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To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick,alt.religion.gnostic,alt.christnet,talk.religion.misc From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nigris (333)) Subject: SPeur: Gnosticism (LONG) Date: 3 May 1997 02:37:12 -0700 [from thelema93-l@hollyfeld.org: Sans Peur] [technical difficulties enforced delay -- apologies for outdatedness] [slightly rearranged -- 333] nigris: >I've noticed that what is variously called 'Gnosticism' is one of the major >religious currents (along with Satanism) associated with 'Thelema' aside >from the elements fabricated or integrated by the Prophet Crowley. > >an example here is the importance of the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica >(Gnostic Catholic Church) and other Gnostic lineages to the various >organizations identified as "OTO" (I make no judgement as to their >legitimacy/integrity). > >given this, and since I came across this (admittedly biased) review of >Gnosticism (from a Coptic Christian source), I'm presenting it for your >review and critique, should any feel inclined, considering your own >comprehension of what Gnosticism means or contains. thanks. Anno IVv, Sol 1 deg Taurus, Luna 15 deg Libra 04/21/97 e.v. 93 Tyagi, Excellent posts. The best I've seen I think. Thank you. I have my favorite Gnostic history to contribute below. 93 93/93 Sans Peur -----------------------------/ cut here /----------------------------------- A Brief Survey of Gnosticism by Jeffrey S. Johnson, Fr. IDWAB Thien Tao Oasis -------------------------------------------------- Gnosticism was a unique spiritual and religious system and movement whose heyday was duringthe firsttwo centuries of the common era. During this period many different schools of Gnostic thoughtflourished. However, there has been considerable scholarly debate over where and when Gnosticismproper 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 acheive 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 conciousness 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 oppossed 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 conciousness. 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 preceeding 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 similiar 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. 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 acheivements 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 ecouraged, 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 transmundane 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 conciousness 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 spirtual 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 ofn 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 unconcious 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 transmundane 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 similiar 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. Afterdeath, 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 hinderance 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 ìimmoralî or ìcriminalî 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 priveledge 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 conciousness 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 conciousness 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 similiar 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 similiar 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 unconcious archetypal principles at work in his life or in the world at large, in order to generate a desired state of conciousness, which can then be experienced directly and understood more fully in the light of conciousness. 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 Gnosticsim 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)." EOF -- see http://www.hollyfeld.org/~tyagi/nagasiva.html and call: 408/2-666-SLUG!!! ---- (emailed replies may be posted) ---- CC public replies to author ---- * * * Asphalta Cementia Metallica Polymera Coyote La Cucaracha Humana * * *
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