Free Endless Things by John Crowley

shorts.
    "Petrie thought that the writings, the core writings, dated to the fifth century BCE. And because the Egyptian religion was so insular—remember, the Greeks held the Egyptians in high regard, but the Egyptians didn't have much regard for the Greeks—you could at that date still have found remote temples in Upper Egypt where the scribes were writing in hieroglyphics, copying magical and theological papyri, ‘writings of Thoth,’ as some are described in Greek. Kom Ombo. The Temple of Isis at Philæ. And the Hermetic manuscripts we know, even if they were written in Greek and collected in the first centuries AD, might have been based on what was still a living tradition. Might well."
    "But don't they incorporate a lot of Platonic philosophy? Or stuff that sounds like Plato, or even the Gospel of John?"
    "Sure. And scholars have assumed that the Egyptians had no such metaphysics, only ritual and myth, and so the metaphysics of the Hermetica must derive from Plato, and not the other way around."
    "Even though Plato said it was the other way around, that he owed Egypt."
    "Yes. That's the new view. That Plato—and Thucydides and Herodotus and Pliny—knew what they were talking about when they said that their knowledge of the gods and the cosmos derived from Egypt. Their laws even. Certainly their writing. The historian's rule being this: that if a people's culture retains lots of stories about their history or origins that are not particularly to their credit, they ought to be taken seriously as likely to have some factual basis."
    "So maybe they aren't wrong."
    "They? Which they?"
    "The Hermeticists. The Renaissance Egyptophiles. Bruno and Fludd and Kircher. The Rosicrucians and the Masons, who think they all come from Egypt, because of the Hermetic stuff."
    "There is,” said Barr, “that possibility. Yes."
    Gentle voices had been speaking while the two men conversed, like spirit informants, telling of the world and the air, planes landing from Africa, Asia, Europe, and now they were told that Barr's to Athens, Cairo, and Delhi was ready for boarding. Barr looked at his watch and stood up.
    "Maybe I'll learn more,” he said. “It's all very controversial. A lot of people don't like this downgrading of the Greeks and Greek originality in favor of Africans. When new Hermetic manuscripts were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Father Festugière, the great student of Hermeticism, said he was sure not much could be learned from une jarre d'Egypt ."
    "But you do think so,” Pierce said. “That it might be so. As the Renaissance thought. At least a little."
    "Well, it's a new age,” Barr said. He yanked out the handle of his nifty trundle and turned to go, lifting a parting hand. “All that stuff is coming back."
    * * * *
    No word yet from out of the air for Pierce, and (though uncertain it was permitted him) he sat in the Olympic Club while the ice in his drink turned to water, listening still to Barr's words and feeling the strangest feeling as he repeated them, the feeling of something healed, or knitted, or resealed, within him but not only within him: a thing that had once been one, and was then divided, becoming one again.
    He'd thought that if you went back, went back through the centuries far enough, at a certain point the way to Egypt—to the Egypt of archæology, the long-lived culture of the dead, the hard-headed small brown people with their revolting rituals of mummification and their gods ever multiplying as in a children's game—that way would part from the way that led to a land he called Ægypt: a name he'd found in that dictionary of the old or other world, the alphabetic world within the world. Ægypt: dream country of philosophers and healers, speaking statues, teachers of Plato and Pythagoras. But what if—like the Nile—this Y was actually right side up, and he alone had got it upside down; what if it had all always been one country, and only divided in two as it came close to the present,