Book Review: The Secret Lore of Egypt

Esoterica

The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West

By Erik Hornung, translated by David Lorton
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001)
Reviewed by Lee Irwin

This is an excellent survey for all esotericists and scholars interested in the role of Egypt in the development of western esoteric thought and practice. It is primarily a book about the history of the idea of "ancient esoteric Egypt" as distinct from the actual culture of pharaonic Egypt. Erik Hornung, who is professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and author of such works as Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many and Akhenaten and the Religion of Light, demonstrates the requisite expertise to trace the esoteric idea of Egypt through the labyrinthian history of western European conceptual imagination. While previous works in the area, specifically Iversen's The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (1961) and Assman's Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997), have addressed various attitudes toward Egypt around specific issues, Hornung's book is a survey of the history of "Egyptosophy" (his term) as conceptualized in various artistic, literary, and esoteric European traditions.

See the above page for the entire review.