In Alexandria—

Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

[Ruins of the Temple of Serapis, Alexandria]

The Alexandrian “Edge of Chaos”: Egyptian Mysteries and Mark

… the edge of chaos is a good place to be in a constantly changing world…. —Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, Frontiers of Complexity

Not everyone can spend forty years in Sinai attaining to the vivifying “edge of chaos,” the state of being adaptable (rather than “stiff of neck”). Aside from meditations of the Indic sort, which never took deep root in the Occident, Mediterranean civilization utilized two related means to approach that edge: religious literature and initiatory rituals. Alexandria serves as a convenient map for these, since it was built around both.

It is the only city memorable primarily because of libraries it once possessed. The larger adjoined a building sacred to the Muses; the smaller occupied a temple to Serapis, a god of the mysteries (see picture above). “Mysteries” were initiations not separate religions, for as Walter Burkert argues, the term “mysteries” usually meant such ceremonies, a voluntary part of Mediterranean polytheism, not denominations (Burkert 1-1). Headed by a priest and themselves servants of those goddesses, Alexandrian librarians also followed the traditions of Egypt, where “libraries seem always to have belonged to the temples” (Thompson 78-80).

Luciano Canfora argues evocatively that the Museum was a tomb of Alexander, surrounded by a temple/library on the model of the temple/library/tomb of Ramses:
Hecataeus’s description of Rameses’ mausoleum helps us to fill out Strabo’s rather condensed topography of the Alexandrian Museum [Library]. Hecataeus’s exploration of the pharaoh’s tomb was almost a voyage of initiation.… Hecataeus … may have been seeking, when he described his exploration, to reveal or suggest the source of the plan on which the “forbidden city” [Alexandria’s libraries and palace] had been built—just as Aristeas thought he had revealed the ineffable character of the books of the Jewish law (Canfora 78-80).

Ramses tomb had an inscription over its library: “The place of the cure of the soul.” Canfora insists the real referent of that sign must be not the library itself (as the ancient tourist Hecataeus assumed) but a concealed door leading to a hidden crypt. At least as probably, the sign could have punningly indicated both library and tomb, each in its way caring for the soul. Indeed, as Canfora’s own phrase “voyage of initiation” indicates, entry to the supposedly undead and eternal body of the divine king through the library was an experience like Egyptian mysteries. Therein, texts prepared the initiate to meet a reborn god. The journey through the temple/library/tomb may have served as one of the mysteries’ models and settings. This internal pilgrimage of readings and rituals brought initiates to the heart of Alexandria and of themselves as they slipped through the edge of chaos into a symbolic death.

Sources of the necessary disorientation, the mysteries were syncretistic, works of such people as “Manetho,” a popular religious author whose name probably means “Truth of Thôth,” the Egyptian god of writing (Waddell ix). His publications forwarded the cult of Serapis (primarily a Hellenized form of the Egyptian god Osiris) (Parsons 184). Manetho’s eclecticism (typical of other mysteries as well) was incoherent, but it eased religious tensions between Hellenes and Egyptians. Indeed, as means to a spiritual experience, reading texts as part of a mystery is unlikely to lead to wars of faith. Pragmatically, lectors may choose whatever they deem sufficiently venerable or stimulating rather than restrict themselves to a narrow orthodoxy. Mysteries situate themselves at “the edge of chaos.” In contrast, religious slackness is an entropy tending toward equilibrium and zeal plunges beyond that “edge” into strange order.

Although the mysteries drew their inspirations from many conflicting theologies, they still maintained faith in the supernatural lineage of their texts. According to Richard Laqueur:

As a Heliopolitan priest, [Manetho] was without doubt acquainted with the sacred tree in the great Hall of Heliopolis, the tree on which the goddess, Seshat, the Lady of Letters, the Mistress of the Library, wrote down with her own hand the names and deeds of the rulers. He did nothing more than communicate to the Greek world what the goddess had noted dow (Quoted in Parsons 186).

Because of the close connection of the libraries with paganism, when Christian orthodoxy largely triumphed from the fourth century onwards “the Library slips from view and significance” Robert Smith, 16; Müller, III, 289). Judged by the number of extant papyri, literary production reached its “peak … in the second century” C.E. This, by the way, was when the mysteries—both pagan and Christian—were on less hostile terms with one another than when the latter eradicated the former (William Harris 296).

Associated with these mysteries, that temple of Serapis at the heart of Alexandria belonged among the wonders of the world. An ancient traveler Ammianus Marcellinus writes of it:
No description can do it justice, yet [it] is so adorned with extensive columned halls, with almost breathing statues, and a great number of other works of art, that next to the Capitol [in Rome] …, the whole world beholds nothing more magnificent (Ammianus Marcellinus, XX-16-12, as trans. in Parsons, 72).
As with so many temples, an important part of its life involved initiations of the rich and powerful, who became munificent patrons and protectors of the cult.

As to the date when something like mystery initiations first occurred, that is unknown, but the Homeric hymn to Demeter, dated ca. sixth century B.C.E., reads, “Blessed among men who dwell on earth is he who has seen these things; but he who is unititated and has no part in the rites has never an equal lot when he has died and passed beneath the dank darkness.” This is certainly more than a puberty rite and sounds like a reference to the Eleusinian mysteries (Radhakrishnan 276). Initiatory texts (according to Burkert “used in mysteries from an early date”) were cryptic (70). Chapter 11 of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, for instance, describes how induction into the rites of Isis requires manuscripts impenetrable to the postulant, who depended entirely on the priest for elucidation:
[The mystagogue] … produced from the secret recesses of the shrine certain books written in unknown characters. The meaning of these characters was concealed, at times by the concentrated expression of hieroglyphically painted animals, at times by wreathed and twisted letters with tails that twirled like wheels or spiraled together like vine–tendrils—so that it was altogether impossible for any peeping profane to comprehend. From these books the high priest interpreted to me the matters necessary for my mystic preparation (Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11, 22, trans. by Jack Lindsey, in Meyer 1987, 188.).

The subject matter typically consisted of what Mircea Eliade calls the “archetypal,” the “paradigms” believed by a culture to have been revealed in the beginning time (Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 197. A mystery consisted of a hierophany, an eruption of the transcendent into human order, such that, according to the ancient observer Dio of Prusa, “something is bound to happen in the soul” (Dio Chrysostom Or, 12.33, quoted in Burkert, 90). Unlike myth, where the comings and goings of gods are purely external events, the mysteries emphasized this internal response, an “experiencing” (pathein) and altered state of consciousness (diatethenai)—according to an account of them attributed to Aristotle by the ancient author Synesius (Synesius, Dio, 10, quoted in Burkert, 89)

What connection did early Christianity have with these cults? Walter Burkert notes, “…even orthodox Christianity adopted the mystery metaphor that had long been used in Platonic philosophy: to speak of the ‘mysteries’ of baptism and the Eucharist has remained common usage.” (3). Moreover, “[Christians] sometimes used the same word to designate their message” (Koester 1982, 201). In the second century, ties existed between church and temple."In the Egypt of the time of the emperor Hadrian [who ruled 117-38 C.E.] those who called themselves bishops of Christ are recorded to have devoted their souls to Serapis" (Witt 54).

Again in the Renaissance, Egyptian mythology played a part in Christian imagery. For instance, an e-mail from Clint Clark recently brought to my attention that the 16th-century Colonna Missal, Rylands Latin MS 32 - 37 ( originally from the Sciarra-Colonna Library in Rome), has St. John looking reverentially toward Serapis--a recondite allusion in that century.

In the second century, however, Christian-pagan connections occurred quite naturally. In the time of [its supervisor] Clement (from A.D. 190 onwards), [the Christian Catechetical] School was attended by Pagans as well as Christians…." (Scott 54).Voicing a modern Christian viewpoint, the Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge deplores that despite the preaching of St. Mark in Alexandria, the natives “seem never to have succeeded in divesting themselves of the superstitious and weird mythological conceptions which they inherited from their heathen ancestors.” (Budge 1967, xlviii).

Since Budge wrote that a letter by Clement of Alexandria has reached public attention. It portrays Mark not as an inveterate enemy of Alexandria’s syncretistic chaos, but as trying to make Christianity into something very like a mystery initiation. Allegedly, he revised his gospel, producing a secret version, kept hidden by local churches in the manner of cults with esoteric scriptures for the advanced. Technical terminology of such works permeates Clement’s letter, which depicts Mark as being like a “mystagogue,” leading the readers in initiations:
he … did not divulge the things not to be uttered, nor did he write down the hierophantic teachings of the Lord, but to the stories already written he added yet others and, moreover, brought in certain sayings of which he knew the interpretation would, as a mystagogue, lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of that truth hidden by seven veils (Meyer 233).

Richard Reitzenstein similarly describes Hermetic writings: “The author, who plays the role of the mystagogue and preserves the outward form of the mystery, can publish it in a book because the forms of the cult of the dead are well known anyway and because he hopes that, if God wills it and if the reader of the book has turned away from the world, his presentation will exert upon the reader the same effect as an actual mystery (Reitzenstein 51),

According to Clement, no less than three versions of Mark’s gospel circulated in Alexandria. The first is the one now found in the Bible. Next, the one hidden in Clement’s church has Jesus spend a night teaching “the mystery of the kingdom
[must–e rion t–e s bassileias]” to a young man described as “wearing a linen cloth over his naked body [peribebl–e menos sindona epi gumnou].” Clement terms it the “more spiritual gospel [pneumatik–o teron … angelion]. (Smith 1973, 448-52).” He recommends it only for advanced Christians. Discovery of the epistle has, of course, occasioned contention whether it contains new historical information about Mark and Jesus. That controversy has obscured what seems most certain about the letter: to Clement and his church, the authoritative version of Mark’s gospel was, like mystery texts, for the advanced alone. And, at least according to Clement, the text should function like an initiation ceremony. This clue has considerable import for reconstructing how Alexandrians may have used the Gospel According to Mark as a gateway into the “edge of chaos.”

Continue to Mark (1)

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