Egyptian philosophy. The history of Egypt is in general a chaos, in which chronology, religion and philosophy, in particular, are filled with obscurity and confusion.

The Egyptians wanted to be seen as the oldest people on earth, and they managed to convince others concerning their origins. Their priests were keen to keep the veneration the people had for them, and transmitted to others only the vain and pompous display of their religion. The more the priests made a mystery of their religion, the more their reputation for so-called wisdom increased. They shared it only with a small number of chosen individuals, whose discretion they ensured by the longest and most rigorous of tests.

The Egyptians had kings, a government, laws, science and art long before they had writing, and so the fables that developed over a long series of centuries corrupted their traditions. They then began to use hieroglyphics, which, however, were not easy enough to read or sufficiently widespread for their understanding to be kept up.

The different regions of Egypt suffered frequent flooding, its ancient monuments were destroyed, its earliest inhabitants scattered and a foreign people was established in its deserted provinces. A series of wars broke out among the new Egyptians , who were relatively recent arrivals from all the neighbouring countries. Knowledge, customs, habits, ceremonies and idioms were confused and blended together. Since the true meaning of the hieroglyphs, which had been entrusted to the priests alone, had disappeared, efforts were made to recover it. These attempts gave rise to an incredible number of opinions and schools. Historians wrote down things as they were in their own time, but the rapidity of developments inevitably gave their writings a highly diverse character. These differences were taken for contradictions, and attempts were made to attribute the same date to events that actually belonged to different periods. People were led into a labyrinth of genuine difficulties, but they made the intricacies even more complicated for themselves and for posterity by creating imaginary difficulties too.

Egypt had already become an almost undecipherable enigma for the Egyptians themselves when the world, according to our chronology, was still in its infancy. At the time of Herodotus, the pyramids bore inscriptions in an unknown language and characters, and the reason for erecting these enormous masses of stone was not known. As time passed, different centuries were confused; events, names, people and epochs, whose distance from the present was not fixed, were little by little brought closer together, and all relations seemed to be cast at random into an obscure abyss, at the bottom of which the hierophants gave a glimpse of everything fit to be revealed to the imagination of natives and the curiosity of foreigners, for the glory of the nation and the hierophants’ own interest.

This fraud sustained their ancient reputation. People came from all countries of the known world to seek wisdom in Egypt. Egyptian priests had such disciples as Moses, Orpheus, Linus, Plato, Pythagoras, Democritus and Thales; all the Greek philosophers, in short. To substantiate their systems, the philosophers lent their authority to the hierophants. For their part, the hierophants took advantage of the very testimony of the philosophers to attribute their discoveries to themselves. This was how the opinions that divided the Greek schools were established one after the other in the gymnasia of Egypt. Platonism and Pythagoreanism, in particular, left deep traces there; the doctrines contained nuances of varying importance compared to those existing in Greece; the nuances that the hierophants pretended to add completed the confusion. Jupiter became Osiris; Typhon was taken for Pluto. No difference was seen between Hades and Amenthes. Identity was founded on both sides on the weakest analogies. The philosophers of Greece only consulted their own security and success on the subject; the priests of Egypt, only their interest and pride. The priests’ changeable wisdom was adapted to the situation. Masters of the sacred books, the only people initiated into the knowledge of the characters in which they were written, set apart from the rest of mankind and shut up in seminaries, the doors of which could hardly be forced open even by the power of sovereigns – nothing compromised the hierophants. Whenever authority forced them to let individuals who were natural enemies to lies and charlatanism partake of their mysteries, the hierophants would corrupt them and force them to support their views, or else revolted them with wearying duties and an austere way of life. The most zealous neophyte was compelled to withdraw, and the esoteric doctrine never emerged into the open.

Such, roughly speaking, was the state of things when Egypt was inundated with the Greeks and barbarians who arrived in the wake of Alexander. A new source of revolutions in Egyptian theology and philosophy was born. Eastern philosophy penetrated the sanctuaries of Egypt a few centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. Jewish and cabalistic ideas were introduced under the Ptolemies. In the midst of the intestine and general war between all the philosophic schools caused by the birth of Christianity, the ancient Egyptian doctrine was increasingly deformed. The hierophants, who had become syncretists, filled their theology with philosophical ideas, imitating the philosophers who crammed their philosophy with theological ideas. Ancient writings were neglected. The new system was written down in sacred characters and soon became the only one of which the hierophants knew anything. These were the circumstances in which Sanchuniathon, Manetho, Asclepiades, Palefate, Cheremon and Hecataeus published their works. These authors wrote about something that neither they nor anyone else understood any longer. Let us judge from this regarding the certainty of the conjectures of our modern writers, Kircher, Marsham and Witsius, who have only worked with mutilated monuments and the highly suspect fragments of the disciples of the last hierophants.

Thoth, also known as Theut and Thoot , is considered the founder of Egyptian wisdom. He was said to be the chief advisor of Osiris, who passed on his views to him. Thoth created several useful arts; gave names to most beings in nature; taught men to memorise facts by means of symbols; published laws; established religious ceremonies; observed the course of the stars; cultivated the olive tree, and invented the lyre and the palestric art. In recognition of his work the peoples of Egypt placed him in the ranks of the gods, and gave his name to the first month of their year.

Thoth was one of the Hermes of Greece, and in Cicero’s opinion, the fifth Mercury of the Romans. But to judge the antiquity of this individual from the discoveries attributed to him, Marsham is right to claim that Cicero was mistaken.

Hermes, son of Agathodemon and father of Tat, or the second Mercury, succeeded Thoth in the historical and imaginary annals of Egypt. He perfected theology, discovered the first principles of arithmetic and geometry, sensed the disadvantages of symbolic images, substituting hieroglyphs instead, and finally raised columns on which he had engraved everything he considered worthy of passing to posterity in the new characters he had invented. This was how he aimed to bring stability to the inconstancy of the tradition. The people dressed altars and held festivals in his honour.

Egypt was ravaged by civil and foreign wars. The Nile burst its banks in several places; a large part of the country was flooded. The columns of Agathodemon were overturned; the sciences and the arts were lost, and Egypt had almost fallen back to its earliest barbarity when a man of genius had the idea of gathering the debris of the ancient wisdom, reassembling the dispersed monuments, seeking the key to the hieroglyphs, increasing their number and confiding their understanding and safe-keeping to a college of priests. This man was the third founder of the wisdom of the Egyptians . The people also placed him among the gods, and worshipped him under the name of Hermes Trismegistus .

This, then, was in all probability the succession of events. Time, which wipes away the faults of great men and magnifies their qualities, increased the Egyptians’ respect for their founders’ memories, and they made gods of them. The first of these gods invented the arts of necessity. The second fixed events using symbols. The third replaced symbols with the more convenient hieroglyphs, and if I might push the conjecture further, I would give an idea of what prompted the Egyptians to build their pyramids; and to avenge this people for the criticisms that have been made of them, I would represent these enormous masses of stone, of which the vanity, heaviness, expense and uselessness have been so much censured, as monuments aiming to preserve the sciences, arts and all the useful knowledge of the Egyptian nation.

Indeed, when the monuments of the first or second Mercury had been destroyed, where were men likely to turn, to preserve themselves from the barbarism from which they had escaped, to keep up the knowledge they had acquired day after day, to prevent the consequences of the frequent revolutions to which they had been exposed in those far-off times, when all the peoples seemed to move across the surface of the earth, and to prevent the destructive events that threatened them in particular because of the nature of their climate? Did they seek out a new means or did they perfect one they already had? Did they try to assure the survival of the hieroglyphs or pass from the hieroglyphs to the written word? But the gap between the hieroglyphs and the written word is immense. The metaphysic that strove to bring these discoveries closer and chain them together would be bad. The symbolic figure is a painting of the thing. The same relation exists between the thing and hieroglyphs, but the written word is an expression of the voice. Here the relation changes; it is no longer an invented art that is perfected, but a new art that is invented, an art that has such an individual character that its invention must have been total and complete. This remark was made by Mr Duclos, of the French Academy, and seems to me to have brought a more philosophical regard to this subject than any that preceded it.

The rare genius able to reduce all the variety of sounds of a language to a limited number, to give them signs, to establish for himself the value of these signs, and to spread their understanding and make them familiar to others, never existed among the Egyptians in the circumstances where they would have been most useful; these peoples, therefore, harried between the disadvantages and the need to attach the memory of facts to monuments, must naturally have thought of building some that were solid enough to resist the greatest upheavals forever. Everything seemed to concur to support this opinion: the old custom of confiding to stone and sculpture the history of knowledge and transactions; the symbolic figures that still exist in the midst of the most ancient ruins of the world, those of Persepolis, where they represent the principles of church and civil government; the columns on which Thoth engraved the earliest hieroglyphic characters; the shape of the new pyramids on which it was decided, if my conjecture is true, to fix the state of the sciences and the arts in Egypt; the pyramids’ angles, designed to show the cardinal points of the world, and which were used to this end; the hardness of the materials, which could not be carved with a hammer and chisel, but which had to be cut with a saw; the distance of the quarries from where the stones were taken to the places where they were used; the incredible solidity of the buildings that were made from them; their simplicity, whereby it can be seen that the only task that was set for them was to have a good deal of solidity and a large surface area; the choice of the pyramidal figure, that is, a body with an immense base that ends in a point; the relation of the base to the height; the enormous expense of the construction; the multitude of men and the time this work used up; the similarity and number of these edifices; the machines whose invention they presuppose; a decided taste for useful things, which can be seen at each step one takes in Egypt, and the so-called uselessness of all these pyramids compared to the great wisdom of the people. All discerning minds weighing these circumstances will have no doubt whatsoever that the pyramids were built to be covered one day with the political, civil and religious science of the country; that this resource was the only one that could have occurred to peoples who did not yet have writing and who had seen their earliest buildings destroyed; that the pyramids should be seen as the bibles of Egypt, whose characters were perhaps destroyed by time and revolutions many centuries before the invention of writing, which is why this event has not come down to us; in a word, that these monuments, far from making the pride or stupidity of this people eternal, are the testimonies of their prudence and the inestimable price they placed on the preservation of their knowledge. And the proof that their reasoning was not mistaken is that for countless centuries their works have resisted the destructive action of elements they had foreseen, and that they have only been damaged by the barbarism of men, against whom the Egyptian wise men either did not think of taking precautions or felt it was impossible for the right ones to be taken. Such is our view concerning the construction of the pyramids of Egypt. It would be highly surprising that of the many people who have written about the monuments, none has made the conjecture that presents itself so naturally.

If we date the institution of Egyptian priests to the time of Hermes Trismegistus, then no more ancient order of citizens in the state exists than the ecclesiastical order, and if we attentively examine some of the fundamental laws of this institution, we will see how impossible it was for the hierophants not to grow in number, to become powerful and dominating, and how the process could not but lead to the ills that afflicted Egypt.

There was nowhere in Egypt nor anywhere else in the pagan world that a temple had only one priest and one god. In any Egyptian temple people worshipped a large number of gods. There was at least one priest for each god, and a seminary of priests for each temple. How easy it was to acquire a taste for a condition in which one could live easily while doing nothing; where, standing beside the altar, a man could share in the homage paid to the idol, and see other men prostrated at his feet; where one could be obeyed even by sovereigns, and be seen as the minister from on high and the interpreter of heaven’s will; where the sacred character that a priest assumed permitted many injustices, and almost always shielded him from punishment; where he had the people’s trust, and dominated the families whose secrets he possessed; in short, where a man united in his person consideration, authority, opulence, laziness and safety. Egyptian priests, moreover, were allowed to have wives, and it is well-known that priests’ wives are highly fecund.

But so that hierophantism might swallow up all the other conditions and ruin the nation still more surely, the Egyptian priesthood was one of those professions in which sons had to succeed their fathers. The son of a priest was born a priest – which did not stop others entering the ecclesiastical order without belonging to a priestly family. The order thus continually took its members from other professions, and never gave back any.

The same was true of goods and acquisitions as of people. What once had belonged to priests could not be given back to the lay community. The wealth of the priests grew as much as their numbers. What is more, the mass of lucrative superstitions in a country is proportional to the number of its priests, seers, soothsayers, fortune-tellers and generally to all those who make a living from their trade with heaven.

To these considerations let us add that there was perhaps no more favourable soil on the face of the earth than Egypt. Its fecundity was an annual prodigy. The phenomena that naturally accompanied the arrival of the Nile’s waters, their stay and withdrawal, were the cause of astonishment in people’s minds. The regular emigration from the lowlands to the highlands; the idleness of that place of residence; the meaning given to the study of astronomy; the sedentary and secluded life led; the meteorites, exhalations, the dark and unhealthy vapours that rose from the mud all other the vast country, drenched in water and baked by a burning sun; the strange creatures that were seen being hatched out; the myriad events produced in the general movement all over Egypt after its river flooded, and the descent from the mountains as the plains were laid bare – all these causes could not fail to make the nation superstitious, since superstition is always a necessary result of surprising and unexplained phenomena.

But when the proportion of those who work to those who do nothing in a country continually decreases, it must happen, in the long term, that the hands that are busy can no longer make up for the inactivity of those who remain idle, so that the condition of laziness becomes a burden to itself. This was what happened in Egypt too, but the evil was too great to remedy. Things had to be given up to their torrent. The government was shaken by it. Indigence and the spirit of self-interest engendered a spirit of intolerance in the priests. Some of them claimed that the crane should be worshipped exclusively; others wanted the only true god to be the crocodile. Some solely preached the cult of the cat, and anathematised the cult of the onion. Some condemned bean-eaters to be burned as heretics. The more ridiculous these articles of belief were, the more warmth the priests brought to them. The seminaries rose up against each other; the people believed that altars were being overturned and religion ruined, when all that was at issue between the priests was to attract the trust and the offerings of the people. People took up weapons, there was fighting and the earth was bathed in blood.

Egypt was superstitious at all times, because nothing can entirely preserve us from the influence of climate, and there are hardly any notions in our minds prior to those arising from the daily spectacle of the country where we live. But the evil was not as general under the first depositaries of the wisdom of Trismegistus as it became under the last of the hierophants.

The ancient priests of Egypt claimed that their gods were worshipped even by barbarians. Their cult had indeed spread to Chaldea, to almost all the countries of Asia, and even today distinct traces of it can be found in religious ceremonies in India. They saw Osiris, Isis, Horus, Hermes and Anubis as celestial souls who had generously given up supreme bliss, taken on human form and accepted all the misery of our condition in order to converse with us, teach us the nature of justice and injustice, bring us the sciences and the arts, give us laws and make us wiser and less unhappy. The priests said they were the descendents of these immortal beings, and the heirs of their divine spirit. An excellent doctrine to give to the people; once there was no superstitious form of worship whose ministers did not make claims of this kind; sometimes they united sovereignty with priesthood. They were distributed into different classes, devoted to different tasks, and distinguished by special signs. They had given up all manual and profane occupations. They walked without cease among the imitations of the gods with a composed gait, an austere air, an upright countenance and their hands closed beneath their clothes. One of their main tasks was to exhort the people to keep an inviolable attachment to the customs of the country, and they had a relatively large interest in fulfilling this priestly duty. They observed the skies at night; they purified themselves during the day. They celebrated an office that consisted in singing several hymns in the morning, afternoon and evening. They filled up the rest of the time with the study of arithmetic, geometry and experimental physics (περὶ τὴν ἐμπειρίαν). Their clothes were clean and modest, and made of linen. Their shoes were plaited bulrushes. They practiced circumcision. They shaved all of their body. They washed in cold water three times a day. They drank little wine. They went without bread in times of purification, or mixed it with hyssop. Oil and fish were strictly forbidden to them. They did not even dare sow beans.

This is the order and the progress of one of their processions. The bards came first, holding symbols of the musical art in their hands. The bards were particularly well-versed in the two books of Mercury, which contained the hymns of the gods and the maxims of the kings.

They were followed by the astrologers, carrying the palm and the sun-dial, the two symbols of judicial astrology. They were knowledgeable in the four books of Mercury devoted to the movements of the stars, their light, their rising and setting, the conjunctions and the oppositions of the moon and the sun.

After the astrologers came the scribes of sacred things, with a feather on their heads, and a writing case, inkwell and bulrush in their hands. They had knowledge of hieroglyphs, cosmology, geography, the course of the sun, the moon and the other planets, the topography of Egypt and consecrated places, measurements and a few other subjects relative to politics and religion.

After the astrologers came those that were called the stolites , with the symbols of justice and libation cups. They were not unfamiliar with everything related to the choice of sacrificial victims, the discipline of the temples, the divine cult, the ceremonies of religion, sacrifices, first premises, hymns, prayers, festivals, public ceremonies and other subjects that made up the ten books of Mercury.

The prophets brought up the rear of the procession. They were bare-chested; they bore on their uncovered chests the hydria, who watched over the sacred bread that accompanied them. The prophets were initiated in everything related to the nature of the gods and to the spirit of the laws; they presided over the distribution of tax revenues; the priestly books, which contained their knowledge, were ten in number.

All Egyptian wisdom was contained in 42 volumes, of which the last six, for the use of the pastophores, dealt with anatomy, medicine, illnesses, remedies, instruments, eyes and women. These books were kept in the temples, in places that were only accessible to the priestly elders. Only natives of the country were initiated, and they were put through long tests beforehand. If the recommendation of a sovereign obliged a foreigner to be admitted to the seminary, nothing was spared to repel him. A neophyte was first taught epistolography or the form and value of ordinary characters. From there he passed to knowledge of holy scripture or the science of the priesthood, and his lessons in theology were completed by the treaties on hieroglyphs or the lapidary style, which was divided into literal, symbolic, imitative and allegorical characters.

The Egyptians’ moral philosophy dealt mainly with the ease of life and the science of government. If we consider that on leaving their school, Thales made sacrifices to the gods after discovering how to describe the circle and measure the triangle, and that Pythagoras sacrificed one hundred cattle after discovering the property of the square on the hypotenuse, we would not have a high opinion of their geometry. Egyptian astronomy reduced itself to understanding of the rise and setting of the stars, the aspects of the planets, the solstices and equinoxes, and the signs of the zodiac; all of which knowledge they applied to astrological and genethliac calculations. Eudoxus published the first systematic ideas about the movement of the celestial bodies; Thales predicted the first eclipse. Either Thales invented the method or he learned it in Egypt. What was Egyptian astronomy ? It is quite likely that their observations owe their reputation solely to the inexactness of what was done elsewhere. The range of their music had three tones, and their lyre had three strings. Pythagoras had long ceased to be their disciple when he was still busy searching for the relations of the intervals of sounds. A long-standing practice of embalming bodies should have improved their medicine, yet the best we can say of it is that they had a doctor for each part of the body and for each illness. Their medicine was in fact a tissue of superstitious practices, very useful to palliate the ineffectiveness of their remedies and the ignorance of their doctors. If the patient was not cured, it was because his conscience was in a bad way. Everything that Borrichius has uttered about their chemistry is mere erudite delirium; it has been proved that the question of the transmutation of metals was not posed before the reign of Constantine. It cannot be denied that the Egyptians had practiced judicial astrology from time immemorial, but do we have a better opinion of them as a result? They had excellent magicians, as can be seen by their quarrel with Moses before the Pharaoh, with the metamorphosis of their rods into snakes. This magic trick is one of the greatest mentioned in history. They had two theologies, one esoteric and one exoteric. The first consisted in admitting no other god than the universe and no other principle for beings than matter and movement. Osiris was the sun and Isis the moon. They said that in the beginning everything was blended together. The sky and the Earth were one, but the elements came to be separated over time. The air was set in motion; its igneous part was carried to the centre to form the stars and to light up the sun. Its coarse sediment did not remain immobile. It rolled up on itself, and the Earth appeared. The sun heated this inert mass, the seeds it contained fermented, and life sprung up in a variety of different forms. Every living thing soared into the element that suited it. The world, the Egyptians added, undergoes periodic revolutions, during which it is consumed by fire. It is reborn from its ashes and suffers the same fate at the end of a further revolution. These revolutions had no beginning and will have no end. The Earth is a spherical globe. The stars are masses of fire. The influence of all the celestial bodies is the cause of the production and the diversity of terrestrial bodies. The moon is plunged into the Earth’s shadow during lunar eclipses. The moon is a kind of planetary earth.

The Egyptians persisted in materialism until its absurdity was explained to them. They then recognised an intelligent principle, the spirit of the world, which was present in everything, and which animated and governed everything according to immutable laws. Everything that existed emanated from this principle and everything that ceased to be returned to it. It was the source and abyss of all existence. The Egyptians were successively Deists, Platonists and Manicheans, according to circumstances and to the dominant system. They praised the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. They prayed for the dead. Their Amenthes was a kind of hell or Elysium. They commended the soul of the dying in these terms: Sol omnibus imperans, vos dii universi qui vitam hominibus largimini, me accipite; et diis oeternis contubernalem futurum reddite (“O Sun, ruler over all, and all you gods who lavish life upon men, accept me, and give back to the eternal gods a future comrade.”).

The Egyptians believed that the souls of the just entered the heart of the great principle immediately after the separation from the body. The souls of the wicked were purified or depraved even more by moving through the world in new forms. Matter was eternal; it had neither been emanated, nor produced, nor created. The world had had a beginning, but matter had not begun and could not end. It existed by itself, along with the immaterial principle. The immaterial principle was the eternal being that shapes; matter was the eternal being that is shaped. The marriage of Osiris and Isis was an allegory of this theory. Osiris and Isis engendered Horus or the universe, which they saw as the action of the active principle applied to the passive principle.

The fundamental maxim of their exoteric theology was not to reject any foreign superstition, so that no persecuted god anywhere on earth failed to find refuge in some Egyptian temple ; the doors were opened to him, provided he agreed to be clothed in the ways of the country. The worship the Egyptians made of animals and other natural beings was a relatively natural consequence of hieroglyphics. The hieroglyphic figures, depicted in stone, originally designated different natural phenomena, but when their meaning was no longer understood, in people’s minds they came to represent divinities. Hence the hordes of gods of every kind that filled Egypt; hence the bloody disputes that arose between priests when the working part of the nation was no longer in a state to supply its own needs as well as the needs of the idle part. Summus utrìmque inde furor, vulgò quod numina vicinorum odit uterque locus, cum solos dicat habendos esse deos quos ipse colit [“This great fury was caused by the opposition of the gods, both peoples being jealous of their own and execrating those of their enemy” Juvenal, Satire 15, 35-38].

This would be the place to speak about Egyptian antiquities and the authors who have written about Egyptian theology and philosophy, but the works of most of these writers disappeared in the fire of the library in Alexandria, and what remains is apocryphal, if we except a few fragments cited in other works. Sanchuniathon has no authority. Manetho was from Diospolis or Sebennis and lived under Ptolemy Philadelphus. He wrote a good deal about the history of the philosophy and theology of the Egyptians . This is how Eusebius judged his works: ex columnis , Eusebe, in syriadicâ terr positis, quibus sacrâ dial sacroe erant notoe insulptoe à Thoot, primo Mercurio; post diluvium verò ex sacrâ lingu in groecam notis ibidem sacris versoe fuerunt; interque libros in adita oegyptia relatoe ab Agatho doemone, altero Mercurio patre Tat; undeipse ait libros scriptos ab avo Mercurii Trismegisti ... [“...from the columns, said Eusebius , standing in Syrian lands, where sacred symbols were engraved in sacred language to Thoth, the first Mercury; soon after the flood, these symbols were similarly translated from that sacred tongue into sacred Greek symbols, and written down in books in Egyptian times by Agathus Demon, the other Mercury, father of Tat, who said the books were written by the ancestor of Mercury Trismegistus...”]

What foundation can we give to this translation of symbols into hieroglyphs, of hieroglyphs into sacred Egyptian characters, of sacred Egyptian characters into sacred Greek letters and of sacred Greek letters into ordinary letters, by the time the work of Manetho reached us?

The Isiac tablet is one of the most remarkable Egyptian antiquities. Cardinal Bembo took it from the hands of a worker who had thrown it onto a heap of scrap metal. From there it was passed on to the cabinet of Vincenzo, Duke of Mantua. The imperial armies seized Mantua in 1630, and the Isiac tablet disappeared in the sack of the city. One of the Duke of Savoy’s doctors recovered it long afterwards, and locked it up with the other antiquities of his sovereign, and there it still seems to be ( See the description given under the heading Isiac). What has not been read into this table? It is a cloud in which shapes have been multiplied according to the quantity of imagination and knowledge bestowed on it. Rudbeck discovered the alphabet of the Laplanders in it, Fabricius the signs of the zodiac and the months of the year, Herwart the properties of the magnet and the polarity of the magnetic needle, and Kircher, Pignorius, Witsius, anything they wanted – which will not stop their successors from seeing anything they want in it too. It is a work that is admirable for attributing only to the moderns and to their discoveries what is thought unworthy of being attributed to the ancients.