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GNOSTIC REBELLIOUSNESS But the great black anti-suns, wells of truth in the essential conspiracy, in the gray veil of the hump-backed sky, come and go and suck one another in, and men call them ABSENCES. Today when we read the catalogue of the various forms of human exploitation and alienation, as presented in the most politically committed publications, one fact immediately becomes apparent: such are the limitations of ideology (the new mythology of our age) that this necessary denunciation, this indispensable catalogue of human injustice is solely concerned with its social and political aspects. In spite of what half a century of socialist experimentation has shown us, we persist in believing that a change limited exclusively to the politico-economic domain and to the means of production can resolve the problems that confront us. It seems a simple, obvious, and irrefutable fact that today, as in the time of the Gnostics, the alienation of man is global; it is also true that the economic, social, and political causes of alienation should be removed first. But far from ending there, the problem begins precisely at the moment when this first hurdle has been cleared. If I try to imagine people like Basilides, Valentinus or Carpocrates (Gnostics of whom we shall speak in detail later) living today, I see them as either totally detached from all political considerations, or, on the contrary, totally involved in the revolutionary struggle of our times (these two postures being, for these men, two identical forms of the same asceticism). I see them on the streets, handing out pamphlets signed The Proletariat of the Stars, but also taking the struggle further, to limits almost inconceivable nowadays (since for them a truly revolutionary combat could be nothing less than total), waging war against the very nature of our presence here on earth. Modifying the means of production, trans- forming the nature of economic exchanges and the distribution of wealth, without tying these changes in with an asceticism operating conjointly on man's mental structures, could achieve nothing more in their eyes than changing one master for another, and therefore one alienating factor for another, all the more dangerous in that people would believe they had abolished the causes of alienation. The Gnostics were no less aware of social injustices than other people, and I am convinced that they fully recognized how infuriating their stance must have been to a mind sensitive to the material miseries of the world. But, despite their detachment from society, they were, after all, the only ones who had any inkling of the political implications of their position. For what were the* Christians doing during these centuries? As soon as the Church was accepted and recognized, and the Roman Empire itself had become Christian, they began to wield their power through repressive measures (they who had once been martyred themselves now made martyrs of their old enemies), thus giving still further credence to the Gnostic contention that all power - whatever kind it might be - is a source of alienation. Moreover, the Christians were to 'capitalize' - to use our contemporary jargon - on the ferment of revolt against human misery, by persuading the poor and the exploited that they would take first place in heaven, so that from the perspective of Christian eschatology heaven appears to be a sort of azure field in which there will be an almost unimaginable settling of accounts, beside which the prophetic images of the Apocalypse arc but pale shadows. The Christians, with their mythology of punishment and reward, have totally evaded the daily problems of their times, and, right down to our own age, have perpetuated acceptance of social injustices and submission to established authority (with good reason, since this authority was vested in them). The Gnostics, how- ever, never ceased to preach opposition to the powers-that-be, whether Christian or pagan, since for them there was no difference between the two. Christianity postponed the solution of immediate problems sine die - and here the expression is particularly apt, as it conforms to eschatological hopes of abolishing time. The Gnostics, on the contrary, were the only ones to adopt a logical attitude - a radical and onerous one, but nevertheless consistent with their deepest feeling: the conviction that as thinking hominids they were totally alienated creatures, right down to their very encephalic cells, and condemned to lifelong enslavement, from which only a full awareness; of man's inert and slumbering condition could save them. So, to have done with this problem and give an exact definition of Gnostic thought - as I understand it, at least - all institutions, laws, religions, churches and powers are nothing but a sham and a trap, the perpetuation of an age-old deception. Let us sum up: we are exploited on a cosmic scale, we are the proletariat of the demiurge-executioner, slaves exiled into a world that is viscerally subjected to violence; we are the dregs and sediment of a lost heaven, strangers on our own planet. To be a stranger is, in its basic meaning, to appear as strange to others. I am not making puns here, for it is the innate strangeness of man which led the Gnostics to reflect on his origin, and on his terrestrial status. They used this term to express the disparity between the nature of the true man of the hyper-world and the abortive creature, the imitation man, that the demiurge managed to fashion and throw down into this circle of dark fire. The stranger's condition is inherently false. One cannot be a stranger except in relation to a non-stranger. Now in ancient times, he who was the opposite of a stranger - in political, civic and human terms-was the autochthon. The autochthon is the Athenian born in Athens, the Alexandrian born in Alexandria, in short, the citizen, but he is more than that: he is the man born of the very soil, bound to his native land by unbreakable biological bonds. Every stranger is, in some sense, the autochthon of another land. The fundamental difference that separates the Gnostics from their contemporaries is that, for them, their native 'soil' is not the earth, but that lost heaven which they keep vividly alive in their memories: they are the autochthons of another world. Hence their feeling of having fallen onto our earth like inhabitants from a distant planet, of having strayed into the wrong galaxy, and their longing to regain their true cosmic homeland, the luminous hyper-world that shimmers beyond the great nocturnal barrier. Their uprooting is not merely geographical but planetary. And to treat them as aliens in the political or civic sense - which is what happened - could be nothing but an absurd misunderstanding, like giving a Martian a temporary residence visa. For the Gnostics, all men were in the same condition, although they were the only ones who knew it, and the human community as a whole is implicated in this universal exile, this galactic diversion that has caused us to be dumped on the mud of planet earth. The Gnostics must have felt this exile even more acutely in that they themselves constituted marginal communities, strangers or 'foreigner in the narrow sense of the term, in the heart of a whole humanity of foreigners. The idea of calling oneself Egyptian, Greek, Roman or Syrian must have seemed ridiculous to them. Moreover, it is no mere chance that the Gnostic communities developed in the only cities of that period which were cosmopolitan in character: Alexandria, Antioch and Rome. One cannot imagine Gnostics in Gaul or Germania. Their own alien condition could freely nourish itself in these towns where the most diverse ethnic groups intermingled, and where the most essential transformations of the Mediterranean world took place between the first and the fourth centuries AD. Here there was an historical humus which justified the Gnostic feeling of exile, of being a planetary foreigner: 'I am in the world but not of the world' is the most basic Gnostic formula. It summarizes perfectly the feeling of being relegated to the lower depths of the cosmos, of living on a planet, and in a fleshly body, made of molecules that have agglomerated in the most dubious combinations, in complex and inextricable amalgams which, in some fashion, constitute the material support of our spiritual reclusion. The sadistic and perverse demiurge responsible for this world and our existence in it must have racked his brains to find these incredible combinations of molecules, these indissoluble aggregates of matter, which make any escape from the carnal and planetary prison impossible or, at the least, very aleatory. So the problem is simple, and one begins to understand how the Gnostics saw it: man, then, is a lifelong exile on a planet which is a prison for all mankind; he lives in a body which is a prison for the soul; he is the autochthon of a lost and invisible world. These images or definitions seem to be constant repetitions. In the texts describing man's condition, the Gnostics repeat themselves endlessly, as if here again they are battering at the walls of a prison of words. The terms they use to describe the world here below resolve themselves into a few formulae which reappear over and over again: a 'hermetically sealed fortress,' 'prison,' 'cloak,' 'slough,' 'desert.' It is the same for the human body: it is a 'tomb,' a 'gross garment,' a 'chain,' a 'trespasser,' a 'suffocating sea,' a 'vampire.' The point is that the history of man reproduces very closely the initial drama - and the farce - of the cosmos. Man, like the universe, is a failed creation, a lamentable imitation, the mere semblance of a man, a counterfeit man, or, in anthropological terms, a pseudanthrope. In man, the forgery is more immediately apparent than it is in the universe, for the human body is better known, and more accessible to us, than the light of the distant stars. Let us therefore summarize, as simply as possible, the precise reason for our being what we are, that is to say, trespassers in a body which is ill-suited to us. In the beginning, in the world of possibilities and virtualities, an image of man was born in the intelligible brain of the true God of the highest circle: a potential man, the mental matrix of he whom the true God might one day have made real. This image was perceived by the demiurges, the archons or angels of the lower circles. How? Why? A mystery. But perceive it they did and were dazzled, as if by the light, the force, the beauty, the coherence which emanated from this mentally conceived Anthropos. They therefore decided to imitate and reproduce him. From: The Gnostics, by Jacques Lacarriere. Pages 27 - 31.
INTRODUCTION Eighteen centuries separate us from the Gnostics. Eighteen centuries during the course of which wars, persecutions and massacres, causing the deaths of thousands, have amply justified the total suspicion in which they held this world and the creatures that inhabit it. In everything that contemporary history sets before our eyes - the ever more blatant contempt for the individual man, the fallacy of ideologies, the wars or military interventions openly carried on for the profit of the combined interests of capitalism and socialism, the daily erosion of liberty and the fascination of violence - in all this, a Gnostic of today would see nothing more than the magnified image of the dramas which were familiar to him, and the inevitable outcome of that everlasting outrage, the very existence of the world and of humanity as they are. Who then were these people, lucid enough to look at creation with eyes stripped of all consoling self-deceptions, sensitive enough to feel, in all its unbearable extremity, the anguish of an eternity forever promised and forever denied, sincere enough to accept in their own lives all the implications of this total rejection of the world, and to behave, everywhere and at all times, as un-subjugated outsiders? The term Gnostic is vague, encompassing several distinctly different meanings. But, historically speaking, it acquired a particular meaning during the early centuries of our era. On the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean, in Syria, Samaria and Egypt, at the moment when Christianity was feeling its way, and when so many prophets and messiahs were travelling the high roads of the Orient, founding short-lived communities here and there, certain men called Gnostics, that is to say 'men who know,' were also setting up important communities, grouped around various masters and female initiates of a teaching that was radically different from all the others. For the moment, I can do no more than sketch in the broad out- lines of this complex, fascinating message, which will be drawn in greater detail throughout the text of the book. Gnosis is knowledge. And it is on knowledge - not on 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. This rejection of all systems, and of a world governed not by men but by shadows or semblances of men - whom I will call pseudanthropes - forced them to live on the fringes of all established society, and to preach a refusal to compromise with false institutions, a refusal to procreate, to marry, to live in fan-Lilies, or to obey temporal powers, whether pagan or Christian. To sum up the essential position of the Gnostics in still simpler terms, let us say that in their eyes the evil which taints the whole of creation and alienates man in body, mind, and soul, deprives him of the awareness necessary for his own salvation. Man, the shadow of man, possesses only a shadow of consciousness. And it is to this one task that the Gnostics of the first centuries AD deliberately devoted themselves, choosing paths which were not only unorthodox but which, moreover, greatly scandalized their contemporaries: to create in man a true consciousness, which would permit him to impart to his thoughts and deeds the permanence and the rigour necessary to cast off the shackles of this world. Let us, then, open the first dossier on this monumental undertaking, launched against the entire universe, against the immensity of the firmament, against man's original alienation and the falsity of systems and institutions, and let us begin at the beginning ... with the sky. From the book - The Gnostics - by Jaques Lacarriere.
Nag Hammadi Library Codex VII Here are two short descriptions of Gnosticism.
"The cardinal feature of Gnostic thought is the radical dualism that governs the relation of God and the world, and correspondingly that of man and the world. The deity is absolutely trans-mundane, its nature alien to that of the universe, which it neither created nor governs and to which it is the complete antithesis: to the divine realm of light, self-contained and remote, the cosmos is opposed as the realm of darkness. The world is the work of lowly powers which though they may immediately be descended from Him do not know the true God and obstruct the knowledge of Him in the cosmos over which they rule. ... "The universe, the domain of the Archons, is like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon is the earth, the scene of man's life. ... The Archons collectively rule over the world, and each individually in his sphere is a warder of the cosmic prison. Their tyrannical world-view is called _heimarmene_, universal fate, a concept taken over from astrology but now tinged with the Gnostic anti-cosmic spirit. In its physical aspect this rule is the law of nature; in its psychical aspect, which includes for instance the institution and enforcement of Mosaic Law, it aims at the enslavement of man.
As guardian of his sphere, each Archon bars the passage of souls that seek to ascend after death, in order to prevent their escape from the world and their return to God. The Archons are also the creators of the world, except where this role is reserved for their leader, who then has the name of _demiurge_ (the world-artificer in Plato's _Timaeus_) and is often painted with the distorted features of the Old Testament God. "Man ... is composed of flesh, soul, and spirit. But reduced to ultimate principles, his origin is two-fold: mundane and extra-mundane. Not only the body but also the 'soul' is a product of the cosmic powers... Through his body and his soul man is a part of the world and subjected to the _heimarmene_. Enclosed in the soul is the spirit, or 'pneuma' (called also the 'spark'), a portion of the divine substance from beyond which has fallen into the world; and the Archons created man for the express purpose of keeping it captive there. ... In its unredeemed state the pneuma thus immersed in soul and flesh is unconscious of itself, benumbed, asleep, or intoxicated by the poison of the world: in brief, it is 'ignorant. ' Its awakening and liberation is effected through 'knowledge.' [_Gnosis_.] "The radical nature of the dualism determines that of the doctrine of salvation. As alien as the transcendent God is to 'this world' is the pneumatic self in the midst of it. The goal of gnostic striving is the release of the 'inner man' from the bonds of the world and his return to his native realm of light. The necessary condition for this is that he _knows_ about the trans-mundane God and about himself, that is, about his divine origin as well as his present situation, and accordingly also about the nature of the world which determines this situation. As a famous Valentinian formula puts it, What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, where-into we have been thrown, where-to we speed, where-from we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth.
"This knowledge, however, is withheld from him by his very situation, since 'ignorance' is the essence of mundane existence, just as it was the principle of the world's coming into existence. In particular, the transcendent God is unknown in the world and cannot be discovered from it; therefore revelation is needed. The necessity for it is grounded in the nature of the cosmic situation; and its occurrence alters this situation in its decisive aspect, that of 'ignorance,' and is thus itself already a part of salvation. Its bearer is a messenger from the world of light who penetrates the barriers of the spheres, outwits the Archons, awakens the spirit from its earthly slumber, and imparts to it the saving knowledge 'from without.' ... " (Hans Jonas, _The Gnostic Religion_ 42-45). Gnostics "hold this world and the creatures that inhabit it in total suspicion. ... 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..." Gnosticism delivers "a radical censure of all creation...accompanied by an equally radical certainty... that there exists...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 of the systems and religions of former times to be null and void. In spite of its links with some philosophies of the times, 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 their eyes the evil which taints the whole of creation and alienates man in body, mind, and soul, deprives him of the awareness necessary for his own salvation. Man ... possesses only a shadow of consciousness. And it is to this one task that the Gnostics deliberately devoted themselves, choosing paths that were not only unorthodox but which, moreover, greatly scandalized their contemporaries: to create in man a true consciousness, which would permit him to impart to his thoughts and deeds the permanence and the rigour necessary to cast off the shackles of this world." (Jacques Lacarriere, The Gnostics)
by Jeffrey S. Johnson, Fr. IDWAB Thien Tao Oasis Gnosticism was a unique spiritual and religious system and movement whose heyday was during the first two centuries of the common era. During this period many different schools of Gnostic thought flourished. However, there has been considerable scholarly debate over where and when Gnosticism proper actually began. If we were to accept the words of the early church fathers, such as Irenaeus or Hippolytus, we would conclude that Gnosticism was nothing more than a heretical offshoot of Christianity. However, knowing that the early Catholic church would do just about anything to clear the way for their new and wondrous institution, including, but not limited to, twisting the truth or ignoring the plain facts if it did not favour their position, we can overlook their speculations on this matter as more polemical than historical and proceed to a brief investigation of the prevalent social, cultural, and religious trends of the time period. This should furnish us with a clearer idea about the beginnings of Gnosticism. To more thoroughly achieve this end it is necessary to backtrack to the Conquest of the East by Alexander the Great (334-323 BCE) and the emergence of the culture within which the many and wonderful threads of Eastern and Western thought and feeling were to merge. As suggested above, the conquest of the East by Alexander would lead to a unification of the Eastern (being, in this context, roughly Egypt to the borders of India) and the Western (mainly the Greek, or Hellenic, world centered around the Aegean Sea) cultures into a common "Hellenistic" culture. Alexander's success in this venture was not all due to his valour and military prowess: the cultures and the consciousness of the people in both the East and the West were prepared, although in radically different ways, for such a merging to occur. The pre-Alexander "Hellenic" world, as opposed to the post-Alexander "Hellenistic" world, was a culture and society that was very much reserved for those who were Hellenes by birth. That is, the culture's moral and political ideas, as well as ideas about knowledge and life in general, were bound up with definite social conditions. Gradually, however, Hellenic culture would open up. This opening was made possible primarily by the philosophical reflections of various schools of thought that appeared on the Greek landscape prior to Alexander, such as the Cynics, the Sophists and the philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The main elements contributed by these schools were the concepts of rationality, and logic and with these came greater awareness that society's laws and customs are conventions. This led to different reactions, some, such as the Cynics, suggested that because of this humans should move away from social conventions and others, such as Socrates, suggested that societal conventions should be upheld in the interests of law and order. Regardless of what the conflicting opinions on this matter were, the Age of Reason had dawned and thus Hellenic culture was heading away from particularism towards a more universal consciousness. To further this, the Stoics later advanced the notion that freedom is a purely inner-quality, not dependent on external conditions. This would suggest that any man, or woman for that matter, could be free if only they were wise and would then open up Hellenic culture to every rational being, i.e., every man. It was at this point that the people of the Hellenic world began to conceive of themselves as citizens of the cosmos rather than solely as citizens of the "Polis" or the state --- thus the term "cosmopolitan". This radical shift in a positive, expansive direction on the part of the Western world coincided with many changes of a passive, receptive nature in the Eastern regions of the world. In the centuries preceding Alexander's conquest, national and local beliefs (traditional religions) were gradually being transformed into theological systems which later evolved into rational doctrines. These changes would fit them for becoming elements of an international exchange of ideas. These changes were made possible by the uprooting of local cultures. For example, as far back as 597 BCE the Jews were exiled to Babylon. This event, while being an extreme hardship on the people, actually liberated Judaism from their lot as a Palestinian cult of Yaweh and allowed them to forward the concept of monotheism as a world cause, thus expanding their scope tremendously. A similar situation would arise for the religion of the Babylonians in their due season. Once the state of Babylon was overthrown by Cyrus II of Persia (539 BCE) the old-religion was no longer a state cult attached to the political center. This would force the Babylonian religion to rest on its spiritual contents alone and would lead to its eventual transformation into the reasoned system of Astrology. One other such incident I'll mention affected, in due course, the Persians. Rather than being exiled as the Jews or conquered as the Babylonians, the old Persian religion of Mazdaism (commonly known as Zoroastrianism) willingly detached itself from its native Iranian soil to be carried throughout the East, from Syria to India, by the ruling nation. After the fall of the Persian empire to Alexander, Mazdaism would be faced with the same advantages and disadvantages of Diaspora which was the lot of both the Jews and the Babylonians. As in the case of Jewish Monotheism and Babylonian Astrological fatalism, which were further developed due to the original dispersion of these religions, the concept of Theological dualism was extracted from Mazdaism.
Ahura Mazda These three religious currents were arguably the main spiritual forces that the East contributed to the Hellenistic world. Interestingly, it would seem that the first "cosmopolitan" civilization known to history was made possible by catastrophes overtaking the original units of regional culture. As can be seen from this rudimentary sketch, the Western world was perfectly fitted for the advent of a new cosmopolitan culture where Greek ideas and achievements could be shared with the rest of the world. The East, sufficiently uprooted and dispersed, and probably made somewhat indifferent by their many conquerors, was reconciled into a passive state of acceptance to what the West had to offer. These conditions, more than anything, made Alexander's conquests possible and so widely successful. After Alexander's conquest, the Hellenistic world became, for all appearances, a Greek secular culture. The state language was Greek and all writings were penned in Greek, utilizing Greek literary devices and styles. Different ideas were tolerated and encouraged, but all were presented within a Greek, Hellenistic framework. It would seem at a glance that the Oriental influence had been overridden by the Greek culture.
This was not the case however. The Oriental influence was there but was masked in the clothes of Greek language and thought. For instance, Astrological fatalism could be masked in the garments of Stoic cosmology and Theological dualism in the garment of Platonism. These currents of Oriental thought would work and develop and evolve "underground" as it were, within Greek, Hellenistic culture, utilizing the rational and analytical techniques of the Greek philosophers to shape their myths and symbols into logical systems of theology and rational doctrine until they were able to come to full light about three centuries later at the beginning of the Common Era. The main currents of Eastern or Oriental thought that would emerge in what was fast becoming a Latin-Roman empire were Hellenistic Judaism and Alexandrian Jewish philosophy; Babylonian Astrology and magic; the spread of diverse Eastern mystery cults into the Hellenistic-Roman world and their evolution into spiritual mystery-religions; the rise of Christianity; the Gnostic movements inside and outside the Christian framework; and the philosophies of late antiquity, beginning with Neo-Pythagoreanism and culminating in Neo-Platonism. Since there were so many different thoughts and ideas abounding at this time, none of these spiritual movements could help but have syncretistic aspects. For example, Alexandrian Judaism was heavily overlaid with Platonic and Stoic elements. Christianity too had its syncretistic aspects, incorporating as its central theme the cycle of the slain and resurrected God which had been celebrated by other cultures under many different forms, including the mystery cults of Osiris, Orpheus, Dionysus, and Attis, etc.1 The Gnostics exemplified the extreme of syncretism, they compounded everything, including; Oriental mythologies, Astrological doctrines, Iranian theology, elements of the Jewish tradition (whether Biblical, Rabbinical or Occult), and Christian salvation eschatology ó utilizing Platonic terms and concepts to elucidate their doctrines. One thing that all these currents had in common was that they were all of a decidedly religious, or spiritual nature. Also, they were becoming more interested in the concept of salvation, and their ideas about God were becoming more and more transcendent, which in turn would alter the idea and the goal of salvation. The positing of a radical dualism of realms of being was a common feature of the religion of this time, whether between God and the world, spirit and matter, soul and body, or light and darkness, etc. The author and Historian Hans Jonas in his book, The Gnostic Religions, describes the common religion of this time period as "a dualistic, transcendent religion of salvation." This brief historical overview has hopefully given you a clearer idea as to the many different threads of thought and idea that were incorporated in what was to become known as Gnosticism. From here, I will narrow the scope of this essay to cover only those ideas and incidents that involve Gnosticism in particular. The Gnostic teachers and philosophers were, first and foremost, individualists who produced their own literary and speculative works without having to subscribe to any particular set of beliefs. This situation, as you might imagine, led to the formation of many different schools of Gnosticism, all with their own particular points of emphasis. This was a point of particular friction between Gnostics and the early fathers of the Catholic church. Bishop Ireneaus of Lyon castigated the Gnostics, sneering that they were capable of producing a new gospel every day. The early church had no tolerance of concepts of symbolical or psychological truths or of unorthodox speculations about creation, the cosmos, God, human origins, or destiny. Taking all of this into consideration, it is still possible to identify certain unifying elements within all the various schools of Gnosticism It is to these common elements that I will now direct your attention. The first and most obvious connection between the schools of Gnosticism was the concept of "Gnosis" or knowledge. Knowledge, according to the Gnostics, was the way of salvation. In the Gnostic use of the term, knowledge refers to the knowledge of God, rather than a sort of academic knowledge as the word was used by the philosophers of that time and of our own time. The ultimate goal of Gnosticism, then, was the knowledge of, or union with, God, who was conceived as completely transcendent and basically unknowable. This knowledge, once attained, transformed the knower by making him a partaker in the divine existence. Another main tenet that they all held in common was the doctrine of radical dualism, ie. deity is completely trans-mundane and is essentially alien to the Universe, the Universe being, as it were, the work of a malevolent and incompetent deity. According to the Gnostics the world was neither created nor governed by the most high God. The world, then, was the work of lowly powers, or "Archons", which did not know God and actually obstructed the knowledge of God by man. As said before, the Gnostics believed that God was completely unknowable by natural concepts and that a sort of supernatural revelation and illumination was required to come to this knowledge. When this awareness was attained, it could then only be expressed in terms of negatives. The Buddhist conceptions of "not mind" and "nothing"; the Judaic-Quabalistic conceptions of the three veils of negative existence; the Taoist conception of the Tao; and, more recently, the researches into the Quantum realm of modern physics are all exemplitive of this concept. All involve states of mind, or existence, which are quite nearly impossible to express in terms of positive expression, as they deal with realms that seemingly transcend normal rational consciousness and modes of thought. This would seem to be why the Gnostics and other spiritual movements dealing directly with this level of experience so often utilize poetry of the most sublime order, where other more "rational" devices would fall short, to elucidate their experiences from beyond the veil.
Getting back to the "Archons", it was said that the Universe was their domain. The Universe could be compared to a cosmic prison with the Earth as its innermost dungeon. The Archons, which were attributed to the seven known "planets" (being Luna, Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), collectively ruled over the world like warders of a cosmic prison. Through the Archons the world was subjected to what was known as "heimarmene" or universal fate. Physically, this refers to the so called laws of nature whose restrictions are hard to deny. Psychically, this would include the Mosaic law, which the Gnostics felt aimed at the enslavement rather than the liberation of mankind. In the Gnostic cosmology, the Archons actively barred passage of souls that sought to ascend after death in order to prevent their escape from the world and their return to God. The leader of the Archons was an entity known as the "Demiurge", a term borrowed from the "world artificer" in Plato's Timaeus. This entity was portrayed with the distorted features of the Old Testament God, whom the Gnostics thought of as a lower and even counterfeit God. Even though the Gnostics had an almost wholly negative conception of the world and man's place therein, it was their intention to balance this situation by positing a means of salvation whereby man could release himself from the prison of matter and know the most high God itself. To take account of this, they developed theories on the nature of existence to aid them in understanding the means and results of their earthly and spiritual experiences. Most Gnostics agreed that man was composed of three principal parts: Flesh, Soul and Spirit or Pneuma. Man's origins were both mundane, that is, of the Archons, and extramundane, that is, of the Divine. The body and the soul were thought to be the products of the cosmic powers (the Archons or Demiurge). They were shaped in the image of the divine archetypal man and were animated by the psychical forces of the Archons. These "psychical forces" represented the appetites and passions of the "natural man" and each one directly stemmed from and corresponded to one of the cosmic spheres or Archons and served to make up man's psyche. It was through these, the body and the soul, that man was subjected to the tyrannical rule of the Archons and the heimarmene. The third component of man, the spirit or pneuma (also called the Divine Spark) was thought to be enclosed within the body and the soul and was a portion of the divine substance which had fallen into the world. In fact, some Gnostics believed that the Archons created the world for the express purpose of keeping the Divine Spark captive. But overall, they believed that the spirit of man was completely unconscious and ignorant of itself in its unredeemed state and that its awakening and liberation was only effected through direct knowledge of the divine. And it was just this question of how man comes to this knowledge that was the main focus of their endeavors. To understand their views on this primary fulcrum of their belief , we need to consider Gnostic salvation eschatology, which is the rationalization of the ultimate goal of their system. The Gnostic doctrine of salvation was determined by extreme dualism. The spirit which is enclosed within the soul of man was believed to be just as alien to this world as God. The goal of Gnostic striving , then, would be the release of the "inner-man" from the world and his return to the divine realms of light. To accomplish this, man must know about the trans-mundane God and about himself: his divine origins, his present situation, and the nature of the world. As a famous Valentinian formula puts it, "What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, wherinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth [is] (Jonas, 45)" [brackets mine]. However, being bound in ignorance did not really help their odds of realizing all of these things. For this reason, they felt that man needed revelation to come to know these things. This could either come about through a personal revelatory experience, or could be delivered to mankind in whole or in part by a messenger from the world of light. This messenger, in order to deliver this information, would have to have outwitted the Archons on its descent and pass through the celestial spheres undetected. Once the messenger had arrived, the spirit of the receiving man would be awakened and the messenger imparted the saving knowledge from without. The knowledge received by the person illuminated included the whole of Gnostic myth, with all its teachings about God, man, and the world. In other words, the individual was informed of the essential nature of himself, his relations with the world in general, and his relations with God. On a slightly more practical level, man received the "knowledge of the way" or the soul's way out of the world. The "knowledge of the way" was comprised of various sacramental and magical preparations for the soul's future ascent to God and the secret names and formulas that forced passage through each of the cosmic spheres. This seems to be a similar concept, although the deities are not quite so malevolent as they appear in Gnosticism, as that of the Egyptians' 42 Assessors of the Dead which the soul must answer to upon death in order to enter the divine realms. After death, according to the Gnostics, those who were equipped with this Gnosis traveled upwards leaving behind at each sphere the psychical "vestments" contributed by it. Once man was free from the dross of the Earth, and the grip of the Archons and the Demiurge, he was free to re-unite with the Divine. On a larger scale this process was also believed to be part of the restoration of the deities own wholeness, which in pre-cosmic times had become impaired by losing portions of the divine substance. This was the sole reason for the deities involvement with the Earth in the first place and why his divine messengers were sent to the Earth to aid in the liberation of man. It was thought by the Gnostics that once this process of removing the light from the world was complete the cosmos would come to an end. With our survey of Gnostic eschatology complete we can now turn to the pressing question of Gnostic morality. It has been shown that the Gnostics held the world, with its physical and psychical laws, in great contempt. To review, the world was conceived of as a great cosmic prison warded over and brought into existence by incompetent and malevolent deities whose sole purpose was the enslavement of man and the hindrance in him of all that is holy. This, naturally, and as the early church fathers were quick to point out in their numerous refutations of Gnostic theory and practice, can be seen as suggesting many possibilities for immoral or criminal behavior.
However, the historical record of Gnostic transgression of moral law and the perpetration of crimes against humanity is virtually non-existent, especially when compared to the records of the Catholic church and other opponents of Gnosticism throughout the centuries. We can say, generally speaking, that Gnostics felt themselves to be sovereigns in the sphere of knowledge and the sphere of action. This was one of the main causes of their many conflicts with the early church. The Gnostics refused to submit to the authority of the Bishops and any other authority, both spiritual and political, on the grounds that they, having received or attained the Gnosis, were in a position to be their own authority in all matters of life. The idea of the Pneumatic (as they called themselves) as a sovereign in all spheres of endeavor led to the formation of two extremes within Gnosticism: the Ascetic and the Libertine. The Ascetic branch recognized through Gnosis the degraded nature of the cosmos, and chose to reduce contact with the institutions and conventions of the world so as to avoid further contamination by it. The Libertine, reasoning from the same principles, assumed the privilege of absolute freedom and regarded the "Thou shalts" and "Thou shalt nots" promulgated by the false God of the Jews and the Christians as just another form of cosmic tyranny, imposed on the ignorant masses of mankind by the Archons through the medium of the Catholic church and other dogmatic religions. Further, they believed that the sanctions attached to such transgressions only effected the body and the soul and not the spirit, which, as mentioned earlier, was viewed as the only part of man which was truly of the divine. This "pneumatic libertinism", more than being simply indifferent permission of any act whatsoever, was a method that they believed directly contributed to the work of salvation by purposely going against the norms of the Demiurge and thus effectively thwarting the designs of the Archons. It was these last two reasons which essentially set them apart from their Ascetic brothers. In conclusion it can be seen that Gnosticism, as it was in its early days, offered the seeker a unique spiritual and religious system by which he or she could experience directly the presence of divinity within, using techniques and methods not unfamiliar to the seeker of today. However, the march of what has come to be known by Thelemites as the Aeon of Osiris would soon trample this movement, at least in its most visible manifestations, under foot. By the Fourth century of the common era, the Gnostics had all but disappeared as organized schools of thought, largely due to the persecution they suffered at the hands of ardent Christian Bishops and devotees. Yet their influence was to be continually felt, although modified to a greater or lesser degree, in the generations of seekers and explorers of the depths and heights of human consciousness to come. Although ultimately falling prey to the advance of Judeo/Christian, or Osirian, doctrines and morality/reality, in many ways they were clearly the product of the Osirian age within which they flourished and many of their doctrines and beliefs are not compatible with our current point of view. However, they did manage to catch a glimpse of some aspect of existence and of consciousness that seems to have a broader, and perhaps Universal, validity. For their courageous leap into largely unchartered waters of human thought and experience, we must remain eternally grateful to these early benefactors of light and knowledge, "that transmitted the light of Gnosis to us, their successors and their heirs". Works Cited Holroyd, Stuart. The Elements of Gnosticism, Element, Inc. Rockport, Ma. 1994. Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press, Boston, 1963. 1 Incidentely, this would seem to be nothing more than a dramatization of the natural course of the Sun as it appears from the Earth, in his rising, noonday, setting and re-rising again the following morning ,only instead of it being conceived as a natural cyclical process, the ignorance of the people of these time periods led them to believe that the Sun actually suffered a physical death nightly and had to be resurrected every morning by priestly machinations. Of course we now enjoy a more accurate understanding of our solar system; realizing that the sun neither rises nor sets but remains poised in a position of supreme balance in the heavens while we revolve around it. 2 Judging by the wide variety of Gnostic schools of thought I would conjecture that in many respects this is a completely unique and personal religious experience, yet is similar in enough respects with the experiences of mystics and sages of all races and climes to be capable of striking a sympathetic chord with other individuals who may have had similar illuminations, thus making possible, in the first place, the formation of general doctrines and schools of thought. 3 Of course to students of the Qabbalah, Hermetic, or Thelelmic Magick the similarities in theory should be obvious, although the occultist of today can conceive of these names and formulas as simply methods of stimulating the activity of unconscious archetypal principles at work in his life or in the world at large, in order to generate a desired state of consciousness, which can then be experienced directly and understood more fully in the light of consciousness. 4 It must be mentioned that absolute belief in the Archons or the Demiurge as literally living in the celestial spheres is not a pre-requisite to practically utilizing this system, this is one of the great aspects of Gnosticism which makes it immediately accessible to any seeker, as Stuart Holroyd wrote it in his book, The Elements of Gnosticism , "... [the Gnostics] teachings have a psychological relevance and appeal which supercedes any question of their literal truth. No Gnostic ever sought to coerce belief, for belief is not the way to gnosis. Truth is not manifest and accessible, it is covert and has to be diligently sought out. Gnostic literature assists the process of seeking, which is simultaneously a process of psychic self-exploration and growth. One does not have to believe that the Archons exist in the celestial spheres to understand that they exist and work their mischief in ones own psyche (pp 6-7)."
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