Another large fragment in the Bruce Papyrus is also connected with that which has been called above the Texts of the Saviour, and helps to link up this with the system of the Pistis Sophia proper. In the first part of the Texts of the Saviour (i.e. the fourth document in the British Museum book), Jesus, as has been mentioned, celebrates with prodigies a sacrament which He calls the “Baptism of the first Oblation”; and He tells them at the same time that there is also a baptism of perfumes, another baptism of the Holy Spirit of Light, and a Spiritual Chrism, besides which He promises them “the great mystery of the Treasure-house of Light and the way to call upon it so as to arrive thither,” a “baptism of those who belong to the Right Hand,” and of “those who belong to the Middle” and other matters. These promises are in some sort fulfilled in that part of the Bruce Papyrus which Dr Schmidt will have it is “the Second Book of Jeû[[655]],” where Jesus celebrates with accompanying prodigies three sacraments which He calls the Baptism of Fire of the Virgin of the Treasure-house of Light, the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and a “mystery” which is said to take away from His disciples “the wickedness of the archons[[656]].” The details of these vary but very slightly from the “Baptism of the First Oblation” celebrated by Jesus in the Texts of the Saviour, and seem to have been written in continuation and as an amplification of it. But the Texts of the Saviour, as we have seen, also mention Pistis Sophia in such a way as to presuppose an acquaintance with her history; and the presumption that the author of the Bruce Papyrus had read the book bearing her name is confirmed by the repetition in it of the names of Jeû, here called “the Great Man, King of the great aeon of light,” the Great Sabaoth the Good, the Great Iao the Good, Barbelo[[657]], the Great Light, and all the “Amens,” “Twin Saviours,” “Guardians of Veils” and the rest who are classed together in the Pistis Sophia as the great emanations of light, and mentioned in a connection which shows them to have the same functions in all these documents[[658]]. When we add to these the repetition of the tradition, formally stated for the first time in the Pistis Sophia, that Jesus spent twelve years with His disciples between His Resurrection and His Ascension[[659]], there can be little doubt that this part of the Papyrus Bruce also is subsequent to the Pistis Sophia. Similar arguments, which are only omitted here for the sake of greater clearness, apply to all the rest of Dr Schmidt’s documents, and it follows that none of the contents of the Papyrus can be considered as any part of the “Books of Jeû” mentioned in the Pistis Sophia[[660]], which, therefore, remains the parent document on which all the others are based. As to their absolute date, it seems impossible to arrive at any useful conclusion. Both M. Amélineau and Dr Schmidt are agreed that the Coptic Papyrus is a translation from Greek originals; and M. Amélineau does not put this too far forward when he suggests that it was made in the IInd and IIIrd century of our era[[661]]. Dr Schmidt is probably nearer the mark when he puts the actual transcription of the Papyrus as dating in the earliest instance from the Vth century. His earliest date for any of the Greek originals is the first half of the IIIrd century[[662]].
If now we put these later documents—the Texts of the Saviour and those contained in the Bruce Papyrus—side by side, we notice a marked, if gradual, change of tendency from the comparatively orthodox Christianity of the Pistis Sophia proper. In the Texts of the Saviour notably, the fear of hell and its punishments is, as we have seen, present throughout, and seems to be the sanction on which the author relies to compel his readers to accept his teaching. In the documents of the Bruce Papyrus this is also to be found in more sporadic fashion, nearly the whole of the book being occupied by the means by which men are to escape the punishment of their sins. These methods of salvation are all of them what we have earlier called gnostical or magical, and consist simply in the utterance of “names” given us in some sort of crypto-grammatic form, and the exhibition of “seals” or rather impressions (χαρακτῆρες) here portrayed with great attention to detail, which, however, remain utterly meaningless for us. Thus to quote again from what Dr Schmidt calls the Second Book of Jeû, Jesus imparts to His disciples the “mystery” of the Twelve Aeons in these words:
“When you have gone forth from the body and come into the First Aeon, the Archons of that Aeon will come before you. Then stamp upon yourselves this seal AA, the name of which is zôzesê. Utter this once only. Take in your two hands this number, 1119. When you have stamped upon yourselves this seal and have uttered its name once only, speak these defences; ‘Back! Protei Persomphôn Chous, O Archons of the First Aeon, for I invoke Êazazêôzazzôzeôz.’ And when the Archons of the First Aeon shall hear that name, they will be filled with great fear, they will flee away to the West, to the Left Hand, and you will enter in[[663]]”:
and the same process with different names and seals is to be repeated with the other eleven aeons. This is, of course, not religion, such as we have seen in the writings of Valentinus, nor even the transcendental mysticism of the Pistis Sophia, but magic, and magic of a peculiarly Egyptian form. The ancient Egyptian had always an intense fear of the world after death, and from the first conceived a most gloomy view of it. The worshippers of Seker or Socharis, a god so ancient that we know him only as a component part of the triune or syncretic divinity of late dynastic times called Ptah-Seker-Osiris, depicted it as a subterranean place deprived of the light of the sun, hot and thirsty, and more dreary than even the Greek Hades or the Hebrew Sheol.
“The West is a land of sleep and darkness heavy, a place where those who settle in it, slumbering in their forms, never wake to see their brethren; they never look any more on their father and their mother, their heart leaves hold of their wives and children. The living water which earth has for every one there, is foul here where I am; though it runs for every one who is on earth, foul is for me the water which is with me. I do not know any spot where I would like to be, since I reached this valley! Give me water which runs towards me, saying to me, ‘Let thy jug never be without water’; bring to me the north wind, on the brink of water, that it may fan me, that my heart may cool from its pain. The god whose name is Let Complete Death Come, when he has summoned anybody to him, they come to him, their hearts disturbed by the fear of him; for there is nobody dares look up to him from amongst gods and men, the great are to him as the small and he spares not [those] who love him, but he tears the nursling from the mother as he does the old man, and everyone who meets him is filled with affright[[664]].”
The priests took care that such a picture did not fade from want of reproduction and, true to the genius of their nation, elaborated it until its main features are almost lost to us under the mass of details[[665]]. Especially was this the case with the religion of the Sun-God Ra, who after his fusion with Amon of Thebes at the establishment of the New Empire came to overshadow all the Egyptian cults save that of Osiris. The tombs of the kings at Thebes are full of pictures of the land of this Amenti or the West, in which horror is piled upon horror, and book after book was written that there should be no mistake about the fate lying in wait for the souls of men[[666]]. In these we see the dead wandering from one chamber to another, breathing a heavy and smoke-laden air[[667]], and confronted at every step by frightful fiends compounded from the human and bestial forms, whose office is to mutilate, to burn, and to torture the soul. The means of escape open to the dead was, under the XXth dynasty, neither the consciousness of a well-spent life nor the fatherly love of the gods, but the knowledge of passwords and mysterious names[[668]]. Every chamber had a guardian who demanded of the dead his own name, without repeating which the soul was not allowed to enter[[669]]. Every fiend had to be repelled by a special exorcism and talisman[[670]], and every “circle” through which the dead passed had its own song and “mystery,” which it behoved the dead to know[[671]]. Only thus could he hope to win through to the Land of Osiris, where he might enjoy a relative beatitude and be free to go about and visit the other heavenly places[[672]]. For this purpose, the map, so to speak, of the route was engraved on the walls of the tombs of those who could afford it, and the necessary words to be said written down. Those who were not so rich or so lucky were thought to be parcelled out, like the fellahin of that day, or the villeins of feudal times, in colonies among the different districts of the lower world, where they flourished or perished according to the number of talismans or “protections” that they possessed[[673]]. “If ever,” says M. Maspero, “there were in Pharaonic Egypt mysteries and initiates, as there were in Greece and in Egypt under the Greeks, these books later than the Book of the Other World and the Book of the Gates are books of mystery and of initiates[[674]].” Thereafter, he goes on to say, the ancient popular religion disappeared more and more from Egypt, to give place to the overmastering sense of the terrors of death[[675]] and the magical means by which it was sought to lighten them.
It is to the survival of these ideas that books like the Texts of the Saviour and those in the Papyrus Bruce must be attributed. The Gnostic Christianity of Valentinus, direct descendant as it was of the amalgam of Christianity with pre-Christian faiths which the Ophites had compounded, no sooner reached the great mass of the Egyptian people than it found itself under their influence. In this later Gnostic literature we hear no more of the Supreme Father of Valentinus, “who alone” in his words, “is good”; no more weight is laid upon the Faith, Hope, and Love who were the first three members of his Heavenly Man; and the Jesus in whom were summed up all the perfections of the Godhead becomes transformed into a mere mystagogue or revealer of secret words and things. All expectation of the immediate arrival of the Parusia or Second Coming, when the world is to be caught up and all wickedness to be destroyed, has passed into the background, as has also the millennium in which the faithful were, in accordance with a very early belief in Egypt, to share the felicity of those who had been kings on earth[[676]]. Instead we have only appeals to the lowest motives of fear and the selfish desire to obtain higher privileges than ordinary men. Even the avoidance of crime has no other sanction, and complete withdrawal from the world is advocated on merely prudential grounds; while rejection of the mysteries is the unpardonable sin:
“When I have gone unto the light” (says the Jesus of the Texts of the Saviour to His disciples) “preach unto the whole world, saying: Renounce the whole world and the matter that is therein, all its cares, its sins, and in a word all its conversation, that ye may be worthy of the mysteries of the light, that ye may be saved from all the torments which are in the judgments. Renounce murmuring, that ye may be worthy of the mysteries of the light, that ye may escape the judgment of that dog-faced one.... Renounce wrath, that ye may be worthy of the mysteries of the light, that ye may be saved from the fire of the seas of the dragon-faced one.... Renounce adultery, that ye may be worthy of the mysteries of the kingdom of light, that ye may be saved from the seas of sulphur and pitch of the lion-faced one.... Say unto them that abandon the doctrines of truth of the First Mystery ‘Woe unto you, for your torment shall be worse than that of all men, for ye shall dwell in the great ice and frost and hail in the midst of the Dragon of the Outer Darkness, and ye shall escape no more from the world from that hour unto evermore, but ye shall be as stones therein, and in the dissolution of the universe ye shall be annihilated, so that ye exist no more for ever[[677]]’.”
The priests who engraved the horrors of the next world on the walls of the royal tombs at Thebes would probably have written no differently.
Gnosticism then, in Egypt soon relapsed into the magic from which it was originally derived; and we can no longer wonder that the Fathers of the Church strove as fiercely against it as they did. In the age when books like the Texts of the Saviour and the fragments in the Papyrus Bruce could be written, the methods of Clement of Alexandria, who treated Valentinus and his school as Christians bent on the truth though led into error by a misunderstanding of the purport of heathen philosophy, were clearly out of place. “Ravening wolves,” “wild beasts,” “serpents,” and “lying rogues” are some of the terms the Fathers now bestow upon them[[678]], and as soon as the conversion of Constantine put the sword of the civil power into their hands, they used it to such effect that Gnosticism perished entirely in some places and in others dragged on a lingering existence under other forms. The compromise that had served for some time to reconcile the great mass of the unthinking people to the religion of Christ thus broke down[[679]]; and Egypt again showed her power of resisting and transforming all ideas other than those which thousands of years had made sacred to her people.