Note 428 — Chapter IX · POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: VALENTINUS

This may have been due either to their Egyptian extraction, or to the necessity of putting the matter in a way that would be intelligible to their Egyptian disciples. Cf. Naville, Old Egyptian Faith, 1909, where he says that the Egyptian way of expressing abstract ideas is by metaphors. Their ancestors, the Egyptians of the early Dynasties, when they wanted to describe how gods of both sexes came forth from one single male deity, did so by means of a very coarse image. See Budge, Papyrus of Nesi-Amsu, Archaeologia, vol. LII. (1890), pp. 440, 441. Cf. same author, Hieratic Papyri in B.M.