Gnosticism: Esoteric Insight and/or Christian Heresy?

I first took notice of Panoramix in Asterix and was intrigued by druids immediately.
Gnomes are great too (despite their size)

 

I already gnosis.

 

Your presentation of these ideas is very academic and historical but I find it interesting how these ideas seem to perennialy arise of themselves in all ages. There is something about them that is endemic to the human condition. As McKenna once summarized, the essential insight of Gnosticism is that something terrible has happened and that we do not belong here. Perhaps there is something in the contrast between the human will with its capacity for imaginative striving and the constraints of the material world which will always give rise to these same ideas.

For one example of how Gnosticism always crops up, consider the similarities between the ancient belief that some humans contain a "divine spark" and the modern 4chan meme of how only some people are actually sentient and the rest are "NPCs." It's actually the same exact thought, just dressed in different metaphysical/technological trappings reflective of the respective age.

That's one interpretation, another is that the Demiurge is simply ignorant of (literally) metaphysical reality.
Some of the other names for the Demiurge were "Samael" meaning "Blind God" and "Saklas" meaning "Fool."
He is also called Leontoeides or "Lion-faced" in conjunction with his depiction as a lion-headed serpent.
The symbology of the demiurge is interesting with the lion head presenting him as a typical solar creative deity, associated with the sun, a creator God, but attached to a serpent like body, implying he is ignorant of his own base nature.

 

Haha. Ohhh I reckon any older culture that used Stonehenge must have been pretty cool.

 

I intended this to be about Gnosticism, the specific religion that appeared mainly as a form of Christianity (although with some Jewish offshoots) in the second century and flourished in the third century) and its modern New Age adherents. The more general gnosis you're referring to is related and we can talk about it, but I've defined what I'm talking about in the OP more narrowly and provided at some length the historical context for it as a form of Christianity declared heretical by the Church. There are plenty of good books on the subject. I've listed the ones I'm using as source books. My post was actually intended to provide a context for a series of twenty posts elsewhere in the Christian forum by a self-styled Gnostic who has said little or nothing about what Gnosticism is but has instead confined himself to carpet bombing the forums with attack ads against this or that tenet of mainline Christianity. It's very hard to reply to that in a coherent way.

 

Neo. Good to hear from you again. It's been awhile. I agree my presentation is academic. I'm essentially talking to myself, trying to provide an organized perspective for assessing the barrage of sniping at mainstream Christianity encountered elsewhere. The sense that "something terrible has happened and we don't belong here" was felt by lots of folks, including apocalyptic Jews before and around the time of Jesus, but it would be sloppy to call them Gnostics. The Gnostics of early Christianity had a specific diagnosis and cure. I think you make an interesting analogy though between classical Gnosticism and the 4-chan NPC meme--a sense of superiority based on having the truth, being special, and being "in the know". Calvinist ideas of "the elect" are also similar--but non-Gnostic, because they didn't view Jesus or any other mediating figure as bringing enlightenment through secret knowledge, as opposed to dying for our sins. You're correct that some Gnostics, particularly Valentinians, saw the Demiurge as ignorant instead of malevolent, and those indeed were other names for him.

 

Pretty much. I'm glad you mentioned the spiritual sparks being trapped in material human bodies, because I don't think I'd made that clear. We might ask, do we really think that happened? How would modern science explain it? The part about ascending through eight spiritual realms may be peculiar to some forms of Gnosticism, but ascending through some is correct. Since I'm not exactly a Gnostic (although I have Gnostic tendencies) I don't know what the particulars of the esoteric knowledge are. I suspect that, too, varies from one sect to another. The followers of Basilides, I understand, had to recite the names of all the Aeons that emanated from the Unknown God. This really sounds a lot like masonic lodges or the pagan Hellenistic or Roman mystery cults. I don't know that the material world will be perfect, but the practitioner will be closer to the pleroma (state of total spiritual fullness or abundance). In the Gospel of Thomas, which is essentially Gnostic without all the complex metaphysics, Saying 113 tells us: "The kingdom of the Father is spread out everywhere upon the earth, and people do not see it." The Jesus Seminar, not ordinarily thought of as Gnostic, regards those words as possibly authentic, and includes the Thomas Gospel along with the four canonical Christian gospels as containing some (though not many) of Jesus' words. This, of course, differs from the concept that the kingdom is coming or a place we will ascend to after death.

As in Buddhism, the quest for spiritual liberation for Gnostics is internal, through guided introspection. I think the basic differences in doctrine between the two forms of Christianity are: (a) Gnostics see Jesus as someone who came to enlighten us instead of someone whose death and resurrection, and faith in those things, are the keys to our salvation; (b) Gnostics believe the Old Testament God was evil or misguided; and (c) Gnostics think the material world is a fundamentally bad place that must be completely transcended. If we can keep it at that, I have no problem with it. (I don't think Yahweh was an evil or misguided God, although I think the writers of the Old Testament often made Him seem that way). My skeptical nature makes me suspicious of claims to secret esoteric knowledge accessible only by a minority of people "in the know" and based on guided intuitive insights. Princeton professor Elaine Pagels offers sympathetic portraits of the Gnostics (The Gnostic Gospels; Beyond Belief), especially the Valentinians, who get high marks for their non- hierarchical, non-patriarchal structure and for finding God within (kind of like the Quakers). Yet she admits the church might not have survived as a mystic cult, and needed the Church ecclesiastical structure to keep it going. That's not an answer purists may find acceptable, but I may have a certain pragmatic appeal--or not, depending on what one thinks of Christianity today and what the unknowable alternatives to it would be (some form of Greco-Roman, Celtic or Germanic paganism; a Muslim or Mongol world; or something we can't even imagine.

 

Another interesting aspect of this is the question 'what has gone wrong'? From what do we need to be saved?

Orthodoxy (ie ordinary Christianity - not the Orhodox Church necessarily) says it's sin. Adam disobeyed God and ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The gnostics thought differently, that ignorance in the sense of lack of knowledge of the spirit is the thing we ned to overcome. It's not human beings who have screwed it up, but the demiurgic creator and possibly his mother, Sophia.

Thus for the gnostic Christ's death on the cross is not the key thing. He is seen more as a transmitter of gnosis. I prefer the gnostic view in some ways, as 'jesus died for you' has never gone down well with me. Some say that the trouble with the gnostics is that they were a relatively small elite, and probably that is true. Orthodox Christianity is meant to appeal to the masses - which clearly it did in the past and still does today. The trouble is that without the inner knowledge and connection it tends to become simply a set of mental formulations with which one is required to agree. Often a ritual component too, which is largely a purely rote performance.This to me seems hopeless.
But so really do attempts in the modern age to reveive Gnosticism. Too much was lost or deliberately destroyed in late antiquity. What we have is very incomplete and fragmentary. I also feel that a lot of the gnostic mythos is pretty much indigestible to the modern psyche.

If you ask me why it's all such as mess, I reject both the orthodox idea of human sin and the gnostic notion of an evil demiurge - I think it's simply that we haven't yet evolved far enough and are still largely governed by the lower animal side of our nature. The gonstic idea that some form of spiritual knowledge or experience is the key to liberation is IMO more acceptable to a sensitive being than 'substitutional atonement'. In a general sense gnosis with a small 'g' may have some merit - to seek to revive it as a religion though seems to me the wrong approach.

A parallell seems to exist between the gnostic idea of the spiritual sparks trapped here and the beliefs of some Hindu schools, noteably Vaishnavism which says a similar thing. We are really spiritual 'souls' who have somehow fallen from our station above and ended up trapped here in the material world. The Vaishnava solution is that we have to reveive our forgotten relation with Krishna.

 

It is a religion of free thinking esoteric ecumenists and naturalists that, unlike what many believe, has absolutely no supernatural content. We are realists. Not super-naturalists.

Our myths have a lot of supernatural in them, but they were written to put directly against the myths that Christians were writing at a time when the religious intelligentsia all knew that no one could know anything about a supernatural realm. Not even that it and a supernatural God existed.

Even the Christians indicated that God was unknowable, unfathomable and worked in mysterious ways.

The bible confirms that the mind of God cannot be know in a number of places.

All the myths of those days were discussed in trying to find the best rules and laws to live by, which is one of the definitions I try to get people to use.

I hope you can see how intelligent the ancients were as compared to the mental trash that modern preachers and theists are using with the literal reading of myths.

What is God?

Further.
Bill Moyers Journal . Watch & Listen | PBS

Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, said that when asked to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching, while he stood on one leg, said, "The Golden Rule. That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. And everything else is only commentary. Now, go and study it."

Please listen as to what is said about the literal reading of myths.

"Origen, the great second or third century Greek commentator on the Bible said that it is absolutely impossible to take these texts literally. You simply cannot do so. And he said, "God has put these sort of conundrums and paradoxes in so that we are forced to seek a deeper meaning."

Matt 7;12 So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

This is how early Gnostic Christians view the transition from reading myths properly to destructive literal reading and idol worship.



I believe that the inquisitors intentionally muddied up the waters of what Gnostic Christians believed, and mixed our spiritual beliefs with our political real life beliefs to justify their use of inquisitions on us.

History will show that Christianity won the God wars but that they murdered the best example of what Christianity was intended to be according to the teaching of the archetypal good man Jesus.

Here is what that best of all Christian based creeds looked like. You decide if they deserved to have the inquisition exterminate them in the same way Hitler tried to eliminate the Jews.



Regards
DL

 

It is now because of all the lies the inquisitors propagated and that is why only a conversation with a modern Gnostic can clear the air. The problem is that many will believe the old reports and not the new. They think that like Christianity and Islam, we are a stagnant dogma believing creed when we are not and have evolved along with what we know of reality. We pray to a doctor when ill, not really pray but you know what I mean, not to an invisible God.



BTW Okiefreak. I thank you for beginning this O.P.

Regards
DL

 

No. At least not exactly but many less astute will see that in some of our many early sects.

The spiritual and physical must be divided in our thinking. One, matter, can be shown as real while the spiritual cannot be shown.

None of the arguments or theories that we put to the spiritual realm can be proven. All that is said of the spiritual must remain as speculation in our thinking.

John 6 ; 63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.

On the lies that we hate matter.

I wrote this to refute the false notion that Gnostic Christians do not like matter and reality that the inquisitors propagated to justify their many murders of my religions originators. It shows that Christians should actually hate matter and not Gnostic Christians.

The Christian reality.

1 John 2:15Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.

Gen 3; 17 Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.

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The Gnostic Christian reality.

Gnostic Christian Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all. [And after they have reigned they will rest.]"

"If those who attract you say, 'See, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you.

If they say to you, 'It is under the earth,' then the fish of the sea will precede you.

Rather, the Kingdom of God is inside of you, and it is outside of you.

[Those who] become acquainted with [themselves] will find it; [and when you] become acquainted with yourselves, [you will understand that] it is you who are the sons of the living Father.

But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

As you can see from that quote, if we see God's kingdom all around us and inside of us, we cannot think that the world is anything but evolving perfection. Most just don't see it and live in poverty. Let me try to make you see the world the way I do.

Here is a mind exercise. Tell me what you see when you look around. The best that can possibly be, given our past history, or an ugly and imperfect world?

Candide.
"It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end.”
" Once one dismisses the rest of all possible worlds, one finds that this is the best of all possible worlds."

Given how nature and physics work and entropy and the anthropic principle, those quoted are irrefutable.

That means that we live in the best of all possible worlds, because it is the only possible world, given all the conditions at hand and the history that got us here.

That is why a Gnostic Christians see all matter as evolving perfection, or the best that is possible.

This concept is older than Gnostic Christianity. If you cannot find God everywhere, you will not find him anywhere.

Anon -- If you can't see God in all, you can't see God at all.

Regards
DL

 

I dismiss this out of hand due to the fact that all the religions I know of have their enlightened few who guide the adherents in their religious ideology.

Regards
DL

 

True. We call that through Gnosis.



Regards
DL

 

That is in our myths which we do not read literally as shown in post # 32

Regards
DL

 

Yes. I have those biblical quotes in my explanation of why I call my God, I am.

Modern Gnostic Christians name our god "I am", and yes, we do mean ourselves.

You are your controller. I am mine. You represent and present whatever mind picture you have of your God or ideal human, and so do I.

The name "I Am" you might see as meaning something like, --- I think I have grown up thanks to having forced my apotheosis through Gnosis and meditation.

In Gnostic Christianity, we follow the Christian tradition that lazy Christians have forgotten that they are to do. That is, become brethren to Jesus.

That is why some say that the only good Christian is a Gnostic Christian.

Here is the real way to salvation that Jesus taught.

Matthew 6:22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

John 14:23 Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.

Romans 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

Allan Watts explain those quotes in detail.


Joseph Campbell shows the same esoteric ecumenist idea in this link.


The bible just plainly says to put away the things of children. The supernatural and literal reading of myths.

Regards
DL

 

If you mean the supernatural Omni-everything God, then you might wonder what such a God would be doing pinning for us to glorify that which needs no glorification.

Christians should also remember that the would be us serving God, when Jesus, via the scribes, said he came to serve and not be served. That contradiction is never dealt with by Christians who want God/Jesus specifically says he does not want.

To your first paragraph on the obsession with Jesus.

If you see those quotes I gave just above, you will see that what Gnostic Christians are doing is using the good man Jesus archetype as a focal point or mantra to help us in meditation. Any mantra can be used but being Christian based, we just use Jesus.

Personally, I was not using Jesus as my guide to trigger my pineal gland to force my apotheosis. Mine was gained more by self-hypnosis. The Gnosis I gained, if you are not into mysticism, can be seen as what Jung and Freud called our Father Complex.

Father complex - Wikipedia

I think that that Complex is what causes what this link shows.



Regards
DL

 

It is both and you are more correct that not in calling it a heresy today, but in ancient days, it meant Christianity sendin another of it's many inquisitions to wipe us out.

Please see post # 32.

Regards
DL