Open AccessAnd Everything Began with Laughs and Tears… The Creation of the Gods According to Esna II, 163, 16-17; III 206, 8-9 (§13) and III, 272, 2-3: Precedents, Interpretation and Influences
Author(s) -
Josué Santos Saavedra,
Roger Fortea Bastart
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
trabajos de egiptología
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1695-4750
DOI - 10.25145/j.tde.2018.09.08
Subject(s) - laughter , interpretation (philosophy) , meaning (existential) , context (archaeology) , literature , period (music) , event (particle physics) , history , philosophy , aesthetics , epistemology , art , linguistics , archaeology , physics , quantum mechanics
The tears of the demiurge play a prominent role within ancient Egyptian cosmogonic traditions regarding the genesis of the human being. However, the creation of the gods as a consequence of the demiurge's laughter appears to be a unicum of the Esna temple texts. This is not to say, however, that certain precedents of laughter as a vitalizing agent cannot be traced at least from the Old Kingdom, which would later be duly reworked by Latopolitan theologians during the late period. It is precisely this topic that will be studied in this work, showing some possible antecedents in which the idea of the creation of divine entities through laughter would have settled, at the same time that it will delve into the meaning of this theogonic method compared to the anthropogonic. Likewise, the relevance or not of the hypothesis formulated by some researchers regarding the transmission of this notion of theogonic laughter to different texts written in Greek will be analyzed, as well as the intellectual context in which such an event could have occurred.