Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

11 results

Histories of the Hidden God
  • Concealment and Revelation in Western Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical Traditions
  • Edited by April D. DeConick, Grant Adamson
  • Published by:
    Acumen Publishing
    Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    30 June 2013
  • In Western religious traditions, God is conventionally conceived as a humanlike creator, lawgiver, and king, a being both accessible and actively present in history. Yet there is a concurrent and strong tradition of a God who actively hides. The two traditions have led to a tension between a God who is simultaneously accessible to humanity and yet inaccessible, a God who is both immanent and transcendent, present and absent. Western Gnostic, esoteric, and mystical thinking capitalizes on the hidden and hiding God. He becomes the hallmark of the mystics, Gnostics, sages, and artists who attempt to make accessible to humans the God who is secreted away. Histories of the Hidden God explores this tradition from antiquity to today. The essays focus on three essential themes: the concealment of the hidden God; the human quest for the hidden God, and revelations of the hidden God.

  • 3 - The old gods of Egypt in lost Hermetica and early Sethianism

  • from Part I - Concealment of the Hidden God
  • Edited by April D. DeConick, Rice University, Grant Adamson, Rice University
  • Book:
    Histories of the Hidden God
    Published by:
    Acumen Publishing
    Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    30 June 2013, pp 58-86

  • Summary

    Amun, the name of the Egyptian god, means hidden, and the utterly transcendent deity in Eugnostos is described likewise. This could be attributed immediately to coincidence if it were not for several other points of interest in the text. First, the theogony in Eugnostos arguably once featured the same number of single and paired gods as found in the Khonsu Cosmogony, an Egyptian monumental source from the Ptolemaic period. Second, in Eugnostos these gods are referred to by Hermetic terms of generation, namely unbegotten, self-begotten, begotten and so on. Third, the cosmos that the gods in Eugnostos produce is manifestly that of the decans who govern the thirty-six weeks of the year in the Egyptian calendar.

    That such cosmological and calendrical assumptions are made in Eugnostos is enough to wonder to what extent the text may be neither Christian nor Jewish: whereas Egyptians kept a ten-day week marked by the rising of a decan, Jews and Christians observed a seven-day week in accordance with the Decalogue. This is not to deny the influence of Jewish literature on the text at some stage of composition; indeed, the author of this didactic letter and for whom it is named could have been a Hellenized Jew living in Egypt, such as one of Philo's extreme allegorizers unconcerned with the Sabbath. But as for the early church, in Roelof van den Broek's words, “I am unable to see any distinct and indisputable Christian influence.”