cladking Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ...just a few thoughts on the subject.
>
> I'm not entirely comfortable with the concept of
> different levels of godness. Of course, the Egyptians may well
> have been and that is the more important point. One suspects that
> Egyptian youth may have needed a few years of seminary school just to
> learn how to blaspheme properly. It could certainly get
> confusing.

To the Egyptians, I doubt it was confusing. You think in either/or terms, which is part of classical thought; the ancient Egyptian did not. As Hornung noted in his 1982 work, the Egyptian considered the divine and its aspects quite differently than we modern humans do, as he notes in describing the concept of Egyptian thought as "complementarity":

"But formal thought in theology, philosophy and science, which is governed by well-defined calculi, is quite another matter. Here problems cannot be solved by "common sense," and this is just as true of ancient Egypt. The highly systematic theology of the New Kingdom is a formal conceptual structure, which must be studied according to strict, formal criteria that cannot be derived from a loose concept of "reason" or "common sense."

Any application of a two-valued logic, which is based on a A/not-A distinctions and on the law of the excluded middle, to Egyptian philosophical and theological thought leads at once to insoluble contradictions. We cannot avoid this fact, and "common sense" is no help here. We must choose between two alternatives. Either we equate truly logical thought with two-valued logic, in which case Egyptian thought is undeniably "illogical" or "prelogical"; or we admit the possibility of a different type of logic which is not self-contradictory, which can only be a many-valued logic.

This choice is beyond the competence of an egyptologist. He can do no more than observe in his material that the Egyptians strove earnestly after system, and that they certainly did not proceed carelessly in their thought; he can also sense that their system of thought has a coherence of its own which can often convince the emotions, even though it cannot be analyzed without contradiction according to western criteria, or defined in formal terms. Recent attempts to isolate the characteristics of this thought and find a suitable descriptive term for it have been concerned too much with the general "cast of mind" of the Egyptians and not enough with the formal side of their thought. If Egyptian thought is stated to be "aspective," that statement says nothing about its logical structure. The term "undifferentiated"89 leads us on the wrong track, for careful differentiation is one of the most distinctive features of Egyptian thought,90 in comparison with which the concept of "analytic" or "rational" (rational) thought, which is intended as its polar opposite, can exhibit a startling lack of differentiation or diversity. Finally, the fact that in Egyptian thought myth is not considered to be contradictory, but is exploited as a legitimate mode of discourse, is not sufficient cause for us to term the thought as a whole "mythical" or "mythopoeic"; myth is one mode of discourse among many, and it is in any case not a form of thought.

One typical Egyptian form of thought—dualistic thought— has long been identified and is often described.* As we learned from Egyptian ontology, the order established by the creator god is characterized by "two things" and thus by differentiation or diversity; this idea is incorporated in the teaching that Egypt is the "Two Lands" and in a mass of other pairs that can form a totality only if taken together. The greatest totality conceivable is "the existent and the nonexistent," and in these dualistic terms the divine is evidently both one and many.

Oppositions such as these are real, but the pairs do not cancel each other out; they complement each other. A given X can be both A and not-A: tertium datur—the law of the excluded middle does not apply." (Hornung 1982: 239-240; emphasis, mine)

> Only part of the discomfort is the suspicion that
> it would be diff-
> icult to get the social cohesion to tackle massive
> projects for kings
> who differ significantly from other gods.
>
> There's a lot of talk in the PT of two enneads
> with Osiris leading the ennead on Earth. ...
> These gods would be simpler to understand
> if the creation Gods were of the heavens and the
> gods of Earth had a physical representation. Other gods might have
> been ascended kings.
>
> Obviously there's no requirement that these be
> easily understood.

Since enneads in ancient Egyptian thought are always made up of creator deities, who are, by nature, both of heaven and earth (since both heaven and earth are aspects are part of their being, as creator deities cause them both to exist), it would be impossible for any ennead (which can number anywhere from 7 to 15+, rather than simply 9 (Hornung 1982:222-223)) to be made up of "ascended kings" since such kings are themselves products of creation, not creator deities themselves.

Katherine Griffis-Greenberg

Doctoral Candidate
Oriental Institute
Doctoral Programme in Oriental Studies [Egyptology]
Oxford University
Oxford, United Kingdom





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2008 05:56AM by Katherine Griffis-Greenberg.