J A N ASSMAN N
The Mosaic Distinction:
Israel, Egypt, and the
Invention of Paganism
Draw a distinction. . . .
Call it the first distinction.
Call the space in which it is drawn the space severed or cloven by the distinction.’
IT SEEMS AS IF GEORGE Spencer Brown’s “first Law of Construction”
does not apply solely to the logical and mathematical construction for which it is
meant. It also applies strangely well to the space of cultural constructions and
distinctions and to the spaces that are severed or cloven by such distinctions.
The distinction with which this essay is concerned is the one between true and
false in religion: a distinction that underlies the more specific ones between Jews
and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Muslims and unbelievers. Once this distinction is drawn, there is no end of reentries or subdistinctions. We start with Christians and pagans and end up with Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans, Socinians and Latitudinarians, and a thousand similar denominations
and subdenominations. These cultural or intellectual distinctions construct a universe that is full not only of meaning, identity, and orientation but also of conflict,
intolerance, and violence. Therefore, there have always been attempts to overcome the conflict by reexamining the true-false distinction, albeit at the risk of
losing cultural meaning.
Let us call the distinction between true and false in religion the “Mosaic distinction” because tradition ascribes it to Moses. While we cannot be sure that Moses
ever lived, since there are no other traces of his earthly existence outside the
legendary tradition, we can be sure, on the other hand, that he was not the first
to draw the distinction. There was a precursor in the person of the Egyptian king
Amenophis IV, who called himself Akhenaten and instituted a monotheistic religion in the fourteenth century B.C.-‘ His religion, however, created no lasting
tradition and was forgotten immediately after his death. Moses is a figure of memory, but not of history, whereas Akhenaten is a figure of history, but not of memory. Since memory is all that counts in the sphere of cultural distinctions and
constructions, we are justified in speaking not of “Akhenaten’s distinction” but of
the Mosaic distinction. The space severed or cloven by this distinction is the space
of Western monotheism. It is the mental and cultural space constructed by this
distinction that Europeans have inhabited for nearly two millennia.
REPRESENTATION S 56 • Fall 1990 © i nt. KKGENT S O F T H E UNIVERSIT Y O F CALIFORNI A
Originalveröffentlichung in: Representations 56, 1996, S. 48-67
This distinction is not as old as religion itself, thoug h at first sight it might
seem plausible to say that every religion produce s “pagans ” just as every civilization generate s “barbarians.” But cultures and their constructions of identity not
only generat e otherness but also develop techniques of translation. 3 Of course,
the “real other ” is always ther e beyond myself and my constructions of selfhood
a n d otherness. It is the “constructed other ” that is, to a certain degree , compen –
sated by techniques of translation. Translation in this sense is not to be confuse d
with the colonializing appropriation of the “real” other. Rather, it is an attemp t to
make mor e transparent the borders erected by cultural distinctions.
Ancient polytheisms functioned as such a technique of translation within the
“ancient world” as an ecumen e of interconnected nations.^ T h e polytheistic religions overcame the ethnocentrism of tribal religions by distinguishing several
deities by name , shape, and function. T h e names, the shapes of the gods, a n d the
forms of worship differed. But the functions were strikingly similar, especially in
the case of cosmic deities: the sun god of one religion was easily equated to the
sun god of anothe r religion, and so forth. In Mesopotamia, the practice of translating divine name s goes back to the third millennium. In the second millennium
it was extende d to many different languages and civilizations of the Nea r East.
Plutarch generalizes, in his treatise on Isis and Osiris, that ther e ar e always comm o n cosmic phenomen a behind the differing divine names: the sun, the moon ,
the heaven, the earth, the sea, and so on. Because all peopl e live in the same world,
they ador e the same gods, the lords of this world:
N o r d o w e regar d t h e god s as differen t amon g differen t people s n o r as barbarian a n d
Gree k a n d as souther n a n d northern . B u t just as t h e sun , moon , heaven , eart h a n d sea a r e
commo n to all, thoug h the y a r e give n variou s name s by t h e varyin g peoples, s o it is with
t h e o n e reaso n (logos) whic h order s thes e thing s a n d t h e o n e providenc e whic h h a s charg e
o f them , a n d t h e assistant power s whic h ai e assigne d to everything : the y a r e give n differen t
honour s a n d mode s o f address amon g differen t people s accordin g t o custom , a n d the y u s e
hallowe d symbols. . . .
5
T h e divine name s are translatable because they ar e conventional and because
ther e is always a referen t serving as a tertium comparationis. T h e cultures, languages, customs may be different: religions always have a commo n ground . T h e
gods were international because they were cosmic, and while different peoples
worshiped different gods, nobody contested the reality of foreign gods a n d the
legitimacy of foreign forms of worship. T h e distinction in question did not exist
in the world of polytheistic and tribal religions.
T h e space “severed or cloven” by the Mosaic distinction was not simply the
space of religion in general, then, but that of a very specific kind of religion. We
may call this a “counterreligion” because it not only constructed but rejected a n d
repudiated everything that went befor e and everything outside itself as “paganism.” It no longer functioned as a means of intercultural translation; on the conT h e Mosai c Distinctio n 4 9
trary, it functioned as a means of intercultural estrangement. Wherea s polytheism
or rather, “cosmotheism,” rendere d different cultures mutually transparen t a n d
compatible, the new counterreligion blocked intercultural translatability. False
gods cannot be translated.
Usually the fundamenta l distinction between truth a n d falsity assumes the
form of a “gran d narrative” underlying and informin g innumerabl e concret e
tellings a n d retellings of the past. Books 2 throug h 5 of the Pentateuch unfol d
the Mosaic distinction in both a narrative and a normative form. Narratively, the
distinction is presented in the story of Israel’s exodus, whereby Egypt came to
represent the rejected, the religiously false, the “pagan. ” Egypt’s most conspicuous
property, the worship of images, thus became its greatest sin. Normatively, the
distinction is expressed in a code of Law that confirms the narrative by giving the
prohibition of “idolatry” first priority. T h e worship of images comes to be regarde d as the absolute horror, falsehood, and apostasy. Polytheism a n d idolatry,
in turn, ar e seen as o n e and the same form of religious error: images a r e “othe r
gods” because the tru e god is invisible and cannot be iconically represented . T h e
second commandmen t is hence a commentary on the first:
1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.
T h e Exodus story, however, is mor e than simply an account of historical
events, and the Law is mor e than merely a basis for social orde r a n d religious
purity. In addition to what they overtly tell and establish, they symbolize the Mosaic distinction. Exodus, the Law, Moses, the whole constellation of Israel a n d
Egypt ar e symbolic figures for all kinds of oppositions.1
‘ T h e leading one , however,
is the distinction between true religion and idolatry; in the course of Jewish history
both the concept of idolatry and the repudiation of it grew stronger. T h e later
the texts, the mor e elaborate the scorn and abomination they pou r over the idolaters. Some poignant verses in Deutero-Isaiah and Ps. 115 develop into whole
chapters in the apocrypha l Sapientia SalomonLs, long sections in Philo’s De decalogo
a n d De legibus specialibus, the Mishnaic tractate Avodah zarah, and Tertullian’s book
De idololatria.1
But the hatred was mutua l and the “idolaters” did not fail to strike back.
Remarkably enough , most of them were Egyptians. 8 T h e priest Manetho, f o r
example , who unde r Ptolemy II wrote a history of Egypt, represente d Moses as
a rebellious Egyptian priest who mad e himself the leader of a colony of lepers. 9
Wherea s the Jews depicted idolatry as a kind of mental aberration or madness,
the Egyptians associated iconoclasm with a very contagious and disfiguring epidemic. T h e language of illness has been typical of the debat e on the Mosaic distinction, from its beginning u p to the days of Sigmund Freud. Maneth o writes
that Moses and his lepers forme d an alliance with the Hyksos, the enemie s of
REPRESENTATIONS
Egypt, and tyrannized Egypt f or thirteen years. All of the images of the gods were
destroyed and the sanctuaries were turned into kitchens where the sacred animals
were grilled. We are dealing with a story of mutual abomination: the activities of
the iconoclasts are rendered with the same horror as those of the idolaters by the
other side. Moses’ laws are thus reduced to two:
1. Thou shalt not worship any gods nor refrain from eating their
sacred animals.
2. Thou shalt not mingle with people outside thine own group.
In Tacitus, the characterization of Jewish monotheism as a counterreligion is
already complete. Moses founded a religion opposed to the rites of other people:
the Jews “consider everything that we keep sacred as profane and permit everything that for us is taboo” [profana illic omnia quae apud nos sacra, rursum concessa apud illos quae nobis incesta]. In their temples they consecrate a statue of a
donkey and sacrifice a ram in contumeliam Ammonis, “in order to ridicule the god
Amun.” For the same reason, they sacrifice a bull because the Egyptians worship
Apis. As the inversion of Egyptian tradition, Jewish religion is totally derivative
of and dependent on Egypt.”‘
It is important to realize that we are dealing here with a mutual loathing
rooted not in some idiosyncratic aversions between Jews and Egyptians but in the
Mosaic distinction that, in its first occurrence, was Akhenaten’s distinction. It is
true that many arguments of the “idolaters” have lived on in the discourse of antiSemitism.” In this sense, the struggle against the Mosaic distinction had antiSemitic implications. However, it is also true that many of those (such as John
Toland or Gotthold Ephraim Lessing) who in the eighteenth century attacked the
distinction f ought for tolerance and equality for the Jews; in this sense, the struggle against the Mosaic distinction assumes the character of a struggle against antiSemitism. T he most outspoken destroyer of the Mosaic distinction was, after all,
a Jew, Sigmund Freud. Moreover, in the debate between iconoclasts and idolaters,
the Christian church sided with the Jews and inherited the repudiation of idolatry
by continuing to denigrate pagan religion. Attacks, therefore, against the Mosaic
distinction concerned the Christian church as well as Judaism and Islam.’2
Thes e attacks took the form of a redefinition that attempted to relativize or
minimize the distinction. “Normative inversion,” which explains one field as just
the inverted reflection of its opposing field, is the earliest of these redefinitions.
Strangely enough, however, the principle of normative inversion is not only
evoked by “pagan” writers who had their reasons to destroy the distinction. It also
recurs about a millennium later in the exact center of the Jewish tradition, as an
element of Jewish self-definition and self-interpretation. Starting from this surprising reemergence of the principle of normative inversion, the f ollowing paragraphs outline some of the more important redefinitions to which the Mosaic
The Mosaic Distinction
distinction was exposed in the history of Enlightenment from Moses Maimonide s
to Freud.
Normative Inversion
T h e principle of normative inversion provides the main metho d of
legal interpretation for Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed.13 Maimonide s did
not speak of Egypt. Instead, he invented a community called the Sabians. It is
mentioned twice or thre e times in the Koran, but nobody knows exactly to which
grou p this text refers. ” Maimonides’ Sabians ar e an imagined communit y that he
created by applying Manetho’s principle of normative inversion in the opposite
direction. If the Law prohibits an activity x, this is because the Sabians practiced
x; a n d vice versa, if the Law prescribes an activity y, this is because y was a taboo
amon g the Sabians.
Maimonides—who lived in Egypt and wrote his book in Arabic—had excellent reasons for choosing the Sabians instead of the historically mor e appropriat e
ancient Egyptians in his reconstruction of a historical context for Mosaic Law. It
is precisely the complet e insignificance of the Sabians that serves his purpose . He
figures them as a once powerful community that had since fallen into almost
complet e oblivion. H e explains the function of normative inversion as a kind of
“ars oblivionalis”‘,13 a withdrawal therapy for Sabian idolatry, which he understand s
as a kind of collective or epidemic addiction. T h e most efficient way to erase a
memor y is to superimpos e a countermemory ; hence, the best way to mak e peopl e
forge t an idolatrous rite is to replace it with anothe r rite. T h e Christians followed
the same principle when they built their churche s on the ruins of pagan temples
and observed their feasts on the dates of pagan festivals. For the same reason,
Moses (or divine “cunning and wisdom,” manifesting itself throug h his agency) 1 6
had to install all kinds of dietary and sacrificial prescriptions in orde r to occupy
the terrain held by the Sabians and their idolatrous ways, “so that all these rites
a n d cults that they practiced for the sake of the idols, they now came to practice
in the hono r of god.”17 T h e divine strategy was so successful that the Sabians and
their onc e mighty community fell into complete oblivion.
Maimonide s was n o historian. He was interested in the historical circumstances of the Law only insofar as they elucidated its meaning, that is, the intention
of the legislator.18 He contends that the original intention of the Law was to destroy idolatry and demonstrate s this by reconstructing the historical circumstantiae
of the Sabians. The n he generalizes the crime of idolatry to fit metahistorical
problems and arrives at his well-known, purely philosophical, a n d ahistorical concept of idolatry. For Maimonides, the Law remains enforced, despite its historical
circumstances, because of the timeless dange r of idolatry.
REPRESENTATION S
Translation: Hieroglyphs into Laws
Five hundre d years afte r Maimonides, his project of a historical explanation of the Law was explicitly taken u p by the Christian scholar who open s the
second section of o u r story. Joh n Spence r (1630-93) was a scholar of Hebrew
and, afte r 1667, master of Corpu s Christi College at Cambridge . In his book on
the Ritual Law, Spence r mentions Maimonides always with the greatest admira –
tion. 1 9 He fully agrees with Maimonides in seeing the principle a n d overall purpose of the Law as the destruction of idolatry, which he also views as an addiction
to be cured by a withdrawal program. He even applies Maimonides’ principle of
normative inversion in a considerable numbe r of cases. But he deviates from
Maimonide s in two respects. First, he draws altogether different conclusions from
this kind of historical explanation, since he makes his metho d that of historical,
not legal, reasoning. For him, not only the circumstances, but also the intentions
o r reasons of the Law are historical and belong to the past. Maimonide s took the
Law’s destruction of idolatry to be a timeless (or metahistorical) task; only the
circumstances of its first formulation and application were historical. For Spencer,
the reason for the Law is historical as well.20 With the cessation of idolatry, the
Law lost its validity and the Mosaic distinction changed its character. This is, of
course, the Christian idea of progress.
T h e second divergence from Maimonides is muc h mor e revolutionary a n d
depend s on the principle of translation. 2 1 This paradigm shift shattered the foun –
dation of the Mosaic distinction between true and false in religion. Like Maimonides, Spence r held that God did not inscribe his Law on a tabula rasa but, rather,
that he carefully overwrote an existing inscription. Unlike Maimonides, however,
Spence r takes this original inscription to be Egyptian rathe r than Sabian: it is mor e
of an intended subtext, or even a kind of “golden ground, ” for the Law, than an
antitext to be wiped out or covered up. T h e idea is that God intentionally brough t
Israel into Egypt in orde r to give His peopl e an Egyptian foundation, a n d that
He chose Moses as His prophe t because he was brough t u p in all the wisdom of
the Egyptians. 2 2 Moses “translated” a good deal of Egyptian wisdom into his laws
and institutions, which can only be explained if reintegrated into their original
context. Translatio (“transfer,” “borrowing”) refers not to texts, but to rites a n d
customs that are received from Egypt in orde r to be preserved as containers of
original wisdom, rathe r than to be supplanted and eventually overcome. Spence r
subscribed to the conventional theory about hieroglyphic writing based on Horapollon’s two books on hieroglyphs, 2
‘ and especially on Athanasius Kircher’s “decipherments.” 2 4 According to this theory, hieroglyphs were iconic symbols that
referre d to concepts. The y were used exclusively for religious purposes, such as
transmitting the “mystic” ideas that were to be kept secret from the commo n
people. Similarly, for Spencer, a good many of the laws, rites, a n d institutions that
The Mosaic Distinction
God, by the mediation of Moses, gave to his people, show this hieroglyphic character. T h e Law appears her e as a “veil” (velum), a “cover” (involucrum), or a “shell”
(cortex) that transmits a truth by hiding it. In this same context, Spence r adduce s
o n e of those passages from Clement of Alexandria that become crucial to Karl
Leonhar d Reinhold’s and Friedrich Schiller’s view of Egypt:
In adyto veritatis repositum sermonem revera sacrum, Aegyptii quidem per ea, quae apud ipsos vocantur adyta, Hebraei autem per velum significarunt. Occultationem igitur, quod attinet, sunt Hebraicis similia Aegyptiorum aenigmata.
[Th e Egyptians indicated the really sacred logos, which they kept in the innermost sanctuary of Truth , by what they called Adyta, a n d the Hebrews by mean s of the curtain (in
the temple). Therefore , as fa r as concealment is concerned, the secrets (aenigmata) of the
Hebrews a n d those of the Egyptians ar e very similar to each other.] 8 5
Thes e sentences open the door to a totally different understandin g of the relationship between Egypt and Israel.
Mystery: Nature into Scripture
At the same time a n d even at the same place that Spence r did his research on Egyptian rites, Ralph Cudworth, Regius Professor of Hebrew, published his True Intellectual System of the Universe.2
* Ther e is every reason to suppos e
that Spence r a n d Cudwort h knew each othe r well, but their books ar e worlds
apart. Spence r worked on the Mosaic distinction as a historian. He wanted to show
how muc h is derived from Egypt and, in doing so, he reduce d revelation to translation a n d transcodihcation. Cudwort h was a Cambridg e Neoplatonist whose
thinking transcended the Mosaic distinction in its biblical expression. His god was
the god of the philosophers, and his enemy was not idolatry but atheism or
materialism.
Cudwort h wants to conf ute atheism by proving that the recognition of o n e
Supreme Being constitutes “the true intellectual system of the universe” because—as Lord Herbert of Cherbur y had already shown in 1624—the notion
“that ther e is a Supreme God” is the most commo n notion of all.27 Even atheism
conforms with this notion: the god whose existence it negates is precisely this o n e
Supreme God a n d not one or all of the gods of polytheism. This notion, commo n
to theists and atheists alike, can be defined as: “A Perfect Conscious Understanding
Being (or Mind) Existing of it self from Eternity, and the Cause of all other things.”28
Especially interesting for o u r concern is Cudworth’s claim that the idea of o n e
Supreme Being is also shared by polytheism. In this context, Egypt becomes important for the simple reason that it was by far the best known polytheistic religion
at the time. Even thoug h the hieroglyphs were not yet deciphered a n d the mon
uments not yet excavated and published, the body of Greek and Latin sources
REPRESENTATION S
(including the Corpus Hermeticum and the writings of” Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblithus, Proclus, and Horapollon, which were believed to be firsthand Egyptian
sources) easily outweighed the available information about other religions.
Cudworth distinguishes between self-existing gods and gods whose existence
is dependent on other gods. No polytheism, he concludes, ever believed in the
existence of several self-existent gods. There is always only one from whom all
the other gods derive. Every polytheism thus includes a monotheism. T he form
of inclusion is mystery or secrecy: polytheism is for the many, while monotheism
is for the few. This unequal distribution of knowledge does not follow from some
malicious strategy of the priests who wanted to keep their knowledge secret for
their agrandissement, but from the difficulty of monotheism and the natural differences in mental capabilities. Truth, by this reasoning, is a natural mystery that
can only be approached by the very few. Cudworth accordingly reconstructs what
he calls the “arcane theology” of ancient Egypt and shows that it is the theology
of the One and the All, hen kai pan. He takes his evidence from a number of
sources, but especially from the Corpus Hermeticum, which he holds to be a late
but authentic codification of ancient Egyptian wisdom and theology.
T he chapter of Hermes Trismegistus seemed closed once and for all in 1614,
when Isaac Casaubon exposed the Corpus Hermeticum as a late compilation and
a Christian forgery.-‘9
Since then, the Hermetic tradition survived only in occult
undercurrents such as Rosicrucianism, alchemy, theosophy, and so forth. This, at
least, is the picture Frances Yates has drawn of the Hermetic tradition.
50
Indeed,
Yates proclaimed the year 1614 “a watershed separating the Renaissance world
from the modern world” because Casaubon’s dating of the Hermetic texts “shattered the basis of all attempts to build a natural theology in Hermetic-ism.”‘1
It
was no easy task to vindicate the Corpus Hermeticum against so devastating a
verdict. Cudworth, however, did so with such brilliant success (although with not
altogether valid arguments), that natural theologies built on the Hermetic texts
continued to flourish. Hermes Trismegistus had, in fact, a triumphant comeback
in the eighteenth century due to Cudworth’s rehabilitation, which inaugurated a
new phase of the Hermetic tradition coinciding in Cermany with a wave of
Spinozism.
Cudworth showed that Casaubon made two mistakes. First, he was wrong in
treating the whole corpus as one coherent text. His criticism affected only three
of the seventeen independent treatises and his verdict of forgery applied at most
to these three, but not to the corpus as a whole. Second, he was wrong in equating
text and tradition. T he text is late, that much Cudworth is ready to admit. But
according to him, this must be taken as a terminus ad quern and not a quo; the text
shows only how long the tradition was alive, not how late it came into being. And
even the three “forgeries” must contain a kernel of truth; otherwise they would
not have been successful. In this way, Cudworth was able to represent the doctrine
T h e Mosaic Distinction
of All-Oneness or hen kai pan as the quintessence of Egyptian arcane theology.
Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and others initiated into the Egyptian mysteries
brough t this doctrine to Greece; Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophy transmitted it
to the Occident.
Sixty years later, William Warburton, a well-known Shakespear e scholar, an
Anglican bishop, a n d a friend of Alexande r Pope, combined the ideas of Spence r
and Cudwort h in his Divine legation of Moses, which appeare d in thre e volumes
between 1738 and 1741.32 Warburton integrated Cudworth’s ideas into his reformulation of the Mosaic distinction, which appears now as “mystery” versus “revelation.” T h e truth is present on both sides: quite a revolutionary admission f o r
a bishop. But the Egyptians and all the othe r religions deriving from Egypt wer e
able to recognize and to transmit this truth only in the form of mystery, that is, as
something reserved for the very few who were deeme d able to grasp it—not as a
permanen t possession but as a quality known throug h rites that wer e boun d to
calendaric observances. Moses, on the othe r hand , mad e the trut h the possession
of the whole peopl e a n d cast it in the form of a permanen t Scripture. 3 3
Warburton’s parallel to Giambattista Vico is striking. Vico, who, like Warburton, wanted to preserve the Mosaic distinction, interpreted it in the terms of sacred and profan e history. He asked how profan e society a n d history were possible,
a n d even worked well, when the various Gentile peoples were guided by reason
(or “natural law”) alone and were not granted the guidanc e of revelation. 3 4 Both
reason and revelation must therefor e contain the truth. Reason, however, was
insecure, always endangere d by error, and the result of a long a n d winding process of evolution, wherea s revelation was pristine, permanent, and secure. Beyond
preserving the Mosaic distinction, though, Vico and Warburton had still anothe r
trait in common : their interest was focused on the “pagan” side, profan e history
and mystery religion. T h e first step of secularization was not the abolition of the
distinction, but a shift of emphasis from the sacred to the profane .
Identity: Jehovah sive Isis
T h e step from mystery to identity might seem slight, because already
in the paradigm of mystery, the truth is recognized on both sides of the Mosaic
distinction. T h e new paradigm of identity does not claim that ther e is revelation
on both sides, but that ther e is secrecy on both sides. Secrecy persists; even Moses
did not reveal the full truth. Henc e Lessing’s idea of universal freemasonry : ther e
have always been a few initiates or illuminates who sought the truth, which could
be uncovered even afte r Moses’ revelation, but only throug h a secret quest. 3 5 T h e
truth is the same on both sides, but it is the possession of no one.
Karl Leonhar d Reinhold published his book on The Hebrew Mysteries, or the
REPRESENTATIONS
Oldest Freemasonry first in 1786 in two issues of the Journal fiir Freymaurer a n d then
as a monograp h in 1788 at Leipzig.’ 6 At the age of 25, h e entere d the famou s
Viennese lodge True Concord (1783). Still a Jesuit, he passed all thre e grade s but
fled in the same year from the Jesuit orde r to Leipzig, wher e he continued his
philosophical studies. He married a daughte r of Christoph Martin Wieland,
joine d him in editing the journa l Teutscher Merkur, became well known for his
Letters on Kant’s Philosophy, and was appointed professor of philosophy at Jen a in
1787. Ther e he befriende d Schiller, whom he induced to read Immanue l Kant. 3 7
In his book on the Hebrew mysteries, Reinhold identifies the God of the Bible
as Isis, the Egyptian Supreme Being, by comparin g God’s self-presentation in
Exodus 3.14 (“I am who I am”) a n d Isis’s self-presentation on the veiled image at
Sais: “Brethren! ” Reinhold exclaims, “Who amon g us does not know the ancient
Egyptian inscriptions: the one on the pyramid at Sais: ‘I am all that is, was, and
will be, a n d no mortal has ever lifted my veil,’ a n d that othe r on the statue of Isis:
‘I am all that is’? W h o amon g us does not understan d as well as the ancient Egyptian initiate himself did the meaning of these words a n d does not know that they
express the essential Being, the meanin g of the name Jehova?”: ,s While the saitic
inscription is reporte d by Plutarch and (in a slightly different, thus independent,
version) by Proclus, they speak only of one such inscription. T h e second o n e was
probably invented by Voltaire, whom Reinhold is closely paraphrasin g in this passage. 1 9
It serves Reinhold’s purpos e because it makes the equation mor e striking:
“I am all that is” a n d “I am who I am.”
T h e equation, however, does not seem so convincing to us. O n the contrary,
o n e proposition negates the other. Whe n Isis says “I am all that is,” she identifies
herself with the world and abolishes the distinction between God a n d world.
Whe n Yahveh says “I am who I am,” he explicitly draws the distinction between
himself and the world and forecloses every link of identification. But Reinhold
read the Bible in Greek. T h e Septuagint renders the divine name as “£go eimi ho
on” [I am the Being one], which Reinhold understand s (and which has always been
understood) as meanin g “I am essential Being.”40 Reinhold was, in fact, following
an antique tradition; in one of the so-called Sibyllinian Oracles, the biblical God,
with his self-presentation “I am who I am” [‘ahjeeh asher ‘cehjeeh], is interprete d in
the sense of the cosmic God of the Hermetists: “I am the being o n e (eimi d’egoge
ho on), recognize this in your spirit: I donne d heaven as my garment, I clothed
myself with the ocean, the earth is groun d for my feet, air covers me as my body
and the stars revolve aroun d me.”41
This is already Isis. But the point that Reinhold wants to mak e is that the tru e
God has n o names, neithe r “Jehovah” nor “Isis.” Both the saitic formul a a n d the
Hebrew formul a ar e to be understood not as the revelation of a name , but rathe r
as its witholding, or as the revelation of anonymity. God is all; every name falls short
because it distinguishes God from something that is not God. Being all, God canT h e Mosaic Distinction
not have a name . With this, we come back to Herme s Trismegistus. T h e pertinent
fragmen t is preserved in Lactantius. Nicholas of Cusa quotes this passage in De
docta ignorantia some decades befor e Marsilio Ficino’s edition of the Hermetica :
It is obvious tha t n o nam e can be appropriat e to t h e Greatest One , becaus e nothin g can be
distinguishe d fro m him. All name s a r e impose d by distinguishin g o n e fro m t h e other.
Wher e all is one , ther e canno t be a prope r name . Therefore , Herme s Trismegistu s is righ t
in saying: “becaus e G o d is t h e totality of things [universitas rerum], h e ha s n o prope r name ,
otherwis e h e shoul d be called by every nam e o r everythin g shoul d bea r his name . For h e
comprise s in his simplicity t h e totality of all things. Conformin g with his prope r name —
which f o r us is deeme d ineffabl e a n d which is the tetragrammato n . . . —his nam e shoul d
be interprete d as ‘on e a n d all’ o r ‘all in one,’ which is even bette r [‘unus et omnia sive ‘omnia
uniter,’ quod melius est].”42
In this text, written in the middle of the fifteenth century, we already find the
equation of the Hebrew tetragrammato n with Herme s Trismegistus’s anonymou s
god, who is unus et omnia, “On e and All,” o r hen kaipan, as this idea will be referre d
to by Cudwort h and Lessing.
Nil novi sub sole? It is tru e that we will find most of the leading ideas of the
eighteenth century concerning the Mosaic distinction, natur e a n d revelation,
trut h a n d religious tolerance, already present in the fifteenth a n d sixteenth centuries. But we a r e not asking for first occurrences. T h e point is tha t these ideas
did not disappea r in the seventeenth century, as is generally believed. Althoug h
the seventeenth century was an age of orthodoxy that destroyed the harmonisti c
and eclectic dreams of the Renaissance, and although most of this period’s religious and philosophical movements went occult o r disappeared unde r the persecution of orthodo x censorship, Spencer’s, Gerardu s Vossius’s (1577-1649), 4 3
Joh n Marsham’s (1602-85), 4 4
and Cudworth’s reinventions of Egypt led to a
strong a n d mostly unknown revival of Hermeticism, pantheism, a n d othe r forms
of Egyptophilia. Thes e rehabilitations of the Egyptian tradition, furthermore ,
had the immens e advantage of answering orthodo x and historical criticism.
T h e enlightened Egyptophilia of the eighteenth century reached its climax
aroun d 1780 whe n it merge d with the ideas of nature a n d the sublime. Durin g
these years Lamoignon des Malesherbes coined the term cosmotheism to describe
the Stoic worship of cosmos as a god. Cosmotheism mor e or less explicitly abolishes the distinction between God and world. Friedrich Jacobi applied it to Benedict Spinoza’s deussive natura and Lessing’s hen kaipan4
‘” a formul a that Cudwort h
(1678) had shown to be the quintessential expression of ancient Egyptian theology. T h e ancient Egyptians were thus cosmotheists just as the Stoics, the Neoplatonists, the Spinozists were. This idea, always present, returne d in the years between 1785 and 1790 with an overwhelming force.
In this new cosmotheistic movement, Isis was generally interpreted as “Nature.” Her e is how Ignaz von Born, the Gran d Master of True Concord a n d the
REPRESENTATIONS
mode l of Sarastro in Wolfgang Amadeu s Mozart’s Magic Flute, summarize d the
ultimate aim of the Egyptian mysteries and of freemasonry:
T h e knowledge of natur e is the ultimate purpos e of o u r application. We worship this
progenitor, nourisher, a n d preserve r of all creation in the image of Isis. Only h e w h o
knows the whole extent of he r powe r a n d forc e will be able to uncove r h e r veil without
punishment. 4 6
This passage combines Plutarch with Clement of Alexandria, who says: “Th e
doctrines delivered in the Greate r Mysteries concern the universe. Her e all instruction ends. Thing s ar e seen as they are; a n d Nature , a n d the workings of
Nature , ar e to be seen and comprehended.” 4 7 O n the last step of initiation, the
adep t is speechless in the face of nature . This idea inspired Schiller’s ballad “Th e
Veiled Imag e at Sais” and his essay “Th e Legation of Moses.”48 Like Warburto n
a n d Reinhold, Schiller constructed the Mosaic distinction as the antagonistic relationship between official religion and mystery cult. In his opinion, secrecy was
necessary to protect both the political orde r from a possibly dangerou s trut h a n d
the trut h from vulgar abuse and misunderstanding. For this reason, hieroglyphic
writing a n d a complex ritual of cultic ceremonie s and prescriptions were invented
to shield the mysteries. The y were devised to create a “sensual solemnity” (sinnliche
Feierlichkeit) and to prepare , by emotional arousal, the soul of the initiate to receive
the truth.
At this point Schiller introduced the notion of the “sublime,” associating it
with the Hermeti c idea of God’s namelessness: “Nothing is mor e sublime than the
simple greatness with which the sages speak of the creator. In orde r to distinguish
him in a truly defining form, they refraine d from giving him a name at all.”49
Appearin g in the same year (1790), Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft associates the
idea of the sublime with the second commandment , that is, with the idea of God’s
imagelessness: “Ther e is perhaps no mor e sublime passage in the law-code of the
Jews than the commandmen t ‘thou shalt not make unt o the e any graven image. . . .'”s
” But in a footnot e Kant mentions the veiled image at Sais a n d its inscription as the highest expression of the sublime:
Perhaps nothin g mor e sublime was ever said or no sublimer though t ever expressed than
the famou s inscription on the templ e of Isis (mothe r nature): “I am all that is a n d that shall
be, a n d n o mortal has lifted my veil.” Segne r availed himself of this idea in a suggestive
vignette prefixed to his Natural Philosophy, in orde r to inspire beforehan d the apprentic e
whom h e was about to lead into the templ e with a holy awe, which should dispose his min d
to solemn attention.” 1
Kant uses Schiller’s language of initiation in describing Segner’s vignette:
“holy awe” (heiliger Schauer), “solemn attention” (j’eierliche Aufmerksamkeit). T h e
main point of Kant’s observation is to emphasize the initiatory function of the
sublime. T h e sublime inspires in human s a holy awe and terro r that only the
T h e Mosaic Distinction 5 9
strongest are able to withstand, so as to prepar e soul and min d for the apprehen –
sion of a trut h that can be grasped only in a state of exceptional fea r a n d attention.
Sublime secrets requir e a sublime environment. T h e connection of the sublime
with wisdom, mystery, and initiation occurs again a n d again in the literature on
the Egyptian mysteries. 5 2 But I would like to quot e a text to which Carlo Ginzbur g
drew my attention: the Athenian Letters, anonymously published in Londo n (1741 –
43). T h e following is a description of the “Hermeti c cave” at Thebes, wher e the
Egyptian initiates were supposed to be taught the doctrines of Herme s Trismegistus as inscribed on the pillars of wisdom:
The strange solemnity of the place must strike everyone, that enters it, with a religious
horror; and is the most proper to work you up into that frame of mind, in which you will
receive, with the most awful reverence and assent, whatever the priest, who attends you,
is pleased to reveal. . . .
Towards the f arther end of the cave, or within the innermost recess of some prodigious
caverns, that run beyond it, you hear, as it were a great way off, a noise resembling the
distant roarings of the sea, and sometimes like the fall of” waters, dashing against rocks with
great impetuosity. The noise is supposed to be so stunning and frightful, if you approach
it, that few, they say, are inquisitive enough, into those mysterious sportings of nature. . . .
Surrounded with these pillars of lamps are each of those venerable columns, which I
am now to speak of, inscribed with the hieroglyphical letters with the primeval mysteries
of the Egyptian learning. . . . From these pillars, and the sacred books, they maintain, that
all the philosophy and learning of the world has been derived.53
This is the prope r setting for the storage and transmission of secret wisdom.
T h e mor e well-to-do amon g the Freemasons of the time even tried to construct
such an ambianc e in their parks and gardens. T h e scenography for the trial by
h r e a n d water in the hnal e from the second act of Mozart’s Magic Flute envisages
such a cave, wher e water gushes out with a deafenin g roa r and fire spurts forth
with devouring tongues. It is modeled not only upo n Abbe Terrasson’s description
of Sethos’s subterranea n trials and initiation but also upo n masonic garde n architecture, such as the grotto in the park at Aigen, nea r Salzburg, owned by Mozart’s friend and fellow mason, Basil von Amann. 5
‘ T h e idea of the sublime—so
importan t for the aesthetics of the time—and the interpretation of ancient Egyptian art and architectur e were practically inseparable from notions of mystery a n d
initiation.
According to Reinhold and Schiller, natur e was the god in whose mysteries
Moses was initiated durin g the course of his Egyptian education. But this was not
the God Moses revealed to his people. In the school of the Egyptian mysteries,
Moses not only learned to contemplat e the truth but also “collected a treasur e of
hieroglyphs, mystical symbols and ceremonies ” with which to build u p a religion
and to cover the trut h unde r the protective shell of cultic institutions a n d pre –
scriptions—sub cortice legis, as Spencer had already formulated it. Schiller replaced
Maimonides’ a n d Spencer’s idea of God’s accommodation of the Law with the idea
REPRESENTATION S
of Moses’ accommodation of God. Religion and revelation, in this scheme, a r e
only forms of accommodation.
Amon g the readers of Schiller’s essay was Ludvvig van Beethoven, who wrote
out the two “saitic inscriptions” a n d a quotation from the Orphi c hymn on a leaf
of pape r and had this p ut unde r glass and in a frame . It stood on his writing table
durin g the last years of his life:
I am all that is.
I am all that was, is, and will be; and no mortal has ever lifted my veil.
He is the One who exists by himself, and to this single O ne all things
owe their existence.”
Thes e sentences were held to be quintessential expressions of enlightened religion and, at the same time, of ancient Egyptian wisdom and theology. Equally
emblematic of Egyptian theology was the Greek formul a hen kai pan that Lessing
wrote as his personal religious manifesto in the guest-book of a friend on 15
August 1780.™ Whe n Jacobi published his conversations with Lessing in 1785, h e
launched the “pantheism debate ” that held sway in German y for almost fifty
years. ” Cudwort h could have launched the same debat e a hundre d years earlier.
But it was only on the eve of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt tha t the retur n
of Egyptian cosmotheism and the abolition of the Mosaic distinction assumed
the dimensions of a sweeping revolution. O n e might call it the “retur n of the
repressed. ”
Latency, or the Return of the
Repressed
Sigmund Freud was anothe r reade r of Schiller’s essay. Its impact on his
Moses and Monotheism is evident.”” But for all the still-growing literature on this
book, nobody seems to notice that Freud’s work on the Mosaic distinction continues the discourse of the eighteenth century.551
It is, of course, importan t to read
Freud’s book in the context of his othe r scientific writings. Nevertheless, the full
import of the book only becomes clear when seen in the context of the Enlightenmen t tradition.’10 When, unde r the pressur e of Germa n anti-Semitism, Freud
started to write his book, remarkably enough , he did not ask “how the German s
came to murde r the Jews,” but “how the Jews came to attract this undyin g hatred. ”
He sought the answer in the Mosaic distinction a n d in Moses himself, who, by
drawing this distinction, Freud believed had created the Jews. Freud’s project was
thus to dissolve or “deconstruct ” the Mosaic distinction by historical analysis: pre –
cisely the project of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Freud’s Moses was
an Egyptian who brough t to the Jews an Egyptian religion. Every attempt, howT h e Mosaic Distinction
ever, to abolish the Mosaic distinction had similarly focused on the Egyptian backgroun d of Moses. Already in 1709, Joh n Toland, basing himself on Strabo, even
went so fa r as to make Moses an Egyptian and the prince of the province of
Goshen, who founde d a new religion in the spirit of Spinoza, a n d left Egypt togethe r with the Hebrews in orde r to realize it.61
Whe n Freud resumed , in the 1930s, the discourse on Moses a n d Egypt, he
was able to avail himself of an archaeological discovery that was inaccessible to all
previous authors from Maneth o to Schiller: that is, the discovery of Akhenate n
a n d his monotheistic revolution. He was spared the trouble of inventing Egyptian
mysteries in orde r to project Hermeti c or Spinozistic theology back into Moses’
times, a n d instead could point to an Egyptian monotheistic counterreligion as a
historical fact. But even in his reconstruction secrecy returns, namely, in the form
of latency. Freud’s Moses did not translate or accommodat e his trut h to the capacities of the peopl e but imposed it without compromise . Therefor e he was murdered . Yet it was precisely by being murdere d and by becoming a traumati c a n d
encrypted memor y that he was able to create the Jewish people. This creation was
a slow process, taking centuries and even millennia. His trut h worked from within
and manifested itself as a retur n of the repressed. In Freud’s words, it “must first
have undergon e the fate ol being repressed, the condition of lingering in the
unconscious, befor e it is able to display such powerful effects on its retur n a n d
force the masses unde r its spell.””’2
In this way, Moses the Egyptian a n d his mono –
theism “returne d to the memor y of his people.” This repression is how Freu d
explains the coercive powe r that religion has over the masses. For Freud, religion
is a compulsory neurosis that can only be treated by “remembering , repeating,
working through ” Freud’s version of Baal Shem Tov’s famou s sentence: the secret
of redemptio n is remembering . In the case of the Mosaic distinction, this remembering has always turne d toward Egypt.
In this situation, it may be important to rediscover the Egypt of the eighteenth
century repressed by nineteenth-century positivism a n d historicism—just as the
Egypt of the Renaissance had been rediscovered by the eighteenth century afte r
a period of suppression, and as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rediscovered
prisca theologia in the Egypt (and its syncretistic cosmotheism) of late antiquity.
T h e eighteenth century reopene d a dialogue with an ancient Egyptian (or generally “pagan”) cosmotheism that had been suppressed by orthodo x a n d rationalistic fundamentalism. In the nineteenth century, this dialogue was again, a n d
apparently forever, brough t to an end by the deciphermen t of hieroglyphic writing a n d the rise of moder n Egyptology, which relegated all Egyptophilic ideas to
the museum of inventions and misunderstandings. Only recently has it become
clear that ther e is a genuine Egyptian cosmotheistic tradition that has been opposed by the Mosaic distinction but has persisted as a countercurren t throug h all
the different stages of Western monotheism until the eighteenth century and beREPRESENTATIONS
yond. Those who referred to ancient Egypt in combating orthodox and f undamentalist distinctions were not completely mistaken. And many of those who engaged in the project of a scientific discovery of ancient Egypt and who opposed
Egyptophilic traditions were ultimately, and more or less unwittingly, following
the same agenda of natural religion and reason. It is always good to remember.
Perhaps, however, this remembrance is not, after all, “the secret of redemption,” but rather a technique of translation. I think that our aim cannot be to
abolish distinctions and to deconstruct the spaces that were severed or cloven by
them. What we need instead is the development of new techniques of intercultural
translation, not in order to appropriate “the other,” but to overcome the stereotypes of otherness that we have projected onto the other by drawing distinctions.
We are no longer dreaming of returning to Egypt or to the eighteenth century,
with its ideas of tolerance. While this concept of tolerance was based on integration
or generalization, what we need is a tolerance of recognition, which depends upon
what is still beyond our reach: a real understanding of those religions that were
rejected as “idolatry” by the Mosaic distinction.
Note s
T h e following essay is based on research completed during my stay at the J. Paul Getty
Center for the History of Art and the Humanities at Santa Monica in 1994-95 . T h e
results of this research will be published in a book titled Moses the Egyptian: An Essay in
Mnemohistory, forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
1. George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form (New York, 1972), 3.
2. See, e.g., Erik Hornung, Echnaton: Die Religion des Lichtes (Zurich, 1995); Jan Assmann,
“Akhanyati’s Theology of Time and Light,” Israel Academy of Sciences and the Humanities,
Proceedings 7 (1992): 143-76.
3. See, e.g., Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds., The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (Stanford, 1996).
4. Peter Artzi, “The Birth of the Middle East,” Proceedings of the 5th World Congress of Jewish
Studies ( Jerusalem, 1972), 120-24. For polytheism, see my contribution, “Translating
Gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un)translatability,” in Budick and Iser, Translatability, 25-36 .
5. Plutarch, De hide and Osiride, trans. J. G. Griffiths (Cardiff, 1970), 223 f.
6. See Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York, 1985).
7. See Moshe Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea (New York, 1992); Moshe
Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
8. T h e sources have been collected by Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews
and Judaism, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1974-1984).
9. W. G. Waddell, ed. and trans., Manetho (Cambridge, Mass., 1940).
10. Stern, Jews and Judaism, 2:17—63. A. M. A. Hospers-Jansen, Tacitus over de Joden (Groningen, 1949); Heinz Heinen, “Agyptische Grundlagen des antiken Antijudaismus:
T h e Mosaic Distinction
Z um Judenexkurs des Tacitus, Historien V. 2—13,” Trierer Theologische Zeitschrift 101,
no. 2 (1992): 124-49 .
11. See, e.g., Joh n G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1983); Pier Cesar e
Bori, “Immagin i e stereotipi del popolo ebraico nel inond o antico: asino d’oro, vitello
d’oro, ” in L’estasi del prof eta (Bologna, 1989), 131-50 (with rich bibliography). For the
polemical impact of this tradition, see especially Peter Schafer, Judaeophobia: The Attitude Towards the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge , Mass., 1997).
12. See Silvia Berti, // trattato dei Ire impostori: La vita e lospirito delsignor Benedetto de Spinoza
(Turin, 1994).
13. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago, 1963).
Spence r quote s Maimonide s in Hebrew a n d only occasionally in the original Arabic.
14. Koran 2.59, see also 5.73 a n d 22.17. Some though t of the Mandaean s o r a similar
movement; Amo s Funkenstein sees in them the “small remnants of a gnostic sect of
the second or third century A.D.; see his Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, 1993),
144. From A.D. 830 on, the term refers to the peopl e at Harra n w h o h a d manage d to
remai n pagans a n d who still adhere d to the cult of Sin, the Mesopotamian moo n god.
Threatene d by persecution, they claimed to be Sabians, a n d referre d to the Hermeti c
writings as their sacred book; see Walter Scott, ed. a n d trans., Hermetica: The Ancient
Greek and Latin Writings Which Contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes
Trismegistus (1929; reprint, Boston, 1993), 97-108 . In the seventeenth century, the
Sabians wer e generally identified with the Zoroastrians; see, e.g., Edwar d Stillingfleet,
Origines sacrae, or a rational account oj the grounds of Christian faith, as to the truth and divine
authority of the scriptures, and the matters therein contained (1662; reprint, Oxford , 1797),
1:49-51. Theophil e Gale held that “the Rites of the Zabii ar e the same with thos e of
the Chaldaeans a n d Persians, who all agreed in this worship of the Sun, a n d of Fire,
&C.”; see The Court of the Gentiles, 2 vols. (Oxford , 1669-71), 2:73.
15. Umbert o Eco, “An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!” PMLA 103 (1988): 254-61 . Umbert o
Eco might be right in postulating that ther e is n o possible art of oblivion o n the level
of individual memory. But Eco’s arguments d o not apply on the level of collective
memory.
16. Talattuf alallah wahakhmatah, “the cunnin g (or ‘practical reason’) of G od a n d his wisdom, ” an expression that Funkenstein very interestingly links with Hegel’s concept of
“the cunnin g of reason” ; see Funkenstein, Perceptions, 141-44, esp. 143 n. 38, referrin g
to Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed; a n d G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophic der Geschichle
(Stuttgart, 1961), 78 ff. Joh n Spence r speaks of God’s using “honest fallacies a n d tortuou s steps,” methodis honeste fallacibus et sinuosis gradibus, quote d afte r Gotthar d Victor
Lechler, Geschichle des englischen Deismus (1841; reprint, Hildesheim, 1965), 138.
17. Ut omnes isti cultus aut ritus, qui fiebant in gratiam imaginumjierent in honorem Dei: Spencer’s
translation of Rabbi Shem Tov ben Josep h ibn Shem Tov’s commentar y on Maimon –
ides’ Guide of the Perplexed.
18. H e was following a principle of Roma n legal exegesis. T h e Roman s studied the historical circumstantiae of a law with the same purpos e of finding out about its original
intention. T h e second step then was to generalize the intention in such a way that it
could be applied to the case in point. History was studied in orde r to save the law, not
to abolish it. A law was saved by generalizing the original intention, or the set of facts
to which it was originally applied, a n d by finding out their timeless relevance. This is
also the metho d of Maimonides.
19. Joh n Spencer, De legibus hebraeorum ritualibus el earum rationibus, libri tres (Th e Hague ,
1686).
REPRESENTATION S
20. Spence r speaks of the cessation of the reason of the Law, De legibus, 3:12: “(Christus)
Mosis Leges, earum ratione iam cessante, penitus abrogaverit [{Christ} abolished the Law of
Moses, because its reason had become inexistent].
21. Translatio in Latin mean s “transfer, ” not “interpretation. ” Spence r conceives of a “translatio Legis” on the mode l of “translatio imperii ” a n d “translatio studii.” Yet “transfer ”
implies, of course, interpretation. Besides translatio, Spence r uses mutatio, “borrowing, ”
a n d derivatio, “derivation.”
22. Acts 7.22. Not e that this information about Moses is given only in the New Testament.
It neve r occurs in the Hebrew Bible.
23. Georg e Boas, The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo (New York, 1950); Erik Iversen, The Myth
of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs (Copenhagen , 1961), 47-49 .
24. O n Athanasius Kircher, see Liselotte Dieckmann, Hieroglyphics: The History of a Literary
Symbol (St. Louis, 1970); Iversen, Myth of Egypt, 92-100 .
25. Spence r combines two distant passages from Clement’s Stromata (5.3.19.3 a n d 5.4.41.2);
see Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata Buch 1-6, ed. Ott o Stahlin (Berlin, 1985), 338,
354.
26. Ralph Cudworth , The true Intellectual System of the Universe: the first part, wherein All the
Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is confuted and its Impossibility demonstrated (1678; reprint,
London , 1743).
27. Edward , Lor d Herbert of Cherbury, De veritate (Paris, 1624).
28. Cudworth , Intellectual System, 195.
29. Isaac Casaubon, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI. Ad Cardinalis Baronii
prolegomena in annates (London, 1614).
30. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, 1964).
31. Ibid., 398.
32. William Warburton , The divine legation of Moses demonstrated on the principles of a religious
deist, from the omission of the doctrine of a future state of reward and punishment in the Jewish
dispensation, 2 vols. (1738-41 ; reprint, London , 1778).
33. For this interesting theory of writing, Warburto n refers to Elavius Josephu s as his
source: “[Josephus] tells Appio n (sic) that that high a n d sublime knowledge , which the
Gentiles with difficulty attained unto, in the rar e a n d temporar y celebration of their
Mysteries, was habitually taught to the Jews, at all times.” See Warburton , Divine legation,
1:192-93.
34. See also Joh n Selden’s distinction between “ius naturale” (the Noahidi c laws) a n d “disciplina Hebraeorum”; Joh n Selden, De iure naturali et gentium iuxta disciplinam hebraeorum
libriseptem (London , 1640); Friedrich Niewohner, Veritas sive Varietas: Lessings Toleranzparabel und das Buch von den drei Betriigern (Heidelberg, 1988), 333-36 . T h e discovery
of the “natura l law” of nations is the object of Giambattista Vico’s “new science.” Vico
mentions Hug o Grotius, Joh n Selden, a n d Samuel Pufendorf as the leading theorists
of natura l law. See Leon Pompa , ed. a n d trans., Vico: Selected Writings (Cambridge ,
1982), 81-89 .
35. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Ernst u n d Ealk: Freimaurergesprache ” [1778], in Gesammelte Werke (Leipzig, 1841), 9:345-91 .
36. Karl Leonhar d Reinhold [Br(uder) Decius, pseud.], Die Hebraischen Mysterien, oder die
dlteste religiose Freymaurerey (Leipzig, 1788).
37. O n Reinhold, see Gerhar d W. Fuchs, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Illuminat und Philosoph:
eine Studie iiber den Zusammenhang seines Engagements ah Freimaurer und Illuminat mil
seinem Leben und philosophischen Wirketi (Frankfurt am Main, 1994) where , however,
Reinhold’s book on the Hebrew mysteries is not mentioned .
T h e Mosaic Distinction
38. Reinhold, Hebrdischen Myslerien, 54.
39. Voltaire, Essay sur le moeurs des peuples, in Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. M. Beuchot (Fans,
1829), 15:102—106; “II se serait fond e sur l’ancienne inscription d e la statue d’lsis, ‘Je
suis ce qui est’; et cette autre , ‘Je suis tout ce qui a et£ et qui sera; mil morte l ne pourr a
lever m o n voile'” (103).
40. Vico also paraphrase s the divine name as “what I a m” and “what is”; Vico. Selected
Writings, 53 (On the Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, chap. 2).
41. R. Merkelbach a n d M. Totti, Abrasax: Ausgewdhlte Papyri religiiisen nnd magischen Inhalts
(Opladen, 1991), 2:131.
42. Nicolaus Cusanus, De docta ignorantia, ed. Paulus Wilpert (Hamburg , 1967), 96-97 .
Bernhardin e von Olfe n a n d Aleida Assmann drew my attention to this important
text.
43. Gerardu s Joannis Vossius, De theologia genlili et physiologia Christiana: sive de origine ac
progressu idololatriae, ad veterum gesta, ac rerum naturain, reductoe; deque naturae mirandis,
quibus homo adducitur ad Deum (Francfort, 1668).
44. Joh n Marsham, Canon chronicns aegyptiacus, hebraicus, graecus (London , 1672).
45. Emmanue l J. Bauer, Das Denken Spinozas und seine Interpretation durch Jacobi (Frankfurt
am Main, 1989), 234 ff.
46. Ignaz von Born, “Ube r die Mysterien d e r Aegyptier,”y«uraa/ fur Freymaurer 1 (1784):
17-132, esp. 22. He quote s Plutarch as his source.
47. Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata, cited in Warburton , Divine legation, 1:191.
48. Friedrich Schiller, Die Sendung Moses, ed. H. Koopmann . Siimtlirhe Werke IV: Historische
Schriften (Munich, 1968), 737-57 .
49. Nichts ist erhabener, als die einfache GroBe, mit d e r sie von d e m Weltschopfe r
sprachen. Um ihn auf eine recht entscheidende Art auszuzeichnen, gaben sie ihm ga r
keinen Namen ; Schiller, Die Sendung Moses, 745.
50. Immanue l Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. M. Bernar d (New York, 1951), 115.
Translation altered slightly afte r Kant, Kritik der Urteihkraft in Werke, ed. W. Weischedel
(Darmstadt, 1968), 8:417.
51. Ibid., 160. T h e German reads: “Vielleicht ist nie etwas F.rhabeneres gesagt ode r ein
Gedank e erhabene r ausgedriickt worde n als in jener Aufschrift ttber dem 1cmpel der
Isis (der Mutte r Natur): ‘Ich bin alles was da ist, was da war u n d was d a sein wird, u n d
meine n Schleier hat kein Sterblicher aufgedeckt.’ Segne r benutzt e diese Idee , durc h
eine sinnreiche, seiner Naturlehr e vorgesetzte Vignette, um seme n Lehrling, d e n e r
in diesen Tempe l einzufiihren bereit war, vorhe r mit d em heiligen Schaue r zu erfullen, d e r da s Gemut h zu feierlicher Aufmerksamkeit stimmen soil.”
52. See, e.g., Abb e Jea n Terrasson, Sethos. Histoire ou vie, tiree des monuments, Anecdotes de
l’ancienne Egypte: Ouvrage dans lequel on trouve la description des Initiations aux Mysterts
Egyptiens, traduil d’un manuscrit Grec (1731; reprint, Paris, 1707).
53. Athenian letters or, the Epistolary Correspondence oj an Agent of the King «/ Persia, residing at
Athens during the Peloponnesian war. Containing the Histoiy of the Times, in Dispatches to the
Ministers of State at the Persian Court. Besides Letters on various subjects between I Inn and His
Friends, 4 vols. (London, 1741-43), 1:95-100 (letter 25 by Orsames, from Thebes).
Carlo Ginzbur g drew my attention to this extraordinary history of the Eastern Mediterranea n at the e n d of the fifth century B.C. The letters by Orsame s a d d u p to a fair
summar y of the knowledge of the time concerning Ancient Egypt.
54. Magnu s Olausson, “Freemasonry, Occultism, a n d the Picturesque Garde n Toward s
the End of the Eighteenth Century, ” Art History 8, no. 4 (1985): 413-33 . I owe this to
Annett e Richards.
REPRESENTATION S
55. See Anto n F. Schindler, The Life of Beethoven, e d. a n d trans. Ignac e Moschele s (Matta –
pan , Mass., 1966), 2:163:
If my observatio n entitles m e to for m an opinio n o n t h e subject, I shoul d say
h e [Beethoven ] inclined to Deism; in so f a r as tha t term m ay be understoo d
to imply natura l religion. H e h a d written with his o wn han d two inscriptions,
said to be take n fro m a templ e of Isis. Thes e inscriptions, which wer e framed ,
a n d f o r man y years constantly lay befor e h im on his writing-table , wer e as
follows:—
I. ” I AM THAT WHICH IS.—I AM ALL THAT IS, ALL THAT WAS, AND ALL THAT
SHALL BE.—N O MORTAL MAN HATH MY VEIL UPLIFTED!”
II. ” HE IS ONE; SELF-EXISTENT, AND TO THAT O N E ALL THINGS OWE THEIR
EXISTENCE.”
Beethoven’s Germa n text is shown in facsimile a n d reads: “Ich bin, was d a ist / / Ich
bin alles, was ist, was war, u n d was seyn wird, kein sterbliche r Mensc h ha t meine n
Schleye r aufgehobe n / / Er ist einzig von i hm selbst, u. diesem Einzigen sind alle Ding e
i h r Daseyn schuldig. ” T h e sentence s a r e separate d fro m each othe r by doubl e slashes.
T h e thir d seems to have bee n adde d later; t h e writing is smalle r a n d mor e developed .
See also E. Graefe , “Beethove n u n d di e agyptische Weisheit,” Gbttinger Miszellen 2
(1971): 19-21 .
56. T h e inscription, which is now lost, ha s bee n seen by Johan n Gottfrie d von Herder ; see
Erich Schmidt, Lessing: Geschichte semes Lebens und seiner Schriften, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1884 –
86), 2:804; Gotthold Ephmitn Lessings Samtliche Schriften, e d. Karl Lachmann , vol. 22, bk.
1 (Berlin, 1915), ix; Karl Christ, Jacobi und Mendelssohn: Erne Analyse des Spinozastreits
(Wurzburg , 1988), 5 9 f.
57. See Gerar d Vallee et al., trans., The Spinoza Conversations Between Lessing and Jacobi: Texts
with Excerpts from the Ensuing Controversy (Lanham, Md., 1988).
58. Sigmun d Freud , Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (1939), vol. 16, Gesammelte Werke, e d. Ann a FYeud (Frankfurt am Main, 1968); in F.nglish: Moses and Monotheism, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, trans,
fames Strachey (London , 1959). E. Blum, “Ube r Sigmun d Freuds: D e r Man n Mose s
u n d d i e monotheistisch e Religion,” Psyche 10 (1956-57): 367-90 , hold s tha t FYeud
knew Schiller’s text, even if h e doe s not mentio n it (375). See Yozef Hayim Yerushalmi,
Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven , 1991), 114 n. 17.
59. See Brigitte Stemberger, ‘”De r Man n Moses’ in FYeuds Gesamtwerk,”Kairo s 16 (1974):
161-225 ; Marth e Robert. D’Oedipe ii Moise: Freud et la conscience juive (Paris, 1974); E.
Amad o Levy-Valensi, Le Moise de Freud ou la reference occultee (Monaco , 1984); Pier
Cesar e Bori, “II Mos e di Freud : Per u n a prima valutazione storico-critica,” in L’estasi,
179-222 , esp. 179-84 ; Use Grubrich-Simitis, Freuds MosesStudie als Tagtraum (Weinheim, 1991); FYnanuel Rice, Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home (New York, 1990);
Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses; Bluma Goldstein, ReinscribingMoses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and
Schoenberg in a European Wilderness (Cambridge , Mass., 1992); Carl E. Schorske ,
“Freud’s Egyptia n Dig,” New York Review of Books, 27 May 1993, 35-40 ; P.C. Bori,
“Moses, t h e Grea t Stranger, ” in From Hermeneutics to Ethical Consensus Among Cultures
(Atlanta , 1994), 155-64 .
60. See Pete r Gay, “Th e Last Philosophe : O u r G o d Logos, ” in A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism,
and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven , 1987), 33-68 .
61. Joh n ‘Poland, Adeisidaemon sive Titus Livius a superstione vindicatus (Hagae-Comitis,
1709), 99-199 .
62. Freud , Standard Edition, 23:101.
T h e Mosaic Distinction