April Deconick (The Gnostic New Age) describes gnosticism as an “emergent structure” of the religious imagination defined by a particular constellation of attributes: “mystical practices, a transgressive esotericism and hermeneutics, a belief in an innate spiritual nature, a quest orientation, and an inclusive metaphysics”. In the preceding essay, I discussed the convergent emergence of gnostic spirituality in both the West and the East (esoteric Buddhism and Hinduism). Here, I’d like review some of the ways in which the gnostic spirit has awakened in different socio-cultural contexts in the West since its first eruption some 2000 years ago. I will move relatively quickly through each awakening, offering a general summary of the relevant history and spiritual philosophy while also highlighting some of the more amusing or lurid details.

Menocchio

Jacques Lacarriere calls gnosticism, “a profoundly original thought, a mutant thought.” This is an apt description—like a genetic mutation, the gnostic anomaly arises randomly and spontaneously and may spread throughout a population or be snuffed out before it has a chance to go viral. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the figure of Menocchio (1532–1599), a self-educated Italian peasant burned at the stake for his mutant thoughts.

Menocchio (born Domenico Scandella) lived most of his life in Montereale, except for two years when he was banished from the town for brawling. He had learned to read and read a number of contemporary works on religion and history. From these, he developed his religious views that departed substantially from Catholic orthodoxy of the time.

He was first tried for heresy in 1583, and abjured his statements in 1584, but spent another 20 months in prison in Concordia. Released in 1586, he claimed to have reformed. He remained under house arrest and had to wear a sign of a burning cross on his garments as a visible sign of his crimes. In 1598, he was arrested again as a lapsed heretic, having continued to propagate his beliefs. In 1599, he was declared a heresiarch and was executed by burning.

Like his gnostics, Menocchio believed in an innate spiritual nature common to all and rejected religious authority and literalist interpretations of biblical events.

During his trial, he argued that the only sin was to harm one’s neighbour and that to blaspheme caused no harm to anyone but the blasphemer. He further said that Jesus was born of man and Mary was not a virgin, that the pope had no power given to him from God but simply exemplified the qualities of a good man, and that Christ had not died to “redeem humanity.”

[…]

In additional criticisms of the Church, Menocchio declared that he rejected all the sacraments, including baptism, as human inventions, and mere “merchandise,” instruments of exploitation and oppression in the hands of the clergy. He stated, “I believe that the law and commandments of the Church are all a matter of business, and they make their living from this”. Regarding baptism, he stated, “I believe that as soon as we are born we are baptized, because God who has blessed all things, has baptized us; but this other baptism is an invention, and priests begin to consume souls even before they are born and continue to devour them even after their death.”

Regarding confirmation, he stated, “I believe it is a business, an invention of men, all of whom have the Holy Spirit; they seek to know and they know nothing”. Regarding marriage, he stated, “God did not establish it, men did. Formerly a man and a woman would exchange vows, and this sufficed; later these human inventions followed.”

With a violent outburst against his judges and their doctrinal arrogance, he proclaimed, “You priests and monks, you too want to know more than God, and you are like the devil, and you want to become gods on earth, and know as much as God, following in the footsteps of the devil. In fact, the more one thinks he knows, the less he knows.”

Regarding the priesthood, he stated, “I believe the spirit of God dwells in all of us... and I also believe that anyone who has studied can become a priest without being ordained, because it is all a business.” Menocchio went on to say, “And it seems to me that under our law, the pope, cardinals, and bishops are so great and rich that everything belongs to the church and to the priests, and they oppress the poor, who, if they work two rented fields, these will be fields that belong to the Church, to some bishop or cardinal.”

On 28 April, he began by denouncing the way the rich tyrannized the poor in the courts by using such an incomprehensible language as Latin (see Law Latin): “I think speaking Latin is a betrayal of the poor because in lawsuits the poor do not know what is being said and are crushed; and if they want to say four words they need a lawyer.”

He further criticized the Church and Court proceedings by stating, “God has given the Holy Spirit to all, to Christians, to heretics, to Turks, and to Jews; and he considers them all dear, and they are all saved in the same manner.”

Frankism

While there are some aspects of Frankism which are highly idiosyncratic (e.g. its cult of personality and militant nature), many of its attributes are nearly identical to those of ancient gnosticism (highlighted below).

Frankism is a Sabbatean religious movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, created in Podolia, named after its founder, Jacob Frank. Frank completely rejected Jewish norms, preaching to his followers that they were obligated to transgress moral boundaries. At its height Frankism claimed perhaps 50,000 followers, primarily Jews living in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe

Frankists believe in Sabbatai Zevi, one of the most famous of all self-proclaimed messiahs in Jewish history. He believed in transgressing Jewish commandments in order to elevate the “divine sparks” constrained by them, and he himself actually performed actions that violated traditional Jewish prohibitions, such as eating foods forbidden by kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, practicing ritual incest, and celebrating prescribed fast days as feast days. He eventually opted to convert to Islam rather than face execution for claiming to be the messiah. Especially after Zevi’s death, a number of branches of Sabbateanism evolved that disagreed among themselves over which aspects of traditional Judaism should be preserved and which should be discarded.

Jacob Frank claimed to be a reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi and followed and extended his practice of transgression. Father-daughter incest was commonly practised by his followers, and orgies featured prominently in ritual. Frank claimed that “all laws and teachings will fall”, and following antinomianism, asserted that the most important obligation of mankind was the transgression of every boundary.

The Sabbatean leader Jacob Frank stood at thelead of Frankism. He regarded his followers as soldiers, and all were members of a company for the purpose of building a Frankist army, which was to secure Frank’s rule over a Frankist country. There were four company locations, in Ivanie, Częstochowa, Brno and Offenbach am Main. Members were required to wear plate armor, shields and helmets and train hard.

His teachings were not intended for the ears of all Frankists, but only for his personally selected, small circle of so-called "Brothers and Sisters", of whom he demanded blind obedience. Frank tried to maintain absolute control over at least this circle, taking advantage of their tendency to believe in demons and magic. Within the circle of “Brothers and Sisters”, Frank spoke directly only to the Brothers; according to his teachings nothing could be done with women alone, since women had brought death into the world.

The most important Frankist text is the Księga Słów Pańskich (Book of the Words of the Lord). This is written in Polish in extremely simple, almost folk language and consists of short sayings (some fewer than ten words), interpretations and parables, visions and dreams; longer speculations about the elements of the doctrine; various episodes from Frank's life, the Frankist “company” and contemporary rulers; and fairy-tale stories up to 1100 words long. To support them, there are mainly quotations from the Torah and the Zohar as well as popular stories from the surrounding culture, which were quoted verbatim or paraphrased, or adapted to his own doctrine.

Frank’s “Brothers” compiled the work between 1755 and 1791 in the form of a Zbiór (collection) of materials developed in numerous meetings over the years. The last known complete manuscript (Words of the Lord §§ 1–2192) was destroyed, along with numerous other Frankist sources, during the destruction of Warsaw in World War II.

In Frankism, Frank is the third messianic incarnation of the Sephira Tiferet after Sabbatai Zevi and Baruchiah Russo, and also the reborn forefather Jacob. But he is nonetheless only a helper. The actual guide in Frankism is the Virgin, the incarnation of the Shekhinah and the female Messiah. Frankists are supposed to follow her bravely like soldiers through all horrors. The path is symbolized by the letter “V”, which also represents Jacob’s ladder. The seeker must first climb down into the abyss to reach the deepest level of humiliation and then climb back up to “life”. According to Frankist doctrine, the patriarchs and Moses had already tried to follow the path, but had failed, as had Zevi.

Frank proclaims that the Frankists’ descent down the “V” ladder into the deepest humiliation is reflected in society’s hatred and exclusion of them, which result from Frankism’s consistent implementation of the idea that all laws and teachings of the world are only laws of the “Three Evil World Rulers”, and therefore do not need to be observed. In the best case such laws and teachings need only be kept in pretense; religions and teachings of the world can be worn like an empty shell and then discarded at whim, because the true Torah is yet to be revealed. The Mosaic Law with its Ten Commandments should be despised, as it is part of the old Torah.

The last stage of the mystical path in Frankism is the stage of Da'as, cosmic cognizance. In the Zohar as well as in Frankism, Da’as (also Da’at or Da’ath) is used to describe the mystical place where all ten Sephiroth are united. It is understood as a “concealed knowledge” that creates a harmonizing union between the two Sephiroth Chokmah (male principle) and Binah (female principle) and results from the fusion of cosmic forces. It is thus possible to reach Da’as through sexual intercourse. With the help of sexual rites, Jacob Frank wished to reach Da’as on earth, the last step of his Jacob’s ladder.

The gnostics (particularly the Valentinians) also commonly used the language of sex and marriage when speaking of gnosis a.k.a. Da’as.

Prepare yourself, as a bride awaiting her spouse, that you may become what I am and I what you are. Establish in your bridal chamber the seed of light. Receive from me the bridegroom, and grasp him and be grasped by him. (Marcus)

Heresy of the Free Spirit

One of the most extended and widespread eruptions of gnostic spirituality was the Heresy of the Free Spirit.

The Brethren of the Free Spirit were adherents of a loose set of beliefs deemed heretical by the Catholic Church but held (or at least believed to be held) by some Christians, especially in the Low Countries, Germany, France, Bohemia, and Northern Italy between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The movement was first identified in the late thirteenth century. It was not a single movement or school of thought, and it caused great unease among Church leaders at the time.

Fears over sets of beliefs similar to the Heresy of the Free Spirit have recurred at various points in Christian history. For example, fears over esotericism and antinomianism, such as were detected in the Heresy of the Free Spirit, were also detected in the early Church’s response to Gnosticism.

The set of beliefs ascribed to the Free Spirits is (again) nearly identical to that of the ancient gnostics.

The set of beliefs ascribed to the Free Spirits is first to be found in a text called the Compilatio de novo spiritu put together by Albert the Great in the 1270s, concerning a group of persons investigated in the Swabian Ries area of Germany. The themes which occur in these documents, and which would emerge again in subsequent investigations, included:

• Autotheism - in other words, a belief that the perfected soul and God are indistinguishably one. This was often expressed through the language of indistinction or annihilation. This belief would be heretical because it would undermine the necessary distinction between created being and creator.

• Denial of the necessity of Christ, the church and its sacraments for salvation – such that austerity and reliance on the Holy Spirit was believed to be sufficient for salvation. They believed that they could communicate directly with God and did not need the Catholic Church for intercession.

• Use of the language of erotic union with Christ.

• Antinomian statements (“Nothing is a sin except what is thought to be a sin”). Critics of the Free Spirit interpreted their beliefs to mean that they considered themselves to be incapable of sin and above the moral conduct of the Church. Verses such as Galatians 5:18 (“Those who are driven or led by the Spirit of God are no longer under the law”) were seen as foundational to such beliefs.

• Anticlerical sentiment.

The Men of Understanding (Homines Intelligentiae), a Christian sect in the Low Countries of Europe in the late 14th and early 15th century, had a particularly radical set of beliefs (and a particularly radical leader).

The sect was doctrinally related to the earlier Brethren of the Free Spirit; they subscribed to a form of universal reconciliation which included demons, the idea that bodily sin could not defile the soul, and a mystical state of perfect illumination and union with God which exempted from all laws and guaranteed salvation. They also believed that prayer had no benefits and that there was no resurrection.

The sect was founded by Ægidius Cantor, a layman, and was led by Cantor and a Dutch Carmelite named William of Hildernissen…Both men reported visions; Cantor once, in a state of religious exaltation, ran nude through the streets of Brussels, declaring himself the saviour of mankind.

Khlysty

The Khlysts were an underground Spiritual Christian sect which emerged in Russia in the 17th century. Once more, we see all the hallmarks of gnosticism, including even the dubious accusations of sexual antinomianism that were also levied against the original gnostics.

The Khlysty renounced priesthood, holy books and veneration of the saints (excluding the Theotokos). They believed in the possibility of direct communication with the Holy Spirit and of its embodiment in living people. Each of their leaders was a “living god”, and each congregation (or “ark”) had its own “Christ” and “Mother of God”, appointed by the overall leader of the sect. Furthermore, they believed that the Holy Spirit could descend upon any one of them during the state of ecstasy which they attained during the ritual of radenie (“rejoicing”). This ritual, which formed the focus of their worship, took place on holy feast days. The congregation would gather during the evening at a prearranged location, such as a member’s house. They would remove their outer clothing, and enter the sacred space dressed only in an undershirt. After a period of singing or chanting the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”), some of the worshippers would feel the Holy Spirit come upon them, and would begin dancing wildly, prophesying in unintelligible language. This would continue for half an hour or more, until the dancers collapsed with exhaustion. Finally, they would share a sacramental meal of nuts, bread, pastry and kvass.

The Khlysty practiced an extreme asceticism, in order to prepare themselves for the reception of the Holy Spirit into their bodies. They abstained from alcohol, and often fasted for days or weeks at a time. Although marriage was permitted for practical purposes, “because the help of a wife was indispensable for a peasant”, it was a sin to engage in sexual intercourse, even with one's own wife. Connected with this mortification of the flesh was the practice of self-flagellation which often accompanied the radenie rite.

Russian author Edvard Radzinsky has described a radenie ritual which he witnessed on the island of Chechen in 1964:

Radzinsky says that they referred to the whirling dance as “spiritual beer”, on account of its intoxicating effect. He reports that after the dance had continued for some time, the worshippers fell to the floor: “And that was the end of it. But apparently only because I was present.” Radzinsky claims that in some arks, the Khlysts would at this point engage in “group sinning” — a frenzied sexual orgy, which they believed would purify them from the lusts of the flesh. Similarly, C. L. Sulzberger, in his book The Fall of Eagles, writes that the Khlysty’s “foremost idea was that salvation could be attained only by total repentance and that this became far more achievable for one who had truly transgressed. ‘Sin in order that you may obtain forgiveness,’ was the practical side of the Khlysty.”

Other scholars have dismissed these rumours. Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, referencing a study by Karl Konrad Grass, writes:

Historian Joseph T. Fuhrmann claims that “splinter groups” practiced ‘holy intercourse,’ but most khlysty were devout pentecostalists who condemned such behaviour.

The New Age

While the awakenings discussed above were not directly related to ancient gnosticism (and thus are compelling examples of gnosticism as an latent structure in the psycho-spiritual imagination), the aforementioned Deconick identifies four further awakenings that are in some way inspired by the original gnostics: the Balkan dualisms of the Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars; the flowering of Renaissance Platonism; the discovery of the discovery of the Bruce and Askew Codices, and their reception by Mead, Blavatsky, and Jung; and the discovery, translation, and reception of the Berlin, Nag Hammadi, and Tchacos Codices.

Deconick associates this last and most recent awakening (the Nag Hammadi library was discovered in 1945) with the New Age movements of the 1960s and 70s.

Ancient Gnostic and modern New Age movements cultivate a form of spirituality that is aggressively countercultural and highly critical of conventionally organized religion. They revel in exposing the errors of conventional religions, which they believe to be ineffective. They delight in upsetting the cart, in exposing the deceptions that they believe traditional institutions maintain to control the masses.

At the center of their transgression is their disapproval of “talk religion”, religion that tries to codify God or intellectualize spirituality. For ancient Gnostics and modern New Agers, the heart of religion is the subjective individual experience of meeting a transcendent or transpersonal reality that is the source of all existence. Religion is about the God experience, not God talk…

I think Deconick oversells how much the re-discovery of these libraries had to do with the rise of the New Age, but she is certainly correct in seeing this diffuse countercultural movement as an awakening brought forth by many of the same socio-cultural factors as the first eruption of the gnostic spirit.

Both Gnostic and New Age movements arose during historical periods of rapid breakdown in traditional institutions and structures. In antiquity, we had the brutal imperialism of Rome, which advanced the collapse of native cultures and created enmity toward the dominant political regime. Likewise, in the 1950s and 1960s the American romance with traditional politics and cultural structures disintegrated, leaving a vacuum in which countercultural movements could make headway.

It is equally true that both the past and the present feature increased interaction between native and nonnative cultures. This expansion in cultural knowledge, past and present, creates a pluralistic environment in which eclecticism and inclusiveness allow for innovation in the realms of spirituality and religion. The ancient Mediterranean world at the time of the Gnostics was undergoing a previously unknown level of internationalization, a result of the increased traffic of merchants, tourists, and new residents on Roman-built roads, along the Silk Road, and over the seas.

The search for truth gained more options in this rich international environment. The same can be said of the 1950s and 1960s, when there was an explosion of the Asian into America. There also was an explosion of space. With our race to the moon, the options for truth expanded to the point that they became alien.

So both eras, the first century CE and the twentieth century CE, were the right moments for counter-cultural religious movements to emerge and take hold.

I.

One should place one’s penis into the vagina of one’s mother and one’s sandals on one’s father’s head, while fondling (or licking) one’s sister’s breasts and kissing her fair seat. He who does this, O great Goddess, reaches the abode of Extinction. He who worships day and night an actress, a female skull-bearer, a prostitute, a low-caste woman, a washerman’s wife—he verily becomes identical with the blessed Sada-Shiva (Yoga Karnika)

In the preceding essays, I introduced the “wildly networked mythologies, doctrinal systems, and rituals” of ancient Gnosticism. Here, I’d like to take a broader view and examine the place of Gnosticism within the religious landscape and its relationship to the wider gnostic tradition, that underground stream of mystico-magical culture often referred to, somewhat crudely, as “Western esotericism”.

The gnostic religion in the first centuries CE was an early representative of the esoteric current in Western culture. It is “a mentality, a frame of mind” that can be found in various religious contexts, and is “characterized by the fact that it can easily attach itself to already existing religious or philosophical systems.”

The central idea of a secret Gnosis as a gift that illuminates and liberates man’s inner divinity is found in all periods...For that reason, the terms “Gnosis” and “Gnostic” are applicable to all ideas and currents from Antiquity to the present day that stress the necessity of esoteric spiritual knowledge. (van den Broek, 2006)

This broader view will yield several convergences across cultural space—between Gnosticism and Eastern spiritualities—and time (the various eruptions of gnostic spirituality in the West over the last two thousand years). In what follows, I will review the first category, the often uncanny convergences between Eastern and Western gnostic forms.

II.

Scholars have highlighted several parallels between Buddhism and Gnosticism. Both traditions view material existence as inferior and illusory (māyā). They identify Ignorance (avidyā) as the root cause of entrapment in this world, with liberation hinging on a mystical understanding or 'knowledge' of our existential condition (gnosis or jñāna).

Buddhism and Gnosticism both transcend in their own way the theism/atheism distinction (transtheism). For the former, “The gods exist, but do not count. Even the greatest gods of Brahmanism, Indra and Brahma, are forced to recognise the superiority of the Enlightened One. Without gods and a true ontology, Buddhism can effectively be considered a non-religion or, as is often asserted, an atheist religion.” Similarly, most forms of Gnosticism feature an elaborate hierarchy of deities/angelic beings, however all of these entities are ultimately irrelevant—what “counts” is the ineffable godhead from which they spring. In this same vein, both Christ and Buddha are understood mythically and symbolically, as primordial archetypes instead of deified historical figures.

It seems to me that what Christian theology calls unearned grace, or, in another mode, unconditional love and forgiveness, has been personalized with some bizarrely legalized conceptions of God, but this notion of grace is not so different from what some of the Hindu traditions call liberation from all action or karma, or what some of the Buddhist traditions call emptiness beyond and before every self or thing. Each religious mode, after all, offers utter freedom from the actions and consequences of the socially and historically determined little self. True forgiveness comes, liberation happens, enlightenment shines forth when one side of the Human is set aside, forgotten, outshined for the other side, the Big Self, which is not a self at all. This is what I think the Sinhalese anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere meant when he observed that the mythos of the Buddha and the mythos of the Christ are structurally the same. They are.

The transtheistic and spiritual attainment-focused nature of both systems lend themselves towards a syncretic openness and independence from ethnonational ties (as opposed to the doctrinal exclusivity and ethnoculturalism of the “bizarrely legalized” Abrahamic religions). Consequently, both systems emphasize classification of individuals by spiritual attainment rather than a simplistic believer/non-believer dichotomy. In Buddhism, there are the puthujjanas, “the worldlings, whose eyes are still covered with the dust of defilements and delusion,” and the ariyans, “the spiritual elite, who obtain this status not from birth, social station or ecclesiastical authority but from the inward nobility of their character”.

These two general types are not separated from each other by an impassable chasm. A series of gradations can be discerned rising up from the darkest level of the blind worldling trapped in the dungeon of egotism and self-assertion, through the stage of the virtuous worldling in whom the seeds of wisdom are beginning to sprout, and further through the intermediate stages of noble disciples to the perfected individual at the apex of the entire scale of human development. This is the Arahant, the liberated one, who has absorbed the purifying vision of truth so deeply that all his defilements have been extinguished, and with them, all liability to suffering.

Compare this to the classification schema of the gnostic Valentinians:

Men who identify with flesh and matter all their lives and cannot tear themselves free, who participate in its existence without in any way lightening its matter, will forever remain hylici, or material men. For them, there is no salvation. Above this are the two circles of Air and Ether, composed of more refined matter, the first step in the climb towards salvation. These circles may be reached by those who have been able to transform matter into psyche by lightening and filtering it, and thus transmuting it sufficiently to create a soul for themselves. This is the second category of human beings: the psychici, the psychic men. But simply to possess a soul is not enough, if this soul is cut off from truth. To perfect oneself, to throw off the ultimate shackles forever, one must know where Truth lies. One must possess gnosis. And here we have the third and certainly the rarest category of human beings: the spirituals or pneumatici, in other words the true Gnostics.

What accounts for these similarities—convergent evolution or cultural exchange? The evidence for the latter is scant and circumstantial; there was some sea trade between the Roman empire and India in the first centuries of the common era, and one of the major centers of Gnosticism, cosmopolitan Alexandria, was home to some Indians. Verardi (1997) argues that the transmission of Buddhist ideas might have been aided by some affinities between the socio-economic base of the two systems: both were were fundamentally urban, mercantile phenomenon existing in societies dominated by great organized powers, the Brahmans in India and the Romans and Catholic church in the West.

The Gnostic communities, and with them the Buddhists, were the optimistic bearers of a model of an open economy and society lacking the defences (and the vexations) of nomos (the laws and institutions of the establishment). It is worth the trouble to observe, as corollary of this position, how both systems opened readily to women. We have spoken of Buddhism; for the Gnostic communities, Rudolph (1977a: 39) has noted how women were offered possibility of self-fulfillment unthinkable elsewhere.

While some degree of influence can’t be ruled out, consider me skeptical. The cultural exchange hypothesis would be more persuasive if antecedents for the similarities didn’t already exist in Western culture; for example, the belief in metempsychosis held by certain Gnostic sects seems to have been passed from Orphism, not Buddhism.

Orpheus, its legendary Thracian founder, is said to have taught that soul and body are united by a compact unequally binding on either. The soul is divine but immortal and aspires to freedom, while the body holds it in fetters as a prisoner. Death dissolves that contract but only to reimprison the liberated soul after a short time, for the wheel of birth revolves inexorably. Thus, the soul continues its journey and alternates between a separate unrestrained existence and a fresh reincarnation around the wide circle of necessity, as the companion of many bodies of men and animals. To those unfortunate prisoners, Orpheus proclaims the message of liberation, that they stand in need of the grace of redeeming gods, Dionysus in particular, and calls them to turn to the gods by ascetic piety and self-purification: the purer their lives, the higher their next reincarnation will be, until the soul has completed the spiral ascent of destiny to live forever as a God from whom it comes.

There is one further domain of correspondence which lends credence to the convergence hypothesis. In the previous essay, we discussed the radical antinomianism of the Gnostics with respect to sexuality and purity codes; though the evidence of ritual orgies and consumption of sexual fluids come down to us only from accusations by Christian heresiologists, the existence of these practices is supported by the fact that certain forms of Eastern spirituality also feature these practices. These transgressive practices and philosophies were, as you might imagine, restricted to more esoteric traditions, and thus highly unlikely to be transmitted across such vast physical and cultural distances.

One such Eastern tradition is Vajrayāna, tantric or esoteric Buddhism, whose rituals include sexual yoga, singing, dancing, and the ingestion of taboo substances such as alcohol, blood, semen, and urine.

Tantric practices focus on transforming poison into wisdom, “one knowing the nature of poison may dispel poison with poison.” Some tantras go further; the Hevajra tantra states “You should kill living beings, speak lying words, take what is not given, consort with the women of others”. While some of these statements were taken literally as part of ritual practice, others such as killing were interpreted in a metaphorical sense. In the Hevajra, “killing” is defined as developing concentration by killing the life-breath of discursive thoughts. Likewise, while actual sexual union with a physical consort is practiced, it is also common to use a visualized consort.

Consider also the Aghori (from Sanskrit: अघोर, ‘dreadless’), a monastic order of ascetic Shaivite sadhus based in Northern India who are the only surviving sect derived from the Kāpālika tradition, a Tantric form of Shaivism which originated in Medieval India between the 4th and 8th century CE.

Aghoris commonly engage in post-mortem rituals, often dwell in charnel grounds, smear cremation ashes on their bodies, and use bones from human corpses for crafting kapāla (skull cups which Shiva and other Hindu deities are often iconically depicted holding or using) and jewellery. They also practice post-mortem cannibalism, eating flesh from foraged human corpses, including those taken from cremation ghats.

An aghori believes that they must go into total darkness in order to find the light…Because of their monistic doctrine, the Aghoris maintain that all opposites are ultimately illusory. The purpose of embracing intoxicant substances, pollution, and physical degradation through various Tantric rituals and customs is the realization of non-duality (advaita) transcending social taboos, attaining what is essentially an altered state of consciousness and perceiving the illusory nature of all conventional categories.

Gnostic antinomianism justifies itself using striking similar notions to those found in Vajrayāna and Aghorism (cf. the bolded passages above to those below).

The idea that in sinning something like a program has to be completed, a due rendered as the price of ultimate freedom, is the strongest doctrinal reinforcement of the libertinistic tendency inherent in the gnostic rebellion as such and turns it into a positive prescription of immoralism. Sin as the way to salvation, the theological inversion of the idea of sin itself… (Jonas)

The Gnostic’s first task was therefore to use up the substance of evil by combating it with its own weapons, by practising what one might call a homeopathic asceticism. Since we are surrounded and pulverized by evil, let us exhaust it by committing it; let us stoke up the forbidden fires in order to burn them out and reduce them to ashes; let us consummate by consuming (and there is only one step, or three letters, between ‘consuming’ and ‘consummating’) the inherent corruption of the material world. (Lacarriere)

III.

Jeffrey Kripal further describes these resonances between Asian tantra and Gnosticism and notes a deep structural pattern found in both Eastern and Western spiritual culture.

Along related lines, it is also worth noting that the gnostic emphasis on salvation by knowledge or mystical insight rather than on faith or obedience to the Law, along with the doctrinal emphasis on transgression, all fit beautifully with the Asian Tantric materials. Following the British Buddhologist Edward Conze, Elaine Pagels has noted the obvious parallels and possible allusions that exist between some of the gnostic materials and certain Hindu and Buddhist ideas (including the very title of the Gospel of Thomas, Thomas being the disciple, according to Christian tradition, who founded a Christian community in India). I am also reminded here of the remarkable gnostic text “Thunder, Perfect Mind”, a profoundly sexualized, deeply paradoxical poem whose very title echoes, like thunder, the kind of language we might find in a Tantric Buddhist tract (note: see below for an excerpt).

Pagels has also observed that the erotic dimensions of the relationship between Jesus and Mary [Magdalene] may point to claims to mystical communion, since sexual metaphors have been used throughout the history of mysticism to express (and, I would add, catalyze) these very types of unitive experience.

I would simply say the same about the alleged sexual practices of groups like the Carpocratians and Phibionites and certain Hindu and Buddhist Tantric texts. Once we have pared away some of the more fantastic and obviously polemical material, what we may be dealing with here is a kind of early Christian Gnostic Tantrism, if I may put it that jarringly. Moreover, and perhaps most important, whether or not any of these groups ever ritually consumed sexual fluids, the rumors, accusations and claims of such acts constitute a powerful witness to the latent mystico-erotic meanings of these same traditions.

Finally, we can also look at these same Gnostic-Tantric echoes structurally. Thanks largely to the work of such scholars as Barbara Holdredge, it is a commonplace among Indologists now to note that there are important structural similarities between Brahmanic Hinduism and Orthodox Judaism. The two religious systems' oral and textual approaches to scripture (Veda and Torah), their profound interest in ritual and sacrifice, and their concern with purity codes have all been noted. This last feature, however, suggests a perhaps hitherto unrecognized structural conclusion: if these two broad religio-social systems display such similar understandings of purity, then we should expect that their “countercultures,” which sought to violate or transgress these same purity ethics (in this case, many of the Hindu Tantric traditions, the early Basileia or “kingdom” movement of Jesus, and some of the early gnostic communities), might also display structural and imaginal affinities, particularly in their use of sexual symbolisms (and likely practices) to effect these same structural transgression. In other words, we might expect early Christian gnostic transgressions and Asian Tantric transgressions to look very similar—and indeed they do.

As I argued in “Gnosticism: Inversions”, this structural transgression was the root and heart of Jesus’ message.

All of Jesus’ inversions and subversions—the first shall be last and the last shall be first, the meek shall inherit the earth, turn the other cheek, “working” (healing) on the Sabbath, his association with prostitutes and lepers, the washing of his disciples’ feet, the very notion that an executed man could be the Messiah—all of these were expressions or manifestations of one basic commandment:

LOVE OVER LAW, LOVE OVER ALL

Valentinus had expected to become a bishop, because he was an able man both in genius and eloquence. Being indignant, however, that another obtained the dignity, he broke with the church of the true faith. Just like those restless spirits which, when roused by ambition, are usually inflamed with the desire of revenge, he applied himself with all his might to exterminate the truth; and finding the clue of a certain old opinion, he marked out a path for himself with the subtlety of a serpent. (Tertullian)

The figure of Valentinus serves as something of a totem for the diametric opposition between the nascent orthodox and the gnostics: each thought the other to be exterminating the truth with the subtlety of a serpent. Yet Gnosticism was not merely a counter-religion defined by its defiance of the One True Christianity, as Tertullian and his fellow Catholics would have you believe. There was in fact a method to the gnostic madness, a coherent spiritual philosophy behind their radically contrarian manner of life.

What Liberates

The whole of Gnosticism can be found in this Valentinian expression and others like it: true spirituality is not a static blind faith (as it was for the orthodox), but a searching and striving for (self) knowledge.

To seek myself and to know who I was and who and in what manner I now am, that I may again become that which I was. (The Acts of Thomas)

The liberating knowledge which the seeker seeks is something like the following: “We are shards of the divine entombed in rotting cadavers in a rotting cosmos. Our true home, and the ultimate destination to which we speed, is the pleroma, that dimension/condition of perfect fullness/oneness wherein resides the utterly ineffable Alien God.1

This world eats corpses, and everything eaten in this world also dies. Truth eats life, and no one nourished by truth will die. Jesus came from that realm and brought food from there, and he gave life to all who wanted it, that they might not die. (The Gospel of Philip)

It is, however, not a mere intellectual grasp of this life-eating Truth that the seeker seeks, but a direct mystical communion with It.

This experience of gnosis is knowledge in the most exalted and paradoxical sense of the term since it is knowledge of the unknowable, an experience of the infinite in the finite. By its own testimony throughout mystical literature it unites voidness and fullness, illuminates and blinds. It stands within existence for the end of all existence: “end” in the twofold, negative-positive sense of the ceasing of everything worldly and of the goal in which the spiritual nature comes to fulfillment. (Jonas)

As for how gnosis was achieved, what little is known aligns with the influence of the Greek mystical tradition (Orphism, the mystery religions) and the eclectic-syncretic nature of Gnosticism; prayer, meditation, drugs, ritual, and various ascetic practices were all used in some form or another.

And it is specifically through this struggle against the body’s inertia and the soul’s slumber, by practising techniques of physical and mental awakening, by a sort of long, immense and rational disordering of all the senses—in short, by living a counter-life—that we may triumph over the material and spiritual order of this world. (Lacarriere)

The moral and social life of the gnostic was a logical consequence of this gnosis: how could one be bound by the morals and laws of this world if they are not of this world, if they are Life and the world is death? Indeed, they could not—and so the gnostic sought, “to become so absolutely free that his very existence was an act of rebellion” (Camus—who, along with Sarte, was greatly influenced by Gnosticism).

This metaphysical rebellion manifested in two contrasting ethics, one of ascetic abstention and rejection and another of antinomian transgression and inversion, “a counter-life”.

Was it not their aim, in this domain as in all others, to bring about a total inversion of the values and the relationships between man, his fellow-creatures, and the world? (Lacarriere)

Thus, instead of morality, we have non-morality:

Confronted with the deceptions of reality, the imposture of all Churches and institutions, the mummery of laws, creeds, and taboos, Basilides proposes a very simple morality: non-morality. Thus, at the moment when the first persecutions are beginning against both Christians and Gnostics (the Romans seeing not the slightest difference between the two), he declares that it is natural and necessary to abjure one’s faith in order to escape them. (Lacarriere)

Instead of moral judgement and a postponement of all reward and punishment until after death, we have a salvation that can only be found in life. Deeds and virtues (like the renouncing of one’s faith) are completely irrelevant—only gnosis, and gnosis alone, can save you.

Instead of dogmatic authoritarianism, we have a celebration of “heresy” and the creativity that produces it. The very notion that moral or spiritual Truth could be passed down on high from some authority was ludicrous to the gnostic.

Who administers [spiritual] authority? Valentinus and his followers answered: Whoever comes into direct, personal contact with the “Living One”. They argued that only one’s own experience offers the ultimate criterion of Truth, taking precedence over all secondhand testimony and all tradition—even gnostic tradition! They celebrated every form of creative invention as evidence that a person has become spiritually alive. On this theory, the structure of authority can never be fixed into an institutional framework: it must remain spontaneous, charismatic, and open. (Pagels)

Anti-Heroes

The central theological inversion of the gnostics was discussed in the preceding essay: the God of the Jews and the Christians was not an omnipotent creator-ruler deity, but something more like a petty demon. This counter-theology enraged and flummoxed Christian heresiologists, much to the delight, we can imagine, of the delinquent gnostics.

Yet Irenaeus found it difficult to argue theology with the gnostics: they claimed to agree with everything he said, but he knew that secretly they discounted his words as coming from someone unspiritual…So Valentinians might confess the same creed as a Catholic, “There is one God the Father and everything comes from him, the Lord Jesus Christ.” But the meaning they took from it was different. They were not confessing the Father God to be YHWH. Rather they were confessing the Father God to be the transcendent God… (Deconick)

The Gnostics’ antithetical view of YHWH was only the beginning of their contrarianism—virtually all figures whom the orthodox tradition looked upon as damned were venerated by one sect or another. So, for example, the serpent was not Satan or his minion, but a salvific emissary of the Living One, sent to instruct Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—i.e. the Tree of Gnosis.

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:2-5)

The gnostics known as the Ophites (from óphis (ὄφις), ancient Greek for snake) associated the serpent with Jesus, hence their incorporation of the slithering ones into their Eucharist ritual.

The Ophites have a snake, which they keep in a certain chest—the cista mystica—and which at the hour of their mysteries they bring forth from its cave. They heap loaves upon the table and summon the serpent. Since the cave is open it comes out. It is a cunning beast and, knowing their foolish ways, it crawls up on the table and rolls in the loaves; this they say is the perfect sacrifice. Wherefore, as I have been told, they not only break the bread in which the snake has rolled and administer it to those present, but each one kisses the snake on the mouth, for the snake has been tamed by a spell, or has been made gentle for their fraud by some other diabolical method. And they fall down before it and call this the Eucharist, consummated by the beast rolling in the loaves. And through it, as they say, they send forth a hymn to the Father on high, thus concluding their mysteries. (Epiphanius)

There were also the Cainites who venerated their fratricidal namesake because, “he had denied the bond of blood, and thus had become the first to oppose one of the primary alienating laws of this world: the law of the family.”

It would be wrong to conclude from this, however, that the Cainites preached and practiced fratricide. What they undoubtedly venerated in Cain—and, similarly, what the Ophites, the Sethians, and the Peratae venerated in the snake—was an image, a mythical model, an act of rejection whose import was positive for them because it set itself against the order of an evil world at a time when all things were still possible.

As you might expect, The Cainites also held Judas Iscariot in high regard.

They regarded Judas the traitor as having full cognizance of the truth. He therefore, rather than the other disciples, was able to accomplish the mystery of the betrayal, and so bring about the dissolution of all things both celestial and terrestrial. The Cainites possessed a work entitled The Gospel of Judas, and Irenaeus says that he had himself collected writings of theirs.

While it is certain that the Cainites and other gnostic sects applauded Judas’ betrayal, there are differing views on what they saw as his motive. I could share what little is known of these views from the historical fragments that have come down to us, but I feel it would be more in line with the creative spirit of Gnosticism were I to instead share the fictionalized embellishments of these views from Borges’ short story, “Three Versions of Judas” (1944), whom we have already said was himself a modern day gnostic (it is no stretch to imagine the gnostics of old regarding this fiction as evidence of Borges’ spiritual maturity).

The story takes the form of a scholarly article on the books of Nils Runeberg.

In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the gnostic monasteries.

The first version of Judas:

Skillfully, [Runeberg] begins by pointing out how superfluous was the act of Judas. He observes (as did Robertson) that in order to identify a master who daily preached in the synagogue and who performed miracles before gatherings of thousands, the treachery of an apostle is not necessary. This, nevertheless, occurred. To suppose an error in Scripture is intolerable; no less intolerable is it to admit that there was a single haphazard act in the most precious drama in the history of the world. Ergo, the treachery of Judas was not accidental; it was a predestined deed which has its mysterious place in the economy of the Redemption. Runeberg continues: The Word, when It was made flesh, passed from ubiquity into space, from eternity into history, from blessedness without limit to mutation and death; in order to correspond to such a sacrifice it was necessary that a man, as representative of all men, make a suitable sacrifice. Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas, alone among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purpose of Jesus. The Word had lowered Himself to be mortal; Judas, the disciple of the Word, could lower himself to the role of informer (the worst transgression dishonor abides), and welcome the fire which can not be extinguished. The lower order is a mirror of the superior order, the forms of the earth correspond to the forms of the heavens; the stains on the skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations; Judas in some way reflects Jesus. Thus the thirty pieces of silver and the kiss; thus deliberate self-destruction, in order to deserve damnation all the more. In this manner did Nils Runeberg elucidate the enigma of Judas.

In response to criticism from orthodox theologians, Runeberg modified his doctrine into the second version of Judas:

To impute his crime to cupidity (as some have done, citing John 12:6) is to resign oneself to the most torpid motive force. Nils Runeberg proposes an opposite moving force: an extravagant and even limitless asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, renounced pleasure. With a terrible lucidity he premeditated his offense.

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendor. Judas elected those offenses unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing. He labored with gigantic humility; he thought himself unworthy to be good. Paul has written: Whoever glorifieth himself, let him glorify himself in the Lord; Judas sought Hell because the felicity of the Lord sufficed him. He thought that happiness, like good, is a divine attribute and not to be usurped by men

Some five years later, Runeberg quietly released his second book, Den hemlige Frälsaren, in which the third version of Judas was expounded:

The general argument is not complex, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man for the redemption of the human race; it is reasonable to assume that the sacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any omission. To limit all that happened to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous. To affirm that he was a man and that he was incapable of sin contains a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitas and of humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, confusion, hunger and thirst; it is reasonable to admit that he could also sin and be damned. The famous text “He will sprout like a root in a dry soil; there is not good mien to him, nor beauty; despised of men and the least of them; a man of sorrow, and experienced in heartbreaks” (Isaiah 53:2-3) is for many people a forecast of the Crucified in the hour of his death; for some (as for instance, Hans Lassen Martensen), it is a refutation of the beauty which the vulgar consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, it is a precise prophecy, not of one moment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and eternity, of the Word made flesh. God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible—all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.

Transgressive Transmigration (Sexy Sects)

It has come down to us that the gnostic counter-life reached its antinomian apotheosis in the Cainites and related groups, notably the Carpocratians, who saw purposeful, systematic transgression of moral prohibitions as the path to liberation.

The logical outcome of this teaching is clear: in order to rediscover the pure source of desire and of the true Law, the Carpocratians had to violate the false laws of this vile world everywhere and on all possible occasions. Here, immorality is raised to the status of a rational system, total insubordination is lauded as the road to liberation; a Christian author of the time expressed it in these words: “According to them, man must perpetrate every possible infamy in order to be saved.”

This radical doctrine was wedded to a belief in the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis); liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth was not granted to a soul until it had passed through all possible experiences.

So unbridled is their madness, that they declare they have in their power all things which are irreligious and impious, and are at liberty to practise them; for they maintain that things are evil or good, simply in virtue of human opinion…they interpret these expressions, “Thou shalt not go out thence until thou pay the very last farthing,” as meaning that no one can escape from the power of those angels who made the world, but that he must pass from body to body, until he has experience of every kind of action which can be practised in this world, and when nothing is longer wanting to him, then his liberated soul should soar upwards to that God who is above the angels, the makers of the world. (Irenaeus)

By far the most significant moral battlefield, the most highly-charged in terms of outrage, revolt and liberation, was the sexual arena. Though it can’t be regarded uncritically (see the next section), we do have an eye-witness account of the sexcapades of one gnostic sect.

In about the year 335 AD, St. Epiphanius went to Egypt to study the teachings of the Desert Fathers. He stayed first in Alexandria, and it was there that a unique experience befell him, an experience he deplored, but to which we owe our only eye-witness account of a Gnostic sect. Epiphanius was then twenty years old and, it seems, still naïvely innocent. This explains why he saw not the slightest malice in the proposals of several young and pretty Gnostic women who persuaded him that they alone held the key to his salvation. He followed them, was introduced to members of the sect, became familiar with some of their works which he was given to read, and—probably once only—attended a group ritual. The experience was shattering, and the horrified Epiphanius recovered from it with some difficulty, whereupon he ran to the Bishop of Alexandria to denounce the outrageous scenes he had witnessed.

Here is Epiphanius’ account from the Panarion, a compendium of eighty heresies composed in 374 AD (the name translates to ‘bread basket’ or ‘medicine chest’, reflecting the idea that the book was meant to provide remedies against spiritual diseases; later versions are known simply as Adversus Haereses).

Now in telling these stories and others like them, those who have yoked themselves to Nicolaus’ sect for the sake of “knowledge” have lost the truth and not merely perverted their converts’ minds, but have also enslaved their bodies and souls to fornication and promiscuity. They foul their supposed assembly itself with the dirt of promiscuous fornication and eat and handle both human flesh and uncleanness. I would not dare to utter the whole of this if I were not somehow compelled to from the excess of the feeling of grief within me over the futile things they do—appalled as I am at the mass and depth of evils into which he enemy of mankind, the devil, leads those who trust him, so as to pollute the minds, hearts, hands, mouths, bodies and souls of the persons he has trapped in such deep darkness.

But I shall get right down to the worst part of the deadly description of them—for they vary in their wicked teaching of what they please—which is, first of all, that they hold their wives in common. And if a guest who is of their persuasion arrives, they have a sign that men give women and women give men, a tickling of the palm as they clasp hands in supposed greeting, to show that the visitor is of their religion. (hehe)

And the husband will move away from his wife and tell her—speaking to his own wife!—“Get up, perform the Agape with the brother.” And when the wretched couple has made love—and I am truly ashamed to mention the vile things they do, for as the holy apostle says, “It is a shame even to speak” of what goes on among them. Still, I should not be ashamed to say what they are not ashamed to do, to arouse horror by every means in those who hear what obscenities they are prepared to perform. For after having made love with the passion of fornication in addition, to lift their blasphemy up to heaven, the woman and man receive the man’s emission on their own hands. And they stand with their eyes raised heavenward but the filth on their hands and pray, if you please—the ones they call Stratiotics and Gnostics—and offer that stuff on their hands to the true Father of all, and say, “We offer thee this gift, the body of Christ.” And then they eat it partaking of their own dirt, and say, “This is the body of Christ; and this is the Pascha, because of which our bodies suffer and are compelled to acknowledge the passion of Christ.”2

And so with the woman’s emission when she happens to be having her period—they likewise take the unclean menstrual blood they gather from her, and eat it in common. And “This,” they say, “is the blood of Christ.” And so, when they read, “I saw a tree bearing twelve manner of fruits every year, and he said unto me, ‘This is the tree of life’” in apocryphal writings, they interpret this allegorically of the menstrual flux.

But although they have sex with each other they renounce procreation. It is for enjoyment, not procreation, that they eagerly pursue seduction, since the devil is mocking people like these, and making fun of the creature fashioned by God. They come to climax but absorb the seeds of their dirt, not by implanting them for procreation, but by eating the dirty stuff themselves.

But even though one of them should accidentally implant the seed of his natural emission prematurely and the woman becomes pregnant, listen to a more dreadful thing that such people venture to do. They extract the fetus at the stage which is appropriate for their enterprise, take this aborted infant, and cut it up in a trough with a pestle. And they mix honey, pepper, and certain other perfumes and spices with it to keep from getting sick, and then all the revellers in this herd of swine and dogs assemble, and each eats a piece of the child with his fingers. And now, after this cannibalism, they pray to God and say, “We were not mocked by the archon of lust, but have gathered the brother’s blunder up!” And this, if you please, is their idea of the “perfect Passover.”

And they are prepared to do any number of other dreadful things. Again, whenever they feel excitement within them they soil their own hands with their own ejaculated dirt, get up, and pray stark naked with their hands defiled. The idea is that they can obtain freedom of access to God by a practice of this kind.

Man and woman, they pamper their bodies night and day, anointing themselves, bathing, feasting, spending their time in whoring and drunkenness. And they curse anyone who fasts and say, “Fasting is wrong; fasting belongs to this archon who made the world. We must take nourishment to make our bodies strong, and able to render their fruit in its season.”

Did they actually eat aborted fetuses?

Opinions vary on how much we should trust the reports of Epiphanius and his fellow heresiologists. Here is religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal’s take on the matter:

Scholars have debated whether or not such angry texts reflect actual gnostic behaviors or the hateful fantasies of the polemicists themselves. It is certainly true that religions consistently sexualize their heresies as rhetorical ways of stirring up fear and dismissing their religious competitors as perverts: from the early patristic attacks on the gnostic communities to the Malleus Maleficarum and its medieval witches (who were said to gain their magical powers from actual intercourse with the devil), the history of Christian heresy is also a coded history of (male) sexual phobias and fears projected onto the religious other, particularly women.

I certainly do not want to deny any of this, but my comparative senses as all me that we should take these reports about the mystical utility of sexual practices both suspiciously and seriously. Clearly, an author like Epiphanius or Irenaeus is writing to discredit, humiliate, and, if possible, persecute. When Epiphanius, for example, reported what he claimed to know to the church authorities eighteen members of the Phibionites were thrown out. Obviously, we are not dealing with neutral reporting here.

But neither, I think, are we dealing with complete ignorance. Epiphanius’s knowledge may have been polemical and sensationalistic, but it was also unusually intimate and, more interesting still, strangely familiar to the historian of religions. We know, for example, of other texts, which are definitely not polemical, that discuss or at least imagine the consumption of sexual fluids in both China and India. Interestingly, as already noted, the gnostic reading of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as a kind of divine couple to emulate fits well into the numerous theologies and sexual practices of both Hindu and Buddhist forms of Tantra…

At the very least then it is not unreasonable to trust the reports of orgies and sexual fluid consumption.3 But what about the aborted fetuses—did they, in fact, mix them with honey, pepper, and certain other perfumes and spices and fall upon them as beasts?

While the claims of antinatalism (“why bring a creature into the world only to teach him later on that his sole task is to escape from it as swiftly as possible?”) and abortion practices seem plausible given the Gnostics’ disdain for the world, even these are hearsay supported only by Epiphanius’ almost-certainly-biased testimony (as one counter-example, the Valentinians, it seems, did raise families and lead relatively normal lives). To the ears of most religious scholars (and my own), the accusations of fetal cannibalism strain credulity and read as little more than salacious charges meant to generate outrage.

(…and, well, so what if they did?)

Letter vs. Spirit

Yet still the question remains—if not fetal cannibalism, then how far did the Gnostics truly go? Does the doctrine of transgressive transmigration not justify and ratify “the perpetration of every infamy”? First, it should be noted that there is (again) no independent corroboration of this doctrine outside of antagonistic Christian sources, and even in these sources there is no indication of violent or criminal activity amongst the Gnostics. I have focused here on the antinomianism because it is more scandalous and philosophically interesting, but the truth is that the Gnostics likely tended towards asceticism more than anything else and were almost certainly not going around committing iniquities in the name of liberation from samsara. The idea that one must “experience every kind of action” in order to be saved, if it were truly professed, was very likely meant to be understood metaphorically and symbolically, in the same way that venerating Cain as a mythical model was not to be understood as sanctioning senseless fratricide.

The literal interpretation of this teaching by Christian heresiologists speaks to a very deep philosophical difference the orthodox and the gnostics, one that gets to the heart of what it meant to be a gnostic.

Not all gnostics considered themselves followers of Jesus Christ, but those that did differed considerably from the orthodox in their understanding of who Jesus was, what his teachings were, and what it meant to “follow” him. The Carpocratians, for example, “revered Jesus as an ordinary man, excellent in holiness and virtue, whose soul had not forgotten its origins in the higher sphere of the perfect God” and saw him as someone to emulate or even exceed. Jesus was not the only one held in this regard; Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle were also held up as figures of veneration. Other gnostics agreed that Jesus was divine, but did not believe him to also be human (how could the perfect spirit of God suffer under the power of matter?). Jesus’ human form, some argued, was only an illusion, a kind of spiritual hologram (docetism); others held that while Jesus did have a material body, his body and his spirit were two separate entities, such that no matter how many pains were inflicted on his body his spirit never suffered (separationism).

The Gnostic text Three Forms of First Thought declares that a divine power “put on Jesus” like a garment. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth has Christ say, “I approached a bodily dwelling and evicted the previous occupant, and I went in.”

This seemingly arcane theological difference had important sociopolitical implications. For the orthodox, those individuals who were closest to the God-Man in his life and to whom He appeared after his resurrection (i.e. the Apostles) were the legitimate leaders of the nascent Church. The gnostics, on the other hand, rejected apostolic succession and the entire notion of spiritual authority, believing it antithetical to Jesus’ teachings. Accordingly, they rejected the literalist interpretation of Christ’s resurrection and virgin birth, seeing them as naive misunderstandings, “the faith of fools”. Those who saw Jesus after his death saw him in visions or dreams; the resurrection was not an event in the past, but something anyone could experience for themselves in the here and now.

One gnostic teacher, whose Treatise on Resurrection, a letter to Rheginos, his student, was found at Nag Hammadi, says: “Do not suppose that resurrection is an apparition [phantasia; literally, “fantasy”]. “Instead,” he continues, “one ought to maintain that the world is an apparition, rather than resurrection.” Like a Buddhist master, Rheginos teacher, himself anonymous, goes on to explain that ordinary human existence is spiritual death, but the resurrection is the moment of enlightenment: “It is…the revealing of what truly exists… and a migration (metabole—change, transition) into newness.” This means, he declares, that you can be “resurrected from the dead" right now: “Are you—the real you—mere corruption?…Why do you not examine your own self, and see that you have arisen?”

Another text from Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Philip, expresses the same view, ridiculing ignorant Christians who take the resurrection literally, “Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error.” Ironically then, “it is necessary to rise in this flesh since everything exists in it!”.

These doctrinal differences—Jesus as the Son of God vs. a son of God, as literally vs. metaphorically resurrected—supported two fundamentally conflicting religious orientations. For the Catholic orthodox, Jesus and his teachings were the end; one need only obey the letter of the Law (as interpreted and dictated by the clergy) to be saved. But for the gnostics, Jesus and his teachings were simply a means to an end; one need only achieve gnosis and become the Spirit of the Law in order to be saved.

And what is the Spirit of the Law? After elucidating the Carpocratians’ doctrine of transgressive transmigration, Irenaeus writes the following:

And in their writings we read as follows, the interpretation which they give of their views, declaring that Jesus spoke in a mystery to His disciples and apostles privately, and that they requested and obtained permission to hand down the things thus taught them, to others who should be worthy and believing. We are saved, indeed, by means of faith and love; but all other things, while in their nature indifferent, are reckoned by the opinion of men—some good and some evil, there being nothing really evil by nature.

All of Jesus’ inversions and subversions—the first shall be last and the last shall be first, the meek shall inherit the earth, turn the other cheek, “working” (healing) on the Sabbath, his association with prostitutes and lepers, the washing of his disciples’ feet, the very notion that an executed man could be the Messiah—all of these were expressions or manifestations of one basic commandment:

LOVE OVER LAW, LOVE OVER ALL

Previously in this series:

• “A New World” (1)

• ”A World of Pure Imagination” (2)

• “Gnosticism: Origins” (3)

Heresiologists in general use Gnostikoi to indicate those people who belong to a hairesis or schole that deviates from their own Catholic form of Christianity. This pejorative keying of gnöstikoi with hairesis in a deviant sense is a strategic way that heresiologists mark the Gnostics negatively as outsiders and transgressers of Catholic Christianity. The Gnostics were understood by the heresiologists to be so diverse that Irenaeus compares the Gnostics to mushrooms that have sprung up among the Christians.

To understand the New Gnosticism (A New World, A World of Pure Imagination), we first understand the old: why it was born, why it was so radical, and why it was killed.

My (secondary) sources:

• The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas (1958)

• The Gnostics by Jacques Lacarriere (1973)

• The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels (1989)

• The Gnostic New Age by April D. Deconick (2016)

In general, I will try to let the authors speaks for themselves—there is no need to reinvent the wheel, especially when the wheel has already been made so round by so many (some of the prose in these books, particularly that of Lacarriere, is also quite lovely and worth sharing for that reason alone).

These secondary sources in turn draw on a number of primary sources, which fall into two broad categories.

• The work of early Christian heresiologists. These writings are antagonistic to the Gnostics and therefore unreliable, but in some cases they are the only information we have on a particular sect. Much of what we know about the rituals and practices of the Gnostics comes from these sources; at the end of the next essay, I will address the question of how seriously we should take the more salacious details of these reports.

• The Nag Hammadi Library. The vast majority of gnostic texts that have come down to us, were discovered entirely on accident in the eponymous city in Upper Egypt in 1945. The texts date to the 3rd or 4th centuries and are written in Coptic, but most are based on Greek originals from the 1st and 2nd centuries. Many are non-canonical gospels of some sort that paint a very different picture of Jesus’ life and teachings and the origins of Christianity (the Jesus of the Bible is very much the sanitized Hollywood version of Jesus; the Jesus of the Gnostics’ will be discussed in later essays).

Two specific texts are worth mentioning now as I will sprinkle in some quotes from them in my next post (“Gnosticism: Inversions”).

• “The Gospel of Thomas is very different in tone and structure from the four canonical Gospels. Unlike the canonical Gospels, it is not a narrative account of Jesus’ life; instead, it consists of logia (sayings) attributed to Jesus, sometimes stand-alone, sometimes embedded in short dialogues or parables; Two-thirds of its sayings and 13 of its 16 parables are found in some form in the canonical Gospels.”

• “In other texts often associated with Gnosticism such as the Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip defends a tradition that gives Mary Magdalene a special relationship and insight into Jesus's teaching. The text contains fifteen sayings of Jesus. Seven of these sayings are also found in the canonical gospels, and two are closely related to sayings in the Gospel of Thomas.”

Origins

Jacques Lacarriere summarizes the core beliefs of Gnosticism.

Gnosis is knowledge. And it is on knowledge—not an faith or belief—that the Gnostics rely in order to construct their image of the universe and the inferences they drew from it: a knowledge of the origin of things, of the real nature of matter and flesh, of the destiny of a world to which man belongs as ineluctably as does the matter from which he is constituted. Now this knowledge, born out of their own meditations or from the secret teachings which they claim to have had from Jesus or from mythical ancestors, leads them to see the whole of material creation as the product of a god who is the enemy of man. Viscerally, imperiously, irremissibly, the Gnostic feels life, thought, human and planetary destiny to be a failed work, limited and vitiated in its most fundamental structures. Everything, from the distant stars to the nuclei of our body-cells, carries the materially demonstrable trace of an original imperfection which only Gnosticism and the means it proposes can combat.

But this radical censure of all creation is accompanied by an equally radical certainty which presupposes and upholds it: the conviction that there exists in man something which escapes the curse of this world, a fire, a spark, a light issuing from the true God—that distant, inaccessible stranger to the perverse order of the real universe; and that man’s task is to regain his lost homeland by wrenching himself free of the snares and illusions of the real, to rediscover the original unity, to find again the kingdom of this God who was unknown, or imperfectly known, to all preceding religions.

These convictions were expressed through a radical teaching which held almost all the systems and religions of former times to be null and void. In spite of its links with some philosophies of the time, and apart from minor reservations—since they borrowed certain beliefs indiscriminately from various systems, prophets or sacred books—one can say that Gnosticism is a profoundly original thought, a mutant thought.

In order to appreciate how profoundly original the gnostic mutation was, we must consider the religious milieu in which it first appeared. The spiritualities of the ancient Mediterranean (the Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek systems) all featured a metaphysical orientation that DeConick describes as “servant spirituality”.

…the human being is the god’s property to do with as the god wishes, even arbitrarily. Gods in these systems typically act as humans might, with emotions and passions that result in capricious and indiscriminate behavior on their part. The sole purpose for the creation of the human being is to produce an entity that will relieve the gods of toil. The human is created to serve the gods, not out of love or respect but out of obligation and fear. If the gods are pleased with the service, the humans may not be punished or destroyed. If the gods are displeased, then famine, pestilence, or war could consume them.

No God exemplified this capriciousness and fear-based rule more than YHWH1, yet Judaism also offered a distinct innovation on servant spirituality: the covenant. No longer could YHWH do as he pleased with his mortal vassals; a treaty was ratified with Abraham and his descendants—if they followed a strict code of law (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”, dietary restrictions, etc.), then He was obligated to provide them with a homeland, protection, and progeny.

But what if your God doesn’t hold up his end of the bargain—what then?

…Gnosticism emerged from the life experiences of people who were oppressed and had no hope for political advantage. Roman colonialism and imperialism had left them despondent and demoralized. Facing brutal oppression on a daily basis, they began to question the value of their religious upbringing, which taught them to submit to the will of the king as the representative of the gods, to suffer divine retribution for their sins, and to endure the fate the gods had cast for them. And so they rebelled and began searching for a truth beyond the authority of kings and gods, and the first gnostics were born.

This countercultural spirituality was novel and radical, and because of that highly attractive—it was not long before gnostic spirituality went viral, engaging the conventional religions in ways that turned them inside out. This new spirituality migrated into Greco-Egyptian circles of the Hermetics and the Jewish circles of the Sethians. It moved through Palestine, Samaria, and Asia Minor where it interfaced with emergent Christianity in the letters of Paul and the Gospel of John. By the second century, a variety of gnostic thinkers had interacted with Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy, ancient medical knowledge, as well as the craft of ancient astrology and magic. The result of this religious interchange is the emergence of a large number of unique gnostic religious movements with wildly networked mythologies, doctrinal systems, and ceremonies. (Deconick)

As the preceding passage alludes to, ancient Greek spirituality was also a major influence on the Gnostic mutation. In Orphism and the mystery religions we have many of the ideas and practices that would come to characterize Gnosticism: an immortal soul in need of liberation, mysticism, asceticism, and initiatory rites.

The Orphics were an ascetic sect; wine, to them, was only a symbol, as, later, in the Christian sacrament. The intoxication that they sought was that of “enthusiasm,” of union with the god. They believed themselves, in this way, to acquire mystic knowledge not obtainable by ordinary means. This mystical element entered into Greek philosophy with Pythagoras…From Pythagoras Orphic elements entered into the philosophy of Plato, and from Plato into most later philosophy that was in any degree religious. (Bertrand Russell)

Gnosticism has been characterized as an “acute Hellenization of Christianity”, or simply “Platonism gone wild”. Broadly speaking, both Platonism and Gnosticism view life as a form of incarceration (à la the Allegory of the Cave) that can be transcended through psycho-spiritual purification. This purification, or katharsis, leads ultimately to anamnesis: a remembrance of one’s divine nature and origin in the heavenly realm of the Forms, what some gnostics called the pleroma.

The platonic doctrine of emanation and restitution held that the soul has its origin in an eternal, divine substance and will return to it again. The implication was that human beings have an inborn capacity for knowing the divine: they are not dependent on God revealing himself to them (as in classic monotheism, where the creature is dependent on the Creator’s initiative), nor is their capacity for knowledge limited to the bodily senses and natural reason (as in science and rational philosophy), but the very nature of their souls allows them direct access to the supreme, eternal substance of Being. In the science of religion, this inner intuitive ‘knowledge’ is known as gnosis.
(Wouter Hanegraaff)

Gods and Cosmologies

The central and most distinctive feature of gnostic belief is its understanding (or non-understanding) of God. Unlike the god(s) of the aforementioned servant spiritualities, the supreme God of the gnostics is neither the creator nor ruler of our corrupted cosmos. God is absolutely transmundane, utterly remote from creation and hidden from all creatures and perfectly ineffable, “Knowledge of Him requires supra-natural revelation and illumination and even then can hardly be expressed in anything but negative terms”.

The beginning and end of the paradox that is gnostic religion is the unknown God himself who, unknowable on principle, because He is the “other” to everything known, is yet the object of a knowledge and even asks to be known. He as much invites as he thwarts the quest for knowing him; in the failure of reason and speech he becomes revealed; and the very account of the failure yields the language for naming him. He who according to Valentinus is the Abyss, according to Basilides even “the non-being God”; whose acosmic essence negates all object-determinations as they derive from the mundane realm; whose transcendence transcends any sublimity posited by extension from the here, and invalidates all symbols of him thus devised; who, in brief, strictly defies description—he is yet enunciated in the gnostic message, communicated in gnostic speech, predicated in gnostic praise. The knowledge of him itself is the knowledge of his unknowability… (Jonas)

He-Who-Is is ineffable. No principle knew him, no authority, no subjection, nor any creature from the foundation of the world, except he alone. For he is immortal and eternal, having no birth; for everyone who has birth will perish. He is unbegotten, having no beginning; for everyone who has a beginning has an end. No one rules over him. He has no name; for whoever has a name is the creation of another. He is unnameable. He has no human form; for whoever has human form is the creation of another. He has his own semblance - not like the semblance we have received and seen, but a strange semblance that surpasses all things and is better than the totalities. It looks to every side and sees itself from itself. He is infinite; he is incomprehensible. He is ever imperishable (and) has no likeness (to anything). He is unchanging good. He is faultless. He is everlasting. He is blessed. He is unknowable, while he (nonetheless) knows himself. He is immeasurable. He is untraceable. He is perfect, having no defect. He is imperishably blessed. He is called ‘Father of the Universe’.
(Epistle of Eugnostos)

If the He-Who-Is played no role in Creation, how then was this cosmic prison constructed? Answers vary widely across different sects, but a central mythic structure can be discerned: the world was created by a lowly being descended from the Ineffable One. This being, commonly referred to as the Demiurge (the “craftsman”, a term borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus), was either ignorant of the Father and thought himself to be the highest being, or was malevolently disposed towards Him, and therefore towards us, those fallen beings to whom He gave a share of His divinity.

The leading Gnostics displayed pronounced intellectual individualism, and the mythological imagination of the whole movement was incessantly fertile. Non-conformism was almost a principle of the gnostic mind and was closely connected with the doctrine of the sovereign “spirit” as a source of direct knowledge and illumination. The great system builders like Ptolemaeus, Basilides, and Mani erected ingenious and elaborate speculative structures which are original creations of individual minds yet at the same time variations and developments of certain main themes shared by all: these together form what we may call the simpler “basic myth”. (Deconick)

It may be helpful to consider one specific example of such a mythical narrative. Jorge Luis Borges, who studied the Gnostics and wrote of them factually and fictionally (and whom we might rightly call a modern-day Gnostic), describes the cosmogony of Basilides, an early gnostic leader who is said to have taught in Alexandria from 117 to 138 AD.

In the beginning of Basilides’ cosmogony there is a God. This divinity majestically lacks a name, as well as an origin; thus his approximate name, pater innatus. His medium is the pleroma or plenitude, the inconceivable museum of Platonic archetypes, intelligible essences, and universals. He is an immutable God, but from his repose emanated seven subordinate divinities who, condescending to action, created and presided over a first heaven. From this first demiurgic crown came a second, also with angels, powers, and thrones, and these formed another, lower heaven, which was the symmetrical duplicate of the first. This second conclave saw itself reproduced in a third, and that in another below, and so on down to 365. The lord of the lowest heaven is the God of the Scriptures, YHWH, and his fraction of divinity is nearly zero. He and his angels founded this visible sky, amassed the material earth on which we are walking, and later apportioned it. Rational oblivion has erased the precise fables this cosmogony attributes to the origin of mankind, but the example of other contemporary imaginations allows us to salvage something, in however vague and speculative a form…In the similar system of Satornilus, heaven grants the worker-angels a momentary vision, and man is fabricated in its likeness, but he drags himself along the ground like a viper until the Lord, in pity, sends him a spark of his power. What is important is what is common to gnostic narratives: our rash or guilty improvisation out of unproductive matter by a deficient divinity. (“A Defense of Basilides the False”)

The Alien God

Jonas argues that the “obscure inventions” and “fruitless multiplications” of gnostic cosmologies (and there are some more byzantine than Basilides’) were meant to emphasize the labyrinthe nature of the world.

You see, O child, how many elements, how many ranks of demons, how many concatenations and revolutions of stars we have to work our way through in order to hasten to the one and only God. (Corpus Hermeticum)

In a similar vein, gnostic literature often compares the human condition to that of a stranger lost in a strange land. According to the gnostics, we are aliens in both senses of the word, foreigners and extra-terrestrials, our fundamental experience in this world one of alienation and bewilderment. Our true home, wherein the Father resides (whom Marcion sometimes calls the “Alien God”), is a divine hyper-dimension, utterly transcendent to this fallen realm (i.e. the pleroma).

The alien is that which stems from elsewhere and does not belong here. To those who do belong here it is strange, unfamiliar and incomprehensible…The stranger who does not know the ways of the foreign land wanders about lost; however if he learns its ways too well then he forgets that he is a stranger and gets lost in a different sense by succumbing to the lure of the alien world and becoming estranged from his own origin…The recollection of his own alienness, the recognition of his place of exile for what it is, is the first step back; the awakened homesickness is the beginning of the return. (Jonas)

Often the experience of mystery cannot be confined to the conceptual categories in which theology barters meaning. In this sense, every mystical act is itself a shift in paradigms and the stuff of “heresy”...Those who have been guided into the annihilatory experience know that new theology continually unfolds both within a tradition and as the breakthrough of tradition. They have offered us rare glimpses of a God who not only celebrates new ideas and new revelations, but who births them as well.

If you read the previous essay then you will know that I have joined the illustrious ranks of history’s doomsday prophets. Truly, I wish it were not so, but alas—it has come to my attention that the End is nigh and the World as we know it will die. There is a silver lining, however. Our silly sad little species will survive, if barely, and a New World will rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old.

What is ending is not this graven earth or mankind then, but the ‘World’, by which I mean that vast architecture of thought (of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, norms, values, and -isms) which structures and supports a civilization. In addition to my apocalyptic visions, I have also been granted a glimpse of the New World to come. It will retain many (but not all) of the same -isms that undergird modernity (humanism, secularism, materialism, liberalism, individualism, capitalism, moral relativism, empiricism, scientism), but they will be remodeled and repurposed into a new cultural superstructure, one founded on a resurrected and reimagined form of Gnosticism.

Worlds are not born in a day, nor by one woman, and the Gnostic World will be no exception. But someone must lay the cornerstone and I, Bacon, it seems, am to be that One.

Gilles Quispel, the Dutch historian of Gnosticism and friend of C. G. Jung, once noted that there are three major strands of Western culture: faith, a way of knowing the world and oneself via religious doctrines; reason, a form of knowledge deriving, at least in the West, from Greek philosophy and logic that relies on analytic and linear thought, empirical sense data, and doubt to arrive at the objective truth of things; and, finally, gnosis, a form of intuitive, visionary, or mystical knowledge that privileges the primacy of personal experience and the depths of the self over the claims of both faith and reason, traditionally in order to acquire some form of liberation or salvation from a world seen as corrupt or fallen.

The logic of my prophecy is simple: if antiquity were the Age of Faith and modernity the Age of Reason, then it would stand to reason that the coming age will be the Age of Gnosis.

But what exactly is this third strand of culture that will serve as the foundation of the New World? The renowned religious historian Ioan Culianu provides some clarifying examples of what it means for something or someone to be ‘gnostic’:

Not only Gnosis was gnostic, but the catholic authors were gnostic, the neoplatonic too; Reformation was gnostic, Communism was gnostic, Nazism was gnostic, liberalism, existentialism and psychoanalysis were gnostic too; modern biology was gnostic, Blake, Yeats, Kafka, Rilke, Proust, Joyce, Musil, Hesse, and Thomas Mann were gnostic. From very authoritative interpreters of Gnosis, I learned further that science is gnostic and superstition is gnostic; power, counter-power, and lack of power are gnostic; left is gnostic and right is gnostic; Hegel is gnostic and Marx is gnostic; Freud is gnostic and Jung is gnostic; all things and their opposite are equally gnostic.

In case that didn’t clear things up for you, here are a number of definitions and reflections on gnosis and gnosticism that might be of help:

Gnōsis is a Greek word meaning “knowledge”, coming from the Indo-European root gno from which the English know and Sanskrit jñāna is derived. Gnosis, according to Quispel, was a term used in Late Antiquity to designate “an intuitive awareness of hidden mysteries as opposed to discursive, analytical knowledge.” (“What is Gnosis? A critical appraisal of a vague category”; Earney)

[Gnosis] refers not just to secret knowledge, but also to knowledge that transcends ratiocinative, discursive, or dualistic forms of knowledge. Gnosis as such is not opposed to rationality, or irrational, but rather includes and transcends ratiocination and dualistic oppositions, including subject-object dualism. (“What is Gnosis? An exploration”; Versluis, 2019)

The fact that Gnostics look for truth ‘beyond reason’ has made them look like obscurantists in the eyes of rationalist philosophy and science; and the fact that they believe to have personal access to divine revelation has evoked the suspicion that they are bypassing the authority of established religion and its collectively recognized sources of revelation. In short: those who have relied to a considerable extent on this third approach tend to be suspected of irrationalism and excessive individualism, while they in turn blame their opponents for relying on religious authoritarianism and excessive rationalism. (“The Study of Western Esotericism”, Wouter Hanegraaff).

Gnosis is an esoteric, spiritual knowledge of God and of the divine origin and destination of the essential core of the human being which is based on revelation and inner enlightenment, the possession of which involves a liberation from the material world which holds humans captive.
(Gnostic Religion in Antiquity, Roelof van den Broek)

Historians of religion (particularly in Europe) have long used the term “Gnosis” to designate simply any religion where salvation is incumbent upon obtaining special knowledge…gnostic religion or spirituality is distinct from the phenomenon of ancient Gnosticism, a peculiarly dualistic instantiation of “gnosis.” In fact, it is distinct from all religion, since it transcends religious and even temporal boundaries. “Gnosis” stretches from antiquity to the present day; its foundation is individual revelatory experience of the ineffable God. (“Gnosticism, Gnostics, and Gnosis”; Burns, 2018)

The Gnostic compositions were forbidden because they promoted a type of spirituality so revolutionary that ancient religion was turned on its head. The Gnostics were the first to view traditional religion as the opiate of the masses, the drug that keeps people satisfied to serve the gods and their kings as obedient slaves and vassals…According to the Gnostics, the essential human self, our authentic being, is nothing less than God’s very own life essence, his own spirit captured deep within the human soul, where it lies dormant, unexpressed and forgotten. It lies there pained, waiting to be awakened, cultivated, and reunited with the divine source of all.
(The Gnostic New Age, April Deconick)

Poetically speaking, gnostic thought recognizes that religious expressions function as symbols and, as such, are simultaneously true and false, that they both reveal and conceal. Reductionism and revelation lie down together here in a (post)modern form of what the Sufi tradition understood as the paradox of the veil (hijab), that is, the psychological and linguistic necessity of cultural forms that reveal the divine light (which is in itself beyond all representation) precisely by concealing it behind veiled symbols and signs. Within the paradox of the veil, that is, within any linguistic system, there can be no revealing without a simultaneous concealing. Every appearance of true reality (al-hagg) is also a relativism. Every religious truth is a literal lie. Given the inherently symbolic and referential nature of language itself, it can be no other way.
(The Serpent’s Gift, Jeffrey Kripal)

To summarize: gnosis is a form of emancipatory, experiential-existential knowledge beyond conceptuality, rationality, and duality. This knowledge, however, can be expressed imaginatively and metaphorically, through language, symbols, and rituals that both conceal and reveal. This knowledge is, by its nature, subversive to all worldly powers who would literalize and dogmatize the divine. For this reason, gnostic traditions are often persecuted and forced into hiding (into esoteric countercultures).

I imagine many readers will balk at the very notion of prophecy.

On what basis, you might wonder, do I claim such foreknowledge? Was the prophecy communicated in some (perhaps drug-induced) altered state of consciousness? Was it whispered to me, tenderly, by a disembodied voice as I spiraled into a desperate psychosis?

Firstly, my mental health is immaculate. I am exceedingly, even excessively, well-adjusted; my grasp on reality has never been tighter. It is the rarest of souls who sees the World more clearly than I do now. Secondly, while yes there is occasional recreational drug use, the prophecy is typically (but not exclusively) revealed when I am more sober than even the birds, in the most average and normal state of mind. In fact, had I not known better, I might have mistaken my prophetic vision for mere thought and imagination.

In Against Heresies, Bishop Irenaeus complains that, “every one of them generates something new every day, according to his ability; for no one is considered initiated among them unless he develops some enormous fictions!”. He charges that “they boast that they are the discoverers and inventors of this kind of imaginary fiction” and accuses the gnostics of creating new forms of mythical poetry. Most offensive, from his point of view, is that the gnostics admit that nothing supports their writings except their own intuition. When challenged, “they either mention mere human feelings, or else refer to the harmony that can be seen in creation”.

Not in cataclysm—no, nothing so dramatic—but a slow-motion civilizational collapse, a gradual, even gentle, slip into chaos and madness and darkness.

A death which can not be construed as a series of unfortunate events, but one that is a failure of our failings, our hubris and cowardice, our prejudice and avarice.

A death which makes our existence seem the most Sisyphean affair, an endless hopeless struggle for liberation from the human condition.

Not a physical death, but a philosophical and spiritual death.

Rehearse your death every morning and night. Only when you constantly live as though already a corpse (jōjū shinimi) will you be able to find freedom.

A species absurdly and pathetically ensnared in self-delusion, a twitching spider caught in its own tangled web. Failed beings, an evolutionary abortion.

War, plague, pestilence, starvation, ecological devastation, nuclear winter, the wailing and gnashing of teeth. A world forsaken by its gods.

And what is left when the world has been lost?

That which is not of this world: memory, fantasy, dream, myth.

Like the first law of thermodynamics myths are not created nor destroyed, only altered in form. Myths are eternal in this way: they’ve preceded us and will outlive us too.

Memory is generally considered a subclass of the imagination, as it allows us to picture what is no longer the case or what we are no longer experiencing. Just as our individual sense of identity depends upon how we remember our life (if we lose our memory, we literally no longer know who we are), likewise our sense of collective identity depends upon how we remember our common history. However, our memory is not a photographic plate. Like all other forms of imagination, it is an active faculty that continually recreates the past in the very process of preserving it…

In “Religion and the historical imagination: Esoteric tradition as poetic invention” (2017), Wouter J. Hanegraaff contrasts history (‘what actually happened in the past’) with mnemohistory (‘the history of how we remember the past’) and argues that history in the pre-modern era was as much remembered as it was imagined, as much myth as it was reality.

Historical narratives with a high degree of poeticity tend to be remembered and have an impact on readers even if they are factually inaccurate, while narratives with a low degree of poeticity tend to be disregarded or forgotten even if they are factually accurate.

The Story of Ancient Wisdom, as Hanegraaff calls it, is perhaps the foremost example of a poetical narrative that exerted a powerful influence on history even though it were not entirely factual. Here is how he tells it:

Once upon a time, in very ancient days long before the birth of Christianity, the Light of true spiritual wisdom began to shine in the East. Some say it all started in Egypt, with Hermes Trismegistus; others say it began with Zoroaster in Persia; yet others say that it originated with Moses among the Hebrews. But wherever its ultimate beginning may have been, its true source was God himself, who caused the Light of wisdom to be born in the darkness of human ignorance. The Light now began to spread, carried forward through the ages by a long succession of divinely inspired teachers, until it finally reached Plato and his school in Athens. Now Plato was much more than just a rational philosopher: he was a divinely inspired teacher of wisdom. His dialogues did not present any new and original message either: they merely reformulated the ancient and universal religion of spiritual Truth and Light. Henceforth the true wisdom was carried forward by a succession of Platonic teachers and philosophers, and this tradition finally culminated in the religion of Jesus Christ. When Christianity began to conquer the world, this should have been the glorious fulfilment of the ancient divine revelation. However, something went terribly wrong. The Christian message was perverted and misunderstood. As the Church was triumphant over its opponents, Christians were progressively blinded by power and the pursuit of worldly pleasures. And so, because of their impurity, they slowly lost touch with the ancient core of all true religion. They no longer understood that the gospel was meant to be the culmination and fulfilment of pagan wisdom. Instead, they began to see all pagans as their mortal enemies – practitioners of idolatry and worshipers of demons, dangerous agents of darkness who must be annihilated in God’s name. The Platonic philosophers themselves, and their ancient Oriental predecessors (those who had been the first carriers of the Light) were now perceived as teachers of the dark arts instead. And so it was that the ancient wisdom declined and its true nature was forgotten. There came a time when the leaders of the Church themselves had descended to the level of common criminals, and the very institution of the Church had become an embarrassment to all true Christians. It was at this darkest moment of history, when all seemed lost, that God himself intervened, and after the long darkness of Winter, a new Spring arrived. By the mysterious workings of Divine Providence, the manuscripts of Plato and the ancient teachers of Oriental Wisdom were rediscovered and restored to the light of day. They traveled all the way to Italy, the heartland of the Church, and were translated into Latin and the vernacular languages. Just when they were most needed, due to the miracle of printing, all the sources of ancient wisdom could now be read and studied by the multitudes, more widely than could ever have been imagined at any previous period of time. And so it is that at this darkest moment of decline and forgetfulness, God reminded humanity of the true sources of Wisdom, Truth, and Light. Surely this is the beginning of a new Reformation that will purge the Church of its errors and usher in a New Age of the Spirit. Behold the Golden Times are returning!

Hanegraaff continues:

This is the essential story that Italian humanists such as Marsilio Ficino and his many followers were telling themselves and their readers by the end of the fifteenth century. In discussing such narratives as scholars, we sometimes risk forgetting that we are not just dealing with a theory, a theological doctrine, or an intellectual argument about history – in short, with something that neatly fits our own preferred order of academic discourse. The narrative may contain, or refer to, all those elements; but at the most basic level we are dealing with a story that is meant to speak directly to the imagination and engage the emotions. I want to insist that this is not a trivial observation.

The core narrative of Ancient Wisdom had a very strong impact on the historical imagination of mainstream intellectuals from the fifteenth to at least the eighteenth century, and after its decline in mainstream academic discourse, it has continued to do so in esoteric milieus up to the present. Its remarkable power to influence discourse can certainly not be explained just by the rational arguments or historical evidence that its defenders have tried to muster in support. First and foremost, that power resides in the fact that it is a good story.

He then asks what is so appealing about The Story of Ancient Wisdom—in other words, what are the sources of its poeticity—and settles on two factors:

(1) It is marked by a clear ethical dualism, formulated not just in the somewhat abstract and always debatable terminology of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ but visualized directly as a battle of Light against Darkness. If the story succeeds in engaging its listeners, they will identify with the Lightbearers who have been working so hard to keep the true knowledge alive, while feeling negative emotions (sadness, defiance, anger) about the forces of darkness and ignorance.

(2) Successive historical events are framed as a journey or adventure through history, in which the protagonists suffer all kinds of setbacks but also experience unexpected moments of salvation. If the story appeals to us, then we are glad to watch the sages carrying on the Light and handing it over to their successors from generation to generation; we are shocked, disappointed, and worried when the mission is betrayed by those who should have known better; we are appalled at the blindness of those who oppose the Light; we feel we want to come to the rescue of the Lightbearers who are so unjustly accused; we feel greatly relieved at the unexpected arrival of help from above; and we are inspired by hope that the forces of darkness and ignorance will not have the final word but the Light will prevail.

If history is the medium of our imprisonment, then history must become the medium of our liberation (to rise, we must push against the ground to which we have fallen).

In order to understand the ideas and currents of thought that will animate the new Renaissance, we must imagine the lived experiences of the underworld men and women. We must imagine what horrors they will have endured, what misery and woe they will have known, how deep and profound their disillusionment. Naturally, there will be some who return, groveling and sniveling, to the religions and ideologies of old, however many will suffer a catastrophic and irrevocable loss of faith in all cultural forms from the Before Times.

It is there, in the hearts and minds of those for whom the world truly died, that a New Life will flower, one animated by a simple, childly logic: if our previous ways of thinking and acting led to the Fall, then let us think and act inversely and reversely that we may Rise.

George Costanza: Why did it all turn out like this for me? I had so much promise. I was personable, I was bright. Oh, maybe not academically speaking, but...I was perceptive. I always know when someone’s uncomfortable at a party. It became very clear to me today, that every decision I've ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, something to eat...It’s all been wrong.

Jerry Seinfeld: If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.

George Costanza: Yes, I will do the opposite. I used to sit here and do nothing, and regret it for the rest of the day, so now I will do the opposite, and I will do something!

The flowering of this counter-life will in turn give rise to a philosophical movement that might be known as Hereticalism, whose core imperative might be expressed as follows: let us resurrect all that was condemned and suppressed; let us raise up what was forced underground; let us revive the thought of those blazing souls whose bodies and books were burned.

From this cultural milieu a new renaissance narrative will emerge and take center stage: If the last two thousand years were dominated by the Christian world-system, then let Gnosticism, Christianity’s long-vanquished arch-nemesis, be the foundation of the next two thousand.

There is one further aspect of the underworld scene that we must consider in order to truly grasp the power of the Gnostic Renaissance narrative. Having lived through the senseless suicide of a global civilization, the disillusionment and disaffection of the underworlders will take on a radical, metaphysical character. They (those who will be the become the bearers of the Light) will feel existence to be a desperate incarceration from which there is no escape.

Man is so fundamentally conditioned by his upbringing, by his social environment, by the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil that there’s really nothing he can do to make himself any better. And everything that he does do is simply a manifestation of this same conditioning, like a wolf masquerading in sheep’s clothing. Therefore, if the human being cannot transform himself, if he is to be transformed at all, he must rely on some power greater than his own. (Terence Mckenna)

This, however, is exactly what Gnosticism promises: liberation from the human condition through mystical insight into one’s divine nature (through gnosis).

To the Gnostics of old this world is an immense prison guarded by malevolent powers on high, a place of exile where the fallen and forgetful divine spark dwelling deep within the pneumatikos (the “spiritual man”) languishes in ignorance and bondage, sealed fast within the coarse involucrum of an earthly body. The spiritual experience at the heart of the Gnostic story of salvation was, as Hans Jonas puts it, the “call of the stranger God”: a call heard inwardly that awakens the spirit from its obliviousness to its own nature, and that summons it home again from this hostile universe and back again to the divine pleroma—the “fullness”—from which it departed in a time before time.

Thus the spiritual temper of Gnosticism is, first, a state of profound suspicion—a persistent paranoia with regard to the whole of apparent reality, a growing conviction that one is the victim of unseen but vigilant adversaries who have trapped one in an illusory existence—and then one of cosmic despair, and finally a serenity achieved through final detachment from the world and unshakable certitude in the reality of a spiritual home beyond its darkness. The deepest impulse of the Gnostic mind is a desire to discover that which has been intentionally hidden, to find out the secret that explains and overcomes all the disaffections and disappointments of the self, and thereby to obtain release. It is a disposition of the soul to which certain individuals are prone in any age, but one that only under special conditions can become much more than a private inclination.

There were, so far as we can ascertain, no Gnostic churches or temples in the ancient world. This is no religion for the orthodox or the many, no bowing down to a King or Lord, and hence a metaphysical monarchy in disguise. Rather, Gnosticism is an esoteric religion of the intellectuals, a spirituality for the assertive soul, the unapologetic knower…There is a quality of unprecedentedness about Gnosticism, an atmosphere of originality that disconcerts the orthodox of any faith. Creativity and imagination, irrelevant and even dangerous to dogmatic religion, are essential to Gnosticism. When I encounter this quality in something, I recognize it instantly, and an answering, cognitive music responds in me.