregated from the general, public sphere (such as intimacy, carnival, ritual or masonic lodge), but constitutes the Other of the public and general culture that is defined by this very binary opposition. The model of religio duplex is consequently based not simply on a pluralism internal to a culture, but on a dualism. With that, nothing has yet been said about the ideological interpretations, social consequences and political institutionalizations of this dualism; these can vary from epoch to epoch and from society to society.24

Where does this idea of a dual religion come from, and how did ancient Egyptian culture come to be seen as the source and inventor of this type of religion? That is the question to which the first chapter of this book is devoted. In the second chapter I investigate how this idea was articulated in the seventeenth century, with a prelude in the twelfth century. The third chapter deals with the political refunctioning of religio duplex in the eighteenth century, while the fourth retraces the dialectic of Enlightenment and mystery in late eighteenth-century freemasonry. Taking its cue from Lessing and Mendelssohn, the fifth chapter illuminates the decisive reinterpretation of the idea of dual religion in the sense of an opposition between particularity and universality. We have already seen this process at work in Theodor Lau, and here the idea assumes a form which can claim a certain topicality for us today, as I show by juxtaposing it with more recent positions. The study concludes with a ‘prospectus’, in which I attempt to follow the idea of religio duplex through to the present and demonstrate its continuing relevance, as well as with a ‘retrospectus’, where I look for traces or foreshadowings of dual religion in the ancient Israelite and ancient Egyptian religions.

Even though the idea of dual religion rests on a misunderstanding, as far as its derivation from Egyptian religious history is concerned, there are still certain features, in the ancient Egyptian as well as in the ancient Israelite religion (and in a wealth of other religions, if this question were to be pursued systematically), which indicate a kind of double-sidedness or complementary dualism within a single religion. To be sure, these phenomena were completely unknown to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the concept of dual religion was first developed. That is why I have chosen not to deal with them in the first chapter. Instead, I cast a backward glance at the evidence in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Egyptian tradition which, from today's vantage point, may be interpreted as aspects of dual religion, even though they played no part in the debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

I should admit in advance that the term religio duplex surfaces only a single time in the sources examined here, in the aforementioned Lau. Unlike the monumental, four-volume work of Ernst Feil, which investigates the incidence and meaning of the word religio in a plethora of texts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this study is not a contribution to the history of concepts. I follow several stations in the development of an idea that I myself have dubbed religio duplex, and which appears under different labels and descriptions in the texts I investigate. The entire discourse on Egypt as religio duplex and model for the ‘new mysteries’ in the absolutist state of the eighteenth century would have remained a marginal phenomenon of merely antiquarian interest, at best, had it not taken a new turn through Reinhold and Schiller – and, in a different way, through Lessing and Mendelssohn – which can also claim relevance for the present and which merits broader public interest. We are dealing, on the one hand, with a reconstruction of European religious history that draws on the idea of religio duplex to connect the ‘depth current’ (Klaus Müller) of ancient – and especially Egyptian – cosmotheism with a Western tradition influenced by Christianity and monotheism; and, on the other hand, with the widening or rechannelling of this ‘depth current’ into a ‘religion of humankind’ of concealed truth, which, for Mendelssohn, represents the common goal of all religions. In this form, the model seems pertinent to our own time as well, in which the cultures and therefore religions of this earth have drawn together in such a way that none of them can afford to claim sole possession of absolute and universal truths. Religion has a place in our globalized world only as religio duplex, that is, as a religion that understands itself as one among many and has learned to see itself through the eyes of the other, without losing sight of the concealed god or the concealed truth that forms the vanishing point of all religions.

Notes

1 ‘An non diceres, Spinozam sua ab hisce Aegyptiis mutuatum esse?’ (P. E. Jablonski, Pantheon Aegyptiorum, Frankfurt/Oder 1750, Book 1, chapter 2, 36, s. v. Phthas).

2Great Shorter Works of Pascal, trans. E. Cailliet and J. Blankenagel, Westport, CT, 1974, 117.

3 G. Vallée, The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi: Texts with Excerpts from the Ensuing Controversy, New York, 1988, 85. Several weeks after the conversation with Jacobi, Lessing wrote the formula Hen kai pan in Greek script on the wallpaper used as a visitors’ book in Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim's garden-house in Halberstadt. He also noted it in a guest book. See W. Albrecht (ed.), Lessing, Kamenz, 2005, 517–18; R. Daunicht (ed.), Lessing im Gespräch, Munich, 1971, 539–40. See also H. B. Nisbet, Lessing, Munich, 2008, 821–31.

4 Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinoza, p. 26.

5Hen panta einai (Frgm. B.50).

6 See my Moses the Egyptian, Cambridge, MA, 1997, 139–43. Lessing apparently envisaged the formula as an inscription on an ancient temple; see Albrecht (ed.), Lessing, 505. My derivation of the formula from the work by Ralph Cudworth cited in note 7 of this chapter has been contested by St. Eberle, ‘Lessing und Zarathustra’, in Rückert-Studien 17 (2006/07): 73–130, esp. 99–103, with some remarkable arguments. First, according to Eberle, Lessing was thinking of Zoroaster rather than Hermes Trismegistos when he imagined a religion of all-oneness; and, second, he had no doubt read Cudworth in the Latin translation of Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, who distances himself very energetically from Cudworth precisely on the matter of an arcane theology. As far as the first argument is concerned, Eberle has cited such striking passages from Lessing's writings that his intensive interest in Zoroaster cannot be doubted. However, it should be remembered that Lessing could have stumbled across the formula Hen kai pan in very few of the treatises on Zoroaster available to him at the time, whereas this formula is cited dozens of times by Cudworth in numerous Greek and Latin variations. It is beside the point that the formula ought correctly to be read with the definite article (to hen kai to pan) or as the sentence hen to pan (‘All is One’); what matters is that we are dealing everywhere with different predicative connections of the two keywords hen and pan (or unus and omnia). Be that as it may, the other objection seems to me to be the more important. The footnote from Mosheim quoted by Eberle in which Mosheim emphatically repudiates the idea of an arcane theology, and with it the model of religio duplex, certainly stands in sharp contradiction to the tradition I am pursuing here. The great Mosheim cannot be numbered among the spokesmen of religio duplex. On the other hand, the freemason Lessing would have known enough about the importance of esoteric traditions for him not to be put off by a single footnote.

7 R. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, London, 1678, 2nd edn, 1743.

8 R. Cudworth, Systema intellectualis huius universi, Jena, 1733. On Mosheim's translation and the sometimes very critical footnotes he added to Cudworth's text, see S. Hutton, ‘Classicism and Baroque’, in M. Mulsow et al. (eds), Johann Lorenz Mosheim (1693–1755), Wiesbaden, 1997, 211–27.

9Meditationes, Theses, Dubia philosophico-theologica [Freistadt 1719]. Dokumente. Ed. with an introduction by M. Pott, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1992. On Lau, see M. Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund, Hamburg, 2002, 432–8 (see also the index, p. 505), and E. Feil, Religio, vol. 4, Göttingen, 2007, 129–33.

10 ‘Veritas & Religio una est: quia Ratio una: quia Deus unus’ (Thesis IX). The Latin citations from Lau's text follow his own idiosyncratic orthography and punctuation.

11 ‘Prima, antiquissima, generalissima & Religio maxime rationalis: est Deismus’ (Thesis X). The expression Deismus here designates the opposition to atheism and not yet – as later – the belief in an impersonal supreme being, in opposition to theism as the belief in a personal God.

12 ‘Deus fuit, nec fuit Religio. Deus enim, ab aeterno. Religio, in Tempore demum introducta, Accidens est Deitatis.’

13 ‘Colit vero Ratio: Deum, ceu Universi totius Creatorem: Conservatorem: Gubernatorem; Cultu maxime interno. Universum hoc, Liber ejus est.’

14 ‘Nulla hinc Turbatio Mentis ob Peccata & Ignem Aeternum.’ Lau thus states with the utmost clarity that consciousness of sin in the strict sense only entered the world with revealed religion, a thesis that can invite theological admonishments even today (as I have had occasion to experience!).

15 ‘Migratio Animarum ex corporibus: Conglutinatio cum Anima Mundi.’

16 A little later, he calls the Religio Christiana the ‘Religio Rationalissima’.

17 On the doctrine of God's two books, see R. Groh, ‘Theologische und philosophische Voraussetzungen der Rede vom Buch der Natur’, in A. Assmann et al. (eds), Zwischen Literatur und Anthropologie, Tübingen, 2005, 139–46; D. Groh, ‘Die Entstehung der Schöpfungstheologie oder der Lehre vom Buch der Natur bei den frühen Kirchenvätern in Ost und West bis zu Augustin’, in the same edited collection, 147–60; and D. Groh, Göttliche Weltökonomie, Frankfurt/Main, 2010; also A. Assmann, Die Legitimität der Fiktion, Munich, 1980, 39–48, as well as H. Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, Frankfurt/Main, 1981.

18 ‘Particularis: per Colloquia, Angelos, Apparitiones, Visiones, Inspirationes, Somnia, Oracula, Vaticinia, Prophetias, Miracula, Scripturam Sacram; Fundamenta Religionis Revelatae, certarum & Nationum: Judaeorum praecipue & Christianorum.’

19 ‘Prior: ex Libro Naturae. Posterior: ex Libro Scripturae.’

20 ‘Sunt interim omnes, in Complexu Generali & Sensu abstracto: Deistae. Sunt Cultores & Adoratores Dei. Sunt Amatores Religionum!’

21 Th. Sundermeier, ‘Religion, Religionen’, in K. Müller and Th. Sundermeier (eds), Lexikon missionstheologischer Grundbegriffe, Berlin, 1987, 411–23; see also Th. Sundermeier, Was ist Religion?, Gütersloh, 1999; A. Wagner (ed.), Primäre und sekundäre Religion als Kategorie der Religionsgeschichte des Alten Testaments, Berlin, 2006.

22 Hildesheim, 1718. I likewise owe my acquaintance with this work to Martin Mulsow.

23 Ibid., 13: ‘sifficiat notasse, Philosophiam Aegyptiorum fuisse omnino duplicam Exotericam et Esotericam.’

24 In his masterful book, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, Cambridge, MA, 1959, Frank Manuel devotes a short section to ‘Twofold Philosophy’ (65–9), which he takes to mean the truths of the natural religion of an ur-monotheism, handed down, in the midst of polytheisms and idolatries, under the veil of mysteries, hieroglyphs and symbolic language (65). As representatives of the ‘double-truth doctrine’, Manuel names William Warburton, John Toland, David Hume, Henry St John Bolingbroke, Le Batteux, Baron de Sainte-Croix, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Abbé Pluche and Charles Dupuis, although he only discusses Toland and Warburton.

1

Egyptian Foundations

The Dual Meaning of Signs

Religio Duplex and the Endgame of Egyptian Culture

Although the idea of ‘dual religion’ ultimately derives from ancient sources, it represents a construction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which, so far as ancient Egyptian culture is concerned, rests mainly on misconceptions. Before we turn to address this idea in its own right, three points need to be considered. First, there were certain characteristics of Egyptian culture which sanctioned their interpretation as religio duplex. Second, the Greeks – who can ultimately be held responsible for this interpretation – could still experience Egyptian culture in full flower and receive answers to their questions about it. And, third, there is much evidence to suggest that the Egyptians who were interrogated by the Greeks in this way themselves set out to disseminate an image of their culture as a religio duplex, a religion split between popular and elite culture. It may therefore have been the Egyptians of this late period who put into circulation many apparent misunderstandings. The idea of Egyptian religion as religio duplex would then be a Greco-Roman confabulation, rather than the product of a one-sided Greek projection of native ideas and institutions onto the Egyptian world.1 We should therefore begin by looking more closely at the interlocutors.

On the Greek side, we find a slew of research into Egyptian culture that almost merits the title of an Egyptology.2 The second book of the Histories of Herodotus, who travelled to Egypt around 450 BCE, offers a comprehensive description of the country, with excurses into its history, religion, customs and mores, geography and chronology. The four-volume history of Egypt by Hecataeus of Abdera, who lived in Alexandria towards the end of the fourth century BCE, must have been even more wide-ranging. Diodorus of Sicily, a contemporary of Cicero, imported large sections of this book into his Historical Library (Bibliotheca historica).3 Strabo devoted the seventeenth book of his Geography to Egypt.4 These works deal very extensively with Egypt, shedding light on its state, system of government, religion, culture, history, customs, geography, mythology and much else besides. Despite the occasional expression of bemusement and disapproval, they are all marked by a tone of fascination and admiration. This positive appraisal is perhaps most noticeable in Hecataeus (as cited by Diodorus). It was this representation of ancient Egyptian culture that was to exert by far the greatest influence on the Enlightenment view of Egypt.

Hecataeus of Abdera numbered among the many Greek scholars and philosophers invited to Alexandria by Ptolemy I (367/366–283/282 BCE), with the aim of acquiring intellectual prestige in the Hellenistic world for his newly founded capital. His history of Egypt was meant to provide the Macedonian ruler who commissioned it with an historical past on which he could base his project of a Hellenistic-Egyptian pharaonic dynasty. At the same time, the work was intended to hold up a mirror to Ptolemy, reflecting back the model of an enlightened monarchy. Strikingly, Hecataeus (or Diodorus) fails to mention the divine status which the Egyptians traditionally associated with the office of pharaoh. He depicts the king as a man duty-bound to uphold strict laws and to adhere to a daily routine prescribed right down to the minutiae; a sovereign who excels his subjects through his extraordinary virtues, his extensive education, and the rigorous example of his conduct, at best, but not through any divine attributes.5 This image of the ideal ruler must be set in the context of contemporary Greek political theory, which distinguished between freedom and despotism and placed the law on the side of freedom and democracy, whereas despots were deplored for ruling without regard for existing laws. Against the background of this alternative, Hecataeus – like Plato, Isocrates and other conservative political theorists before him – recommends Egypt as a third way that unites monarchy and the law.6 In the heyday of absolutism, this image of Egypt could therefore be advanced as a counter-model to the absolutist state. So it was that, 2,000 years later, Hecataeus's Egypt could once again serve as a mirror for princes. At the behest of Louis XIV, Jean-Bénigne Bossuet wrote his Discours sur l'histoire universelle (1681) as a guide- and textbook for the dauphin, hence under conditions comparable to the Alexandrine Museum. Egypt was described there as the school of wise lawmaking and politics, a land which envisaged the happiness of the people as its supreme goal and strictly committed the king to upholding the law.

With Egypt's annexation by Rome as a crown colony, the country forfeited its political interest for the Greeks. Now religion – and the culture of writing, believed to stand in the closest possible connection to that religion – moved to the forefront of attention. Among the most important works of Greek Egyptology to have survived from this period are Plutarch's treatise, De Iside et Osiride (On Isis and Osiris),7 and the text known since the Renaissance by the title De mysteriis Aegyptiorum (On the Egyptian Mysteries),8 written by the Neoplatonist Iamblichus and stylized as the reply of an Egyptian priest, Abammon, to Porphyry's Letter to Anebo.9

To be sure, the Greek ‘Egyptologists’ had no first-hand knowledge of Egyptian religious affairs. They were ignorant of the language and unable to read the writing. For this reason, modern Egyptology has tended to dismiss this literature as an authentic source on Egyptian religion. What is thereby overlooked, however, is the fact that those who contributed to this Egyptological discourse included Greek-writing Egyptians who were well-versed in Egyptian writing, language and religion: above all, the priests Manetho of Sebennytos10 (first half of the third century BCE) and Chaeremon of Alexandria (first century CE).11 While their works are now mostly no longer extant, Plutarch, Iamblichus and others could still consult them, and authentic information may well have found its way into their writings by this route. The image of Egypt that the Greek ‘Egyptologists’ handed down to us may thus contain more genuinely Egyptian ideas and motifs than we realize.

To this Greco-Egyptian ‘Egyptological’ canon was added, in late antiquity, a fairly extensive religious Greco-Egyptian primary literature, above all the ‘magical papyri’12 and the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum.13 This literature mostly purports to be translated from the Egyptian, but it is so strongly steeped in Neoplatonic terminology and motifs that the Egyptian content has tended to be dismissed as a masquerade.14 However, Iamblichus expressly points out that the ‘Hermetic’ writings, in being translated into Greek, were equally brought ‘into the language [i.e., conceptual vocabulary] of the philosophers’.15 This means that the situation could be exactly the opposite of that assumed by later scholars: the Greek content, not the Egyptian, could be the ‘packaging’. At any rate, the Egyptian elements in this discourse, too, are being assessed quite differently today.16

The Greek-language literature that flowed from Egyptian quills was unmistakably guided by propagandistic intentions: it was motivated by the desire to present Greeks and others with as impressive an image of Egyptian culture as possible. The authors would have been members of the educated, Greek-speaking former upper class. At the time, these were primarily priests. Under the conditions of foreign rule, beginning with the conquest of Egypt by the Persians in 525 BCE and continuing – and, in many respects, worsening – under the Macedonians and Romans, the native Egyptian elite had been forced to come to terms with the loss of its political power, which had now passed into the hands of the occupying forces. Whereas the Persians had still ruled the land in collaboration with the Egyptians, the Greeks immigrated in vast numbers to Egypt and established themselves as a new ruling class.17 The Egyptian elite reacted to its loss of political influence and social standing with a process of inner emigration, retreating into the sanctified space of the temple. This led, on the one hand, to a clericalization of Egyptian culture, whose standard-bearers were now to be found above all in the priesthood, and to a structural transformation of religion, on the other hand. The religious traditions now expanded into an immensely complicated system consisting of ritual, learning and grammatology, a kind of arcane glass-bead game which – through the virtuosity with which they played it, the intellectual and spiritual prestige it conferred upon them, even and especially in the eyes of the Greeks, and the magical-spiritual claims to power they asserted through it – could to a certain extent compensate the sacerdotal elite for the political interests they had been forced to relinquish. This transformation most clearly left its mark on the culture of writing, which will be examined more closely in the next chapter. The stock of hieroglyphs increased tenfold; learning to write accordingly meant embarking on a decades-long process of initiation into a highly complex world of knowledge; and mastery of writing came to be regarded as a high art. Shut off in the sanctuary of the temple, the clericalized Egyptian culture for many centuries proved remarkably adept at resisting the pressure to Hellenize, even as it paid for its inner emigration by losing contact with the wider community.

This inner emigration of the elite, its self-imposed isolation from the outside world, finds its clearest expression in temple architecture. In earlier times, temples had formed nodal points in a network of avenues along which the deities, periodically leaving the precincts which sheltered them from their impure surroundings, were drawn through the city. These religious processions transformed the populace into a huge festive crowd, sometimes swollen by pilgrims from abroad.18 Since the people were forbidden from setting foot in the temples, these festivals provided the only opportunity for more general religious participation; that is why there were so many of them in ancient Egypt. If the traditional religion exhibited any characteristics of a religio duplex, then they are to be found in the split between an exclusive everyday cult and communal festive rites. In the Ptolemaic period, however, the temples were transformed into fortress-like precincts, enclosed by high walls, within which the divine processions now took place. Having retreated into the temples, Egyptian culture took on many of the features of an ‘enclave culture’ (Mary Douglas19), which we also see emerging around the same time in sectarian movements in Judaism. These include xenophobia, stricter purity laws, dietary taboos and other forms of self-exclusion from the general culture.20

We can easily imagine the Egyptian priests presenting their religion to their Greek visitors as a religio duplex. The first questions posed to them by the Greeks would naturally have concerned the more bizarre or even repulsive aspects of Egyptian religion: the holy animals, the theriomorphic gods, and certain cruel or obscene rituals and feast-day customs, such as those described by Herodotus. All that, they would have been told, is put on only for the benefit of the uninitiated; behind it, there stands a deep wisdom which the people know nothing about. The taint of a certain elitist, undemocratic arrogance, which clings to the idea of religio duplex from first to last, may be explained by the situation of a politically disqualified and socially degraded elite struggling for status, prestige and recognition. Thomas Mann depicted this problematic aspect of religio duplex with unsurpassable pithiness in a scene from the final novel in his Joseph tetralogy. ‘I may not think’, he has Akhenaten say, ‘what I cannot teach.’ Tiy, his scheming mother, counters with the principle of religio duplex: ‘The office of teacher need not darken knowledge. Never have priests taught the multitude all they themselves know. They have told them what was wholesome, and wisely left in the realm of the mysteries what was not beneficial. Thus knowledge and wisdom are together in the world, truth and forbearance.’ Akhenaten rejects this as arrogant: ‘No, there is no arrogance in the world greater than that of dividing the children of our Father into the initiated and the uninitiated and teaching double words: all-knowingly for the masses, knowingly in the inner circle.’21 That is the arrogance contained in the idea of religio duplex, and it may very well have shaped the mentality of the later Egyptian priesthood.

Sacramental Interpretation: The Dual Meaning of Signs

Transfigurations

In Egyptian religious history, the central importance accorded to secrecy reaches much further back than the problematic split into popular and elite religion. The concepts of the sacred and the mysterious are here closely intertwined.22 The sacred is held to be the epitome of the occult. Moreover – and this is the phenomenon that I would like to illuminate here in the light of the religio duplex idea – we encounter from a very early time in Egypt, at the latest around the middle of the third millennium, a separation and bifurcation of the tradition, although it initially involves rites rather than texts. Behind this development stands a particular group of priests whose office and role was closely linked to texts and writing. In Egyptian, they are called cheri-hāb(et), ‘scroll-bearers’, which the Greeks translated as hierogrammateus, ‘priests schooled in writing’ or ‘priest-scribes’. In the Bible, we meet them as magicians and interpreters of dreams; they vainly compete with Moses in the magic arts and with Joseph and Daniel in the interpretation of dreams.23

We see these scroll-bearing hierogrammatists appearing from very early on in depictions of Egyptian rituals, wearing sashes around their chests and sporting long wigs. They are charged with reciting sacred texts in the context of the royal and non-royal death cult. The texts we see these priests reciting in the depictions are called ‘transfigurations’, s-akhu in Egyptian, the causative form of the root akh, which means ‘to take effect’ and, derivatively, ‘to be spirit’.24 The use of the causative form of this generic term alone shows that we are dealing here with powerful texts whose recitation brings about a transfor­mation, specifically, one into the state called akh. These texts are not just ‘performative’, they are ‘transformative’ in the sense that, if the precisely determined conditions of the rite are observed – if, that is, they are recited with strict accuracy, with the correct intonation and emphasis, at the right time and in the right place, by a ritually prepared (‘pure’) and authorized speaker – then they have the power to bring about the state to which they refer: the state of transfiguration.25

If we cast a glance at the ‘transfigurations’ which the hierogrammatist was charged with reciting, we notice very quickly that we are dealing here with an ambivalent semantics resting on the distinction between sensus literalis and sensus mysticus, the level of phenomena and the level of secret meaning. These texts rehearse a procedure that I call ‘sacramental explication’. This refers to the rite and the spatial, material and personal circumstances of its enactment, upon which it superimposes a divine layer of meaning. Sacramental explication therefore presupposes the distinction between the ‘real world’ (or ‘cult world’) and the ‘world of the gods’, a distinction which certainly only emerged in the course of the third millennium BCE.

Sacramental explication draws out the occult meaning or sensus mysticus of the act, the meaning which, for the uninitiated spectator, remains hidden from view. Ritual cloaking (sensus literalis), for example, is explicated as an ‘embrace’ (sensus mysticus), ritual cleansing with a jet of water (sensus literalis) is interpreted as ‘rebirth’ (sensus mysticus), while the ritual ‘feeding’ of the dead (sensus literalis) becomes an ‘ascent into heaven’ (sensus mysticus).26 In several respects, the procedure of sacramental explication appears to bear an affinity to allegory. The divine meaning of objects, people and ritual acts constitutes a higher, concealed, secret layer of meaning, a covert knowledge.

We are dealing here not just with explication, however, but with an actual process of transformation. By establishing a link between the cult world and the divine world, a liturgical procedure is transformed into an event in the world of the gods. As the cloak is donned, for example, a mystical embrace of god and priest or dead father and surviving son is not just indicated, but ritually enacted. This transformative function of the spoken word is expressed in the word s-ākh (‘transfigure’). The recitation of the text, along with its sacramental explication, has a transformative effect which presumes the linguistic complexion of two spheres of meaning.27 The things of this world become transparent to those of the next, which in turn shines through in the here and now.

Initiatory interrogations

The divine level of meaning is the subject of an occult knowledge that can only be attained through initiation. This emerges from a second group of sources to which we now turn. We are dealing here with dialogues in which one speaker is interrogated by the other about the divine or mythic significance of particular objects. Such dialogues have come down to us in coffin texts thematizing the transition to the afterlife. The motif of transition appears to be constitutive here: the dialogues take the form of ‘initiatory interrogations’.28 Two complexes of objects which are subject to mythic explication in the dialogues are particularly associated with this transition: the boat that ferries the dead man to the next world and the fishing net in which he wants to avoid getting caught. The fishing net is spread out between heaven and earth, threatening the dead man as he braves the passage in the form of a bird.

In the ferry texts, the deceased is interrogated by the ferryman. The interview typically proceeds in the following way. First, the dead man is asked who he is, where he wants to go and what he intends to do when he gets there; then, who will bring him the ferry which, disassembled into its individual parts, lies in the shipyard and must now be put together again through language. The ferry is reassembled piece by piece and identified for the world of the gods. The fishing-net texts, by contrast, are not written as a dialogue. Here, only the dead man speaks, listing the elements of the fishing net along with their divine meanings. In other texts, the objects themselves are allocated speaking parts and quiz the dead man about their names. The principle is always the same. A list of things in this world is correlated with a list of things, persons and events in the world beyond. What connects the two worlds is language, in which references and meanings are preserved.

Dino Bidoli, who researched the fishing-net sayings and ferryman texts in his doctoral dissertation, very convincingly reconstructed the real-life basis of these interrogations by drawing parallels with the Islamic and European guild systems. The ferry text, for example, could allude to a ceremony

that was actually performed with assigned roles in a shipyard of the Old Kingdom, presumably when a new member was inducted into the guild of shipwrights. We would then have here an ancient Egyptian example of an initiation into the ‘mysteries’ of a vocation, in the typical form of an examination in a prescribed question-and-answer format, such as can often be found among artisan groups in quite different epochs and cultural settings; indeed, until quite recently it was still practised among guilds in Egypt. Such examinations were not meant to test the candidate's knowledge of his chosen craft. Instead, they were primarily a means of justifying his induction by demonstrating his command of a richly figurative idiom. This idiom was typically guarded as a secret for members of that particular guild, and it consisted largely of a symbolic or mythical transcription of the most important parts of the object to be built – in our case, the ship referred to as a ‘ferry’ – and the tools and instruments used to build it.29

We encounter here the social function of secrecy, to which Georg Simmel, above all, drew our attention. As Simmel showed, secrecy represents the most effective means of group cohesion, the strongest social putty.30 Guild secrets are a typical phenomenon of the ancient and modern world, and the freemasons, amongst whom ancient Egypt and the idea of dual religion were to play a quite exceptional role, built on the fraternal mysteries of the construction industry. In societies without writing, all initiations and fellowships rest on secrecy and concealment. It would be difficult to identify any groups or collective traditions which have eschewed secrets of this kind. In the everyday world, such initiatory interrogations signify and seal induction into a professional organization. In ancient Egyptian beliefs about the dead, they induct the candidate for initiation into a community of other-worldly, immortal beings, likewise imagined as a kind of fraternity or ‘community of care’. Initiatory interrogations effect the transition from this world to the next. The deceased qualifies for entry into the afterlife by showing that he has mastered the knowledge and language which connect the two worlds. The bifurcation of the world, its separation into sensus phaenomenalis and sensus mysticus, is overcome through language. In these interrogations, the candidate for initiation demonstrates his credentials through his command of an occult language: whoever understands this occult language belongs in the secret world to which it refers, and therefore gains access to that world. The cult commentaries, for their part, provide sacramental explication of the rite, ensuring that everything that happens in the world of the cult is transposed into a divine, other-worldly context.

What we are witnessing here is the confluence of writing, secrecy and power. In the case of the initiatory interrogations, power is expressed in the control that the initiate gains over the ferry, the fishing net, and the things of the divine world in general; in the case of the cult commentaries, power is expressed in the transformative force of sacramental explication. The decisive point is the presumed efficacy of a spoken language which touches on the mysteries of the divine world. The Egyptians gave the term ākh to this peculiar efficacy, from which the word s-ākh, ‘to transfigure’, is derived. The hierogrammatists are the real custodians of this efficacy. They invoke it whenever they recite the sacred texts from their scrolls in the context of cult ceremony.

Iamblichus and the Egyptian mysteries

In this tradition lies the kernel of truth in Greek notions about the Egyptian mysteries, and here the Greeks once again prove to have been remarkably well informed. At the time when they first encountered Egyptian culture, an Egyptian generic name for these sacred texts for recitation had already established itself. To our ears, at least, it sounds quite strange: ‘the power of the sun god’, or, in an alternative translation, ‘solar energy’.31 The Egyptians assumed that sacred and magical texts were able to promote cosmic harmony and balance and keep chaos at bay, in cult usage, just as they could heal the sick and keep domestic evils at bay, in magical usage. According to the Egyptians, the impact of these texts was powerful enough to assume cosmic dimensions, and their misuse could wreak havoc on a similar scale. The Neoplatonist Porphyry alludes to this in his letter to the Egyptian priest Anebo, known to us from the reply of Iamblichus. Porphyry expresses his outrage that a priest would seek to influence the universe through his recitation: the reciter threatens ‘that he will assail the sky, that he will reveal to view the arcana of Isis, that he will expose to public gaze the ineffable symbol in the innermost sanctuary, that he will stop the Baris; that, like Typhon, he will scatter the limbs of Osiris, or do something of a similar character’.32 In fact, many such texts set out to do just that. It would be impossible to convey the Egyptians’ ideas about the power of cultic language more precisely. The threats which Porphyry has in mind appear by the dozen in Egyptian magical texts. Much more generally, however, he is sketching the performative force of cultic language as such. Sacred texts are quite capable of unleashing such effects – and similar effects must be feared if they are profaned, if they end up in the wrong hands, or if their secrets should ever see the light of day. ‘Power of Ra’ is, as mentioned, the collective name for such ‘holy texts’. They must be protected and kept secret, because they contain the cosmogonic knowledge which, when read aloud in the rite, maintains the world by attuning it to the cosmic work of the sun's course. In Egypt, a holy text was considered a linguistic vessel of the sacred, and it was subject to access restrictions and protective measures that were no less stringent than those applied to the cult image itself. The recitation of a sacred text was just as effective as the sacred image in making present, or ‘presentifying’, the divine.33 This literature was kept secret because it belonged to the cult mysteries, which were to be protected from profanation and degradation by the outside world. A sacred text that had been desecrated was believed to have lost its power to make present the divine.

In his efforts to counter Porphyry's accusation that the Egyptian priests sought to threaten the gods, compel them, or otherwise influence them to do their bidding, Iamblichus used arguments which likewise betray an intimate knowledge of Egyptian cult worship. His argument rests on the idea that the priest approaches the gods not as a human being, but in a divine role. The priest does not draw the gods down to his level, but is raised up to theirs:

For such invocation does not draw down beings that are impassive and pure, to that which is susceptible and impure. On the contrary, it makes us who had become impressionable through the generated life, pure and steadfast. (I.12)

That is why Iamblichus insists

that divine works are not effected through the contrariety of two distinct parties (human and divine), but every such work is accomplished through sameness, union and consent. (IV.3)

The theurgist, through the power of arcane symbols, commands cosmic forces no longer as a man, nor as employing a human soul; but as existing superior to them in the order of the Gods, he makes use of greater mandates than pertain to himself, so far as he is human. (VI.6)

The basic idea behind ancient Egyptian ritual beliefs could not be more trenchantly expressed. This ‘theurgic’ principle applies to the ritual act, and particularly to the language with which it is inseparably linked. The recitations accompanying the acts exert a transformative, transfiguring influence; that is why the priest is always there with his scroll. He administers the linguistic side of the operation, the recitation, which becomes divine speech in his mouth and in the moment of the cult act. When the priest speaks, one god speaks to another, and the words unleash their transformative, performative and ‘presentifying’ force. The words he intones may be likened to a musical performance or recital, while the scroll he holds in his hand corresponds to the score. In its meaning and essence, the sacred recitation is thus divine speech, stored up in the medium of writing and realized in the context of cultic role-play. The priest does not express it for his own sake; he does not appear before the divine image as a human being. Rather, he slips into a role in the context of an other-worldly ‘constellation’. Cult language is the language of the gods.34

The language of the gods is also, however, their writing