The Exodus Quest

TWENTY-SEVEN
I

Knox took the tray back through to the library, set it down on the low coffee table. He wasn't exactly in the mood for a tea party, but Kostas evidently was, so he tried to master his aches and jitters. He was at least safe here, after all. He poured them each a cup of aromatic pale tea from the silver pot, cut two thin slices of moist chocolate cake. 'You were telling me about Harpocrates and the Gnostics,' he prompted, passing Kostas his plate.

'Yes,' agreed Kostas. He nibbled the end of his cake, washed it down with a decorous sip of tea. 'You see, there was a group of Gnostics actually called the Harpocratians. At least, they may have been called that, though it's hard to be categorical. They're only referred to once or twice in the sources, you see. And there was another, much better-known group of Gnostics called the Carpocratians, founded by an Alexandrian by the name of Carpocrates. So it seems feasible, perhaps even probable, that these two were one and the same.'

'A spelling mistake?'

'It's possible, of course. But our sources were the kind of people to know the difference. So my suspicion has always been that these Carpocratians might have been reputed to worship Harpocrates as well as Christ. That the names were therefore interchangeable, if you like.'

'Is that plausible?'

'Oh, yes,' nodded Kostas vigorously. 'You have to realize that Gnostics weren't Christian in the modern sense. In fact, even grouping them together as Gnostics is really to miss the point, because it implies they had a single way of thinking, whereas in fact each of the sects had its own distinct views, drawn eclectically from Egyptian, Jewish, Greek and other traditions. But the great pioneers of Gnosticism, people like Valentinus, Basilides and Carpocrates, did have certain things in common. For example, they didn't believe Jesus to be the Son of God. Come to that, they didn't believe that the Jewish God was actually the Supreme Being at all, but merely a demiurge, a vicious second-tier creation who mistook himself for the real thing. How else, after all, could one explain all the horrors of this world?'

'So who was the Supreme Being?'

'Ah! Now there's a question!' His eyes were watering freely, his skin flushing. Like many solitary people, Kostas tended to become over-stimulated in company. 'The Gnostics held that it was incapable of description, incapable of even being contemplated, except perhaps in mathematical terms, and only then by the exceptionally enlightened. A very Einsteinian God, if you like. And that's where Christ came in, because Gnostics saw him, along with Plato and Aristotle and others, as gifted but essentially ordinary men who'd nursed their divine sparks sufficiently to have glimpsed this truth. But I'm getting away from the point, which is the similarities between Harpocrates and Christ.'

'Such as?'

'Oh my dear Daniel! Where to start? Luxor Temple, perhaps. The nativity reliefs. A newborn pharaoh depicted as Harpocrates. Nothing surprising about that, of course. Pharaohs were the physical incarnations of Horus, so infant pharaohs were by definition Horus-the-child or Harpocrates. But the details of this particular tableau are curious. A mortal woman impregnated by a holy spirit while still a virgin. An annunciation by Thoth, the Egyptian equivalent of the archangel Gabriel. A star leading three wise men from the east, bearing gifts.'

'You're kidding me.'

'I thought you'd enjoy that,' smiled Kostas. 'In fact, the wise men crop up all the time in divine nativity stories, especially among sun-worshippers. An astronomical allegory, of course, like so many religious conceits. The three stars of Orion's belt point towards Sirius, the key to the ancient Egyptian solar calendar and for predicting the annual inundation. Gold, frankincense and myrrh often crop up too. Man's very first possessions, you know, given by God to console Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden. Seventy rods of gold, if my memory serves.'

'Rods?' frowned Knox. A rod was a unit of distance, not of weight.

'According to The Book of Adam and Eve,' nodded Kostas. 'Or was it The Book of the Cave of Treasures?' He sighed wistfully. 'My memory, you know.'

'I don't think it was The Cave of Treasures,' said Knox, who'd wasted countless glorious summer afternoons in a forlorn effort to master Syriac by studying that particular text, about a cave in which Adam, Abraham, Noah, Moses and most of the other leading Jewish patriarchs had supposedly been buried. 'Anything else?'

'There are some startling parallels between Horus's mother Isis and Mary the mother of Christ, of course. You must be aware of those. And Harpocrates was believed to have been born on a mountain, the hieroglyph for which was the same as that for a manger. Ancient Egyptians used to celebrate his birth by parading a manger through their streets. Easier than carrying a mountain.'

'Ah.'

Kostas nodded. 'The Gospel of Matthew claims that the Holy Family fled to Egypt when Jesus was a child to avoid the Massacre of the Innocents. According to Saint Edward the Martyr, they got as far south as Hermopolis, city of Thoth. Which brings us neatly full circle, for Hermopolis was directly across the Nile from the city founded by this pharaoh I mentioned, the one in those Luxor reliefs.'

'You mean Amarna?' asked Knox. 'The pharaoh was Akhenaten?'

'Indeed,' agreed Kostas, allowing himself a little chuckle. 'Just think of it! The New Testament accounts of Christ's Nativity borrowed from the birth of a heretic Egyptian pharaoh. Not something the Church has sought to publicize, for some reason or other.' He held out his cup. 'You couldn't pour me some more tea, could you?'