A World of Pure Imagination
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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.
Jesus said, “Show me the stone which the builders have rejected.
That one is the cornerstone.” (The Gospel of Thomas, saying 66)
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).
Jesus said, “I’ll give you what no eye has ever seen, no ear has ever heard, no hand has ever touched, and no human mind has ever thought.”
(The Gospel of Thomas, saying 17)
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”.
This, I think, is in the end what finally separates the gnostic intellectual from the strict rationalist—a real energetic awareness that thought at its most intensely creative is often experienced as coming from elsewhere, as if it were being literally empowered by non-ordinary energies or forces that temporarily overwhelm the thinker in order to bring new ideas, images, or words into the field of awareness. This is the realm, of course, of what is commonly called inspiration, yet another example of a category with clear religious roots (literally, “en-spirited” or “breathed in”) that has now been secularized and rationalized but retains nevertheless many of its original religious connotations. The themes of inspiration and creativity, in other words, are fundamentally gnostic categories to the extent that they combine both rational and ecstatic dimensions.
“They are to be blamed for describing feelings and mental tendencies,
and ascribing the things that happen to human beings, whatever they recognize themselves as experiencing, to the divine Word.”
(St. Irenaeus)
so what's the contemporary folk version of gnosis? many of these definitions seem to talk about gnosis as an almost theurgical concept: reaching for these exalted states, awash in white light, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth... what about the gnosis of Lovecraft, Crowley, Forte, Keel, Dick, Thompson, Romero, Barker, Giger, Ligotti? the grubby, visceral kind... should that have its own term, or do we just need to widen the aperture on the High Church version?
Well, now I see you are using an expanded conception of gnosis. The earlier post though seemed limited to the schools of gnosis claiming the world is corrupted and there is an evil demigod trapping us in this one, which just propagates dualism and the pernicious two-world mythology. This non-dualistic understanding of gnosis, gnosis as process, as actual gnosis, I can jibe with (not that you give two shits (nor should) about my random-person-on-the-internet-opinion). Please continue the prophecies, fine sir.