Lapis Magazine

During the early centuries A.D., when the Hermetic treatises were being written and the Neoplatonists were reviving Plato’s teachings, a number of schools or sects appeared under the banner of “gnosis,” or the true knowledge that leads to salvation.(1) What was this “true knowledge”? It was nothing new. Plato explains in Book Six of his Republic that there are four levels of knowing.(2) The first is the inner perception of our own imaginations.(3) Second is the opinions that we base on the evidence of the senses.(4) Third is the more accurate knowledge obtained through rational thought.(5) And the fourth, to which later Greeks gave the name of gnosis,(6) is the direct knowledge of spiritual reality, which brings a certainty even beyond reason.

Anyone can experience the fourth type of knowledge instantly, if not very usefully, by asking themselves: “Do I exist?” It is so obvious, so intimate a fact that one never thinks to question it. The knowledge given in gnosis is like that. Another classic example is the answer that Carl Jung, the great Gnostic of the twentieth century, gave to the BBC television interviewer who asked him if he believed in God: “I do not believe; I know.”(7)

If only we could all have gnosis, and know the nature of things without fumbling with opinions and logic-chopping! It seems rather unfair that we are denied it, since it is evidently within the human capacity. There are examples, admittedly rare, of quite ordinary people who have suddenly been opened permanently to the gnostic dimension. Douglas Harding(8) and John Wren-Lewis(9) come to mind. As they describe the experience, they go on living their lives and dealing with the same problems as the rest of us (human relations, money, illness, etc.), but against a background of serene and perfect certainty that all of life is a play, and that they are one with the Player.

Wren-Lewis, reflecting on his sudden and unplanned opening to the gnostic dimension, speculated that long ago people were all in this state, and that it is our natural human birthright. This is certainly a stimulus for speculation about human ancestry. Perhaps the great brain of Neanderthal Man—larger than mine or yours—served for modes of knowing that totally elude us. As it is, we are using only a fraction of our cerebrum.(10) For all we know, the rest of it holds the potential of knowledge that transcends the senses and language, and is hence incommunicable and unimaginable to those who lack it.

But this is to argue from the physical to the metaphysical, whereas most authorities on gnosis go the opposite way, blaming the physical body for the frustration of our spiritual potential. Plato, influenced by the Orphic and Pythagorean soma-sema doctrine wrote that “the body is a tomb for the soul.”(11) He seemed to blame the body for our ignorant predicament, and recommended philosophy as the means of separating ourselves from it.(12) The ultimate philosophic ideal would then be the Hermetic ascent of the soul through the cosmic spheres,(13) as described in Chapter 1, which disburdens the soul of all the bad tendencies it has acquired through falling into matter. At the end of the ascent, which can be accomplished in initiation and not merely after death, the purified soul regains its pristine state and enters the realm of the gods. But even then, the chances are that the cycle will be re-enacted, for the soul has an inexplicable lust for the body, and cannot resist plunging into it if the chance is offered.(14)

A majority of the Gnostic schools, not content with the quest for liberation through knowledge of the Real, shared a cosmology that was supposed to explain why we have lost it. They attributed the existence of the material world to an evil and inferior member of the heavenly hierarchy, called the Demiurge. That was originally Plato’s name for the god who has constructed the physical world, as a deputy from the supreme One.(15) For Plato and his school, the world and the bodies made from its matter are not evil, but on the contrary very beautiful; they are just low down on the cosmic ladder which the philosopher aspires to climb. For Gnosticism, on the contrary, the world is a catastrophic mistake made by a malevolent junior god who thinks that he is supreme and lords it over a host of souls entrapped in bodies.(16) Plato’s attitude was hierarchical; Gnosticism’s was dualistic. That was what was novel about the movement.

Arising in the context of a Christianity ill at ease with its Judaic origins, Gnosticism offered the most radical solution to the problem by casting the Hebrew god Yahweh in the role of this malevolent Demiurge.(17) If Yahweh had not actually created the physical world (and Gnostic schools differ on this detail), he and his evil Archons had held it in their grip for thousands of years, nourished by the devotion of his chosen people and their animal sacrifices. All of this had confirmed his illusion, or the illusion that it suited him to maintain in his followers: that he was himself the One God, Lord of the Universe and maker of all things.

Unknown, no doubt, to the majority of its readers, this Gnostic notion dominates the third novel of Philip Pullman’s great fantasy trilogy, The Amber Spyglass.(18) Here the Ancient of Days and his lieutenant Metatron have kept the souls of the dead imprisoned in their egos in a dreary, Harpy-guarded limbo. After the defeat of the tyrants, the hero and heroine liberate the dead by releasing their energies back to Nature, just as in the Poimandres “your vital spirit you yield up to the atmosphere, so that it no longer works in you; and the bodily senses go back to their own sources, becoming parts of the universe, and entering into fresh combinations to do other work.”(19)

Then, the Gnostic myth continues, came Jesus, sent as an emissary from the True God to abrogate Yahweh’s meaningless laws and to show select human souls the way of escape.(20) And the way lies not though love, or morality, but only through gnosis: the direct knowledge that the Demiurge has been at pains to suppress in us, but which can still be kindled by the spark of divinity that lies buried in us all.

There is no intrinsic need to link the doctrine of saving knowledge with a dualistic world-view. The possibility of gnosis also exists in Platonism, Hermetism, and for that matter in Kabbalah, Sufism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, none of which has a dualistic theology. It is simply because some of the principal Gnostic sects were dualistic that their “gnosis”-derived name has become a label for this particular doctrine of the Demiurge.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, these two main features of Gnostic philosophy continued to flourish in the Middle East, though no longer united as they had been in classic Gnosticism. The esoteric teaching of a way of salvific knowledge continued in Persia, where the native Zoroastrian tradition welcomed the last of the Neoplatonists. The Zoroastrian philosophers had already developed a complex system of angels, worlds, and states of the soul in which these things were known. They also had a personification of evil, Ahriman, but he was certainly not the creator of the world, only its spoiler. The higher one goes in Zoroastrian theosophy, the further one is from Gnostic dualism. It was perilous to maintain this initiatic and mystical school in the face of the Islamic invasion and conversion of Persia. Nevertheless, an accommodation was made with the Quranic teachings that allowed an Islamic theosophic tradition to survive for many centuries, and to produce an incomparable wealth of inspired writings, colorful angelic visions, and detailed bulletins from the immaterial world that is the object of gnosis. During the Dark Ages of Europe, the light of wisdom was burning brightly in Persia.(21)

Gnostic dualism, on the other hand, had flourished in the religion of Manicheism, founded by the Jewish-Christian Mani near Babylon in the third century CE. In Mani’s theology, the Evil God is not a misguided underling of the One, but a high power in his own right and the eternal rival of the Good God. We have our spirits from the Good God, but our bodies from the Evil one. Jesus and the other prophets, says Manichean doctrine, have come to offer us the saving gnosis that releases our spirits from bondage, so that we can rejoin the Good and abandon the Evil one to the dead world he has created.

Manicheism survived during the Dark Ages in the Near East and in Eastern Europe, where it took on new names and forms and periodically emerged to aggravate the established churches. The Bogomils (“beloved of God”) of Thrace or Bulgaria were one such offshoot, first entering the historical record in the tenth century.(22) Their theology laid the blame for the world’s evil on God’s first-born son, called Satanael, who rebelled against his father, then came down to earth with his rebel angels and seduced Eve: their child was Cain. In due course, Satanael persuaded the Jews that he was the Supreme God, and gave Moses a law of his own devising. Jesus was an emissary from the Supreme God, who after his resurrection took Satanael’s vacant seat in heaven. The Bogomils denied most of the Church’s dogmas and despised its practices, leading an ascetic and ethical life. Like many heretical sects, they considered themselves the only true believers, or to be precise, the only ones who had not been fooled by the Evil One.

The Bogomils illustrate a syndrome common to esoteric groups as well as to more exoteric cults: a conviction that they have a deeper or a truer knowledge than the established churches, and that they thereby stand apart from the deluded mass of humanity. However, measured against Plato’s definitions of the levels of knowledge, theirs was only a pseudo-gnosis, being just as much based on opinion and politics as any religious dogma.

Something of the Bogomils and their doctrine survived, to resurface in the Cathars of Northern Italy and Southern France. It was never clearly established whether they considered the evil world-creator as equal to or dependent from the True God. But they certainly believed that the Roman Church, with its unchristian wealth and abuses, belonged in the Demiurge’s camp.

The Cathars were Gnostic dualists, but without a concept of gnosis as the way of salvation. Instead, they practiced a sacramental laying on of hands. They aspired to a sexless, vegetarian life, in order to deny the Demiurge anything connected with physical reproduction and birth in his world of matter. But, realizing that not everyone is capable of asceticism, they allowed for an exoteric body of more worldly “believers” beside the esoteric “true Christians.” The Cathars also had their bishops and clergy, and held most of the Languedoc region (Provence) under their influence. Until the early thirteenth century, when the Pope and the mercenaries of the King of France mounted a genocidal “crusade” against them, theirs was one of the most civilized and artistic corners of Europe.

Perhaps it is merely temperament that decides whether one divides the universe of one’s experience into higher and lower, or into good and evil. Gnostic dualism in its many forms certainly attracts those who are looking for somewhere to place the blame for an imperfect world. And if the blame can be placed on that which someone else regards as most holy, there is the additional thrill—for those of a certain temperament— of insulting or degrading them. There is no room here for an analysis of modern groups that wear the Gnostic label;(23) but one could begin by dividing them into those primarily inspired by the quest for spiritual gnosis, and those that are centered on dualism and the revolt against the Church, seen as an extension of the Demiurge’s power.

That said, the science fiction scenario of Gnosticism is not to be dismissed lightly. There are scientists today who believe and even hope that the human race will eventually take over other planets and exploit their environments, with any life-forms that may be found there, for human advantage. Give us a million more years and we might become an evil Demiurge ourselves, enslaving the inhabitants of some hapless planetary system, perhaps even without their knowledge. In an era of genetic manipulations, it is no longer frivolous to wonder whether our own earth, and our bodies, might have suffered some such intervention by beings cleverer than ourselves. Mythological and esoteric literature has many suggestions of this kind, though unsubtle minds like Erich von Däniken(24) and his millions of readers have dragged the issue down to the lowest level of “gods from outer space,” thus isolating it from intelligent discourse.

I think that it is time to dust off the Gnostic mythology and to reconsider it in a dispassionate frame of mind. There are two questions to be considered. The first is the epistemological one: does the human being have a potential for gnosis, and if so, how do we recognize it? Obviously we cannot believe everyone who goes around claiming to possess higher knowledge. I suspect that the answer to this question may reside purely in the subjective domain: that the person who has it, knows it; but that it is incommunicable and perhaps even useless to anyone else.(25) To cite the example at the beginning of this chapter, I may know that I exist, but that doesn’t prove to you that I do!

The second question is the historical one of whether the human race may have undergone interference from outside in the distant past. In view of the continuing inability of materialistic science to explain the origins of humanity,(26) it seems worth collecting material bearing on this hypothesis.(27) As a corollary to it, one might include the theory of the egregore, mentioned in the previous chapter: the theory that there exist immaterial energy-complexes that are sustained by human beliefs and emotions, and consequently assume a quasi-independent, personal guise. The powerful effects of egregores over collective behavior range from what the Victorian author Charles Mackay called “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” up to entire religious movements, which dissolve as soon as their energy sources are cut off. Perhaps there is no more to the evil Demiurge than that; perhaps the fantasies about him derive from the collective energies that compel people, in the mass, to do stupid and cruel things which they conveniently blame on a “god.”

Footnotes:
(1) For a survey that treats both the history of Gnosticism and the infusion of Gnostic ideas in popular culture, see Richard Smoley, Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy from the Gospels to The Da Vinci Code (San Francisco: Harper, 2006).
(2) Republic, 6, 509-511.
(3) The name for the image-making function is eikasia. Plato seems to include here both mental images and external ones that have no physical reality, such as shadows and reflections (510a).
(4) This is pistis, which takes the objects of sense (Plato names animals, plants, and man-made things) and forms opinions about them (ibid.).
(5) This is dianoia, which also works with sense-objects (including geometrical figures), but makes investigations and draws rational conclusions from them (510d-e).
(6) Plato uses the term noesis. His text is very obscure at this point (511b), but suggests that this function gives knowledge not of sense-objects but of the Forms themselves. English translators do not agree on how to name the four functions. Thomas Taylor calls them “passions of the soul,” and names them from the top downwards: 1. Intelligence, 2. the Dianoëtic Part, 3. Faith, 4. Assimilation (Works, 1804, I, 356). Paul Shorey’s translation of 1930 calls them “affections occurring in the soul” and names them: 1. Intellection or Reason, 2. Understanding, 3. Belief, 4. Picture Thinking or Conjecture (Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton & H. Cairns, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 [Bollingen Series LXXI], 747). G. M. A. Grube’s version, much used in college teaching, has “processes in the soul” and calls them: 1. Understanding, 2. Reasoning, 3. Opinion, 4. Imagination. This shows how futile it is to conduct any serious study from translated sources.
(7) I cite this locus classicus of the Jung mythology from Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney, Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (New York: Penguin/Arkana, 1999), 323. The recent smear campaign against Jung by Freudians and other counter-Gnostics has succeeded in conformist Academe, but Jung’s greatness will doubtless outlast them all.
(8) See Douglas Harding, On Having No Head: A Contribution to Zen in the West, (London: Buddhist Society, 1961, and reissues).
(9) In 1995 John Wren-Lewis kindly let me read the manuscript of his book The 9:15 to Nirvana. One could not expect such a train to leave on time; publication was last announced for 2002.
(10) And some get along very well with almost none. See the remarkable medical report: Robert Wesson, “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?” Science, 210 (1980), 1232; cited in William R. Corliss, Biological Anomalies: Humans II (Glen Arm: Sourcebook Project, 1993), 265-66.
(11) Quoted in Plato, Gorgias, 493a.
(12) Plato has Socrates say: “Every seeker after wisdom knows that up to the time when philosophy takes it over his soul is a helpless prisoner, chained hand and foot in the body…” (Phaedo, 83e, tr. H. Tredennick).
(13) The description of the ascent through the spheres is in the Poimandres, Corpus Hermeticum 1, 25-26a.
(14) See Poimandres, 14, and works of Gnostic literature such as Pistis Sophia and the Hymn of the Robe of Glory. The works of G. R. S. Mead (who translated and edited the works mentioned) are a mine of valuable sources and reflections on these matters, with comparisons drawn from Eastern philosophy. While the latter is of no relevance to “pure” scholarship (hence the banishment of Mead from academic discourse), it is of considerable interest to those who think that these are literally matters of life and death. A vivid description of the soul’s obscuration and descent through the spheres is in the 3rd-4th century Neoplatonist Aristeides Quintilianus. See his On Music, in Three Books, ed. and tr. Thomas Mathiesen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 151-52.
(15) “Everyone will see that [the Demiurge] must have looked to the eternal [for his model], for the world is the fairest of creatures and he is the best of causes.” (Timaeus, 29a)
(16) See, for example, “On the Origin of the World” in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. J. M. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 163.
(17) “Celsus […] reports that the Gnostics—he considers them Christians—called the God of the Jews the ‘accursed God,’ since he created the visible world and withheld knowledge from men.” Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of an Ancient Religion (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1983), 73, with reference to Origen, Contra Celsum, 6, 28.
(18) Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London, Scholastic, 2000; part 3 of His Dark Materials).
(19) Poimandres, 24, trans. Scott. Pullman’s Gnosticism however only goes half way, because his ultimate reality is not transcendent but pantheistic. See J. Godwin, “Esotericism without Religion in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” Tyr, 3 (2006), 155-171.
(20) In “The Second Treatise of the Great Seth,” Jesus laughs at the Demiurge’s pretensions: “And then a voice—of the Cosmocrator—came to the angels: ‘I am God and there is no other beside me.’ But I laughed joyfully when I examined his empty glory.” Nag Hammadi Library in English, 331.
(21) Thanks to Henry Corbin and his translators, this tradition has been made accessible in modern Europe. See Chapter 2, n. 8, and, in the present context, Corbin’s The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, tr. Nancy Pearson (Boulder: Shambhala, 1978).
(22) This summary draws on Fred. J. Powicke’s “Bogomils” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 2:784-85, and on standard encyclopedic sources.
(23) On gnosticism since the 19th century occult revival is Massimo Introvigne, Il ritorno dello gnosticismo (Carnago: SugarCo Edizioni, 1993), unfortunately not yet translated.
(24) Author of Chariots of the Gods?, first published 1968, trans. M. Heron (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970), and many subsequent books on the same theme. The unsubtlety of this author and his imitators consists partly in their crass materialism, and, even given that constriction, in the poverty of their imaginations, which are unable to go beyond the limits of early human space-travel. Thus, for instance, von Däniken’s spacemen wore helmets and needed to have their landing-strips marked out for them by the Stone Age inhabitants of earth. In this as in many other fields of “rejected knowledge,” the treatment by popular writers and by the media has given the kiss of death to any serious investigation.
(25) This is written with a sympathetic nod to those who long to find spiritual guidance, and who either find none, or fall into the hands of self-deluded or cynical “masters.” Even genuinely wise and illuminated persons can sometimes be hopeless as psychologists and advisors; see the examples in Anthony Storr: Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen. A Study of Gurus (New York: The Free Press, 1996). There is no easy solution, as witness the Buddha’s parting words: “Be a light unto yourselves.” On spiritual mentorship in original Gnosticism and Hermetism, see Peter Kingsley, “An Introduction to the Hermetica: Approaching Ancient Esoteric Tradition,” in From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme: Gnosis, Hermetism and the Christian Tradition, ed. R. van den Broek & C. van Heertum (Amsterdam: in de Pelikaan, 2000), 17-40.
(26) A superabundance of anti-Darwinian evidence is presented in Michael Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race (San Diego: Bhaktivedanta Institute, 1993).
(27) The archaeologist and psychical researcher T. C. Lethbridge made a tentative start in his last book, The Legend of the Sons of God. A Fantasy? (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). A serious investigation would have to take into account the copious writings on this subject by H. P. Blavatsky, especially The Secret Doctrine (London: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1888), vol. 2, “Anthropogenesis.” There are several separate hypotheses to be considered: 1) That the mutation which brought homo sapiens sapiens into being was deliberately introduced by an entity or entities unknown. (This is a major theme of Zechariah Sitchin’s books, beginning with The Twelfth Planet, New York: Stein & Day, 1976). 2) That early man was educated by superior beings from elsewhere, later commemorated as “gods”; a pioneering treatment is Brinsley le Poer Trench, Men Among Mankind (London: Neville Spearman, 1962); see also Lethbridge, op. cit., and Robert K. G. Temple, The Sirius Mystery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976). 3) That the motivation of such beings may not have been in mankind’s best interests; see for instance Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles of Time (London: Frederick Muller, 1980), and, more amusingly, Pierre Gripari, Histoire du méchant Dieu (Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 1979); 4) That they are still engaged with us, perhaps as the “unknown superiors” of occult groups, perhaps as the aliens who perform abductions; see Valdemar Valerian, The Matrix, 4 vols. (Yelm: Leading Edge Research Group, 1992-94). The mythos of Scientology is also relevant here.