The Gnostic World

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THE GNOSTIC WORLD
The Gnostic World is an outstanding guide to Gnosticism, written by a distinguished

international team of experts to explore Gnostic movements from the distant past
until today. These themes are examined across sixty-seven chapters in a variety of
contexts, from the ancient pre-Christian to the contemporary. The volume considers
the intersection of Gnosticism with Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Indic practices
and beliefs, and also with new religious movements, such as Theosophy, Scientology,
Western Sufism, and the Nation of Islam.
This comprehensive handbook will be an invaluable resource for religious studies
students, scholars, and researchers of Gnostic doctrine and history.
Garry W. Trompf is Emeritus Professor in the History of Ideas, and Adjunct Professor
in Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney, Australia.
Gunner B. Mikkelsen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Ancient History,

Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
Jay Johnston is Associate Professor, School of Literature, Art and Media, University
of Sydney, Australia.
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ROUTLEDGE WORLDS SERIES
The Routledge Worlds are magisterial surveys of key historical epochs, edited and written
by world-renowned experts. Giving unprecedented breadth and depth of coverage, they are
the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged and are essential
reading for anyone with a serious interest in the subject.
THE BUDDHIST WORLD Forthcoming:

John Powers
THE BIBLICAL WORLD, SECOND
THE HINDU WORLD EDITION
Sushil Mittal, Gene Thursby John Barton
THE ISLAMIC WORLD THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WORLD,

Andrew Rippin SECOND EDITION
Philip F. Esler
THE OCCULT WORLD
Christopher Partridge https://www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Worlds/book-series/WORLDS
THE GNOSTIC WORLD
Garry Trompf, Gunner Mikkelsen,
and Jay Johnston
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T H E G N O STI C WORLD
Edited by
Garry W. Trompf
in Collaboration with
Gunner B. Mikkelsen and Jay Johnston
Assistant Editors
Milad Milani (Organization)
Brikha H. S. Nasoraia (Illustrations)
Advisory Editors
Ex officio as Advisory Board members of the Gnostica Monograph
Series (Routledge): Jason BeDuhn, Antoine Faivre, Iain Gardner, Wouter
Hanegraaff, Jean-Pierre Mahé, and Raoul Mortley; with Dylan M. Burns,
Michael Carter, Majella Franzmann, Joscelyn Godwin, Samuel Lieu,
Christopher Partridge, and John O. Ward
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First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Garry W. Trompf,

Gunner B. Mikkelsen and Jay Johnston; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Garry W. Trompf, Gunner B. Mikkelsen and Jay Johnston to

be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-138-67393-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-56160-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Out of House Publishing
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C ONT E N T S
List of figures xi
List of contributors xii
Introduction 1
Garry W. Trompf
THEORETICAL 7
1 Gnosticism, gnostics, and gnosis 9

Dylan M. Burns
2 The Gnostic World: a history of scholarship (until 2000) 26

Garry W. Trompf
3 Gnostics and temporality: from myth to macrohistory 43

Garry W. Trompf
ANCIENT 6 1
4 Ancient pre-Christian “Gnosticisms”: the state of the questions 63

Carl B. Smith II
5 The Jewish background to “Gnosticism”: a guide for the perplexed 79

Garry W. Trompf
6 Gnostic motifs in the New Testament 90

Pheme Perkins
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— Contents —
7 On ancient “Gnosticism” as a problematic category 100

Michael A. Williams
8 Gender issues in the study of ancient Gnosticism 118

Majella Franzmann
9 The Gnostics in early Christian heresiology 124

Mark Edwards
10 Genres of Gnostic literature and the “classical Gnostic”

school of thought 133
John D. Turner
11 Sethian Gnostic speculation 147

John D. Turner
12 Basilides and the Basilidians 156

Jean-Daniel Dubois
13 Valentinus and the Valentinians 162

Einar Thomassen
14 Is the Gospel of Thomas Gnostic? 170

David W. Kim
15 The Gospel of Judas and the Tchacos Codex 180

Garry W. Trompf and David W. Kim
16 The Mandaeans: writings, ritual, and art 187

Brikha H. S. Nasoraia
17 Hermetism and Gnosticism 200

Jean-Pierre Mahé
18 Plotinus and the Gnostics 208

Francis Lacroix and Jean-Marc Narbonne
19 Gnostic elements in ancient magical papyri 217

Malcolm Choat
20 Mani’s life 225

Iain Gardner
21 The Manichaean path to salvation 235

Jason David BeDuhn
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— Contents —
22 Insight and means in Chinese Manichaean texts 246

Gunner B. Mikkelsen
23 From “Zurvanism” to Mazdak 253

Garry W. Trompf and Milad Milani
24 Christian gnosis: from Clement the Alexandrian to John Damascene 259

Doru Costache
25 Gnostic vicissitudes in Late Antiquity 271

Garry W. Trompf
26 Jñāna: gnostic tendencies in early Hinduism and Buddhism 283

Gregory Bailey
27 The discourse of truth in Chinese Tiantai Buddhism: “gnosis

beyond gnosis” 294
Haiyan Shen with Brikha H. S. Nasoraia
MEDIEVAL 3 0 5
28 Questions of Gnostic influence on early Islam 307

John C. Reeves
29 An agenda for the study of early Shiʿi cosmologies 321

Mushegh Asatryan
30 Classic Sufism and gnosis 328

Milad Milani
31 Ismailism and gnosis 337

Farhad Daftary
32 Druze gnosis and the mystery of time 349

Adnan Kasamanie
33 Gnostic elements in Yezidism 358

Victoria Arakelova and Garnik Asatrian
34 Gnosticism and Kabbalah 369

Michael Schneider
35 Bogomils and Cathars 382

Zdenko Zlatar
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36 Alchemy and gnosis from antiquity to early modern times:

“as above so below” 397
Peter Marshall
M OD ERN: WEST, EAST, AND CU RRE NT IS S U E S

EUROP E AND THE W E S T 4 0 7
37 “Gnosis” as term and concept in the esoteric movements of the

modern West: an attempt at periodization 409
Antoine Faivre Translated by Korshi Dosoo
38 Byzantine and modern Orthodox gnosis: from the eleventh to the

twenty-first century 426
Doru Costache
39 Pansophia, Christian Kabbalism, and the quest for universal

knowledge in the early modern West 436
Garry W. Trompf
40 Freemasonry: gnostic images 445

Garry W. Trompf
41 British Romanticism: gnostic longings 454

William Christie
42 William Blake, the ancient Gnostics, and the birth of modern

Gnosticism 464
Peter Otto
43 Gnosis and the “French Occult Revival” and its offshoots 475
Tobias Churton
44 The “Lost Word” key and esoteric eschatology: Blavatsky’s

Gnosis the core of Krishnamurti’s teaching 487
Al Boag
45 The philosophy of Guido von List (1848–1919): connecting

Gnosticism to Nazism 499
Jeffrey D. Lavoie
46 Rudolf Steiner: multiple bodies 510

Wayne Hudson
47 Gnostic sensibility in Gurdjieff’s “Work” 516

Constance A. Jones
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— Contents —
48 Western Sufism and gnosis 527

Mark Sedgwick
49 Gnosis: a Perennialist perspective 537

Harry Oldmeadow
50 Carl Jung on Gnosticism 549

Robert A. Segal
51 Elevating the family in the Nation of Islam: discerning the

“gnostic factor” 553
Dennis Walker
THE EAST (AND BE YO ND ) 5 6 3
52 Inner tradition: recovering the Christianity of the East 565

Lynn C. Bauman
53 Gnosis in Bābism and gnostic signs in Bābī talismans 579

Denis M. MacEoin
54 Ayatollah Khomeini’s gnoseology and its impact on his

political worldview 587
Emad Bazzi
55 Syncretistic Sufi Gnosticism in South and South East Asia 595

Clinton Bennett
56 Aurobindo and supermind 603

Peter Heehs
57 Of Gnosis in tribal and “primal” cultures 610

Garry W. Trompf
CURRENT 6 1 9
58 The neo-Gnostic synthesis of Samael Aun Weor 621

Bernard Doherty
59 Scientology and Gnosticism: L. Ron Hubbard’s “The Factors” (1953) 632

Donald A. Westbrook and James R. Lewis
60 Gnostic and esoteric filaments in popular culture 638

Adam Possamai
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— Contents —
61 Feminist gnosis and modern gender issues 646

Jay Johnston
62 Modern psychedelic gnosis 652

Christopher Partridge
63 Exposing Gnosticism 663

Douglas E. Cowan
64 Gnostic fiction 671

Carole Cusack
65 Cinema: evil demiurges in Hollywood films at the threshold of the

twenty-first century 679
Fryderyk Kwiatkowski
66 Music and Gnosis 688

Joscelyn Godwin
67 Aesthetics and visual art 693

Jay Johnston
Index 698
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FI GU RE S
13.1 The Valentinian Pleroma according to Irenaeus 164

16.1 Image of Hibil Ziwa from the Rivers Scroll 190
16.2 Image of Abatur at the Scales (from Diwan Abatur) 193
16.3 Image of Ptahil (from Diwan Abatur) 195
22.1 Fourteenth-century relief of Mani, the Buddha of Light, in Cao’an
temple, Jinjiang, Fujian 251
35.1 Bogomil and Cathar church offices compared 388
35.2 Bogomil and Cathar tenets compared 390–1
36.1 The Emerald Tablet in Johann Daniel Mylius,
Basilica Philosophica (1618) 405
52.1 Early Christianity 30–130 CE 570
52.2 Culturally interpreted streams of Christianity 574
53.1 Bābī talisman combining pentagram and circle, with
central jadim of Quranic verses 584
53.2 Complex but predominantly circular Bābī talisman with
Quranic verses 585
57.1 A Catholic catechist teaching Fugughe youth (Papuan Highlands)
and introducing a totally new cosmos and its layers (1930s) 616
65.1 Mr Book from Dark City 680
65.2 The Source from The Matrix Revolutions 680
65.3 Christof in The Truman Show 681
65.4 The Strangers in Dark City 682
65.5 The agents in The Matrix 683
65.6 “One of the Twins” in the The Matrix Reloaded 683
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C ONT R I B UTO RS
Victoria Arakelova is Associate Professor, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian-

Armenian University, Yerevan. She works on Near Eastern non-dogmatic milieux
(Heterodox Shi‘a trends, Yezidis), ethno-religious identities, and contact zones. She
is co-author with Garnik Asatrian of The Ethnic Minorities of Armenia and The
Religion of the Peacock Angel on the Yezidis.
Garnik Asatrian is Director, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian- Armenian
University, Yerevan. He works on Iranian ethno- linguistics, comparative religion
studies, and Kurdology. Of many books he authored, recent titles include Études on
Iranian Ethnology, Ethnic Composition of Iran, and The Religion of the Peacock
Angel, on the Yezidis. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Iran and the Caucasus.
Mushegh Asatryan is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Muslim Cultures at the
University of Calgary, Canada. With a PhD from Yale, his research interests include
the religious, social, and intellectual history of the pre-modern Muslim Middle East.
He is particularly interested in the history of Muslim sectarianism, Shi‘ism, and the
Nusayris. He is the author of Controversies in Formative Shii Islam: The Ghulat
Muslims and their Beliefs (2017), and a number of articles.
Gregory Bailey, formerly Reader in Sanskrit, is an Honorary Research Fellow in the
School of Languages and Cultures, La Trobe University, Melbourne. He has published
translations and studies of the Gaṇeśa Purāṇa, Bhartṛhari’s Śatakatrayam, and books
on the god Brahmā, early Buddhism, and many articles on Sanskrit literature, as well
as a book on contemporary Australia.
Lynn C. Bauman taught comparative religion and spirituality at the Universities of
Tehran (Iran) and Dallas (Texas). Recent publications are The Gospel of Thomas:
Wisdom of the Twin and In Trouble and In Wonder.
Emad Bazzi completed his doctorate on the thought and revolutionary career of
Ayatollah Khomeini. He has also published on the encounter between Islam and
Modernity/Postmodernism. He teaches Islamic Studies, through Distance Learning,
with the Islamic College for Advanced Studies, based in London. He was Assistant
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— Contributors —
Professor of Islamic Studies, Khalifa University, UAE, and Lecturer in Arabic and
Islamic Studies at Leeds University.
Jason David BeDuhn is Professor of the Comparative Study of Religions at Northern
Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA, and author of The Manichaean Body (2000) and
Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma (2010, 2013).
Clinton Bennett received his PhD (Islamic Studies) from Birmingham University, UK
in 1990. He has worked in Bangladesh, taught at Colleges in the UK and USA, and
has written or edited fifteen books including (as editor) The Bloomsbury Companion
to Islamic Studies (2013) and, with Charles M. Ramsey (as co-editor), South Asian
Sufis (2012). He teaches at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Al Boag researched the origins and development of apocalyptic eschatology during
the decade of the 1970s, first at Avondale College, New South Wales, then at St.
Andrews University, Scotland. He recently completed Masters and Doctoral degrees
at the University of Sydney, on esoteric eschatology and Christology by leading fig-
ures in the Theosophical Society: Blavatsky, Besant, Leadbeater, and Krishnamurti.
Dylan M. Burns is a Research Associate at the Egyptological Seminar of Freie
Universität Berlin. Co-editor of Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies, he is the
author of Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism
(2014), and collaborative editor of Gnosticism, Platonism, and the Late Ancient
World (John D. Turner Festschrift, 2013).
Malcolm Choat is Associate Professor in the Department of Ancient History,
Macquarie University, Sydney. His research fields are Coptic and Greek papyr-
ology, and Christianity and monasticism in Late Antique Egypt. His recent
publications include Belief and Cult in Fourth-Century Papyri (2006) and (with Iain
Gardner) A Handbook of Ritual Power in the Macquarie Collection (P.Macq. I 1)
(2013).
William Christie is Head of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian
National University and a Fellow and Head of the English Section at the Australian
Academy of the Humanities. His publications include Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A
Literary Life (2006), The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic
Britain (2009), Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life (2014), and The Two Romanticisms,
and Other Essays (2016).
Tobias Churton was appointed Honorary Fellow of Exeter University in 2005 as
Lecturer in the Center for the Study of Western Esotericism: He holds a Master’s
degree in Theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, and is the author of many
books, including biographies of William Blake, Elias Ashmole, Aleister Crowley, and
George Gurdjieff, as well as works on Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Gnosticism,
and Hermeticism, including Occult Paris; Freemasonry: The Reality; The Invisible
History of the Rosicrucians; and Gnostic Philosophy.
Doru Costache is an Honorary Associate of the University of Sydney’s Department of
Studies in Religion. Before 2004 he lectured in the University of Bucharest and since
2005 for the Sydney College of Divinity. A Romanian Orthodox priest, he is Director
of The Australian Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies.
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Douglas E. Cowan is Professor of Religious Studies at Renison University College in

Waterloo, Canada. His most recent books include America’s Dark Theologian: The
Religious Imagination of Stephen King, and Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe
Heroes: Fantasy Culture and the Mythic Imagination.
Carole Cusack is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney. She
researches contemporary religious trends, including pilgrimage and tourism, new
religious movements, esotericism, and popular culture. Her books include (with
Katharine Buljan) Anime, Religion and Spirituality: Profane and Sacred Worlds in
Contemporary Japan (2015) and Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith
(2010).
Farhad Daftary is the Director of The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, and Head
of its Department of Academic Research and Publications. An authority on Ismaili
studies, he has lectured and published widely with more than twenty books and 300
articles and encyclopedia entries. He serves on a number of editorial boards and is
the co-editor (with Wilferd Madelung) of Encyclopaedia Islamica. Professor Daftary’s
books have been translated into numerous languages.
Bernard Doherty is Course Director in the School of Theology and a research fellow in
the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology at Charles Sturt University, Canberra.
His research interests and many articles range from theology and history to law, pol-
itics, and media studies.
Jean-Daniel Dubois is Emeritus at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Chair of
Gnostic and Manichaean Studies), PSL Research University, Paris. A member of the
“Laboratoire d’études sur les monothéismes,” a unit of the French National Research
Center (UMR 8584), he is working on Valentinian and Basilidian Gnostics, and on
Manichaean hymnography.
Mark Edwards has been Tutor in Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, and University
Lecturer (now Associate Professor) in Patristics since 1993. Since 2014 he has also
held the title Professor of Early Christian Studies. His books include Catholicity and
Heresy in the Early Church (2009), and Christians, Gnostics and Philosophers in
Late Antiquity (2012).
Antoine Faivre, Professor Emeritus since 2002, has been Attaché de Recherches au
C.N.R.S., Professor of Germanic Studies at the Universities of Bordeaux and Rouen,
Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Directeur d’Études at
the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris (with a Chair in the History of “Esoteric
and Mystical Currents in Modern and Contemporary Europe”). Author of twelve
books and over a hundred articles, he is director and co-director of several academic
series and journals.
Majella Franzmann, formerly Pro- Vice Chancellor at Curtin University, Western
Australia, currently holds a Professorial position at the University of Sydney. She has
been a long-term researcher in Gnosticism, beginning with studies of Jesus in the Nag
Hammadi and Manichaean writings. Professor Franzmann is currently working on a
project on Women in Manichaeism with Prof. Madeleine Scopello (CNRS Sorbonne,
Paris).
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Iain Gardner is Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Sydney

and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He has published widely on
Manichaeism, as well as preparing many first editions of Coptic texts from museum
collections and ongoing archaeological excavations such as in the Dakhleh Oasis.
Joscelyn Godwin is Professor of Music Emeritus, Colgate University, USA. Educated
at Cambridge and Cornell Universities, he has written widely on esoteric matters, as
in The Theosophical Enlightenment and Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World.
In the 1980s–1990s he undertook a six-book project to make the tradition of “specu-
lative music” from all eras accessible in English translation.
Peter Heehs is an independent scholar based in Pondicherry, India. He is the author of
more than 60 articles, which have appeared in journals such as History and Theory
and magazines such as History Today, and twelve books, including The Lives of Sri
Aurobindo (2008) and Spirituality without God (2018).
Wayne Hudson is a Research Professor at The Australian Centre for Christianity
and Culture, Charles Sturt University, Canberra, and an Adjunct Professor at the
University of Tasmania. He is the English-language authority on the German philoso-
pher of hope Ernst Bloch, and the leading historian of English deism. He has written
and edited over twenty books.
Constance A. Jones, PhD, is Professor in the School of Consciousness and
Transformation at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco,
California. She is the author of Encyclopedia of Hinduism (2007), The Legacy of G.I.
Gurdjieff (2005), and numerous articles on Krishnamurti and new religions.
Jay Johnston is Associate Professor, School of Literature, Art and Media, University
of Sydney, Australia. Recent publications include co-editor (with Alexandra Grieser)
of Aesthetics of Religion: A Connective Concept (de Gruyter 2017).
Adnan Kasamanie spent most of his academic life teaching Political Economy and
Mathematical Economic Modelling at the University of Technology, Sydney. A Druze,
Professor Kasamanie is well known for his international lecturing tours to expound
Druzism, and currently researches Druze manuscripts in the Mounts Lebanon. His
book Druze Gnosis is to be published in the Gnostica series.
David W. Kim (PhD Sydney) is a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Political and
Social Change, Australian National University, Canberra. His teaching and research
include the Nag Hammadi Library, the Tchacos Codex, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the
New Testament, and Asian History. He is author of Intercultural Transmission in the
Medieval Mediterranean; Revivals Awaken Generations, and a forthcoming book for
Gnostica on The Gospel of Thomas.
Fryderyk Kwiatkowski, a joint doctoral candidate at both the Jagiellonian University
and the University of Groningen, is writing his dissertation on the reception of
Gnosticism in Hollywood (1990–2016). His research focuses on the reception of
ancient Gnostic thought in the West; and he has recently published in the Canadian-
American Slavic Studies, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, and the
Journal of Religion and Film.
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Francis Lacroix is a doctoral student under the supervision of Jean-Marc Narbonne

(Laval University) and Philippe Hoffmann (École Pratique des Hautes- Études).
His thesis concerns the treatise 6 (IV 8), On the Descent of the Soul into Bodies. It
includes a new French translation with a commentary focusing on the Gnostic influ-
ence of Plotinus.
Jeffrey D. Lavoie is a Professor of Philosophy at Newbury College in Brookline. He
received his PhD from the University of Exeter (working under the late Nicholas
Goodrick-Clarke). He has published widely on subjects related to modern religious
philosophy and their intersections with gender, race, and sexuality.
James R. Lewis is an extensively published scholar in the field of New Religious
Movements, and is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tromsø
(Norway). He currently co-edits four book series and is the general editor for the
Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review. Recent publications include (co-edited
with Inga Bårdsen Tøllefsen) The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements II
(2016) and The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Terrorism (2017).
Denis M. MacEoin holds degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, and from the uni-
versities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, the latter two in Persian, Arabic, and Islamic
History. His PhD was the first modern study of Babi doctrine and history (work
later expanded in several books, including The Messiah of Shiraz). He taught Arabic
and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University, and is currently a Distinguished Senior
Fellow at New York’s Gatestone Institute. The author of 26 works of fiction under
other names, he lives in the UK.
Jean-Pierre Mahé, Emeritus at EPHE (Sorbonne), Fellow of the “Académie des
Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres” (Paris), FBA, has been working on Hermetic Literature
since 1974. He has edited and translated the Coptic and Armenian versions, as well
as more recently discovered Greek fragments. He is currently preparing an additional
volume to the Nock and Festugière edition.
Peter Marshall is the author of seventeen books, which have been translated into fif-
teen languages, including The Philosophers Stone: A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy
(2001) and The Theatre of the World: Alchemy, Astrology and Magic in Renaissance
Prague (2006). He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Gunner B. Mikkelsen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Ancient History,
Macquarie University, Sydney. He was formerly Carlsberg Fellow and Associate
Professor at Aarhus University and Senior Research Associate at SOAS, London. He
specializes in Chinese Manichaean and Christian texts, and among his publications
are Dictionary of Manichaean Texts in Chinese, and (with Sam Lieu et al.) Tractatus
Manichaicus Sinicus.
Milad Milani is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at Western Sydney University,
specializing in Sufism and Islamic history, and a research member of the Religion
and Society Research Cluster (RSRC). Milad is on the executive committee of the
Australian Association for the Study of Religion (AASR) and is a member of the
Australian Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies (AAIMS). His books are on
Sufism.
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Jean-Marc Narbonne is a Professor in Ancient Philosophy at Université Laval

(Québec), holder of the Canada Research Chair in the Critical Spirit in Antiquity and
the Emergence of Modernity, and director of Plotinus’s Oeuvres complètes for the
Budé collection. He has published many works, e.g., Antiquité critique et modernité
(2016) and Plotin, Oeuvres complètes, t. I, 1 (2012).
Brikha H. S. Nasoraia is Professor of Arabic, Ancient Semitics, and History of
Religions at Artuklu and Sydney Universities (the former in Turkey). A Mandaean
from Iraq, he is the leading scholar in the esoteric texts of Mandaeism. In Australia he
is a distinguished artist and public intellectual, and abroad he is also an archaeologist
with more than seventeen years of fieldwork experience. He authored The Mandaean
Rivers Scroll for the Gnostica series, Routledge.
Harry Oldmeadow was formerly Coordinator of Philosophy and Religious Studies at
La Trobe University, Bendigo. His books include Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial
Philosophy (2010), Touchstones of the Spirit (2012), and Black Elk, Lakota Visionary
(2018).
Peter Otto is Professor of Literature at the University of Melbourne. His recent
publications include Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity and the Emergence
of Virtual Reality (2011), and 21st Century Oxford Authors: William Blake (2018).
He is completing a book on Blake and the History of Imagination.
Christopher Partridge is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Politics,
Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of several
books, including High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence
in the Modern World (2018) and The Re-Enchantment of the West, 2 vols (2004–
2005), and edited The Occult World (2015) for the Routledge Worlds series.
Pheme Perkins is the Joseph Professor of Catholic Spirituality at Boston College,
specializing in Christianity during the first three centuries. Her research in Gnostic
texts focuses on revelation discourses, Biblical hermeneutics, and the development of
Christian theology.
Adam Possamai is Professor in Sociology and Director of Research in the School of
Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University. His latest books are
Sociology of Exorcism in Late Modernity (with G. Giordan, 2018), The I-zation of
Society, Religion, and Neoliberal Post-Secularism (2018), and the co-edited Religions,
Nations and Transnationalism in Multiple Modernities (2017). He penned a novel,
L’histoire extraordinaire de Baudelaire (2017).
John C. Reeves is Blumenthal Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte. He specializes in the study of the history of religions in the
Near East during Late Antiquity and the medieval era. He is the author of Heralds
of That Good Realm: Syro-Mesopotamian Gnosis and Jewish Traditions (1996), and
Prolegomena to a History of Islamicate Manichaeism (2011).
Michael Schneider is Senior Lecturer in Jewish Thought at Bar Ilan University, Israel.
He specializes in early Jewish mysticism with special focus on the transition period
between the Antiquity to the Middle Ages. His studies deal with rabbinic, mystic, and
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magic texts of Late Antiquity, a main interest being connections between Judaism and
other Near Eastern religious traditions.
Mark Sedgwick is Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University in
Denmark. He was educated at the universities of Oxford and Bergen, and taught for
many years at the American University in Cairo. His most recent book is Western
Sufism, from the Abbasids to the New Age.
Robert A. Segal is Professor in Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen. He writes
and teaches on theories of myth and theories of religion as well as on Gnosticism.
Among the books he has written or edited are The Poimandres as Myth, which applies
Jung to an ancient Gnostic myth; The Gnostic Jung; Jung on Mythology and The
Allure of Gnosticism.
Haiyan Shen is Professor of Buddhist Studies and Religious Studies, Department of
Philosophy, Faculty of Social Science, Shanghai University. She received her doctorate
from Ghent University, Belgium. Her primary interest is Access Consciousness. Her
main publication is The Profound Meaning of the Lotus Sūtra – T’ien-t’ai Philosophy
of Buddhism, 2 vols. (2005–2007).
Carl B. Smith II (PhD, Miami University) is Chair of the College of Theology and
Program Director of the DMin Program at South University, Savannah, GA. He is the
author of No Longer Jews: The Search for Gnostic Origins (2004).
Einar Thomassen is Professor of Religion at the University of Bergen, Norway. His
main contributions to scholarship have been on Nag Hammadi, and Valentinianism
in particular, though his research interests and teaching in general range from Greco-
Roman religions over ancient Christianity to formative and mystical Islam, as well as
to theoretical issues in the study of religion.
Garry W. Trompf is Emeritus Professor in the History of Ideas, and Adjunct Professor
in Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney. He was formerly Professor of
History at the University of Papua New Guinea. Inter alia his publications include The
Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought; Early Christian Historiography;
and Payback. He is Senior and co-Founding Editor of the Gnostica monograph series
(Routledge).
John D. Turner, Cotner Professor of Religious Studies and Charles J. Mach University
Professor of Classics and History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, specializes
in the study of ancient Gnosticism, in particular the restoration, conservation, trans-
lation, and interpretation of the thirteen fourth-century papyrus codices from Nag
Hammadi, Egypt. Among many publications, he authored Sethian Gnosticism and
the Platonic Tradition (2001).
Dennis Walker received his doctorate (on pan-Arab nationalism, Egypt 1892–1952)
at the Australian National University (ANU). He taught Middle Eastern Studies at
Melbourne University and the ANU, and is currently Adjunct Research Associate in
the Centre for Religious Studies, Monash University, and Executive Member of the
Centre for Millennial and Apocalyptic Studies, embraced within the University of
Bedford. His major work is Islam and the Search for African-American Nationhood.
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Donald A. Westbrook (PhD Claremont Graduate University) has taught at UCLA, Cal
State Fullerton, Fuller Seminary, and is affiliated with the Faculty for the Comparative
Study of Religion and Humanism (FVG) in Antwerp, Belgium. His main areas of
research are American religious history and new religious movements.
Michael A. Williams is Professor of Comparative Religion and Near Eastern
Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington (Seattle). His publications
include: The Immovable Race (1985), Rethinking “Gnosticism” (1996), Charisma
and Sacred Biography (1982, editor), Innovation in Religious Traditions (1992, co-
editor), and a variety of articles.
Zdenko Zlatar is an Honorary Reader in the Department of History at the University

of Sydney. His areas of expertise include Russian and East European History, in par-
ticular the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of the Balkans. He has published
on the Cathars, the Bosnian Church, and a trilogy on the Balkan epics. Recently he
published Golden Byzantium and Red and Black Byzantium.
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1
INTRODUCTION
Garry W. Trompf
I t is high time scholars and general readers alike should have the opportunity to
contemplate and probe “the Gnostic World” as a whole, guided by the best up-to-
date scholarship. An immense amount of ink is still being spilt on interpreting the
Gnostic texts of Antiquity, in particular the Nag Hammadi Codices in Coptic from
the early Christian centuries, materials from Egypt ranking with Judaea’s Dead Sea
Scrolls among the most spectacular archeological discoveries ever. And more recently
such a controversial text as the Gospel of Judas has come to light, along with the
availability of previously secret scrolls and lead rolls held by the Mandaeans, extollers
of John the Baptist, and different materials enabling us to be clearer about the rise
of the Manichaeans, the most widespread of the ancient “Gnostic” systems. In these
cases a veritable treasure house of what has been called ancient “Gnosticism” has
opened up, its varied pieces inevitably beckoning explanation as a whole and asking
for the means to place it in a bigger perspective. All the (admittedly understandable)
excitement over the antique finds has been inspiration for holding in mind and better
conceptualizing a Gnostic World that is both broader in scope than the special, often
arcane lines of speculation first associated with early Christian heresies, and longer
in time as a persisting and highly important current in the history of human thought.
This book is designed as a collection of critical studies by experts to both widen and
deepen study in Gnostic movements and strands of speculation as a discrete “World”
of human socio-spiritual life from the distant past until today.
The idea of a truer and more profound capacity to know is most commonly traced
to the parable of the cave given by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, with its stark
contrast between those who are lost in the dinginess of shadow puppetry and those who
can see the clear light of day, able “to know” (gignōskein) better. In the most general way
γνῶσις (gnōsis) implies a better than ordinarily accessible “knowledge,” and a Gnostic
in the generic sense would be someone who is a deep and (on typical assumption) wise
knower. In ancient Greek semantics, then, “Gnosis” and “Gnostic” already connect to
wisdom (sophia) and the love of it (philo-sophia), word associations remaining to this
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— G a r r y W. T r o m p f —
day. When the agenda of this collection was first being projected, expectations as to
how subjects and thinkers should be broached were kept as loose as possible, just pro-
nouncing that: “Quests for Gnosis, or for the deep knowledge in which the mysteries of
the cosmos are unveiled, form a crucial component in world religious and cultural life.”
But scholars acquainted with the general field are only too well aware of the differing
usages and deployments of Gnosis, its cognates, and linguistic equivalents in various
historical and geographical contexts. It might mean access to some highly arcane for-
mulaic instructions or else an abstract, high-principle of Truth. It may be intentionally
kept secret as covert mystery (hence the neologism “mysteriosophy” tested by Italian
historian of religions Ugo Bianchi) or, in contrast, a teaching that is open to all, if dis-
creetly imparted. It might only be received by initiatory procedure or else simply by
the possession and reading of a relevant text. The applications of contents might range
from a highly specific elite (or “cultic”) group, in a geo-historically confined situation,
to the generous, but now properly disclosed message that it has always been the Truth
behind “all” religions (in its acclaimed “perennialism”). Whatever the variations, an air
de famille pertains, to use a phrase (deployed by French esotericist Antoine Faivre) for
discerning, as a heuristic device, the related thought-modes we call “esoteric,” “mys-
tical,” “occult,” “theosophical,” “sapiental,” and not just what is “Gnostic[al].” In toto,
moreover, both the variegation and interwovenness point to a “World” of conscious-
ness and activity that this volume seeks to encompass.
As we proceed through the volume, we find how changes in the way the cosmos
is conceived of can affect the functioning objective of “gnosis,” whether to overcome
problems inflicted by an alienating demiurge (as with “classic Gnosticism”), or later on
to seek union with the one true God (a common medieval tendency, as with the Sufis),
or later again to subvert authoritarian, “established” religions with deeper insights
(ponder William Blake and the English Romantics). As we advance through the centuries
(through the pages of this book), “history” diminishes (but never completely overcomes)
“myth” as the conceived theater in which attained “Gnosis” is dramatized: the Gnostic
myth of the soul’s descent into matter and hoped-for return gets encased in varieties of
cyclical theories about the human adventure through earthly temporality. And slowly,
especially in modern times, higher “Knowledge” sheds some of the primacy originally
given to “spiritual-revelatory” experience for a more secular acceptance of extraor-
dinary disclosures from more rational investigations of the natural order, or of human
pasts long hidden from sight, or psychic data that would stir Swiss psychoanalyst Carl
Jung to say in a famous 1959 film interview that from probing the Unconscious he could
“know” rather than just believe in God. It is remarkable, as Dutch historian of Hermetic
and related speculation Wouter Hanegraaff has shown, how secularized even New Age
“gnoses” present themselves, as if they have to be legitimated by modern science; and
by now we are all somehow absorbed into a “myth of universal knowledge” offered
to us daily on screens from the Internet. Still, it intrigues that, if the ancient Gnostics
mostly fell for what modern cosmologist Paul Davies called “the matter myth,” des-
pising materiality as such as well, in the long run we owe from later thinking in the
Gnostic trajectory our greater awareness of cosmic process and of matter/energy inter-
changeability, which both bear “theological implications.”
All these matters are addressed by the rich set of studies in this volume, and along
with the encouragement of diachronic awareness come demonstrations of geograph-
ical spread: gnōsis, for example, being cognate to the Sanskrit jñāna; with Gnostic
2
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— Introduction —
insights seeping into the Islamicate world (as far as Indonesia, and with renowned
gnoseologist Ayatollah Khomeini framing the Iranian constitution on Platonic
principles); and the globalization of Western theosophic and New Age cabals such
that even isolated tribal movements can be affected by the prized possession of
Masonic texts and their symbols. It is indeed a very suitable, not just timely event
that the collective contents of this book should join the “Routledge Worlds” series.
When it was originally mooted that such a volume of this was needed (in 2012),
under the encouragement of the Editorial of Acumen (publishers since subsumed
by Routledge), it was conceived more as an encyclopedic affair, with a myriad of
entries large and small alphabetically ordering materials from “Zarathustra to the
Da Vinci Code, as it were” (in my jocular phrasing). However, that soon proved an
unwieldy prospect, and Routledge’s invitation to join their series facilitated much
better focus and management. From the first there was no intention to compete with
the monumental Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2006), its senior
editor Wouter Hanegraaff having co-founded with me the monograph series Gnostica
(from 1997). The dream of taking in more non-Western materials, Persian and Indic,
Buddhist and Islamic especially, was the immediate and obvious mark of distinc-
tion for this volume, and with it the prospect of bringing in many non-European
authors who could give expression to the wide Gnostic World beyond top-heavy
specialist concentration on difficult ancient texts issuing from Nag Hammadi and
new European-supervised archeological digs. Attempts have admittedly been recently
made to convey a better sense of a wider compass of Gnostic prepossessions across
time and space, with the anthology of Essential Gnostic Scriptures edited by Marvin
Meyer and Willis Barnstone, monographs by Julia Iwersen in Germany, Sean Martin
in Britain, Pepa Sanz Bisbal and Ramiro Cañon in Spain, Richard Smoley and April
DeConick in the United States, along with very popular coverages, of course, such
as Andrew Phillip Smith’s Dictionary of Gnosticism. But one can dare to say that
the cross-cultural breadth and depth of this volume are close to being its best and
clinching raison d’être. Indeed, the rich range of nationalities present here is to be
celebrated, and, at the risk of being chauvinist, the academic resources in Australia
have been a draw-card, its biggest cities now the most ethnically diverse on earth.
Then again, more than justification for this volume lies in the range of experts
probing the ancient materials, the study of which has involved one of the great stories
of international collaboration and academic exchange. So, as new things have come
to light, from better piecing together of papyrus fragments or finds from the earth,
there is always usefulness in having the best up-to-date scholarship on the foundation
works of “Gnosticism.” An older generation, particularly of Nag Hammadi scholars,
has moved on: individuals of that time graciously wished us the best, but the cohort
of scholars we have here, some who have worked with the “elder statesmen,” others
arising anew, put us in touch with ongoing, cutting-edge scholarship and generate
welcome new insights.
Naturally, the structure of this book should give weight to the importance of
understanding the ancient bases and inheritance of Gnostic thought and practice, and
this gives necessary background to many essays on Gnostic currents and movements
running to our time. Articles in the Theoretical section are designed to address issues
of definition, scholarship, and conceptual framing that pertain to the trajectory or
“World” as a whole. The Ancient section, with papers on the background to ancient
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4
Gnostic religious and philosophic modes, on how to best characterize major elements
and speculative themes, and on the contents of various texts and the worldviews they
convey, gives that fundamental grounding to the whole enterprise. Actually the papers
in the Ancient section reflect an extraordinary, indeed immense, body of ongoing
research especially on “classic Gnostic,” “orthodox Christian Gnostic,” Mandaean,
and Manichaean remains, and all the excitement and healthy debate issuing from the
string of new “discoveries” since the last World War. Writers on later phenomena will
typically gauge the significance of what has persisted from Antiquity, and what rele-
vant strains of thought came to be seriously modified and why.
The Medieval Section opens up an extraordinary view into Gnostic speculation
that has been too long without clear and critico-distantiated exposition or has not
been placed in the kind of perspective that allows a Gnostic World to be recognized, or
too long thought unworthy or perhaps improper to display to world-wide readership
because mainstream religion has ruled it “suspect”. The Modern section, divided into
Western, Eastern (and Beyond), and Current Issues, presents a vast panorama, enab-
ling readers to see how Gnostic threads extend out of the Eastern Christian, Jewish
and Muslim arenas into many different spiritual and socio-religious movements that
make up part of the rich tapestry of the world’s religiosity at present. These include,
inter alia, neo-Gnostic churches, decisively Western Sufism, peculiar adaptations of
minority Shi‘i theology for African-American Muslims, and Gnostic impetuses in
modern literature, art, film, and aesthetics more generally. Negative reactions to resur-
gent Gnosticism, indicated by such a title as Against the Protestant Gnostics by Philip
Lee (and recalling the early adversarial heresiology of the Church Father Irenaeus), go
to show the Gnostic mode is taken as a living theological contestant within the huge
Christian theater, not just an isolated part of the multi-religious mix.
The division of editorial responsibilities was as follows: I was in charge of
Theoretical, Medieval, and the Eastern Modern chapters; Gunner Mikkelsen, from
the Ancient History Department at Macquarie University, handled Ancient; and Jay
Johnston, Associate Professor in Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney and
my colleague tackled the Western Modern. Collaboration was essential, and we have
each cherished the collegiality that has come out of undertaking a mammoth task.
This includes the very pleasant working experiences with Assistant Editors Dr Milad
Milani (Western University Sydney) and Prof Brikha Nasoraia (Universities of Sydney
and Mardin, Turkey) –who made us a truly multicultural lot –and willing support
enjoyed from the Editorial Advisory Board members. We have all been thankful for the
guidance and patience of Sarah Gore, at the Routledge editorial for the Worlds series,
and for generous seeding money provided by both Routledge and the Theosophical
Society of Australia. Such available funds helped with the translation of the major
article by Faivre by Korshi Dosoo.
Aside from acknowledging the participant authors in this volume, who were
always ready to work as resource persons for the project, special personal
acknowledgements for particular help should go to Fadia and Nadia Al Faris,
Giselle Bader, Revd Cynthia Bourgeault, Prof. David Brakke, Caroline Chivers,
Archdeacon John Chryssavgis, Dr Adam Cooper, Colin Everitt, Céline Durassier,
Profs Claire Fanger and Anthony Johns, Lili Kamala Johnston, Zoe Katiraei, Dr
Stephen Lambden, Annemarie Lejbølle, Izabella Mackiewicz, John MacMurphy,
Alfred and Mary Mansour, Dr Mehravar Marzbani, Prof. Willemien Otten, George
4
5
— Introduction —
Papousakis, Ray Radford, Profs van den Broek, Pieter van der Horst, Kocku von
Stuckrad, and Harold Tarrant, Naira and Ruben Ulikhanyan, Hermit Sr Wendy,
Prof. Edwin Yamauchi, and to many others along the way.
Garry Winston Trompf
The Day of SS Carpus and Papylus, 2018
5
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THEORETICAL
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CHAPTER ONE
GNOSTICISM, GNOSTICS,
AND GNOSIS
Dylan M. Burns
INTRODUCTIO N
This is not a historical survey of Gnosis and Gnosticism, but of what scholars have
taken Gnosis and Gnosticism to be, with particular regard to ancient individuals
who called themselves “Gnostics”. Although the primary goal of this essay is to elu-
cidate questions of definition and methodology, to help orient any reader interested
in Gnosticism or Gnosis, it will also advance arguments regarding the relative utility
of these terms. Specifically, “Gnosticism” is a term which has been thoroughly
interrogated by contemporary scholarship, discussed and refined over the course of
decades. While many scholars avoid it, others have tried to rehabilitate it to describe
the distinctive “school of thought” characteristic of our extant evidence regarding the
gnōstikoi, Christian heretics of the second and third centuries CE. On the other hand,
while the term “Gnosis” has long been used interchangeably with “Gnosticism,”
others have employed it to describe a vast range of discourses about disparate histor-
ical and philosophical phenomena, often related to, if not conflated with, “mysticism”
and “esotericism.” The present article therefore begins by discussing the problem and
attendant evidence of ancient “Gnosticism” before tracing the reception and devel-
opment of ancient Gnostic traditions in the medieval world as well as the modern
emergence of discourse about “Gnosis.”
FRO M BAUR TO RUDOLPH: P HIL O S O P HY O F RE L IG IO N,

EX ISTENTIALISM, AND THE D IVINE S PARK
The term “Gnosticism” was first coined by the Cambridge Platonist Henry More
(1614–1687) as a blanket term for all early Christian heresies (Layton 1995: 348–9),
yet modern research into the subject begins in Germany, with the Protestant theo-
logian and church historian Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860). Baur used the
term Gnosis (Grk. “knowledge”) to describe a transhistorical philosophy of religion,
culminating in the philosophy of Hegel, whose central features are an emphasis on
religious knowledge, cosmic dualism, and allegorical interpretation of Scripture (Baur
1975: 4). Such speculations originated in Egypt’s cosmopolitan center Alexandria,
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— Dylan M. Burns —
with heretical Christian teachers considered affected by them (such as Simon Magus,
Valentinus, Basilides, and Marcion) being dubbed “Gnostics” (Grk. gnōstikoi,
“knowers”) by ancient heresiographers (Baur 1975: 7–9). Baur’s paradigm endured
until the dawn of the twentieth century, when the so-called History of Religions
School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule), chiefly represented by Wilhelm Bousset
(1865–1920), shifted research towards the origins of Gnosticism in Egyptian and
especially Iranian religion. Yet, as we will see, Baur’s notion of Gnosis stands in its
own trajectory of Protestant theologizing from which derive several models of ana-
lyzing “Gnosis” today.
The History of Religions School was ultimately unsuccessful in its quest
to derive Gnostic thought from Persian religion. The Berlin church historian
Adolf von Harnack (1851– 1930), meanwhile, dubbed Gnosticism “the acute
Hellenization of Christianity,” by which he meant the transformation of the original
Jesus movement into a philosophically sophisticated, crypto-Pagan Catholicism
(Harnack 1975: 147; further, King 2003: 55–70; Marjanen 2005: 33–5). Bousset
and Harnack alike were eclipsed mid- century by the pioneering work of the
German Jew Hans Jonas (1903–1993). In his two-volume dissertation (pub. 1934,
1954), revised as The Gnostic Religion (pub. 1958), Jonas (2001 [edn.]) read the
ancient sources about the Gnostics through the lenses of Martin Heidegger’s exist-
entialism and debates surrounding Karl Barth’s theology (Lazier 2008: 32–6). He
identified ancient Gnosticism as the existentialism of Antiquity, whose emphasis on
salvation through knowledge and anticosmic dualism expressed a “removal of the
cosmos” (Entweltlichung) from God, emblematic of the “spirit of late antiquity”
(Waldstein 2000: 364–7).
Jonas conceived his ideas without the benefit of access to much surviving Gnostic
literature. Two ancient Coptic manuscripts, the Askew and Bruce Codices, had been
known since the eighteenth century, but their contents were (and remain) famously
obscure, despite important popularizations of them both by Theosophist Madame
Blavatsky and by G.R.S. Mead. The discovery of other late ancient Coptic codices
containing Manichaean and Gnostic works (at Medinet Madi and Nag Hammadi,
Egypt, in 1929 and 1945, respectively), as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran,
1945), called for renewed reflection upon “Gnosticism.” Led by the Italian scholar
Ugo Bianchi (1922–1995), the Messina conference on Gnosticism at Messina, Italy
(1966), did just that, famously distinguishing “Gnosis” –“knowledge of the divine
mysteries reserved for an elite” –from “Gnosticism,” the thought of second-century
CE sects about “a divine spark in man … fallen into this world of fate, birth and
death, and needing to be awakened … in order to be finally reintegrated …” (in
Bianchi 1970: xxvi–xxvii). The “Messina definition” dominated scholarship of the
later twentieth century, despite criticisms of its notion of “Gnosis” as too distant
from what the ancient heresiologists meant by it, and “Gnosticism” as too vague,
unable to distinguish, for instance, between Christian, Platonic, and “Gnostic”
discourses (Couliano 1992: 56; Markschies 2001: 13–15; Marjanen 2005: 47).
Indeed, the influential German scholar Kurt Rudolph rejected the Messina defin-
ition even as he proposed explanations of “Gnosis” and “Gnosticism” which were
more or less identical to it, again emphasizing salvation via secret knowledge for
an elite coupled with a dualistic view of the cosmos (Rudolph 1987: 55–60; see
Marjanen 2005: 51).
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— Gnosticism, gnostics, and gnosis —
RETHINKING “ G NO S TICIS M ”
The field of Gnostic studies and the debate over the terms involved experienced a
seismic shift in the 1990s. The first of these was a devastating critique of the term
“Gnosticism” and the scholarship built up around it by the American scholar
Michael A. Williams (1996; 2005b). He argued that, despite the Messina confer-
ence, “Gnosticism” had become a muddled, confused term commanding no con-
sensus amongst specialists, having lost all sense of meaning and distinction. The few
attempts to delimit it either misuse the word “Gnostic” to describe groups that likely
did not describe themselves as “Gnostic” at all, or they produce typologies of the
second-order category “Gnosticism” that are simply incoherent (Williams 1996: 7–
28, 31–50; and see ch. 7).
Williams is interested, though, in ancient discourses that hold the Bible to be the
authoritative source of revelation yet make a meaningful distinction between God
and the creator of the universe. He therefore proposed the new, typological construct
“biblical demiurgicalism” to describe such discourses. This term has three advantages,
he argues: first, it is very specific and therefore clear; second, it is a modern con-
struct and so will not lead scholars down rabbit-holes looking for ancient people who
described themselves as “biblical demiurgicalists”; and third, it will not be “burdened
at the outset by certain clichés which have come to be routinely invoked at almost
any mention of ‘Gnosticism’ ” (1996: 52–3). These clichés occupy the bulk of his criti-
cism, which demonstrates that the bulk of evidence about ancient Gnosticism –and
the Nag Hammadi texts in particular –cannot be characterized by “protest exegesis,”
“parasitism,” “anticosmic world-rejection,” “hatred of the body,” “asceticism,” “lib-
ertinism,” and “deterministic elitism.”
Harvard Professor Karen King soon followed with a parallel critique (2003) which
surveyed twentieth-century scholarship on “Gnosticism,” demonstrating that it has
emulated the ancient heresiologists in using the term “Gnostic” to homogenize, mar-
ginalize, and delegitimize a diversity of early Christian groups. She has suggested
interpreting the Nag Hammadi texts and related sources without recourse to any
category of “Gnosticism”; rather, we may read them in terms of ancient Christianity,
simply using the term “Christian” to designate sources like the Apocryphon of John
(King 2003: 231; 2006: viii–x). Many successful studies have since taken Williams
and King as their point of departure. For example, a recent monograph tackles the
problem of the mysterious origin of the Nag Hammadi Codices by contextualizing
the codices’ contents in terms of evidence not about Gnostic heretics, but about the
sole environment to which we are positive these codices belonged –namely, Coptic lit-
erature of the fourth–sixth centuries CE, particularly monastic apocrypha (Lundhaug
and Jenott 2015: 56–103).
RETHINKING TH E G N Ō ST IKOI
For other scholars, however, “Gnosticism” lives. Williams’s charge that some
definitions of Gnosticism describe the thought of individuals who did not describe
themselves as “Gnostics” assails the still-vital approach of the American Coptologist
Bentley Layton (1995). Layton observes that both the heresiographer Irenaeus
of Lyons (writing ca. 180 CE) and the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry of Tyre
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(ca. 263 CE) describe certain groups of ancient gnōstikoi as belonging to a haeresis
(Grk. “school of thought,” but also “heresy”). Irenaeus claims that a multitude of
these groups appeared in the second century, ultimately deriving from the heretic
Simon Magus, and to them belongs the school of the Alexandrian teacher Valentinus
(Adversus Haereses 1.11.1); he then gives descriptions of a number of teachings
and myths of these “Gnostic” heretics, the most extensive of which are those of the
“Barbelo-Gnostics” and the “others” (usually called “Ophites” [1.29–30]). As Layton
noted, the myths described in Haer. 1.29–30 accord closely with a large, coherent
body of myths and teachings found in the Nag Hammadi Codices as well as the phil-
osopher Celsus (Origen, Contra Celsum 5.61). Given that the term gnōstikos was
used by Plato and others in Antiquity by individuals wishing to designate themselves
as having a special knowledge and that Irenaeus, Porphyry, and others excoriated
gnōstikoi espousing myths and ideas like those from Nag Hammadi, Layton surmised
the authors of these “Sethian” texts and related works had designated themselves
“Gnostics,” representatives of a “Gnostic school of thought” (gnōstikē hairesis, thus
Layton 1995: 338; widely followed, e.g., by Marjanen 2005: 2; Pearson 2005: 94;
Brakke 2010: 29–51).
Layton’s critics reply that no Gnostic text includes the self-designation gnōstikos;
the heresiographers’ use of the word may not then correspond to any social reality of
individuals who styled themselves “Gnostics” (Williams 1996: 42; King 2003: 167;
Smith 2015: 132). Layton anticipated this argument: “the works in the Gnostics
mythographic corpus are pseudepigraphic and mythic in literary character … In such
compositions, there is no context in which a second-century school name such as
Gnōstikos might naturally occur. Thus, the absence of the proper name Gnōstikos in
the mythographic corpus is not a significant absence” (Layton 1995: 344; similarly
Brakke 2010: 47–48). Some remain unconvinced (see Williams 2005b: 74). Other
critics have added that the focus on the term gnōstikos puts historians at the mercy
of the heresiographers’ capricious use of the word (Smith 2015: 157–8). Irenaeus, for
instance, does not employ the term only for the individuals who interest Layton; he
later widened his usage after his first book to include other opponents, such as Basilides
or even Marcion (e.g., Haer. 2.31.1, 4.6.4; Marjanen 2005: 11–12). Similarly, the
third-century Refutation of all Heresies erroneously ascribed to Hippolytus stretches
the term “Gnostic” to designate Adoptionist Christologies with apparently little or
no relation to teachers of salvific knowledge or dualism (Haer. 7.35.1, 36.2; 9.4,
on Theodotus of Byzantium, Theodotus the Banker, and Elchasai, respectively; see
Williams 1996: 38–9; Marjanen 2005: 20–1).
Despite appearances, the present impasse in scholarship on “Gnosticism” is
semantic, for there exists a consensus that a specific group of ancient testimonies
and texts, largely extant from Nag Hammadi, attest a shared literary tradition with
a common stratum of myth and ritual, and that this literary tradition qualifies as a
distinctive and interesting object of study. Despite occasional protestations (Williams
1996: 42; King 2003: 168), even opponents of the term “Gnosticism” acknowledge
the coherence of this group, although they may prefer other terms for it, such as
“Biblical Demiurgical,” “Christian” (Williams 2005b: 67, 75, 77). The individuals
formerly called “Gnostics,” under this view, were simply “members of the church”
(Smith 2015: 171). Yet there is a risk here of completing the work of the heresiologists
by assimilating this evidence to a vague sense of early Christian “diversity,” when
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there are some provocative –even transgressive –aspects of this evidence which call

for recognition (Cahana 2014: 72–3; DeConick 2016: 259–94). Especially predom-
inant are the distinction between God and a denigrated demiurge, and the emphasis
on the divine nature of humanity (as opposed to the non-divine cosmos) –a com-
bination of ideas distinctive and controversial in ancient thought, corresponding to
no known philosophical or theological school other than the “Gnostics” of Irenaeus,
Porphyry, et al. The term “Gnosticism” suggests itself here to be useful for describing
the complex of evidence initially delineated by Layton (Marjanen 2008: 210–11;
Burns 2016: 76–9).
SETHIAN AND VALENTINIAN L ITE RATU RE :

GNOSTIC , CHRIS TIAN, O R … ?
A sub-complex of evidence was dubbed “Sethian” by the German Coptologist Hans-
Martin Schenke (1929–2002) due to relevant texts’ emphasis on the figure of Seth
(third child of Adam and Eve –Gen 5:3) as revealer and savior (Schenke 1981).
Baptismal language figures strongly in these texts, indicating origins among a bap-
tismal group (Schenke 1981: 607; cf. Burns 2014a: 154–5). Tuomas Rasimus (2009)
has recognized a separate, distinctive set of mythologoumena –particularly the val-
orization of the Serpent’s recommendation to Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of
Knowledge –mixed in with some Sethian texts, inviting us to denote some of the
works deemed “Sethian” by Schenke “Ophite” (per Grk. ophis, “serpent”), with per-
haps the most famous of Gnostic texts, the Apocryphon of John (ApJohn), blending
Sethian and Ophite traditions. Rasimus and many others today refer to the Sethian
and Ophite corpora together as “Classic” Gnosticism.
Like nearly all other Sethian texts, ApJohn is also a revelatory text. It is written
in the distinctive genre and cadence of “apocalypse,” in which otherworldly know-
ledge is granted to a seer by a heavenly mediator (Collins 1979). Some scholars have
argued that Gnostic literature marks a particular development in early Christian lit-
erary genres, the “Gnostic revelation-dialogue,” in which the risen Jesus offers hidden
knowledge to his disciples (Rudolph 1996), but such texts are, in terms of form
and genre, indistinguishable from other early Christian revelatory texts without a
heavenly journey, like the Revelation to John (Burns 2014b: 361). Pseudepigraphy
and claims to possess heavenly knowledge are strategies of self-authorization where
more tangible authorities are absent. Their widespread usage in Sethian and Ophite
texts indicates that a strong sense of group definition did not inform these literary
traditions; rather, the “Sethian” authors more likely saw themselves as belonging to
a subculture among fellow Christians (cf. Scott 1995: 116–19; Brakke 2010: 87;
2011: 274). This could explain why we have almost no hard evidence regarding the
social group behind Sethian literature. Notably, in the one case where we do have
a witness to a group of individuals reading Sethian texts –Porphyry, who says he
knows “Christian heretics” circulating apocalypses with the titles of Sethian works
extant at Nag Hammadi, like Zostrianos (Zost) (NHC VIII,1) and Allogenes (NHC
IX,3) –the philosopher calls them “Christians” and “Gnostics,” not “Sethians” (Vita
Plotini 16; Burns 2014a: 3, 161–2).
The case is different with the second- century Alexandrian teacher Valentinus
and the movement bearing his name, where our evidence presents us with a
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variety of mythological and cosmological ideas recalling Classic Gnosticism, taken

to be “esoteric” teachings underlying Biblical Scripture (Holzhausen 2005: 1145;
further, Thomassen 2008 and chs. 10–13). Valentinus and his students were cha-
rismatic, educated teachers, whose names their proto- orthodox opponents knew
and condemned. Their literature employs the scriptural strategies –philosophic-
ally informed exegesis regarding problems typical of early churches –of Christian
Platonists like Justin Martyr or Origen of Alexandria, presupposing a strong eccle-
sial structure. The Valentinians were not a subculture; they were a Church (Williams
1996: 111; Brakke 2011: 280).
All of our testimony about the Gnostics from their enemies regards the Gnostics
as members of Christian communities. All of our surviving manuscripts of Gnostic
literature are Christian productions. There is no evidence regarding Gnosticism that
does not belong to a Christian milieu in some sense (Yamauchi 1983: 184–6), and
therefore the phenomenon of ancient Gnosticism must be regarded as a development
bound up with Christianity. This view faces its greatest challenge with the Sethian
literature, where we possess some texts that are clearly Christian (like ApJohn, or the
Egyptian Gospel), but others do not refer explicitly to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth
as the savior, or to the New Testament. Some of these texts, like the Apocalypse of
Adam (NHC V,5) are clearly indebted to the world of ancient Jewish pseudepigrapha
and apocalyptic literature; some, like Zost., are also conversant with Neoplatonic
metaphysics. While scholars once regarded these texts as “Jewish” and “Pagan”
developments within Sethianism (even hypothesizing the Jewish origins, subsequent
Christianization, and eventual Paganization of a Sethian community; thus Turner
2001: 255–300), the common strata of Jewish apocalyptic tradition and baptismal
language throughout the Sethian corpus indicate that it surfaced from individ-
uals occupying the borderlines between emergent Judaism and Christianity (Burns
2014a: 145–7).
R E CEPTIONS OF GNOSTIC TRAD ITIO NS , I:

M AN DAEISM, MANICHAEISM , “ IS L AM IC G NO S TICIS M ,”
AND BALKAN D UAL IS M S
Another Gnostic group that emerged from these borderlines are the Mandaeans,
a late ancient baptismal movement, first appearing in Mesopotamia somewhere
from the third to fifth centuries CE (Bukovec 2013: 423–39; cf. now van Bladel
2017). Mandaeism draws freely from a wide spectrum of ideas in Late Antique
Mesopotamian religion, but the “Gnostic” character of its thought shows in the
mythological importance assumed by a somewhat clumsy demiurge-figure, Ptahil,
by the central goal of returning Mandaean souls to their Lightworld home, and the
dualism between this heaven and the world of Darkness, ruled by malevolent Ruha
(Rudolph 1987: 343; Buckley 2002: 9–10, 40–8, 145). Even more, “Mandaean”
means “Gnostic” (re: manda, “knowledge”), and so one may say that “Gnosticism” –
in the strictest sense of an ancient religion of people who call themselves Gnostics –
has survived to the present day (Buckley 2002: 7; Pearson 2005: 97–8, 101; cf. van
Bladel 2017: 5–6).
The Mandaeans are exceptional; the fate of other known Gnostic groups of Late
Antiquity was persecution and eventual disappearance (Koschorke 1981; Turner
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15
2001: 300–1). Yet we can speak meaningfully of the reception of ancient Gnostic
traditions and ideas in a diversity of religious contexts and trajectories of develop-
ment. For instance, Manichaeism, the religion founded by the Persian prophet Mani
in the mid-third century CE (Gardner and Lieu 2004), is often called a “Gnostic reli-
gion,” but its world-creators are benevolent, divine agents. Mani taught that divine,
incorporeal light and profane, material darkness have always coexisted and are
engaged in a great, cosmic battle, in which the present world and our bodies are a
mere battleground. The cosmos is a machine built to winnow trapped, divine light out
of material bodies and return it to heaven. By proper observance of prayer and rituals,
especially diet, human beings fight on the side of light in this war, helping deliver light
to heaven. Thus, while Manichaean thought is the epitome of dualism –the “idea of
two ultimately opposed principles, with the cosmos as the arena of conflict between
them” (Gardner 2016) –it is not exactly “Gnostic.” Yet there exist broad similarities
between many Sethian Gnostic and Manichaean ideas, which scholarship has only
begun to investigate. They may be accounted for by a shared heritage in the milieu of
Mesopotamian baptismal sects fond of Jewish apocalyptic lore (Burns 2014a: 143–6;
BeDuhn 2016).
While Mandaeism has always belonged to a relatively small community,
Manichaeism achieved great success as a missionary religion within its prophet’s
own lifetime, reckoned as a potent force throughout the medieval period. Islamicate
sources remain particularly important for our knowledge of the movement and
its development (Reeves 2011). In the medieval Islamic world, reports of Gnostic
traditions traceable back to the flowering of “classic Gnosticism” continue to circu-
late, as in the Syriac heresiographer Theodore bar Konai’s discussion of the ancient
sect of the Audians, still active in his day (Bee 2005). It has also been suggested
that some heretical Muslim sects may be regarded as “Gnostics,” as in the case of
the Ghulat (“extremists”) (Halm 1982; Asatryan 2017). This early Shiʽi movement
reportedly believed the Prophet and his family to be divine beings who had incarnated
on earth in human guise, and believers to be capable of themselves attaining divine
status in this life; their pseudepigraphic books contained ornate, detailed myths
of the origins of the heavens, the cosmos, angels and demons, and, eventually, the
creation of humanity and the cycle of reincarnation, recalling the lengthy cosmol-
ogies and world-histories of classic Gnostic mythos. Yet the creation-accounts of the
Ghulat are not dualistic: versions where the demiurge is the demon Azazil unam-
biguously subordinate him to the Deity, while versions where the divine Muḥammad
created the world regard him as benevolent (Couliano 1992: 37; Burns and Asatryan
2016: 82–4). While the term “Islamic Gnosticism” is then something of a misnomer,
it is nonetheless clear that the Ghulat and other Shiʽi groups, such as the Nuṣayrīs,
were products of the same Syro-Mesopotamian religious milieu of the first millen-
nium CE, in which Gnostics, Manichaeans, and Mandaeans freely exchanged and
developed ideas among their Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contemporaries (Amir-
Moezzi 2016).
Meanwhile, the problem of how these Gnostic and Manichaean traditions relate
to the development of dualist heresy in medieval Europe –specifically, Bogomilism
and its progeny, Catharism –remains unanswerable, despite intensive research (e.g.,
Couliano 1992: 40–2; Stoyanov 2000: 158–66, 187–92; and see ch. 35). Our sources
regarding the development of these dualisms are even more biased and obscure than
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those pertaining to ancient Gnosticism; the very existence of a Cathar movement

is debatable (Sennis 2016). Nonetheless, Bogomilism and Catharism have assumed
great importance in the modern popular imagination as the ostensible heirs to and
transmitters of the esoteric teaching of the ancient Gnostics.
RECEPTIONS OF GNOSTIC TRAD ITIO NS , II:

“JEWISH GNOSTICIS M ” AND M AG IC
The relationship between Gnostic traditions and Judaism, on the other hand, has
traditionally been tied to the problem of the origins of Gnosticism. Scholarship
long sought to locate “Gnostic origins” among ostensibly pre-Christian, Gnostic
characteristics in later Jewish texts, whether pseudepigraphic, Rabbinic, or belonging
to the medieval manuscript tradition of what has been traditionally called the
“Hekhaloth” (“Palaces”) literature (surveyed in Lahe 2012). This line of investiga-
tion has proven to be fruitless. Rabbinic polemics about the existence of “two powers
in heaven” superficially recall the Gnostic demiurge, but are less obvious than they
appear and in any case far too late to demonstrate Gnosticism’s pre-Christian, Jewish
origins (Gruenwald 1981; Segal 2002). Meanwhile, Gershom Scholem’s hypothesis
(1960: 10, 34–5) that the roots of the Hekhaloth texts, and Jewish mysticism in gen-
eral, lie in a Hellenized “Jewish Gnosticism” that we may reconstruct from Patristic
and Rabbinic evidence is today considered misleading at best. The study of Jewish
mysticism now proceeds apace without reference to Gnosticism, rather focusing on
the interaction between medieval Jewish and Byzantine Christian cultures (Herrmann
2013: 87–8). Nonetheless, the crucible of Jewish apocalyptic literature –common
to Gnostic, Manichaean, and later Jewish, mystical developments –offers splendid
opportunities for exploration of cross-fertilization between these traditions, even if
we abandon the search for origins (Burns 2014a: 141–3).
A primary trajectory for such interaction between these traditions presents itself
in magical practice and names of power (nomina barbara, “barbarian names”), as
recognized by Scholem over half a century ago (1960: 94–102), in his study of Jewish,
Aramaic incantation bowls featuring the name Sesengenbarpharanges, a name also
appearing in Greek and Coptic magical and Gnostic texts. The Gnostic heroine
Norea, sister and consort of Seth, appears next to some of her archontic adversaries
in an eleventh-century Hebrew spell from the Cairo Genizah (Leicht 2000). There
are countless other examples of mythologoumena, names, and prayers travelling
between “Gnostic” and “magical” texts (Tardieu, van den Kerchove, and Zago 2013;
Burns 2019; and ch. 19). The evidence does not permit one to ask if “Gnosticism”
was influenced by “magic,” or vice versa, for the flourishing of ancient Gnosticism
and of the Greco-Egyptian magical culture that informs corpora like the “Greek
Magical Papyri” (PGM) appears to be contemporaneous and mutually sustaining,
transcending cultic boundaries through and beyond the end of Antiquity. (Tellingly, it
is impossible to extricate the “magical” and “mystical” strands of the Hekhaloth texts
from one another as well.) Even the scholarly publications of Gnostic and magical
sources are bound together. When nineteenth- century scholars began to publish
editions and translations of the PGM, they noted their use of vowel-spells known to
be practiced by the second-century Gnostic Marcus Magus (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.14) and
names found in the then newly published Askew Codex (Brashear 1995: 3406, 3422).
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17
Thus did Wolfgang Schultz, future mythologist of National Socialism, come to write
in 1910: “that the authors of the magical texts dubbed their own wisdom Gnosis is
witnessed explicitly and repeatedly by the magical papyri” (Schultz 1975: 263).
R ECEPTIONS OF GNOSTIC TRAD ITIO NS , III:

GNOSIS FALSELY S O - C AL L E D
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, scholars have often followed Baur in
referring to “Gnosis” and “Gnosticism” interchangeably (e.g., Williams 1996: 3, 7–8,
44, 56, 80, 82, 263). However, a different scholarly trajectory distinguishes ancient
“Gnosticism,” with its dualistic connotations and Christian trappings, from “Gnosis,”
a term meant to encompass a much broader range of phenomena. Historians of reli-
gion (particularly in Europe) have long used the term “Gnosis” to designate simply
any religion where salvation is incumbent upon obtaining special knowledge (Jonas
2001: 32; Rudolph 1987: 55; Filoramo 2000: 1043; Markschies 2000: 1045; Pearson
2005: 100). Sometimes, it is argued that this salvific “Gnosis” is an alternative to the
revealed “faith” (Grk. pistis) of the churches, a disparity ostensibly central to the con-
flict between the ancient Gnostics and their “proto-orthodox” opponents (Rudolph
1987: 56; Pearson 2005: 91). The dichotomy of gnōsis vs. pistis has its roots in
scholarship on the New Testament: Paul attacks the gnōsis of eating meat sacrificed
to idols, and declares faith and love to be the correct Christian path (1 Cor 8, 13;
Bultmann 1933: 709; also Jonas 2001: xvii–xviii), even as the Pauline authors of the
Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians supposedly found their high Christologies
influenced by “Gnosis” (Baur 1975: 16). Most importantly, the author of the Pastoral
Epistles excoriates a “gnōsis falsely so-called” that teaches strange myths and declares
the resurrection to have already taken place (1 Tim 6:20).
“It is not self-evident that the reference to the gnosis in 1 Tim 6:20 must be taken
as an allusion to the teaching of the people representing ‘an early form of Christian
Gnosticism’ ” (Marjanen 2005: 9), and there are good reasons to reject this dichotomy
of gnōsis and pistis. The terms were debated in early Christian literature, but some-
times they were equated with one another, favorably, by writers with no relation to
Gnosticism (e.g., Athanasius, Vita Antonii 77; Justin Martyr, Dialogus 69.1; Bultmann
1933: 714). Meanwhile, there certainly are cases where a sort of mystical know-
ledge is called gnōsis, as in Hermetic literature (Hanegraaff 2008), but other terms,
such as “faith,” “mystery,” or “primary revelation,” were used for such knowledge as
well (Burns 2015: 28–9). Indeed, as Williams (2005: 71) notes, a wealth of evidence
pertaining to ancient Gnosticism talks about the importance of “faith” where we would
expect gnōsis. To be sure, salvific knowledge of the divine origins of humanity is cen-
tral to Gnosticism, as highlighted by ancient myths valorizing eating from the Tree of
Knowledge in Paradise (e.g., On the Origin of the World, NHC II,5.118.34–119.19).
Yet we do not find Gnosticism wherever the term gnōsis is used, nor do we always find
gnōsis when we are deep in Gnostic territory. Gnostic vocabulary is diverse.
Nonetheless, Irenaeus himself, finding 1 Tim 6:20’s phrase felicitous, declared the
teaching of the Simonians, the first Gnostics, to be “knowledge falsely so-called”
(Haer. 1.23.4), and the distinction stuck. A touchstone of ancient anti-Valentinian
polemics was the accusation that the “spirituals” who claimed to possess salvific
“knowledge” elevated themselves above “animates” (only able to achieve “faith
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18
and works”), with deleterious effects for the Church (Ir. Haer. 1.6.2; Clem. Alex.
Stromateis 2.3.10.2). In Enlightenment-era Protestant polemics, salvific “knowledge”
took on a partner, “reason,” beginning with the anti-apologist Jacob Thomasius. In
his Schediasma Historicum (1665), Thomasius argued that Gnosis was the “core
element of heresy, referring to the attempt … to gain knowledge about divine real-
ities by merely human means, independent of the Biblical revelation,” and thus to be
distinguished from the knowledge obtained by rational philosophy and revealed by
God (Hanegraaff 2016: 385; 2012: 101–7). Such “Gnostic” heresy encompassed a
range of discourses which had come into fashion thanks in large part via Renaissance
Platonism: Neoplatonic and Hermetic literature, magic, alchemy, and astrology
(Hanegraaff 2012: 148–52). Jakob Brucker made a similar tripartition of Faith-Reason-
Gnosis in his Historia critica philosophiae (1742–1744), with Gnosis “containing
essentially everything we nowadays study under the rubric of ‘Western esotericism’ ”
(Hanegraaff 2016: 386; 2012: 137–47). Eventually, “Gnosis” came to be used in a
positive sense to denote a valorized revelatory knowledge lost in Antiquity, as by
Jacques Matter (in 1828), who used it with reference to an ancient “esoteric” teaching
of the “Egyptian and Greek mysteries” and the “Pythagoreans.” Matter’s usage of
“Gnosis” appears in turn to derive from that of Johann Philipp Gabler, who coined the
term Esoterik in 1792 (Hanegraaff 2012: 335). Thus, in the early nineteenth century,
“Gnosis” and “Esotericism” became synonyms, with a positive connotation (Faivre
2010: 92; Hanegraaff 2016: 386; and see ch. 37), contrasted with “faith,” “reason,”
and, yes, “Gnosticism.” Notably, “Gnosis” as conceived by Thomasius and valorized
by Matter was articulated with practically no knowledge of ancient Gnostic literature,
which would not become available to scholars until the mid-nineteenth century.
There is therefore a tension between the early modern theological construct of
“Gnosis” and the world of thought we find among ancient gnōstikoi that scholarship
today may call “Gnosticism.” We see this tension in Dutch scholarship, where “Gnosis”
remains in use as a historical category. It was first employed by the Patrologist Gilles
Quispel (1916–2006), in turn inspired by Carl Jung (Faivre 2010: 102), and has
since been employed by Roelof van den Broek, Wouter Hanegraaff, and an American
scholar inspired in part by Quispel, April DeConick.
Van den Broek sees the Gnosis attacked in 1 Tim 6:20 as “an esoteric, that is partly
secret, spiritual knowledge of God and of the divine origin and destination of the
essential core of the human being which is based on revelation and inner enlighten-
ment, the possession of which involves a liberation from the material world which
holds humans captive.” In Antiquity, this gnosis is primarily to be found in what
van den Broek terms “Gnostic religion” and “Hermetic religion,” i.e., the thought of
ancient Hermetic literature, while “Gnosticism” is a “radical form of gnosis expressed
in the great gnostic myths of the second century” (van den Broek 2012: 1, 3, 10). In
fact, “Gnostic religion in the first centuries CE was an early representative of the eso-
teric current in Western culture.” It is a “mentality, a gnostic frame of mind” that can
be found in various religious contexts, and is “characterized by the fact that it can
easily attach itself to already existing religious or philosophical systems.” “The central
Gnostic idea of revealed, secret Gnosis as a gift that illuminates and liberates man’s
inner self is found in all periods … For that reason, the terms “Gnosis” and “Gnostic”
are applicable to all ideas and currents, from Antiquity and the present day, that stress
the necessity of esoteric knowledge” (van den Broek 2006: 406; 2012: 3, 8).
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19
A similar complex of ideas is negotiated in the recent work of April DeConick on

“Gnostic spirituality,” which is “not a new religion but a new type of spirituality” that
transcended ancient religious affiliations (DeConick 2016: 10). She locates the emer-
gence of this spirituality, to which individual mystical experiences are central, among
(entirely hypothetical) initiations of Platonists into the mysteries of the Egyptian God
Atum (DeConick 2016: 70). She identifies four “Gnostic awakenings” following the
suppression of Christian Gnostics and Manichaeans in Antiquity: the Balkan dualisms
of the Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars; the flowering of Renaissance Platonism; the
discovery of the discovery of the Bruce and Askew Codices, and their reception by
Mead, Blavatsky, and Jung; and the discovery, translation, and reception of the Berlin,
Nag Hammadi, and Tchacos Codices (DeConick 2016: 347–50).
To be sure, these theorizations of “Gnosis” are distinct: for DeConick, experiences
of Gnosis are best understood as altered states of consciousness (similarly Merkur
1993: 110–14), which does not come up for van den Broek (although it is cen-
tral for Hanegraaff; see below). They differ on the origins of “gnosis.” Yet on the
fundamentals, they agree: gnostic religion or spirituality is distinct from the phe-
nomenon of ancient Gnosticism, a peculiarly dualistic instantiation of “gnosis.” In
fact, it is distinct from all religion, since it transcends religious and even temporal
boundaries. “Gnosis” stretches from antiquity to the present day; its foundation is
individual revelatory experience of the ineffable God.
As Hanegraaff notes (2016: 391), this conception of “Gnosis” has hardly been
discussed in modern scholarship; indeed, it has hardly been engaged by scholars of
ancient Gnosticism at all. A brief stab at criticism may be offered here (also Burns
2015: 27–9). Although both van den Broek and DeConick are careful to demar-
cate the “Gnostic frame of mind” or “Gnostic spirituality” from a “Gnostic religion”
(in turn distinct from “Christianity,” “Islam,” etc.), it is difficult to see what else it
amounts to. Van den Broek finds himself, for instance, contrasting “gnostic religion”
and “the gnostic religion” (2012: 3). This can only confuse things. Meanwhile, the
aim to distinguish accounts of special, “gnostic” religious insight or mystical experi-
ence from any particular religious movement in hopes of avoiding essentialization
winds up achieving it instead. If one calls ancient Sethians and Manichaeans, medieval
Jewish mystics and Shiʽi theologians, modern Theosophists, and others all “gnostics”
in a sense, one papers over their distinctive, historical identities with distinctive, his-
torically circumscribed concerns and interests. Even if two of these groups agreed,
say, that the creator of the world is not God, or that human beings are divine, they
usually had different reasons for thinking so, and articulated the issue with respect
to different authoritative (e.g., scriptural) traditions. One is reminded of the German
Romantic “mystocentrism” of Jung and the scholars who met with him at the Eranos
meetings in Switzerland in the mid-twentieth century; motivated by “an explicitly
metahistorical –if not idealist –agenda,” Eranos scholars sought to plumb the
“Gnostic,” the esoteric core of the religions they studied –indeed, of religion itself –
relegating social, legal, and ritual elements of religion to the periphery (Wasserstrom
1999: 5, 239–40). Even if one does not call it religion, even if it is accidental, the con-
struct of the “Gnostic mentality” of “Gnosis” appears to do much the same.
Meanwhile, the term “Gnosis” has also been used by Dutch Historian of Religion
Wouter Hanegraaff to describe a type of revelatory knowledge (my words). From
this perspective, too, “Gnosis” is something distinct from Gnosticism (Hanegraaff
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2016: 381): philosophers’ claims to possess extraordinary knowledge resulting from

experiences of altered states of consciousness. In Antiquity, such claims were often
authorized as belonging to an “oriental” philosophia perennis. These experiences,
writes Hanegraaff, were
the central preoccupation of a kind of ‘transconfessional’ cultic milieu that

flourished particularly in Egypt, and whose adherents –whether they were
pagans, Jews, or Christians –all interpreted (Middle) Platonic metaphysics in
such a way as to transform it into religious worldviews,
seeking “the ancient and universal spiritual wisdom … of the Orient and their legendary
sages …” (Hanegraaff 2016: 381). According to Hanegraaff, Gnosis emphasizes “the
total inadequacy of discursive language” to describe God, and so gives us instead
“idealized narratives of how it has been attained by exemplary seekers.” Experience is
integral to it: “the possibility of gaining direct access to the realms of light by means
of ecstatic states was inherent in Platonic Orientalism.” Renaissance thinkers’ interest
in the “suprarational ecstatic knowledge” of ancient Hermetic and Platonic literature
ensured the “incognito survival of gnosis as ecstatic religion based on Platonic and
Hermetic foundations,” which “appeared to require an altered state of consciousness”
(Hanegraaff 2016: 382–4, 387–8).
Like van den Broek and DeConick, Hanegraaff does not describe a “Gnostic reli-
gion,” yet the referent of his use of the term “Gnosis” does the same work. Try as one
might, it is difficult to map out a transconfessional, transhistorical “Gnosis” –whether
we call it “gnostic spirituality,” “gnostic religion,” or the ecstatic states of “Platonic
orientalists” in the sphere of historical criticism. A salient example presents itself in
the Sethian Gnostic apocalypses now extant at Nag Hammadi which circulated in
the seminar of the ancient Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus in the mid-third cen-
tury CE. Plotinus’s student Porphyry tells us that Christian heretics referred to these
apocalypses as even more authoritative than the writings of Plato. Metaphysics and
negative theology contained in these Sethian texts were articulated in Platonic terms,
advanced enough to merit Plotinus’s attention; their descriptions of noetic ascent to
the One may have influenced Plotinus’s own mysticism (Mazur 2010; and see ch. 18).
Both Plotinus and the Gnostics participated in Platonic Orientalist discourse: the
former regarded hieroglyphics to have a supralinguistic quality proper to higher
thinking (Enneads 5.8.6), and one of the Gnostic apocalypses, Zostrianos, makes the
pseudepigraphic claim to be “Oracles of Zoroaster” (NHC VIII,1.[132]). Now, here
are two ostensible exemplars –Plotinus and the Gnostics –of “Gnosis.” Yet Plotinus
wrote a treatise attacking the Christian Gnostic exponents of these Sethian texts;
Porphyry entitled it Against the Gnostics (Enneads 2.9). Plotinus strongly disagreed
with the Gnostics about cosmology, soteriology, eschatology, the nature of myth and
revelation, and, most of all, cultic and philosophical affiliation (Burns 2014a: 32–47).
By no means did Plotinus and his Gnostic opponents belong to a single “gnostic
mentality” or “spirituality.” He considered himself a “Hellene”; Porphyry calls them
“Christians” and “Gnostics”; both parties considered Plato authoritative. Should we
use the term “Gnosis” to understand the terms of their engagement –mutual interest
in ecstatic experiences –then one might ask if this chapter of the history of “Gnosis”
is simply a chapter in the history of “mysticism” under another name.
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MYST I CISM, ESOTERICISM, AND NE O - G NO S TICIS M

Indeed, it is difficult to see how “Gnosis” differs from “mysticism,” particularly when
definitions of “Gnosis” emphasize its distinction from the dualism of “Gnosticism.”
It is also difficult to see how the study of “Gnosis” differs in practice from that of
“Western esotericism,” despite the attempt of Hanegraaff (2012: 371–3). Accordingly,
Kocku von Stuckrad (2013: 315) argues that mysticism, esotericism, and Gnosticism
(i.e., Gnosis) are categories that together “form a discursive field” that “organize
… concepts such as perfect knowledge, ultimate truth, concealment, revelation, or
salvation,” recommending that “esotericism” be used in cases focused on obtaining
absolute knowledge, and “Gnosticism” in cases concerned with salvation; thus, “a
mystical discourse can be entangled with an esoteric one, if claims of knowledge are
derived from mystical narratives. A Gnostic discourse is entangled with an esoteric
one, if notions of salvation are linked to claims of perfect knowledge” (von Stuckrad
2013: 318). Elsewhere, I have argued that what is at issue in debates over “Gnosis” is
really competing revelatory claims, some of which are studied today under the rubric
of “Western Esotericism” (Burns 2015: 29).
Debates over these terms will surely continue. Meanwhile, outside of the academy,
translations of ancient Gnostic literature and scholarly debate about “Gnosticism”
and “Gnosis” have taken upon lives of their own. While some scholars of ancient
Gnosticism regard the reception of Gnosticism in contemporary religious life to be a
sideshow (Markschies 2001: 13), it furnishes some of our best laboratories for sorting
out what we are after when we talk about Gnosticism, Gnostics, and Gnosis. The
Gospel of Thomas from Nag Hammadi has found theological commentators from
the New Age movement as well as the Neo-Gnostic Ecclesia Gnostica and inde-
pendent, self-described “Gnostics,” all of whom bring diverse, modern perspectives
informed by (at times selective) reading of popular scholarship (Burns 2007). ApJohn,
discussed earlier, has been debated with respect to the question of whether Gnosticism
is “dualistic” or “holistic” on Neo-Gnostic online message boards (Dillon 2018). The
proximity of much Neo-Gnostic discourse not just to new religious movements but
self-described practitioners of magic(k) reminds us that the fates of “Gnostic” and
“magic” in modern discourse remain intertwined. “Gnostic cinema” is a hit at the
movies, a trend that only seems to be accelerating (DeConick 2016; and ch. 65). In
all of these cases, revelatory phenomena regarding the special or divine character of
the protagonist in question seems to be central, reminding us how central the notion
of a special revelatory knowledge is to contemporary culture. Despite the best efforts
of ancient heresy-hunters and modern scholars, Gnosticism, Gnostics, and, perhaps,
Gnosis appear to be here to stay.
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CHAPTER TWO
THE GNOSTIC WORLD: A HISTORY

OF SCHOLARSHIP (UNTIL 2000)
Garry W. Trompf
B EGINNINGS IN HE RE S IO L O G Y
The history of research into the Gnostics or Gnosticism properly begins with early
Church Fathers, who, after the first cataloguing of heresies was under way (G. Smith
2015: 5–109), unwittingly founded the sociology of religion by classifying types of
new religious groups, mainly according to distinctive beliefs, but sometimes also
by practice (Trompf 1987: 96–8). The Gnostics were among those said by keen-
eyed, polemical Patristic writers to hold “other views” (haireseis), dissentient from
received traditions followed by most early churches. They were alleged to over-
value special spiritual knowledge (gnōsis) above faith (pistis), and characteristically
subscribed to a system of aeonic powers (aiōnes) that issued and descended from
a Hidden God in a “fullness of emanations” (plērōma), with the last major aiōn,
often named the Demiurge (artificer) and/or Sophia (Wisdom), giving rise to the
material order, typically as a cosmic flaw (e.g., Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1.1–8,
23–7; 29–30; Hippolytus[?]‌, Refutatio omnium haeresium 5.1; 3; 6–8; 18; 23–6).
The Christ figure, originating in the unspeakably perfect Being, descends and is
sent through the aeons to overcome the mistake, with the offspring of the low, pre-
sumptuous aeon Sophia usually being responsible for the (inferior and tyrannical)
creator God of the Old Testament. In Patristic characterization, the Gnostics are
those who can escape from the entrapment of the material world, presenting them-
selves as a spiritual elite who, knowing the names of the aeons and taught by Christ,
can safely ascend or return to the true source of their existence. The “sparks” left
over from the huge cosmic unfolding inheres in their souls and is releasable from
the unwanted body. Apart from Patristic rebuttals, the diatribe by Plotinus (260s)
against comparable views from a Neoplatonic philosophical viewpoint (Ennead
2.9.5–17) was read by Porphyry as “Countering the Gnostikoi” (Vita Plotini 5, 16).
Earliest the nomenclature gnostikoi applied to a limited number of sects (thus
from Irenaeus, Haer. 1.11.1 on to Augustine, Haer. 1.6; cf. 17), but in the encyclo-
pedic heresy-spotting and theological critiques of Epiphanius of Salamis (ca. 370
CE) they have “sprouted and grown like fruit from a dunghill” into seven groups,
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— T h e G n o s t i c Wo r l d —
the Valentinians strongest among these “Gnostic “sects” (Panarion 1.26.1.l, 27.1.1;
3.63.1.3), and it he is who first gives Valentinians and Manichaeans “the same char-
acter” (2.42.12.3 schol. 2/26). The Fathers’ combined impression of a heterodox
“classic Christian Gnosticism” had a long-enduring effect n scholarship, and of the
“twenty heresies before and sixty after Christ” in the words of ninth-century Byzantine
Photius (Epistolarum 1, paraphrasing Panarion, proem. 3.2–4.8), the lion’s share
were gnostical in their proclivity for attending to a liberating knowledge of aeonic
powers or “principalities” (Panar. 2.23–32; 3.34–37, 39–40, 44; 3.56, 63, 66; cf.
Ephes. 6:12). By 300 CE debate was had over fine points of Scripture, the “orthodox”
countering Bible versions used by Gnostic schools (as well as by Marcionites, who
also dichotomized the good New and false Old Testament deities) (e.g., Adamantius,
De recta in Deum fide 842c, 847a, 849c, etc.).
Already in Christian heresiological reckoning, problems lay in groups that
suggested accentuated quasi-equal contest between God/Christ and Satan (e.g.,
Epiphanius, e.g., Pan. 1.33–4; 45; 2. proem. 4.8, on to 4.59.4.11; 66.6.6). They
remind us of the interface between more Hellenistic-syncretic concerns with aeonic
or astral powers and dichotomies between good and evil angels and forces in Hebrew
and Persian speculations, and especially between Ohrmazd and Ahriman (the Great
Bounteous and Destructive Spirits) in Zoroastrianism. In the important Sasanian
effort at a Zoroastrian “religious establishment” (320s CE, 60 years before compar-
able measures by Christian emperor Theodosius the Great), high priest Adurbad-i-
Marhrspandan was carefully inspecting and distinguishing all “sects and schools”
that were “false religions” and “heresies” (Denkart 413). We owe to the Armenian
Christian monk and self-inscribing “Christian philosopher” Eznik of Kolb, over
a century later (440s), the most detailed descriptions of the primordial myth of
Zurvan (from a Zoroastrian heresy) and a likening to it of Manichaean cosmology
(from a distinct Gnostic religion) as “dualist” (dualistakan) (Refutationes 1.1.4;
2.2.1–2; cf. 4.13); and to Theodore bar Konai (flor. 800), an Assyrian exegete and
admirer of Epiphanius, both a rich account of the Manichaean chasm between the
co-eternal realms of Light and Darkness (Liber scholiorum [Scher, pt. 1] [pp.] 213–18)
and a version of the Zurvanite myth (see Zaehner 1975: 420–30). From then on
dualism as over-accentuating good and bad cosmic principles and as dichotom-
izing divine goodness and evil matter and/or flesh became the key twinned-bases
for detecting major heresies in the Byzantine and western Medieval worlds (e.g.,
Hamilton 1998), and for tracing their ongoing history (by Peter the Sicilian and
Photius in the ninth century on to Cyriacus Spangenberg in the Reformation).
Meanwhile Muslim doxographers developed their own methods of discrimination,
as to whether Zoroastrian-looking touches of dualism or “angelology” in various
sectarian views, or Gnostic-looking concern for “emanations” or occulted Imams,
compromised the unity of Allah. The great ninth-century Persian bibliographer Ibn
al-Nadīm, for example, classified the Sabians (here = Mandaeans), Manichaeans,
and Mazdakites as non-monotheistic dualists, relating their views to creeds in India
and China (Fihrist [970s] 8). The massive scholarship on “doctrines of all peoples”
by Al-Shahrastānī in his Al-Milal wa ’l-nihal (written 1127–1128) widened and
gave more detail to the agenda, again with an interest in Indian religions.
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EARLY MODER N E N T RÉ E S
Understandably, until near contemporary times no scholar took up these threads and
comprehended a trans-cultural “Gnostic World” in the way we do in this volume. In
early modern Western scholarship, historical interest in particular bodies of Gnosis –
especially Platonic, Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and alchemical –facilitated quests to plot
a prisca theologia or ancient theology, or a body of deep spiritual insights running
alongside and in compatibility with the Biblical story (Schmidt-Biggemann 2004).
A key lineage usually included Zoroaster, Thoth (Hermes), Orpheus, Pythagoras, and
Plato, and was much affected by the fact that when the Platonic corpus reached Medici
Florence in the Renaissance, the Hermetic treatises then called Poimandres and the
Chaldean Oracles (attributed to Zoroaster) were attached to it (Kristeller 1972: 95–
105), the former being translated as Il Pimandro in 1548. An incipient sense of a wide
world of deep wisdom awaiting probing had opened up here, but of course the pre-
emptive exclusion of classical heresies prevented “Gnostic” qua positive descriptor
coming to the fore. An early modern move of interest was to print in Latin some of
the Hermetica together with Proclus and Iamblichus (in Marsilio Ficino’s translation)
on the Mysteries of Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians (1570). Valentinus had a
few Late Renaissance scholarly sympathizers, Abraham von Franckenberg for one (in
his Theophrastia Valentiniana, 1629), and his fellow German co-Lutheran publisher
Gottfried Arnold famously produced an enormous “impartial” history of heresies
(1700), maintaining that they all had by Providence some useful truth –in various cases
Gnosis –to bequeath (see ch. 37). Sharper historical delineations of early Christian
deviations had increased among antiquarians –Jean-Jacques Chif[f]‌let and Caesar
Baronius on Gnostic medallions and iconography (pub. 1617 and 1635 respectively,
and Franz Buddeus (1702) on Valentinianism (1702), being of most interest –and
entrants into Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and related esoteric quests could invite orthodox
accusations of undercover Gnostic tendencies. Cambridge Platonist Henry More first
deployed the English abstraction “Gnosticism” (in 1669) to signify spiritual forni-
cation and idolatry (especially in Catholicism), while Isaac Newton calumniated his
arch-competitor Gottfried Leibniz as Gnostic heresiarch Simon Magus redivivus for
his de-Christianized Kabbalism (Manuel 1974: 68–76). Common enough agreement
was shared, however, that God’s truth lay reflected across creeds and nations, gener-
ating the pursuit of deep-structural insights behind familiar differences (explaining
the rise of Masonry) (see ch. 40).
In the West’s early Enlightenment, the earliest synoptic view of something like a
Gnostic World was purveyed by Newtonian Humphrey Prideaux (esp. 1724: 228–
32), that natural but false ideas of necessary “mediation” between the divine and
human started with Chaldaeo-Babylonians magnifying the planets and then angels,
an outlook passed on to Egypt and Greece via the Sabians of Arabia. Jesus gave an
eventual “universality” to this proclivity, but the “Gnostic Christians” did not escape
the spell of older contaminants. For those savants wanting to embarrass the Christian
“establishment,” of course, the Gnostics and the Manichaeans received some learned
rehabilitation (strikingly by Huguenot Isaac de Beausobre), along with Zoroaster and
Hermes, to shake staid clerical dogma; yet in Voltaire’s terms they “would all still cut a
sorry figure” beside modern men of reason (Newton, Pierre Bayle, etc.) (Dictionnaire
philosophique [1767] s.v. “Zoroastre”). In the main, Gnostic or Hermetic interests
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were basically dumped into the “waste-basket” with the useless “Occult Sciences”
copiously documented for encyclopedist Abbé Migne (De Plancy and Simon 1846; cf.
Hanegraaff 2012: 233–4). Over the centuries in the Orthodox East, by comparison,
theological discussions and histories concerning mystical, “true” (as against “false”)
Gnosis had been going on unabated in the Eastern churches, it being accepted as
Christ’s gift, though unnecessary for salvation and often connected with personal
theōsis (union with God) (see chs. 24, 38). Occasionally a thinker, Byzantium’s great
Mikhaēl Psellos for one (1060s), had even dared to imagine being in the position of
ancient extra-Christian “initiated knowers” (e.g., Expositio in Oraculo Chaldaica.
[Migne, PG, vol. 122, col. 1135C-D]), as also late Byzantine Gemistos Plethon (1420s),
a Neoplatonist testing what it would be like to be pagan again (cf. Burns 2006).
INVENTING “ THE GNO S TIC WO RL D ”

By the nineteenth century a whole range of relevant studies appeared. On the classic
Gnostics ecclesiastical historians August Neander and Ferdinand Christian Baur are
renowned (publishing in 1818 and 35 respectively), and Jacques Matter (1791–1864)
seems first to objectify the abstraction gnosticisme in learned literature (1828), sensing
deep connections between ancient gnosticizers and esoterists Emanuel Swedenborg
and Claude Saint-Martin. About other sets of related phenomena we find inter alia
Thomas Taylor on ancient Neoplatonists (in 1809–1810, 1816), Joseph von Hammer-
Purgstall on Nizari Isma‘ilis (1818), August Hahn on Bardesanes (1819), Silvestre de
Sacy on the Druze (in 1838), Daniel Chwolson on the Sabians (in 1856), Moritz
Friedländer on Merkabah mysticism and Frederick Conybeare on the Paulicians
(both 1898), Gustav Schlegel on Uighur Manichaeism (1896), and René Dussaud on
the Alawite Nusayris (1900), along with Henry Blunt’s Dictionary of Sects (1874)
and Max Müller’s edited translations in The Sacred Books of the East (1879–1910) –
all making the vision of a critically studied Gnostic World more possible. First in with
an obviously synoptic encompassment, however, was Cantabrian classicist Charles
King (1818–1888), who suspected Zoroastrian and Indic bases for both the classic
Gnostics and “Kabbala” (originated by the Pharisees or “Pharsis”). Admitting sym-
pathy with gnōstikoi ([1864] 1887: vi), he traced “Gnostic remains” into Mithraism,
Sufism, and the Druze, on to the Templars, Rosicrucians, and (to many Lodges’ ner-
vousness!) the Freemasons.
Then came the heady Russo-Ukrainian Theosophist Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891),
reflecting ideas before and after her that mystic fraternities bore the same sacred, eso-
teric Gnosis through the ages. For all her wild chronological jumps and inferences,
she left an indelible impression of the Hermetic Brothers of Egypt, the (Zoroastrian)
Mazdaists, the Orphic, Pythagorean, Eleusinian, Bacchic and Isean mysteries, the
Essenes, Gnostics, Magi, the “Nazarenes” (or Mandaeans), Coptic hermit monks,
Origen, Plotinus and theurgic Neo- Platonists, Kabbalists, Sufis, Druze, Lamaists,
let alone the re-connecting linkages in Boehme’s Christian Theosophy, Giordano
Bruno’s neo- Pythagoreanism, Rosicrucians, Mesmerists, modern théosophes,
Swedenborgians, and the Brothers of Luxor, as all integrally related. They reflected
the recurring presence of a “Secret Association” through history, starting from the
Brahmins or the original South Asian propounders of Budhi (or Gnosis) from whom
all these “fraternities” ultimately derived in our order of time (Blavatsky 1877: vol.
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1: 307–8, 323–4; vol. 2: 38, 306–11; 1886: 22–6; 1994: v). Creating this lineage
was to herald her Theosophical Society (founded 1875) as the direct inheritor of this
great chain of esoteric wisdom, but despite her special motives Blavatsky had at least
introduced the general field we can now recognize as “the Gnostic world,” and one
of the chief aims of her Society was to promote the comparative study of religion. By
incorporating Eastern (especially Indic) quests for higher spiritual attainment, with
jñāna cognate to gnōsis, a new “theater” was built where “East and West” would take
each the more seriously.
Blavatsky’s last private secretary, English historian George Mead (1863–
1933), we would have to say, made more substantial scholarly contributions to
Gnostic studies than she ever could, and in deploying his undogmatic approach
to comparative religion he influentially posited the commonality of doctrine and
practice he Anglicized as “Gnosticism” (Goodrick-Clarke 2005: 27–31). Mead
followed the lead by Baur, paragon of the Tübingen School, who sought to recon-
sider Christianity itself as a Gnosis, at least philosophically (Simuț 2014: 3, 236),
and who generalized about the various particular gnostischen Systeme of early
Christian times, cautiously including Manichaeism (1847: 64, 82; cf. 1831, the
phrase “Gnostic system” having been introduced by Neander). After Matter’s
early French usage and appearances of the German term Gnostizismus in book
titles (Grätz 1846, on Jewish threads; Anz 1897, probing Babylonian roots) and
its equivalent in English (with King 1864: 1–7), Mead expounded the ancient
expressions of the Gnosticism as he broadly conceived it from the Hermetic
corpus, the Chaldean Oracles, the Neoplatonists, and the classic Gnostic strand
traditionally beginning with Simon Magus. But he went on to relate the whole out-
look to Buddhism and other Eastern philosophical outlooks, and saw its latter-day
rehabilitation –as “a faith forgotten” –in modern theosophy (Mead 1900). Very
significantly, he translated for Anglophone scholarship (in 1896) the important
Late Antique Christian Gnostic text Pistis Sophia (discovered in 1773, in German
by Carl Schmidt in 1905, and about the relative redemption of the aiōn Sophia)
and also (by 1906) Mead Englished most of the Trismegistic literature, and also
(by 1924) much of the crucial Mandaean Book of John the Baptizer, at the time
when Polish-German philologist Mark Lidzbarski (1868–1928) was translating
major Mandaic texts of the last-surviving Gnostic group from Antiquity (see ch.
16). It was in this context that the obvious question arose as to whether there were
pre-Christian gnosticisms, Jewish or otherwise (Legge 1915: 90–202), a matter
now of long academic debate (Yamauchi 2003). But by then French orientalist
Edgard Blochet (1870–1937) had already written of gnosticisme musulman (1913),
extending the use of the abstraction to strands of Shi’ite theology and heralding
the term’s rising deployment by mainstream scholars into the 1920s, most notably
by the Sorbonne’s Patristic specialist Eugène de Faye (1860–1929), completing his
Gnostiques et gnosticisme (1925) as a “critical study of the documents of Christian
Gnosticism.” At this stage critical editions of the Hermetica by Walter Scott (1924–
1936), and of Pistis Sophia and some Coptic Manichaica by Schmidt (1925, 1933;
cf. also Henning 1937), were rolling off the press.
A tendency in the “Theosophical Current” has been to conflate “the Gnostic” with
“the esoteric,” mysticism, clairvoyance, occultism, induced altered states, etc. This
(con)fusing reappears in different ways in post-Blavatskian variants –from Rudolf
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31
Steiner’s Anthroposophy, Alice Bailey’s New Ageism, René Guénon’s “Traditionalism,”

down to Samael Aun Weor (ch. 58), who images an “endoteric Gnostic” fraternity
over time and whose on-line Gnostic Library allegedly substantiates it. But this
rather sucks distinctive meaning out of “Gnosis,” “the Gnostic,” and “Gnosticism.”
Scholars, let alone popular readership, have been left with the problem of disentan-
gling a cluster of related ideas “fuzzy around the edges” ever since. Even Theosophy,
the very name implying the great quest for divine Wisdom, like deeper or higher
Knowledge, and usually connected to “inner enlightenment,” was left undefined by
the founders of the Theosophical Society (Oliveira 2017: 5–7). Out of this manner
of discourse there developed the by now popular notion that all the founders of the
great religions were proponents of a higher knowledge of the divine, and that ancient,
“secret wisdom” or “Mysteries of all Ages” lie behind Rosicrucians, Masons, and
other modern “occultisms” (Trompf 2006: 60–2; cf. Hall 1928).
Critical scholars from the turn into the twentieth century, however, sought greater
certainty about the foundations of the early Gnostic schools in Antiquity and
movements following them, and saw it emerging from cultic and speculative interests
shared or mixed between West and East, mainly Greece and Persia, in Hellenistic
times (after Alexander’s conquests). Members of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (or
History of Religions School), particularly Wilhelm Bousset (1865–1920) and Richard
Reitzenstein (1861–1931), focused on concerns with “cosmic time,” especially the
concept of aiōn (a deity of Time in various cult centers) and the need to control
aeonic powers (forces prominent in magical papyri and in “classic Gnosticism,” and
alluded to as dangerous in the New Testament [e.g., Col 2:8–9]). Apart from noting
such key motifs as Mother-Sophia, hidden Father, Primal Man, Redeemer, dualism,
emanations, and the soul’s heavenward return, such scholars tended to labor Eastern
“origins” over Western. That accounted for the widespread acceptance of Babylonian
authority on matters of zodiacal, cosmic-sympathetic, and fatalist-looking forces, and
the westward shifts of Iranian ideas –especially of divinized Time and Fate (Zurvan),
“mystified” cosmic extensions of the divine (in the Mithraic mysteries), and great
cosmic Ages unfolding toward final resolution (in Mazdaist) speculations. Before
Israel, Persia birthed “Redemption Religion” (Erlösungsreligion) from all this and the
Gnostics inherited their moulds (Bousset 1907: 28; Reitzenstein 1921).
The great Irish-Australian product of the History of Religions school, Samuel
Angus (1881–1943) was happy to write of a generic “Gnostic religion” (or the “wide-
spread and influential phase of religion known as Gnosticism”) that prided itself for
holding arcane, tightly group-kept mysteries, especially “elaborate cosmologies,” and
“a Gnosis accessible to the few” (1925: 52, 155, 284). While over the last century
or so more wary researchers preferred writing of “a movement” of “religious syncre-
tism” that “fell on all the religions” of its time (thus earlier, Lebreton 1910: vol. 2,
83) or a “syncretistic-religious movement” (later, Peel 1969: vii). The first anthologist
of Gnosticism, American Church historian Robert Grant (1917–2014), displaying
mainly the Church Fathers’ accounts and only a few newly discovered materials,
accentuated the syncretic “mixture” precisely because of the systems’ multiple origins
and filaments –mainly “Hellenistic, Jewish, Oriental, and Christian” (1959: 13–26;
1961: 18). Whether derivative or not, emerging new discoveries did not deter others
from writing of a distinctive religious bloc. If there had been an “incipient movement”
we call Gnostic in the first century, contended acclaimed Scottish New Testament
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32
scholar Robert Wilson (1916–2010), it was a “world religion” and of “real danger
to the Christian faith” by the second (1955: 211). Dutch Early Church historian
Gilles Quispel (1916–2006) probably gave him in his cue (1951), and Quispel’s
student Roelof van den Broek (1931–) still accepts a distinct “Gnostic religion in
Antiquity” (2013: 1–21), albeit as an apparently less heterogeneous affair than for his
predecessors (cf. Marjanen 2005).
Various expositors from the Christian and other monotheistic traditions, of
course, kept the image of heresy forefront in mind. Gnosticism was essentially
a Christian deviation. One scholar, however, was avant-garde for treating heresy
more as an historical phenomenon of departures from orthodoxies. This was
Oxonian cleric and classicist Frederick W. Bussell (1862–1944), in his mammoth
if rather uneven and at times naive Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle
Ages (1918), where he dealt with a whole range of religious views and groups –
Chaldaic astrology, Zoroastrian dualism and Zurvanism, Indian nastika sects
such as Buddhism and the Jains, Orphics, “Mandaean-Sabians,” Gnostics, and
Manichaeans, but going on to Paulicians, Bogomils, Cathars, Shi’ite sects, Sufis,
Isma’ilis, Druze, Yezidis, south-eastern Asian syncretisms, and so on –that might
otherwise be called our “Gnostic World” (albeit discussed alongside freethinking,
apocalyptic, communalist, and early radicalist groups). Bussell, moreover, tried
his hand covering the pseudo- Clementine “gnosticizing” writings (1896a) and
the ancient history of the Platonic tradition, which ends up under the Roman
Empire as “a doctrine of Emanation,” with gradations of being from the “Highest
God known to a few” down to “the mortal sphere,” the “interspaces” being filled
by “Demons, Aeons, Angels, Archons, World-Powers” looking very much like a
Gnostic’s plērōma (1896b: 317).
In the interwar years some made less ambitious but nonetheless significant
advances. A scholar of the Druze, Chicago’s West Asian expert Martin Sprengling
(1877–1959) first raised the methodological issue of “undeniably original” and much
less derivative Gnosticisms, citing the three cases of Bardesanes in Syria and Mani
in Mesopotamia from Antiquity, and the Druze in medieval Egypt (1939: 403–11).
American Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas (1903–1993) seminally read “the Gnostic
religion” (being the first to analyze “classic Christian” Gnosticism, Hermetism,
Mandaeism, and Manichaeism side-by-side) as reflective of the modern condition
of alienation (Entfremdung) (1934; 1966: 211–34), of not fitting anywhere in the
cosmos and, in acosmic nihilistic rejection of it, seeking to live beyond normative
good and evil. In the 1930s French Patristic scholar Dom André-Jean Festugière
(1898–1982) began his intellectual journey into the Hellenistic religious scene (esp.
1955), which took him into Byzantine Gnose, Platonism in the Western Renaissance,
and a critical text of the Hermetica (with Alfred Nock). But coping with such an enor-
mous body of materials was really impossible for one or two individuals. A team was
needed; and it came from rather unlikely but strikingly interesting quarters –from the
father of Analytical Psychology.
In the late summer of 1933, Sigmund Freud’s first favored protégé of the psycho-
analytic movement, Carl Jung (1875–1961), co-hosted a round-table “banquet of
deep thinking” (Eranos) on the Swiss bank of Lago Maggiore. What resulted from
the first 30 years of these gatherings offers the richest feast of publications in the
Eranos Jahrbuch series (Fröbe-Kapteyn et al. 1933) concerning Gnostic and related
32
3
subjects, across East and West. On classic Gnosticism, including Manichaeism, Henri-
Charles Puech was first most prominent (1934–1935, 1937, 1951) to be overtaken by
Gilles Quispel (1947–1948, 1950, 1953), both big names in the subject; on Orphism,
Neoplatonism, and Hellenistic mystery religious, including Mithraism, the names
of Ernesto Buonaiuti (1936), Andreas Speiser (1937), Walter Otto (1939), Walter
Wili (1944), and Jean de Menasce (1944) appear; on Gnostic connections of New
Testament Johannine literature, Robert Eisler (1935) and Max Pulver (1940–1941,
1943); on Patristic speculation, Hugo Rahner (1947) and Ernst Benz (1953), with
others on astrology and alchemy. For Gnosis in Shi’ite Islam and Sufism, giants in
the field Louis Massignon (1937–1939, 1944–1945, 1947, 1951) and Henri Corbin
(1949–1951, 1953–1954, 1957–1959, and on) led in turn, and for Jewish Kabbalism,
after emergent Israeli Jungian Erich Neumann (1948), came the great Gershom
Scholem (1950, 1952–1953, 1956–1960, 1964, and on), a man also highly appre-
ciative of Jonas’s insights. For relevant themes in the wider world of comparative
religion, especially Indic materials, Mircea Eliade was a vital inclusion (1951–1952,
1954, 1957–1960) and for “primitive religions,” John Layard (1937, 1948). If the
weight of Eranos preoccupations caused theologians anxiety as “pseudo-Gnostic”
(Holz 1984), there is no gainsaying that Jung was above all sponsoring research into
what we apprehend as “the Gnostic World” in the history of religion and culture (cf.
Wasserstrom 1999), and he himself grounded the quest of self-gnosis, as a goal of
Analytical Psychology, in the study of ancient Gnostic texts, alchemical works (fam-
ously a Daoist one), and Western theosophy, with his book on the phenomenology of
the self significantly titled Aion (see Jung in Segal 2013: 8–40) (ch. 50).
THE GREAT DIS COVE RIE S

Significantly, after a great cache of crucial Coptic documents was found in 1945, two
of the Eranos conferees, Puech and Quispel, were early on hand to publicize them
as ancient Gnostic Christian materials. In startling circumstances, so the “standard,”
if questionable account goes, one Muhammad Ali came upon a large sealed storage
jar under a broken boulder when plotting to avenge the death of his father near
Nag Hammadi, Upper Egypt, on the bend in the Nile, a single stroke of his mattock
unlocking a thousand pages of previously unknown works –excluding, that is, par-
allel passages in other papyri (Berlin Codex 8502.2; Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1, etc.) and
translations from Plato’s Republic and the Hermetic Asclepius (which immediately
suggested Coptic translations of earlier Greek texts and pointed to the metaphysical
orientation of authors and collectors) (esp. Robinson 1979; cf. Doresse 1959; Burns
2016). The first codex, its most crucial parts –including most of the Gospel of Truth
introduced to the world inter alia by Puech and Quispel, was acquired through the
latter’s mediation by the Jung Institute (Zurich) and titled the Jung Codex (Cross
et al. 1955). Though a gift for the great psychoanalyst’s eightieth birthday, it was
later returned to Cairo’s Coptic Museum, where the first facsimiles (four pages) of
the Gospel of Truth had been published (Labib 1956) and whither all the codices
came to lie (though only fully photographed by 1977). In 1975 another codex had
surfaced, called Tchacos after the father of the Zurich-based art dealer who bought
it, or Qarara after its place of discovery (some 240 km north of Nag Hammadi), and
was sensationalized for containing the Gospel of Judas (Robinson 2006: 89–184).
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34
At a timely 1966 conference in Messina organized by Italian historian of religions

Ugo Bianchi (1922–1995) gnosticismo received a working consensual definition –
that it was dualist (if not ditheistic), based on revelation, needed mythical narration,
organized itself into different systems, and was “mainly a perverted secondary devel-
opment within the Christian church” (Georgi 2003: 287; Bianchi 1967: 427–579).
Already it was becoming obvious, though, that “Gnosticism” was a large religious
mondo in itself. Wilson, for one, abreast of research into the new finds, insisted the
Christian connections had been overplayed, and that Gnosticism, though using the
“Christ myth,” was a much broader philosophical outlook, anticipating views that it
comprised many specific positions but the same characteristic “attitude” (see Widengren
1973), and that the orthodox/heresy polarity essentialized both “Christianity” and
“Gnosticism” when neither was without inner differences (King 2003: 241, 319).
Why, had not the great German higher critic Rudolf Bultmann (1941) already used
John’s Gospel to point up early “orthodox gnostic” proclivities? (cf. Hilgenfeld 1882,
much earlier). At Messina Jonas was present to proffer the widest perspective, while
specialists in Hermetic, Zoroastrian, and Buddhist materials (including Theosophist
Edward Conze) showed their hands (within Bianchi 1967: 229–37, 281–290, 651–
67), and in the end, although the conference focused on the origins of Gnosticism,
Bianchi himself surveying scholarship about this (716–746), the documento finale
acknowledged a whole “storia mondiale of Gnosticism” running from the Upanishads
at least to the Yezidis and Isma’ilis (xxii).
Now, the history of presenting the original Nag Hammadi codices (NHC) and
T chacos facsimiles for research (1955– 2007), and of translating these textual
bodies for wider usage, is one of very complex energies, often involving a certain
jousting between national schools. Piecing together fragments and setting them
for publishable facsimiles, editing, with annotations of reconstruction, codicology,
meaning, and textual relationships both internal and external, and then trans-
lating the Coptic, was necessarily an international exercise and involved UNESCO
funding (esp. 1960–1970). The general editor of NHC or The Coptic Gnostic
Library Project, Claremont’s James Robinson, sought to manage all the pressures
and unite the whole exercise around the assumption that “the Gnostic religion”
was “significant … in its own right,” not only “a force” operating within formative
Christianity and Judaism (as his forewords to Project publications repeat). In his
official Nag Hammadi Story, Robinson wrote of early national “leadership” by
the French, Dutch, Swiss, and German, melding into an (almost exclusively Euro-
American) International Committee, with Brill of Holland chosen as the “offi-
cial” publishing house. Substantial funding from US sources, however, meant that
the US scholarly input into editing and translating (and then digitizing) became
noticeably increased (Robinson 2014: vol. 1, xviii, xxii, 121–614; vol. 2, 615–
798, 901–94). A cursory look at the translators for the Nag Hammadi Library in
English will confirm this (Robinson 1977: 206–477), as also my own notes from
various conferences and workshops attended. Even if The International Version
was meant to alter the balance, translation work by the American editor Marvin
Meyer (1948–2012) was dominant (2007). Mind you, Francophone scholars were
never to be outdone, generating their own editions, translations and commentaries
in their UNESCO-funded Bibliothèque Copte de Nag Hammadi (BCNH), with
heavy involvement by Québec’s Université Laval (Ménard et al. 1977–2002); and
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35
the Germans were to recover lost initiatives through reconstructing the T chacos
Codex (CT) (Brankaer and Bethge 2007; cf. Georgi 2003: 286).
The Nag Hammadi and related materials bore an immense effect on our
understanding of “classic Gnostic” speculation of the second and third cen-
turies BCE, with all the signs that it originated out of responses to the Jesus phe-
nomenon (Pétrement 1984), especially in its Valentinian and Sethian versions
(Stroumsa 1984; cf. chs. 10, 13). But of course they constituted only components
in the whole history of the Gnostic world, and for the best minds it was clear that,
even for Antiquity, these texts gave snapshots out of an exceptionally well pre-
serving Egyptian context that could warp the true and wider picture of Gnostic
activity. In his anthology, for example, leading Nag Hammadi scholar Bentley
Layton (1941–) aptly earmarked the Hermetic corpus along with Patristic and
later-discovered texts (1987: 445–62), and East-German Mandaean specialist Kurt
Rudolph (1929–) insisted that emerging accounts of ancient Gnosticism, even the
Messina definition, would have to be seriously revised when old Mandaic texts
were revisited and newly-known ones assessed (1983; cf. 1978), given also the
labors of Englishwoman Lady Ethel Drower (1879–1972) in making many such
texts available for research (cf. Buckley 2012).
In other developments, Groningen’s Han Drijvers (1934–2002) kept reminding
(from 1966) about the importance of Bardesanes (154–222), considering the avail-
ability of a major Syriac text (British Museum Nitrian MSS [ed. Cureton 1855]),
with the great Edessan said to influence Mani and in the long run the Bataniyya
and Ismai’ili Shi‘a sub-sects (Crone 2012: 146–220). Manichaean research went
on apace, buoyed by new access to versions of Mani’s Kephalaia or “Chief Points”
(from 1945), and punctually enlivened through an introductory coverage (in
1961) by the Swede Geo Widengren (1907–96), by the Dakhleh/Kellis excavations
(from 1978), and the collecting of Manichaean remains in Quanzhou (from 2000).
Publishing the Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum started from 1996 (Lieu, van Oort
and Tongerloo, 1996–), with the monograph series Nag Hammadi Studies being
wisely turned into Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies in 2013 (its first number
by Johannes van Oort). Obviously, the issue had to be addressed as to whether
Manichaeism was a whole new species of Gnosis (Böhlig and Markschies 1994).
And as time passed, general introductions to ancient Gnosticism stressed diver-
sity of strands (e.g., by Haardt in 1967, Foerster in 1972–1974, Krause, 1972 and
1975, Rudolph 1975 and 1977, Bianchi 1978, Nagel 1979, Layton 1980–1981,
Barc 1981, van den Broek and Vermaseren 1981, Filoramo 1983, Hedrick and
Hodgson 1986, Pearson 1990, Turner and McGuire in 1997), as also reflected in
bibliographic work (e.g., Scholer 1971–2009; Mikkelsen 1997) and textual listings
(e.g., Lieu, Sims-Williams, et al. 1999).
RECONCEP TUA L IZATIO NS

The Nag Hammadi finds certainly pushed out threads of thought facilitating con-
sideration of a wider Gnostic world, and new Manichaean texts entailed medi-
eval provenances and disparate places (Barnstone and Meyer 2003). With NHCs
highlighting Mary Jesus’s Mother, Mary Magdalene, and Salome, and female leader-
ship in church worship, who can truly gauge the effect of The Gnostic Gospels (1979),
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36
by Princeton’s Elaine Pagels (1943–), on social impetuses for the feminization in con-
temporary religion? Of course most of the “distinctively Gnostic buzz” concerned
secrets as to whether Jesus got married –recall what turned out to be a fake Coptic
“Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” attracting the attention of Harvard’s Karen King (Schroeder
2017) and curious claims about BM Syriac Ms 17.202 (Jacobovici and Wilson 2014) –
and whether Jesus’s children, allegedly descending through Magdalene to French
royalty, known to the medieval Templars and Cathars, early modern Illuminati and
Freemasons; and all this made for a strange mini-Gnostic world in itself (Burstein
2004). Medieval “Manichees,” of course, had been long critically researched –at
least from Runciman (1947) to Barber (2000) –but new finds showed the west/east
spread of Manichaeism was extraordinary, another special Gnostic world unto itself.
In studying this spread, the “indigenous factor” in scholarship came into play, with
such Chinese researchers on Manichaeism as Lin Wushu and above all Samuel Lieu
(1950–), while the sweep of dualisms, as a residue of Zoroastrianism, was fixed in the
attention of Bulgarian Yuri Stoyanov (1961–), his Hidden Tradition in Europe (1994)
famously confirming Zoroastro-Gnostic-heterodox Islamic connections within the
Byzantine ambience (across the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean).
With the intensifying study of Silk Road and Middle Eastern Gnostic filaments
many scholars with Asian backgrounds made a steadier showing. Most famously,
Iranian Hossein Nasr (1933–) and Ceylonese Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947)
were protagonists in the perennialist and traditionalist movements (with Frithjof
Schuon and others) that located the heart of all major religions in gnosis (see ch. 49).
As for research breakthroughs, Armenian scholars probed Paulicians, for instance
(e.g., Bartikyan 1961); Iranians explored the interface between residual Zoroastrian
strands and Shi‘a ghulat movements (e.g., Hamzehee 1991), as well as Persianite
Sufism (e.g., Zarrinkoub 1970) and Kurdish esoterism (Nūr ‘Alī Elāhī 1966); Isma’ili
and Druze thinkers reflected more critically on their own truths, as also Yezidi author-
ities acting as informants (Nanji 1978; Makarem 1974; Celil and Celil 1978); a Turk
impressively covered the Mandaean materials (Gündüz 1994); and so on (though in
all these arenas Western intellectuals remained crucial, with Corbin, Vladimir Ivanow,
Jes Asmussen, Philip Kreyenbroek, Daniel de Smet, etc.). Interest in Jewish Kabbalah
had an enduring presence both in Jewish thought and out of it (the latter in the West
since Renaissance humanists Pico della Mirandola and Johann Reuchlin), but became
an object of critical analysis basically through Scholem (1960). Plumbing the his-
tories of alchemy and astrology also gave Eastern and Western “esoteric connections”
greater clarity (e.g., Eliade 1956; Campbell 1961), and from 1976 with the series
Studies in Neoplatonism, Ancient and Modern down to the new International Journal
of the Platonic Tradition (2007–) some umbrella coverage from Thales to Thomas
Taylor and beyond was to the fore.
Put together, such varied specialist researches and the conceptual intersecting set
in place more building-blocks of a “Gnostic World,” of a shared “attitudinal ethos”
and “yearning for deep cosmic knowledge” that had impressed itself on the history of
human consciousness globally. The “mold” or “configuration” (whether being named
mystical, theosophical, Gnostic, Hermetic, esoteric, occult) might even be imagined
to pop up in small-scale traditional religions, and indeed those intellectuals making
ritual use of drugs also made some talk of researching a “forgotten … primordial
tradition” (e.g., H. Smith 1976; and see chs. 49, 62).
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37
In looking beyond his Western tradition from Utrecht, Gilles Quispel, signifi-
cantly Jung’s last-surviving confidant, became renowned for gathering up matters to
posit Gnosis as a third great component of human thought –most definitely within
European culture, but in his developing, ambitious universalism, much more widely.
First distinguishing the grand cultural components of Faith (connected to established,
“Biblically grounded” churches and theologies) and Reason (with its roots in Greek
rationalism and philosophizing), Quispel (1988: 19) traces a derde component to
Alexandria, which involves the emergences from time to time through history of an
introspective concern with the deeper Self as identified with the divine. Long before
crediting Gnosticism with the status of Weltreligion (1951) (see above), Quispel
universalized the common psycho-spiritual concern for the Discovery of the Self, and
deep structural process of individuation as recognition of “the Divine within,” in
Jung’s psychological framing (1958). In his later years, Quispel, early in assessing the
significance of Armenian Hermetica (cf. Mahé 1978–1982; Fowden 1986), became
prepossessed by the Hermetic principle “as above, so below,” reading this as the
common mental outlook of the Gnostic, a manner of intuiting esoteric relationships
with the Divine through correspondences and symbols (Quispel 1992: 227–62; cf.
1996; and see Yates 1964 on later Hermetism). “Inventing the Gnostic World” this
way earned Quispel a marble bust in Amsterdam’s Ritman Library, which holds
an extraordinary collection of over 23,000 volumes impinging on the “Christian-
Hermetic tradition.”
In another pertinent development Antoine Faivre (1934–), one-time but eventually
disaffected Eranos attender, was appointed in 1979 to a new Chair in the Esoteric
and Mystical Currents in Europe (1979–), following François Secret’s Professorship
in Christian Esotericism (1965–1979), and devoted much of his research to the his-
tory of mid-modern Hermetic and Christian Kabbalistic thinkers (e.g., Faivre 1994).
Since he has been touted as the one first defining Esotericism as an academic dis-
cipline, with Wouter Hanegraaff (1961–) –who worked with him in Paris –and
Kocku von Stuckrad (1966–) key theoreticians in his train, the issue was bound
to be raised as to the conceptual overlapping and differentials between what was
Gnostic, Hermetic, and Esoteric, and also Theosophical, Mystical, deep-Sapiental and
Occult(ic). Interestingly when Hanegraaff was appointed to a university Chair (1999)
it was in the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (Amsterdam),
and the only known position to teach the “History of the Gnostic Tradition” as a
whole (not just of ancient matters) was an isolated casual Lectureship, held by John
Cooper (1930–1998) at the University of Sydney, for three years before his death.
Strong Sydney-Utrecht relations led to the founding of the learned monograph series
Gnostica (1997–), by the present author (who had worked with Quispel at Utrecht)
and Hanegraaff (who took his doctorate there), and in Gnostica’s second number
Faivre and Hanegraaff (1998: 1–61) paired to draw their methodological lines in
the sand.
Definitional problems necessitated the previous chapter. After all, in early scholar-
ship the esoteric and Gnostic had been carelessly used interchangeably (e.g., Blochet
1902), and issues had to be sorted out as to whether Gnostic texts had to be eso-
teric –even the famous Valentinian Gospel of Truth might be intentionally “exo-
teric” (Attridge 1986) –or whether the esoteric had to involve secrecy (von Stuckrad
2004). Modern scholarship is also necessarily involved in getting straight ongoing
37
38
conceptualizations from older schools concerned with Gnosis (Theosophical,

Traditionalist, etc.). Interestingly for the Western tradition, we find Hanegraaff
(2013) taking the continuation of the Gnostic trajectory beyond Antiquity more in
terms of the Hermetic (cf. Van den Broek and Hanegraaff 1998; van den Broek and
van Heertum 2000), while Faivre has taken up the challenge of French Nag Hammadi
experts to trace “la notion de Gnose” down into modern esoteric currents (2010),
revising and expanding upon his account in this very volume (ch. 37).
Pace contesting positions, whether scholarly overviews of “the Gnostic” take true
esotérismes always to entail gnoses (Riffard 1990); or complain when “old wisdom” is
put in the same study trajectory as alleged pseudo-gnosticisms of the New Age (Quispel
1992: 7); or insist instead that all deserve encompassing investigation (e.g., Godwin
1994; Hanegraaff 1996: 381–405); or see a Gnostic unity more psychologically in
terms of deep-structural states of being (Merkur 1993); or read it as part of a the-
osophy and the non-discursive mind (starting from Mead 1906; cf. Hoeller 2002), or as
subverting established religion (Churton 1999) or democratic politics (Voegelin 1952);
or abandon “Gnosticism” as an unworkable category (see ch. 7); they all still form part
of an intricate body of scholarship that requires historical perspective. Considering the
need to delineate adequately a whole “tree of Gnosis” (Coulianu 1992) and also better
apprise the plethora of “new Gnosticisms” abroad in contemporary culture (Hassan
1973), such a perspective is herewith provided, albeit in too confined a span, for con-
textualizing the many specialist articles in this book that follow.
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43
CHAPTER THREE
GNOSTICS AND TEMPORALITY: FROM

MYTH TO MACROHISTORY
Garry W. Trompf
H ow history is conceived in Gnostic strains of thought is enigmatic. Setting

down a narrative order of human events is rarely a key concern of those
seeking a deep knowledge of celestial arrangements and the path to the eternally
non-contingent. Gnostics’ treatments of what are normally recognizable as histor-
ical materials are typically extensions of cosmogonic unfoldings and cosmological
outworkings rather than matters of detailed interest and narratological expression
for their own sake. The literary and semantic quality of Gnostic approaches to
human temporal change, then, almost always enshrouds the past in some mythos
or in a cosmically significant, patterned frame in which all ephemerides (the myriad
of mere happenings) get bundled and explained within “overarching visions.” This
chapter analyzes this general tendency, although it also shows that, over centuries,
attention to “received, known history” increases in this trajectory of thought.
Despite this slow and special historicizing process, though, the mythic element
remains pronounced: it is just that matters of historicity become more addressed
and accommodated. Macrohistory, as a heuristic concept, captures the adventurous
visioning of the human past as a whole, in god-like panoramic regard or “the mind’s
eye,” often including a sense of where humanity is heading (to an imminent End or
Transformation, for example, or an “open future,” whether of progress, regress or
recurrence) (Trompf 1979a: 71).
Macrohistory is the term that can best cover how human affairs are synoptic-
ally conceived by relevant parties, from Antiquity’s Gnostic myths – otherwise called
cosmo-or myth-histories, or mythical narrations (Heehs 1994; Perkins 1993: 14–
15) –to the time when a modern Gnostical thinker, such as Rudolf Steiner, can be
rated among macrohistorians, or exponents of “big history” like Gibbon, Spengler,
and Toynbee (Scharmer 1997: 90–7). “Gnostic,” for its part, is accepted as a gen-
eric term used today (yet with roots in ancient appellations) that covers a persisting
temper of thought and “ways to immortality” introduced in the previous chapters.
Already incipient as far back as the Upanishads and pre-Socratic Orphism, it has
received modern rehabilitations, most strikingly through The Theosophical Society
(cf. Casadio 1993; Quispel 1996).
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4
THE GNOSTIC M YTH

In what can serve here as a key signpost, one mythic structure most characterizes
Gnostic approaches to human events: that of cosmic descent and then (re-)ascent. The
universe issues from the Divine (typically a One or Father), and in stages of eman-
ation from higher to lower cosmic states of being, the material world is formed, and,
as refractions of the heavenly Source, human beings (or at least some of them) are
capable of ascending and returning to their true Home. This we name the primary
Gnostic Myth; it is shared by a number of schools of thought in Antiquity (including
Platonism and Hermetism). With “classic” (most often Christianizing) Gnostic specu-
lation from the second century CE it comes with recognizable distinctness. Humans
need to be saved by a Redeemer out of the world of matter and physical corporeality,
brought about by a “cosmic mistake” in the lower heavens by a demiurgic figure, a
false deity responsible for creating a bad world (often identified as the God of the
Jews). Jesus/Christ/Son is almost invariably the necessary savior, descending from the
hidden, highest Being, bypassing and thwarting threats of heavenly powers poten-
tially inimical to humans’ Return-to-the-Source, and teaching them on earth the path
of escape. Gnostic soteriology is thus mostly a saving from an “alien cosmos” and, if
saving from sin is admitted (as in Valentinianism), it is from the sin of willful ignorance
about the human condition (e.g., Desjardins 1990: 131; Havrda 2007). In that at least
select humans are the farthest extensions of a divine unfolding (through increasingly
lesser aeonic emanations), and retain a divine spark against the wishes of a baleful
Artificer (Christie-Murray 1989: 21–2), they are souls which have descended from
above and are capable of reascending, unless they have become completely trapped
in materiality (e.g., Hypostases of the Archons [NHC = Nag Hammadi Codices II.4],
94–7). The redeemer mythos fulfills and eases what is already potential or forgotten in
each psychē, unfortunately cast out into cosmic dis-location, and thus salvific action
reintegrates the soul into the divine process.
Because celestial events are disturbed by temporal contingencies in classic Gnostic
views (those rebutted in Patristic writing as heresy and those dominant in NHC), the
motion of “issuing out” and “returning to” forms a broken circle, marred by change-
ability as well as materiality, and an “overwhelming of souls for a time” before their
reascent, in Macrobius’s terms (Commentarium in Somnium Scipionis 1.12.17). What
results from the time- lapse between eternity and recovered everlastingness is best
encapsulated as a cosmic “U-curve” (Trompf 2013: 388): the temporal gap provides
the space in which narrating the human predicament can occur, indeed potentially the
filling out of a history. In the classic Gnostic case, mind you, this is an awful space –
initiates are “acosmic” or radically “anti-cosmic” (Jonas 1963: 264–5; Tröger 1981: 88)
in rejecting this evil realm of the soul’s bodily entombment (Bianchi 1982: 228) and in
realizing not all can escape –and yet the alien condition necessarily has to be addressed.
Now, one should not forget that “mental toolkits” for handling such terrestrial
events were already (relatively) accessible. If diverse, one may summarily list a rele-
vant pre-existing repertory thus:
• Historia as the kind of historiographical writing we find in classical Hebrew and

Graeco-Roman literature (e.g., the Deuteronomists or Herodotus), which can
claim its own “light of truth” (Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.prolog.10).
44
45
— Gnostics and temporality —
• Platonism (with certain Orphic and Pythagorean frames affecting it), including
ideas of the demiourgos bridging the ideal and made worlds but not overcoming
“primeval matter-connected evils” (Timaeus 41A-42D; Politicus 273B), of the
soul falling from the highest heavens (Phaedrus 245C-246E), of unforgetting
one’s divine origins and “returning back to the original” (Phaedo 71B-72C),
reincarnation of the worthy (69B; Gorgias 523A), and Middle Platonic visions
of general cosmic emanation, descent and return to the Divine Source, but with
no redeemer-figure involved (e.g., Numenius and Cronius apud Porphyry, De
Antro Nympharum 22–28; Alcinous, Epitome doctrinae Platonicae) (Plotinus
being strong on cosmic descent but weaker on ascent, through stressing a never-
changing World-Soul). Cf. Manilius, Astronomica 2: 107–8 for related astro-
logical ideas, some also in Mithraism (Ulansey 1989: 60–3).
• Alexandrian Hermetism, itself a Gnosis, perhaps with Jewish mystical touches,
in which primordial, “mythic” Man has presence in all earthly humans, as key to
their Return (Poimandres 12–16, 24–6; cf. Holzhausen 1994), with sadness that
the world and “heaven’s image” shown in Egypt is expiring (after “millions of
years”), yet hope in a cosmic restoration (Ascelpius 25–6).
• Zoroastrianism, in which (over twelve successive Ages of equal length, or three
greater cosmic Ages), Good and Evil (or the two great spirits Ahura Mazda and
Angra Mainyu) battle for supremacy over the cosmos, again with a Primal Man
(Gayomard), who has to be sacrificed to make the creation of all humans possible,
these being challenged to choose right over bad. The cosmic process is moving
toward resolution in Good’s favor, to be heralded by the coming of a spiritual
savior (Sayoshant) (esp. [Greater] Bundahishn 1, 3–4, 30, 34 [a late-dated text
usually held to hold archaic materials, Boyce 1989: 285–7]) [See also ch. 23.].
• Jewish speculative and apocalyptic beliefs, with the roles of such key Genesis fig-
ures as Adam, his son Seth (who makes up for Cain’s evil), Enoch (who can visit
different heavens), and Shem (Noah’s blessed son) taken to foreshadow spiritual
election, as all divinely ordered “human generations” pass toward Judgement
(Jubilees 4:20, 24b; 4 Ezra 5:41–2), a time of cosmic crisis needing the ultimate
Redeemer (e.g., Dan 7:13) from “the Lord over all the Ages” and all heaven-
recorded human labor (1 Enoch 9:4; 3 Enoch 45:1–2). In Zoroastrianism and
Judaism climactic rewards to the righteous and punishments to evildoers were
commonly projected, and in these together with Hellenistic philosophy and his-
toriography divine Providence was upheld (Trompf 1979b: 92–111, 116–18,
165–96).
The recognizable classic Gnostic response to temporality is to mythologize it, so

that it falls subservient to “a cosmic framing,” or stands as a mere appendage to
a cosmo-history of emanations, or as the terrestrial setting in which the story of
cosmic power relations is taught (usually by Jesus). If we use the NHCs as indica-
tive, Biblical material is embraced, but the overwhelming concentration is on the
primal family, especially Adam and Eve and their third son Seth, and on the consum-
mating event of Christ’s Coming. Adam and Eve, expectedly, can be contemplated in
their ideal spiritual existence, escaping the contamination befalling the earthly couple
from evil principalities (NHC V.5; cf. Tardieu 1974: 100–22). In between Adam and
Christ, figures of the Flood Noah and Shem get some treatment, with light touches
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of Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses, and Solomon, and barely anything on David and
the prophets, though “at the other end of the story” come varied details of (extra-
canonical) interactions between Jesus and his disciples, most noticeably Peter, Mary
the Mother, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, John, and Judas, and almost always after the
Resurrection (cf. Acts 1:3). It is not as if there is a mixture of mythos and concern for
historical detail, as in the New Testament. (Ponder the high Christology of Paul in Col
1:15–2:23 yet his genuine interest in historical details in Gal 2; 4, or of the Evangelist
John’s Prologue and yet his narratives with geographical accuracy.) It almost always
happens with the Gnostics’ Jesus that he acts as “the climax of a play” or some drama
in which the personae are never convincingly “historistic” (Barrett 1972: 67), and
other Biblical protagonists are uniformly archetypal.
Different explanations are given for these proclivities –that for Gnostics “ordinary
history” was a pseudos, a bearer of falsehood concerned with mutability (e.g., Puech
1951: 76–113); that Gnostics rewrote Bible beginnings and its Christic highpoint
while taking the account of Jewish affairs in between as about a people serving the
evil Demiurge (e.g., Bayme 1997: 122); or that Gnostics concentrated on overcoming
the imagined “continually present predicament” because Biblical eschatological
dreams disappointed and the Parousia (Christ’s Second Coming in glory) did not
transpire (e.g., Faessel 2006: 27). However, since degrees of attention and diverse con-
ceptual approaches to time by classic (mainly Christian) Gnostics make these gener-
alities too simple, alternative factors have to be considered. As insisted earlier, classic
“Gnosticism” is but one Hellenistic grouping of belief and ritual concerned with the
“journey of the soul [back] to heaven” (Bousset 1901; Colpe 1967), and in working
out their positions beside Hermetists, Platonists, astrological magicians, even pos-
sibly Alexandrian theologians, and partly adapting their outlooks to them, Gnostics
chose a Biblical-affected path ostensibly to be recognized by other camps more as
Christians than not (Culianu 1983: 5–15; Tervahauta 2015: 177–99). In my own
long-argued view, Gnostic approaches to history are “unacculturated,” and earthly
events sit squashed as in a retracted telescope between a Primordium (to all intents
and purposes enshrouding everything from “just back around the corner” in time) and
the recent coming of the Redeemer. Outside Jewry, history (as against mythology and
poetry) was not a school subject among Gentile elites, and Hellenistic responses to
the Christian message could not be expected to involve the ready imbibing of “Jewish
historical baggage” –the product of an alien, if still attractively mysterious “tribe.”
Against this difficulty, and in accepting Scriptural continuity from the Old Testament
into the New, from nomad Abram to voyaging “apostle” Paul in Rome, the “norma-
tive Christians” became “the evangelists of history,” beginning a crucial cross-cultural
shift in the collective consciousness of positive human temporality, not only being
evangelizers of Christ’s salvific role (Trompf 1989: 644–8). But it would be hard
to imagine all early Hellenistic Christianities as capable of avoiding the pressure of
mythicizing attitudes, or resisting popular ways of philosophizing that had no use of
detailing or celebrating culturally irrelevant events.
Insofar as Gnosticizing writers faced up to the historical emphasis in the Bible their
manner was very schematic. Biblical characters after Moses are treated as markers.
“The righteous ones and prophets” of “the Hebrew race,” according to The Tripartite
Tractate (TT [by Heracleon?]), avoided the misguided Demiurge’s “Law” and spoke
“each one by the power at work within him,” sometimes “as if” through the Savior
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Himself (NHC I.5.111, 113, cf. 105, 113.5); while Irenaeus informs us that for the
Ophites and/or Sethians specific prophets worked by the power of specified principal-
ities –Moses, Amos and Habakkuk from Ialdabaoth, Samuel and Micah from Iao,
etc. –the contents of their messages being unimportant (Adversus haereses 1.30.11).
Even when Jeremiah, Hosea, Ezekiel, Isaiah, the Psalms, and Paul are quoted in The
Exegesis of the Soul it is more for oracular effect beside Homer’s Odyssey (NHC
III.6) in a text not convincingly Christian anyway. A rarity has a skeleton of Israel’s
history offered (Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, the prophets, with
Moses (misplaced) and John the Baptist) (Second Treatise of the Great Seth [NHC
VII.2.62–64]) but only that. With Sethianism (see ch. 11) some Age-like periodization
appears, for we learn of “three missions” of the divine Barbelo to enlighten Adam,
impart the saving seed to Seth so as to help Noah during the Flood, and then send the
resurrected Christ to explain such significant macrohistorical shifts for a new time
to come (Apocryphon of John [II.1] 20–31). But on further stupendous events (even
“kingdoms”) allusively covered in related texts, such as The Apocalypse of Adam and
The Gospel of the Egyptians, one can never be convinced that they are terrestrial;
their unfolding over “thousands of years” seem more supernal, including the Flood
and Sodomic Conflagration, as if what is worked out among the aeons (in thirteen
heavens) affects happenings on earth (NHC V.5.70–82; III.2.56–65, esp. 56.10–25;
cf. Turner 2001: 93–6; cf. ch. 10).
When we find talk then of the Valentinian “theology of history” (Marrou 1967),
or Sethian “salvation history” (Stroumsa 1984: 81–103), or that TT presents a “gran-
diose concept of world history” (Quispel 1992: 4), this could be misleading if it is
not clarified that in classic Gnostic texts what we are calling cosmo-history, or the
narrative of the mythic Urzeit (very affected by Jewish Genesis traditions) and of the
heavenly Redeemer, simply dominates (reflect on Evans, Webb, and Wiebe 1993).
The Christ, who most often avoids embodiment (e.g., Gilhus 1985), explains why the
world is evil (a concern shared early with Marcionism), how it is affected by “sympa-
thetic forces” (see Knox 1961: 46–54, 61–5), and how the soul can escape the cosmic
predicament.
THE INCIPIENCE AND E M E RG E NCE O F

GNOSTIC MACRO HIS TO RY
Signs of “more rootedness in historical reality,” and also hopes of a future apocalyptic
dénouement on earth, only come through greater seepage from (or accepting of) more
standard, less mythicized human happenings in the “Judeo- Christian” tradition.
Some interesting shifts occur with the Mandaeans. Certainly they teach an elaborate
cosmo-history of emanations (esp. Ginza Rba GY III [Lidzbarski 66–70]), and distin-
guish strongly (as do various NHC texts) between the primal heavenly Adam (Adam
Kasia) and the earthly one (Adam Pagria), the latter being partly put together by the
demiurgic Ptahil. However, they make more of Biblical and wider human affairs, their
“macrohistory” filling out new narrative details –of Shitil (Seth), the first human to
die and go to heaven; Shem bravely holding on outside the floating Ark; Abraham
unfortunately self-circumcising because of leprosy; the Nasoraian Mandaeans
helping and dying for the Pharaoh against Moses at the Red Sea; John the Baptist’s
really broken relations with Jesus; the faithful fleeing Judea at the time of the Jewish
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War; etc. Indeed, the Mandaeans’ intriguing Rivers Scroll (Diwan Nahrawata) offers
a great pictograph of the cosmic Jordan (Yardna) running from the celestial Light-
worlds and then separating out into streams that run to named nations of the earth.
And while some attention is paid to astro-zodiacal influences, greater focus falls on
long drawn-out Ages, punctuated by four great catastrophes of sword, fire, flood, and
(in the future) air, the first coming 216,000 years after Creation, for example, with
100,000 years between fire and deluge (Nasoraia and Trompf 2010–11: 399–423).
If matter is looked on negatively, as in most other early “Gnosticisms,” Living Water
is the saving element in the universe, circulating Life for souls between heaven and
earth through regular baptizing (this still surviving Gnostic tradition extolling John
the Baptist) (see ch. 16). Such inter-connectedness by water persuaded Kurt Rudolph
(1978) that Gnostic systems reflect a cyclic framing akin to our formulation of the
U-curve, for apart from the varying fate of souls down here the whole material order
eventually draws back into the divine.
Such circulation is also suggested in Gnostic systems accepting metempsychosis
(e.g., Epiphanius, Panarion 26.1–10; NHC II.1.26; VIII.1.45–6). Mandaeism, however,
denies reincarnation and also teaches an eschatology, a sliding into corruption and dis-
order akin to Jewish-Christian apocalyptic visions, a 50,000-year earthly reign under
their Gabriel-figure ending with the Dark triumphant and only Nasoreans surviving
(esp. Harran Gawaita [Drower], [pp.] 14–21). As the End was delayed, the long listing
of past kings (especially Persian) was apparently injected (into Ginza Rba XVIII,
reflecting Zoroastrian and Christian apocalyptic sources) to accommodate maturing
historical perspectives and the seventh-century Islamic eruption (cf. Shapira 2010).
By comparison with Mandaeism, the cosmo-and macrohistory of the Manichaeans
was initially more Zoroastrian-influenced, their Endzeit pictures looking to the over-
coming of the “False Mithra,” victory for the Manichaean righteous, the coming of
the “Great King,” and the Last Judgement to separate “the sheep from the goats”
(esp. [Coptic] Homilies [Polotsky] 28; with Widengren 1965: 66–7). The Manichaean
view of cosmic unfolding, admittedly, is enshrouded in the myth of cosmic sacri-
fice, with the Primal Man (the eternal Christ) prepared to bridge the chasm between
Light and Dark, giving Himself to allow for the ascent of souls and holding the uni-
verse from falling into evil until the final resolution (esp. Mani, Psalm 219; Kephalaia
7; Theodore bar Konai, Liber Scholiorum [Scher, pt. 1] [pp.] 235–41). This relates
back to Zurvanist, even Mazdaist ideas of primordial sacrifice before Creation can
occur (Eznik of Kolb, Refutationes 2.1; cf. Bundahishn 4.20) as well as to three
great Moments of separateness, intermingling, and the return of separation between
Light and Darkness, with a final victory for Ahura Mazda in the battle against Angra
Mainyu (e.g., Bundahishn 1.29; Zātspram 34.52). Mani talked of Three Great Days of
“Beginning, Mixture, and End” (apud Augustine, Contra Felicem Manichaeum 1.6),
stressing final victory. The great Satan-figure looming in Manichaean texts mirrors
the dual cosmic conflict in Zoroastrianism, whereas in classic Gnosticism the Devil
(Satan, Samael, etc.) can be muted among other aeons. Yet Manichaeism is more
Jewish/Christian than Zoroastrian for expecting an imminent End, while in standard
Zoroastrianism the cosmic consummation is put afar off (Schweizer 1956: 485–501;
against Cohn 2001: 96–9, 102–4).
Manichaeans definitely paid attention to terrestrial events, as in writing on Mani’s
and his disciples’ missions (Cologne Mani Codex [Koenen and Römer], pp. 107–91]),
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but most famously on a succession of “God’s Apostles” in various lands. Allegedly

incarnating Persia’s Zoroaster, the Buddha in India, and Jesus, Mani then taught self-
professedly as the promised Paraclete (esp. Shabuhragan apud Al-Biruni, Chronologia
8; Keph. 1; cf. Jn. 14:16). This model perhaps derives from Mani’s background among
the Jewish-Christian Elchasites, who had Christ taking human form whenever he
wished (“Hippolytus,” Refutatio omnium haeresium 10.29; cf. pseudo-Clementine
Homilies 3.20). Serious usage of Jewish story materials, though, relates to Genesis,
Mani’s Book of Giants, possibly based on access to 1 Enoch, apparently explaining
the entrance to devils on earth (cf. Gen. 6:4). For Mani Jewish history was that of a
devil-god, and even the prophets are all devils (Hegemonius, Acta Archelai 12; Al-
Nadim, Kitāb al-Fihrist [970s] 9.1). To call all this a “world history,” mind you (Jonas
1963: 226–31), is misleading. If obviously “macro,” the unfolding drama is highly
“mythopoeic” and tied into an idiosyncratically conceived (“esoteric”) cosmologic
process (cf. Luttikhuizen 1997: 96–9), and into the “history of the [collective] living-
soul” (Gardner 2010: 334) through which “the Elect” can be saved, the “Soldiers”
helping the Elect have to reincarnate continually, and “the Sinners” are doomed
to Hell (Mani, Book of Mysteries 2–5 apud Al-Nadim, Fihrist 9.1). If Bardesanes
allegedly influenced the Manichaeans, when he calculated 6,000 years of world his-
tory and planetary movement (Coniunctiones astrorum [Patrologia Syriaca vol. 2,
cols. 611–15], he was more recognizably historicizing than Mani, indeed useful to
orthodox Christians for framing all human affairs within a Great Week, with each
Day a millennium (Trompf 1979b: 207–11; cf. 2 Pet 3:8; with [pseudo-]Barnabas,
Epistolae 15.3–80).
The central difference between these highly distinctive Gnostic forms of
macrohistory and those emergent within settling trajectories of Zoroastrianism,
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is that these latter accepted and defended the definite
goodness of God’s (initial) Creation (Bund. 2–3; Gen 1:31; Jn 1:3–4; Qur’an 32:7–8)
despite earthly vicissitudes and human weakness. Adopting Platonic and Hermetic
conceits in these traditions was admissible because the problems of the material uni-
verse were read as more to do with mutability and irregularity than any intrinsic
evil, and Middle Platonists took the descent of souls in the world very positively
(e.g., Festugière 1949: 125–6; Turner 2001: 454–8). When Origen presented the first
Christian systematic theology (ca. 230), all immortal souls pre-exist the wonder of
Creation, suffer from the Fall, and are offered redemption though the Incarnation, but
can require purging by rebirth into many worlds (not the same one as this) until the
final Restoration and Return into God (De Principiis 1.6.2–5; 2.3.5; 3.1.23–4, 6.1–
9). Under this vision of an “overall progress,” even the Devil can ultimately be saved
(3.6.6), parallel to a Gnostic motif of Sophia or the Mandaean Queen of Darkness,
Rua, being “rehabilitated” (Pistis Sophia 2.74–6; Ginza V–VI). But of course Origen
is renowned for his acceptance of the whole Bible, for accepting the continuity of
the Old and New Testament God in his commentaries, and for learned treatment of
historical issues (e.g., Contra Celsum 1.16–29; Commentarius in Matthaeum 10.7).
History is telescoped out fully, not just wrapped within a mythic envelope. The great
Mosaic legislation is placed long before Plato, with very ancient events recountable
through the help of the Jews Josephus and Philo Alexandrinus (e.g., Vita Mosis).
In the Jewish- Christian-
Islamic trajectory from then on, harboring as it has
developing Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and Theosophic speculation to our own time, the
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“acosmic” Weltanschauungen withered, kept alive mainly in Manichaean quarters (pace

Indic doctrines of the visible world as māyā). When dealing with most post-Antique
Gnostic cosmo-and macro-historical envisionings, significantly, they accept “moments
of descent from above” as necessary materialization, thereby creating the possibility
of a readier ascent back to the Divine rather than cosmic imprisoning. Where we find
U-curve models reminiscent of classic Gnosticism still reappearing they will now be
accompanied by doctrines of Ages and/or a greater sense of time depth, but not entrap-
ment in cosmic cycles (as, e.g., in Plotinus, Ennead 4.9, or Indic karmic processes).
Jewish Kabbalah, which has ancient roots in merkabah speculation about the celes-
tial Adam, is “pro-cosmos.” The Sefer Yezirah introduces famous “paths” of Creation
(Sefiroth, or ten emanatory “Utterances out of Nothing”), and concentrates on Adam
Kadmon (Gen 1:26), the first (and anthropomorphic) emission of the Divine Light
(Ein Sof). He is the “Crown” and “Plan” behind the cosmo-historical Four Worlds
making for Creation and the persisting ideal of human reunification with God (see
chs. 34, 39). Yet if it was disputed whether each heavenly “issuing” (hamshakhah)
involved time, discussion of temporal sequence in the created material order naturally
arose (with Malkhut, “Queen/Mother of Creation” or Shekhinah, a “good-Sophia
equivalent” as lowest in the Sefiroth, mediating between heaven and earth).
At what ever point it had formulation (probably in early medieval times), Kabbalistic
teaching of great Ages (behind Sefer ha-Temunah [ca. 1250]) went way beyond the
idea of a Great Week (as in Rav Catina, [Babylonian Talmud] Sanhedrin 97a) into
7,000-year great cycles (based on the planetary Great Year) that would end after
49,000 years in an eschatological Great Jubilee. Each cycle was under the influence of
a relevant Sefirah, each ended in a return to chaos (before re-creation), each decreased
in length or numerical weight as if the whole process needed final messianic inter-
vention, and in each reincarnations (gilgul) occurred to purify for sin over specified
periods (mostly three generations) (see esp. Scholem 1974: 23–7, 43, 120–2, 343–7,
365–81). The archangel Metatron, originally connected with Enoch’s translation to
heaven (Gen 5: 24), and sometimes seen as a lesser YHWH (3 Enoch [ca. 500 CE] 4;
16; 18), monitors all space and time. Greek-philosophical “eternity of the world” is
denied, but what we call a Gnostic “tendency to near-eternalize time” applies, if always
as a poor inferior to the real Everlasting, by whom “no one is cast off forever” and all
earthly defilement and punishment will finally end (Lam 3:31; 1 Enoch 10:22).
Islam, from its very beginning, reflects signs of residual Gnostic macro-historical
touches. Historical materials in the Qur’an look rather unacculturated, with most
narratives from the first two books of the Bible (Taurat) and the Gospels (Injil). The
model of a list of prophet figures, though more probably inspired by the Samaritan
“chain” (shalshaloth) of holy luminaries from Adam to Aaron’s priestly descendants
Eleazar and Phinehas (Memar Marqah [ca. 370s] 1.9), could also have been affected
by Manichaean ideas of a lineaged “prophetic succession” and of such ancient teachers
of truth as Hermes and Plato (see Ephrem Syriis, Prose Refutations [Mitchell] 2.208–
209, with Reeves 1996: 11–17; cf. ch. 28). This manner of signposting the past had
its highpoint in the studied listing of prophets (25 main, 124,000 possible), heralding
increasing interest in long-term history among Islamic scholars, but it is our pur-
pose here to introduce forms of distinctly Gnostic macrohistory in the Muslim ambi-
ence, and these are found above all in Shi‘a thought, and from its allowances to
Zoroastrian, Hermetic, Platonic, and Illuminist impetuses.
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Henri Corbin (1964: 40– 109) has rightly described Shi’ite concern for the
succession of mystical imams after Muhammad as a “meta-or para-history” of
imaginal hierognosis, considered much truer than ordinary recordings of human
events (see also ch. 29). But this imamological succession also sits within a wider
framework of “prophetic gnoseology,” accepting many standard prophets (nabīs), yet
honoring only six as teaching a new law (sharī’at) (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses,
Jesus, Muhammad), each of whom mark a separate cycle, with all six sealed through
a superior legislative cycle by Muhammad. Yet now the truly universal but esoteric
period of prophecy or sanctity (walāyat) has unrolled: the Imamate (in the dominant
school the Twelve Imams) becomes the plērōma, its universal seal being the Shi‘as’
first Imam ‘Ali (Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law) and its particular Muslim seal
being the last Imam al-Mahdī, through whom the final Imam will come and the end
of the current cycle will be announced, with everything and all (believers’) souls then
returning to their Beginning in Allah (Ya‘qub al Kulayni, Kitāb al-Kāfi [920s], with
Corbin, e.g., 1966: 382–7).
This quest for a theosophy, or divine wisdom (hikmat ilāhīya) and gnosis (‘irfān,
haqīqat) expressed macro-and hiero- historically or as so- called “historiosophy,”
reappears strongly in Batiniyyah “heretical” groups triggered by the unprecedented
‘Shi’ite Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt under al-Hākim (996–1021). In Isma‘ilism (ca.
813–), the modeling is basically oscillatory, great cycles of epiphany (“day”) and
occultation (“night”) negating each other in turn, each with sevenfold divisions
marked by altered planetary configurations over 360,000 years. Every major cycle
starts with “a partial Adam,” and experiences a guiding Imam and associates
(expressing divine individuality on earth and angelic help). Our present cycle, that
of the “historical” Adam, is of “total night” (with corruption, fornication, terrible
ignorance). It faces untold catastrophes and the last revolt of Iblis (the Devil), who,
most like a Zurvanist Ahriman, had disturbed the original cosmogonic flow (ch.
23). The cycle is helped by six prophets: the five standard ones listed above, plus al-
Hākim, with the Imam-to-Come presaging the “total day” of eschatological epiphany.
Muhammad knew this esoteric meaning of the Qur’anic revelation through Salman
the Persian (cf. Qur. 62:2). Souls, necessarily descending (“falling”) into materiality,
need nature and history as mirrors for accessing beauty and moral perfection, in a
cosmic process that is overall a “progress,” overcoming retardations, and reverting at
the last to origins in the Divine (Idris ‘Immādaddīn, Zahr al-Ma’ānī, 4, 7–8, 10–13,
with Corbin 1951: 165–74, 183–221; Abu’l Jorjani [990s], with Corbin and Mo’in
1955: 61–3, 74–83, 87–8, 102–12; cf. ch. 31). In Nizari (and Khoja) Isma‘ilism long
lists of the Imams (the Aga Khans) and their ongoing significances are cherished (e.g.,
Ginans [Dossa] 1, 4–6, 9), the Khojas viewing (from Qur. 2:28) the Aga Khan as the
visible divine “successor” on earth (Trompf 1980: 8–10). Consequently, the End is
left “delayed.”
For the Druze (not strictly Islamic) case (1017–), we also find alternations between
Light and Shadow, septenary stages, and talk of the five Hudūd (divine principles
also appointed as personal guides through the whole system from the beginning of
Creation), with key prophets and their foundations in the last septenary cycle –Adam-
Seth, Noah-Shem, Abraham-Ishmael, Moses-Aaron, Jesus-Simon, Muhammad-
‘Ali –consummated by the Fatimid Imamate and by founder-leader of the Druze
Hamza ibn ‘Ali. The time of al-Hākim was the last station (maqām), in which the
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Gnosis of the Islamic message was realized. Yet the stress is on the huge length of
the macrohistorical system, with seven grand aeonic cycles (adwār), each made up
of 4,900,000 years in a total of 343,000,000 years, prefaced by a cosmic emanatory
process (Divine Intellect, All-inclusive Soul, Word, Precedent, and Follower), issuing
from the utterly indescribable divine One (see ch. 32, with Trompf and Kasamanie
1981: 189–93). In every grand cycle (“globe”), separated by cosmic dissolution, the
first stage is spiritually idyllic and longer, while the last one of crisis is shorter, with
enough time allowed for the soul’s choices through reincarnation. According to the
Druze view, history is the playground of Providence and Fate. There is overall deteri-
oration portending a cataclysmic End (but not a convincingly final one!) (Hamza
ibn-‘Ali, Rasā’il al-Hikma, esp. 12–14 [1017–1020], with De Smet 2007: 60–7). The
Druze notion of al-Qiyāma is a final reintegration of our world into its primordial
pattern. Pythagorean, Platonic, Aristotelian, and Hermetic influences are strong, and
the cyclical trajectory from best to worst and back to best may reflect acquaintance
with the Indic yuga pattern (idyllic Kṛta Yuga to evil Kali Yuga and back, as in the
Mahābhārata 3.312), given Druze epistles to India now being translated.
Other non-standard macrohistorical visions reflect significant propensities. Isma’ili-
affected Persian encyclopedist Abū Hātim ar-Rāzī sought to accommodate Zoroastrian
age theory into his vision of a grand cosmic cycle (dawr’at a’zamān), with descent
by cosmic devolution (including a cosmic Adam) to terrestriality back up through
periodic resurrections in angelic orders in seven stages (Kitāb A’lam al-Nubuwwa [Al-
Sawī and A’vānī], 1.3–6). Martyred Persian Sufi and founder-IIluminist Suhrawardī
was bent on demonstrating that eternal truth always existed among followers of
all revealed religions, radiated through angels like stars in the night sky, and was
known deeply among ḥakīms (Masters of Gnosis). For him access to Divine Wisdom
(al-ḥikmat al-laduniyyah) was first disclosed through Enoch/Idris (Gen 5: 24; Qur.
19: 56–7), identified with Hermes, and kept in two lines of transmission, one Greco-
Egyptian, stronger in alchemy, the other Persian (involving Zoroaster), stronger astro-
logically and revived by Suhrawardī’s Ishrāqī teaching (Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq [1153]; cf.
also Anon., Chrysia epē; Ibn al-Sīd, Kitab al-Ḥadā’iq; Ibn Sinā, Danishnama-i ‘ala’i 1;
Ibn al-‘Arabī, Fusūs al Ḥikām). As a means of rooting this mysticism in Islam, there
was a common Sufi acknowledgement that Muhammad, as the Ideal Man (Al-insan
al-kamil), came at the worst time in history, to the most ignorant and wicked people,
the Arabs, bringing through them the “Heavenly Light” to engender “the most God-
fearing divine lovers the world has ever seen” (Sufi Raushan Ali 1925: 136–7).
More eclectically, in Kurdish Yezidism (and related minorities) we find the pattern
of paradoxical care for the Fallen Angel (the Yezidi Peacock Angel or Malak Tawus).
Though looking homologous with Satan and the Zoroastrian Ahriman, when falling
with Adam and Eve out of heavenly Paradise for not obeying the divine request to
worship Adam (cf. as background, Vita Adae et Evae 12–17; NHC IX.1; Qur. 7; 11–
14), Malak Tawus actually showed pure monotheism for his refusal and was reinstated
as head of his angelic heptad (Açikyildiz 2014: 15). Claiming to worship one God, the
Yezidis take the Peacock Angel to make re-unity with the Divine possible and reincar-
nation avoidable. His original descent marks a golden age, with our cosmos forming
when Malak Tawas sent divine emissaries upwards to create the sun and moon, etc.
He ordained 7,000-year-long “vessels” (one involving a prior Flood), and in this our
present, fifth Age, the worst one, minor deities/angels/kings established seven millennia
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(the last with his chosen people, the Kurds, being given their language before Malak
Tawas returns, openly reinstated by God as victor after millennia of Hell’s threats)
(Mishaf i Resh; with ch. 33). The Yezidis believe they originate from Adam (not Eve!),
through Enoch and Noah, while other Middle Eastern ethno-religious minorities have
their own unusual lineages: the Shabak and Ahl-e Haqq both honoring ‘Ali for earlier
incarnating as Adam, Jesus, and Muhammad, and further on, Babists (precursory to
Bahaism) holding the cycles of time to close off the “Islamic dispensation” for a totally
new Endzeit (‘Ali Muhammad Shirazi, Bayán [1847]).
MODERN DEVE L O P M E NTS

If in the Islamic and Byzantine worlds reflection on such interesting frameworks
still remains alive in gnoseology or soph[i]ology (chs. 37, 38), it becoming a gnōsis
in Orthodoxy (via Maximus the Confessor) that all human history incarnates the
Logos, we can barely talk of an attested “Gnostic macrohistory” in the West until the
Theosophical Society (TS). Relevant components were admittedly present. We find the
descent and ascent of souls, the principle of divine procession (exitus), creation (as
natura), and return of all to God (reditus), especially in Hermetic and Platonic lines of
thought, but usually the envisioning is of the broadest cosmo-history (not terrestrial
event-patterns), or else (as with Bogomilism) of great events transpiring in heaven (ch.
35). Early moderns posited lineages of shared universal wisdom (of prisca theologia
or philosophia perennis), from ancient sources like antediluvian Enoch and Egypt, or
Noah. Note also Trinitarian or three-staged visions of cosmic unfolding affected by
Kabbalah followed by three-staged human history à la medieval Cistercian Gioacchino
di Fiore, as in Jacob Boehme’s Sechs mystische Puncte (1620); and we see various other
theories of great Ages. Yet since, even if ideas of Gnosis or deep Wisdom occur, Western
expositors deploying these motifs typically dissociate themselves from (“heretical”)
Gnostic thought, it is better to refer to them as esoteric or (lower-case theosophic)
macrohistories, certainly within Occidental Christian thought-modes, even including
Christian Kabbalism (see Trompf 2005: 707–13, with ch. 39). Exceptions aside (e.g.,
Lurianic-Kabbalist impacts in the West [chs. 34, 39] or such Masons as De Pasqually
[ch. 40]), the turning point comes with the modern (upper-case) Theosophy, after
which some of those who kept sustaining earlier esoteric frames of synoptic history
(Rosicrucians, Martinists, etc.) could re-read them inter alia as “Gnostic.”
We owe to Ukraino-Russian Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the TS (1875–), the
fundamental texts of modern Gnostic macrohistory: Isis Unveiled (1877) and The
Secret Doctrine (1888). While conceding secret societies had plotted lines of transmitted
wisdom (e.g., Freemasonry on the Buddha as first known “Masonic legislator” and on
successive groups of Initiates into the Mysteries [Pike 1871: 277, 379–90]), Blavatsky
arrestingly detailed a lineage of confraternities that kept multi-millennia-old Gnostic
truths alive, from India’s ancient rishis through Hermetists, Zoroastrians, Orphics, to
Essenes, Gnostics, the (Mandaean) “Nazarenes,” Origen, Plotinus, Kabbalists, Sufis,
the Druze, on to Boehme, Giordano Bruno, even Emanuel Swedenborg (see previous
ch. 2). She also left one the grandest European visions of “the spiritual evolution of
the world proceeding in cycles, like the physical one.” There was “a regular alterna-
tion of ebb and flow” over huge aeons in the overall length of 4,320 million years
(Isis, vol. 1, pp. 30–5), surpassing figures of the Druze –with whom she outrageously
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claimed membership (Letter 110 [Algeo]). The general framework seemed confirmed
by myths about great time-passages taught around the globe, in the Golden-to-Iron
Ages of Greece (taken seriously), the Egyptian nero, and also prior worlds told of in
Popul Vuh, a by-then better understood Mayan text. Blavatsky’s extravagantly high
numbers, however, clearly derived from new researches into the Indian kalpas (aeons),
and, joining the current “Indo-mania,” she sought to “trace” virtually “every ancient
religion to India” (Letter 71) and detect vestiges of very ancient civilizations so far
back in time as to embarrass the newly popular Darwinists (Trompf 1998: 270–6).
Blavatsky hated modern materialistic evolutionists for causing a massive spiritual
crisis in her time, and it was a claim of The Secret Doctrine that she could confute
their myopia through a long-lost “akashic” text. The alternative vision in this second
master-work, diverging from Isis, answers pressures to systematize the TS cosmo-
logical position by competitor Alfred Sinnett in The Mahatma Letters (1880–1884),
where he expounded the idea of huge Buddhist-looking and seemingly endless undu-
lating cycles (though still giving them such Hindu names as manvantaras and yugas).
The essence of Blavatsky’s finally disclosed “Gnosis” was that, while material life very
slowly progressed, from stones to higher organisms, humanity devolved from the
highest ethereal planes, inhabiting increasingly solid bodies toward necessary materi-
alization, before the meeting of higher and lower- natural evolutionary processes
produced the bodily outcome seen thriving in us today. In the “globe” pertaining
to our world (a Druze feature), the cosmic Descent involved a vastly long proto-
history of higher (although increasingly more problematic) civilizations –of “great
pitris,” Hyperboreans, Lemurians, and Atlanteans, and their “Root Races” –to our
current state, which is preliminary to a returning Ascent. That the TS had access to
a true spiritual science was legitimated by the newly accessible translation of the
Ethiopic Enoch, accepted as indicative of antediluvian truth and foresight (e.g., [1]‌
Enoch [Laurence 1883] 3–6). Within the whole cosmic process souls were tested by
reincarnations, Spirit “Masters” moving through the course of things as guides (a
Druze motif) to facilitate nirvanic escapes from the rounds and re-absorption into the
“Over-Soul.” In our time the Fifth Root Race prevails, remnants of the Fourth survive
(as “primitives”), with signs of a more highly spiritual Sixth emerging (marked by the
Aryan superiority, and the prospect of a “messianic” Maitreya-figure, identified as
young Krishnamurti after Blavatsky’s death). The cycling always winds back, as in a
U-curve, to the Absolute, but like Vishnu’s mighty ex-and inhaling apparently goes
on forever (Trompf 2013: 383–90; French 2000: 192–235; with ch. 44).
Apart from shifts of relevant viewpoints in the long-term history of the TS itself,
macrohistories in breakaway movements and thinkers require recognition. Most
famously, Austrian Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy (1923–), accepted the
basic “Akashic” macrohistory, but reacted against the favoring of Buddhism (in its
TS version) and the marginalizing of Christ. Over and above expositions of the lost
civilizations (Aus der Akasha-Chronik 1904) and repeated karmically-appropriate
reincarnations (Theosophie 1922), Steiner paid much more attention to the succession
of civilizations in “our historical order” –the Indo-Vedic, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean,
and Greco-Roman-Christian epochs –with Christ becoming the consummating point
(McDermott 1984: 172–3).
Greco-Armenian Georges Gurdjieff, Christian-esoteric founder of “The Work”
(1921–), radically modified Theosophical cosmology by reviving ancient Middle-Asian
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teaching about the Ray of Creation, through which divine Light and Tonality become
increasingly less rarified in a “totally material universe.” Members of early and lost
civilizations, including the pyramid-builders, possessed a superior consciousness to
ours that can be re-attained, while the maintenance and recovery of higher-being
states is the purpose of subtle cosmic cycles (Pecotic 2004). French Traditionalist
René Guénon, paradoxically, while renouncing Theosophy as a “pseudo-religion,”
honored Blavatsky’s frameworks of yugas and lost civilizations for understanding how
processes brought about increased materialization, or the Crise du monde moderne
(1927) and the West’s Reign of Quantity (1945). For solutions the best remnants of
primordial wisdom were northern (Hyperborean), fragmentarily available in Celtic
Druidism, a residual Arctic “Boreal” culture being also celebrated by Giulio Evola
of Italy’s occult Ur-group (1927–) as the primal basis for a Rivolta contro il mondo
moderno) (1934) and the restoration a new Mithraism to preserve lost Gnosis. For
Evola the Greek Golden Age (the Indic Kṛta Yuga) was that of the gods, who made
possible all the mysterious monuments –pyramids, megalithic henges, Easter Island
statues –as an “eternal race that lives in eternal cycles, … travelling in flying saucers
from distant galaxies,” with the Fall happening, and consequent “cycles of decadence”
and imperial succession, after gods mated with humans (Gen 6:2) (Godwin 2011: 88–
171; Trompf 1998: 292–5). Germanic “Ariosophical” lines of thought stressed pure
Aryan descent and access to Wisdom from “Hyperboraea” (Arktogaa/Arktos, and its
capital Thule) where Atlanteans survived (cf. ch. 45).
These better- known modern Gnostic overviews will recall many and varied
threads in the complex array of related macroscopic outlooks. In psychoanalysis,
for example, aside from Sigmund Freud’s possible Kabbalizing, depth psychology
with Carl Jung implies an apparent inversion of the Gnostic U-curve by positing
humanity’s very slow ascent from the depths of the unconscious, into a problem-
atic situation of “exteriorized” over-done conscious life that needs to probe and
recover contact with the inner, unconscious Deep through dreams and symbols (Jung
1951). Though ancient Gnostics were not averse to referring to the ultimate “Root”
(e.g., NHC II.7.94.15), the Jungian implication is explored macrohistorically in Ken
Wilber’s 1983 title “Up from Eden.”
Symbolist Harold Bayley (1912: 7– 9) taught that Freemasonry inherited the
secret signs of “Gnosis or secret Wisdom of the Ancients,” of truths needing “no
connection with historic fact,” from Rosicrucians, Provençal Cathar paper-makers,
and the Templars. Traditionalists and Perennialists so- called (chs. 48, 49) have
stressed continuity of the same deep wisdom in all the great religious traditions. The
Anthroposophically inspired Christengemeinschaft (1922–) is proclaimed by founder
Friedrich Rittelmeyer to further spiritual evolution in the whole cosmic process
divinely guided by “Christ-Helios” (Christus, 1936). In Sri Aurobindo’s alternative
Gnostic strand (see ch. 56), Culture, “based on the truths of life,” is always superior
to Civilization, and the meeting of cultures, as in the impact of the (Veda-based) East
on a declining West, illustrates the grand spiral of humanity’s advance through ser-
ious crises toward the supramental state of “Gnostic Being” (Varma 1976: 134–65).
Deep wisdom passed on through adepts and Masters is of course a characteristic
of new-esoteric and New Age thought (e.g., Atkinson [?]‌[1908] 2003: 3 [for neo-
Rosicrucians]; Johnson [1939] 1980: 175 [Shabdists]), and features in various New
Religious Movements (NRMs). Contemporary Latter-day Saints, for example, see
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56
themselves heirs to a holy Remnant passed on in the supplementary Biblical stories in

The Book of Mormon about Israelite tribes reaching America, while also teaching that
the Divine Couple propagating humans for our world from a minor planet called Kolob
is far inferior to the hidden Lord of the universe (Bracht 1990: 97–133). Followers of
Indo-Persian Meher Baba hold him to be the God-Man for our time, but also as avatar
on earth in prior prophets (Trompf 2012: 76). For Scientologists, the esoteric gnosis
is that our world has been infiltrated by dangerous entities called Thetans trapped
on earth from very long-passed galactic tensions and Ron Hubbard has revealed the
way to “clear” ourselves of the threat (Rothstein 2009: 379–83, and ch. 59). For the
Nation of Islam, “the white devils” (not the hellish “black devils” of old Gnosticizers
[e.g., Acta Thomae 55]) resulted from evil Frankenstein-like engineering in Arabia
6,800 years ago. In a cosmology warping Isma‘ili/Druze cyclical paradigms, the time
of black redemption is at hand (Walker 1990: 344–6; ch. 51). These are all alterna-
tive macrohistories of new religions with strong Gnostic features. Some Indian NRMs
modify the yuga system to allow in the Theosophical framework, so that the present
Kali Yuga is followed by the intermediate Satya Yuga (not the Golden Age), allowing
“the Knowledge of Reality” that was conveyed by the (divine) Serpent in Eden and
recently fully expounded by Sri Mataji Nirmala Devi, as Mother, true Eve and fem-
inine Holy Spirit, to prepare for extraordinary times ahead (Trompf 2012: 69).
The typical salvific purport of these newer macrohistories is that a blessed spir-
itual elite or long-deserving oppressed group are now “truly-in-the-know” about the
nature of things. But that is quite generally true of all Gnostic macrohistories: “the
last shall be first,” as in the special realized eschatology of Pistis Sophia (2.87), because
“insider-listeners” of the myth- history, from the persuasive “Spinners of Time,”
benefit “right now” at the end of its story (yet cf. Matt. 20:16). The revelations about
unfoldings and great processes only serve to confirm the currently offered gnosis (the
special details of the constructed past often being too hard to remember anyway,
and left to leaders). For us to scrutinize these constructions for their own interest
and as a clustering, however, provides a crucial window into “the Gnostic World”
in broad compass, especially the grand cosmic visioning of descent from on high,
to the entanglements and predicaments of the material world, on to return as in
a U-curve. Obviously variables come into the visioning, whether reincarnation, for
instance, expresses futility, or a possibility to progress, or is just denied (by Guénon,
interestingly, and other Traditionalists, at least as a literal truth). Differences over
origin-points, emanations, and teloi can apply, and over values placed on human
affairs –“ordinary history” usually taken as of little interest compared to successions
of masters, prophets, avatars, etc. bespeaking how Divinity “descends on earth”
(Kant 1990). But we have discerned a major pattern and a family of characteristic
features, hopefully useful to guide those wanting to negotiate complex terrain in the
chapters ahead.
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ANCIENT
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CHAPTER FOUR
ANCIENT PRE-C HRISTIAN

“GNOSTICISMS”: THE STATE
OF THE QUESTIONS
Carl B. Smith II
I N TRODUCTION: THE STATE O F THE QU E S TIO NS

Providing an analysis of and possible answers for the question of the existence of
a pre-Christian “Gnosticism” in the ancient world is fraught with difficulties from
the outset. First and foremost is the problem of the definition of terms, both of
“Gnosticism” and of pre-Christian, neither of which is settled in contemporary schol-
arship. Further, there are two major challenges that loom large in the academy. The
first is the challenge of methodology, particularly what evidence one considers essen-
tial and how critically and/or skeptically one approaches the extant materials and
posits theories or hypotheses as history. The second is the challenge of motivation
that often predetermines the questions one asks, the materials one considers, and
the conclusions one reaches. In this article, each of these areas of scholarly dispute is
examined and a review of some promising developments and directions in Gnostic
studies is provided.
TH E PRO BLEM OF THE DEF IN ITIO N O F “ G NO S TICIS M ”

Anyone even remotely attuned to this field of scholarly endeavor knows there has been
a major upheaval in Gnostic studies, which was initiated in 1996 with the publication
of Michael Williams’s Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling of a
Dubious Category. Due largely to the modern derivation of the term “Gnosticism”
(Layton 1995: 334–50), the widely diverse teachings and literature that have been
categorized under the heading, and the broad stereotypes that have been developed to
describe the phenomenon in modern scholarship (e.g., anti-cosmic dualism, parasitic
and extreme ethics, whether libertine or ascetic), Williams called for the abandon-
ment of the term entirely, at least for the present. The category had lost its meaning
and utility in scholarly discourse, and he advocated substituting in its place the ana-
lysis of specific phenomena, with “Biblical demiurgical” offered as a modest introduc-
tory proposal (1996: 51–3).
In July 1999, several leading scholars in the field of Gnostic studies presented
papers responding to Williams’s proposal at the International Society on Biblical
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— Carl B. Smith II —
Literature Meeting in Lahti, Finland. Antti Marjanen’s edited volume, Was There
a Gnostic Religion? (2005), provides access to these papers, which indicate that
Williams’s proposal, while highly influential, was not embraced by all. Birger Pearson,
using a typological model for defining “Gnosticism,” remains one of the strongest
advocates for the presence of a Gnostic religion in the ancient world, and he con-
tinues to posit “Gnosticism” as an independent religion deriving from a pre-Christian
environment among Jewish inhabitants of Egypt in the first century BCE (2005: 81–
101; 1990: 7–9; 2007). Similarly, Gerd Lüdemann, following Rudolf Bultmann and
his student Walter Schmithals, sees Paul contending with a Gnostic competitor in his
Corinthian correspondence (2005: 121–32). Highlighting the fact that Jesus hid his
identity in order to overthrow the hostile powers of this world (1 Cor 2:6–8), the
blinding activity of the “god of this world” (2 Cor 4:4–6), the cursing of Jesus (1 Cor
12:1–3; a possible reference to Docetism), and a denial of Jesus’s bodily resurrection
(1 Cor 15:12), Lüdemann contends that the issue of a pre-Christian “Gnosticism”
should not be dismissed with so much evidence within the New Testament itself (cf.
MacRae 1978a: 144–57; Pétrement 1990; Perkins 1993). Williams, in his own con-
tribution to this conference and volume, proposed a second heuristic category of
study beyond “Biblical demiurgical,” what he termed “preincarnational” traditions
(2005: 78 n. 63). This category encompasses those notions of the human spirit or soul
which define a pre-existence prior to physical birth, an origination of that spirit or
soul from the transcendent realm, and its potential return there after life in this world.
In 2001, Christoph Markschies published a careful study of the concept of
“gnosis” and sought to provide a typological definition for this interpretive category.
Working from Williams’s concepts of “Biblical demiurgical” and “preincarnational,”
Markschies created a typology of eight categories that were either implications or
corollaries of Williams’s proposed agenda (2003; cf. Jonker 2014: 301–20). Then
in 2003, Karen King published What Is Gnosticism?, a second bomb blast within
the discipline, which provided a further challenge to scholars who utilize the cat-
egory “Gnosticism.” King chastened scholars for employing the term in a process
of identity formation through the creation of an “other” against whom to define
what they consider normative. The development of this term was, in effect, taking a
modern rhetorical category and giving it historical reality, which in essence was the
ancient equivalent of “heresy” (King 2003: 1; cf. Ramelli 2014: vol. 2, 140). While
King does not propose the abandonment of the terms Gnostic and “Gnosticism,” she
does advocate that their usage should be attended with the critical awareness of the
terms’ modern derivation and our proclivity to assume our own positions as norma-
tive in our research. King encourages scholars to step back from the task of making
categories to examine why and how we make them and to recognize they are always
“provisional and positional” (2005: 113). These analyses have had a major impact
upon contemporary scholarship.
Since the publication of these works, scholars in the field have used the terms
Gnostic and Gnosticism rather tenuously. Authors typically place quotation marks
around the latter term to indicate their awareness of its development as a construct of
modern scholarship and, perhaps at the same time, their inability to provide adequate
terminological alternatives to represent important ideological developments in the
ancient world. Hence, their use of the terms Gnostic and Gnosticism endures to the
present, but with qualification.
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— Ancient pre-Christian “Gnosticisms” —
In 2008, Antti Marjanen lamented, “in the current scholarly discussion no con-
sensus prevails as to how the religious category or phenomenon ‘Gnosticism’ is to be
conceived or even employed” (2008: 205). Marjanen proposed the preservation of the
term “Gnosticism” with very limited typological characteristics. Being careful to pre-
serve the heuristic nature of the category and to warn against defining this as a distinct
religion with a specific social group, he offered two features, following the suggestions
of Williams: (1) Biblical demiurgical –the belief in higher and lower gods, with the
lower god(s) responsible for creation and typically portrayed as evil and ignorant; and
(2) the origination of the human spirit from the being of the transcendent God him-
self, otherwise identified as “the consubstantiality of the self and God.” This feature
of human origin and identity includes an eschatological element –that is, the eventual
return of the human spirit to God following the realization (“gnosis”) of this identity
and potential (Marjanen 2008: 211; cf. Williams 2005: 79; Burns 2016: 76–7).
David Brakke has taken another direction with the language, following the nom-
inalist approach of his mentor, Bentley Layton (2010; cf. Layton 1987; 1995: 340–1).
While questioning the validity of the representative terms “Gnosticism” and “proto-
orthodoxy” in the ancient world, Brakke has also rejected the conclusion that the
scholarly task is reduced to “microstudies” (2010: 14). Instead, Brakke has isolated a
tradition and a group of texts, which have a common cosmogonical myth and which
Irenaeus (Adversus haereses 1.11.1; 29–31; Layton 1987: 13–18) and Porphyry (Vita
Plotini 16; Layton 1987: 121–41) identified as deriving from a group which likely
called themselves “gnostikoi” or “Gnostics.” If indeed these individuals self-identified
by the term gnostikoi and developed a shared religio-philosophical tradition and
related texts, Brakke contends that scholars are justified in applying the term “the
Gnostics” or “the Gnostic school of thought” to this group and, he would add, this
group alone (2010: 50–1).
Dylan Burns has recently presented a defense of the right of scholars to create
“second-order” terms to describe phenomena which they find unique. Further, he
contends that scholarship might find it profitable, following this recent period of
critical reflection on terminology, to “rehabilitate ‘Gnosticism’ fruitfully” to depict
what he has isolated as a unique approach in related literature to divine providence,
that is, the divine care of humans and the cosmos (2016: 76–7). Burns also notes that
resistance to the usage of Gnostic and “Gnosticism” has been stronger among North
American scholars than their European counter-parts, who prefer to retain “gnosis”
as a meaningful category.
What these details evidence is that “Gnostic” (as adjective and noun) has been
retained as a meaningful though chastened category, and the term “Gnosticism” has
generally, but not entirely, fallen out of favor. There was a Gnostic school of thought
or religio-philosophical viewpoint in the ancient world, which was distinct from
Jewish, Hellenistic, and other Christian perspectives. A minimalist definition of what
it means to be Gnostic, whether defining people, ideas, or texts, includes, (1) a dis-
tinction between higher transcendent being and lower gods responsible for creation,
often considered ignorant and/or evil, and (2) the origin of the human spirit from the
essence of the highest divinity. These two features seem consistent, though there is a
great deal of debate regarding additional elements, as well as the implications these
two features hold for other religious, philosophical, and social developments observ-
able in Antiquity.
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6
THE PROB LEM OF THE D E F INITIO N O F

“PRE-C HRIS TIAN”
The term “pre-Christian” also requires definition because the modifier can be taken
in at least two ways: one in historical chronology and the other in ideological pre-
cedence (Yamauchi 1979; 1983; 1997; cf. Lüdemann 2003). For the former, the
question is: was there a Gnostic religion, movement, or school of thought that
preceded the time of Jesus Christ and the Christian movement that revered him? In
the latter case, the question is: did a Gnostic religion or Gnostic school of thought
develop independent of the Christian movement during the earliest centuries of the
Common Era, and only secondarily appropriate into its myths Christian concepts,
terms, or even Christ himself as a revealer figure? With each of these questions, a
non-Christian “Gnosticism” is in view, whether deriving from a Jewish, Hellenistic,
Eastern Oriental, or some other source or environment. Yet, this statement raises a
further definitional difficulty, in that what constitutes a document as non-Christian is
not entirely clear. For instance, would a work written by a second-century Christian,
which described the creation of the world and the experiences of the first humans, be
recognized by modern scholars as “Christian” if the work lacked signature elements,
such as verbiage and concepts which were exclusively or predominantly “Christian”
(whatever those terms might be)?
First, we will discuss the issue of historical chronology (see Smith 2004). This issue
is complex for those who seek to identify a Gnostic viewpoint which is chronologic-
ally prior to the Christian movement, though this has certainly not hindered attempts.
The first problem lies in the dating of materials which are clearly Gnostic in orien-
tation. It is a point of fact that there is no clear evidence that the literature which
has been identified as Gnostic, whether from Nag Hammadi or any other source
of documents, is datable with certainty to the first century CE or earlier; rather, the
earliest documents classified as Gnostic or related to so-called “Gnosticism” appear in
the second century CE or later (Pagels 2011: 143; Ehrman 2004: 102).
A second concern is that several of the sources that have been proposed as evidence
of pre-Christian Gnosticism have not borne out through historical scrutiny, especially
Iranian and Mandaean sources which have been demonstrated to date to a post-
Christian timeframe. This includes the dating of the Gnostic redeemer myth proposed
by Bultmann (1925: 100–45; cf. Colpe 1961; Yamauchi 1988: 308–9; Robinson
1988: 15– 23; Koester 2007: 105– 21), Mithraic rock monuments (Apocalypse
of Adam 80.22–26; Yamauchi 1978: 537–63), and teachings and practices of the
Mandaeans (Yamauchi 1970; 1979: 133; Lupieri 2002: 161–5; Buckley 2006: 315–
41) and Elchasaites (Yamauchi 2005: 49– 60), and Manichaeism (Cameron and
Dewey 1979; Yamauchi 2005: 49–60).
The problématique is exacerbated for those who, using source critical studies,
would identify for an author, community, or context the composition of earlier editions
or document fragments. Popular speculations regarding a pre-Christian origination
of Gnostic concepts and myths range from Hellenism (Einar Thomassen), to Jewish
baptismal groups (George MacRae, Jean-Marie Sevrin, Pheme Perkins, John Turner),
to Jewish intellectuals adopting Platonic ideas (Martin Hengel/Volker Drecoll, Stevan
Davies) and, perhaps, experiencing crises of faith (Birger Pearson), to disaffected
Jewish priests who sought a heavenly temple (Turner), to Hermetic lodges in Egypt
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where Jewish and later Christian intellectuals assembled (April DeConick), about
which we know very little (for these views using interviews, see Conner 2011: esp. 12,
72–3, 86–96, 107, 207). These speculations appear to be based upon the assumption
of a long historical and literary process for the development of Gnostic ideas and the
need to posit a possible context in the past where they might have developed versus
what Drecoll identifies as “quick shift theory” (2013: 139–65). The ability of scholars
to move beyond imaginative speculation to convincing argument is limited by a pau-
city of literary and material evidence, which raises critical problems for producing a
convincing historical reconstruction solidly based on extant documentary evidence.
There are several primary Gnostic documents which are alleged to be pre-Christian,
whether chronologically or conceptually. For instance, as a conclusion of his analysis
of 1 Cor 2:6–8, Lüdemann contends, “Given the logic behind Paul’s Christological
statement, one has to conclude that he is using a tradition which was widely used in
Gnosticism and which can now be amply documented in the Nag Hammadi Library”
(2005: 126). He goes on to cite passages from the two Nag Hammadi tractates which
are most frequently identified as non-Christian Gnostic texts: The Paraphrase of Shem
(Nag Hammadi Codices [hereafter NHC] VII.1) and The Apocalypse of Adam (NHC
V.5). Each of these documents have been alleged to be pre-Christian and/or non-
Christian and deserves close examination.
PARAPHRASE OF SH E M (NHC VII. 1 )

Michel Roberge wrote the introduction to Paraphrase of Shem in both the third edition
of The Nag Hammadi Library in English (1988: 339–41 [hereafter NHL]) and The
Nag Hammadi Scriptures (2007: 437–71 [hereafter NHScr]), and his comments dem-
onstrate the status of the document in contemporary scholarship over two decades of
research. In 1988, he noted that there was some speculation regarding the possibility
that Paraph. Shem provided evidence for a pre-Christian gnosis when compared with
the Paraphrase of Seth quoted in the Refutation of All Heresies (5.19–22) attributed
to Hippolytus of Rome. “More recent research tends not to regard The Paraphrase of
Seth as a Christianized version of The Paraph. Shem,” Roberge concluded (1988: 341),
“which in that case could have been a witness to a pre-Christian Gnosticism.” This
position was taken in contrast to the volume’s editor, James Robinson (1977: 308),
and the text’s translator, Frederik Wisse (1970: 137), both of whom saw NHC VII.1
as non-Christian and possible evidence for a pre-Christian redeemer figure.
Wisse (2000: 20–2) revised this earlier position with an introduction to Paraph.
Shem that minimized any connection between it and The Paraphrase of Seth, raising
the slight possibility of Christian allusions, proposing conceptual parallels with
Manichaeism, and hazarding a late-second/early third-century date for the docu-
ment. In 2007, Roberge strengthened his assessment stating, “we cannot regard the
Paraphrase of Seth as a Christianized version of the Paraphrase of Shem,” due largely
to the latter’s knowledge of the gospel tradition regarding the Savior’s baptism, the
Johannine phraseology of “lifting up” of the Savior (through crucifixion), its anti-
baptismal polemic against the great church, and its dependence upon Valentinianism.
He concludes, “It could have been written at a time when the main Gnostic systems
were already constituted and the polemic against the great church was at its peak,
perhaps in the first half of the third century” (2007: 446–7). Its connections with
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either Valentinianism or Manichaeism preclude a pre-Christian origination and a

non-Christian orientation. Burns strengthens this analysis as the frequent appeals
to divine providence in Paraph. Shem (e.g., “by the will of the Majesty,” NHC VII.1.
2.29; 4.15; 6:30–31, etc.) fit best with the latter stages of his analysis, that is, no
earlier than the late second century (2016: 73, 76).
R EV EL AT I ON (O R APO CALYPSE ) OF ADAM (NHC V. 5 )

The case for the pre- Christian and/ or non- Christian orientation of Apoc. Adam
follows a similar line of debate. MacRae, in the first edition of the NHL, resonated
with the classification of Apoc. Adam as a “witness to a non-Christian Gnosticism”
with a “well developed redeemer myth,” potentially connected to an early Jewish
apocalyptical tradition and/or Jewish baptismal circle, and datable to the first or
second century CE (1978b; 1988: 277–8). In the third edition of NHL, Douglas Parrott
considered the details that persuaded some scholars to favor any reference to Christ
as too vague. The text’s “description is that of a charismatic figure who ran afoul of
the authorities and was punished. It is difficult to see any compelling reason to iden-
tify this figure with Christ” (1988: 278). Many scholars who argue for a pre-Christian
and/or non-Christian origin of Apoc. Adam date the major portions of the apocalypse
to the late first, early second century; and they also identify later “Christianizing”
redactions to the text, particularly in sections on the origin of the Illuminator (Hedrick
1980: 130–54; MacRae 1988; Parrott 1988; Scopello 2007: 343–5).
Contrary to these opinions, Françoise Morard argues for the unity of the text
(1985: esp. 100–2), and in uncharacteristic sharpness, Yamauchi (1979: 132) offers
a plain rebuttal:
Indeed, unless one has strong reasons for believing in an independent redeemer
myth, these traits of the Illuminator would seem to point inescapably to Christ: 1)
the working of signs and marvels, 2) the opposition of powers who will not see
the Illuminator, 3) the punishment of the flesh of the Illuminator, and 4) the des-
cent of the Holy Spirit upon the Illuminator.
He further contends for a second century date for Apoc. Adam based upon inscrip-
tional evidence of Mithras born out of a rock, which the apocalypse seems to assume
(1978: 4:537–63). Brakke, recently arguing from the explicit references to Jesus as the
“embodied incarnation of the savior” in Three Forms of First Thought (Trimorphic
Protennoia; NHC XIII 1 50.12–15) and Gospel of the Egyptians (NHC III 2 and IV 2
75.15–24), suggests that “The Human Being” of Apoc. Adam is also Jesus (2010: 68–
9). For Brakke, Apoc. Adam reflects the myth that is common to his Gnostic school
of thought, which developed in the early-to mid-second century CE.
S EC R ET BOO K (OR APO CRYP H ON ) OF JOH N (NHC II. 1 ,

I I I .1 , IV.1 , B G.2, IRENAE U S , H AE R. 1 . 2 9 –3 1 )
Several other documents are alleged to pre-date Christianity or to come from at least
the first century CE in their earliest stages of composition. Most prominent among
these is the Apocryphon of John (also known as the Secret Book or Secret Revelation
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of John). Apoc. John is extant in four editions, with an abbreviated version included
in Irenaeus’s Haer. (1.29–31). Several scholars take this apocryphon as representa-
tive of Sethian or classic “Gnosticism” (Schenke 1981: 588–616; cf. Rasimus 2009),
and, as an early manifestation of Gnostic teachings, its significance in Gnostic studies
cannot be overstated. Views regarding its background and compositional history are
illustrative of the complexity and speculative nature of the scholarship in the field.
Hans-Martin Schenke, the original formulator of “Sethian Gnosticism,” saw the
roots of this movement in a pre-Christian baptismal sect that practiced baptism,
contemplated heavenly ascent, and considered themselves the virtuous offspring of
Seth (1981). Sevrin later traced the magical components of the Sethian tradition
to a heterodox Jewish baptismal sect interested in both magic and angelic powers
for protecting their baptism (1986; cf. Rasimus 2009: 277). Turner has pursued an
extensive, five/six-stage redaction history of Apoc. John that begins with two inde-
pendent pre-Christian movements, one led by disenfranchised temple priests in the
first century BCE (Barbeloites) and the other focused upon revisionary exegesis of
Genesis (Sethites). These movements migrated into Christian and later into Platonic
circles in the first and early second century CE. A redactor, in the mid-second century
CE, wove together their traditions in the first edition of Apoc. John (Turner 2001;
2007: 899–908).
Despite these claims, many scholars reject the pre-Christian classification of Apoc.
John. King positions it as a socio-political critique of Roman injustice probably
written in first-to-second century Alexandria (2006: 157–73). She concludes that the
text was likely a Christian work utilizing Jewish elements and not evincing a pre-
Christian or a non-Christian origination (14–15). Tuomas Rasimus, in a sophisticated
treatise, has argued that there was an “Ophite Gnostic” tradition that preceded the
“Sethian” one and was combined with it to formulate what has been commonly
considered “Sethian Gnosticism.” Based upon his review of the evidence, the earlier
Ophite tradition may have a first-century CE derivation, likely after the First Jewish
War of 66–74 CE. Further, the parallels with the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine
Epistles suggest that the Sethianization of the Ophite tradition could have occurred
through the Johannine schismatics responsible for composing the earliest versions of
Apoc. John (Rasimus 2009: 279).
Alastair Logan has long contended for a second-century derivation of Apoc. John,
though some of his arguments have not gained popular support (1996; 2006; cf.
Rasimus 2009: 38). Gerard Luttikhuizen, based largely upon the hermeneutical
approach to the Biblical text within the document, proposes that Christian Hellenists
produced Apoc. John in the mid-second century (2006: 10–12). Burns has suggested
that the redaction history of Apoc. John follows the debates regarding divine provi-
dence in the mid to late second century, with Irenaeus’s account in Haer. 1.29–31
representing the earliest version of the myth, before adjustments were made in the
various editions of Apoc. John to mollify charges made against the Gnostic teachers
by their philosophical peers (2016: 53–79, esp. 72–6).
There are other works that could also be considered as cases for pre-Christian
“Gnosticism,” including Three Forms (NHC XIII 1), Eugnostos (NHC III 3, V 1),
Thunder: Perfect Mind (NHC VI 2), and Three Steles of Seth (NHC VII 5; cf. Yamauchi
1979: 138–40), but what is most obvious from the scholarly debate surrounding
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these documents is that methodology is a major concern and determiner of the variety
of perspectives.
THE QUESTION OF M E THO D O L O G Y

When Yamauchi raised his challenge to the claims of a pre-Christian “Gnosticism,”
he identified six methodological fallacies in the use of evidence: (1) the use of late
sources; (2) parts for the whole argumentation (i.e., an appeal to alleged Gnostic
technical terms); (3) the use of ambiguous New Testament passages as evidence for
an early “Gnosticism”; (4) the common conversion of parallels to cases of depend-
ence; (5) the appeal to authority instead of an analysis of the evidence itself; and
(6) the assumption that what is non-Christian is ipso facto pre-Christian (Yamauchi
1983: 170–86). Without restating these ongoing concerns, two additional methodo-
logical issues can be added to Yamauchi’s list and one takes on new meaning in the
contemporary scholarly context.
1. Reconstructing a past in a quest to simplify the complexities

of our extant evidence
Michel Desjardins, in relative concert with the critiques of Williams and King in his
analysis of Gnostic studies, has identified an additional concern in contemporary
scholarship: the use of sophisticated methods to propose whatever we want. He
observes: “only in modern times have scholars had the freedom to come to any con-
clusion they wish about the Bible; with that freedom has come the possibility of new
hypotheses and conclusions” (2005: 373). To illustrate his critique, he mentions the
hypothetical Q source (cf. Stanton and Perrin, 2013) and the division of Pauline letters
into authentic and deutero-Pauline lists, neither of which can be supported with dem-
onstrable evidence. This freedom has resulted in a “blend of academic naiveté and
hubris” as scholars “colonise” texts and propose “academic reconstructions” which
are “rarely, if ever, ‘objective exercises’.” Desjardins continues:
Even under the pretense of living in a ‘postcolonial’ world, we wander freely

into and across traditions, finding meaning that even adherents have never seen,
applying mainly Western perspectives to cultures across the world: comparing
and categorising, stratifying and universalising. This is our métier. At times our
academic work is done with respect, humility and the recognition that the human
beings who are being examined, whether directly or indirectly, are at least as
complex as those of us who are doing the examining, and that at least part of
what we do is playful self-discovery. Other times, we seem to assume, once again,
that we are encountering the primitive, to be examined and mastered with our
more precise scientific tools of observation.
(2005: 371)
Desjardins applauds Williams’s observation that we have coerced the complex data
of our materials to fit our modern, predetermined, and often artificial categories.
He takes this criticism a step further by challenging the motives and methods of
scholars, whether conservative or liberal, who seek to reconstruct the data to remove
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complexities and contradictions which they have determined should not be present.
He surmises, “When it emerges from textual reconstructions, those earlier stages are
inevitably reconstructed, at least partly, in the scholar’s own image. The rich con-
fusion of our sources gets downplayed, at times overlooked, in favour of our own
worldview; as a result, we can easily misread our sources by forcing them into preset
mental silos” (378). This critique follows closely with King’s charge against scholars
seeking a normative Christianity in the ancient world.
2. The creation of texts and communities from ideas

Paul McKechnie has raised additional concerns regarding what he calls “dangerous”
scholarly assumptions. The first is, “where there is physical evidence for the past exist-
ence of a theory, there must have been people –let us say, a sect –who followed that
theory” (2001: 13). A second assumption is related: “that where there is written evi-
dence for two (or more) competing ideas, those ideas must have attracted comparable
degrees of support, or number of adherents.” With that, he warns, “The gap between
the history of ideas and the history of people can be wide” (13). McKechnie goes on
to expose one of the crucial weaknesses of source critical methodology: “The source
critic decides first on theology, then on history” (33). Thus, for example, if there was
an idea present at the time of Paul’s writing, there must have been a source or a text to
support it which predated Paul. Consequently, a basis has been created for the exist-
ence of a text and a community that followed its teachings prior to Paul’s ministry and
extant letters. A methodology that has yielded the proposal of numerous hypothetical
documents with a corresponding rewriting of the earliest history of Christianity has
found innovative employment in the field of Gnostic studies.
3. Parts for the whole argumentation

With the publication of Williams’s challenge, Yamauchi’s earlier critique of the “part-
for-the-whole” fallacy was both embraced and circumvented. It was embraced in
that scholars in the discipline are now encouraged to review the nature of each par-
ticular “part” or feature of what was once considered the Gnostic religious phenom-
enon. It also circumvents the critique in that there is no longer a “whole” to which
the “parts” are joined. Scholars are guided to focus on the individual phenomena
without drawing broader religious conclusions. This is all well and good on the face
of it; however, the question becomes: when is it ever appropriate to employ the term
Gnostic to our objects of study –never, only when we can affirm a self-designation, or
when certain typological or heuristic features are present? If the latter is the case, then
what and how many features must be present? It seems that a suitable starting place is
the presence of the two most frequently identified features: (1) “Biblical demiurgical,”
or the distinction between higher and lower gods; and (2) “pre-incarnational,” or the
divine origin, identity, and destiny of the human spirit or soul.
Williams’s challenge that individual phenomena should be the focus of our
current research is reasonable, and this, in effect, takes the pressure off the search
for the “whole” and allows for an analysis of details in literary discourses and
social contexts. Likewise, his suggestion about two primary categories of focus
is appropriate, and crucial questions must be asked along the trajectory of each
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phenomenon’s development. For example, in the analysis of “Biblical demiurgical,”

it must be asked when the secondary powers responsible for the creation of the
world were identified to be in an oppositional versus a cooperative relationship
with the transcendent God and, more particularly, when the God of the Jews was
demoted to this secondary and oppositional status. Here, Alan Segal’s important
study Two Powers in Heaven (1977) deserves attention. It is also here that some
of the church Fathers’ claims of the genealogy of the “Gnostic heresy” should be
reexamined (see McKechnie 2001: 160–6; Drecoll 2013). Theological anthropology
is a rich topic of contemporary research, and it is worthwhile asking when the
pre-existence of human spirits or souls became a topic of theological discussion
among early Christian teachers and groups. Burns’s study on divine providence
is a good example and model, as the transcendent God makes humanity the spe-
cial focus of his attention and even intervenes on humanity’s behalf. This “extreme
anthropocentrism on the one hand, and the disjunction between divine care for
humanity and divine care for the cosmos, on the other,” is a distinct feature of
Gnostic thought “when framed against the backdrop of ancient Platonic, Stoic, and
Christian discourses about providence” (Burns 2016: 57).
Other phenomena are equally deserving of attention. The use of polemics in
Jewish, Christian, Platonic, and Gnostic writings requires careful study. A cru-
cial question having important implications for historical developments concerns
the timing when Jews, (other) Christians, and Platonists took up their pens to
challenge Gnostic ideas (Smith 2004: 149–214). The question of the development
of hermeneutical strategies is significant, particularly that of many Gnostic texts
which demonstrate a “critical, revisionary and resistant interpretation” which
likely indicates a “gap between the thought pattern of the interpreter and the text
as he or she understands it” (Luttikhuizen 2006: 10). Luttikhuizen argues that this
stance toward the Jewish Scriptures was similar to other intra-Christian debates
about Jesus’s person and mission and was demonstrated by way of correcting or
rejecting certain Biblical accounts: “It is not as Moses said …” (2006: 10–11).
The subject of “secrecy” is also important in that two alleged Gnostic texts are
titled “apocryphon” or “secret revelation,” those of James and John (NHC I.2;
II.1). Numerous other tractates in the Nag Hammadi collection claim to contain
secret teachings of Jesus, including the Gospel of Thomas (NHC II.2; Koester
1990: 75–128; 2007: 277–84; cf. Pagels 2003; Perrin 2007; and see ch. 14). How
these “secret” teachings relate to other and possible prior teachings and texts may
have historical implications for plotting the development of Gnostic texts and
ideas (Rudolph 1995: 265–87; Bull, Lied, and Turner 2012: esp. 61–85 [King]).
Lastly, an important study is the employment of myth as genre in Christian theo-
logical discourses regarding human origins and salvation (Burns 2016: 57; Pearson
2007: 14; Brakke 2010: 52–89).
Overall, the discernible ancient trends and the studies of them point to the con-
vergence of unique phenomena in the early-to-mid-second century and beyond. As
the “parts” are analyzed in themselves, with attention to the features that were once
considered part and parcel of what was considered “classic Gnosticism,” something
unique has been shown to be on the religio-philosophical horizon. The second cen-
tury proved a significant hermeneutical space in which postulations and traditions
were forged into a distinctive Gnostic school of thought.
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What also seems evident is that the question of Gnostic origins is going full
circle. The church Fathers maintained that the Gnostics were a heretical grouping
which deviated from apostolic Christianity largely due to Hellenistic influences.
The History-of-Religions School rejected this thesis as they saw parallels in Eastern
oriental literature and traditions and considered these, rather than Hellenism or
Judaism, the primary source of Christian and Gnostic ideas and practices (see chs. 1,
2). The late date of sources weakened the force of this religionsgeschichtliche thesis,
and the focus shifted to Judaism as a primary source of Christian and Gnostic ideas,
especially in the post-Holocaust era of scholarship (Desjardins 2005: 375–7). More
recently, however, the movement is back toward an origination of Gnostic thought
in a Christian context (King 2003: 188; Luttikhuizen 2006; Rasimus 2009; Burns
2016). This new orientation comes, however, by an acute awareness of the diversity
that existed in earliest Christianity (or “Christianities”), nuanced by the concerns
raised by Williams, King, and others. Yet, the convergence of evidence remains, a
distinctive conglomerate of Gnostic ideas manifested in the early-to-mid-second
century CE.
Brakke (2010: 85–9), with his identification of the “Gnostic school of thought,”
posits this tradition within the diversity of second-century Christianity, while Rasimus
(2009) places the interacting of Ophite and Sethian traditions in the late first,
early second centuries. Luttikhuizen, investigating ancient hermeneutical methods,
proposes a “dual hypothesis” for the origins of Gnostic thought. Rather than using
the authors’ familiarity with Biblical traditions as his starting-point, he begins with
the “critical, revisionary and resistant interpretation” of the Biblical texts themselves,
noting the significant “gap between the thought pattern of the interpreter and the
text as he or she understands it. If we bear this in mind we have no reason to connect
the critical rewritings of Biblical texts with any form of Judaism” (2006: 10) With
that, Luttikhuizen proposes a second-century derivation for Gnostic ideas and texts,
maintaining their creators “were guided by Greek-Hellenistic ways of thinking before
and after they came to believe in Jesus … They came from a different background
and drew from different sources than other early Christians” (2006: 12). Burns
contextualizes discussions regarding divine providence within their Platonic and Stoic
environments. He sees within the tradition related to Apoc. John a trajectory in which
the topic of divine care for humanity and creation becomes more nuanced as one
moves from shorter and earlier versions to those which are longer and later through
the second century and beyond (2016). The list of analysts goes on.
With this review of documentary evidence and scholarly trends, an important last
consideration is the question of import and motivation.
CONCLUSION: THE QUE S TIO N O F IM P O RT

AND MOTIVATIO N
A further problem in Gnostic studies is one of import and motivation. The question
is: to whom and why is the possibility of a pre-Christian “Gnosticism” important?
This issue is a double-edged sword, revealing an enduring divide among scholars. The
question is typically directed at conservative Christian scholars, since the issue of a pre-
Christian “Gnosticism” may have implications for influence and borrowing between
proto-orthodox and Gnostic teachers and traditions. Following the traditional picture
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presented largely by the early church Fathers, the Gnostics are presented as perverting
an already existing Christian theology through their importation of Hellenistic ideas
into the Christian faith. In contemporary debate, conservative scholars are presented
as “threatened” by extra-canonical Jesus traditions (Davies 2011: 14), preferring
instead a view of Christianity as “pure, true and essentially … unspoiled by for-
eign ideas” (Desjardins 1994: 44; cf. King 2003). As a historian of early Christianity,
Desjardins demurs that he has not discovered “the same pure, undiluted form of first-
century Christianity, and I have no confessional reason to construct one.” Apparently,
some scholars, for lacking confessional biases, believe they bring greater objectivity
to their research.
On the other hand, Desjardins has alleged that pre-Holocaust scholarship may
have been impacted by bias and fabrication as Judaic influence on earliest Christianity
was minimized and other origins for Christianity and pre-Christian “Gnosticism”
were sought and embraced (2005: 376–7). Further, the tenacity with which many
in the modern academy retain the Bauer thesis of heresy’s priority over orthodoxy
(Bauer 1934, 1971), despite modern challenges (Robinson 1988; Köstenberger and
Kruger 2010; Hartog 2015; Smith 2015: 60–88), and the readiness to sensationalize
recent discoveries (e.g., Gospel of Judas, Meyer 2011: 195; “Gospel of Jesus Wife,”
King 2014; Askeland 2014) accentuate that the potential for bias is not limited.
While conservatives appear in pursuit of a pure form of original Christianity, other
scholars give preference for a pluralistic, egalitarian, intellectual, non-hierarchical and
anti-authoritarian movement in Antiquity that very much parallels attributes of the
modern academy.
In recent Gnostic scholarship, we have experienced intense debate over the nature
and definition of our categories and undergone a great deal of introspection regarding
our quest for self-identity and a normative Christian framework. Yet, after all this
we are still speaking, with appropriate nuance, about the same central features of
what was called “Gnosticism” two decades after Williams’s challenge. Either scholars
are somehow unable to make the adjustment to new paradigms or there is some-
thing valid about the general framework of our understanding. While no one should
avoid reflecting on the effects of the special intellectual privileges they might grant
themselves, a concerted effort to move beyond divisions to listen carefully to the
arguments and evidences of others may move us closer to the actualities of earliest
Christianity. Reflecting as we have on different theories about the pre- Christian
origins of Gnosticism goes to confirm that, as well as make it obvious that debate is
ongoing and worth keeping lively as many difficult archeological, historical, and her-
meneutical problems keep demanding our attention and solution.
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CHAPTER FIVE
THE JEWISH BACKGROUND

TO “GNOSTICISM”: A GUIDE
FOR THE PERPLEXED
Garry W. Trompf
A recent listing of those who have contended for the Jewish origins of “Gnosticism”
(Lahe 2017: 60–6, 122–8) includes leading names in the history of Gnostic
studies –Moritz Friedländer, Gershom Scholem, Gilles Quispel, Robert Wilson, Hans-
Martin Schenke, Karl-Wolfgang Tröger, Birger Pearson, Kurt Rudolph, and Christoph
Markschies (see ch. 2). Yet still such a positioning remains interestingly vexed; and
this piece is simply designed to introduce various positions on the matter and discuss
key relevant issues.
M E RKAVAH MYS TICIS M

There is an age-old Jewish understanding that YHWH allowed the transmission
(qblh) of secret deep knowledge, only disclosed to some, that lay on divinely inscribed
tablets additional to the Ten Commandments yet smashed by an angry Moses when
he saw the worship of the golden calf (Exod 32:15–24; Zohar 1.37b, 52a-b), a trad-
ition going back at least to the second century CE ([Midrash] Tanchuma, Ki Tisa 16),
at a time when there was also talk of “heavenly tables” revealed to Moses over and
above the Torah (e.g., Jub 1:1, 3:9). According to Scholem, this Qabbalah has its roots
in Merkavah (“Chariot”) mysticism, contemplations upon Ezekiel’s account of “the
likeness of the glory” of God and the vehicular “wheels within wheels” running above
the earth but below the divine throne (Ezek 1:16, 26, 28b). Indeed, as Friedländer had
already argued (1898), and even before him Moshe Gaster (1893), ancient fragments
preserved in rabbinic literature (see [rabbis] Ishmael and Avika [coll.] [flor. 110],
Shi’ur Komah in Merkavah shelemah [Parush], fols. 32–43) showed such “Jewish-
Gnostic” speculations sprouting in the first centuries CE, to inspire that “Gnosticism”
countered by the Church Fathers (Scholem [1962] 1991: 22–8).
In the visions of heaven containing “archaeons [archangels] and seraphim” (Shi‘ur
Komah fol. 37a) there appear the equivalents of the Gnostic plērōma, and because
of mystical meanings put on letters and numbers (speculative gematria connected to
merkavah literature), Scholem chooses the Gnostic system of Marcus, a well-tried
example (see Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 1.14–18, with ch. 34), for the best cor-
roboration of Jewish-Gnostic effects. The trouble is, however, these Jewish mystical
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preoccupations are centered very decidedly on the awesome glory of the godhead
and the enormous range of angels around the heavenly throne, while for “classic
Gnosticism” the High God is hidden and beyond attention. Of course, mystical and
apocalyptic authors could exaggerate angelology far beyond the normative Jewish
concerns that we find, for example, in the Tamid Psalms, Tobit, or the patriarchal
Testaments (Bietenhard 1951; Trudinger 2004: 265). If 3 Enoch (allegedly second
century CE) can serve to make the point (and it is continually associated with
merkavah literature), myriads of angelic names need to be acknowledged (e.g., 14–18,
23–24, 48B-D). It turns out, though, that in typical Gnostic systems aeons present in
discernibly limited numbers, the overlap of Jewish angelic names is small (Gabriel,
Michael, with Adonaios, Sabaoth, Samael, etc., yet with some expected ones like
Uriel, Azazel [1 Enoch 8–9] curiously offstage), and if aeonic powers are listed in
detail (e.g., Apocryphon of John [Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC II.1)], 15–17), they
are detached from the realm of ultimate divinity, and angels at their command left
unnamed as “infinite” (Hypostases of the Archons [NHC II.4], 95.29) or an “angelic
church” (Origin of the World [II.5] 105.20–21). And the Gnostic Marcus deployed
by Scholem so obviously developed his numerology around the Valentinian aeonic
Ogdoad that emanated below the Father of Truth in a manageably (characteristically
“unexcessive”) discrete system (see ch. 13). Per contra 3 Enoch has Enoch as celestial
prince Metatron (3–4) –in classic Kabbalah he becomes a lesser Yhwh monitoring all
space and time –and the author celebrates the divine control over the whole career of
Israel, from Adam to the prophets and later rulers (45:3–4), a synoptic history hardly
of interest to Gnostic depreciators of the Old Testament “demiurge.”
SAMARIA, SIMON M AG U S , AND THE

ANGEL OF THE L O RD
In early Christian tradition, as is well known, the origins of Gnostic heresies were not
placed in Judaism but with Simon, apparently a Samaritan “magician” who amazed
people as embodying a divine “Power called Great” (“the Great Angel”?) (Acts
8:9–10). Still, Samaritans accepted a version of the Hexateuch as their Scriptures,
and their angelology, if in its most ancient form evidently limited, was derived from
Israelite tradition. A more detailed exposition of Simon’s thought-world, provided by
early Samaritan Christian Justin Martyr, has him teach that his (“prostitute”) consort
Helen of Tyre had sprung from him (primordially) as Ennoia or First Thought and
had generated evil angels that made the world but then overpowered her (trapping
her in a body, and also humanity created through her as the “Mother of all”). Unable
to return to the Great, and made captive from age to age (as Helen of Troy, and as the
lost sheep of the Gospel), Simon/“the Father over all” had come to earth disguised
as a man to rescue her, and redeem her progeny with his gnōsis, sometimes tempor-
arily suffering (as the wooing poet Stesichorus, for example, and among the Jews
as God’s Son), but soon to be descending (in a final resolution) –to Samaria as the
Father and among all other nations as the Holy Spirit (Justin, Contra omnes haereses,
apud Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 1.23). However self-ingratiatingly personalized, the struc-
ture of this teaching – material and corporeal alienation from the removed Father,
ontological dualism with the marring of creation by inferior powers and the fall of a
Sophia-like figure, the melding of Biblical and pagan elements, and redemptive Gnosis
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— The Jewish background to “Gnosticism” —
– were sufficient to persuade some scholars, Quispel, Wilson, and Jean Daniélou most
noticeably, that this “Simonianism” was the pre-Christian Jewish-heterodox seedbed
of most Gnostic systems to come (Quispel 1969: 32; Wilson 1958: 100; Daniélou
1964: 73). Fascinatingly, the account leaves us with an incipient mythic macrohistory,
of selected special events and hierophanic recurrences in time enshrouded by a story
of the cosmic fault and its eschatological solution (see ch. 3).
The trouble with this approach is that it extracts too much Jewishness from a
culture-complex claiming its own identity, Justin asserting Simon’s massive influence
on his own Samaritan “nation” (Apologia [1]‌.26 and [2].15). But then we are left
with endless debates about the nature and persistence of the “Dosithean” (popular
lay) tendency in Samaria’s belief-profile (Grant 1966: 90–2; Yamauchi 1973: 57–62).
Did Dositheus, said to be Simon’s teacher and perhaps honored by later Gnostics
(NHC VII.118), cultivate the Samaritans’ great “Angel of the Lord” (let alone any
Jewish parallels to him) that laid the basis for “classic Gnostic” demiurge-figure(s)
(Fossum 1985a; cf. Segal 1977)? Since, according to tenth-century Arabic sources,
the long-enduring Samaritan “Magharians” extolled the Angel for doing a perfect job
in Creation (Wolfson 1960: 97), do we really find here the basis of a bad Artificer?
It is too hard to call. Many relevant inferences about Samaritan beliefs in the early
Christian centuries have to be made from medieval texts, and even any general interest
in a messianic Restorer figure (Tā’eb) for Samaria looks too late (Bóid 1990: 737). At
least the Simonian case raises crucial questions involving the Jewish background to
Gnosticism: it is reasonable to assume that “formative Gnostic” thinkers speculated
upon inimical angelic influences before imagining aeonic entities, and to ask how
the transition might have occurred. After all, Aramaeo-Hebraically named beings are
part of the “classic Gnostic” repertory. We are also forced to recognize that before
Basilides (ch. 12), our world projected as an error was not made by the Old Testament
deity but by rebels among the hosts in his heaven (Fossum 1985b: 149). Here Jewish
traditions about fallen angels become highly relevant (e.g., 1 Enoch 6–8; Vita Adae
et Evae 16–17), in pseudepigraphical texts that were, however, to be discarded under
Jewish Rabbinism (cf. [Mishnah] Hagigah 2.1) and picked up by Christians (Stone
1980: 97–117).
PH ILO JUDAEUS AND MYS TICAL E X E G E S IS

Both the problems and issues, as is well known, have led scholars, most promin-
ently Pearson (1990; cf. 2004), to focus more on Egypto-Alexandrian Judaism as
Gnosticism’s key source. Here Jewish mentalities incorporated various if highly rele-
vant (Hellenistic) strands. Philo Judaeus (d. ca. 50 CE) philosophized about Creation
in a Platonizing vein, yet was disturbed by antinomian Jews disregarding all reli-
gious ceremonies, heretics (or mīnīm as they appear in the Talmud) whom Rudolph
(1967: 116), following Friedländer’s cue, reckoned as “Jewish Gnostics.” Philo him-
self allowed Reason (Logos as in John 1) to mediate between the utterly good, pure
Father and his material creation, “to ward off anything pernicious” (esp. De mundi
opificio 2.10; 6.24), and was daring enough to argue that the making of the first
corporeal man (down from and distinct from the ideal) involved “more than one
dēmiourgos” but also “other assisting beings” (heteroi sunergoi) to bear blame for
Adam’s moral weaknesses (24.72, 75; 26.79; cf. 46.135).
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Philo’s references to Wisdom (Sophia), intriguingly, much less related to Creation (as
in LXX Proverbs 8; Sap Sol 6–7) have her more as the virgin “Consort” (Heb. malkāh)
in crucial earthly happenings, She is mystically available as the eternal light-stream
from God (more particularly for Moses, and in the allegorically interpreted lives of
the Patriarchs through their wives) who can lead the soul upwards from the material
world’s burdens to heavenly freedom, even Sonship of God (e.g., Vita Mosis 1.155–
59; Quaestiones in Genesim 3.10, 44; 4.88–146 with Armenian version [Topchyan
and Muradyan] 1.92.7–8; De cherubim 45; cf. also Goodenough 1935: 153–66;
Schäfer 2011: 154–74). All this bears comparison with Gnostic writings when we find
Philo reading Moses as discloser of the greatest mysteries and a savior figure better
than any offered in the Alexandrian mystery religions, and offering deeper numero-
logical and astrologic truth (e.g., Mosis 2.71–93, 124; Cherubim 48). These all seem
“thought motifs” akin to Gnosticism, even down to the idea of a female microcosm,
as with Simon’s Helen, bearing eternal significance in time.
The problem is, however, Philo’s philosophizing sits a long way from “character-
istic Gnostic” tendencies, his angelology so weak, the absence of speculation about
aeons or diabolical powers, and his uncompromising monotheism set to undermine
Hellenistic syncretisms. Clearly higher knowledge is crucial for him: the Cherubim
and Seraphim at the heart of Israel’s ancient cult stood for God’s “higher Knowing
and full knowledge (epignōsis kai episteme pollē)” (Mosis 2.98), yet his attention
was on knowing that Creation bespoke of Providential ordering above and below,
not on an ambiguous plērōma. And of course the Sophia and Gnōsis of the Old
Testament God were to hold no promise for classic Gnostics, who make no appeal
to Jewish wisdom books on Creation, even if we have to allow the Sophia-figure
they appropriated was relatively more Jewish than not (MacRae 1987: 184–202).
If Simon’s Ennoia- Helen perhaps had an afterlife of cult influence, too, as the
“Trimorphic Protennoia,” expressed in a trinitarian “aeonic economy” of Father,
Mother and Son (NHC XIII,1 37.23–24), why do we have to say it is Jewish as
against Samaritan “Gnostic-Christian” (cf. Yamauchi 1981)? As there were almost a
million Alexandrian Jews we must be aware of competing positions and complicated
interactions between their groupings and those looking in on their attractive cul-
tural riches. If Philo, as some insist, led his own “group” (Goodenough 1962: 15,
cf. 70–4), his openness apparently encouraged some to a greater compromise with
Hellenism (Pseudo-Philo, De aeternitate mundi), his hatred of tyranny and defiance
of Roman desecrations against Jewry probably inspired his nephew to lead a rebel-
lion (Quod omnis probus liber sit 106–109; Legatio ad Gaium 350; Pseudo-Philo,
[Armenian], On Samson [Muradyan and Topchyan] 44–46; cf. Pfeiffer 1949: 37–8);
and any “school” he fostered lost attraction among Jews after the Jewish War, to be
picked up instead, if rather surreptitiously, in the Alexandrian academy of “Christian
Gnosis” (Berchman 1984).
J EWI SH CONTEMP LATIVES AND THE HE RM E TICA

There were, to be sure, various Egyptian expressions of Judaism, and indeed some
esoteric and secret that might connect to speculations in the Jewish heartland (Stone
2018). Two communities greatly interesting Philo, the Essenes and the Therapeutae,
seem alike in piously reading the Scriptures for deep allegorical meaning; but to conflate
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every mystically and esoterically inclined group for a Gnostic one would be absurd,
even if the Therapeutae were Egyptians possibly using an extra-Biblical patria philo-
sophia (De vita contemplativa 25–28; cf. Omnis probis 82). One grouping, though,
that has been intriguingly brought into “the Jewish equation” is the Egyptian Corpus
Hermeticum [CH], normally given a second-century date (since the puncturing of
its great antiquity by Isaac Casaubon in 1614), and in particular the Poimandres
(not among the Hermetic texts in NHC VI). This text (“The Shepherd”) concludes
upholding God as “holy,” constituting “all things by the word,” and “wishing to
be known by his own people” (31). The treatise carries many verbal features per-
suading Pearson that it is “obviously dependent” on the LXX, if not “a Jewish text”
(1984: 474–5; cf. Quispel 2000), and it is focused on Gnōsis (Poimandres 26). Since
the text also concerns aeonic powers (as does CH generally), this would certainly pro-
vide a crucial link between the Hellenistic cult deity Aion (“Time”) and the spiritual
entities preoccupying Gnostics (Casadio 1999: 181–84). The problem is, as I have
said elsewhere (ch. 25), the Hermetica could have been sponsored by a languishing
Egyptian priestly group wanting to outclass the very influential Alexandrian Jewish
community. Fine points of contrast also have to be weighed up: in solar-dominated
Egypt the divine omnividence was bound to be pronounced, for example, and in HC
and NHC the highest deity has to know precisely what is going on in order to act
redemptively. Distinctively Alexandrian Jewish approaches, however, have God so
penetrating as to expose and purge the vulnerable core of our very being (Sap. Sol.
7:20; Philo, De Providentia 2.35–36; Heb. 4:12–13, and see Trompf 1971), calling for
awareness of the divine immediacy, not to work out a route of cosmic Return.
NAG HAMMAD I J U DAICA?

It would be remiss, of course, to forget that most NHC texts are riddled with
evocations of Genesis material from the Tanakh –on material creation, the first
humans, Paradise, the birth of Seth, etc. –along with such motifs as a hierarchized
(if variously arranged) caelestia and a double (higher/lower) Adam. But here we
need to make the cautious distinctions between evident degrees of Jewish features or
appropriation and Jewishness of character, or between influences and genuine der-
ivation. After all, classic Gnostic texts usually cherish a Christ-redeemer figure (see
chs. 3, 9, 10, 12, 13). One test case is the striking NHC text called the Apocalypse
of Adam (V.5) which betrays no explicitly “Christian filaments” at all, and for that
reason has been held up to illustrate a transition from Jewish to Gnostic apoca-
lyptic, from “about where the history of the Essenes … breaks off” (Robinson
1977: 7). The tract seems designed to solve a problem: the sacred seed of Seth, pre-
serving Adam’s line (after Abel’s murder and Cain’s exile), indeed in the author’s
view humanity’s sacred elect line (for background, e.g., Jub 22:12; Adae et Evae 49;
2 Enoch 33:11; Philo, De posteritate Caini 170–3) necessarily has to be regenerated
after the destruction of the Flood, and this is apparently specially done (if we can
infer behind lacunae) through a gift to Shem of “men who came forth from the
great eternal Gnōsis.” While Ham and Japheth inherit twelve faulty kingdoms (that
appear more aeonic than temporal and earthly), the new Sethian generation is
“undefiled” in a “thirteenth kingdom” of “glory and power” and “knowledge of the
truth” ([V.5] 64, 73, 77–82).
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Again, the difficulty is that various “Sethian” texts (see ch. 11) use different
Genesis scenarios to make special points relevant to a distinctive system that other-
wise include quasi-or para-Christian, middle-Platonic, and particular combinatory
elements (Turner 2002), and reading this Apocalypse simply as Jewish looks perilous
(see also ch. 3). Other NHC texts reflect “merkavah touches” –the untitled work
on cosmic origins (II.5), for instance, has Sabaoth’s throne in his high heavens as “a
four-faced chariot called Cherabin” [sic] –but this particular text is a highly contrived
syncretic cosmography, with “gods and angels,” and with Jesus the Christ/the Logos
holding the crucial role to explain all the newly disclosed heavenly arrangements and
conflicts before a consummating “shake-up” (105; 109.9; 125–6). Yes, the classic
Gnostic corpus is scattered with Judaic features –heavily in NHC II.1 and 4, for
other examples (Lahe 2017: 231–5) –and without them it would present very dif-
ferently. But if they suggest “Jewish background,” available for appropriation, the
evidence does not clinch “Jewish texts” or “Jewish origins.” Regarding layers of
heaven, for example, the distinctly Jewish ranking of seven (e.g., 3 Baruch) would
seem to be assimilated by classic Gnostics into archon-dominated Hellenistic celestial
spheres, more as an ogdoad than hebdomad (thus Origen, Contra Celsum 6.31), or
else “marginalized” (cf. Rudolph 1967) by using magical number thirteen, at least for
lower heavens, and parading a superior “Hyperkosmos” with “esoteric,” “secretive,”
and spiritually “aristocratic” airs (Hilgenfeld 1890: 12, 22). Similar conclusions go
for Eden, overlooked for Paradise (Alexander 1992); even for baptismal rituals, that
lose their Jewish base (see ch. 16).
QUMRAN AND THE DE AD S E A S CRO L L S

The apocalyptic element rounding off the untitled NHC cosmogony of II.5 (125–7)
should naturally draw us back to the Essenes, Qumranites, and the Dead Sea Scrolls,
to test any possible connections with Gnosticism. There are matters of comparison
between Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia requiring years more research about
magical incantations, imprecations, and divination using Jewish names in fragmentary
texts and on amulets, vessels and sherds, with powerful spells by such divine or aeonic
names as Sabaoth, or Solomon as master of magic, suggesting Jewish-Gnostic practices
(see ch. 19; cf. also Test Sol). Certain Qumran finds (e.g., 4Q318, 560–2) belong to this
category, but I cannot discern their relevance here. Merkavah-looking references some-
times show (especially in a vision of God’s Holiness, Chariots, Wheel Angels, Secret
Wisdom, Image of Knowledge (da‘ath), and Fountain of Understanding in 4Q286
A.2); yet they sit alongside less distinctive phrases of praise, and in Qumranite litera-
ture Ezekiel’s model of the future “Zadokite” Temple receives much greater attention
(esp. in 11QTa and also 4Q400–407 [with other Sabbath Songs]). In very convention-
ally Jewish fashion “Adam is given great glory,” more than Seth, Enoch, Noah, and
Shem (Damascus Document [CD] 3.20b; cf. Ecclus 49:16), as I suppose we would
have to say applies among classic Gnostics. But in the Scrolls Noah is given uniform
affirmation (especially as an epitome of “human wisdom” who “knows the secrets of
mankind … and all living things” that lie in “a book which, not wearing out,” will be
revealed in the End-time (4Q536). The NHCs give decidedly more space to Seth and
Shem, and Sethians would hardly like the deprecation of “the sons of Seth” as facing
deserved destruction from “Belial” (CD[A]‌8.21–9.2; with Knibb 1987: 63)!
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The conflict between the forces of light and darkness, a dualistic motif, is a rec-
ognizable stress common to Gnostic and Qumranite thought, drawing “the distinc-
tion” between the two, and the difference between “demons … and good powers” or
“angels” (as the The Origin of the World expresses it [107.1–6; 120.28; 126.1–2];
cf. esp. 1QS III-IV, with Xeravits 2010). But this divarication is well known in many
ancient religions from the Mediterranean across to Zoroastrian-permeated Persia
(Lange et al. 2011), and all prospect of thought patterns in Qumran’s body of litera-
ture providing a seedbed for Gnostic religion(s) breaks down on careful inspection.
Conceding that the Dead Sea Scrolls reflect the keeping of secret and esoteric hopes
away from dominant strands of Judaism (Stone 2018: 55–77), probably by a “sectlet”
of Essenism rather than its main body (esp. Tyloch 1968) and not a diversity of views
from a Jerusalem Jewry under first-century Roman-imperial pressure (Golb 1995: 95–
116), Qumranite dualism is tied into an apocalyptic mentality largely foreign to NHC
authors. Indeed, the “Qumranites” came to envisage a flashpoint, an eschatological
“war of the heavenly warriors sweeping through the world” (1QH 3.35–36), between
the sons of Darkness and Light, led against each other by archangel Michael and
great demon Belial (4Q548, 546), with community members wielding gold and silver
weaponry received from on high (1 and 4QM). Their “millenarian” moment was to
entail a “this-worldly” annihilation of all Israel’s enemies (the Kittim, above all the
Romans), to transform social and material conditions that Gnostics were only too
ready to relinquish completely (Trompf 1999).
THE MANDAE ANS

Since over the years various scholars have connected both John the Baptist and
Jesus of Nazareth to Qumran, even having them community leaders there (Trompf
2002: 132–3, 137–40), we are bound to ask, at last, whether the closest Jewish hinter-
land to Gnosticism is with either the Jewish followers of John the Baptist (to become
“the Mandaeans”) or of Christ (in many Gnostic texts the Teacher and Savior), or
perhaps of both. Aside from the lack of clinching evidence for an Essene-Qumran
basis for the ministries of the Baptist and Jesus, in the view of the most far-reaching
explorer of Jewish/ Gnostic links, Estonian Jaan Lahe, the Mandaeans would be
the last best hope in defending non-Christian “Jewish origins” (2017: 391–5). It is
interesting how the flight of John’s followers during the military crisis in Jerusalem
and Judea (60s CE) recounted in the Mandaic tract Harran Gawaita ([Drower], pp. 3,
8–9) runs like a parallel to the story of the early Christians’ flight to Pella (Eusebius,
Historia ecclesiastica 1.2.8–9; 3.1–5), although with a Jewish princess convert Miriai
providing safe passage far to the north after Jewish authorities killed many Mandaean
priests.
Admitting the greater interest Mandaean texts have in Jewish history (yet still
above all in the prologue figures of Adam and Eve, Seth, Enoch [Idris], Noah, and
Shem [Shitil]) (Nasoraia and Trompf 2010: 401–4), a difficulty arises in trying to
reconstruct early Jewish (not later clearly anti-Jewish!) Mandaeism for first-century
Judea (thus Rudolph 1960: 82; 1965: 138–9, 212), from inference and a paucity
of data. A debate persists, moreover, about “western” (Palestinian) and “eastern”
(at least Median) origins for Mandaeism, which partly revolves around the issue as
to whether the dominant form of what is obviously a Mandaean system of Gnosis
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(Manda) derives from Mesopotamia, possibly focused on a saving knowledge through

baptismal purification (see ch. 16). A definitely Jewish and smaller Mandaean group –
probably less esoteric in its message (e.g., Matt 3), and having interaction with Jesus
and his disciples (e.g., Johannesbuch [Lidzbarski]; cf. Luke 7:18–35) –apparently fled
to join the heartland of a special Aramaic-speaking, not exclusively Jewish and cer-
tainly non-circumcising ethnos somehow linked to it. The Mandaean “aeonic system”
(of greater Light-world Powers and ’Uthras as in the Ginza Rba III), then, might
seem to have a more likely source in a syncretic Perso-Hellenistic milieu in which
some influential Jewish input was accepted (and we are not to forget the continuing
ancient history of Mesopotamian Jewry from 586 BCE on) (Levi 1956). Mandaeism
as a Jewish origin-point of Gnosticism becomes too problematic.
JEWISH GNOSTICIZI NG CHRIS TIANS

Most of the earliest Christians, of course, were Jewish, with their movement taking
inspiration from John’s message and practice of cleansing. We have signs of a mys-
tical meaning put upon baptismal water in the most Gnostic (and Jewish, if anti-
Judaistic) Gospel, that of John (1:24–34: 3:5; 25–31; 4:12–15; Nasoraia 2004).
But in the early Christian texts living water is not the medium for relating human
souls caught on earth to the Light-world beings, or of negotiating the path back
to the divine Source, through the Mandaean equivalent to the aeonic “fullness”
(Franzmann 1989). New Testament writers generally warn against preoccupa-
tion with celestial entities (stoicheia) (see ch. 6), and if John’s reference to “the
Archōn of this world” (12:31; 16:11) is to the inferior demiurgic Jewish Creator
god (DeConick 2013) it would be a rare departure indeed from early Christian
Jewish acceptance of continuity in the Old and New Testament deity. And signifi-
cantly, if we ponder the earliest Aramaic liturgical Responsorial: “we have lifted
up (our hearts) up unto the Lord,” it would appear to have meant: “now we have
risen into heaven” (cf. Quispel 1997: 69), as if worship allowed immediate group
access because of Christ’s work, rather than waiting, with the right gnōsis, for one’s
ultimate ascent (cf. 1 Pet 3:22).
One has to take very seriously, though, that classic Gnostic works are riddled
with Biblical allusions (usually the cosmogonic or “most mythic” ones from the Old
Testament) and have much accentuation of (a commonly docetic) Jesus as Redeemer
and Revealer-Teacher. As an obviously missionary movement (though Jewry was not
without that aspect [Dalbert 1954]), the Christian “Way” soon bridged the Jewish/
Gentile divide and the conversion process inevitably involved syncretistic and accul-
turative complexities, with some free-floating of Gospel messages detached from the
old well-established (rabbinical) authorities. In a world of “peripatetic” philosophers
and competing outlooks, it only needs imagination to conceive how peddlers of
new ideas gained footholds. Take the mobile Jew Apollos, for example, popularly
touted as author of the allegorizing, “Philonic-looking” New Testament Letter to
the Hebrews. Possibly a very early follower of John and acquainted with water-
cleansing rites, known in Ephesus and Corinth, and by birth and literary implication
in Alexandria (Acts 18:24; 19:1; 1 Cor 3:4–6; Heb), he could be a decent candidate to
take Qumran-affected talk of “innumerable angels” as “spirits” and of Melchizedek
as Son of God (11QMelch) to Alexandria (Heb 1:7; 7:1–19; 12:22), where the ancient
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priest-king would filter into Gnostic arcana (NHC IX.1; cf. Schenke 1980). This is
only to visualize a possibility: we simply need to recognize how the Roman world
facilitated the movement of ideas. The Gnostic Valentinus, recall, born an Egyptian
Jew, studied in Alexandria, rose to fame in Rome as a Christian theologian, and retired
to Cyprus (cf. ch. 13). This, admittedly, raises the imponderable, already hinted at by
Irenaeus: Gnostics like Saturninus and Basilides allegedly said they were “no longer
Jews,” but were “not yet Christians” (Adv. haer. 1.24.6), as if they wilfully turned the
Judaism they knew into something different, with a Christian tinge! The disaffection
could have erupted from a crisis, such as the terrible failure of the Jewish Kitos revolt
(115–117) against Rome (Smith II 2004), but by then the ethnic range of those ready
to respond to “Jesus truth” was widening fast.
CONCLUDING CO M M E NTS
I have only been able to scan the horizon in this piece, to encourage debate and more
research, and specialists would better probe areas I have only skirted. To conclude,
I must clarify, I will hardly deny there were ancient Jewish Gnostics (and thus age-old
bases for the continuing Jewish mystical tradition [chs. 34, 40]). Speculative activity
in 1 Enoch 2–5 alone shows how Judaism could take its indigenous philosophical
resources into the Hellenistic mix (Enoch being uninteresting to classic Gnostics).
And of course I will allow talk of Hermetic Gnosis, if not Gnosticism (Tröger 1973)
and of special close affinities between Gnostic types (e.g., Deutsch 1995). I affirm
here, too, a “Jewish background” to most “classic Gnostic systems” known from
Antiquity; but to argue for Jewish “bases or origins,” especially when the Lord of the
Torah is so frequently depreciated, is to go too far.
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CHAPTER SIX
GNOSTIC MOTIFS IN THE

NEW TESTAMENT
Pheme Perkins
T o ask whether or not the New Testament reflects Gnostic motifs does not mean
that its authors either explicitly accepted or opposed the religious systems which
belong to the broad category, Gnosticism. Instead we are looking for seeds that would
take root and flower in the Gnostic mythic speculation and ritual practices of the
second to sixth centuries CE. Christians begin learning about their religion from four
gospels that focus on the earthly life, miracles, teaching and death of Jesus in the
Jewish setting of Galilee and Jerusalem. The short resurrection stories tacked on at
the end of each one remain firmly anchored to that biographical narrative line. So,
students find Gnostic writings which are labeled “Gospel of …” very strange reading
indeed. Some, like the Gospel of Thomas, collect familiar sayings and parables of
Jesus without the life context of the canonical gospels. Others, like the Gospel of
Mary, provide revelations by or about the heavenly Savior which Jesus only gives
after his resurrection. Still others, like the Gospel of Truth or Gospel of Philip may
interpret items from the Jesus story or Christian rituals according to some version of
second-century Gnostic speculation.
In other words, even the authors of Gnostic texts did not find clear or consistent
expression of their religious truths in the New Testament. But they did find openings
there for the more elaborate mythical, philosophical and ritual developments in the
Gnostic world of the later centuries. Only the appearances and revelations by the
risen Jesus, a heavenly figure, can overcome the obvious fear and ignorance of Jesus’s
disciples represented in the gospel accounts of Jesus’s passion and death. In a different
context, the apostle Paul owes his entire teaching to a revelation of the risen Christ.
Both the gospel of John (Jn 1:1–18) and letters of Paul (Phil 2:6–11; Col 1:15–20;
Eph 1:18–23) celebrate Christ as a heavenly Savior to whom believers are united.
The New Testament gospels mention occasions on which Jesus withdrew from public
healing and preaching to instruct all or a small group of disciples in private (Mk
4:33–34; 9:2–10). Was that private instruction preserved in another form?
Consequently, there are four broad areas to investigate in looking for Gnostic
motifs that would be expanded in the following centuries: (a) Christ as a cosmic,
heavenly figure overcoming demonic powers; (b) risen Christ as a savior figure to
whom believers are united; (c) knowledge of a hidden teaching about salvation;
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— G n o s t i c m o t i f s i n t h e N e w Te s t a m e n t —
(d) ritual recovery of the true Human within oneself. Once the New Testament motifs
are expanded and repackaged in later Gnostic systems of myth, speculation and ritual,
they will look quite different from their first-century prototypes.
The Gnostic writings which survive in Coptic translations from the third or even
fourth century often make their own use of New Testament materials. So we will use
examples from later texts to provide clues as to the earlier forms of religious thought
and praxis when the New Testament was being written. Often the situation is similar
to that of fossil hunters trying to find the ancestors of a later animal. Only a few
similar bones can be found in the earlier rock layers. Consequently, the links between
the earlier fragmentary bones and the full skeleton will remain partially hypothetical.
COMING OF A HEAVE NLY VICTO R

A fully elaborated mythological version of the Gnostic redemption story such as that
found in the Apocryphon of John will explain how part of the divine light became
trapped in the world of matter, conflicting passions and darkness that humans experi-
ence (King 2006). In that story human beings are kept from recognizing their divine
origins by the demonic ruler and subordinate powers who shaped material and psy-
chic creation as a prison. Only the descent of a savior figure from the heavenly world
can awaken humans to their inner divine being and enable them to escape captivity.
Demon rulers resist human liberation since they know that if/once all the divine light
returns above this world will collapse. Gnostic mythemes will be fitted out with links
to Biblical texts in diverse ways. Neither the dualistic cosmogony nor the mytho-
logical recasting of the creator God from Genesis or Isaiah to be a hostile enemy of
human salvation from Gnostic myths can be found in the New Testament.
However, other key features of the Gnostic set of building blocks appear in the
metaphorical symbol set in the New Testament. The best-known example of a Savior
from the divine world of light coming into the lower world of darkness appears in the
opening of John’s gospel (Jn 1:1–5, 10–13), which also asserts that none of those like
Moses who might have claimed to see or know the Father actually did so (Jn 1:18).
So, it is not a major shift to set the light revealer in a mythological universe where
humanity had no knowledge of the divine Father until the appearance of a heavenly
revealer figure in human form (Perkins 1993: 93–120). However, that myth is not
developed in the Fourth Gospel. In the Johannine narrative the divine Word as the
Incarnate Human Being leaves no space for demonic opposition to human enlight-
enment. Instead the demon-opponent takes the form of Jewish teachers opposed to
Jesus in Jn 8:12–59. John’s religious polemic presumes that only those who believe in
Jesus’s divine origins are children of God (Jn 1:12–13). The gospel explains religious
opposition to Christianity on the premise that some are fathered by the devil (Jn
8:44–7). Though John’s imagery has some motifs that will be developed by second-
century Gnostic teachers, it remains attached to a narrative life of Jesus that remains
firmly anchored in first-century Judea.
The motif of a heavenly victor surfaces in poetic or liturgical language used in New
Testament epistles. A typical hymnic pattern praises the risen Christ enthroned above
all the cosmic powers at the right hand of God (Phil 2:9–11; Eph 1:20–21). These
poetic phrases are found in letters which otherwise show no interest in expounding
a Gnostic story of redemption. But a quasi-mythic descent to conquer powers in the
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— P h e m e Pe r k i n s —
lower regions followed by a cosmic ascent that restructures reality makes a brief
appearance in Ephesians. Eph 4:8–10 interprets Psalm 68:19 as a representation of
that mytheme:
Therefore it is said, ‘When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive;

he gave gifts to his people’ (Ps 68:19). When it says, he ascended, what does it
mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who
descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he
might fill all things.
(NRSV)
The author of Ephesians does not appear overly interested in its mythic possibilities.
Rather this expansion of the psalm text serves as a rhetorical flourish to support
ethical exhortation (vv. 7, 11–13). Another hymnic fragment is attached to ethical
exhortation to live as children of light in Eph 5:7–14:
Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you.
(v. 14)
Its image of the Savior’s call of awakening becomes another familiar motif in Gnostic
sources. This liturgical fragment in Ephesians is ambiguous about when the awakening
occurs. Does it refer to a discovery of salvation in this life or to the post-mortem fate
of believers? Both are possible.
The long version of a Gnostic revelation that was allegedly transmitted by the
risen Jesus to John concludes with a hymnic celebration of the descent of heavenly
Forethought as light into the realm of darkness. Her third entry into the “bowels of
the underworld” was to awaken those who belong to her (King 2006: 246–57). She
identifies herself, summoning the hearer to arise:
I am the Forethought of pure light, I am the thought of the Virgin Spirit, who
raises you to a place of honor. Arise, remember what you have heard and trace
your root, which is I the compassionate. Guard yourself against the angels of
misery, the demons of chaos, and all who entrap you, and beware of deep sleep in
the trap in the bowls of the underworld.
(31, 11–22; Meyer 2007: 131–2)
Self-identification formulae, (“I Am X …”), employed by the revealer in this Gnostic

example are also familiar to readers of the Fourth Gospel (Perkins 1993: 132–4).
There they form a distinctive feature of Jesus’s speech both with predications (“bread
of life/from heaven,” 6:35, 41, 48, 51; “light of the world,” 8:12; 9:5; “sheep gate/
good shepherd” 10:7, 11, 14; “resurrection” 11:25; “way, truth and life,” 14:6; “true
vine,” 15:1) and in an absolute sense apparently to recall the divine self-naming of
Exod 3:14 (Jn 4:26; 8:27, 58).
The “I Am” revelatory style in the Gospel of John remains more closely tied to
the real world of its first-century readers. The sayings employ a series of established
symbols from the Old Testament that also have resonance in the wider cultural world
of the first century. This cultural symbolism separates the Jesus figure of John’s gospel
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from the one portrayed in the synoptic gospels by reinforcing the opening proclam-
ation of Jesus as God’s presence in the world. He is not to be identified with Abraham,
Moses, Isaiah, or any other human figure in the Old Testament story of salvation.
UNITED WITH THE H E AVE NLY S AVIO R

In Gnostic mythologizing the core of that awakened soul is not completely whole
and independent. When a portion of divine light fell into darkness, the light itself
was fragmented. Philosophically this devolution created two fissures in reality: (a)
on the cosmic level, a gap in the divine itself; (b) on the individual level, one in the
embodied soul. In some systems the soul has a spousal divine counterpart left behind
in the divine realm. Consequently a process of reunification is involved in the pro-
cess of salvation. The nomenclature for the heavenly, metaphysical entities which
characterize the light world that appears in Gnostic writings involves Greek words
designating intellectual functions or other abstractions like the One, Foreknowledge,
Forethought, Invisible Virgin Spirit, Self-Generated, and even Wisdom/Sophia. So the
restoration process can appear more abstractly as refilling rather than transforming
or recreating as in more familiar Biblical images.
When redemption through light’s entry into darkness has been associated with a
historical individual as in the case of Jesus imagining a reunification or completion
of some loss to the divine world seems problematic, but traces of this motif do occur
in the New Testament. Its most characteristic form occurs in pictures that involve
reassembling believers in some imagined heavenly space in which the deity and the
risen Jesus are also present. For example, John’s gospel has the departing/ascending
Jesus promise to ready rooms for his disciples (Jn 14:2–6). In the eschatology of that
gospel that spatial return imagery does not tell the whole story. The same discourse
has Jesus promise a reunion with his disciples that takes a different form. The Father
and Son return to dwell in the believer (14:19–20, 23). That metaphor of divine in-
dwelling is associated with the gospel’s “love” terminology (v. 23), rather than its
imagery of light/revelation.
Poetic language in the New Testament epistles provides additional images for
redemption as restoration. For example, Colossians and Ephesians shift Paul’s socio-
political metaphor for the local community as “body of Christ” (1 Cor 12:12–27;
Rom 12:4–5) onto the cosmic stage. Christ is identified with Wisdom as “… firstborn
of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, whether
visible or invisible … in him all things hold together” (Col 1:15–17). Consequently,
the body of Christ represents the assembled believers, who in the resurrection reflect
God’s fullness: “He is the head of the body, the church; the beginning of the first-
born from the dead, … For in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (vv.
18–19). This example does not mythologize “fullness” as restoring something that
had been lost from divine reality as Gnostic mythologizing does. Commentators
have found possible hints of opposition to a Gnostic cosmos with its demonic lower
powers in what Col 2:8 labels “philosophy and empty deceit, according to human
tradition, according to elemental spirits of the universe.” By insisting that the risen
Christ as Wisdom embodies divine fullness to which believers are joined (Col 2:9–10)
Colossians seems to reject a piety that required souls trapped under cosmic powers
to escape this world through some combination of mystical visions and ascetic praxis
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(Col 2:16–23). Colossians undermines mythologizing which depicts the physical body
as a demonic trap to lock up the divine light by transitioning away from the phys-
ical body to that of the risen Christ. One might suggest that the resurrection motif
in Colossians streamlines moving into the heavenly world by eliminating the cosmic
distances between the divine and earthly typical of Gnostic myths. Colossians 3:1–4
grounds ethical transformation in an existing unity with the risen Lord, “So if you
have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated
…” (v. 1).
Ephesians, on the other hand, retains that sense of cosmic distance between
the heavenly realms and those predestined to share that heavenly inheritance. But
following the lead of Colossians, it imagines the “body of Christ” as embracing the
entire expanse with divine fullness:
God put his power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated
him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and
power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age
but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made
him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him
who fills all in all.
(Eph 1:20–23; NRSV)
And, like Colossians, Ephesians also depicts believers as made alive and seated with
the risen Christ in the present, “… [God] … made us alive together with Christ … and
raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus
…” (2:5b-6). Some interpreters have minimized the opening toward Gnostic cos-
mology in the depiction of Christ seated in the “heavenlies” above all the powers by
assuming that those lower entities are not demonic but integrated into God’s harmo-
nious governance of the universe. That hypothesis runs up against Eph 6:12, which
clearly identifies the opposition as “… the cosmic powers of this present darkness,
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
One Nag Hammadi tractate presents a dramatized picture of Wisdom’s fall from
unity with the Father into the material world and body where she is defiled by all
those lower powers like a prostitute. Incorporating quotations from Jeremiah 3:1–4,
Hosea 2:2–7, Ezekiel 16:23–26, and 1 Corinthians to describe that state, Exegesis on
the Soul transitions to divine redemption as marriage to a heaven-sent bridegroom.
It identifies the process of regeneration with the resurrection/ascent motif: “This is
resurrection from the dead. This is freedom from captivity. This is ascent to heaven.
This is the way up to the Father” (134, 12–15; Meyer 2007: 231).
KNOWLEDGE OF SEC RE T TE ACHING

Claims to possess secret religious teachings that can only be conveyed to a limited
group take many forms in Antiquity. Such teaching could require an oral transmission
from master to disciple that is never written down. Or it might involve possession of
a book said to have been written or inscribed by a figure of distant ages that has been
hidden away. Or it could take the form of a system by which interpreters discover
esoteric wisdom concealed within a well-known, exoteric text. None of the New
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Testament writings claim to be such long-lost books, but Jewish apocryphal writings
that circulated in the first century like the Books of Enoch or Jubilees did make such
claims. A version of the oral transmission from sage to disciple/successors model
appears in the Pharisees’ claim to base some Torah interpretation on what the elders
had received from Moses. The most pervasive exempla of recasting the reading of
familiar texts to elicit a hidden meaning involve discerning God’s plan of salvation in
prophetic or symbolic texts as in Daniel 7–12.
Fully actualized variants of each type of secret teaching appear in Gnostic texts
from the second and third centuries. Ancient figures to whom their revelations are
attached include Adam, Shem, Seth, and Zostrianos. Of course the “plan of salva-
tion” will not take the apocalyptic forms of coded historical survey directed toward
those who see themselves living at the end of days that is typical of Jewish apocrypha.
Instead an elaborate cosmogonic myth sets up the situation to which the Savior’s
revelatory descent responds. Some Gnostic apocalypses mention prior revelations
or admit an unspecified time lapse between the mythological set-up and the emer-
gence of a Gnostic race. Some even anticipate a quasi-apocalyptic end to the demonic
powers when all those possessing the divine light have been awakened and returned
to their origin (as in Nature of the Rulers 96,17–97,23; Denzey Lewis 2013: 230–42).
Typically, the master–disciple oral transmission model involves singling out the
recipient from a larger group of followers who lack the requisite spiritual maturity.
To make esoteric teaching available to the public or to the spiritually immature would
result in destruction rather than salvation. Where Matt 16:13–20 attributes special
divine revelation to Peter, the sayings collection in the Gospel of Thomas presents a
variant scenario (Stang 2016: 78–102). What Jesus tells Thomas in secret cannot be
transmitted to the others:
Jesus said to the disciples, ‘Compare me to something and tell me what I am

like.’ Simon Peter said to him, ‘You are like a just messenger.’ Matthew said to
him, ‘You are like a wise philosopher.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Teacher, my mouth
is utterly unable to say what you are like.’ Jesus said, ‘I am not your teacher.
Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring
that I have tended.’ And he took him, and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to
him. When Thomas came back to his friends, they asked him. ‘What did Jesus
say to you?’ Thomas said to them, ‘If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to
me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and
consume you.’
(GThom 13; Meyer 2007: 141)
The prologue to Gospel of Thomas refers to its collection of teachings as hidden

sayings of Jesus that Thomas recorded. Anyone who discovers their interpretation
“will not taste death”. Evidently such persons would be spiritually mature enough to
hear the words that Thomas refused to tell the other disciples.
GThom 108 picks up on the characterization of adepts as having drunk from
Jesus’s mouth. It even reverses the normal polarity in which the disciple is enjoined to
become like the master. Instead Jesus will become like that person to whom hidden
things are revealed. This soteriological comment has been inserted between versions
of two parables about the Kingdom familiar to all Christians, the shepherd who leaves
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99 sheep to seek and find the lost one (Matt 18:12–13; Lk 15:4–7) and the treasure
hidden in a field (Matt 13:44). Given its extensive repertoire of familiar sayings of
Jesus, Gospel of Thomas often figures in discussions of the historical Jesus and extra-
canonical preservation of early Jesus tradition. The canonical gospels acknowledge
the possibility of an oral teaching not represented in writing (Jn 20:30; 21:25). Jesus
teaches the disciples in private (Mark 4:33–4) or promises a post-resurrection enlight-
enment to correct their deficient understanding (Jn 14:25–6) or engages in teaching
about the Kingdom after Easter (Acts 1:3).
In its mix of what are variants of early Jesus traditions and other sayings that
represent more developed speculation about eternal life as discovery of the true
human being, Gospel of Thomas shines light on another group that makes fleeting
appearances in the gospels, women disciples. Most readers of the canonical gospels
see these women merely as auxiliaries who happen to overhear Jesus’s teaching while
looking after the material needs of the group (Lk 8:1–3; 10:38–42). However, a
few stories present women as recipients of teaching in their own right: an unnamed
Samaritan woman (Jn 4:4–42), Mary sister of Martha (Lk 10:38–42), Martha sister
of Mary and Lazarus (Jn 11:1–44); and also as having encountered the risen Jesus
(Matt 28:9–10; Jn 20:11–18). Though one could hardly make the presence of women
disciples itself a Gnostic motif, later Gnostic texts evidently do so, placing them
among the enlightened disciples.
GThom 21 attributes to Mary Magdalene the question which elicits an important
series of sayings on what disciples are like. Salome is presented as one filled with
light because she has recovered the primordial unity which constitutes salvation
(GThom 61). Though these sayings treat the presence of women as unproblematic,
the concluding saying (GThom 114) takes a surprising turn. Jesus rebuffs Simon
Peter’s demand to banish Mary because women are not worthy of salvation (life). In
response Jesus promises a transgender operation by which having become male, Mary
can become a living spirit like the male disciples. Some scholars suggest that this final
exchange was a later addition to the collection in response to controversy over the
role of women as spiritual guides. A more extended variant of the controversy over
Mary as recipient of Jesus’s hidden teaching turns up in a Gnostic revelation dialogue
claiming to incorporate teaching that Jesus had given to Mary Magdalene privately,
the Gospel of Mary (Perkins 1993: 182–3).
In addition to challenging assumptions about whether or not a literal reading of
the teachings of Jesus in the gospels actually conveys the insight necessary for salva-
tion, GThom poses another question: who is spiritually enlightened? Not everyone
is capable of the secret wisdom found there (Perkins 1993: 58–73). The question
of spiritual maturity is not limited to interpretation of esoteric sayings. St. Paul,
himself, mocked the pretentious factionalism of Christians in Corinth by suggesting
that while he did teach wisdom, he would not do so among them. Their immaturity
makes doing so impossible (1 Cor 2:6–16). When pressured by other alleged apostles
to defend his credentials, Paul appeals to his own heavenly vision and audition of
words which cannot be spoken (2 Cor 12:1–6). Paul’s reluctance to speak about audi-
tory visions, whether entirely sincere or a bit of rhetorical sarcasm, provided oppor-
tunity for later Christians to imagine the content of such an apocalyptic journey.
A Gnostic version was found at Nag Hammadi quite different from the Christian
“Vision of Paul” which circulated in a Latin version during the middle ages.
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R ITUAL RECOVERY OF TRU E HU M ANITY

Discovering the inner divinity of the human person requires more than finding truths
concealed in words of Jesus or learning secret revelations of the risen One. The “inner
human being” is dissociated from the soul that represents passions associated with the
physical body. Reflections on that situation can be expressed in various forms: philo-
sophical, as in Stoic reason taking charge of desires and willing; eschatological, as
in the soul’s departure from the body at death; mystical, as the consequence of a
visionary experience, or ritual activities. All of these possibilities are represented in
speculative Gnostic treatises and have traces in the New Testament as well. Another
mytheme that is used to represent a recovery of the original Human attributes the
disturbances caused by erotic passions to the splitting apart of a human being who
was originally androgynous (Plato, Symposium 189e-192e). The story of Adam and
Eve provided the seeds for considerable speculation in Gnostic texts. In one example,
the demonic rulers extract the “Spirit” which had come from above to enliven their
material/psychic creation when they extract the “rib” from his side. Adam acknow-
ledges that spiritual power when he calls Eve “Mother of the living”: “For she is my
mother. She is physician, woman, one who has given birth” (Nature of the Rulers
89,15–17; Meyer 2007: 193).
To be healed this proto-human requires both dissociation from his material self
and reunification with the divine. The spiritual soul must disentangle itself from
the passions and desires of the body in order recover a primal unity with the heav-
enly spiritual power represented by the spiritual Eve. By the mid-second century CE
Valentinian Gnostic groups had an elaborate ritual practice that culminated in the
“Bridal Chamber,” apparently celebrating the soul’s reunion with an angelic coun-
terpart that had never fallen into the material world (Denzey Lewis 2013: 63–99).
Whether or not this ritual included the marital union of male and female partners,
as suggested in Gospel of Philip 70,9–22, remains unclear. Though no such ritual
appears in the New Testament, Eph 5:22–33 expands the traditional household code
subordination of wife to husband with images of Christ and the Church (compare
Col 3:18–19; Perkins 1997: 126–37). Not only is Christ the bridegroom, he also
performs the task of the bride’s female attendants in cleansing her in the pre-wedding
bath so that she can be presented to him “spotless and holy”. Baptism is the ritual
preliminary to the unification with Christ, the bridegroom.
Rather than serving as the indispensable entry into a process of ritual transform-
ation, baptism, itself, might be experienced as the return to the true, spiritual human
being. The baptism of Jesus in the Jordan occasioned considerable speculation in
the second and third centuries. One fragment of a Valentinian thanksgiving prayer
suggests that just as Jesus at the Jordan united what descended from the realm of light
with the Spirit, so those baptized will be united with their heavenly counterparts: “You
who have united perfect light with the Holy Spirit, unite the angels also with us, as
images” (Gospel of Philip 58,10–14; Meyer 2007: 166). The baptismal formula to
which Paul alludes in Gal 3:26–28 proclaims that for those clothed with Christ in
baptism the social and ethnic dualisms of slave–free and Jew–Greek are erased along
with the gender division of “male and female” from Gen 1:27. Paul’s use of the for-
mula to advance an argument that Christ believers are not under the Law provides
no indication of how the ritual itself framed the new being in Christ. Other echoes of
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this formulary in Paul do not incorporate erasing the gender division of Genesis (1
Cor 12:13; Col 3:11).
Paul’s preferred baptismal catechesis appears to be the symbolic incorporation
into the death and resurrection of Christ (Rom 6:3–4; Col 3:1–4). Its consequences
for the believer are played out in the moral life rather than in recovering a divine
inner self. Paul’s letters have no elements of the mythic superstructure by which
later Gnostic speculation connected the Savior, the true heavenly human being,
and the embodied, death-bound figure of Adam. Paul is content to label the Adam-
figure a “type of the one to come” who will undo Adam’s transgression and bring
life to all (Rom 5:12–17; 1 Cor 15:20–28). His eschatological scenario of resur-
rection as the culminating triumph when in Christ all things are returned to God
in 1 Cor 15 has no place for the spiritual remaking of the self that is envisaged in
Gnostic ritual.
But 2 Corinthians presents a small opening for what will be the other two ritual
patterns of second-and third-century Gnostic texts: mystical vision and a post-
mortem ascent of the soul past the guardians of the material universe. In response to
the counter-claims of opponents, Paul makes an ironic reference to his own visionary
experiences in 2 Cor 12:1–5 that involves an ascent into at least three heavens.
Though Paul, himself, refuses to present details, a later Gnostic author created a
version that takes the apostle beyond the third heaven up even to heavens eight,
where he is welcomed by the Twelve, ninth and finally, tenth, the dwelling of Gnostic
fellow spirits (Apocalypse of Paul, Denzey Lewis 2013: 234–7). Rituals associated
with visionary ascent do not appear in these examples. Another example from the
Nag Hammadi collection, Zostrianos presents an upward ascent enabled by a series
of spiritual baptisms and seals at each level until the seer enters the highest level of
reality as fully perfected (Denzey Lewis 2013: 250–3).
While the visions of 2 Cor 12 occurred during Paul’s lifetime, he recasts the post-
mortem eschatology of 1 Cor 15 to suggest a transformation upon death in 2 Cor
5:1–5 that involves stripping off the mortal body. Gnostics who associate the body
with the passions which disturb the psyche imagined that to get beyond the material
world meant defeating demonic powers representative of the passions. A fragmentary
section of the Gospel of Mary (15,1–17,9) appears to have set out such a scheme. She
received this teaching through a visionary experience. Other Gnostic sources suggest
a ritual associated with death to enable the soul’s final transformation (1 Apocalypse
of James 32,28–38,11).
Scholars acknowledge diversity of expressions that Christians gave to their
faith that salvation had broken into the world through a revelation of divinity
in Jesus. Key elements in the configurations that took shape in various Gnostic
systems of the second and third centuries are emerging in the New Testament
period. Though much in later Gnostic speculative mythology cannot be derived
from the New Testament directly, historians must ask whether Gnostic groups
would have formed without that larger Christian world. It seems not. Though
the power of the mythic structures of Gnostic religious forms would give birth to
another global religious gnosis, Manichaeism, in the mid-third century. Once again
a human prophet, founder, proclaimed the reunion of the soul with its Light Form
from the divine world (Stang 2016: 145–84).
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REFERENCES
Denzey Lewis, Nicola. 2013. Introduction to Gnosticism. Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds.
King, Karen L. 2006. The Secret Revelation of John. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Meyer, Marvin. 2007. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures. New York: HarperCollins.
Perkins, Pheme. 1993. Gnosticism and the New Testament. Minneapolis: Fortress.
——— 1997. Ephesians. Nashville: Abingdon.
Stang, Charles M. 2016. Our Divine Double. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
ON ANCIENT “GNOSTICISM” AS A

PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY
Michael A. Williams
I NTRODUCTION: ANCIE NT AM B IG U ITY
In modern times the words “gnostic” and “gnosticism” have been applied to a
dizzying hodgepodge of things, from political movements (Voegelin 1968), to literary
figures (Grimstad 2002), to liberal Protestants (Lee 1987), to American anti-abortion
theologies (Bloom 1992), and many more. Why? In large measure, because the label
“gnostic” has been laden with denotative ambiguity throughout its history, beginning
with the term’s first uses in early Christian circles.
Morton Smith pointed out that the Greek term gnōstikos, “gnostic,” is found as
early as Plato (Politicus 258e–267a) and used by a handful of other philosophical fig-
ures over the next few centuries with connotations of “knowledge-related, leading to
knowledge (gnōsis), capable of knowledge” (Smith 1981). It was not a label wielded
as a slur against opponents.
References by the apostle Paul (e.g., 1 Cor 8:1–2, 7; 13:2) show that in early Jesus
movement circles spiritual “knowledge,” gnōsis, could be valued but also disputed as
far as its implications. The pseudo-Pauline writing 1 Timothy (probably in the early
second century CE) warns against “gnōsis falsely so-called” (6:20), revealing conflict
over the term. By the second century CE the cognate term gnōstikos was also used
positively as a self-description but also negatively against theological opponents.
Certain Christians referred to themselves as gnōstikoi, apparently adapting termin-
ology from the philosophical tradition as mentioned above. Irenaeus of Lyons (180
CE), in his “Exposure and Refutation of Knowledge (gnosis) Falsely So-Called,” con-
ventionally known as Against Heresies (= A.H.), mentions a teacher in Rome named
Marcellina and says that persons in her following “called themselves gnōstikoi” (A.H.
1.25.6). Another important source, the Refutation of All Heresies, possibly, though
not certainly, authored by Hippolytus of Rome (Litwa 2016), mentions persons who
“call themselves gnōstikoi”: (1) a group that the author of the Refutation prefers to
label “Naassenes” (from their emphasis on Naas, Hebrew for “serpent”; Ref. 5.2–11),
and (2) in Ref. 5.23.3 the followers of a certain Justin, and possibly including other
groups (Williams 1996; 2005b). However, at least of the Naassenes the author states
that they claim to be “the only true Christians” (Ref. 5.9.22). So “Christians” was
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— On ancient “Gnosticism” as problematic —
apparently their self-designation as far as religious group whereas gnōstikoi probably

indicated a quality much like, say, a modern Catholic or Protestant might refer to
herself also as a Christian “intellectual,” or “interested in deeper insights.” Origen of
Alexandria (third cent. CE) says that the anti-Christian writer Celsus (second cent. CE)
had referred to “some” among the Christians who “call themselves gnōstikoi” (Origen,
Against Celsus 5.61), though precisely whom Celsus had in mind is unclear. One of
Origen’s predecessors, Clement of Alexandria (writing ca. 200 CE), in one instance
mentions that the followers of a certain Prodicus “falsely call themselves gnōstikoi”
(Stromateis 3.30.1), and in two other instances Clement refers disapprovingly to
unnamed persons using this self- description (Strom. 4.114.2–116.1; Paedagogus
1.52.2). Yet elsewhere he can compliment “those who say that they are knowledge-
able (gnōstikoi),” observing that they are like athletes running “the gnōstikos road” –
i.e., the path of knowledge (Eclogae Propheticae 28.1–3). And it is well known that
of surviving Christian sources from the first three centuries it is Clement himself who
most frequently advocates the self-label, identifying the “gnostic” as the Christian
spiritual hero (Völker 1952; Lilla 1971; Havrda et al. 2012).
But to others gnōstikos came to be wielded negatively as a demonic claim by false
teachers. The first clear suggestion of such an attack, though without the adjective
gnōstikos itself, is 1 Tim 6:20, mentioned above. But the supposed content of the
“falsely named ‘knowledge’ ” mentioned there is somewhat unclear, unless it is to
be inferred from things attacked elsewhere in the writing (contentiousness; teaching
myths and “genealogies”; rejecting marriage and forbidding certain foods; and so
forth; see Smith 2014, 27–34).
A more explicit and extensive attack on “gnostics” appeared in around 180 CE in
Irenaeus’s Against Heresies. As the original title indicates (see above), Irenaeus was
appealing to 1 Tim 6:20 as apostolic legitimation of his polemic. He adapted con-
tent from an earlier “catalogue against all sects/schools (haireseis)” mentioned by
the Christian apologist Justin Martyr (1 Apology 26.8), but his five-volume Against
Heresies constitutes the first known “blacklist” of its size (to borrow the designation
in Smith 2014).
But what is to be emphasized here is that Irenaeus’s various uses of the term gnōstikoi
laid the groundwork for confusion to the present day. For he refers (1) at one point to
“the school (hairesis) called ‘gnostic’ (gnōstikē)” (A.H. 1.11.1); (2) at another point
to persons who “called themselves gnōstikoi” (1.25.6) –i.e., followers of Marcellina
(see above), apparently (Irenaeus is somewhat ambiguous here) associated with
doctrines of Carpocrates of Egypt; (3) in A.H. 1.29.1, to “a multitude of gnōstikoi”
who sprouted like mushrooms among the “Simonians,” including devotees of a myth-
ology summarized in 1.29.2–4 (and other variations in 1.30–31); finally, (4) Irenaeus
mentions gnōstikoi in several other places without distinct reference to any specific
sect (often: “and the rest of the gnōstikoi”), evidently as a shorthand for essentially
all of the “heresies” he is attacking (see Williams 1996: 36).
Irenaeus’s Against Heresies was a foundation for catalogues composed by
other anti-“heresy” writers in later centuries. Most later anti-“heresy” writers
listed “heresies” under the names based on alleged leaders or on some doctrine
ascribed to the sect (“Valentinians,” “Basilideans,” “Ophites,” “Sethians,” etc.),
with “gnostics” sometimes mentioned as only one “heresy” among these others.
At other times “gnostic” was a macro-category encompassing several of these
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— Michael A. Williams —
“heresies.” Other heresiologists listed various “heresies” such as those above, but
avoided use of the term “gnostic” altogether. There was a revival of interest in, and
new editions of, Irenaeus’s Against Heresies in the Reformation period. Down to
modern times, Against Heresies was one of the principal sources cited regarding
ancient “gnostics” (see Williams 2016).
Given the above, it is not surprising that “gnostics” became such a contested label
in modern usage. The rise of “history of religion” research in the late nineteenth cen-
tury and the discovery or new awareness of manuscript evidence widened the appli-
cation of the category “gnostic/gnosticism” even further. For example, some now used
the label also for extra-Christian phenomena such as ancient Greco-Egyptian litera-
ture associated with the revealer god Hermes/Thoth, the “Hermetica” (Copenhaver
1992), and for the sacred writings and practices of the Mandaean people, whose
communities survive today (e.g., Buckley 2002).
The discovery in 1945 by villagers in southern Egypt of several fourth-fifth-century
CE books (codices), the Coptic Nag Hammadi manuscripts, was phenomenally
important (for translations and bibliographies, see Meyer and Robinson 2008). Their
gradual publication, along with the long-delayed publication of the related Berlin
Codex 8502 (Meyer and Robinson 2008), generated new interest in descriptions of
“heresies” in the ancient blacklists. Spotlights were turned on what was dubbed the
“Nag Hammadi Gnostic Library,” or the “Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics,”
or the “Gnostic Gospels” (e.g., Doresse 1960 [1958]; Pagels 1979; Robinson 1988;
2000). The codices did offer confirmation of some elements of reports in Against
Heresies and other ancient catalogues, since some of the Nag Hammadi tractates pro-
mote mythologies with definite similarities to those attacked by Irenaeus and others.
Yet the tractates do not always fit so neatly into the “heresy” pigeonholes of the
ancient blacklists. Moreover, Nag Hammadi content has cast doubt on some long-
cherished generalizations about alleged “gnostic” ethics and lifestyle, or views about
the body and the material world, or about salvation, or treatment of scripture, or
other supposed “gnostic” characteristics. Inconveniently, although the noun “know-
ledge” and verb “know” appear in these tractates, the word “gnostic” is absent.
CATEGO RIE S
It is important to underscore that the debate is not about whether we have data.
Ancient texts, mythologies or doctrines often grouped under the label “gnostic”
did exist; the issue has been how to organize the data. We think in categories, and
spend much time acting in accordance with them. Categories are necessary for both
sanity and safety, but some categories can be a problem. Today we are usually con-
scious of such hazards in areas of “race” or “ethnicity” and also “religion.” When
we expect felonious behavior due only to racial profiling or mistake a poisonous
mushroom because it looks so much like an edible one, categorizing has gone awry.
When does thinking of persons as a group actually help us to understand them?
Contrariwise, when does the grouping of persons into a category contribute precisely
to misunderstanding because we approach them with unfounded presuppositions,
stereotypes?
Approaches to the category of ancient “gnosticism” have broadly been of two
sorts: either more typological or more social-historical. In a typological approach one
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is grouping according to similar thematic or structural features even among examples

with no social-historical connection. For example, scholars have compared examples
of “mysticism” from “Christian,” “Jewish,” “Islamic,” “Buddhist” or other historical
traditions; or “apocalyptic”-type communities in different cultures; or so-called “fun-
damentalist” versions of traditions. Typology can often be useful as a heuristic tool and
is employed in various ways by psychologists, linguists, archaeologists, sociologists,
and other research fields. Max Weber famously employed “ideal” or “pure types” in
his analysis of human societies past and present, such as types of authority, political
domination, economic order, religious actors (e.g., magician, priest, or prophet), reli-
gious practices (e.g., asceticism, mysticism), and so forth (Weber 1968).
In the social-historical approach, grouping is according to features that indicate
some kind of direct social-historical lineage. Textbooks with chapters on “major world
religions” are a typical example of this on a wider scale. Modern scholars sometimes
do raise objections to the “essentializing” of “world religions,” as though “religions”
come in capsules with fixed boundaries (e.g., Masuzawa 2005). There is debate even
about treating “religion” itself as though it were an “essence” independent of our
having invented it as a category for study (Smith 1978). However, even some who
have objected to such essentializing of “religion” or “religions” may refer to a “cumu-
lative tradition” (Smith 1991 [1962]) embodied in the aggregate cultural history of
those inspired by the Buddha, or Jesus, or Guru Nanak, or Muhammad, and so forth.
In other words, there obviously exist and have existed populations of significant size,
and with histories, who self-identify in such ways.
David Brakke draws much the same distinction, referring to “heuristic”/“inter-
pretive categories” used to “analyze and label modes of religious thought and prac-
tice” (e.g., “apocalyptic”) vs. “social categories” that are seen to correspond “to how
people actually saw and organized themselves” (Brakke 2010: 16). But he correctly
cautions that “in actual practice nearly all the categories that scholars of religion use
are a hybrid of these kinds” (17). Such hybridity will be detected in some examples
below illustrating overall approaches to “Gnosticism” in modern scholarship.
“GNOSTICISM” OR “GNO S IS ” AS A TYP E

Typological approaches to defining and studying “Gnosticism” (or “Gnosis,” as many
German scholars prefer) have been around for many generations. For example, the
famous historian of Christianity, Adolf von Harnack, mapped out a lengthy typology
of “Gnostic” theological features (Harnack 1901 [1893]: 257–63; King 2003: 62–3;
Williams 2016: 15). Harnack was not original in proposing most of these features, and
later typologies would repeat, prune or amplify his list. Among features he proposed
were: distinction of the supreme God from the creator God of the Jewish scripture;
evil is inherent in matter; mythology of divine “aeons” who emanated from supreme
God; in Christ, a clear distinction between a divine being and the inhabited earthy
human; distinction between people who are “spirituals” (pneumatics), others who
are “soulish” (psychics), and others “materials” (hylics); and two resulting ethical
paths: either strict asceticism, or libertinism. He famously insisted that Marcionites,
whom Irenaeus had incarcerated within his blacklist of “gnōsis falsely so-called,” do
not belong to this typological category. For example, Marcion taught no mythology
of divine “aeons” as emanations of the supreme God’s perfection.
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There is not space to mention all of the attempts at typological definitions of

“gnosticism” in generations since Harnack, but four examples illustrate some of
the important issues involved. The four examples are studies by Hans Jonas, Birger
Pearson, Christoph Markschies, and April DeConick:
1. In the early 20th century the philosopher Hans Jonas developed a typological
construct of “gnosticism” that was to have wide influence even into the twenty-
first century. Jonas discussed various historical movements defined in his day as
“gnostic,” and so like Harnack he was in essence beginning with pre-selected data.
These included most of the figures from Irenaeus’s blacklist (e.g., Simon Magus,
Menander, Carpocrates, Saturninus, Cerinthus, Valentinians), and from other
heresiologists (e.g., Naassenes, Justin “the gnostic”). But Jonas’s prominent case
studies also included the “Hymn of the Pearl” from the Acts of Thomas, Hermetica,
Manichaeism, and Mandaean literature. He had begun this work prior to the Nag
Hammadi discovery but was able to discuss some of those writings in later editions
(Jonas 1964 [1934]: 377–418; Jonas 1963: 290–319). Jonas abstracted from these
data what he considered the most characteristic themes and symbols –e.g., alien-
ation, light vs. darkness, falling, forlornness, anxiety, homesickness, awaking from
sleep (1963: 48–99). These expressed the “fundamental experience, the mode of
feeling, and the vision of reality distinctively characteristic of the gnostic mind”
(1963: 48).
Unlike Harnack, Jonas included Marcion as a notable “gnostic” specimen.
Marcion had often been marked among “gnostics” since the time of Irenaeus, and
Marcion did distinguish between the supreme God and the creator. Although Jonas
readily acknowledged differences between Marcion and “the general gnostic stream”
(1963: 138), he felt Marcion fit a focal element in his typology: the concept of the
“Alien” (1963: 49–50). There is a twist: although for “gnostics” typically, says Jonas,
humans feel “alienation” from this world because of a divine element in them, in
Marcion’s case only the supreme God is “alien” to the cosmos; humans belong to
the creator god’s realm; they do not possess spirits belonging by emanation to the
supreme God. They are saved only by that “Alien” God’s grace (1963: 138).
As mentioned earlier, typologies can be useful as heuristic, exploratory tools that
bring into bolder relief dimensions that might have been less noticed or not noticed
at all. Sociologists may even employ them predictively –e.g., a researcher might the-
orize that “apocalyptic” groups will likely behave in a certain way because “this type
usually has.” But typologies must be treated as tentative and subjected to continual
correction in the light of the historical data from which they are abstracted.
When their tentative, heuristic character is forgotten, ideal types can ossify into
stereotypes, lose their utility and become obstacles to understanding. Hans Jonas’s
depiction of “The Gnostic Religion” came to be treated in this way, especially after
the availability of his English-language distillation (Jonas 1963). Whatever Jonas’s
own intention, readers could be distracted from the multiple traditions from which
features had been abstracted, and imagine them as properties of a single “religion.”
Jonas’s portrait of “the Gnostic religion” arguably often fails to match critical evi-
dence from original sources like texts from Nag Hammadi (Williams 1996; Waldstein
2000; King 2003). Yet original sources are nevertheless still sometimes read with the
assumption that elements of Jonas’s typology surely must be present in them because
they are “Gnostic” texts.
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2. The important work of Birger Pearson is more grounded in close textual ana-
lysis and historical method than was Jonas’s, although Pearson does invoke typ-
ology. His overall strategy is evident in his textbook Ancient Gnosticism (2007; cf.
Pearson 1994; 2005). In his opening chapter he abstracts the “essential features” of
“Gnosticism” (2007: 12–14): (1) the centrality of special knowledge (gnosis) as a
prerequisite for salvation; (2) “a dualistic way of looking at God, humanity, and the
world”; (3) “the construction of elaborate myths through which revealed gnosis is
transmitted”; and (4) “innovation and reinterpretation,” specifically of Jewish trad-
ition and Platonist philosophy.
Pearson’s book surveys a large number of texts, teachers, and traditions, including
many from the blacklists of Irenaeus and other heresiologists: Simon Magus,
Menander, Saturninus, Nicolaitans, Cerinthus, Carpocratians, Justin the Gnostic,
Ophites and Ophians, and Cainites (2007: 25– 50), Basilideans, Valentinians,
Naassenes, and others (134–209). Pearson devotes two chapters (51–133) discussing
a collection of texts from Nag Hammadi and elsewhere that represent what he calls
“Sethian or Classic Gnosticism.” This approach, shared by many other scholars,
adapts a grouping of “Sethian” sources proposed decades earlier by Hans Martin
Schenke (Schenke 1974; 1981). To “Sethian or Classic Gnosticism” Pearson assigns
the Secret Book (Apocryphon) of John (= SBJ), The Apocalypse of Adam, Trimorphic
Protennoia, Hypostasis of the Archons, Thought of Norea, The Holy Book of the
Great Invisible Spirit (aka: Gospel of the Egyptians), Melchizedek (though he deems it
only “Sethianized”; 2007: 83), Three Steles of Seth, Zostrianos, Allogenes, Marsanes
(Pearson, 2007: 52–94; for translations see Meyer and Robinson 2008; Robinson
1988), along with an “Untitled Text” found in a bundle of manuscript pages known
as the Bruce Codex (Schmidt and MacDermot 1978: 226–77), and two more recently
discovered Coptic writings in Codex Tchacos, the Gospel of Judas and an Allogenes
quite different from the Nag Hammadi tractate with that title (Meyer, 2008: 755–75;
Kasser and Wurst 2008; Jenott 2011).
This “Sethian/Classic Gnostic” classification illustrates the social-historical dimen-
sion in Pearson’s method, and thus a methodological hybridity mentioned by David
Brakke (see above). For “Sethian/Classic Gnosticism” Pearson turns from typological
features (dualism, salvation by gnosis, etc.) to shared specific content (common jargon,
mythic terminology and structures) that suggests historical connections. Interlinking
argot includes, for example: a divine figure named “Barbelo,” a set of four divine
lights named (with variant spellings) Harmozel, Oroaiel, Davithe, and Eleleth, a chief
lower creator named “Ialdabaoth,” and others. Every text does not always contain all
items, but if enough are present, especially with the right constellations and dynamics,
then the likelihood of a genetic, social-historical relationship of at least some kind
is enhanced. Pearson finds (as had Schenke) some “Sethian or Classic Gnostic” spe-
cial features also in certain heresiological accounts, such as Epiphanius’s accounts of
the “Sethians” and “Archontics” (Panarion 39–40), and above all, Irenaeus’s descrip-
tion of the mythological notions in A.H. 1.29–31 (see below). Employing the same
kind of analysis Pearson gathers other sources into a “Valentinian” subset (Pearson
2007: 145–89). On the other hand, he devotes a chapter to seventeen further “Coptic
Writings of Uncertain Affiliation” (210–55).
Under “Gnosticism” Pearson also includes the third-century CE prophet Mani
(2007: 292–313), whose very successful new movement expanded from Babylonia
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west to the Mediterranean world and east across Asia to China (Lieu 1992).
Pearson considers that in Manichaeism “Gnosticism became a world religion”
(Pearson 2007: 293). Finally, he discusses the Mandaeans, a small but still living
population whose ancestors some scholars trace back to the Jordan Valley in Late
Antiquity (Buckley 2002). Pearson styles them “the sole surviving remnant of ancient
Gnosticism” (2007: 315). He does not view “Gnosticism” as merely a cross-cultural
type, such as one might speak of, say, “mysticism” across many global cultures. He sees
it as a single “religion” (cf. Pearson 1994; 2005), it is “a religion of self-realization”
(Pearson 2007: 335, 339).
Nevertheless, his typological rules do exclude some candidates that others include.
For instance, Pearson’s typology eliminates Marcion, the “Hymn of the Pearl,” and the
Hermetica, all three of which Jonas had highlighted as case studies of “The Gnostic
Religion.” Pearson explicitly announces that he will omit Marcion (2007: 20), pre-
sumably for reasons similar to Harnack’s (see above). He argues that the “Hymn of
the Pearl” and the Acts of Thomas in which it appears simply exemplify “the theology
of Syrian Christianity” (260). He is more ambivalent about the Hermetica. This trad-
ition bears some resemblance to “Gnosticism,” but he considers the Hermetica closer
to forms of Platonism: “in Hermeticism there is no idea that the cosmos is bad,” the
Hermetic Demiurge “is not an evil or ignorant being,” and lacking is “the Gnostic
idea that human beings are strangers in a hostile world” (276).
Pearson briefly mentions medieval “Gnostic-looking dualist groups of heretics”
such as Paulicians, Bogomils, and “Cathars,” as well as modern “Gnostic churches”
and “New Age” currents (338–9), but adds that these are not descendants (like the
Mandaeans) of ancient “Gnosticism.” They are merely evidence of the “resonance” of
certain “Gnostic” ideas (339).
As mentioned above, Pearson gives special weight to connections between content
in Irenaeus, A.H. 1.29–31 and mythological structures and jargon found in sources
he classifies as “Sethian or Classic Gnosticism.” The myth in A.H. 1.29 has unmis-
takable similarities to the first part of the SBJ, and important correspondences also
with A.H. 1.30–31 are found in SBJ as well as Coptic sources from Nag Hammadi
and elsewhere. Early in this essay we noted Irenaeus’s references to (1) “the school
(hairesis) called ‘gnostic’ (gnōstikē)” (A.H. 1.11.1), to (2) persons who “called them-
selves gnōstikoi” (1.25.6), and to (3) “a multitude of gnōstikoi” who sprouted like
mushrooms from the “Simonians” (1.29.1). Irenaeus clearly intended to include
among these gnōstikoi the mythologies summarized in 1.29–31 (and probably others,
as we will see). Pearson conflates all three passages as referring to one special “school,”
the “Sethian or Classic Gnostics” (2007: 9–10). Other scholars reject that confla-
tion. As will be seen below, sorting out implications in the three passages remains a
point of contention regarding the category of ancient “gnosticism.” The only passage
in Irenaeus’s entire work where he says that people “called themselves gnōstikoi”
(1.25.6) pertains not to the mythology in 1.29, but rather to followers of Marcellina
in Rome, whom Irenaeus appears to group with Carpocratians. However, Pearson
actually questions whether Carpocrates fits his typological profile for “a Gnostic,
even though some of his followers are later reported to have referred to themselves
as Gnostics” (2007: 41).
Pearson’s reputation as an expert in Nag Hammadi and related studies is well
deserved and although details may be debated, his historical analysis of individual
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sources represents serious empirical research. The relevant issue here is whether the
category “gnosticism” significantly enhances that empirical research or instead poses
an unnecessary obstacle. We have noted that Pearson groups evidence through two
methods: typology overall, but social-historical classification of subgroups based on
shared jargon and mythic details. The second methodological strategy is the more
concrete, and an even stricter rendition of it will be discussed in the next section.
By definition, typology leans more toward the abstract and is more dependent on
judgment on the part of the abstracter.
Might Pearson’s judgment in abstracting four “essential features” of “Gnosticism”
(see above) constitute distracting baggage? The first proposed feature is that “know-
ledge (gnosis) … is a prerequisite for salvation” (2007: 12). This is a very frequent
assertion when distinguishing “gnostics” from others. Unquestionably, revelation
and knowledge of its truth are vital in most or all of the sources Pearson counts as
“gnostic.” However, knowledge of divine truth is the channel of salvation in most
religious communities that stress revelation (cf. Pétrement 1990: 8–9). Most forms of
Christianity proclaim a founding myth of Christ as Savior. However, knowledge of
truth may be one of many essential, organically interconnected elements in religious
devotion. “Gnosis as means of salvation” does not work well for either Manichaeans
or Mandaeans, for example. Knowledge/revelation is a theme in both, but both are
heavily invested in ritual, as Pearson himself acknowledges (Pearson 2007: 306, 323–
6; BeDuhn 2000; Buckley 2002). And he mentions the vital role of rituals (variously
baptisms, sacred meals, last rites, and others) also in many of the “gnostic” groups
that he surveys (e.g., Pearson 2007: 33–4, 44, 72–5, 81, 85, 93, 167, 170–2, 179–80,
189, 232). Moreover, his marking of salvation by gnosis as an essential feature of
“Gnosticism” sometimes obtrudes as a stumbling block. For instance, he insists that
the Paraphrase of Shem in Nag Hammadi Codex VII “is clearly a Gnostic text,” yet “it
is curious that the term gnosis (‘knowledge’) never appears in it” and “faith” is used
instead. He asserts that “faith” in this writing must carry “a sense equivalent to ‘know-
ledge’ ” and wonders if this is the result of “Christian influence” (206). Conceivable.
But is it necessary? Has not imposing on Paraphrase of Shem expectations built from
Pearson’s typological abstraction created an artificial problem?
The narrow abstraction of “knowledge” as prerequisite for salvation also distracts
from the obvious importance of morality and avoidance of sin in the salvation
process in so many of these texts. Pearson touches on this in places (e.g., Pearson
2007: 141, 182, 306, 326), but not to the extent justified (Desjardins 1990; Tite 2009;
Williams 2013). Serious research has long ago abandoned erroneous (anti-Jewish)
caricatures of Judaism as a religion in which one is “saved by one’s works” and of
Christianity as a religion in which “belief alone is necessary for salvation.” Both are
misleading stereotypes that appreciably distort. Modern research is only beginning to
learn the same lesson with regard to so-called “gnostic” traditions. Are we more likely
to miss entirely the organic relationship of multiple factors in devotees’ experiences
of the process of salvation when we abstract “knowledge” as “the Gnostic” path to
salvation?
Pearson’s three other “essential features” similarly entail some accurate
observations. But again the overarching question is what, if any, added ana-
lytical value ensues from building all of these features into something called
“Gnosticism”? His fourth feature, “innovation and reinterpretation,” specifically
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of Jewish tradition and Platonist philosophy (Pearson 2007: 14–15), is apposite

but it is also a general characterization that fits much of ancient Christianity.
The second and third (“a dualistic way of looking at God, humanity, and the
world”; “the construction of elaborate myths through which revealed gnosis is
transmitted”; 2007: 12) probably supply greatest analytical leverage, although in
most sources the two seem aspects of a single feature. One or more lower creators
distinguished from the highest divinity and the revelation of this through origin
myths do constitute a remarkable characteristic shared by most of the sources
Pearson discusses. Moreover, this issue was unmistakably one that attracted
opposition from many religious opponents. Some scholars have considered it the
defining characteristic of “Gnosticism” (e.g., Pétrement 1990: 30, 34). However,
these myths of lower creators come with remarkably different twists –e.g., varying
from creator angels fashioned by the supreme God (Saturninus; Pearson 2007: 35);
to well-intentioned creator divinities who achieve partial (Valentinian Demiurge;
Sabaoth in Hypostasis of the Archons; Pearson 2007: 158) or even complete salva-
tion (Justin’s Elohim; Pearson 2007: 44); to demonic creators whose destiny is said
or assumed to be destruction (e.g., Ialdabaoth in SBJ; on the diversity, cf. Williams
1996: 98–100).
It is one thing to select as a heuristic strategy a trait like distinguishing true God
from creator(s), then exploring variety and differing implications. It is quite another
to insist that we can appreciate the implications only by corralling all the variety into
a “single religion.”
3. In his brief volume Gnosis: An Introduction (2003), German scholar
Christoph Markschies contends that the plurality of approaches to ancient “gnos-
ticism” or “gnosis” as a category is actually appropriate, because the “unitary phe-
nomenon of ‘gnosis’ to which all reconstructions relate exists only in the form
of various typological constructions” (27). Unlike Pearson, Markschies does not
regard “gnosticism” as “a religion,” but prefers to stay with a typological model
that consists of eight ideas or motifs supposedly characteristic of the “theological
systems” in the category “gnosis” (16–17). With some wording condensed for
brevity’s sake, these eight ideas/motives are: (1) a completely otherworldly supreme
God; (2) other divine figures between this God and humans; (3) the world and
matter regarded as “evil creation,” resulting in the experience of “alienation of the
gnostic in the world”; (4) a distinct creator God, sometimes ignorant but some-
times also evil; (5) mythology of a divine element falling into an evil world and
slumbering in humans; (6) knowledge (gnosis) of this state, gained only through
a descended redeemer who then returns to the higher world; (7) redemption of
humans by means of knowledge of the God (or divine “spark”) in them; (8) ten-
dency toward dualisms regarding concept of God, opposition of spirit and matter,
and anthropology.
There is some overlap. For example, (8) essentially rewords and condenses several
of the others; (7) seems to restate the event in (6); (1) and (4) amount to the distinc-
tion between a supreme God and the creator of the world.
But a more pertinent observation is that when Markschies then presents “a his-
tory of the development of gnostic movements in antiquity” (17), a “fit” with his
model often requires adjustments. Most of the historical examples do agree on one
thing: some distinction between a supreme God and one or more lower creators,
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though Markschies acknowledges that this notion is found in popular Platonic phil-
osophy (64, 78). But among inexact fits: what is said of Menander’s doctrine includes
no mythology of a fallen, slumbering divine element in humans; salvation comes
through baptism that provides immortality (77). Basilides is tested against the model
and found lacking, because in what is known of his teaching, neither the material
cosmos nor its ruler is “fundamentally evil” (81). Basilides’s system is merely “on the
way towards becoming a ‘gnosis’ ” (80).
In his chapter on “The Great Systems of Ancient ‘Gnosis’ ” (85–100), Markschies
selects for discussion “above all the Marcionites, the Valentinians and the so-called
‘Barbelo-gnostics’ as an example of great ‘gnostic’ schools” (86). And yet he deems only
two of these truly “gnostic”: the so-called “Barbelo-gnostics” (94–7; i.e., in Irenaeus,
A.H. 1.29, SBJ; similar to Pearson’s “Sethian/Classic Gnostics”), and Valentinus’s
followers –but Valentinus himself does not fit the typology (90–4). Marcion, for his
part, “belongs only very indirectly in the history of ‘gnosis,’ because he was basically
a Christian thinker with a quite individual stamp,” though his “doctrine of two gods
… forced other ‘gnostics’ to expound their position more clearly” (86). But Marcion
taught no elaborate mythology. And the salvation of humans is dependent on the
goodness of the high God, not some “divine spark of light” within them (88).
While Pearson was somewhat ambivalent about Hermetic writings, Markschies
judges them “non-’gnostic’ ” (63–4). He also includes no mention of the Mandaeans,
whom Pearson regards as a living remnant of ancient “Gnosticism” (see above).
Instead, Markschies treats Manichaeism as the “culmination and conclusion of
‘gnosis’ ” (101–17). Although he states that “Mani’s teachings correspond fully” to
his typological model (105), Markschies’s own description reveals that the situation
is more complex. Divergent from the typology’s third motif, Mani viewed the world
as “not radically evil, but more of a place of purification,” because it “represents a
mixture of light and darkness” (106).
Of course, the abstraction of allegedly typical features from a set of historically
particular instances usually means exceptions –i.e., not every historical case will
manifest every feature of the ideal type, at least not always to the same degree. But
what level of accuracy do we have a right to expect? How many exceptions before
one questions the analytical advantage of a given typology?
4. April DeConick’s The Gnostic New Age (2016) is the most expansive example
to be mentioned here of typological construction of “gnosticism.” DeConick insists
on using “Gnosticism” in the singular, as a “countercultural spirituality” attested in
the ancient world but surviving in one form or another into the modern age, e.g., in
“New Age religion” (17). “Gnosticism” is not a single social movement or religion,
but rather a distinctive, “innovative concept,” “a new way to be religious,” the claim
to “a new kind of spiritual knowledge (gnosis)” (9).
DeConick’s hypothesizes that this “innovative religious identity” first emerged
among Greek and Jewish pilgrims to Egyptian temples who were escorted by
Egyptian priests on “soul journey” to meet the transcendent god Atum (54–7). The
experience stirred a questioning of the pilgrims’ ancestral religious traditions. They
fashioned new “religious ideas and practices of liberation and therapy” for ritual
control of traditional gods and personal empowerment as immortals (14). This spir-
ituality was manifested, she says, in the apostle Paul and the Gospel of John (108–61);
the Hermetic literature (79–90); Simon Magus and Menander (98–104, 149–50);
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“Sethians” (90–8, 187–91, 221–6); Ophians, Justinians, and Naassenes (209–21);

Valentinians (230–52); various writings from Nag Hammadi, along with the Gospel
of Judas from Codex Tchacos (297–308); Manichaeism (308–24); “Jeuian” reli-
gion inferred from the Books of Jeu (316–26); the Mandaeans (326–39); “Gnostic
awakenings” supposedly “evident in the emergence of the so- called Paulicians,
Bogomils, and Cathars” (347–8), in Renaissance fascination with Hermetica (348),
and in excitement over manuscript discoveries from the eighteenth century into the
twenty-first century (349).
DeConick contends that “five ideal characteristics” were understood from
Antiquity to define this “new type of spirituality” (11–12): (1) direct experiential
knowledge (gnosis) of a transcendent God; (2) unity with this God experienced
in “ecstatic states” that “were not always unbidden raptures but were carefully
choreographed in terms of ritual”; (3) conviction that humans possess “an innate
spiritual nature that is an extension of this transcendence” experienced in ritual
(spark of God; pneuma or spirit; “our permanent immortal aspect”), and that
survives bodily death but also enables restoration of “psychological and physical
wellness” during life; (4) countercultural, “transgressive talk that sets Gnostics
at odds with conventional religions”; (5) incorporation “into their religious
discussions everything but the kitchen sink” (Homer; Plato; magic; astrology;
ancient brain science; fantastic cosmologies), but with the location of “spiritual
authority in the individual’s soul or spirit.”
There are some similarities with the models of Pearson and Markschies –e.g., a
supremely transcendent God accessed by gnosis, and a divine element in humans.
But there are also dramatic differences. For example, DeConick does not list a dual-
istic characterization of the material world and human body as evil. To the contrary,
the notion in (3) above of a therapeutic role of gnosis in the here and now recurs
often in the book (e.g., 165–91). She refers to “dark lords” when oppressive cosmic
powers appear in sources, but an evil material cosmos is not a required feature in
her model.
DeConick’s expansive typology herds into its flock so many actors that the
question of analytical purchase eventually arises. Features (4) and (5), for example,
are remarkably broad. Transgressiveness is by definition contingent on context and
degree, as DeConick herself observes (273–4). She sees it in phenomena as diverse as
Paul (“he pitches his previous life as a Jew as nothing more to him now than shit”;
2016: 118; Philippians 3:8) and “aggressively countercultural” New Age movements
(343). Her fifth feature, also, is oddly imprecise: eclecticism gathering “everything but
the kitchen sink.”
Though typology has been a popular strategy for defining “gnostic” phenomena,
the challenge, as the few examples above reveal, is agreeing on what elements actually
best define the type. Thus, some scholars have abandoned typology and attempted a
more exclusively social-historical definition of “gnosticism.”
“ GNOSTICS” AS A SING L E HIS TO RICAL

GROUP OR M OVE M E NT
In 1995, Bentley Layton published a seminal article proposing a method that could
“be used to write a history of the Gnostics, and thus to define the term Gnosticism”
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(Layton 1995: 334). He suggested that “Gnosticism” be defined as an “inductive cat-

egory” (343) achieved by the sorting of data in five steps:
(1) First, collection of sources that mention the devotees “by their own professional
name … hoi Gnōstikoi” (340–1).
(2) Next, finding matches between these myths and content in other sources (341–
2). Results: the long-recognized match between Irenaeus A.H. 1.29 and part
of SBJ. In addition, Layton noted the philosopher Porphyry’s naming of a lec-
ture by his teacher Plotinus (Ennead 2.9) “Against the Gnōstikoi,” and claiming
that the Gnōstikoi used writings with titles now found for some Nag Hammadi
writings: Zostrianos, Allogenes, and a “Book of Zoroaster,” excerpted in a version
of SBJ (Life of Plotinus 16).
(3) Within writings identified in step (2), recognition of a “distinctive system of
mythographic features,” then gathering other sources with correspondences to
this. Results: ten further writings, essentially the ones from Schenke’s “Sethian
Gnostic” list, though Layton refined this somewhat (342), e.g., adding Thunder,
Perfect Mind (Meyer 2007: 367–78). Importantly, the Valentinians are excluded,
since they were only a “distinct mutation” of the “Gnostics,” an adaptation of the
“Gnostic school” (Against Heresies 1.11.1).
(4) Finding sources with features similar to the fourteen “Gnostic” works netted so far,
but under other names (Saturninus of Antioch, the “Sethians” and “Archontics”
as described by Epiphanius, and the “Audians” described by Theodore bar Konai
(343)).
(5) Layton’s last step is apparently to use the results of step (4) and return for a
second sorting through all sects by other names.
David Brakke, a former student of Layton’s, developed this method in The

Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (2010). His excellent
monograph addresses scholarly debate since Layton’s article, significantly elaborates
and refines Layton’s argument, and situates the resulting picture of “the Gnostics”
within the contentious history of divergent movements and emergent “orthodoxy”
over the second and third centuries CE. Brakke is “leery” of “Gnosticism” as a cat-
egory (2010: 31) although he still occasionally uses the term. He is certainly clear that,
like Layton, he means by “the Gnostics” only one historical “school of thought,” and
recommends abandoning the extra qualifier “Sethian” as not well established from
the ancient sources (31). Like Layton he gathers sources under the “Gnostic” tent on
the basis of shared mythic terminology and structures (what Brakke calls a shared
“authoritative story”) and ritual (42, 44). These features (the name “Barbelo,” etc.) are
basically the same ones that scholars since Schenke have used to delimit “Sethianism”
(e.g., Schenke 1981; Turner 1995; 2001), or “Classic Gnosticism” (Pearson 2007;
see above). “The Gnostics” are not defined “in terms of abstract doctrines or general
attitudes, such as a lower creator god, anthropological dualism, emphasis on mys-
tical knowledge, salvation by gnōsis, and the like” (Brakke 2010: 41–2). Typology is
eschewed.
Some have questioned whether the interlocking patterns of special jargon or motifs
in this set of sources must reflect a social-historical group (e.g., Wisse 1981). However,
many specialists today would agree with Layton and Brakke that shared mythological
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patterns and jargon in their gathered sources are sufficiently distinct and concrete to
justify speaking of an identifiable “tradition,” even if the underlying social history is
not entirely clear and legitimate disputes also remain over inclusion/exclusion of this
or that source (Williams 2005a).
But there is an irony. Layton and Brakke restrict the label “the Gnostics” to this
one tradition because, they say, “the Gnostics” was the “professional school name”
(Layton 1995: 338) by which these people called themselves. Yet: (1) none of the ori-
ginal writings collected by their procedure actually claims to come from “Gnostics”
or refers to “the Gnostic school of thought”; and (2) there is evidence that other
groups, not included in the assemblage proposed by Layton and Brakke, did call
themselves gnōstikoi –e.g., the followers of Marcellina in Rome, the Naassenes, and
followers of a certain Justin (see above).
Layton and Brakke acknowledge these facts (Layton 1987: 199; 1995: 344;
Brakke 2010: 46), but they contend that gnōstikoi was used in a special way by “the
Gnostics”: not as a common noun (e.g., “people capable of knowledge”) but rather
as a proper noun, as their “professional school name”; it did not indicate “what they
were, but who they were” (Layton 1995: 338–9, 344; Brakke 2010: 47). Brakke
favors a comparison with the term “Lutheran,” which people might use to indicate
their religion; but he says that in their own sermons, worship books, and Sunday
School materials, Lutherans would be less likely to call themselves “Lutherans,”
but rather “Christians,” “children of God,” etc. (2010: 48). Hence the absence of
“Gnostic” in the mythological texts from Nag Hammadi and related sources is not
surprising, Brakke argues. By contrast, Marcellina’s followers, or the Naassenes, or
others who are said to have “called themselves ‘gnostics’ ” must have been using
gnōstikoi merely as “a secondary claim to perfection rather than as a sectarian
self-designation” (49).
Now this rationale by Layton and Brakke leans heavily on a single phrase in
Irenaeus, A.H. 1.11.1, where it is said that Valentinus adapted the teachings of
“the school called ‘Gnostic’ ” to the special character of his own school. Layton and
Brakke presuppose that the persons “calling” this school “Gnostic” must have been
its devotees themselves.
However, it is precisely that presupposition that is challenged by Geoffrey Smith
in Guilt by Association: Heresy Catalogues in Early Christianity (2014). Smith
offers a remarkably economical resolution to long-standing confusion mentioned
at the beginning of this essay over how Irenaeus uses the term gnōstikos. He avoids
any pretzel-like maneuvers that surgically sort only the teachings in A.H. 1.29–31
into the special “school called ‘Gnostic’ ” (1.11.1), and insists that the self-label
by Marcellina’s group must have been used in a different sense than the “school,”
leaving somewhat in limbo the numerous indistinct references in Books 2–4 of
Against Heresies to gnōstikoi. Instead, Smith argues that Irenaeus used the term
gnōstikoi as a pejorative designation for the entire content of his inherited blacklist.
His updated version now incorporated everyone from Simon Magus through the
teachings summarized in 1.29–31. “Apparently there was no qualitative difference
in Irenaeus’s mind between Simon and the Simonians and Menander, Saturninus,
Basilides, and the rest of the successors of Simon” (2014: 157). Smith says that
in A.H. 1.11.1 Irenaeus “uses ‘the school called Gnostic’ and ‘those falsely called
Gnostics’ as equivalent expressions” (159) –in other words, for the entire catalogue
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of “heretics.” And Irenaeus was especially keen to prove that these included his
most proximate adversaries, Valentinians. A crucial point in Smith’s analysis is that
Irenaeus does not say, “the school that calls itself ‘Gnostic’ ” (161). Comparing the
way in which rival medical sects in Antiquity could refer to “the sum total” of
opponents from various other schools under a single label –e.g., “the Rational
school (hairesis),” “the Dogmatic school” (2014: 160) –Smith suggests that by
Irenaeus’s time “the ‘Gnostic school’ ” was likely a popular label used pejoratively
for the “aggregate of heretics” in his procured blacklist (162). Like others (e.g.,
followers of Marcellina, Naassenes), some in the blacklist might have called them-
selves “gnostics,” but in the common noun sense of “persons capable of know-
ledge,” as mentioned in the beginning of this essay (cf. “intellectuals”).
Smith’s argument undermines the approach of Layton and Brakke, though the
damage is essentially limited to their construal of the label “the Gnostics,” not to their
theory (shared by many) of an evolving historical school tradition with distinctive
jargon and so forth.
SHELVING THE CATE G O RY

Other scholars argue that enough problems burden the ancient category “gnosticism”
that a moratorium on or outright discontinuation of the use of the category is in order.
The present author has argued that the multitudinous interpretations and invocations
of the category “gnosticism,” of which only a fractional sampling has been provided
above, has led only to confusion. Moreover, the category too often carries baggage
of past stereotypes controlling assumptions about what is “in” texts. Even authors
who in theory claim to be using “gnosticism” as only an ideal type frequently assert
that “the Gnostics believed (this or that),” “the Gnostics did not do (this or that),”
and so forth –as though one were speaking of a single “religion.” Numerous clichés
about “the Gnostics” turn out to be disconfirmed when one reads closely the per-
tinent ancient sources. Notions that “Gnostics’ ” only preoccupation was “escape”
from the world, that they lacked interest in society, hated their bodies, believed their
salvation was predetermined by their divine nature, felt ethics were irrelevant to sal-
vation, followed one of two lifestyles: fanatical asceticism or the opposite, wild licen-
tiousness –all of these stereotypes clash with the evidence of remarkable variety and
complexity in the sources (Williams 1996; 2005b).
If “gnosticism” has become a category incorrigibly burdened with confusion and
presuppositions, what are the alternatives? First of all, the primary sources in question
are not going away, and there is no reason to abandon all past methods of research
on these traditions. Certain sources are definitely related in at least some way (e.g.,
so-called “Valentinian” or “Sethian” traditions). Even if there are complexities and
some obscurity about underlying social-historical realities, the obvious kinship in
specialized jargon and distinct mythic structures justifies the hypothesis of historical
traditions of speculation. Most of these traditions never achieved sufficient “scale” in
sociological terms. Most never fully “gelled.” One might compare the situation with
William Arnal’s comments about the absence of “Christianity” prior to the second
century CE (Arnal 2011). It was Christianity as it took formation in the second cen-
tury and onward that in retrospect created a singularity of message (“Christianity”)
in what are now New Testament writings –“the fabrication of Christianity that
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occurred through the second century represents an invention of the tradition and
identity itself” (Arnal 2011: 212). Manichaeism is a different story, because there we
can trace a level of self-conscious continuity –a devotion to Mani, a sacred literature,
institutions and rituals –over centuries, vast geographical dissemination and cultural
interactions. So without needing the problematic category “Gnosticism” one can cer-
tainly research individual traditional threads (as Pearson, Layton, Brakke and others
do) and explore possible social-historical continuities, even where ultimately they did
not achieve significant numerical size.
Neither are all forms of comparison ruled out. There are unquestionable similar-
ities across some of these individual historical traditions. However, multi-bulleted
typologies might be a hindrance in this case because of the history of confusion
and ossification mentioned above. A more tactical approach may be in order. For
example, one might focus on individual characteristics, such as the distinction
between creator(s) and the supreme divinity. Across sources manifesting a single fea-
ture such as this, one might examine the diversities and similarities in the implications
for values, social formation, daily life, and other questions that have been asked of
Nag Hammadi and related sources for generations. One would not be constrained
by a necessity to find presupposed “gnostic” traits in a given source, when close
reading reveals their absence. “Gnosticism” an overarching category may simply
be unnecessary, a labor-saving device that can preempt close reading and prevent
understanding.
Such fresh approaches could avoid obstacles to a more open analysis of these
sources within the wider socio-religious contexts in which they came to birth and
were circulated. Here mention must be made of Karen King’s What is Gnosticism?
(2003). King concurs with most of the points just mentioned about past stereotyping
of “gnosticism,” and so forth. But her study lays out a complementary and funda-
mentally important argument, directing attention to the “elephant in the room” for
most of the agendas for defining “gnosticism.” That is, these projects ultimately bear
a genetic relationship to the anti-“heresy” literature of early Christianity. They have
tended too often to be doing the work of defining what “Christianity” is, by defining
what it is not. Her book reviews a history of discourses that “seek to keep alive the
self-evident nature of Gnosticism as a reified entity so that it can continue to play its
role as the heretical ‘other’ ” (2003: 244).
CONCLUDING CO M M E NTS
Clearly, there remains very significant disagreement about the category “gnosticism.”
It is likely that many specialists and non-specialists will continue to refer to “Gnostics,”
“Gnosticism,” or “Gnosis.” How helpful will this be? Though everyone recognizes
that there were remarkable diversities across ancient Christian populations, is the
stubborn perdurance of “gnosticism” as a category largely a credit to the imagination
of Irenaeus and its hold on the imaginations of subsequent generations?
At the least, one hopes that future discourse will take account of what has been
learned about the inaccuracies of many past clichés, which have so often amounted
to stereotyping that in many other contexts (e.g., modern societies) might be counted
as a lack of interest in understanding persons.
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Second-Century Christian ‘Heretics’. Leiden: Brill: 32–63.
——— 2005b. “Was There a Gnostic Religion? Strategies for a Clearer Analysis.”
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CHAPTER EIGHT
GENDER ISSUES IN THE STUDY

OF ANCIENT GNOSTICISM
Majella Franzmann
E arly work on gender issues in ancient Gnosticism can be found in small sections in
seminal works like Kurt Rudolph’s Gnosis (1977), while Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic
Gospels (1979) is among the earliest and best known to deal in more detail with the sub-
ject. Raoul Mortley’s Womanhood (1981) focused on redressing the shortage of schol-
arship on women and the female within Gnosticism, as did Karen King’s edited work
Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (1988). Much of the early work concentrated on
texts about men and women and their relative standing in the communities and within
the authoritative texts, as well as details on heavenly female figures. While the early
work dealt with the broad spectrum of Gnostic groups, only recently did scholars like
Kevin Coyle (2001), Madeleine Scopello (2005), and Majella Franzmann (2007; 2010)
begin more detailed work on the same issues within Manichaean communities.
As would be expected, the outer organizational structure of Gnostic groups gen-
erally mirrored the structures of the cultures in which they operated and those of the
ancient world generally. To deal with the world outside, but also for their internal
structure, many Gnostic communities had male leadership. Even the Manichaeans,
where male and female were equally among the inner circle of the enlightened Elect,
had an organizational structure which was exclusively male as far as we can ascer-
tain, as do the Mandaeans even to the present, although some suggest that there may
have been female priests in the past (e.g., Buckley 2000; Deutsch 2009: 534).
Within the belief systems of the many groups forming what is known loosely
as “Gnosticism” there is a tendency to dualism, much more strongly delineated in
some outlooks than others: light and darkness; insight and ignorance/error; male and
female. But this is not the ideal state of affairs; the purpose always is to come to a
oneness, not necessarily by combining two opposites such as darkness and light, but
to exist in the oneness that all are a part of in the One Who Is, as found in The First
Apocalypse of James:
… until you cast away from yourself blind thought, this bond of flesh which
encircles you. And then you will reach Him Who Is. And you will no longer be
James; rather you are the One Who Is.
(Nag Hammadi Codices [=NHC] [V.3] 27.3–10)
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Mortley’s early work illustrated how androgyny represented the epitome of perfec-
tion, using as one example The Gospel of Philip 68:23–26:
When Eve was still in Adam death did not exist. When she was separated from
him death came into being. If he again becomes complete and attains his former
self, death will be no more.
([NHC II.2] 68.23–26)
The idea of the return to oneness as a way of perfection was not limited to Gnostic
groups in the ancient world, as Peter Brown showed extensively in The Body and
Society (1989), although some groups considered marriage itself to be the return to
oneness (Pagels 1988: 70–2), rather than androgyny. For Gnostic groups, bringing
together male and female and restoring the complete person parallels the restoration
of the light from darkness, although both ideas are not without difficulty as to what
one does with the darkness or with the female in restoring the incomplete male. It
seems clear, at least in The Gospel of Philip, that the man is deficient/incomplete
without the woman who was divided from him, so that the basic view of gender in
this text is that both male and female are deficient; only the androgynous being is
without death.
Over against this idea, some texts seem to suggest that only males may be perfect.
The Second Treatise of the Great Seth [VII.2] 65.24–31, for example, warns: “Do
not become female, lest you give birth to evil and (its) brothers: jealousy and div-
ision, anger and wrath, fear and a divided heart, and empty, non-existent desire.”
Perhaps the most well-known and cited of all the texts in this regard is The Gospel
of Thomas Logion 114 which presents the male as the epitome of the saved human
being. Simon Peter protests to Jesus at the presence of Mary (Magdalen[e]‌) with the
group of disciples, because “women are not worthy of Life”:
Jesus said, ‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may
become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make
herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’
([II.2] 51.20–26)
However, The Gospel of Mary provides another possible explanation for this apparent
depreciation, that perhaps it is spiritual maleness, which is beyond the gendered
human male and female, that represents perfection. In this gospel, Mary Magdalen
explains to the disciples who are weeping and afraid to go out and preach the gospel,
in case they meet the same fate as the Savior: “… let us praise his greatness, for he
had prepared us (and) made us into men” (9:18–20). Since the group clearly includes
men, we must assume that being “made into men” is not about the physical con-
dition of human maleness. This is made even clearer further in the text when Levi
defends Mary from both Andrew and Peter, who refuse to believe Mary has received
private revelation from Jesus, and exhorts the disciples to “put on the perfect man”
so as to go and preach the Gospel (18:16–19). While no explanation is given about
how being made into men or putting on the perfect man takes place, we are left to
conjecture from other texts where the virgin is portrayed as the perfect human being
(with the continent person also positively presented [e.g., the Manichaean Psalmbook
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— Majella Franzmann —
179.7–181.18]), that perhaps the idea of the perfect man is such a virginal/continent
man or woman.
The perfect man must contend against the darkness of the physical world. For
Gnostic groups, as with many other belief systems from which they borrowed such
as Christianity and Judaism (leaving aside Neoplatonism and other philosophical
systems), the process of the fall of light into darkness or insight/gnosis into forget-
fulness or error is often sexualized, or is described in terms of evil trickery that may
also include a sexual aspect. Thus in The Apocryphon of John [II.1] 9:25–10:19, the
heavenly Sophia is said to bring forth from herself, without the consent of the spirit
and without her consort, an imperfect form, dissimilar to herself, a lion-faced serpent
which she names Yaltabaoth, and who becomes the first archon, the Demiurge. In a
more violent story, the heavenly soul, virginal and androgynous (although a female
in her nature with a womb, we are told) falls down into a body into the darkness as
a sexual victim of the evil archons (“robbers”) who rape her and lead her to a life of
prostitution (Exegesis on the Soul [II.6] 127:18–128:1).
The dark world is also the place for the beginning of humankind, and the Gnostics
continue the tradition of Adam and Eve as the first human beings. While the Jewish
and Christian story of “the Fall” of the first humans after their creation is interpreted
generally in a sexual way, many Gnostic texts tell a different story. On the Origin of
the World ([II.5] 114:27–115:3), for example, relates the creation of Adam, not by a
good creator God in a garden of Eden, but by the archons as a lifeless ignorant human
although fashioned in the image of the One Who Is. Zoë (Eve), the daughter of the
heavenly Sophia, is sent by her mother to be an instructor to Adam and to bring him
to life (115:31–116:8).
Salvation from the fallen state, to release the light from darkness, is much less
sexualized, although there are exceptions. Of these, perhaps the most striking is found
in the Manichaean hymn M 741/R/3–7 concerning the Virgin of Light (here called
Sadwēs) who deliberately displays herself to incite lust in the Demon of Wrath, who
ejaculates the light trapped in him. Another version of the story is found in Kephalaia
134.13–135.14, where the Third Ambassador, a male heavenly figure, also frees the
Living Soul from Matter. In this case, the Ambassador is said to be like a great free
woman who comes out of her seclusion and shows herself in her beauty in order to
inspire lust in the men around her, and thus save her brother. Again, the storyteller has
chosen a female character to make the story stronger in its aspect of inspiring lust in
evil powers to release what is captive.
Within the Manichaean corpus especially, female and male heavenly characters
and roles may be interchangeable, and the apparent gender of such characters may
be somewhat fluid. Jesus the Splendor, for example, is identified as the Twin of Mani
in the Psalmbook (42.22–23, 166.33), while in the Persian hymn M 801, the Twin
is also identified as the Maiden of Light. Even more interesting is the description
of Jesus the Splendor assuming the body of Eve in Kephalaia 94.1–11, as one of a
number of garments that he assumes as he descends to carry out particular work
within the cosmos.
While the salvation both of the light and of those with insight rests on heav-
enly figures like Jesus, humans are also involved in salvation activity. Each Gnostic
who comes to insight is able to save themselves from the darkness, although insight
itself is a gift from some heavenly figure like Jesus. Included in those with insight
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are key women in the tradition about whom we have stories, like Mary Magdalen,
who is said to be loved by Jesus more than any of the disciples and to have received
revelation from Jesus that they did not (The Gospel of Mary 10:1–6; 18:10–15),
or Manichaean women like Thecla, Drusiane, Maximilla, and Aristobula who are
named among those who have been severely tortured and martyred (Psalmbook
141.1–143.16).
Gender and sexuality are important aspects in the life of gnostic men and women
within the world of darkness. They must avoid any distraction from the work of the
light, generally brought about through forgetfulness or ignorance. Above all they must
avoid the distraction caused by sexual temptation or activity, hence the exhortations
we find in the texts to a life of virginity and continence, since sexual lust dwells in men
as well as women, and inflames them both towards one another.
While the Manichaean Kephalaia relates this teaching for both genders (26:16;
190:19–20), it is clear that women are particularly dangerous for male catechumens,
who are taught that they need to be cleansed from their sexual relations with women
and renounce them (249.21–27) and if they are married, they should act as if their
wives were strangers to them (228.22–23), or as if they did not have wives at all
(229.10–12). Moreover, the Kephalaia anthropomorphizes lust in a particular female
way as “the goddess of the body” (143.6–7).
The result of lust and sexual activity may result in the birth of more human flesh
into the world of darkness and the continual trapping of light there. The teaching in
The Gospel of Philip concerning the tragedy of splitting Adam into male and female
is put even more strongly and explicitly in On the Origin of the World ([II.5] 109:21–
5), when the first sensual pleasure sprouts on the earth:
<The man followed> the earth,

The woman followed <the man>,
And marriage followed the woman,
And reproduction followed marriage,
And death followed reproduction.
Thus everything to do with birthing more humans is undesirable. While this leads to
various classes of human beings among the gnostic groups –married, continent, vir-
ginal –it also leads to a complete abhorrence with the human organ of birthing, the
womb. The Manichaean Psalmbook teaches that a Manichaean “makes God pure”
(l.27) by denying that Jesus was born of a woman, “in a womb corrupted” (l.23),
later referred to as a “filthy womb” (120.25; 122.23). It is only the Mandaeans who
are out of step with this teaching, with the Ginza Rba (Right Ginza 105:21–106:8;
107:14–18) relating how Manda–dHija and the Uthras planned Adam’s wedding,
instructed him how to marry a woman, found him his wife Hawwa (Eve), rejoiced
with them, and stayed with them until Eve went into labor with her first child.
For most Gnostic groups then, while women and men share equally in their ten-
dency to lust, it is the woman’s womb and the idea of human motherhood that appears
to put women in an invidious position in such groups. Kurt Rudolph (1977: 247–50)
writes of the claims by Epiphanius (Panarion 26) that Gnostic liturgy may include
eating semen, menstrual blood or forcibly aborted embryos, identifying it as a kind of
pornographic fantasy on Epiphanius’s part, but the idea of it would have fitted well
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— Majella Franzmann —
with someone who knew of the aversion to womb and birthing spoken of in many
Gnostic texts.
By comparison, heavenly activity described in terms of birthing or motherhood
are represented positively. The Kephalaia relates how the Mother of Life farewells
her son, the First Man, as he goes to battle the darkness, arming him and making
him mighty, laying hands on him and blessing him and kissing him goodbye (38.13–
39.9). In contrast to the “filthy womb” of a woman, the Psalmbook teaches that
Jesus is conceived by a holy womb, the Luminaries (121.31). In fact, several earlier
texts name heavenly figures as “womb,” as for example, the heavenly Mother in the
Trimorphic Protennoia:
I am androgynous. [I am both Mother and] Father since [I copulate] with myself

[and with those who love] me, [and] it is through me alone that the All [stands
firm]. I am the Womb [that gives shape] to the All by giving birth to the Light that
[shines in] splendor. I am the Aeon to [come. I am] the fulfillment of the All, that
is, Me[iroth]ea, the glory of the Mother.
([XIII.1] 45:2–10)
And, similarly in The Apocryphon of John:
This is the first thought, his image; she became the womb of everything for she
is prior to them all, the Mother-Father, the first Man, the holy Spirit, the thrice-
male, the thrice-powerful, the thrice-named androgynous one, and the eternal
aeon among the invisible ones, and the first to come forth.
([II.1] 5:4–11)
Questions still remain for scholars about the complexities and seemingly ambiguous
way that gender operated and was understood within Gnostic communities and
within Gnostic liturgical and teaching texts, especially in stories and teaching about
women. One need only note the number of times scholars return to key passages
like Logion 114 of The Gospel of Thomas to try to make sense of the seemingly
insurmountable polarities between male and female and the negative views of earthly
women in their traditional gendered roles. While Gnostic communities varied enor-
mously in their teachings and practices, these polarities and negative views were rela-
tively constant. One would imagine that Gnostic women, too, who listened to such
teachings must have felt some confusion about how they were to act in their everyday
lives. We know much about the spiritual leaders of Gnostic communities, and we have
a range of evidence in liturgical and teaching texts, but have only more recently been
able to ascertain some details about the everyday lives of Gnostic families. One com-
munity has provided the opportunity to go beyond the teaching and liturgical texts
and study the everyday lives of Gnostic men and women, in this case a Manichaean
community on an oasis in Egypt in the fourth century.
The letters found at Kellis, both personal and business letters and sometimes
a mixture of both at once, show us families who are like their neighbors in many
ways, living in socially assigned gender roles, with women bearing and raising chil-
dren and running households and businesses, but who find a way of believing and
being that is praiseworthy. Here we see in action what we know already from the
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Kephalaia (233.2–7), that what seems the very negative category of the “married
one,” as compared to the virginal and continent, clearly is not intended to be taken
literally as encompassing all married men and women. The married refrain from
sexual relations, for example, on fast days, when the perfect catechumen must master
his “purification, controlling himself [from] lust for his wife, purifying his bedroom
through self-control on all these Lord’s Days.” We also find a rather unexpected
blurring of the lines between Manichaean Elect and catechumens, well illustrated
in the personal letter from a male Elect to the catechumen Eirene (P[apyri] Kell[is]
Copt[ici] 32), in which she is praised as a “daughter of the Holy Church” (vv. 1–2),
“God-loving, good-loving” (vv. 18–19), and especially “the good tree whose fruit
never withers, which is your love that emits radiance every day” (vv. 4–5). This letter
to Eirene praises her in such strong spiritual imagery that it is difficult to see any
degree of difference between her spiritual standing as catechumen and others as Elect,
and we are reminded here of Elaine Pagels’s conclusion (using especially Tertullian’s
De Praescriptione haereticorum 41) that Gnostic church organization could be
“egalitarian” enough to let females into senior leadership roles (1979: 37–44). Such
everyday artefacts from a community are not the only, but certainly a very important
means, to probe the experience of Gnostic communities and so ascertain whether and
how Gnostic men and women found ways to make sense of what appear complex and
ambiguous views of gender in their texts, teaching, and liturgy.
REFERENCES
Brown, Peter. 1989. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early
Christianity. London: Faber and Faber.
Buckley, Joruun. 2000. “The Evidence for Women Priests in Mandaeism.” Journal of Near
Eastern Studies 59: 93–106.
Coyle, Kevin. 2001. “Prologomena to a Study of Women in Manichaeism.” Paul Mirecki and
Jason BeDuhn (eds.). The Light and the Darkness: Studies in Manichaeism and its World.
Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill: 79–92.
Deutsch, Nathaniel. 2009. “Mandaean Literature: Introduction.” Willis Barnstone and Marvin
Meyer (eds.). The Gnostic Bible. Boston: Shambhala: 527–35.
Franzmann, Majella. 2007. “Manichaean Views of Women: A Study of the Teaching and
Perspectives on Women from the Kephalaia of the Teacher and the Manichaean Psalm
Book.” Pauline Allen, Majella Franzmann, and Rick Strelan (eds.). “I Sowed Fruits into
Hearts” (Odes Sol. 17:13): Festschrift for Professor Michael Lattke. Sydney: St Paul’s
Publications: 67–85.
—— —2010. “Mothers, Virgins and Demons: reading beyond the female stereotypes in
Manichaean cosmology and story.” Humanities Australia 1 (1): 56–63.
King, Karen (ed.). 1988. Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Mortley, Raoul. 1981. Womanhood. The Feminine in Ancient Hellenism, Gnosticism,
Christianity, and Islam. Sydney: Delacroix Press.
Pagels, Elaine. 1979. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House.
——— 1988. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. London: Penguin.
Rudolph, Kurt. 1977. Gnosis. The Nature & History of Gnosticism (trans. Robert Wilson).
Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Scopello, Madeleine. 2005. Femme, Gnose et Manichéisme: De l’espace mythique au territoire
du réel. Leiden: Brill.
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CHAPTER NINE
THE GNOSTICS IN EARLY

CHRISTIAN HERESIOLOGY
Mark Edwards
B efore the discovery of the Berlin Codex in 1892, the Gnostics were known to
us only from the writings of their antagonists, together with the few derisive
extracts from their own works which are embedded in these polemics. The contents
of the Codex, in conjunction with those of the documents which came to light at Nag
Hammadi in 1945, reveal that while Gnostic literature was not well understood by
these custodians of orthodoxy, they did not go out of their way to misrepresent it.
It is therefore not unreasonable to hope that they may help us to resolve questions
which the texts themselves cannot answer regarding their origin and the circles for
which they were written. There are scholars who deny such a possibility, contending
that any information derived from such sources can only be prejudicial; certainly we
could put no trust in any writer who followed the example that Justin Martyr sets
when he makes a wizard of Marcion and mistakes a statue of the Sabine deity Semo
Sancus for a relic of the cult of Simon Magus (First Apology 23). The following review
of our principal witnesses, however, will suggest that they were not uninformed or
wantonly mendacious when the truth would be equally hurtful to their opponents.
We are not obliged to believe their more lubricious disclosures, even when these are
offered as personal testimony, but we cannot doubt their acquaintance with Gnostic
books (which they must have read in the original Greek), and we cannot dismiss their
attempts to differentiate the sects and establish an order of succession simply because
the results do not always confirm the taxonomies proposed by modern scholars.
IRENAEUS O F LYO NS
As Williams (1996: 35–6) and others have recognized, Irenaeus is not promiscuous in
his use of gnostikoi as a designation for certain professors of “gnôsis falsely so called”
(Against Heresies 2.4.17). This Pauline phrase (1 Timothy 6.20) does not signify that
all the heretics share one gnôsis or knowledge –indeed he asserts triumphantly that
their differences are legion (2.13.10) –but that they base their pretense of know-
ledge on private judgment rather than the church’s rule of faith. When Valentinians
are characterized as “more gnostic than the Gnostics” (1.11.3), it is implied that the
latter are a different sect; on the other hand, an invidious genealogy at the end of the
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— Gnostics in early Christian heresiology —
first book derives the one from the other, so that those who might otherwise take the
Valentinians for good Christians may see their heresies writ plain in their Gnostic
ancestors. Most prominent among these are the “Gnostici Barbelo” (1.29.1), a sect
which is certainly not an invention of the heresiologist, as the text whose original
Greek he summarizes is the one that now survives in four Coptic redactions as the
Apocryphon of John (Nag Hammadi Codices II.1). For this reason, many scholars
now reserve the name “Gnostic” for this group and the literature that appears to
be related to the Apocryphon (Brakke 2011: 29–50); others, while admitting that
Irenaeus makes a distinction between the Gnostici and other claimants to gnôsis, sus-
pect that he used these words according to his own caprice (Wisse 1971).
Whatever opinion we form of his veracity, it was not he who taught modern
scholars to apply the term “Gnostic” to every deviation from his own rule of ortho-
doxy (pace King 2003). If his nomenclature is tendentious, it is hard to discern the
tendency, for there is in fact only one group of which he himself says “they call them-
selves Gnostics” –not his “Gnostici Barbelo” but the Carpocratians, whose determin-
ation to win the mercy of God by committing every sin extends even to the ordination
of women and the use of pictures in church (1.25). Basilides (whose system of 365
heavens merits only a cursory chapter at 1.24 and some retrospective allusions in the
later books) is coupled with the Gnostics and perhaps included among them, but is
not said to have adopted the name as his own. On the other hand, the texts which are
adduced to show that Irenaeus sometimes imposed it on the Valentinians are extant
only in Latin, and in any case will not furnish the desired evidence if judiciously
rendered “Valentinians and others, who are called Gnostics” (Edwards 2015). Thus
it would seem most probable the designation for those who (as he thought) used it of
themselves. He may not have asked himself whether it was for them a denominational
noun (as “Anglican” or “Methodist” are today) or rather an adjective, like “progres-
sive” or “liberal,” which might qualify the name of any Christian group, or even that
of another religion or philosophy.
For him, as for all observers in Antiquity, the Gnostics and their affiliates are
heretics posing as Christians. As they wax proud, they ramify: Valentinus who springs
from the Gnostics becomes in turn the father of Ptolemaeus, Secundus and Heracleon;
Marcus Magus is also assigned to this family, at least by juxtaposition (1.14). The
Valentinian system expounded in the opening chapters, in which the demiurge is the
son of the fallen Sophia and the author of the material cosmos (1.1–2), proves in fact
to be properly the creation of Ptolemaeus, while the teachings ascribed at a later point
to Valentinus himself are sparse and not so fanciful (1.11). Discrepancies between the
accounts of the Ptolemaean system in Irenaeus and Hippolytus have raised doubts
as to the provenance of the information deployed by both these witnesses, and a
number of scholars suspect that both are guilty of creating artificial lineages for their
adversaries, in imitation of those which were being devised in this era, not always
benignly, for rabbis and philosophers (see now Smith 2014). These arguments are
often based on the false presupposition that a philosopher in Antiquity was expected
to be a facsimile of his teacher. In fact, Epictetus the Stoic was ostentatiously indif-
ferent to many teachings of Chrysippus, who himself was only one of three supposed
founders of the school; it is easy enough to find matter in Numenius and Proclus,
particularly their allegorical criticism of Homer, which runs counter to the principles
of their acknowledged master Plato. Irenaeus takes a hostile pleasure in exposing the
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— Mark Edwards —
fissiparous history of the Valentinians, but the same lines of descent are acknowledged
by all other Christian witnesses. Just as we have no reason to disbelieve them, so we
have no reason to join Pétrement (1990: 397–419) in doubting the priority of the
Apocryphon of John.
Irenaeus himself does not attempt to fit Simon Magus into the same genealogy,
though Simon too is the progenitor of numerous heresies (Against Heresies 1.23).
He has more to say of this wizard’s unsavory life than of his teachings, and he is also
terse in describing Marcion’s heresies, although Marcion is his principal adversary in
books 3 and 4. There he recalls that Polycarp, when Marcion asked “Do you know
me?” replied “I know you, the firstborn of Satan” (3.3.4). The episode is reminiscent
of Justin Martyr’s account of his conversion, and Irenaeus refers us to this author for
a full refutation of Marcion (4.6.2). Justin’s own words suggest that Marcion was
at most one of the heretics attacked in his Syntagma; in his extant First Apology, he
couples Simon and Marcion, accusing the latter of making the Creator a lesser god,
but not alluding to the mutilation of Paul or Luke with which Irenaeus charged him
(see Smith 2014: 62). What is lacking in these two responses to Marcion is made up
in Tertullian, who of all our ancient witnesses shows the greatest idiosyncrasy of style
and the greatest dependence on Irenaeus.
TERTULLIAN OF CARTHAG E
Tertullian, trained in adversarial rhetoric if not a professional lawyer, was in his
own eyes a pneumatic, but no Gnostic. In Against the Valentinians he gives notice of
his polemical intention at the outset by comparing the alleged reticence of the sect
to the vow which cloaked the nefarious practices of Eleusis (1.1–3). His account
of their opinions, copied for the most part from Irenaeus, is punctuated with sar-
castic allusions to the anthropomorphic conceits of Latin poets (7.1). He retains
Greek names, with a ponderous apology (6.1), thus ensuring that the sect will remain
incomprehensibly foreign to his readers. He distinguishes them from Gnostics, yet
perpetuates the fatal association when he quips in his final sentence that the insolent
doctrines of the Valentinians have sprung up into the thickets of Gnosticism (39).
Their teaching that the Demiurge made the world from matter which he did not
create is ascribed promiscuously to the Stoics, the Pythagoreans and Plato (15.1).
Donating to the sect his own word trinitas (17.1), Tertullian insinuates that they are
wearing the borrowed clothes of orthodoxy; he also likens the Demiurge to a gen-
eral seizing a province without the approval of the senate (20.1). His one addition to
Irenaeus –uncorroborated in other sources –is the assertion that Valentinus took to
heresy when he failed to secure the bishopric of Rome (4.1). This would be not only
a baseless but a toothless libel if, as some scholars now contend, there was no such
office in the second century.
There is no more information to be gleaned from his Prescription against the
Heretics, where Valentinus, Marion, Simon, Ebion, and Apelles form a motley huddle
of infidels, proclaiming by their mutual disagreements that they lack the rule of faith
(12.4). Valentinus is stigmatized as a Platonist at 7.2, but without corroboration.
For a fuller account of Apelles –our fullest, indeed –we must turn to his treatise On
the Flesh of Christ, where he is presented as an unfilial pupil of Marcion (1.3), who
argued that the flesh of Christ, while solid and not phantasmal, was produced by a
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condensation of spirit which entered Mary’s womb from above without deriving any-
thing from her body. Here as elsewhere, we see that for ancient witnesses the great
error of Gnosticism was to narrow, not to exaggerate, the ontological gulf between
spirit and matter. Although the only named heirs of the heresiarch in Against the
Valentinians are Ptolemaeus, Heracleon, Marcus Magus, and Secundus, the treatise
On the Flesh of Christ introduces an otherwise unknown Valentinian, Alexander,
who is said to have imputed to the catholics the belief that Christ became incarnate
in order to destroy the flesh itself and not merely its sin (16). Einar Thomassen notes
that his quotation from the Psalms of Valentinus (17.1) is the one known appeal to the
founder by a member of the sect (Thomassen 2006: 492); he surmises that Tertullian
was mistaken and that Alexander’s censures were aimed at fellow Valentinians of the
eastern school who held that Christ had taken on pneumatic flesh to free the spirit
from its carnal prison (Thomassen 2006: 497).
The five caustic books Against Marcion would be by far the most informative of the
African Father’s writings against the Gnostics if we had a sure means of winnowing
fact from rhetoric. The first book denounces Marcion as a ship-owner (nauclerus),
spawned in the province of Pontus, which was noted for its savagery (Against
Marcion 1.1). His preaching of two gods belies the clear testimony of scriptures (not-
withstanding the vulgar use of “gods” to denote created beings in Psalm 82) and
contradicts the very definition of “god,” which implies superiority to all other beings
(1.3.2). Belatedly acknowledging that Marcion held the Demiurge to be inferior to
the highest being, and hence only “god” by courtesy, Tertullian asks how anyone
can be more worthy of this appellation than the Creator (1.13.2); how, furthermore,
can the god who redeems us be good when he invades the territory that belongs
to another (1.23), and why, if this was a just transaction, was it so long deferred
(1.22.4)? Mention is made of Marcion’s Antitheses (1.19.4), but Tertullian does not
quote them; nor does he wonder, like some modern scholars, whether it was Marcion
or Cerdo who drew the antithesis between the just and the good.
The content of the Antitheses can be deduced from the second book, where acts of
divine retribution in the Old Testament are found to display not only the severity but
the goodness of the Creator, while conversely the Redeemer names not another god
but the Creator as his Father. The third book offers further illustrations of the ubiqui-
tous foreshadowing of the New Testament in the Old, repeatedly charging Marcion
with a failure to grasp the allegorical sense of prophecy. The fourth book accuses him
of the contrary error in his reading of certain passages in Luke’s Gospel which bear
witness to the solidity of Christ’s body even after the resurrection; this, we are told,
was Marcion’s sole gospel, arbitrarily selected from the canon of four and even then
in a mutilated form. The fifth book finds him equally disingenuous in the handling of
ten Pauline letters, the pastoral epistles having been arbitrarily cut out of the canon
and the letter to the Ephesians having been redirected to the Laodiceans. Modern
commentators are not so certain that the omitted texts were current in Marcion’s
time, or that our letter to the Ephesians bears its original title; they even suspect that
the gospels which were canonical to Tertullian (Luke included) achieved their present
shape only after Marcion had compiled his own narrative. Tertullian’s reports of his
exegesis have also been contested in detail; nevertheless, it is on these dubious testi-
monies, together with the quotations in Epiphanius, that we rely for any alternative
reconstruction of Marcion’s “New Testament.”
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HIP P OLYTU S
The Elenchus, or Refutation of all Heresies, is commonly, though not confidently,
attributed to Hippolytus, a truculent prelate of the Roman church who, like Tertullian,
was inclined to schism but inexorable to heresy. The work gives a show of learning
to the thesis –assumed but hardly demonstrated in Tertullian and repeated in the
same key by theologians ever since –that where there is heresy in the church it has its
origin not in scripture but in some philosophical hairesis, or sect, of the pagan world
(see further Mansfeld 1992). Valentinus is assigned to the school of Pythagoras, to
which Hippolytus annexes that of Plato (Refutation 6.21, 6.29). Although Irenaeus
anticipates this claim in his critique of the Valentinians, and although the fragments
of Valentinus himself bespeak some knowledge of Plato, these chapters in Hippolytus
add more to our knowledge of his pagan informant, Alexander Polyhistor, than to
the etiology of Christian error (Diogenes Laertius 8.25–33). The Apophasis Megale,
or Great Revelation, of Simon Magus proves him to be a disciple of Heraclitus,
who declared that the origin of all things was fire (6.9–11). The authenticity of this
text, known only to Hippolytus, is doubted; there is even more reason to question
his pairing of Marcion and Empedocles (Refutation 7.29) since the two have little
in common except that both are commonly thought to have suspended the world
between good and evil powers. Hippolytus improves the correspondence by affirming
that each of them posited a third principle (Refutation 29.25–26), of which we hear
no rumor in other sources. The notion of a middle term between love and strife in
Empedocles has received the careful attention of at least one distinguished classicist
(Osborne 1987: 130–1), but few, if any, students of Marcion are willing to believe
that he made the Logos a mediator between the Demiurge and the true God.
The report on Basilides (Refutation 7.20–27) once again makes use of a text
unattested elsewhere, in which the Father of all is described in a manner that carries
negation beyond the point of self-contradiction, and creation is represented as a
threefold procession of sonships, each following the pattern of emanation and return.
While some scholars stand by the testimony of Irenaeus and Clement, others regard
this notice in Hippolytus as our one trustworthy account of Basilides (Quispel 1968);
while no-one would follow Hippolytus in tracing the “non-existent god” to the
Categories of Aristotle, his caricature of the Stagirite may be based on a Platonic
source that is not so much erroneous as satirical (Edwards 1990). It is not so likely
to have been drawn from Basilides himself, but elsewhere in the refutation we meet
quotations of recondite sources which may be drawn at second hand from the works
of the heretics who made use of them; “plagiarism” may be too harsh a word, since
it is his undisguised quotation of the same text in two places that enables us to detect
his indebtedness (cf. Marcovich 1988: 120–33).
Had books 2 and 3 of the Refutation survived, we should no doubt possess a lurid
account of the mysteries which the heretics imitated in their ritual self-abandonment to
sacrilege and sexual incontinence. The fourth book is a compendium of the dabblings
of obscure sects in astrology, numerology, and sortilege, from which we surmise that in
order to sustain his thesis Hippolytus gave an eclectic sense to the term “philosophy.”
The theology of the mysteries, without reference to the obscenities that defiled them,
occupies the first half of Book 5, where the threefold constitution of human nature
affords a template for the interpretation of secret cults throughout the Roman world.
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The authors of this discourse, to whom Hippolytus gives the name Naassenes, or serpent-
folk, are said to have called themselves Gnostics, by which they meant no doubt that they
possessed knowledge of arcana which were impenetrable to others (Refutation 5.6). At
Refutation 8.35 gnôstikoi is the appellation of an insignificant group. The “Naassene
Sermon” is one of the most remarkable of the documents preserved in the Refutation,
and we have no reason to doubt that, whatever its history of redaction, Hippolytus
transcribed the text that had reached him. The same may be said of the Paraphrase of
Seth, which is clearly a variant of the tract whose Coptic title is The Paraphrase of Shem
(Nag Hammadi Codices VII.1). The protagonist of the latter, who is saluted as “the first
being on earth,” would be more aptly named Seth than Shem, and this eponym would
explain the use of “Sethian” as a label for the sect (Refutation 5.19–22). This is the first
occurrence of the term “Sethian” in any language, although Theodoret applies it to
those whom Irenaeus presents as a branch of the Gnostici Barbelo.
CLEMENT OF A L E X AND RIA

Clement was the author of many works, of which three survive: the Protrepticus, or
Exhortation, the Paidagogos, or Governor, and the Stromateis, or Miscellanies. The
mauling of the Greeks in the Protrepticus hardly prepares us for the benign if selective
appraisal of philosophy in the Stromateis; and “Gnostic” is a similarly amphibious term,
implying the perfection of faith by knowledge when used in the singular of Christian
philosophers like Clement himself, but encompassing every species of vice and error
when it is qualified in the plural by the participle kaloumenoi, “so-called.” Having
exposed the turpitude of the mysteries with unparalleled candor (or if we prefer, unpar-
alleled creativity) in the Protrepticus, Clement describes the rites of aberrant Christians
in language that was not thought fit for translation into English in the one complete
version of his Stromateis. Under pretense of expelling the lustful tendency in accordance
with Christ’s own precepts, a certain Epiphanes enjoins promiscuous copulation, while
the Carpocratians go so far as to advocate not only the holding of wives in common but
intercourse with beasts (Stromateis 3.2.5–11). The enormities that ensue when they turn
out the lights bear a striking resemblance to those of which Christians are accused in
pagan diatribes (Benko 1984: 54–78); some scholars opine that heretics had been mis-
taken for Christians, others that Clement is purposely deflecting the pagan charges, or
that he simply subscribes to the common suspicion of nocturnal cults. The Basilideans,
typified by Isidore (whom Hippolytus also mentions), maintain the pretense of celibacy
by “rejecting the fire of the seed” in casual intercourse (Stromateis 3.1.2), while the
Marcionites pursue continence, but only from hatred of matter (3.3.12). Basilides is
also said to have regarded martyrdom as the penalty for the sins of a previous life, and
therefore to have encouraged dissimulation. He is also accused of holding a fatalistic
view of the natural order, but at the same time denying that this diminishes the soul’s
responsibility for its sin. As Winrich Löhr (1996) has argued, it is probable that some of
his inconsistencies would vanish if we could peruse the original text.
Clement was not so uncharitable in his reading of Valentinian literature.
His Excerpts from Theodotus, whom the title assigns to the western school of
Valentinianism, are interspersed with statements of “our” position, which often
express a nuanced agreement rather than complete repudiation. At times it is hard to
distinguish the voice of Clement from that of Theodotus, and in other works Clement
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follows the Valentinians in maintaining that Christ was always immune to hunger
(Stromateis 3.7.59) and that after the resurrection his body was penetrable to the
hand (Hypotyposes, p. 210 Staehlin). His extracts from the works of Valentinus him-
self augment our knowledge of this elusive figure. Thus he is at once more sym-
pathetic and more informative than Origen, reputedly his pupil in Alexandria, for
whom Gnostics, Valentinians, and Marcionites are three distinct schools of error. We
owe to Origen only one Gnostic document, the “Ophite diagram,” which his pagan
interlocutor Celsus had denounced as a plagiarism from the Mithraists (Against
Celsus 6.22–28). To Origen the provenance of this text was of no interest, since the
Ophites were not true Christians; he leaves it to us to ascertain whether this sect
which regarded the serpent as a ladder to the heavens can be identified with the
Naassenes of Hippolytus, or even with the Ophites who cut a somewhat different
figure in the writings of other heresiologists.
EP IPHANIUS O F S AL AM IS
Although the pagan haireseis are among the eighty heresies seeking a cure from
the Panarion, or Medicine-Chest, of Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, he
contends that it was the poets, not the philosophers, who inspired the blasphemous
fables of the Gnostics (Panarion 26.16). He treats them as one sect, which admits of
further subdivision into Phibionites, Stratonici, Caddites, and Borborians. Although
Seth figures in some of their books, the Sethians occupy a separate chapter (39); the
two sects are none the less similar enough to leave us wondering how he arrived at
this taxonomy. Of the Borborians at least he can claim to speak with authority, for as
a young man he was almost inveigled into their ceremonies (26.17). To share a meal
with them, one must undergo the initiatory rite of drinking menstrual blood, which
they identified at once with the feminine soul and with the Eucharistic oblation. The
promiscuous mingling of bodies which ensued was never allowed to produce a child.
The recollections of the most tendentious and vituperative of all the heresiologists
must be treated with due caution; on the other hand, the Nag Hammadi Codices
(IX.2) furnish a cognate text to his paraphrase of the myth of Norea, the wife of
Noah, who secretly introduced powers from a higher realm into the ark despite the
efforts of the chief archon to cast her out into the flood. He may not therefore be lying
(though he is certainly trying to justify his own taste for herpetological metaphors)
when he says that the Gnostics honored the serpent as an agent of revelation (26.1).
A neat contrast (some would say, too neat) is afforded by the Ophites, for whom the
serpent is the evil henchman of the Demiurge in the creation of the world, the seduc-
tion of Eve and the persecution of the elect (37). Here as elsewhere, Epiphanius adds
detail to the briefer account in Irenaeus, occasionally offering further parallels to a
Latin work falsely attributed to Tertullian. Before convicting him of willful embel-
lishment, we should observe that the newly discovered Gospel of Judas (Kasser and
Wurst 2007) lends credibility to his chapter on the Cainites, who (according to him)
believed that both the murder of Abel and the betrayal of Jesus were acts performed
on behalf of the hidden god for the chastisement of ignorance and error (38).
Sparing as his own usage is, Epiphanius informs us that the term gnôstikoi was now
a self-designation for the followers of Basilides, Satornilus, Colorbasus, Ptolemaeus,
Secundus, Carpocrates, and even (against all previous testimony) Valentinus
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(Panarion 31.1). In the chapter on the Valentinians a long transcript of the myth of
Sophia’s fall from Irenaeus is prefaced by a magical incantation and a shorter vari-
ation on the myth (31.2 and 31.5–6). There cannot be any doubt that “Valentinians”
is here an amplified form of the name Valentinus, just as in Aristotle “those around
Pythagoras” signifies Pythagoras and no-one else. The same trope permits Epiphanius
to turn the individual followers of the heresiarch into Secundians, Heracleonites, and
Theodotians. He adds little to previous sources in these chapters, but when he comes
to the Ptolemaeans, he quotes as the work of their founder a letter upholding the
inspiration of some portions of the Old Testament, with only vestigial reference to
the myth that Irenaeus lays at his door (33). The “Letter to Flora” has been adduced
as evidence that Ptolemaeus was not a Valentinian (Markschies 2000), while con-
versely it is argued, on the authority of Irenaeus, that Valentinus was not the true
inventor of the myth. We need not challenge the accuracy of either of our ecclesi-
astical witnesses: it is likely enough that both Ptolemaeus and Valentinus wrote in
different registers, sometimes expounding the whole of their system, sometimes prac-
ticing an economy that was suited to the audience or the purpose of composition.
Certainly, Epiphanius gives every impression of scholarship when he lists no fewer
than 78 omissions in Marcion’s text of Luke, and proceeds to draw up two catalogues
of the excisions, contaminations and misconstructions in his commentary on Paul
(Panarion 42). The first observes the true order of the Pauline corpus as Epiphanius
knows it, while the second, interlarded with his own strictures, adheres sarcastically
to Marcion’s order. Sixteen of his instances are drawn from First Corinthians, eight
from Romans, another eight from Galatians, the remainder from Second Corinthians,
Colossians, Philippians, Philemon, and Ephesians (this name being substituted
without remark for the heresiarch’s “Laodiceans”). Epiphanius cannot produce a text
of the apostle that is demonstrably older than Marcion’s edition, and his refutation of
him is characteristically circular; in reporting facts, however, he is no liar but a pedant
whose eyes are sharpened by his malice.
AF TERWO RD
Soon after the publication of the Nag Hammadi Codices, the historian Arthur Darby
Nock (1964: 275) declared that they added flesh to an anatomy that had been drawn,
with sufficient accuracy, by Irenaeus and other early witnesses. This verdict is sound,
with the obvious proviso that a full survey of the corpus will encourage a more sym-
pathetic reading of Gnostic thought than selective paraphrases whose very faithful-
ness renders them all the more tendentious. We cannot acquit the first heresiologists
of hyperbole, acerbity, and misplaced literalism; these faults betray want of taste, of
tact, and of charity, but are not evidence of intellectual hebetude or the intention to
deceive.
REFERENCES
Benko, Stephen. 1984. Pagan Rome and the Early Christians. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Brakke, David. 2011. The Gnostics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Edwards, Mark J. 1990. “Hippolytus of Rome on Aristotle.” Eranos 88: 25–9.
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———2015. Review of Smith, Guilt by Association. Catholic Historical Review 101: 902–3.

Kasser, Rodolphe, and Gregor Wurst. 2007. The Gospel of Judas. A Critical Edition. Washington
DC: National Geographic Society.
King, Karen L. 2003. What is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Löhr, Winrich A. 1996. Basilides und seine Schule. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Mansfeld, Jaap. 1992. Heresiology in Context: Hippolytus’ Elenchus as a Source for Greek
Philosophy. Leiden: Brill.
Marcovich, Miroslav. 1988. Studies in Graeco-Roman Religion and Gnosticism. Leiden: Brill.
Markschies, Christoph. 2000. “New Research on Ptolemaeus Gnosticus.” Zeitschrift für
Antikes Christentum 4: 225–54.
Nock, Arthur D. 1964. “Gnosticism.” Harvard Theological Review 57: 255–79.
Osborne, Catherine. 1987. Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy. London: Duckworth.
Pétrement, Simone. 1990. A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism. New York:
Harper Collins.
Quispel, Gilles. 1968. “Gnostic Man: The Doctrine of Basilides.” Joseph Campbell
(ed.). The Mystic Vision: Papers from the Eranos Jahrbuch. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Smith, Geoffrey S. 2014. Guilt by Association: Heresy Catalogues in Early Christianity.
Thomassen, Einar. 2006. The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the “Valentinians.” Leiden: Brill.
Williams, Michael A. 1996. Re-thinking Gnosticism: An Argument for the Dismantling of a
Wisse, Frederik. 1971. “The Nag Hammadi Library and the Heresiologists.” Vigiliae Christianae
25: 205–23.
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CHAPTER TEN
GENRES OF GNOSTIC LITERATURE

AND THE “CLASSICAL GNOSTIC”
SCHOOL OF THOUGHT
John D. Turner
D espite contemporary scholarly reservations concerning the appropriateness of

the term “Gnosticism” as a designation for the teachings of certain religious
groups or individual thinkers of the first four centuries that the second- century
Church Father Irenaeus and subsequent heresiologists –and even Plotinus’s disciple
and biographer Porphyry –designated as “gnostic” (Williams 1996; King 2005), this
essay is an attempt to survey the types of revelatory literature produced by such
thinkers and practitioners, and then to focus on an early stratum of the literary
corpus produced by them that has come to be referred to as “classical Gnosticism”
or “Sethian Gnosticism.” While “Gnosticism” is a typological category designating a
type of teaching and practice either claimed by its adherents or perceived by others to
be different or distinct from common opinion, “Classic Gnostic” or “Sethian” refers
more properly to a specific sectarian group of thinkers and practitioners and attempts
to characterize a significant aspect of their sense of social identity.
One might define a Gnostic (gnōstikos, “knowledge-supplying”) as a type of reli-
gious person who claims to possess and teach gnōsis, a revealed knowledge that affords
a direct insight into the nature of ultimate reality and its divine ground, thereby enab-
ling the self-realization of one’s own essential divine affinity, a possibility claimed to
be accessible only to a community initiated into its secrets. Aspects of this knowledge
were contingent upon metaphysical speculations and a hermeneutic that appeared to
be different from those widely accepted as traditional. Gnostics often employed the
same authoritative texts, myths, philosophies, and even rituals sanctioned by trad-
ition. But they viewed the world, humans, and God in non-standard, even subversive,
terms that challenged more traditional understandings by drawing upon the hidden
implications of various well-known but underdeveloped late antique philosophical
and religious traditions, often independently of commonly accepted philosophical
and religious boundaries (DeConick 2013a: 285–305; 2013b: 148–84; 2016). Their
tendency toward the apparent transgression of the more traditional interpretations
of both the Biblical and philosophical corpora provoked the Church fathers and even
Plotinus and his disciples to accuse them of heresy or sectarianism, excessive dis-
content with the perceived defects and inequalities in the sub-intelligible world, an
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— Jo h n D . Tu r n e r —
arrogant claim to extraordinary contemplative abilities available only to the initiated

elect, and the violation of the accepted norms of philosophical discourse and reasoned
argument in favor of divine revelations. Since accurate knowledge of the higher order
through unaided human reason alone was regarded as a fundamentally difficult if
not impossible proposition, a natural strategy would be to resort to the revelatory
agency of divine envoys, angelic mediators, or authoritative figures from the ancient
past, such as Adam, Seth, Zoroaster, or even the apostle John, as essential means of
securing and authenticating knowledge of the divine world.
GENRES OF GNOST IC S CRIP TU RE

In communicating their revelations of the nature of the divine and human world and
the means to enlightenment, Gnostic authors of the first four centuries adopted a
large variety of literary genres for the composition of their treatises, most of which
were long established in the wider literary world. Beginning in the fourth century
BCE and steadily over the course of the first three centuries of the Common Era, in
both the religious and secular sphere, great libraries and scriptoria were gradually
becoming the backbone of a living literary culture of collections of ancient texts.
Rather than being merely a part of a living tradition, these texts become authorita-
tive, even canonical, invested with a hitherto unheard-of authority and truth merely
on the basis of their authorship and antiquity. In this way, not merely Gnostic reli-
gious discourse, but also the study of Biblical literature, Greek philosophy and
natural science were becoming exercises in the exegesis of and commentary upon
authoritative ancient texts (Hadot 1987; Saffrey 1987). Centrally important texts
come to be considered sacred and their study a religious act, since they contained
the fullest expression of a wisdom that their authors had inherited from even more
ancient worthies and peoples, not only Greeks but also oriental peoples –Israelites,
Indians, Persians, Chaldeans, and Egyptians –who were believed to be closer to the
gods, yielding what amounts to ancient revelations (Baltes 1999). It was precisely
this interest in ancient wisdom that increasingly attracted not only historians and
philosophers, but also less academic thinkers, including Jews, Christians, Hermetics,
and, of course, the Gnostics.
These latter revelations, delivered by an authoritative but often pseudonymous
revealer or teacher, concerned matters such as: (1) the true nature of ultimate reality
including the nature of divinity and the invisible realms beyond the created cosmos;
(2) the origin of the physical cosmos as a more or less approximate copy of the truly
real transcendent realms and the means by which mundane humans could transcend
it; and (3) the nature, origin, and plight of the human soul confined to a physical body,
understood as its ancient exile from and eventual restoration to the divine realm.
These revelations were packaged in a number of literary genres, some resembling
those used by philosophers –didactic treatise, religio-philosophical epistle, dialogue,
monologue, and questions and answers (erōtapokriseis) –and others more typical of
religious discourse –apocalypse, testament, self-predicatory aretalogy, homily, gospel,
liturgical manual, ritual etiology, acts of apostles (praxeis apostolōn), and sayings of
the sages. In fact, one Nag Hammadi treatise (NHC VI,5) is merely a rough Coptic
translation from Plato’s own dialogue on the passions of the human soul excerpted
from Republic IX 588a-89b.
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— Genres of Gnostic literature —
With certain exceptions (e.g., the Letter of Ptolemy to Flora preserved by

Epiphanius, Panarion 33.3.1–33.7.10, the Naasene Hymn and perhaps the Megalē
Apophasis preserved by Hippolytus, Refutatio 5.7.2–9 and 6.18.4–7), the reports and
summaries of Gnostic teachings and practices by patristic authors such as Irenaeus,
Tertullian (and Pseudo- Tertullian), Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Origen,
Filastrius, Epiphanius, and Theodoret rarely contain original Gnostic sources, and
thus provide little information on the literary genres of Gnostic revelations. On the
other hand, many of these original compositions are preserved in Coptic translation
in papyrus books or codices. These are: the Askew codex, containing four books of
Pistis Sophia, bought from Anthony Askew by the British Museum in 1795; the Bruce
Codex, containing the Books of Jeu and an Untitled Text, found in upper Egypt by
Scottish traveler James Bruce in about 1769; the Berlin (or Achmim) Gnostic Codex
8502 –here cited BG –containing the Gospel of Mary, Apocryphon of John, Sophia
of Jesus Christ, and The Act of Peter, acquired in Cairo in 1896; the Nag Hammadi
Codices –here cited NHC –consisting of twelve papyrus codices and a portion of a
thirteenth, containing 52 treatises of which 48 are distinct works, discovered near Nag
Hammadi, Egypt in 1945; and the Tchacos Codex (= TC), containing The Letter of
Peter to Philip, the (First Apocalypse of) James, the Gospel of Judas, a work featuring
Jesus as Allogenes, and probably a version of Corpus Hermeticum XIII, discovered
in Egypt sometime during the 1970s but published only in 2006.
Certain treatises may have been aids to some form of worship, whether individual
or communal (especially the baptismal rite), while others were directed primarily
toward indoctrination. Among the liturgically oriented treatises, some consist solely
of prayers, such as the Prayer of the Apostle Paul (NHC I,1), the Hermetic Prayer of
Thanksgiving (NHC VI,7), and the Sethian Platonizing Three Steles of Seth (NHC
VII,5), and the Thought of Norea (NHC IX,2) containing Norea’s (the wife-sister
of Seth) invocation, petitions, and ascriptions of praise to the denizens of the divine
realm. One also finds fragments of hymnic material throughout the Nag Hammadi
corpus, although rarely as extensive as the Naasene Hymn cited by Hippolytus, the
Hymn of the Pearl cited in the Acts of Thomas 108–113, or the Round Dance of the
Cross cited in the Acts of John 94–101.
In the Nag Hammadi corpus, one finds also narratives of the deeds of apostles,
such as the short Act of Peter (BG, 4) and the Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles
(NHC VI,1). One also finds several instances of the genre of sayings of the sages (logoi
sophōn) that for the most part commend an ascetic lifestyle, for example, the famous
Gospel of Thomas (NHC II,2) as a collection of the sayings of Jesus, the Teachings of
Silvanus (NHC VII,4) on the plight and salvation of the soul, the Sentences of Sextus
(NHC XII,1), an incomplete collection of gnomic wisdom in the form of several hun-
dred aphorisms, and perhaps the Gospel of Philip (NHC II,3), a broadly Valentinian
miscellany composed of various kinds of material including aphorisms, parables, moral
exhortations, sayings of Jesus, snippets of narrative dialogue, and instances of Biblical
exegesis and sometimes polemical dogmatic utterances. There are also instances of
homilies, such as the Valentinian Gospel of Truth (NHC I,3) and Interpretation of
Knowledge (NHC XI,1), as well as a treatise of unknown affinity, the Testimony
of Truth (NHC IX,3), a highly metaphorical and even polemical exposition of the
origin of the soul, its descent into the material world, and ultimate salvation. A clear
instance of a Hellenistic romance tale is offered by the Exegesis on the Soul (NHC
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II,6), which traces the journey of the human soul in a way very similar, not only to the
myth of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses 5–6, Plotinus, Ennead III.
5 “On Love,” On the Origin of the World (NHC II 109,1–110,29), and the Hymn of
the Pearl in the Acts of Thomas 108–113, but also to the Valentinian myth of Sophia,
which the Exegesis on the Soul amply illustrates by a series citations from the Bible
and Homer: having left the perfection of the divine world and separated from her true
bridegroom, she undergoes many passions and misadventures that tempt her chastity,
but eventually comes to herself, and is once again reunited with her true bridegroom
in her Father’s dwelling.
Almost all extant Gnostic writings feature spoken performances on the part of a
revealer, whether as monologues (sometimes with brief oral exchanges) or as dialogues
or letters between named interlocutors. The three main genres, usually in some com-
bination though rarely in pure form, are: (1) a philosophical epistle; (2) a dialogue
containing the revealer’s answers to questions posed by one or more interlocutors in
either an earthly or heavenly setting; and (3) a lengthy genealogical narrative of the
origin, history, and destiny of the universe in both its transcendent and immanent
dimensions in the form of an uninterrupted discourse of a revealer figure.
1. Religio-philosophical epistles
As a teaching device rather than a private communication over a distance, one thinks
of the didactic epistles of figures such as pseudo-Plato, Epicurus, Cicero, and Seneca or
the dominant role of epistles in the New Testament, many of which achieved the status
of genuine revelations. Although their literary form is not that of a dialogue, they
nevertheless invoke the dynamics of a dialogue between the author and an implied
interlocutor. In what is commonly regarded as Gnostic literature, there are, besides
Ptolemy’s well-known Letter to Flora cited by Epiphanius of Salamis (Panarion 2.3.1–
7.10), also three Nag Hammadi treatises composed in the form of religio-philosophical
epistles: Eugnostos the Blessed, the Treatise on the Resurrection (Letter of Rheginos),
and the Letter of Peter to Philip, to which one may add the overarching genre of the
Apocryphon of James (NHC I, 2, whose inner content is a revelation dialogue between
Jesus and James and Peter), and a single sentence of the Hypostasis of the Archons
(NHC II 86,26–27). Of these, all except Eugnostos the Blessed are clearly Christian
and refer to the apostle Paul as an authority. The Codex III version of Eugnostos is a
philosophical treatise in the form of a letter written by Eugnostos that begins with the
sender’s name and greetings to the recipients (“Eugnostos the blessed, to those who
are his, greetings. I want you to know …). Following a critique of certain philosoph-
ical opinions on fate and providence, the remainder consists of a lengthy theogonical
narrative which concludes with the phrase “This is enough; I have told you all this
so that you might accept it, until one who does not need to be taught appears among
you.” Although the Treatise on the Resurrection is a philosophical diatribe on the doc-
trine of the resurrection, its overarching literary form is that of a letter addressed to a
pupil: “Rheginos my son, some people want to become intellectuals … Since you ask
about the main issues on resurrection in such a pleasant way, I am writing to you.” The
epistolary portion of the Letter of Peter to Philip occupies only its initial lines (NHC
VIII 132,10–133,8) without any formal conclusion, while the main body of the treatise
is a dialogue between the risen Jesus and his apostles. The Hypostasis of the Archons is
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dominantly a revelation monologue concluding with a brief dialogue between Norea

and the Luminary Eleleth (NHC II 92,32–97,21); although it is introduced by Pauline
citations (Col 1:13; Eph 6:12) and an epistolary formula (NHC II 86,26–27: “[I have]
sent this because you inquire about the reality [of the] authorities.”), it bears no other
epistolary traces other than this.
2. Revelation dialogues
The prototype of the dialogue is, of course, the Platonic dialogue. In them, Plato never
speaks to his audience directly in his own voice, and rarely affirms specific doctrines;
it is rather his dialogical interlocutors like Socrates who do all of the affirming,
doubting, questioning, and arguing. But this is not so in the Gnostic revelation dia-
logue, where the presumed teacher speaks apodictically and is often identified as
an either human or angelic envoy from a realm that transcends that of his human
interlocutors. In contrast to Plato’s dialogues, where the reader or listener is invited
to question the teacher’s assertions, the interlocutors of the revelation dialogue are
portrayed in a state of unquestioning trust in the teacher’s responses.
The popularity of Gnostic revelation dialogues can be seen from their numbers: fif-
teen of 52 treatises in the Nag Hammadi Codices, three of four treatises in the Berlin
Gnostic Codex, three (or perhaps four) of five treatises in the Tchacos Codex, two
of the three treatises in the Bruce Codex (the two books of Jeu), and all four books
of Pistis Sophia from the Askew Codex. Most of the revelation dialogues are set
on earth and occasioned by an earthly appearance of Jesus –whether pre-or post-
resurrection –as principal revealer speaking with one or more of his apostles, such as
the Apocryphon of John (BG, 2; NHC III,1; II,1; IV,1), Sophia of Jesus Christ (BG, 3;
NHC III,4), Letter of Peter to Philip (NHC VIII,2), Gospel of Mary (BG, 1), Gospel
of Judas (TC 3), the second part of the Dialogue of the Savior (NHC III 124,23–
147,23), and the books of Jeu and the Pistis Sophia. Sometimes the interlocutor is a
single brother of Jesus, as in the Apocryphon of James (NHC I,2), First Apocalypse of
James (NHC V,3), and the Book of Thomas the Contender (NHC II,7). The Gospel of
Mary actually combines two dialogues, an initial one between Jesus and his disciples
(BG 7,1–9,24), followed by Mary Magdalene’s dialogue with his other –apparently
less favored –male disciples concerning things Jesus had privately revealed to her
(BG 10,1–23; 15,1–19,2). Jesus’s dialogue with Judas, Mary, and Matthew in the
Dialogue of the Savior seems to consist of elaborations and interpretations of trad-
itional Jesuanic sayings rather than the author’s original composition, yet sometimes,
as in the blessings and curses that conclude the Book of Thomas the Contender, the
content of such elaborations clearly overwhelms what remain as mere vestiges of
Jesuanic sayings formulas.
Besides dialogues that occur in an earthly setting, there are treatises that feature
dialogues between an ancient exemplary visionary with various divine or heav-
enly revealers, often received in the course of a heavenly ascent, such as in Jewish
apocalypses such as the apocalypses of Enoch or the Ascension of Isaiah. These
include: the Apocalypse of Paul (NHC V,2), Hypsiphrone (NHC XI,4), Allogenes
(NHC X,3), Zostrianos (NHC VIII,1), the second half of the Hypostasis of the
Archons (NHC II,4), and a few portions of Marsanes (NHC X) as well as dialogues
between Hermes Trismegistus and his pupils, such as the Discourse on the Eighth
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and Ninth (NHC VI,6) and Asclepius 21–29 (NHC VI,8), and perhaps a fragmentary
copy of the Hermetic Perfect Discourse (TC 4) in the Tchacos Codex.
Some revelation dialogues were created by imposing a dialogue form on an origin-
ally non-dialogical discourse. Thus, the Sophia of Jesus Christ is a revelation dialogue
in which the metaphysical teaching of the philosophical epistle Eugnostos the Blessed
has been extracted and placed on the lips of the risen Jesus as responses to questions
raised by various disciples. The same transformation seems to have occurred in books
1–3 of the Pistis Sophia. Another possible instance of this transformation may be
the most well-known of the gnostic genealogical myths, the Sethian Apocryphon of
John. All four of its versions are presented in the form of a post-resurrection dia-
logue between Jesus and his disciple John son of Zebedee, in which Jesus reveals
the unknowable deity, the divine world which emanated from him, the creative act
of the divine wisdom resulting in the birth of the world creator who fabricates the
earthly Adam, and subsequent acts of the denizens of the divine world to awaken
Adam, Seth, and his seed of Seth to their true divine identity. However, since the
version of its introductory theogony and cosmogony paralleled in the church father
Irenaeus (approximately Adversus Haereses I.29.1–4 ≈ NHC II 4,35–14,13 ≈ BG
27,13–47,13) seems to be unaware of such a dialogical framework, it is possible that
it may also have circulated as a non-dialogical revelation monologue.
Other treatises are hybrids, such as the Hypostasis of the Archons, a revelation
discourse with a brief first-person epistolary introduction that begins as a mono-
logue on cosmogony and anthropogony, interpreting Genesis 1–9 in terms of the
struggle between the spiritual rulers (archons) of this world and the exalted powers
of the supreme deity over the fate of the divine image incarnated in Adam and his
descendants (NHC II 86,20–92,31), but which concludes with a revelation dialogue
on theogony and soteriology between the angel Eleleth (lowest of the Sethian Four
Luminaries, 92,32–97,21) and Norea, wife-sister of the Biblical Seth. Likewise, the
Paraphrase of Shem (NHC VII,1) begins as the revelatory discourse of the celestial
figure of Derdekeas received during the heavenly ascent of the biblical Shem, which
then turns into a brief revelatory dialogue between Derdekeas and Shem shortly
before his death. The Second Apocalypse of James (NHC V,4) is a report on the mar-
tyrdom of James delivered to his father Theudas by a priestly relative who witnessed
James’s stoning, but which contains a short dialogue between Jesus and James (50,4–
57,19). Among the well-known Platonizing Sethian treatises, Zostrianos, Allogenes,
Marsanes, and the Three Steles of Seth, both Zostrianos and Allogenes are heav-
enly ascent apocalypses consisting of a series of dialogues between various angelic
revealers and exemplary ascending visionaries, respectively Allogenes (conceivably an
alter ego of Seth) and Zostrianos (legendary grandfather of Zoroaster) as they ascend
through ever higher levels of the divine world. On the other hand, the Three Steles
of Seth presents a sequence of doxological prayers ascribed to the ancient Seth, for
use during a community ritual of visionary ascent, each of which marks a contem-
plative absorption into the same levels of the divine world that are also described in
Allogenes and Zostrianos.
Possible antecedents of the Gnostic revelation dialogue include certainly the
Platonic dialogues, but also the later philosophical dialogues of Cicero or Plutarch,
or certain Hermetic philosophical dialogues between master (Hermes, Isis) and pupil
(Tat, Asclepius, Ammon), or even the didactic question-answer treatises like those
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of Plutarch, Cicero, and Seneca devoted to the exegesis of authoritative texts for the
purpose of attracting adherents to a particular school of thought (Hadot 2005: 13).
But as Perkins (1980: 19–28) has suggested, even closer prototypes may have been
the dialogues between an ascending seer or visionary and an angelic guide during a
heavenly journey in various Jewish and Christian apocalypses that use the device of
an otherworldly journey to reveal a process of cosmic salvation that unfolds in time
and history, e.g., 1 Enoch 14.70–71; 2 Enoch 20–22; the Apocalypses of Abraham
and Zephaniah; Ascension of Isaiah; 3 Baruch; and 4 Ezra. There are also Greek
exemplars of this genre that feature otherworldly journeys either to the heavens (e.g.,
Parmenides’s Peri Physeōs, Plato’s myth of Er, Republic 614B-621B, Cicero’s Somnium
Scipionis, Plutarch’s De genio Socratis and De sera numinis vindicta, the Hermetic
Poimandres and Korē Kosmou) or to the underworld (the nekyiae of Odyssey XI and
Aeneid VI). In contrast to the Judaeo-Christian apocalypses, they emphasize a more
personal eschatology, display extensive speculation about the nature of the invisible
world, and do not develop an extended history of salvation (Attridge 1979).
An interesting example of a hybrid revelation dialogue is the Book of Thomas the
Contender (NHC II,7), whose initial three-fifths is a revelation dialogue between the
risen Jesus and his twin brother, the apostle Judas Thomas (138,4–142,21), while the
remaining two-fifths (142,21–145,16) constitutes a long monologue of Jesus in which
Thomas no longer plays a role. Ostensibly a Christian document, the basic teaching
of the dialogue occupying its first part seems to have been excerpted from a pre-
existing Middle-Platonic epitome of Plato’s teaching on the soul drawn principally
from the Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic, and Timaeus –or even from those dialogues
themselves –into expository units that formed Jesus’s answers to fictitious questions
asked by his interlocutor Thomas. On this construction, the Book of Thomas is an
interesting example of the Christianizing of Platonic teaching or, better yet, of the
Platonizing of Jesus. While the traditional style of Jesuanic wisdom sayings is adapted
to the conversational form of the Socratic dialogue, its content –Plato’s teaching on
the soul –has been transcribed into apodictic summaries, thereby losing the original
character of those dialogues as maieutical (cf. Theaetetus 149a-151d), performing the
role of a midwife helping to bring true knowledge to birth (Turner 2007).
3. Revelation monologues
At least 14 of the Nag Hammadi revelation discourses appear in the form of extended
monologues: On the Origin of the World, the Second Apocalypse of James, the
Authoritative Teaching, the Paraphrase of Shem, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth,
the Thunder-Perfect Mind, the Concept of Our Great Power, the Sethian Apocalypse
of Adam, Gospel of the Egyptians, Marsanes, and Melchizedek; the Valentinian
Tripartite Tractate, Interpretation of Knowledge, and Valentinian Exposition (to
these one might add the extensive patristic summaries concerning the teaching of
Basilides, the Valentinian Ptolemy, and the “Simonian” Megalē Apophasis cited by
Hippolytus). Many of these narrate a global history of the transcendent and imma-
nent cosmos in the form of a genealogical or theogonical myth, which can in turn be
embedded in or recast into other literary genres.
Thus the Gospel of the Egyptians narrates an extensive theogony, cosmogony,
anthropogony, and soteriology as an etiological justification for the ritual acts of a
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baptismal liturgy that conclude it. The main episodes of its theogony are punctuated
with doxological responses on the part of the auditors in praise of the supreme
divine pentad (Invisible Spirit, Barbelo, Triple Male Child, Youel and Child of Child
Esephech; see NHC IV 59,13–29 plus NHC III 49,22–50,17; 53,12–54,11; 55,16–
56,3; 61,23–62,13), and it concludes with a set of invocations and prayers (NHC III
66,8–68,1) that comprise the liturgy itself.
Melchizedek is an apocalypse containing the Biblical high priest Melchizedek’s
report of revelations imparted him by the angelic “receiver” Gamaliel and certain
“brethren” concerning future events that include the coming of the suffering, dying,
and rising savior Jesus Christ; like the Gospel of the Egyptians, it includes a lengthy
baptismal prayer, in this case spoken by Melchizedek as he receives baptism “in the
living, holy [names] and waters.”
The Apocalypse of Adam, despite its title, is actually a deathbed testament of
Adam to his son Seth in which he reveals the content of a dream vision in which he
was instructed by three heavenly men concerning the fortunes of Eve and himself, his
son Seth and Seth’s offspring in the contest between the evil creator god Saklas and
the earthly seed of Seth who are rescued from destruction by the Illuminator Seth who
finally appears in the form of Jesus.
Sometimes these monologues are delivered as first-person self-testimonies rather
than in third-person narratives. The revelation monologue Trimorphic Protennoia
(NHC XIII 1) takes the form of a first-person self-predicatory aretalogy (“I am X,”
“I am Y”) or recitation of the deeds and attributes of Protennoia-Barbelo, the First
Thought of the Sethian supreme deity. Speaking in the first person, she recites her
attributes and saving initiatives in three separate compositions related respectively
to her establishing heavenly dwellings for her fallen spirit trapped in mankind, her
destruction of the power of the hostile spiritual rulers of the world, and her final saving
descent as the Logos in the guise of Christ. These three salvific missions are metaphys-
ically identified as her successive appearances as the voice or Sound, the Speech, and
finally the Word of the divine thinking itself. Another such self-predicatory aretalogy
that employs a similar metaphysical scheme is the Thunder, which consists of para-
doxical self-predications spoken by a female savior figure, a primordial Thought that
expresses itself through sound, speech, and Logos rather like Protennoia. Yet given
the often paradoxical or even antithetical nature of these self-predications one finds in
the Thunder (NHC V 13,19–14,9, reflected also in On the Origin of the World, NHC
II 114,2–24, and the Hypostasis of the Archons, NHC II 89,14–17), one might also
think of a morally ambiguous figure such as Sophia or even Eve (Layton 1986: 52–4;
Bak- Halvgaard 2016). Another instance of a first- person monologue is Second
Treatise of the Great Seth (NHC VII,2), in which Jesus narrates his commission by
the heavenly Assembly, descent to earth, encounter with the worldly powers, and
apparent crucifixion, in which Simon of Cyrene is crucified in the place of Jesus, who
laughingly presents the whole story as a joke perpetrated against the ignorant powers
(including apostolic Christians).
In many Nag Hammadi discourses, dialogues, and epistles, the true nature of the
relation between man and world and world and God is explained by a genealogical
narrative that traces the genesis of this world from some primordial disruption of the
divine transcendence in its original stability and unit. This leads to the emergence of
a multiplicity of powers –often regarded as ignorant and even antagonistic to the
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supreme deity –who become the creators and rulers of a lower world that lacks the
purity of its origin.
Many of these genealogical myths, such as found in the Apocryphon of John, the
Hypostasis of the Archons, or the Valentinian myths of the Tripartite Tractate and of
Ptolemy (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses I.1.1–8.6; Hippolytus, Refutatio 6.29.2–36.4;
Ptolemy to Flora; Excerpts from Theodotus 43.2–65.2) clearly incorporate rewritings
of traditional cosmological myths. Indeed, the two dominant protological texts of
Graeco-Roman Antiquity were Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical book of Genesis (per-
haps supplemented by the myth of the “Book of the Watchers” in 1 Enoch 1–36).
The innovative, even counter-traditional, character of these rewritings offer interpret-
ations of passages from Jewish Scripture, especially the first nine chapters of Genesis,
that were perceived as problematic long before these Gnostic revelations were
produced. Many were intended to resolve notorious “difficulties,” such as uncom-
fortably anthropomorphic descriptions of God as having the form or emotions of a
human being. Perhaps the most notorious of these was the phenomenon that Michael
Williams (1996: 218) has called “Biblical demiurgy,” an adaptation of Jewish or
Christian protological traditions that assigns primary initiative and responsibility for
the creation of the cosmos to one or more creator figures other than and lower than
the highest divinity. In this way, one could explain the origin of what were perceived
as defects in the lower created order without holding the highest deity responsible
for them.
The main exegetical template that enabled the derivation of this view of the creator
from the book of Genesis was probably the ontological distinction Plato drew in his
Timaeus 29d7–47e2 between (1) the supreme and eternally stable being of the para-
digmatic “Living Thing that Is” (ho esti zōion, Timaeus 30c2–5), (2) the ever-changing
sensible cosmos, and (3) the demiurgical Intellect who, together with his product, the
soul and body of the cosmos, mediates between them. Even though Plato’s demiurge is
good because he is a god who always does what is best (Republic II 379ac, Phaedrus
247a, Timaeus 29d), he nevertheless ranks below the model that he must consult, and
it is necessary that his product (the cosmos) be inferior both to himself and his eternal
model (Timaeus 28–30). But beginning in the first century BCE, the apparent dualism
between the demiurge and his model implied by the Timaeus was transformed in a
monistic direction by Neopythagorean speculation on the generation of multiplicity
from a supreme Monad or One by a self-reflexive process of fission or doubling or
self-extension and by Middle Platonists such as Philo of Alexandria who overcame
Plato’s apparent distinction between model (the “Living Thing that Is”) and demiurge
by conflating them into a supreme divine Intellect whose own thoughts served as the
stable being (or “isness”) of the model and whose own “living” constitutes the creative
act of demiurgy, a notion further amplified in Plato’s Sophist (248e6–249a2). Such
a derivational monism was developed by a number of Gnostic –especially Sethian –
metaphysical systems and also by Plotinus, for whom the secondary principle must
itself derive directly from the absolute unity of the hyperontic primary principle. In
this scheme, an indefinite procession or spontaneous emission of an indefinite activity
or otherness from the first completes itself by an eternal act of self-reflection on its
prefiguration in the first, and thereby achieves definition as a second principle, usually
regarded as a kind of intellect (e.g., Ennead V.2. [11] 1.8–13). In this way, the abso-
lutely unique and self-directed supreme deity is excused from any responsibility for
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the existence of anything subsequent to itself. As Plotinus observed in the case of the
supreme One, “his products (i.e., Intellect, Soul, Nature, and even Matter) could not
be the same as himself. If then it is not the same, it cannot of course be better, for what
could be better than the One or in any way transcend him? It must then be worse; and
this means more deficient. What then is more deficient than the One? That which is
not one; it (Intellect) is therefore many” (Ennead V.3 [49] 15.7–10).
THE “ CLASSICAL GNO S TIC” S CHO O L O F

THOUGHT (H AIR Ē SIS)
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Hans-Martin Schenke (1974; 1981), followed by many
scholars, established a typology that purported to define a religio- philosophical
movement of the first four centuries that he called “Sethian Gnosticism,” whose myth
of origins, in-group nomenclature, ritual practice, and sense of group identity and
heritage were clearly distinct from other “gnostic” schools of thought such as the
Valentinians, who could at least claim a historical founding figure. The major motifs
Schenke used for identifying various texts as “Sethian” were: (1) the self-understanding
of certain Gnostics as being the pneumatic “seed” of Seth, (2) Seth as the heavenly-
earthly savior of his seed, sometimes appearing in the guise of Jesus, (3) a supreme
trinity of Father (the Invisible Spirit), Mother (Barbelo, the divine First thought),
and self-generated Child (Autogenes, who could be identified with the pre-existent
Christ), (4) the Child’s four luminaries (Harmozel, Oroiael, Daveithe, and Eleleth)
who, along with their attendants Gamaliel, Gabriel, Samblo, Abrasax (or the like),
are also the dwelling-places of the heavenly prototypes of Adam, Seth, and his seed,
(5) the evil creator-god Yaldabaoth (Saklas, Samael) who tries to destroy the seed of
Seth, and (6) the division of history into distinct ages defined by the appearance of the
savior at critical points in history marked by catastrophes (the flood, the conflagra-
tion, and final judgment of hostile powers). In addition to these criteria belong certain
figures and themes dealing with the transcendent world (e.g., the division of Barbelo’s
aeon into the triad of Kalyptos, Protophanes, Autogenes), instances of “obvious sec-
ondary Christianization,” and the ritual practices of the baptism of Five Seals and a
practice of visionary ascent into the transcendent realm.
These features are represented in the following texts: (1) the report of Irenaeus
of Lyons around 180 ce in his Adversus haereses (I.29) concerning a “multitude of
Gnostics” that in mid-fifth century Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Haereticarum fabularum
compendium (1.13) are identified as “Barbeloites” as well as aspects of the doctrine
of certain “others” (alii) Irenaeus proceeds to describe in Adv. Haer. I.30 (later iden-
tified as Sethian/Ophites by Theodoret, Haer. fab. comp. 1.14); (2) the report on the
“Sethoitae” by Pseudo-Tertullian’s Adversus omnes haereses 2.7–9 around 220 CE
(probably based on Hippolytus of Rome’s lost Syntagma, ca 210 CE); (3) even later
reports –based on both Irenaeus and Hippolytus’ Syntagma –by Filastrius of Brescia
around 385 CE (Diversarum haereseon liber 3, PG 1116–7) and by Epiphanius of
Salamis around 375 CE in the first book of his Panarion (chs. 25, 26, 39, 40) concerning
libertine “Gnostics,” “Sethians,” and “Archontics” respectively; (4) the untitled text
from the Bruce Codex; and (5) most importantly, fourteen original Coptic treatises
from the Nag Hammadi and Berlin Gnostic Codices: the Apocryphon of John (short
[BG 8502,2; NHC III,1] and long [NHC II,1; NHC IV,1] versions); Hypostasis of the
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Archons (NHC II,4); Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit = the Egyptian Gospel
(NHC III,2; NHC IV,2); Apocalypse of Adam (NHC V,5); Three Steles of Seth (NHC
VII,5); Zostrianos (NHC VIII,1); Marsanes (NHC X,1); Melchizedek (NHC IX,1);
Thought of Norea (NHC IX,2); Allogenes (NHC XI,3); and Trimorphic Protennoia
(NHC XIII,1). Beginning in 2006, it has become necessary to add the Gospel of Judas
from Codex Tchacos (TC 3) and perhaps also the immediately following work in
which Jesus refers to himself as Allogenes (TC 4).
There is, however no mention of Seth in the Thought of Norea, the Trimorphic
Protennoia, Melchizedek, Allogenes, Marsanes, Bruce, Untitled, or the Allogenes
work of Codex Tchacos, and he plays a major role only in the Apocalypse of Adam,
the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Apocryphon of John, the testimonies of Epiphanius
Panarion 39–40, and perhaps the Three Steles of Seth, suggesting that the term
“Sethian Gnostic” may not capture what seems to be most characteristic of these
texts as would a more neutral term such as “Classic Gnostic.” This term suggests
the relative chronological priority of Schenke’s text group with respect to the texts
widely accepted as defining the well-attested “Valentinian” school of Gnostic thought
descending from Valentinus (ca. 100–174 CE), whose characteristic doctrine Irenaeus
(Adversus Haereses 1.11.1) considered to have been adapted from the first principles
of the “school of thought” (haeresis) he goes on to attribute to the “multitude of
Gnostics.”
The designation Classic Gnostic was first introduced in 1987 by Bentley Layton’s
anthology of Gnostic texts, The Gnostic Scriptures, whose first and most extensive
part (5–22) was devoted to what he calls “Classic Gnostic Scripture.” While Schenke’s
starting point for his discussion of the Sethian system was the Nag Hammadi collection
of Coptic texts, Layton’s starting point was Irenaeus’s discussion of the “multitude
of Gnostics” in his Adversus Haereses I.29–31, which he then supplemented by those
Nag Hammadi Coptic texts that seemed to reflect the mythic and ritual features iden-
tified as “Gnostic” by Irenaeus. One could easily conclude from this that Schenke’s
“Sethian” Gnosticism is virtually the same as Layton’s “Classic” Gnosticism (which
also includes Irenaeus’s testimony on Saturninus in Adversus Haereses I.24).
More recently, in his Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking: Rethinking
Sethianism in Light of the Ophite Evidence (2009), Tuomas Rasimus proposed that
we enlarge the list of texts to be included in the “classic gnostic” group by including
those that feature what he calls an “Ophite” mythology. The most important of these
are Celsus and Origen’s description of an “Ophite diagram” (Origen, Contra Celsum
6.24–38), plus what he considers to be “Ophite” mythology found in Irenaeus’s
description of “other Gnostics” in his Adversus Haereses 1.30 (whom Pseudo-
Tertullian’s Adv. Omnes Haereses 2.1–4 later identified as “Ophites”), and those Nag
Hammadi texts that contain similar mythologumena: On the Origin of the World
(NHC II,5), Hypostasis of the Archons (NHC II,4), Eugnostos the Blessed (NHC
III,3; NHC V,1), Sophia of Jesus Christ (NHC III,4; BG 8502,3), and the second half
of the Apocryphon of John (NHC II 11,15–30,11; BG 41,16–75,10).
The most significant Ophite features found in the above-mentioned Ophite sources
are (1) a positive estimation of Adam and Eve’s eating from the tree of knowledge and
the serpent’s revelatory role therein; (2) a traditional group of seven theriomorphic
archons with specific names (Ialdabaoth, Iao, Sabaoth, Adonaeus, Eloeus, Oreus, and
Astaphaeus); and (3) the true godhead as a pentad made up of heavenly Adam and
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Eve figures: the First Male whose Thought becomes instantiated as the Second Male
or Son of Man, the First Woman called the Holy Spirit and Mother of the living, and
the offspring of the first two males, Christ as the Third Male and his sister Sophia.
Here, the figure of Seth as revealer and savior of the holy “seed” descended from him
plays no role.
The Barbeloite features include the four-level hierarchy formed by a supreme
triad (Father/Invisible Spirit, Mother/Barbelo, and Child/Autogenes) supplemented
by the Child’s four luminaries, as well as the notion of Barbelo’s three earthly self-
manifestations (two in Paradise, a final one in contemporary times) to rescue her
fallen members.
Since speculations about Seth as a savior or transmitter of secret knowledge as
well as the idea of Gnostics as the “seed of Seth” do not occupy a central place in
either the Barbeloite or Ophite mythology, these should be considered as a distinct
third “Sethite” type of mythology. Sethian texts not only demote the figure of Sophia
from her central soteriological role and membership among the supreme divinities in
Ophite mythology to a rather culpable and marginal status as the lowest of divine
beings in comparison to the exalted figure of Barbelo/Pronoia; they also elevate the
figure of the Autogenes Child at the expense of the divine Adamas, and they tend to
link Pronoia or Autogenes with Christ rather than the “increasingly troublesome”
figure of Sophia. The third “Sethite,” mythology, most evident in the Apocalypse of
Adam, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Three Steles of Seth, the Gospel of Judas, and
perhaps Zostrianos, is defined by the idea that the Gnostics are the “seed of Seth” and
by speculations about Seth as a savior or transmitter of secret knowledge, a notion
based on a tradition that Seth had erected two pillars, one of stone to survive the
flood, the other of brick to survive the conflagration, inscribed with secret knowledge
concerning the heavenly world and first-hand details of Adam’s life and the events
in paradise (Life of Adam and Eve 50.1–51.3; Josephus, Antiquities 1.68–71). The
Sethites somehow augmented the notion of these two catastrophes with a third, the
final eschatological descent of Seth to save his seed from the malevolent god respon-
sible for the first two, to yield a series of Seth’s three saving descents as outlined in the
Apocalypse of Adam and the Gospel of the Egyptians.
Rasimus goes on to note that from this typological perspective, Schenke’s Sethian
corpus actually contains three different types of material that comprise a wider tri-
partite group of “classic gnostic” texts whose components can be distinguished by
the artificial names “Ophite,” “Barbeloite,” and “Sethite,” designating originally inde-
pendent traditions that only later were interconnected when individual authors utilized
and linked them in various combinations. Of these three types of mythologies, the
purely Ophite sources are Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses I.30, Origen’s Contra Celsum
6.24–38, and the Nag Hammadi treatises On the Origin of the World, Eugnostos the
Blessed, and the Sophia of Jesus Christ. The more or less purely Barbeloite sources
are Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses I.29, and the Nag Hammadi treatises Trimorphic
Protennoia, Marsanes, and the Thought of Norea, while the purely Sethite sources are
Epiphanius, Panarion 40 and 39 (dependent on Pseudo-Tertullian, Haereses 2.7–9),
and the “Coptic Book” of Papyrus Berolinensis 20915 (Robinson 2004). Of those
sources that interfuse only two of these mythological types, by far the largest group
contains those that combine Sethite with Barbeloite features, pretty nearly Schenke’s
original “Sethian” group: the Apocalypse of Adam, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the
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Three Steles of Seth, Allogenes, Melchizedek, the Gospel of Judas (and Irenaeus,
Adversus Haereses I.31 on certain “Cainites”), and the untitled treatise of the Bruce
codex. The group combining only Ophite and Barbeloite features contains only two
members, the Hypostasis of the Archons and Epiphanius’s Panarion 26, while the
group combining only Sethite and Ophite mythology contains only one member, the
“Coptic Book” of Papyrus Berolinensis 20915. Only one treatise, the Apocryphon of
John, contains features of all three of these distinctive mythologies, and thus might
well be considered the classic Gnostic –or Sethian –revelation par excellence, espe-
cially given its primacy of place in three of the four codices containing its longer
and shorter versions. Since Rasimus hypothesizes that Ophite traditions go back to
the early second or even first century (prior to Valentinus, who shows interest in the
“Ophite” myth of the archontic creation of the primal human according to Clement
of Alexandria, Stromateis 2.236.2–4, cf. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses I.5.3–6),
Barbeloism to the second century (contemporary with Valentinus), and Sethianism to
the early third century (after Valentinus), his analysis invites a reconsideration of the
development, not only of Sethian and Ophite, but also of Valentinian tradition.
REFERENCES
Attridge, Harold. 1979. “Greek and Latin Apocalypses.” John J. Collins (ed.). Apocalypse: The
Morphology of a Genre. Semeia 14: 159–86.
Bak-Halvgaard, Tilde. 2016. Linguistic Manifestations in The Trimorphic Protennoia and the
Thunder: Perfect Mind: Analysed against the Background of Platonic and Stoic Dialectics.
Leiden: Brill.
Baltes, Matthias. 1999. “Der Platonismus und die Weisheit der Barbaren.” John J. Cleary (ed.).
Traditions of Platonism: Essays in Honour of John Dillon. Aldershot: Ashgate: 115–38.
DeConick, April D. 2013a. “Crafting Gnosis: Gnostic Spirituality in the Ancient New Age.”
Kevin Corrigan and Tuomas Rasimus (eds.). Gnosticism, Platonism and the Late Ancient
World: Essays in Honour of John D. Turner. Leiden: Brill: 285–305.
———2013b. “Gnostic Spirituality at the Crossroads of Christianity: Transgressing Boundaries
and Creating Orthodoxy.” Eduard Iricinschi, Lance Jenott, Nicola Denzey Lewis, and
Philippa Townsend (eds.). Beyond the Gnostic Gospels: Studies Building on the Work of
Elaine Pagels. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 148–84.
——— 2016. The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized
Religion from Antiquity to Today. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hadot, Pierre. 1987. “Théologie, exégèse, révélation, écriture, dans la philosophie grecque.”
Michel Tardieu (ed.). Les règles de l’interprétation. Paris: Éditions du Cerf: 13–34.
——— 2005. “Preface.” M.-D. Richard. L’enseignement oral de Platon. Second edition.
Paris: Éditions du Cerf: 10–15.
University Press.
Layton, Bentley. 1986. “The Riddle of the Thunder (NHC VI,2).” Charles W. Hedrick and
Robert Hodgson (eds.). Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism and Early Christianity. Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson Publishers: 37–54.
Perkins, Pheme. 1980. The Gnostic Dialogue. New York: Paulist Press.
Robinson, Gesine. 2004. Das Berliner “Koptische Buch” (P 20915): Eine wiederhergestellte
frühchristlich-theologische Abhandlung. Leuven: Peeters.
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Saffrey, Henri-Dominique. 1987. “Quelques aspects de la spiritualité des philosophes

néoplatoniciens de Jamblique à Proclus et Damascius.” Revue des sciences philosophiques et
théologiques 68: 169–82. Repr. in Henri D. Saffrey. Recherches sur le néoplatonisme après
Plotin. Paris: Vrin, 1990: 213–26.
Peter Nagel (ed.). Studia Coptica. Berlin: Akademie Verlag: 165–73.
——— 1981. “The Phenomenon and Significance of Sethian Gnosticism.” Bentley Layton
(ed.). The Rediscovery of Gnosticism: Proceedings of the International Conference on
Gnosticism at Yale, New Haven, Connecticut, March 28–31, 1978. Leiden: Brill: vol.
2: 588–616.
Turner, John D. 2007. “Victorinus, Parmenides Commentaries and the Platonizing Sethian
Treatises.” Keith Corrigan and John Turner (eds.), Platonism: Ancient, Modern, and
Postmodern. Leiden: Brill: 55–96.
Williams, Michael A. 1996. Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
SETHIAN GNOSTIC
SPECULATION
John D. Turner
SETHIAN GNOSTIC L ITE RATU RE AND

PATRISTIC TES TIM O NIE S
Until the early 1950s, Sethian Gnosticism was known mainly through descriptions
and refutations of it produced by various of the ante- Nicene Church Fathers,
supplemented by a few original Gnostic writings. The earliest such description
we possess is that of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons in chapters 29–31 of his Adversus
haereses, written around 180 CE. Chapter 29 describes the teaching of certain
“gnostics” (gnostici), later (ca. 225–250 CE) identified as “Sethoites” by pseudo-
Tertullian in his Adversus omnes haereses 2, which in turn was probably based
on Hippolytus’s lost Syntagma composed around 210 CE (cf. Photius, Bibliotheca
cod. 121 Bekker 94a); still later (ca. 450 CE), these same gnostics were named
“Barbeloites” by Theodoret of Cyrrhus, in his Haereticarum fabularum compen-
dium 1.13. In c hapter 30 of his Adversus haereses, Irenaeus presents the teaching
of certain “other” (alii) gnostics, whom Theodoret in turn identified as “Sethians”
or “Ophites,” that is, devotees of the paradisiacal serpent (Greek ophis) as a divine
revealer. In chapter 21, Irenaeus went on to describe “yet other” (allii autem rursus)
gnostics, whom pseudo-Tertullian later identified as certain “Cainites” who revered
the biblical Cain and proffered a “Gospel of Judas.” These reports on these three
groups were again summarized around 383 CE by Filastrius, Bishop of Brescia, in his
Diuersarum haereseon liber 3, and all these accounts were greatly enlarged around
375 CE by Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, in his lengthy descriptions of “Gnosticism”
“Sethians,” and “Archontics” in chapters 26, 39, and 40 of the first book of his
Panarion. To these secondary accounts, we may also add original primary sources
of similar teaching that were known prior to the 1950s, such as the “Untitled Text”
from the Bruce Codex published by Carl Schmidt in 1905.
In 1945 the chance discovery near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt of thirteen
papyrus codices written in Coptic –the final stage of the language of pharaonic
Egypt –added more than 50 original documents to the pool of evidence about
Gnostic teaching. Of these, no less than eleven treatises fit the designation “Sethian
Gnostic,” revealing the existence of a hitherto unknown religious competitor of early
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Christianity that had its own roots in second-temple Judaism. Sethian Gnosticism is
now the earliest form of Gnosticism for which we possess a great deal of textual evi-
dence, and appears to antedate and form a partial source for certain doctrines of the
equally well-documented but better-known Christian Gnostic school of Valentinus
(120–160 CE) and his followers. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Hans-Martin Schenke
identified the following Nag Hammadi texts as Sethian: the Secret Book of John
(NHC II,1; III,1; IV,1 in addition to the Berlin Gnostic version), the Nature of the
Rulers (NHC II,4), the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (NHC III,2; IV,2, also
known as the Egyptian Gospel), the Revelation of Adam (NHC V,5), the Three Steles
of Seth (NHC VII,5), Zostrianos (NHC VIII,1), Melchizedek (NHC IX,1), Thought
of Norea (NHC IX,2), Marsanes (NHC X), Allogenes the Stranger (NH XI,3), the
Three Forms of First Thought (or, Trimorphic Protennoia; NHC XIII,1). In 2006,
this corpus was supplemented by the Gospel of Judas (TC 3) and a poorly preserved
work of uncertain title that features Jesus as the stranger “Allogenes” (TC 4) from the
newly published Tchacos Codex.
THE F IGURE O F S E TH
The name “Sethian” does not seem to have been an original self-designation of
the authors and users of the distinctive teachings contained in either these original
sources or these patristic reports; it seems instead to be a convenient term used by
both the patristic opponents of this form of Gnostic thought and by modern scholars
who study them. Indeed, the figure of Seth is not even mentioned in the Thought
of Norea, Three Forms of First Thought, Allogenes the Stranger, Marsanes, or the
Untitled Text of the Bruce Codex, Melchizedek contains but a single mention of the
“children of Seth,” and the Nature of the Rulers mentions the birth of Seth to Eve,
but Seth plays no further role therein. Although the name Seth occurs in the titles of
the Second Discourse of Great Seth and the Three Steles of Seth, Seth is mentioned in
the body of the latter only. This leaves the Revelation of Adam, the Holy Book of the
Great Invisible Spirit, the Secret Book of John, and the Three Steles of Seth as the only
Sethian works wherein the figure of Seth is truly significant. As a result, a number
of recent scholars such as Bentley Layton and Tuomas Rasimus have suggested that
Schenke’s Sethian corpus as well as the aforementioned patristic testimonies be
classified under the rubric “Classical Gnostic Scripture.”
On the other hand, many of these treatises refer to a special segment of humanity
called “the great generation,” “strangers,” “another kind,” “the immovable, incor-
ruptible race,” “the seed of Seth,” “the living and immoveable race,” “the children
of Seth,” “the holy seed of Seth,” and “those who are worthy.” The terms “gener-
ation,” “race,” “seed,” and “strangers” are all plays on the tradition of Seth’s birth as
“another seed” (sperma heteron) in Genesis 4:25 (J source) and as bearer of the same
image and likeness to God as was his father Adam in Genesis 5:3 (P source):
And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth, for
she said, ‘God has appointed for me another seed (Hebrew kī šāt-li elohīm zēra’
‘ahēr; Greek eksanestēsen gar moi ho theos sperma heteron) instead of Abel, for
Cain slew him.’
(Genesis 4:25 RSV)
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— Sethian Gnostic speculation —
When Adam had lived a hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son
in his own likeness, after his image (Hebrew wayyōlek bidmūtō kezalmō; Greek
egennēsen kata tēn idean autou kai kata tēn eikona autou), and named him Seth.
(Genesis 5:3 RSV)
Seth’s status as bearer, transmitter (unlike Cain and Abel), and ultimately restorer of
the authentic image of Adam, the original bearer of the divine image, was of great
significance to the original composers and users of this literature, whether or not
they called themselves Sethians or “the seed of Seth.” Equally important was Seth’s
identity as transmitter of secret knowledge revealed to Adam about the nature of the
heavenly world and God’s plan to destroy the world by flood and fire according to a
tradition in which Seth was told to erect two pillars or steles, one of stone to survive
the flood, the other of brick to survive the conflagration (of Sodom and Gomorrah),
inscribed with this secret knowledge (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.68–71;
Life of Adam and Eve 25.1–29.3; 49.1–51.3). Since it was not Moses, who was the
servant of the God who expelled Adam from paradise and brought the flood, but
actually Seth who lived in paradisiacal times, Moses’s account in Genesis is not to
be trusted and must be corrected, as the Apocryphon of John (NHC II 13,19–20;
22,22–24; 23,3–4; 29,6–7) says repeatedly: “not as Moses said” (Rasimus 2009).
Of the three Sethian Gnostic texts (the Apocalypse of Adam, the Holy Book of the
Great Invisible Spirit, and the title of the Three Steles of Seth) that allude to this pillar
tradition or to writings of Seth, the first two rewrite Genesis in light of the pillar
tradition, revealing the existence of the heavenly Seth and his seed as transcendent
archetypes of the earthly Seth and his virtuous offspring, whom the heavenly Seth
and his angels rescue from the creator God’s attempts to destroy them by Flood and
Fire. The Apocalypse of Adam and the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit link
these two primordial destructions with a third, impending judgment and destruc-
tion of the archons by Seth (Holy Book, NHC III 63, 4–8), who has descended three
times: at the Flood, at the conflagration in primordial times, and in recent times for
the judgment of the archons where he appears as the figure of Jesus (III 63,9–64,6).
The Apocalypse of Adam likewise speaks of the third descent of an unidentified
Illuminator (NHC V 76, 8–11), possibly to be identified with Jesus; earlier the text
had spoken of the primordial deliverance of Seth’s seed at the times of the flood (69,
2–71, 14) and conflagration (75, 9–76, 7).
In varying ways, these treatises display a number of recurrent mythological features
which Schenke considered to form a core doctrine or myth on the basis of which one
may characterize a document as “Sethian”: the self-understanding of their readers as
the spiritual “seed” (descendants) of Seth, who is also their heavenly-earthly savior;
a supreme trinity consisting of the Father (Invisible Spirit), the Mother (Barbelo),
and the Child (Autogenes), who in turn establishes Four Luminaries (Harmozel,
Oroiael, Daveithai, and Eleleth, often conceived as the dwelling places of the heav-
enly archetypal Adam, Seth, and the seed of Seth), the last of whom is responsible
for the appearance of Sophia and, through her, for the material world and its evil
fashioner and ruler Yaldabaoth/Saklas/Samael and his demonic powers, who try to
destroy the seed of the earthly Seth by flood and fire but are thwarted by the Mother’s
saving interventions: first, as a divine voice revealing the existence of the archetypal
human; second, as the spiritual Eve; and ultimately as the heavenly Seth or Christ
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who bestows a saving baptism often called the Five Seals (Schenke 1974; 1981;
Turner 1986; 2001; 2012).
SETHIAN SPECULATION O N S ACRE D HIS TO RY

Sethian Gnostic thought had its roots in a form of Jewish speculation on the figure
and function of Sophia, the divine Wisdom that the Jewish Scriptures sometimes per-
sonified as the instrument through whom God creates, nourishes, and enlightens the
world (Proverbs 1–8; Sirach 24; Wisdom of Solomon 7). In the hands of Sethian
Gnostics, especially in the Apocryphon of John and the Holy Book of the Great
Invisible Spirit, these Biblical functions of Sophia were distributed among a hierarchy
of feminine principles: (1) an exalted divine Mother named Barbelo, who, as the First
Thought (“Protennoia,” “Pronoia”) of the supreme deity (the Invisible Spirit), is the
ultimate savior and enlightener; (2) a lower figure named Sophia, who gave rise to
the actual creator (“Yaldabaoth,” “Saklas,” “Samael,” the first archon) of the phys-
ical world, who in turn incarnated portions of the supreme Mother’s divine essence
into human bodies; and (3) the emissary figure of the spiritual Eve (“Epinoia”), who
appears on the earthly plane to alert humankind (Adam) to its true affinity with the
divine First Thought. Final salvation would be achieved by the supreme Mother’s
complete reintegration of her own dissipated essence into its original unity.
The functions of these various feminine wisdom figures were interconnected by
means of a myth that narrated the vicissitudes of knowledge (gnosis) itself. The poten-
tial thinking and self-knowledge of the supreme deity (the Invisible Spirit) initially
achieves full actuality in the person of his First Thought (Barbelo), whose intelli-
gence obediently extends itself into a multitude of intelligent spiritual entities called
aeons, culminating in the figure of Sophia. But at that point, the orderly unfolding
of the divine thinking tragically enters a phase of decline and fallenness in Sophia’s
rash attempt to imitate the supreme deity by conceiving a thought of her own. The
independent power of her creative thought results in the birth of the archon creator,
who then steals it and infuses it into Adam’s mortal human body, where it is further
weakened by fleshly and material preoccupations and undergoes oblivion.
The remainder of the myth narrates the steps by which the divine Mother restores
this dissipated divine thinking to its original actuality. Appearing first as the spiritual
Eve/Epinoia, she awakens Adam’s dim knowledge of his divine origin and image
and bequeaths this enlightenment to subsequent humanity through Adam’s son Seth
and his progeny, the seed of Seth. This ensures that humanity’s knowledge of its
essential divinity will be preserved among future humanity in spite of the archon’s
attempts to suppress it by the expulsion from paradise, the bringing of the flood,
the inauguration of sexual lust through the fallen angels, and the conflagration of
Sodom and Gomorrah. The Mother continues to make further salvific appearances
throughout subsequent history in various guises (for example, as a luminous cloud,
as ethereal angels, as Seth himself, or as Jesus) and ritual contexts (mainly bap-
tism) to awaken humanity’s potential self-awareness of its essential divinity to full
actuality. Salvation is thus the awakening of the fallen divine self-knowledge and
a reintegration into its original condition, which is actualized through the indi-
vidual Gnostic in the act of coming to know oneself by reenacting the myth of the
vicissitudes of knowledge itself.
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15
SETHIAN SP ECULATION O N E S TAB L IS HE D

T R A DI TIONS: JEWISH, CHRIS TIAN, AND P L ATO NIC
Sethian Gnosticism seems to be a phenomenon that arose in close proximity with
some form of apocalyptic Judaism. Most of the treatises portray a divine world as
if it were a great heavenly temple filled with a choir of spiritual beings (“aeons”)
gathered about the presence of the invisible supreme deity and engaged in a heavenly
liturgy. They stand in attendance and render praise at each successive stage by which
the Invisible Spirit unfolds the fullness of the divine realm. This regimen is broken
only at the terminus of this deployment by Sophia’s rash attempt to undertake her
own version of creative activity, which gives rise to the ignorant and jealous creator
of this world.
What is more, many of the Sethian treatises include a selective reworking of
the early chapters of Genesis. For the Sethians, the creator god in Genesis is an
inferior being named Yaldabaoth, not the true supreme God praised by the denizens
of the divine world (the Apocryphon of John, Hypostasis of the Archons, and the
Trimorphic Protennoia). As the chief world ruler, the creator Archon (“ruler”) or
Archigenetor (“creator”) is usually portrayed as having several offspring as his
henchmen (“Archons,” or “Authorities”). Sethians regard the plurality in this family
of archons as the explanation for the plural in such passages as Genesis 1:26 (“Let us
make the human being after our image”), or as the equivalent of the “fallen” or rebel-
lious angels of Gen 6:1–4 featured in certain later Jewish literature such as the first
Apocalypse of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. Since the commandments from the
chief archon do not really come “from on high,” –that is, from the true God –they
need not –indeed must not –be obeyed. To disobey the creator’s command not to eat
of the tree of knowledge was viewed by the Sethians, as by most Gnostics, as the means
of appropriating Gnosis, saving knowledge, rather than as a commission of sin (the
Apocryphon of John, Hypostasis of the Archons). As a result, the expulsion of Adam
and Eve from paradise was the pitiful and desperate act of a false god, motivated out
of fear, jealousy, and revenge, rather than a just punishment for disobedience. Thus,
a principal feature of certain Sethian protological texts is an interpretation of Jewish
scripture that appears to challenge a “standard” reading of Genesis (Tröger 1980;
Pearson 1986; 1988; 2007; Turner 2016).
Moreover, some of the central characters in the Sethian treatises seem to derive
from Jewish traditions. One such mythological figure is Wisdom (Sophia), who in
several treatises (the Apocryphon of John, the Trimorphic Protennoia, the Egyptian
Gospel, the Hypostasis of the Archons, Zostrianos, and perhaps Norea) plays the
crucial mediating role between the transcendent realm of perfection and the origin of
the of the sensible cosmos and its deficient creator and ruler. In addition, this Archon
and his assisting authorities and angels who control the cosmos bear an unmistakable
resemblance, not only to caricatured versions of the demiurge and the younger gods
of Plato’s Timaeus, but also to the “fallen” or rebellious angels of Gen 6:1–4 featured
in certain later Jewish literature such as the first Apocalypse of Enoch and the Book
of Jubilees (Stroumsa 1984; Couliano 1992). In general, Jewish exegetical tradition
appears most prominently in the protological sections of the Apocalypse of Adam, the
Hypostasis of the Archons, and the Apocryphon of John, and is least evident in the
Three Steles of Seth, Zostrianos, Allogenes, and Marsanes.
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While all the Sethian treatises owe something of their content to Jewish tradition, the
question of Christian influence is more complex, but probably stems from a perceived
equivalence between both Seth and Christ (cf. I Cor 15:49; Col 1:15; Rom 8:29) as
the authentic image of God. Some of the Sethian treatises (Zostrianos, the Three Steles
of Seth; Allogenes; Marsanes; Norea) seem to be unaffected by Christianity. Some dis-
play slight possible but debatable Christian motifs (the Apocalypse of Adam), and
others a thin Christian veneer such as Christological glosses (positively applied to
the divine Autogenes and to Seth in the Egyptian Gospel; Codex Bruce, Untitled,
and polemically applied to Barbelo in the Trimorphic Protennoia). Others are super-
ficially Christianized by means of NT citations (of “Paul” in the Hypostasis of the
Archons) and allusions to facets of Christ’s life (in Melchizedek). But the two Sethian
texts that exist in multiple versions are decidedly Christian: the entire content of the
Apocryphon of John is cast in the form of a post-resurrection dialogue between Jesus
and John the son of Zebedee, and the Egyptian Gospel, not only contains baptismal
prayers directed at Jesus as son of God, but explicitly identifies the third member of
the supreme divine triad as “the Great Christ” and portrays Seth’s final descent in the
form of the victorious living Jesus.
The thoroughgoing influence of Platonism throughout the entire Sethian corpus
is obvious to any reader. They all distinguish the earthly, visible realm of change
and becoming from a transcendent, invisible realm of permanence and stability,
and make much use of the distinction between intelligible archetype or model and
physical image or copy. Moreover, the Sethian exegesis of Genesis –like Philo of
Alexandria’s (e.g., On the Creation of the World) exegesis of the same text –could
be considered as an interpretation of a Jewish text according to a set of rules derived
from Platonism (Couliano 1992). In effect, the Sethian cosmogony generally identi-
fied the Biblical creator God as the chief Archon, a parody of the demiurge of Plato’s
Timaeus (although the Sethians never call the world creator a “demiurge”): he cannot
really be the supreme deity, since he consults a divine intelligible paradigm beyond
him as the model for his creation, so there must be a higher God presiding over the
ideal realm who is superior to the creator God of Genesis. In addition, the Biblical
creator’s continual assertion of his sole godhead and supremacy (e.g., “I am a jealous
God” in Dt 5:9 and “I am God and there is none other beside me” in Is 45:5–7,
18, 21; 46:9) when one comes to know that he is not supreme suggests to Sethian
exegetes a jealous pretender to divine authority. His role is more like that of the
younger gods of Plato’s Timaeus 41a-44c to whom the demiurge assigns the task of
incarnating immortal souls into human bodies; indeed, his first creative act is to bring
into being seven or twelve subordinate “archons” as his henchmen. Indeed, a creator
who jealously subjects his creatures to his power and thwarts their attempts to attain
knowledge of the divine realm is manifestly a faulty being, quite the opposite of the
ungrudging demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus.
Moreover, especially in the four treatises Allogenes (NHC XI, 3), Zostrianos (NHC
VIII, 1), the Three Steles of Seth (NHC VII, 5), and Marsanes (NHC X), there is no
trace of Christian influence and very little of Jewish influence, but instead an inten-
tional rapprochement with Plato’s Timaeus, Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Sophist, as well
as the metaphysics of the sort found in Philo of Alexandria, Moderatus, Numenius,
Plotinus, and his disciple Amelius. This is reflected in their ontological structuring and
deployment of the divine world and in their presentation of a technique of spiritual
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ascent to the level of the highest unknown deity, not to mention their use and devel-
opment of specific philosophical terminology. Indeed, Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus 16
tells us that both Zostrianos and Allogenes were read and critiqued in his Roman
seminar in the years 265–268 CE (Tardieu 1996; 2005; Narbonne 2011). These four
treatises feature a method of enlightenment through a visionary ascent that in effect
reascends the chain of being originally generated by the supreme deity.
In these treatises the maternal figure of the merciful Mother Barbelo becomes the
masculine Aeon of Barbelo who contains the ideal archetypes of all earthly realities.
Allogenes, Marsanes, and the Three Steles of Seth define Sethian religious praxis,
not in terms of a baptismal rite, but rather in terms of a practice of contemplative
ascent up to, through, and even beyond the Barbelo Aeon toward even more tran-
scendent divine principles –the Invisible Spirit and his Triple Powered One from
whom Barbelo originally derived. This ascent is clearly modeled upon the ascent to
and vision of ultimate Beauty as presented in Plato’s Symposium 210a-212a, whose
stages of conceptual abstraction leading to a vision of ultimate Beauty are interpreted
in terms of an assimilation to ever higher levels of reality. A median position in this
spectrum of ritual practice is represented by the treatise Zostrianos, which conceives
the stages of this visionary ascent as baptismal sealings, a terminology also taken up
by the treatise Marsanes. This suggests that the baptismal rite was the cultic setting
within which the completely non-baptismal practice of visionary ascent in Sethian
texts like Allogenes and the Three Steles of Seth arose. In the latter two texts, the
ascensional rite has become detached from the older baptismal mystery, while in
Zostrianos (and perhaps Marsanes) it is still associated with the baptismal rite, or at
least interpreted in terms of it.
The metaphysical hierarchy of the Platonizing Sethian treatises is headed by
a supreme and pre- existent Unknowable One, often called the Invisible Spirit, a
hypernoetic entity beyond even being itself and who can be known only by a process
of unknowing. Below him is the intelligible realm of true being called the Barbelo
Aeon, a divine Intellect containing three sub- intellects: one that is contemplated
(called Kalyptos or the “hidden” one) and contains the realm of pure Being, one that
contemplates (called Protophanes or “first manifesting” one) and represents the divine
contemplating Intellect, and one that is discursive and demiurgic (called the divine
Autogenes or “self-generated” one) that represents the function of the demiurge of
Plato’s Timaeus. These names may have originally designated the stages by which the
intelligible world was generated: at first “hidden” in the supreme One, then “first-
manifesting” and finally “self-generated.” Indeed the famous noetic of Being–Mind–
Life triad that underlies all subsequent Neoplatonic metaphysics probably arose from
similar attempts to interpret the creative activity of the Demiurge whose intellect
consults the archetypal “Truly living Being” of Timaeus 39e7–9, such as found in
Numenius (Frgs. 11, 13, 15, 16 des Places), Amelius (Proclus, In Timaeum I 306,1–14),
and the early Plotinus (Ennead III, 9 [13], 1 –but rejected in Ennead II, 9 [33], 1).
Mediating between the hypernoetic Unknowable One and the intelligible realm of
the Aeon of Barbelo is the Triple Power of the Invisible Spirit, an inter-hypostatic triad
consisting of the three powers of Existence, Vitality, and Mentality (or Blessedness)
between the Unknowable One and the Barbelo Aeon. This Triple Power is the emanative
means by which the supreme One generates the Aeon of Barbelo in three phases. (1) In
its initial phase as a purely infinitival Existence, it is latent within and identical with
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the supreme One; (2) in its emanative phase it is an indefinite Vitality that proceeds
forth from One; and (3) in its final phase it is a Mentality that –through the contem-
plation of its source in the One –takes on the character of determinate being as the
intellectual Aeon of Barbelo. It is very likely that the Sethians developed this sequence
of ontogenetic powers to account for the origin of the noetic triad of Being-Life-Mind
derived from Plato’s Timaeus 39e7–9 by them and others: the indeterminate activities
of being and living resident in the paradigmatic Living-Thing-that-Is (ho esti zōion)
which interact with the activity of intellection (nous … kathorai) on the part of the
perceiving demiurgic Intellect become regarded as the means by which the determinate
components of the divine intellect – Being, Life and Mind – are generated.
In fact, Allogenes (NHC XI 60,13–61,22) narrates a practice of contemplative ascent
whose stages are the exact inverse of the ontogenetic stages by which all reality was ori-
ginally generated. Beginning with knowledge of perceptible phenomena, one advances
through discursive analysis of these phenomena in search of their transcendent causes,
which ultimately leads to a sudden and direct insight, even absorption, into the nature
of ultimate reality. This absorption amounts to a self-reversion towards some residual
aspect of the transcendental One’s initial self-manifestation that somehow lies also at
the origin of the mystic’s own self. This ascending sequence of epistemological states
ends in an utter cognitive vacancy or “learned ignorance.” Both Allogenes and two
Middleplatonic sources speak of a kind of learned ignorance that transcends reason and
intellection: extension of a “vacant intellect” in fragment 1 of the Chaldaean Oracles, or
an ineffable “preconception” cognizant of nothing at all in fragment 2 of the anonymous
Turin Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides. But whereas the latter two sources merely
describe these approaches, Allogenes is the earliest attempt in the history of Western mys-
ticism actually to narrate the successive stages of a mystical union with the Unknowable
God who can only be known by not knowing him.
Below the transcendental realms of the Invisible Spirit and the Barbelo Aeon
comes the third level of the metaphysical hierarchy, which Allogenes (XI 51,26–32)
calls the realm of Nature (physis), a realm whose relative defects are to be rectified
by the divine Autogenes. While these three levels of the cosmic hierarchy have ana-
logies in Middle-and Neoplatonic metaphysics, Zostrianos and Marsanes articulate
the realm extending below the intelligible realm of the Aeon of Barbelo down to
the earth into distinct aeonic levels, each populated with various kinds of souls and
spiritual beings, but whose nomenclature and function is more typical of Biblical
speculation. According to Zostrianos, directly below the Aeon of Barbelo, one finds
the Self-generated Aeons, the final resting place of enlightened souls, containing the
four Luminaries and the archetypal Adamas, Seth, and his seed. Below these is a
sequence of transitional levels containing souls still in the process of enlightenment,
yet destined for further reincarnations: the Repentance, containing the disembodied
souls of those who sin, but repent and are drawn to immortal things, and the Sojourn,
containing disembodied souls who are outer-directed, but are gaining self-knowledge.
Below these are the aeonic “copies” –presumably the realm of the Milky Way and
the seven planets –as the initial abode and a kind of “training ground” in which
recently disembodied souls prepare for entrance into the true Self-generated Aeons,
Repentance, and Sojourn. The realm below these copies, perhaps extending from the
moon (the “airy earth”) down to the earth itself, seems to be identified as the thirteen
aeons presided over by the Archon of creation.
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15
Although they employ the notably Jewish genre of heavenly ascent apocalypses,
and use a few identifiably Christian figures (e.g., Yesseus Mazareus Yessedekeus),
within the Sethian corpus, one is justified in speaking of a specific sub-group of
texts, the “Platonizing” Sethian texts Zostrianos, Allogenes, the Three Steles of Seth,
and Marsanes. Assuming that comparisons between the Sethian texts are not to be
explained by interdependencies between versions to which we have no access, the
obvious conclusion seems to be that these four texts represent a departure from an
earlier Christian Sethianism, since in them the baptismal rite, the Sethian primeval
history, and indeed the figure of Seth himself no longer play a fundamental role.
REFERENCES
Couliano, Ioan P. 1992. The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to
Modern Nihilism (trans. H. S. Wiesner). San Francisco: HarperCollins
Narbonne, Jean-Marc. 2011. Plotinus in Dialogue with the Gnostics. Leiden: Brill.
Pearson, Birger A. 1986. “Jewish Sources in Gnostic Literature.” Kent H. Richards (ed.). Society
of Biblical Literature 1986 Seminar Papers. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
———1988. “Use, Authority and Exegesis of Mikra in Gnostic Literature.” Martin J. Mulder
(ed.). Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient
Judaism and Early Christianity. Assen/ Maastricht: Van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress
Press: 635–52.
——— 1990. Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
——— 2007. Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.
Peter Nagel (ed.). Studia Coptica. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag: 165–73.
———1981. “The Phenomenon and Significance of Sethian Gnosticism.” Bentley Layton (ed.).
The Rediscovery of Gnosticism: Proceedings of the International Conference on Gnosticism
at Yale, New Haven, Connecticut, March 28–31, 1978. Leiden: Brill: vol. 2, 588–616.
Stroumsa, Gedaliahu A. G. 1984. Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Tardieu, Michel. 1996. “Recherches sur la formation de l’apocalypse de Zostrien et les sources
de Marius Victorinus.” Res Orientales IX. Bures-sur-Yvette: Groupe pour l’Etude de la
Civilisation du Moyen-Orient: 7–114.
———2005. “Plotin citateur du Zostrien.” Paper presented at the Colloquium on “Thèmes et
problèmes du traité 33 de Plotin contre les Gnostiques.” Collège de France, Paris, June 7–8.
Tröger, Konrad W. 1980. Altes Testament–Frühjudentum–Gnosis: Neue Studien zu “Gnosis
und Bibel.” Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn.
Turner, John D. 1986. “Sethian Gnosticism: A Literary History.” Charles W. Hedrick and
Robert Hodgson (eds.). Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism and Early Christianity. Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson Publishers: 55–86.
——— 2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Québec: Presses de l’Université
Laval; Louvain and Paris: Peeters.
—— —2012. “The Curious Philosophical World of Later Religious Gnosticism.” Kevin
Corrigan, John D. Turner, and Peter Wakefield (eds.). Religion and Philosophy in the
Platonic and Neoplatonic Traditions. From Antiquity to the Early Medieval Period. Sankt
Augustin: Academia Verlag: 151–81.
—— —2016. “Transgressing Boundaries: Plotinus and the Gnostics.” Gnosis: Journal of
Gnostic Studies 1: 56–85.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
BASILIDES AND
THE BASILIDIANS
Jean-Daniel Dubois
B asilides was the first Christian intellectual known in the history of the Egyptian
Church (Tardieu 1994: 86). He taught in Alexandria under emperor Hadrian (117–
138) and may have lived until the emperor Antoninus (138–161) according to Clement
of Alexandria (Stromateis VII.106.4), who also records that Basilides claimed to have
been taught by Glaucias, the interpreter of the apostle Peter. According to the author of
the Elenchos (VII.20.1) he also received secret traditions of the Savior through Matthias.
Basilides had a son, Isidoros, who was his disciple (Clement, Strom. VI.53). His place of
origin and his education remain unknown in spite of some biographical details invented
by heresiologists to prove that his doctrine is part of the history of Christian heresies.
Basilides wrote 24 books of Gospel commentaries under the title Exegetica, now
lost, but then known to Agrippa Castor, who refuted them in the middle of the second
century (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History IV.7.6–7). The number of books is very
likely historical (Markschies 2012: 461 and note 9) as the thirteenth book is quoted
in the Manichaean refutation of Hegemonius, Acta Archelai (67.5), and Clement
of Alexandria (Strom. IV.81.1–83.2) quotes a fragment of the twenty-third book.
Exegetica must be Basilides’s only work, attested by a number of fragments. The most
detailed commentary on these fragments is offered by Winrich Löhr in his mono-
graph Basilides und seine Schule (1996). But Basilides’s book of psalms (Fragmentum
Muratorianum, 82–84; cf. also Origenes, In Iob XXI.11) and the Gospel of Basilides
(Origenes, In Lucam I.2) are inventions of the heresiologists to confirm Basilides’s
qualification as a heretic (Kehlhoffer 2005; Markschies 2012).
Three titles of Isidoros’s works have survived: (a) the Commentaries (Exegetica)
of the Prophet Parchor in two books of which Clement of Alexandria quotes three
fragments (Strom. VI.53.2–5); Parchor is the figure of the true philosopher receiving
direct revelations; (b) a treaty, On the Adventitious Soul (Strom. II.113.3–114.1), in
which Isidoros explains the role of casual spirits in the origin of passions; (c) a treaty
on Ethics in two books (Strom. III.1.1–3.2) in which Isidoros discusses the role of
prophetic knowledge with some philosophers, like Pherecydes of Syros.
Most of the fragments of Basilides’s Exegetica are preserved in Clement of
Alexandria’s Stromata. Fragment 1 (Strom. I.145.6–146.4) attests that the Basilidians
were celebrating the dates of the birth of Jesus, of his baptism, and of his Passion.
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— Basilides and the Basilidians —
Fragment 2 (Strom. II.10.1–11.2) affirms the role of faith and election as a natural
and free gift from God. Clement objects to the disappearance of free will.
Fragment 3 (Strom. II.27) defines faith as an ascent of the soul.
Fragment 4 (Strom. II.36.1) develops Proverbs 1:7 about the fright of the demiurge
when he heard the Holy Spirit at Jesus’s baptism (cf. also Excerpts of Theodotus 16
about the Holy Spirit as “Deacon”; Orbe 1976: I, 553–69); the fright of the demiurge
marked the beginning of his wisdom.
Fragment 5 (Strom. II.112.1–114.2) deals with the origin of passions among the
casual spirits in the non-rational part of the human soul.
Fragment 6 (Strom. III.1–3) develops an extract of Isidoros’s ethics on Pauline
exhortations on marriage (1 Cor. 7) and shows how Basilidian ethics is able to pro-
pose techniques of caring for the soul.
Fragment 7 (Strom. IV.81.1–83.1) is often quoted as it treats of pain and suffering
in relation to sin in the context of persecutions against Christians.
Fragment 8 (Strom. IV.86.1) intends to combine God’s providence and goodness
according to a Christian understanding of love in spite of suffering and persecution.
Fragment 9 (Strom. IV.88.5) also concerns God’s providence while the soul is
governed by will, even when man sins.
Fragment 10 (Strom. IV.153.4) allows forgiveness of sins only for those committed
in ignorance or unintentionally.
Fragment 11 (Strom. IV.162.1) defines justice and peace among the virtues of the
perfect Gnostics which are typical of their freedom from the emotions of the soul.
Fragment 12 (Strom. IV.165.3) evokes the natural determination of the Gnostic
Elect which means a certain distance from the world.
Fragment 13 (Strom. V.3.2–3) links faith and knowledge of God to a natural ten-
dency which brings Clement to object to the disappearance of free will.
Fragment 14 (Strom. V.74.3) reaffirms the transcendent nature of God.
Fragment 15 (Strom. VI.53.2–5) quotes three extracts of Isidoros on the role of
true philosophers.
Fragment 16 (Excerpts of Theodotus 28) alludes to the Basilidian migration of the
soul in an interpretation of Deuteronomy 5:9 about God’s punishments of three or
four generations.
Fragment 17 (Origen’s Commentary on Matthew, GCS 38.73.7–13) expresses
Origen’s opinion on the reincarnation of the soul that he sees in the Basilidian doctrine.
Fragment 18 (Origen’s Commentary on Romans V.1.25, Sources Chrétiennes 539,
382–383) repeats Origen’s opinion, as in Fragment 17.
Fragment 19 (Hegemonius, Acta Archelai 67.4–12) is a very long and authentic
fragment on Basilidian cosmogony and on the origin of evil, a fragment inserted in
the anti-Manichaean refutation of Hegemonius which makes Basilides a kind of pre-
decessor of Mani in spite of his medioplatonic affiliation.
It is difficult to draw a clear picture of Basilides’s work as Christian theologian and
exegete from all these fragments. The heresiologists of the second and third centuries
refuting Basilides bring additional information about his doctrine (Löhr 1996: 256–
84, on Irenaeus and authors who have used Irenaeus’s presentation). Irenaeus, Against
the Heresies I.24.3–7 presents a summary of Basilides’ s pantheon of aeons (I.24.3)
and its cosmogony of 365 skies, full of angels. In I.24.4 a presentation is given of
Basilides’s Christology with a Christ as Intellect of the Father who cannot, as such,
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— Jean-Daniel Dubois —
suffer on the cross; therefore, the Basilidian Gnostics would deny a crucified Christ
and believe in a living Savior. The three other paragraphs (I.24.5–7) explicit Basilides’s
ethics and secret practices to accompany the soul on its way to heaven.
The author of the Elenchos, often referred to as Pseudo-Hippolytus, gives a very
detailed summary of Basilides’s cosmogony, anthropology and Christology (VII.20–
27; X.14; Litwa 2016: 505–37; Löhr 1996: 284–323). The philosophical orientation
of the author of the Elenchos underlines the medioplatonic context of Basilides’s doc-
trine (Grant 1979), and in particular Aristotelian sources of Basilides’s cosmogony
(Bos 2000; 2005; 2011) and Stoic sources of his ethics (Löhr 1996). One character-
istic of this presentation is that it focuses on a God who cannot be described with the
category of Being (Whittaker 1969; Grant 1979). This apophatic definition of God
resembles that of other Gnostic texts like the Apocryphon of John (BG 24,20–25,10)
or the Valentinian Tractatus Tripartitus (NHC I, 53,21–37). Therefore, the creation
exists from an initial seed (El. VII.21) from which derive three Sonships. The first two
are linked to the “supercosmic” (with a Great Ruler in the Ogdoad) and the “cosmic”
(with a “Ruler” in the Hebdomad) worlds, while the third Sonship is mixed with the
matter of the world and needs purification (El. VII.22–24). Salvation history starts
with the revelation of the Gospel which illuminates the world and can diffuse like a
perfume (El. VII.25–26). This illumination first happens in the supercosmic world
and the Great Ruler is instructed about the mystery of the Gospel (El. VII.26.2–5),
then it continues in the Hebdomad (El. VII.26.5–8; Méhat 1974) until the Holy Spirit
descends on Jesus the son of Mary (El. VII.26.8–10) so that the third Sonship can be
purified with the light that shines from above (El. VII.26.10). The restoration of the
world mixed with matter can then happen, while a great ignorance is thrown on the
world as the saved souls ascend to the supercosmic domain of the Holy Spirit (El.
VII.27.1–5). So, the key of the Gospel is given in the life of Jesus (El. VII.27.6–13)
ending with the crucifixion; its meaning is the following: “Jesus was the first-fruits of
the differentiation, and his suffering occurred for no other reason than to differentiate
the blended elements” (El. VII.27.12; Orbe 1976: II, 224–93; Dubois 2017: 302). In
other words, the purification of the worldly matter can happen through the coming of
the Gospel and Jesus’s crucifixion as the symbol of the separation between body and
soul in order to help the saved souls ascending to their pneumatic realm.
Beside the Fragments of Basilides and Isidoros, and beyond the refutations of
Irenaeus and the Elenchos, Coptic documents of the Nag Hammadi collection
of Gnostic texts (in Codex VII; Tardieu 1985–1986) are now offering a new
approach to Basilidian doctrine. The Second Logos of the Great Seth (NHC VII,
2; Dubois 2014–2015, and Dubois, in press b) and the Apocalypse of Peter (NHC
VII, 3; Dubois 2007) have often intrigued scholars because of their proximity
to the Basilidian scenario of the crucifixion in Irenaeus (for example Painchaud
1982: 105; Dubois, in press a). But a comparison between the Second Logos of Seth
(p. 56) and Irenaeus shows that the crucified Jesus cannot be confused with the real
Savior. But the Coptic tractate does not develop the unlikely scenario described by
Irenaeus of a crucifixion of Simon of Cyrene in place of Jesus. It uses an apoca-
lyptic understanding of the crucifixion as the final result of the bad conduct of
ignorant archons in charge of the creation of the universe. Jesus descends from the
world above to bring the Gospel to the world (Great Seth 50.2–24). This advent
is described as involving a separation into three kinds of people (52.14–29): those
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who believe in the Gospel and the miracles of Jesus, those who flee from the Savior,
like the disciples and the apostles, and join the worldly people, and those who
inflict on Jesus a deadly punishment.
The Apocalypse of Peter is centered on a revelation of the Savior to Peter about the
real meaning of the crucifixion (81.8–83.15). The crucified body on the cross is not
the real Savior, who is laughing above the cross because of the ignorance of those who
crucified him. Just like in Irenaeus’s presentation of the crucifixion, Peter is to deny the
crucified body (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies I. 24.4) and believe in a spiritual Savior
laughing at those who take the crucified body as their Savior. And just like the Great
Seth, the Apocalypse of Peter confirms the Elenchos’s allegation of the Basilidians
(VII.27.12): Jesus’s crucifixion is the manifestation of the separation of three kinds
of body of the Savior (terrestrial, psychic and pneumatic). For the Apocalypse, the
real Savior cannot be the crucified body. One can discern in these presentations of
the crucifixion a direct Basilidian polemic against a Paulinian understanding of the
crucifixion (1 Cor 2:2: “I only know Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ crucified”), just
as the Great Seth also firmly attacks the Paulinian understanding of baptism (Great
Seth 49.26–28; Rom 6). The Apocalypse of Peter, more than the Great Seth, was
confronted with baptismal rites and rules of penance when the Church of Alexandria
was reorganized by the bishop Demetrius at the end of the second century (Dubois
2017: 298–302). The study of these two Coptic tractates of Nag Hammadi helps
understanding some passages of the Elenchos on the Basilidians, and, vice versa, the
Elenchos makes it possible to link the Fragments of Basilides with the two Coptic
tractates.
As most of the Fragments of Basilides and Isidoros are preserved in Clement of
Alexandria, it is evident that the Basilidians did not spread their doctrine much beyond
the Alexandrian Church, and Egypt in general. In this they differ from the Valentinian
Gnostics who spread all over the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, Basilidians seem to
be still present in Egypt at the time of Epiphanius (around 375–377; Panarion 24.1.4;
Löhr 1996: 36–37) just like the Valentinian Gnostics (Panarion 31.7.1). It may be sig-
nificant that Basilides and his son Isidoros are mentioned once in the Coptic Gnostic
Testimony of Truth (NHC IX, 57, 1–14; Mahé and Mahé 1996: 122–5, 199; Löhr
1996: 40–1), and that there are many Basilidian pages in the Codex VII of Nag
Hammadi, still preserved in the second half of the fourth century.
The recent discovery of the Gospel of Judas may also shed light on the diffusion of
Basilidian doctrine among the Gnostics (Dubois 2012). The presence of a fragment of
Basilides in the refutation of Manichaeism of Hegemonius, the Acta Archelai (67.4–
12), shows that the Basilidian doctrine may also be known among the Manichaeans.
A Byzantine formula of renunciation of Manichaeism (Lieu 1994: 244) attests that
the presentation of Jesus’s crucifixion according to the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter is
taken as Manichaean doctrine.
Although Basilides is not as famous as the Gnostic Valentinus and his disciples, he
remains one of the first leading intellectual figures of the Alexandrian Church during
the first half of the second century. He will be remembered as a theologian and a
Bible interpreter concerned about God’s providence and human suffering (Nautin
1974; Tissot 1996). His interest in caring for the life and progress of the Christian
soul also makes him a leader interested in the Church liturgy. His philosophical edu-
cation in Platonism and Stoicism of that period illustrates how Christianity used the
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— Jean-Daniel Dubois —
resources of philosophy to establish a theological reflection in the Alexandrian trad-

ition, nourished later on by Clement and Origen.
REFERENCES
Bos, Abraham P. 2000. “Basilides as an Aristotelianizing Gnostic.” Vigiliae Christianae
54: 44–60.
———2005. “Basilides of Alexandria: Matthias (Matthew) and Aristotle as the Sources of
Inspiration for His Gnostic Theology in Hippolytus’ Refutatio.” Anthony Hilhorst and
George H. van Kooten (eds.). The Wisdom of Egypt: Jewish, Early Christian and Gnostic
Essays in Honour of G. P. Luttikhuizen. Leiden: Brill: 397–418.
———2011. “Basilides of Alexandria Disqualified as Not a Christian but an Aristotelian by
the Author of the Elenchos.” Gabriella Aragione and Enrico Norelli (eds.). Des évêques,
des écoles et des hérétiques: Actes du Colloque international sur la Réfutation de toutes les
hérésies, Genève 13–14 juin 2008. Lausanne: Zèbre: 103–18.
Dubois, Jean-Daniel. 2007. “L’Apocalypse de Pierre.” Jean-Pierre Mahé and Paul-Hubert Poirier
(eds.). Écrits gnostiques. La bibliothèque de Nag Hammadi. Paris: Gallimard: 1141–66.
——— 2012. “The Gospel of Judas and Basilidian Thought.” Enno E. Popkes and Gregor
Wurst (eds.). Judasevangelium und Codex Tchacos. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 121–32.
———2014–2015. “Les gnostiques basilidiens et la documentation gnostique copte de Nag
Hammadi.” Annuaire de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Section des Sciences religieuses
123: 171–74.
———2017. “Le docétisme des christologies gnostiques revisité.” New Testament Studies 63
(2): 279–304.
———In press a. “Les gnostiques basilidiens et les textes du codex VII de Nag Hammadi.”
Louis Painchaud and Tuomas Rasimus (eds.). Nag Hammadi à 70 ans (Québec, 29–31 mai
2015). Québec.
——— In press b. “Le Deuxième Traité du Grand Seth (NH VII, 2) et la gnose basilidienne.”
Studies … F. García Bazán. Buenos Aires.
Grant, Robert M. 1979. “Place de Basilide dans la théologie chrétienne ancienne.” Revue des
études augustiniennes 25: 201–16.
Kehlhoffer, James A. 2005. “Basilides’s Gospel and Exegetica (Treatises).” Vigiliae Christianae
59: 115–34.
Litwa, M. David (ed.). 2016. Refutation of all Heresies, Translated with Introduction and
Notes. Atlanta: SBL Press.
Lieu, Samuel N. C. 1994. “An Early Byzantine Formula for the Renunciation of Manichaeism,
the Capita VII Contra Manichaeos of <Zacharias of Mytilene>. Introduction, Text,
Translation and Commentary.” Manichaeism in Mesopotamia and the Roman East.
Löhr, Winrich A. 1996. Basilides und seine Schule: Eine Studie zur Theologie-und
Kirchengeschichte des zweiten Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Mahé, Jean-Pierre, and Annie Mahé. 1996. Le Témoignage véritable (NH IX,3). Gnose et
martyre. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval; Louvain: Peeters.
Markschies, Christoph. 2012. “Das Evangelium des Basilides.” Christoph Markschies and Jens
Schröter (eds.). Antike christliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung. I. Band: Evangelien
und Verwandtes. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 460–65.
Méhat, André. 1974. “APOKATASTASIS chez Basilide.” Mélanges d’histoire des religions
offerts à H.-C. Puech. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France: 365–73.
Nautin, Pierre. 1974. “Les fragments de Basilide sur la souffrance et leur interprétation par
Clément d’Alexandrie et Origène.” Mélanges d’histoire des religions offerts à H.-C. Puech.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France: 393–403.
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Orbe, Antonio. 1976. “Los ‘apéndices’ de Basílides” (Un capítulo de filosofía gnóstica). I/II.”
Gregorianum 57: 81–107, 251–84.
Painchaud, Louis. 1982. Le Deuxième Traité du Grand Seth (NH VII, 2). Québec: Les Presses
de l’Université Laval.
Tardieu, Michel. 1985–1986. “Le Codex VII.” Annuaire de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études,
Section des Sciences religieuses 94: 465–6.
—— —1994. “Basilide le gnostique.” Richard Goulet (ed.). Dictionnaire des philosophes
antiques. Paris: CNRS: vol. 2, 84–9.
Tissot, Yves. 1996. “À propos des fragments de Basilide sur le martyre.” Revue d’histoire et de
philosophie religieuses 76: 35–50.
Whittaker, John. 1969. “Basilides on the Ineffability of God.” Harvard Theological Review
62: 367–71.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
VALENTINUS AND
THE VALENTINIANS
Einar Thomassen
“V alentinus came to Rome under Hyginus, reached his peak under Pius, and
remained until the time of Anicetus” (Irenaeus, Haer. 3.4.3). This is the most
reliable piece of biographical information we have about the founder of a movement
which Irenaeus saw as the most dangerous of all the Gnostic heresies and therefore
accorded special prominence in his Adversus Haereses. Irenaeus’s statement suggests
that Valentinus was active in Rome ca. 136–160, which corresponds well with Justin
Martyr’s mention of “the Valentinians” as a heretical group in his Dialogue with
Trypho (35.6), written around 155–160.
Valentinus gave rise to a widespread movement. Around 210, Tertullian describes
the followers of Valentinus as frequentissimum collegium … inter haereticos
(Adversus Valentinianos 1.1). Several prominent leaders are mentioned in the
heresiological sources: Ptolemy, Heracleon, Marcus “the Magician,” Axionicus,
Theodotus, Alexander, Secundus. Most of these leaders belong to the immediate gen-
eration following Valentinus himself. In the preface to his Adversus Haereses (ca.
180), Irenaeus names “the disciples of Ptolemy” as the most dangerous Valentinian
group at the time of his writing.
Sources: Ptolemy: Irenaeus, Haer. 1 pref., 1.12; Tertullian, Val. 4.2; Hippolytus,
Refutatio omnium haeresium 6.35.6; Epiphanius, Panarion 33.3– 7. Heracleon:
Irenaeus, Haer. 2.4.1; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 4.9.71–73, Eclogae propheticae
25.1; Tertullian, Val. 4.2; Hippolytus, Haer. 6.4, 29.1, 35.6; Origen. Comm. Jo.
2.14.100 and passim. Marcus: Irenaeus, Haer. 1.13–16.2; Hippolytus, Haer. 6.41–
42. Axionicus: Hippolytus, Haer. 6.35.7; Tertullian, Val. 4.3. Theodotus: Clement of
Alexandria, Excerpta ex Theodoto. Alexander: Tertullian, De Carne Christi 15–17.1.
Secundus: Irenaeus, Haer. 1.11.2.
DOCTRINE
Valentinus’s own teachings are attested only by eight short fragments, deriving
from his letters, his homilies, and a hymn. They are too brief to allow the confi-
dent reconstruction of a systematic doctrine. The attribution to Valentinus of the
system reported in Irenaeus, Haer. 1.11 is highly spurious (Markschies 1992: 364–79;
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— Va l e n t i n u s a n d t h e Va l e n t i n i a n s —
Thomassen 2006: 23–7). It is quite possible that Valentinus never composed a sys-

tematic text himself but was content in his teaching and preaching to comment on
topics taken from various Gnostic and other sources. His psalm-book at any rate
became a lasting legacy for Valentinian communities (Muratorian Canon, lines 81–5;
Origen, Enarrationes in Job 21,12 [PG 17, p. 80]; Tertullian, Carn. Chr. 17.1, 20.3;
Hippolytus, Haer. 6.37.7).
As the main source for Valentinian doctrine, scholars have traditionally relied on
Irenaeus, Haer. 1–8, where Irenaeus reports in detail on a system he describes as the
hypothesis of the Valentinians, though he also hints that the system actually derives
from Ptolemy or Ptolemy’s followers (Haer. Pref.; 1.8.5 end, Latin version). It is
clear in any case that the source used by Irenaeus is only one among a number of
variant system texts authored by individual Valentinian teachers. Different versions
of the system are preserved in Hippolytus, Haer. 6.29–36, Tripartite Tractate (NHC
I,5), A Valentinian Exposition (NHC XI,1), Irenaeus, Haer. 1.11.1, Irenaeus, Haer.
1.14 (Marcus), and Epiphanius, Pan. 31.5–6. In addition, the existence of numerous
other versions is attested, especially in Irenaeus, Haer. 1.11–12 and Clement of
Alexandria, Exc. A canonical form of the Valentinian system clearly did not exist;
individual teachers must have felt free to compose their own versions of it, within the
constraints of a shared framework. In the following, an outline of the main features
of the system is given, without attention to all the variations of detail found in the
different versions.
TH E FATHER, THE SON, AND THE P L E RO M A

Common to all the systems is the notion of an unknowable Father, who in order
to make himself known produces a Son, who is also described as his Name. This
initial self-duplication of the divinity enables the further generation of a multitude
of aeons, who are collectively called the Fullness (Pleroma), or the Totality. Jointly
constituting the divine Fullness, the aeons originate as aspects of the Father him-
self, brought forth through his self-reflection in the Son; however, they are also
set to become individual beings through a process of birth and maturation, whose
ultimate aim is their obtaining knowledge of the Father, the source of their being. In
most versions of the system, including Irenaeus, Haer. 1–8, a standard model of the
Pleroma recurs, according to which 30 aeons are generated in a fixed sequence: a
first tetrad is followed by a second tetrad, thus producing an ogdoad, then a set of 10
aeons is brought forth, and finally another set containing 12 aeons. The aeons form
male-female pairs (“syzygies”). In Irenaeus’s main system, the Pleroma is organized
as shown in Figure 13.1.
The other systems of the 30-aeons type display minor variations on this scheme
(Thomassen 2006: 193–247). “The Depths” (Bythos) is also termed “Pre-beginning”
and “Fore-father,” whereas “Only-begotten” (Monogenes) is also called Mind (Nous),
Beginning and Father, the latter designation probably because he is conceived of as
“the Name” of the Father. It is fairly clear that the organization of the highest entities
into a tetrad is derived from an older and less systematic set of terms which included
the figures of a Father and a Son as well as the expression “Father of Truth.”
According to Tertullian (Val. 4.2), it was Ptolemy who introduced names for
the individual aeons as well as the numerical organization of the Pleroma, whereas
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— Einar Thomassen —
The Depths + Silence
Only-begotten + Truth
Word + Life
Man + Church
Deep + Mingling
Ageless + Union Advocate + Faith
Self-producing + Pleasure Paternal + Hope
Immobile + Blending Maternal + Love
Only-begotten + Happiness Praise + Understanding
Ecclesiastic + Blessedness
Desired + Wisdom
Figure 13.1 The Valentinian Pleroma according to Irenaeus
Valentinus himself had conceived of the aeons as “thoughts, sentiments and emotions”
within the deity. This earlier conception of the Pleroma (though probably incom-
pletely described by Tertullian) corresponds fairly well to the account given in Tri.
Trac. and Gospel of Truth, where the aeons appear as nameless and innumerable and
become personal beings through a process of manifestation from the paternal depths,
mediated by the Son.
THE STORY OF S O P HIA

The projection of the Pleroma takes place under the condition of a latent and succes-
sively deferred tension between unity and duality, a tension that eventually culminates
in the internal division of the last aeon, Sophia, or Wisdom (in Tri. Trac. the last aeon
is simply referred to as “a logos”). Experiencing a “passion,” Sophia endeavors to
attain knowledge about the Father and the Totality of the Pleroma without being
joined to her syzygic partner and without the accord of the rest of the aeons. Since
such knowledge is beyond the capacity of a single aeon, Sophia’s desire inexorably
pulls her towards infinity and dissolution until the Father brings forth Limit (Horos),
which ends her infinite extension by cutting her in two.
One part of Sophia hastens back to the Pleroma. In older versions, that part is
Christ, her son (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.11.1; Clement of Alexandria, Exc. 23.2, 32–3;
Val. Exp. 33:36–7). The detachment of Christ from his mother is here modeled on
the separation of Jesus’s spirit from his body on the Cross. (The Limit is in fact also
generally named the Cross.) In later versions (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.1–8; Hippolytus,
Haer. 6.29– 36), there are, instead, two Sophias: one that is reintegrated with
the Pleroma, and another called Achamoth in Irenaeus and “the lower Sophia”
in Hippolytus, who remains outside in the void. In these versions, the connection
between the motif of the division of Sophia and the crucifixion of Jesus has become
less transparent.
Cut off from the Pleroma, together with her passion, Sophia laments, repents, and
eventually turns towards the Pleroma supplicating for help. In response, the aeons
give birth to Jesus the Savior as their collective representation. He is sent to Sophia
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with an entourage of angels, manifesting the unity and multiplicity of the Pleroma.
On seeing him, Sophia is filled with joy and gives praise. Her acts of praise become a
new set of offspring, the spiritual seed, who are images of the angels she has seen. Her
mind is now at rest, and she installs herself, together with her spiritual offspring, in a
realm below the Pleroma called the Ogdoad, or the Middle.
CREATION OF T HE WO RL D
The three sentiments successively experienced by Sophia –uncontrolled passion,
repentance, and joy –become the sources of three distinct substances: matter, soul,
and spirit. The Savior transforms passion and repentance into matter and soul; these
two substances will be used as the building materials for an orderly structure in
the extra-pleromatic realm: the cosmos. Matter and soul may also be conceived as
two groups of personified powers that are locked in constant struggle. The manual
construction of the cosmos and the task of controlling the competing powers are
delegated to a supreme ruler born from the substance of soul: the Demiurge. Creating
the cosmos is a necessary part of the Father’s plan of salvation, the oikonomia (a
term that is also used as a name for the cosmos itself), and the Demiurge serves as an
unwitting instrument in this plan. In contrast to some other forms of “Gnosticism,”
the Valentinian world creator is not an inimical figure who created the world to
entrap the human spirit. Rather, experiencing life in the cosmos forms part of a divine
pedagogy designed to enable the salvation of humans.
CREATION OF THE HU M AN
After setting up the cosmos, the Demiurge moulds the first human being from matter
and breathes soul into him. Unbeknownst to the Demiurge, however, Sophia and/or
the Savior also inserts into the protoplast a spiritual element in the form of a seed.
Seen from the perspective of the salvation plan, this seed is the same as the spiritual
seed that was brought into being by Sophia in response to her vision of the Savior
and his angels. It came into being as images of the object of her vision and resided
until this point in a state of relative imperfection in the Ogdoad. This spiritual seed
is now inserted into the human being of matter and soul created by the Demiurge in
order to be educated towards perfection by living in the material world. Valentinian
sources often speak about three kinds (genos) of humans. Beside those possessing the
spiritual seed, soul-endowed (“psychic”) and material (“hylic”) humans are also said
to exist as distinct categories.
DESCENT OF THE S AVIO R

At a given moment in history, Jesus the Savior descended into the cosmos in order
to redeem humanity. His work of redemption on the one hand took the form of
teaching: he taught the receptive among humankind about their origins in the tran-
scendent world. On the other hand, the events of his incarnation, suffering, and death
on the Cross were in themselves necessary for the redemption to happen. The pre-
cise soteriological significance of these events, however, is variously interpreted in
the sources. Two main positions may be distinguished. According to the first, the
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Savior submitted himself to the conditions of the material world, suffered and died.
Incarnation and crucifixion both have the same meaning: the intermingling of the
Savior with matter and his constraining attachment to a body. On this view, the
Savior had to share the condition of the ones he came to save. He took their cor-
poreal existence on himself, as it were, in order to reverse, through his own passion,
the original passion of Sophia and its consequences. As a result, the Savior became
in need of salvation himself. His redemption took place, first, at his baptism, when
something (usually “the Name”) came down upon him from above, and, secondly,
when his spirit was detached from his body at the Cross and hastened back into the
Pleroma. This doctrine is most explicitly formulated in Clement of Alexandria, Exc.
22:7 (explicitly attributed to Theodotus) and Tri. Trac. (124–5). It also most prob-
ably underlies other Valentinian Nag Hammadi tractates such as Gos. Truth, Treatise
on the Resurrection, Gospel of Philip, and Interpretation of Knowledge (Thomassen
2006, esp. Part I).
The self-sacrificing assumption of a human body by the Savior is, however, only
half of the story. Descending into the world, he also brought with him his spiritual
body, which contained all those he came to redeem –the spiritual ekklesia, which is
also associated with the entourage of angels with which he was first sent out from
the Pleroma. The underlying soteriological idea appears to be a form of “wonderful
exchange,” by which humans are integrated into the Savior’s spiritual body through
his own assumption of a physical human body.
A different interpretation is given in the versions reported by the Church fathers.
Thus, Irenaeus, Haer. 1.6.1 says that the Savior’s body at his descent included both
a spiritual and a “psychic” part, as the “first-fruits” of the ones he came to save. The
psychic part is identical to “the psychic Christ,” the son of the Demiurge. In addition,
the Demiurge provided him with a psychic body for his descent, whereas he received
nothing material, “for matter is not capable of being saved.” Similar ideas are found
in Irenaeus, Haer. 1.7.2, Clement of Alexandria, Exc. 58–62, and Hippolytus, Haer.
6.35.2–4. In these texts, the Savior himself does not suffer, but only the psychic Christ
whom he has put on for the salvation of the psychics. Moreover, the spirituals do not
need a work of salvation to be carried out for them: they are “saved by nature” and
need only instruction.
This second version has the appearance of a revision of the first. It may have
been motivated by a wish to exempt the Savior from any kind of contact with
matter, or of suffering, by a desire to include the psychics in the project of redemp-
tion and thus in the ekklesia-body of the Savior, or by a combination of both. The
notion that the spirituals are “saved by nature,” much criticized by the Church
fathers, seems to have been developed, or at least more strongly accentuated, in
consequence of this revision. (On this notion, see, most recently, Dunderberg 2013
and Thomassen 2013a.)
These two distinct doctrines about the descent of the Savior, the nature of his body,
his passion, and the intended target groups of his redemptive mission are probably
to be related to the reports about “the two schools” of Valentinianism (Tertullian,
Val. 11.2, cf. 4.1–2; Hippolytus, Haer. 6.35.5–7). According to Hippolytus, an
“Italic” school held the body of the Savior to be “psychic,” whereas an “oriental”
school described it as “spiritual.” This report seems to echo, in inverse order, the two
positions described above.
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THE RITUAL OF RE D E M P TIO N

To bring about the restoration of the spiritual seed to the Pleroma, the Valentinians
performed an initiation rite called “the Redemption” (apolytrosis); the main sources
are Irenaeus, Haer. 1.21, Gos. Phil., and Clement of Alexandria, Exc. 66–86
(Thomassen 2006: 333–405; Thomassen 2011). In its outward form the Redemption
was a baptism in water followed by an anointing. (The Valentinians provide the
earliest attestations of anointing as part of the baptismal rite.) It was seen as a re-
enactment of Jesus’s own baptism. The reception of “the Name,” which had also
descended on Jesus at the Jordan, was an important element of the liturgy. Equally
important was the idea of the “bridal chamber”: during the ritual the initiates were
symbolically joined with their angels as brides to their bridegrooms. The angels were
the heavenly entourage of the Savior in whose image the spiritual seed had originally
been emitted by Sophia. In the bridal chamber the human images are thus ritually
united with their angelic models, who may also be seen as multiple representations
of the Savior himself, spread out so as to be received by the individual initiates. At
their death, the initiates were thought to go up to the Ogdoad, the region of Sophia
situated in the middle between the Pleroma and the cosmos.
ESCHATO L O G Y
Once the entire spiritual seed has been educated by being incarnated in human bodies,
experiencing deficiency in order to be able to attain perfection, the world has served
its purpose and will be destroyed. The spirituals will then leave the Ogdoad to be fully
united with their angelic bridegrooms in the Pleroma, just as their mother Sophia her-
self will finally receive the Savior as her spouse. In sources that deal with the ultimate
fate of the Demiurge and the psychics, we are told that those who have acknowledged
the Savior and the existence of a higher, spiritual realm will ascend to the now vacant
Ogdoad as the cosmos ceases to exist (Irenaeus, Haer. 1.7.1,5; Clement of Alexandria,
Exc. 34.2, 61.8, 63–65, Tri. Trac. 122). It is not made clear in any of the sources
whether psychics will ultimately be able to attain the rank of spirituals.
ORGANIZATIONAL NATU RE
Although Valentinianism is often referred to as a “school” by ancient heresiologists
as well as modern scholars, their own self-designation was ekklesia: they identified
themselves as the church-body of the Savior. Ritual acts were essential; the baptismal
“redemption” rite was the indispensable gateway to the Pleroma. Eucharistic meals were
celebrated as well (Schmid 2007; Thomassen 2017a), and there were regular services that
included singing the psalms of Valentinus and listening to homilies (Thomassen 2013b).
It is possible that “psychics” had access to a part of the service only. Valentinianism was
thus a religious organization more than an educational establishment.
On the other hand, Valentinianism seems to have existed as groups centered on
individual leaders rather than as a centralized church organization, and it is plaus-
ible that those leaders also offered instruction after the manner of the philosoph-
ical schools. The many versions of the Valentinian system are best explained as the
products of individual leaders who wanted to put their own stamp on the system as
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teachers. Commentaries on texts (Heracleon) and diatribes on miscellaneous topics

(Gos. Phil.) probably also reflect a classroom situation (Thomassen 2017b).
HISTORICAL CO NTE X T
Irenaeus’s contention (Haer. 1.11.1) that Valentinianism built on older “Gnostic”
sources is certainly right. Basic themes such as the Sophia myth, the Pleroma of aeons,
the dualism between the Father of the All and the world creator, the spiritual element
in humans as consubstantial with the divine and redeemable through gnosis revealed
by a Savior are all inherited from previous Gnostic mythology. On the other hand,
Valentinians undertook to revise that mythology, making it more Christian, and also
more Platonic. In his Letter to Flora, Ptolemy describes the Valentinian position as
the correct middle way between those who identify the world creator with the Father
of the All, and those who see him as the devil. Unlike Sethian Yaldabaoth and similar
Gnostic creator figures, the Valentinian Demiurge is not, in fact, an evil enemy, but a
useful, if unwitting, tool in the realization of a divinely premeditated plan of salva-
tion. Being of a “psychic” nature, he will also be granted some form of redemption
himself. Correspondingly, the cosmos and the human body are not conceived of as
prisons of the spirit, but as devices serving its education. The material world forms
part of a divine pedagogy.
In Platonist manner, the cosmos is seen as an image of the transcendent world,
even if only as an imitation and a world of shadows; being made from matter, which
is nothingness, it has no real existence, but has nevertheless been given a form by the
Demiurge. The narrative of the origin of matter in Sophia’s passion and her subsequent
division by Limit is based on Neopythagorean theories about the derivation of the Dyad
from the Monad (Thomassen 2006, esp. 270–91). At the same time, those theories are
fused with an interpretation of the crucifixion, in which the Cross is identified with the
Limit that separates spirit from matter. In this way, Valentinianism combines distinct-
ively Christian ideas with contemporary Platonist physics of a Neopythagorean type.
THE CONTINUITY OF VAL E NTINIANIS M

The Valentinians are most visible in the historical record in the second half of the
second century and the first half of the third, when they are commented on by
Christian writers from Justin Martyr to Origen. Their later history is shrouded in
darkness, but glimpses of their continued existence surface in the later fourth cen-
tury, when they were being persecuted by other Christians in Syria (Julian, Epistle 40;
Ambrose, Epistles 40.16, 41.1 [ed. Maur]). That Valentinians could still be identified
as such in 362 (Julian) and in 388 (Ambrose) suggests that the movement possessed
an internal coherence and a continuity that other “Gnostic” groups failed to achieve.
REFERENCES
Dunderberg, Ismo. 2013. “Valentinian Theories on Classes of Humankind.” Christoph
Markschies and Johannes van Oort (eds.). Zugänge zur Gnosis. Akten zur Tagung der
Patristischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft vom 02- Spandau. Louvain:
05.01.2011 in Berlin-
Peeters: 113–28.
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Markschies, Christoph. 1992. Valentinus Gnosticus? Untersuchungen zur valentinianischen

Gnosis mit einem Kommentar zu den Fragmenten Valentins. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul
Siebeck).
Schmid, Herbert. 2007. Die Eucharistie ist Jesus: Anfänge einer Theorie des Sakraments im
koptischen Philippusevangelium (NHC II 3). Leiden: Brill.
Thomassen, Einar. 2006. The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the ‘Valentinians’. Leiden: Brill.
———2011. “Baptism Among the Valentinians.” David Hellholm, Tor Vegge, and Christer
Hellholm (eds.). Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism: Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early
Christianity. Berlin: De Gruyter: vol. 2, 895–915.
—— —2013a. “Saved by Nature? The Question of Human Races and Soteriological
Determinism in Valentinianism.” Christoph Markschies and Johannes van Oort (eds.).
Zugänge zur Gnosis. Akten zur Tagung der Patristischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft vom 02-
05.01.2011 in Berlin-Spandau. Louvain: Peeters: 129–49.
———2013b. “Going to Church With the Valentinians.” April D. DeConick, Gregory Shaw,
and John D. Turner (eds.). Practicing Gnosis: Ritual, Magic, Theurgy and Liturgy in Nag
Hammadi, Manichaean and Other Ancient Literature. Essays in Honor of Birger A. Pearson.
———2017a. “The Eucharist in Valentinianism.” David Hellholm and Dieter Sänger (eds.).
The Eucharist –Its Origins and Contexts. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 1833–50.
——— 2017b. “Gnosis and Philosophy in Competition.” Christoph Riedweg (ed.).
PHILOSOPHIA in der Konkurrenz von Schulen, Wissenschaften und Religionen: Zur
Pluralisierung des Philosophiebegriffs in Kaiserzeit und Spätantike. Berlin: De
Gruyter: 61–74.
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IS THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
GNOSTIC?
David W. Kim
T he Gospel of Thomas (hereafter Thomas) is the most famous find from among
the 1945 Nag Hammadi discoveries, even being published separately, Coptic text
beside English translation, and without commentary, as if a Biblical text (in 1959
[Guillaumont et al.]). Although fragments of Jesus’s sayings (logia) from it had been
uncovered on Papyrus leaves (e.g., Oxyrhynchus Pap. (I), 654–55) from the end of
the nineteenth century (esp. Blomfield 1900; Grenfell and Hunt 1904; Taylor 1905),
these fourth-century fragments were only related to a whole gospel text after the Nag
Hammadi codices (NHC) were carefully researched (starting with Puech, e.g., 1954).
In the course of time Thomas became treated as a “Fifth Gospel” (e.g., Koester 1990;
Funk et al. 1993), its 114 Logia of Jesus taken as comparable, even equivalent to the
postulated Q source (Quelle), consisting of Jesus’s teachings found shared between
the canonical Gospels of Matthew and Luke (but absent in Mark, the other, shortest
“Synoptic Gospel”) (e.g., Kloppenborg 1988; Patterson 2013: 176–96).
By now much critical research has gone on to probe behind the extant Coptic
Thomas (NHC II.2) to get to its original, its community, and beyond to Jesus himself
(e.g., Patterson 1993; DeConick 2005; Kim 2009 [and forthcoming]). The Thomasine
Gospel has its own special literary history (e.g., Akagi 1965), then, so that, if we are
to ask the question “is the Gospel of Thomas Gnostic?” (thus Davies 2002: 18–35),
we need to be clear what we mean. If we are considering the Coptic NHC text, obvi-
ously its discovery within a cache containing many obviously Gnostic texts is cru-
cial to the query. The three separate Greek fragments found earlier do not prove a
Gnostic identity, but NHC II, 2 was manifestly affected by the Gnostic influence in its
context, and shows signs of being transformed during the process of religio-cultural
transmission. If there were Gnostic Egyptian followers of the Thomasine tradition,
even a community, they would have revised the original text and probably used it
in their canon. The literary traces of oral tradition in Thomas’s Logia 9, 33, 65, and
66 persuade one that the text can be related to an oral period of the first century
CE [Logia numbering following Guillaumont et al. (1959)]. A traditionsgeschichtlich
approach, with oral traditions in view, exposes not only the primitivism of “the secret
Logia” ([NHC II.2] 32.1–2 [prolog]), but also the existence of local Christian com-
munities well established to put them together textually, even under the leadership of
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— Is the Gospel of Thomas gnostic? —
eyewitness-disciples (Davids 1992: 831–4). However, the notification of the “Gospel

of Thomas” that first appeared in (pseudo-) Hippolytus’s mid-third-century Refutatio
5.7.20 supports the possibility that the text was “re-created” in the era of flourishing
Gnostic traditions (Attridge 1989: 103–9). The following subjects of the NHC text,
which I highlight here as “the images of Jesus,” “the ideological figures of Thomas,”
and “the female disciples of Salome and Mary,” imply the Gnostic development of the
Thomasine tradition.
THOMASINE IMAG E S O F J E S U S
The “I am” statements of Thomas that reflect a transformation of the original
Thomasine Jesus tradition occur in twenty different Logia in the extant NHC text.
The “I” Logia of Thomas are served by using four different words of Jesus’s self-
identification: the term ⲉⲓ was used eleven times (Logia 10, 16, 16, 28, 28, 28, 46, 62,
72, 104 and 114), the term ⲁⲛⲟⲕ was used ten times (Logia 13, 29, 30, 43, 61, 61, 77,
77, 108 and 114), the term ϯ was used seven times (Logia 10, 17, 23, 38, 43, 71 and
108), and the term ⲓ was used twice (both in Logion 92). The “I” sayings of Thomas
are much more numerous than in the Gospels with which it usually compared –the
Synoptics. And Thomas favors three slightly different impersonations of Jesus as “ⲥ̄ⲱ̄ⲣ̄
(Saviour),” all of them known Gnostic “figures”: “revealer,” “judge,” and “redeemer.”
The Coptic Thomas’s Jesus was not depicted to the community as the expected one
(the future coming one), but as the present one from the heavenly place of ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ
(“God”). The phrase “compare me to someone and tell me whom I am like (ⲧⲛ̄ⲧⲱⲛⲧ `
ⲛ̄ⲧⲉⲧⲛ̄ ϫⲟⲟⲥ ⲛⲁⲉⲓ ϫⲉ ⲉⲉⲓⲛⲉ ⲛ̄ⲛⲓⲙ: NHC II.2 34.31–32)” reflects the heavenly Man inter-
rogating his followers about his identification, and the Logion 13 here could be the
mark of “Gnostic docetic Christology” (Marjanen 2006: 210–11).
The Thomasine image of Jesus, according to other “I” sayings, is as the Judge
against the world. The phrase “I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding
it until it blazes (Logion 10)” illustrates a practical concept of the Judge who came
from a heavenly place. The meaning of ⲡⲕⲟⲥⲙⲟⲥ (“the world”) is not clear in this part,
yet it seems to symbolize the corrupted world, if one regards Logion 104 as presenting
the case that the sinful world ought to repent through the religious activities of prayer
and fasting. The related text of Thomas that portrays Jesus’s role as Judge in a for-
midable way has him say: “I have come to cast upon the earth: fire, sword and war”
(NHC II.2: 35.34–36). This judgmental impression in Thomas is more redactional
than for the Jesus of Q. Giving a “finalization” of judgement, the Thomasine Jesus
of Logion 71 becomes at once “decision-maker” and “performer” of the decision. In
the saying “I shall [destroy this] house, and no one will be able to build it […],” the
author of the text also does not avoid indicating the destination of ⲙ̄ⲡⲉⲉⲓⲏⲉⲓ (“this
house”). On Bertil Gärtner’s reading, “house (ⲏⲉⲓ)” here functions as a metaphor for
Jesus’s body, but as part of a Gnostic polemic that denies the resurrection of Jesus’s
body (see Dunderberg 1998: 56–8). The Coptic Thomas community has corrected
“the body/temple tradition” with “the body/house” one suiting Gnostic concerns over
shedding the body (Riley 1995: 148–51). The view of the Gnostic influence can be
seen in the notion that the pioneers of the Gnostic movement, at different stages, were
ready to adopt Jewish scriptures useful for their primary doctrine, affecting the pro-
cess of Thomas’s textual development.
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— D a v i d W. K i m —
IDEOLOGICAL FIGURE S O F THO M AS

The perspective that the original text of Thomas would be quoted and also touched up
by the post-Thomasine Gnostic supporters during the second and third centuries CE
can be proved if readers take into account various discourses in the Coptic text, such as
“dualism,” “image,” “light,” “vision,” “cosmos,” and teachings of becoming “one” and
“male.” The ideological features of Thomas are an ongoing contentious issue, along
with the Christ narratives revealing secret teachings, treatises, sermons, meditations,
and otherworld journeys. In particular, features of “dualism” indicate a considerable
enough Gnostic influence. Logion 87 disparages the body which is given birth to from
another body: “Wretched is the body that is dependent upon a body, and wretched
is the soul that is dependent on these two.” The soul should be independent from the
bodily life. The soul should not depend upon the flesh (the physical world), whether
it manifests itself in the form of the individual, or the universal. The Jesus tradition of
Thomas is a body-rejecting or world-rejecting message, for the dependence of the soul
on the flesh causes doom (Logion 112). The anthropological dualism polarizing soul
and body, between flesh and spirit, and between flesh and soul, whether originally or
later accentuated, was a good source for the Gnostic outlook.
The concept of “a likeness in place of a likeness” in Logion 22 is used to denote the
preferable state of mankind, and the necessary requirement for entering the Kingdom
of God. The opportunity for the heavenly Kingdom is given to those who experience
the moment of “the two into one,” in order that one’s human image is replaced by
her/his heavenly light-image. DeConick interprets the condition of “the images in the
Image” as “salvation”: “Salvation is granted only to those who have encountered and
been transformed into their divine image, when they have made ‘an image in place of
an image’” (DeConick 2001: 95). The context of “image” in Thomas can be compared
with the Valentinian Gospel of Philip: “Before the Christ, certain beings came from a
realm that they could not re-enter, and went to a realm that they could not yet leave.
Then the Christ came. He brought out those who had entered and brought in those
who had left” (NHC II.3 68.17–21). The use of image in Valentinianism, however,
“is not applied to the angel or heavenly counterpart as it is in Thomas” (DeConick
1996: 149), but is related to the human being and eventually needs to rejoin with the
angels: “You who have joined the perfect light with the Holy Spirit, unite the angels
with us also, as being the images” (58: 10–14).
One should not be surprised over the metaphorical light found in Thomas, when
the concept of light is considered within the pattern of Gnostic myth. The last part
of Logion 77, when after Jesus says “I am the Light” he goes on about “Being in a
piece of wood (ϣⲉ) and being under the stone (ⲱⲛⲉ),” indirectly illustrating the omni-
present characteristic of Jesus. Those who came from the Light are distinguished
by their realization of the fact: “You (plural) will find me there.” The question and
answer (Logion 50) “where did you (disciples of Jesus) come from? … we came from
the Light, the place where the Light came into being on its own accord” harmoniously
demonstrates that the origin of the followers of Jesus (applicable to the Thomasites)
stems from the same Light of Logion 77 (Pagels 1999: 483–87). Despite the term
being changed from “Light” to “the Kingdom,” in Logion 49, the insistence that “you
are from it, and to it you will return” clinches the heavenly origin and final destiny
of believers, instead of their life in this world (Allberry 1938: 155). The figure of the
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“esoteric ascent tradition” also presents itself in the question of Logion 11: “When
you come to dwell in the Light, what will you do?” If an ignorant inferior Demiurge
has created a fallen universe, here is the assurance that the Light of the Supreme God
becomes enmeshed in his creatures (DeConick 1996: 23). One can fairly presume the
scenario, though, that the post-Thomas Gnostics applied their thoughts to the light
originating from the Supreme God and returning to him from a similar idea already
in the Jewish (Jesus) tradition of Thomas (see also 1 Apocalypse of James [NHC
V.3] 33.11–34.1; Gospel of Mary [BG 852] 15–17; and [NHC V.2] Apocalypse of
Paul 22.24–23.26). The Thomasine Light is a creative medium and human beings are
created through the Light. They are the children of the Light or the elect of the Living
Father: “We are its children, and we are the elect of the Living Father” (Logion 50).
Among the futuristic visioning Logia 15, 27, 37, 59 and 114, the very last Logion
has often been attributed to the Gnostic myth as well. The words “look for the Living
One while you are alive,” according to Wilhelm Bousset early on (using previously
available fragments attributed to Thomas), indicates “an ecstatic journey that occurs
during the life of the performer rather than an eschatological journey that occurs
only after the body’s death” (Bousset 1901: 136). Thomas’s Jesus commands people
to seek God while they are alive or while they still have time. The soteriological vision
is that they will not be able to see or search the vision, if they search him after they
have died. Life after death will not be worthy for eternal life, but the opportunity for
personal salvation is given to those who are alive.
Thomas has used the term ⲕⲟⲥⲙⲟⲥ about sixteen times. Some Logia contain the
term more than once in the same Logion: Logion 28 (thrice), Logion 56 (twice),
Logion 80 (twice) and Logion 110 (twice). Instead of ⲕⲟⲥⲙⲟⲥ, moreover, the
Logiographer employed the word ⲕⲁⳉ (earth) in two different Logia (16 and 113).
This “cosmology” was probably another source for Gnostics. Among these Logia,
10 and 16 contain very similar phrases: “I have cast fire upon the world;” “I have
come to cast upon the world;” and “I have come to cast upon the earth: fire, sword,
and war.” By implication the cosmos is regarded as the region of darkness or evil, or
an insecure, uncontrolled place in which one needs to be on guard (Logion 21). It is
an unworthy place that one should immediately leave, and the cosmos, according to
Logia 56, 80 and 111, is compared with the body. The one who finds or recognizes
the cosmos should eventually renounce it. Ernst Haenchen, based on its cosmology,
reads Thomas as an esoteric Gnostic writing (see Marjanen 1998b: 117–18). The
concepts of “the cosmos” and “the kingdom of God,” are completely opposed to each
other. The material world or visible world of Logion 56 is understood as a hopeless
place in which life is meaningless.
The Jesus of Logion 22 instructs his followers that the two shall become one
and that male and female shall become one. This ideological teaching, for entering
ⲉⲧⲙⲛ̄ⲧⲉⲣⲟ ((in)to the Kingdom), signifies not only “a complete renewal of the person,
who must break radically with his old existence,” but also getting into a new dimen-
sion of neutral (Klauck 2003: 116). The Logia tradition of “the two becoming one” is
a useful source for Gnostics (Uro 1998: 149–56). The Greek term εἰς ἓν (P. Oxy 654.
26) and the Coptic term ‘ⲟⲩⲁ ⲟⲩⲱⲧ (NHC II.2 33.10) of Logion 4 with Logia 11, 22,
23 and 114 can be understood either as “a single one” or “one and the same,” as “an
integrated existence that transcends all the divisive categories of human life” (Meyer
1985: 98).
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FEMALE DISCIP LES: SAL O M E AND M ARY

Salome
Thomas’s accounts of female disciples in private dialogue with the Master have no
strict parallels in the canonical texts. Clearly, each female character in Thomas was, in
a creative way, remembered by the earliest members of the early Thomasine Christian
community. If in the canonical tradition women are seen as a marginal group, following
Jesus at a distance, this hardly applies to Thomas’s picture of Salome, who plaus-
ibly had the opportunity to converse privately with her Master. Thomas’s Jesus evi-
dently committed himself to approve the position of the female follower in the circle
of discipleship. Although Salome is introduced only once (in a Logion) to the Thomas
readers, the influence of the female disciple implies a “feminine perspective.”
The Logiographer of Thomas is not interested in her background, but remarks
on her relationship with Jesus. Logion 61 reveals an occasional conversation from
an ordinary “dinner table fellowship,” maybe in Salome’s house, perhaps when Jesus
was initially undertaking his Galilean ministry (cf. Corley 1999). None of the canon-
ical texts includes such a show of confidence in a woman (NHC II.2 43.23–34), with
Salome an active “interlocutor” in the context of a master and a disciple:
Th.61-a.) Jesus said, “Two will rest on a couch: the one will die, and the other
will live.”
Th.61-b.) Salome said, “Who are you, man, that you have come up on my
couch and eaten from my table?”
h.61-c.) Jesus said to her, “I am he who exists from the undivided. I was given
some of the things of my father.”
Th.61-d.) < … > “I am your ⲙⲁⲑⲏⲧⲏⲥ.
Th.61-e.) < … > “Therefore I say, if he is destroyed he will be filled with light,
but if he is divided, he will be filled with darkness.”
(Gospel of Thomas Log. 61: NHC II.2 43: 23–34)
Here is a clear disclosure of the inspirational moment in which two characters,

Jesus and Salome, engage in conversation regarding her status among Jesus’s circle.
Although contemporary readers, like Sterling Bjorndahl (1994: 86), might easily
interpret Logion 61 in the way that Jesus could have taken advantage of a weak
female, by using his authority, for the momentary pleasure of sexual intercourse or
a relationship, the entire context of the message is genuinely based on a personal
teaching, to encourage the rest of the unknown female followers into discipleship,
through a heart-felt acknowledgement and lifetime commitment. The communica-
tion of a deep teaching of Jesus (Log. 61a) was suddenly continued by Salome, who
was not surprised but rather eager to ask a personal question about the origin of
Jesus: “Who are you, man? (61b).” It sounds like, “Master! You have visited my place
and have eaten meals with me, but I still do not know who You really are. I would like
to understand who really You are” (Funk 1993: 507). The response of Jesus brings
up his connection with his heavenly Father, if one reads the phrases of “ⲁⲛⲟⲕ` ⲡⲉ
ⲡⲉⲧϣⲟⲟⲡ` ⲉⲃⲟⲗ ⳉⲙ̄ⲡⲉⲧ` ϣⲏϣ (I am He who exists from the undivided),” and “ⲁⲩϯ ⲛⲁⲉⲓ
ⲉⲃⲟⲗ ⳉⲛ̄ⲛⲁⲡⲁⲉⲓⲱⲧ` (I was given some of the things of My Father).”
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The next phrase is a private confession that Salome sincerely professed to Jesus.
Despite the text having omitted the identity of the speaker, such as “Salome said” or
“Jesus additionally said” (cf. NHC II.2 43: 30–31), it is obvious that the phrase “I
am Your ⲙⲁⲑⲏⲧⲏⲥ (disciple)” (61d) was spoken by Salome; and if the character who
spoke in the last phrase (61e) is actually unnamed, the whole context surely offers
another saying of Jesus, not particularly addressed to Salome alone, but more to those
who wanted to become the true disciples of Jesus. Thomas’s Salome is not “depicted
as the one who misunderstands, but as the one who at least does not yet understand
enough” (Marjanen 1996: 41). She is seen as an appropriate ⲙⲁⲑⲏⲧⲏⲥ, even if she is
additionally “challenged to reach the highest level of discipleship and become ‘equal
(ϣⲏϣ)’ (with other leadership disciples) … (as being) ‘filled with ⲟⲩⲟⲉⲓⲛ (Light)’”
(Marjanen 1998a: 92).
The independent combination of Logion 61 “as an authoritative witness to the
words of the historical Jesus” can also be highlighted, if one does not ignore the value
of its last portion. The theme of “ⲟⲩⲟⲉⲓⲛ (Light)” and “the concept of unity” in the 61e
(“Therefore I say, if he is destroyed he will be filled with Light, but if he is divided, he
will be filled with darkness”) is quite relevant to the scenes of Logia 11, 24, 50 and
83, in which there is Light within a person of light and the light of the people origin-
ally comes from the Light of the Father. The teaching of Jesus here on ⲟⲩⲟⲉⲓⲛ (Light,
61e), having no parallels with any canonical texts, brings forth a new Salome trad-
ition of Thomas (Mead 1984: 282–9), with Salome’s character completely in contrast
with the picture in the canonical Salome.
Mary of Thomas
The Thomasine Mary is another female character by whom the final Logiographer of
the text could express an anti-canonical figure of the Gnostic Christian community.
As with Salome, the intimate dialogue between Jesus and the Thomasine Mary dir-
ectly illustrates a close mentorship between Master and pupil. There is no evidence
in the gospel but their discipleship presents as very analogous, with suggestions of
female leadership activity not evident in the canonical Synoptics.
The Logiographer of Thomas never makes clear the character is Mary Magdalene,
but ⲙⲁⲣⲓⳉⲁⲙ (Mariham), which is only the name for the Mary of Thomas, and made
not to be the same as ⲙⲁⲣⲓⲁ (Maria), meaning Mary the mother of Jesus (Bearsley
1980: 461–504). The character of Mary the mother of Jesus is shown negatively in
Logion 79, where ⲟⲩⲥⳉⲓⲙⲉ (a woman) from the crowd first appealed to Jesus, announ-
cing “blessed are the womb which bore You (Jesus) and the breasts which nourished
You (Jesus)” (cf. Anderson 1987).
The Logiographer assigns two Logia traditions for the character of Mary
Magdalene for his/her community. While the authors of the canonical texts lack any
narrative of Jesus with Mary Magdalene clearly specifed, Thomas includes a Logion
tradition illustrating the closeness of Mary Magdalene to Jesus in terms of a public
master/disciple relationship. At the beginning of Logion 21 the name of the disciple
who asked Jesus a question is not male (like Peter, Mathew, or Thomas), but Mary:
“Mary said to Jesus,” and this Mary of Thomas inquired about the true nature of
discipleship: “ⲉⲛⲉⲕⲙⲁⲑⲏ[ⲧ]ⲏⲥ ⲉⲓⲛⲉ ⲛ̄ⲛⲓⲙ` (whom are your disciples like?).” Without
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parallel in any canonical texts, this passage of NHC II.2 36.33–35 articulates a new
perspective on Mary, as with Salome.
The parabolic address following Mary’s query (36.35–37.6) is not made familiar
from any canonical text. The way Jesus’s discipleship is displayed is purely in a
Thomasine style for the purpose of educating the community members. Mary’s
question that was not for herself, but was on behalf of all Jesus’s disciples, is
revealed by the forthcoming six references to six second-person plural yous (37.10–
17; and see Shish-Halevy 1988: 157–93; Layton 2000). The second-person plural
suffix pronouns of (ⲙ̄ⲙⲱ)ⲧⲛ̄ (“you”), (ϣⲁⲣⲱ)ⲧⲛ̄ (“you”), (ⲉ)ⲧⲉⲧⲛ̄ (“you”) and
(ⳉⲛ̄)ⲧⲉⲧⲛ̄ (“you”) commonly mean both females and males among Jesus’s disciples,
and so the second-person plural subject pronoun ⲛ̄ⲧⲱⲧⲛ̄ (“you”) (in 37:10–17)
most likely demonstrates that the disciple group Jesus was talking to consisted of
both female and male followers. The word ⲛⲉⲧⲛ̄ (“your”), the second-person plural
(masculine and feminine) possessive of Logion 21, which is only used in the case
where one speaks about a group of males and females, also supports the deduction.
In this context, the Thomasine character of Mary Magdalene can even be inferred
as the chief leader of the female disciples in Jesus’s whole leadership group (cf.
McGuire 1999).
The last Logion of Thomas (Logion 114) is not the scene of a dialogue between
Mary Magdalene and Jesus, but seems to deliver a momentary picture of the disciples’
meeting, led by Jesus. Simon Peter raised a crucial leadership issue to the disciples’
meeting, concerning the dissatisfaction with Mary Magdalene’s inclusion (Marjanen
1998a: 89–105). The Jesus of Logion 114, on hearing Peter’s negative opinion, sys-
tematically and philosophically advocated the reasonable position of the female dis-
ciple for entering the Kingdom of heaven. Mary Magdalene is not actually involved in
the conversation of Jesus’s disciples, but here the Logiographer reflects a certain right
of Mary Magdalene in the leadership group, since Simon Peter advised “Let Mary
leave us, for women are not worthy of life.” This passage is not a religio-political
campaign, though, to the effect that ⲙⲁⲣⲓⳉⲁⲙ (Mary) should not be a disciple of Jesus,
but rather a personal objection to get her to give up her authority or leadership role
from among the disciples. There is no hint as to what kind of responsibility Mary had,
but Peter’s argument obviously indicates that she is challenging the leadership role
of Peter, generally recognized as one of the three most senior disciples (with James
and John). This scene in the Coptic text can be presumed to be the view, if not the
construction, of the Gnostic followers of the Thomasine tradition as opposed to the
Jewish tradition of “male chauvinism.”
Peter’s views about ⲙⲁⲣⲓⳉⲁⲙ (Mary) were based on the traditional Jewish con-
cept of ⲛ̄ⲥⳉⲓⲟⲙⲉ (women): “For women are not worthy of life.” Mary’s position was
measured not by the new Christian faith of Jesus, but by anti-feminine conceptions of
Judaism. Jesus corrects the issue with a “human egalitarian” answer and by looking
in personal compassion to Mary’s future destiny: “I Myself shall lead her …, so that
she too may become a living spirit …” Although Jesus, in terms of discipleship, has to
help Mary, his Logion “For every woman … will enter the kingdom of heaven” denies
the inferiorizing view of women through Peter and used to complain of her allegedly
unworthy ministerial actions. That the powerless role of Mary who was lifted up by
the master was a vital point the Gnostic keepers of the Thomasine tradition wanted
to emphasize at the gospel’s end.
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17
CONCLUS IO N
Among the new discoveries by Biblical and archaeological scholars in the twentieth
century, the Gospel of Thomas was one of the most important. However, since the
original socio-historical identity of the Thomasine community is obscure, as also the
way Thomas was used in later ancient contexts, its textual interpretation remains
controversial. In the period 1959–1970 numerous research papers published on
Thomas claimed the gospel’s dependence on the canonical traditions and tended to
criticize it as “secondary” (Kim 2009: 26–8); but with new translations of the Greek
and Coptic texts by Thomas Lambdin and Bentley Layton in the 1980s (see Lambdin
1996), professional re-interest has grown. New assessments by Helmut Koester and
Marvin Meyer in the 1990s have Thomas relatively independent of better-known
Christian traditions. The exploration of Thomasine ideas, developing into the new
millennium, invites new questions about how we can explore a marginalized reli-
gious community in the history of early Christianity. As this very paper attempts to
demonstrate, though, we have to be aware that the original Christian context of the
Thomas text (in Greek, or possibly first in Aramaic) was to an extent transformed
in Gnostic circles and with Gnostic concepts in Hellenistic Egypt (whence NHC
was uncovered). The original Jewish Christian text was adopted, then, in a foreign
land, and the former contexts of the writing were challenged by culturally different
followers. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri and Nag Hammadi text prove that Thomas was
not purely Gnostic, but was partly gnosticized in a new Coptic-speaking environ-
ment. The evidence for the Gnostic usage shines through the “I am” statements,
the images of Jesus as “revealer” and “judge,” the discourse of “dualism,” “image,”
“light,” “vision,” “cosmos,” and of “becoming one and male” and achieving female
discipleship that I have discussed in this paper. In our discussion we have thus
considered the main sayings of Jesus in Thomas that reflect the religious identity of
a “Gnostic Thomasine community.”
REFERENCES
Akagi, Tai. 1965. “The Literary Development of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas.” Doctoral
dissert., Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH.
Allberry, Charles. 1938. A Manichaean Psalm-Book Part II. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer.
Anderson, Janice. 1987. “Mary’s Difference: Gender and Patriarchy in the Birth Narratives.”
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Attridge, Harold. 1989. “Appendix: The Greek Fragments.” Bentley Layton (ed.). The Coptic
Gnostic Library; Nag Hammadi Codex II, 2–7 (with XII,2, BRIT. LIB. OR. 4926(1), and
P.OXY. 1, 654, 655), vol.1: Gospel According to Thomas, Gospel According to Philip
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Bjorndahl, Sterling. 1994. “To Live and Die in Thomas 61.” Forum 10 (1–2): 87–93.
Bousset, Wilhelm. 1901. “Die Himmelsreise der Seele.” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft
4: 136–69.
Corley, Kathleen. 1999. “Salome and Jesus at Table in the Gospel of Thomas.” Semeia 86: 85–97.
Davids, Peter. 1992. “Tradition Criticism.” Joel Green (ed.). Dictionary of Jesus and the
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Davies. Steven. 2002. The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom. Oregon House, CA: Bardic.
DeConick, April D. 1996. Seek to See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of
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——— 2001. Voices of the Mystics: Early Christian Discourse in the Gospels of John and
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——— 2005. Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel and Its
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Dunderberg, Ismo. 1998. “Thomas’ I-Sayings and the Gospel of John.” Risto Uro (ed.). Thomas
at the Crossroads: Essays on the Gospel of Thomas. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark: 33–64.
Funk, Robert, et al. 1993. The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.
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Grenfell, Bernard, and Arthur Hunt (ed., trans, and comm). 1904. New Sayings of Jesus and
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Jackson, Blomfield. 1900. Twenty-Five Agrapha or Extra-Canonical Sayings of Our Lord.
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Kim, David. 2009 [and forthcoming]. “The Thomasene Logia: The Genesis of a Jesus Tradition.”
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Klauck, Hans-Josef. 2003. Apocryphal Gospels (trans. Brian McNeil). London: T. & T. Clark.
Kloppenborg, John. 1988. Q Parallels: Synopsis, Critical Notes, and Concordance. Sonoma,
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Lambdin, Thomas. 1996. “The Gospel of Thomas (II, 2).” James Robinson (ed.). The Nag
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Marjanen, Antti. 1996. The Woman Jesus Loved: Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS AND

THE TCHACOS CODEX
Garry W. Trompf and David W. Kim
L ess well known than the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC), yet seemingly related to
them, stands the Tchacos Codex (CT), these two collections of ancient “Gnostic”
works together making up as significant a set of post-War discoveries for Biblical and
archaeological scholarship as the uncovering of the Dead Sea Scrolls (see ch. 2). CT
has presented special challenges for readers of ancient Gnostic texts. Discovered at
the Jabal Qarara, in the El Minya region of Middle Egypt in the mid-late 1970s and
sometimes called the Qarara Codex, the original book manuscript was not strictly
researched by experts for three decades whereas work on NHC started in earnest
in 1955, closer to discovery. CT was instead frustratingly relocated four times, to
Cairo (from 1980), Geneva (1983), Long Island (1984), and then to Celigny, Geneva,
Switzerland (by 2000). CT as an archaeological item is also seriously damaged, pos-
sibly through bad storage, even by having some stake driven through it (!), unfor-
tunate for a codex that is now carbon-dated to the 280s CE, well before NHC, the
more famous cache now thought to be transcribed by Christian monks in Egypt in
the fourth and fifth centuries (Lundhaug and Jenott 2015). The Maecenas Foundation
eventually invited Rodolphe Kasser and Florence Darbre to examine the damaged
CT. An initial analysis was presented at the Eighth International Congress of Coptic
Studies (IACS) in 2004, with the first English book, focused on the Gospel of Judas,
being published not long after (Kasser, Meyer, and Wurst 2006).
The Tchacos Codex (CT) was not in a form of scrolls, but in book style, with
66 pages. The four tractates enclosed are Gnostic texts, written in (Sahidic) Coptic
language. The first two of these are copies of the Letter of Peter to Philip (CT 1.1–
9) (9 pp.) and the (First) Apocalypse of James (CT 2.10–32) (33 pp.), both already
known from NHC VIII, 2 and V, 3 respectively. The third, bringing much publicity
to CT, was the Gospel of Judas (CT 3.33–58), apparently long lost if it was the
text of that name mentioned by Irenaeus of Lyons (Adversus Haereses 1.31.1 [ca.
180 CE]) and other Fathers following him. The codex’s last inclusion (CT 4.59–66)
is untitled, but probably related to the Nag Hammadi tractate Allogenes or “The
Stranger” (NHC XI, 3). These works have usually been treated on the assumption
that neither the Tchacos Codex nor the Nag Hammadi Codex is dependent on the
other, pace the proposal that CT was a missing component of the Nag Hammadi
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— T h e G o s p e l o f J u d a s a n d t h e Tc h a c o s C o d e x —
“library” (Robinson 2006: 108). Dating techniques confirm CT was transcribed first,

but fragments of the book, known to have been sold piecemeal, have not all turned
up (the Ohio fragment of Judas and the Lafayette fragment of Allogenes being the
best recoveries thus far), so that working out historical relationships between the two
codices requires patience. Already, however, CT’s temporal priority puts it closer to
the intensities of second-century Gnosticizing Christianity and it could be a “Gnostic”
as against “monastic” collection. The trouble is, the texts in both CT and NHC are
apparently translations of Greek texts of varied provenances.
THE LE T T E R O F PET E R TO PHILIP

The Letter of Peter to Philip (CT 1.1–9.15), probably first written in Greek (ca. 190–
210 CE) is translated into Coptic with many Greek loan words and Greek idioms. The
narrative context of the CT 1–9 is approximately the same with the NHC VIII, 2, but
is a different version (Kasser and Wurst 2007: 85–86), with the CT having the title
at the end of the writing ([ⲧ]ⲉⲡⲓⲥⲧⲟⲗⲏ ⲙ̄ⲡⲉⲧⲣⲟⲥ ϣⲁ ⲫⲓⲗⲓⲡⲡⲟⲥ: CT 9.13–15), not at the
beginning of the text (as with NHC). The textual condition of CT Peter to Philip is
critically damaged through its relocations (Brankaer and Bethge 2007: 12–30). Some
pages are pretty well preserved (3 and 9), but most (1, 5–8) miss at least sixteen lines
(NHC VIII, 2 helping to make up the lacunae). The work, accounting for original
author(s) and any “tweaking” by the Coptic translator(s), was “Christian Gnostic,”
interpreting the Christian message through discourse of the post-resurrection Jesus
(as found in NHC I, 2, 1; II, 1, 2; 7, 138 etc.) to defend Gnostic belief against the
proto-Orthodox Christianity (Kaler 2009: 264–87).
The Letter of Peter to Philip, however, is a part of the Petrine tradition, accepting
Peter as the leader of the disciples and calling for their unity, with Philip being
pressed to join in the common evangelistic mission after somehow being separated.
When Philip joins the disciples a revelatory encounter occurs (lost in CT, but in
NHC set on the Mount of Olives in a scene reminiscent of Christ’s Ascension in
Luke 24 and Acts 1, with a great light self-identifying as “Jesus Christ who is
with you forever” (CT 1 [p.] 4–9; NHC VIII, 2, 133–4). Jesus teaches about the
aeons and their plērōma, because Peter had confessed that they were struggling
with the archontic powers and wonders what suffering they would further face.
After their unexpected encounter and divine assurances, the disciples go down to
Jerusalem to evangelize, testifying to the incarnation and earthly works of their
master and performed healings. The key subject of CT’s Peter to Philip is the sal-
vation of human beings, yet characteristically Gnostic discourse supplants what
was congealing as the mainline Christian approach. The problem with the cosmos
is the “deficiency” of the aeons through the “Mother” (Coptic: Maau recognizably
Sophia), and “the Arrogance” issuing from her (called Authades in NHC VIII, 2,
135–6), who produces “[material] bodies” (CT 3.16–4.2; 4.17–21; 9.6) and also
causes a false Plērōma, the true Fullness being Christ (4.22–5.9; 6.3; cf. Col. 1:19).
Jesus came down to die by crucifixion and be buried; but He rose again, being a
“stranger” (shmmo) to suffering. Jesus “accomplished everything according to a
likeness in us,” thus being “the author of our life,” but his role is to overcome what
“we suffer at the transgression of the Mother” (not from sin). This is a “neces-
sary suffering” explained “many times before” (cf. Lk 24:25–6), including that
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they would be “brought to synagogues and governors” (cf. Lk 21:12; Acts); yet
the disciples, after beginning their preaching in Jerusalem, are filled with the Holy
Spirit and come to understand Jesus is “with them forever” (cf. Acts 2–4; Matt
28:20) (CT 7.3–9.14; cf. NHC VIII, 2, 137–39). The myth of Sophia the cosmic
marrer, known inter alia from The Apocryphon of John and the Barbelo Gnostics (à
la Irenaeus [Adv. Haer. 1.29.1–4]), clearly intrudes, along with “aeons,” “archons,”
“the mortal realms,” and “the Arrogant one,” found in other Gnostic texts.
The (First) Apocalypse of James

The second tractate (CT 2) is called The (First) Apocalypse of James (1 ApocJas),
already known from another version (NHC V, 3, distinguished from NHC V, 4 of
the same name). Whereas the Nag Hammadi Codex copy has eleven fragmentary
parts, the CT copy is better preserved with pp. 13 and 14 each missing only five lines
(between lines ten to fourteen). Even before radiocarbon findings the favored date of
the text was the third century, with the original a century earlier. If the original text
(or source) was in Greek, clearly both CT and NHC versions were not translated by
the same Christian Gnostic person, though the translators probably worked on the
same source. The concern with James, first head of the Church in Jerusalem (Acts
21:18), and in a text placed after one with Petrine connections, raises questions about
Gnostic/Jewish Christian association and cooperation in “classic Gnostic” writings.
1 ApocJas contains a revelatory dialogue between Jesus just before his arrest (by a
“[crowd] of [priests]”?) and his (spiritual, “not material”) “brother” James the Just,
who realizes that upon his own prospective death he has to contend against the aeonic
powers within “She who always gives the chalice of bitterness” (namely Achamoth, a
self-centered emanation of Sophia) (CT 2 [pp.] 11–12; 21–2). Jesus affirms his own
“going” –“this destiny” –as the reason why James need not be afraid that he himself
is also to be seized (CT 11; 15; cf. Josephus, Antiq. 20:200), the latter’s martyrdom
being described at the text’s conclusion (CT 30; Haxby 2013: 8–11). The Lord, as
the image (hikōn) of the true God, offers redemption (pasōte), again not from sin,
but relief from cosmic suffering by revealing how James and believers after him can
“overpower” the archons, who can seize the dead like earthly arresters (CT 11.19–
20). Indeed, Jesus appears to James again, this time on the mountain Galgelam (17.9;
cf. NHC V.3.30: Gaugelan) and after his resurrection, with similar reassurances, spe-
cifying that he himself suffered nothing and that Sophia, Achamoth’s mother, is under
his control (18; 21–2; yet cf. NHC V.3.34–5, where an honored Sophia mediates
“imperishable gnosis” and redemption). 1 JasApoc purveys “standard” Gnostic
teachings about humans’ predicament in the universe, and with talk of “seventy-
two heavens,” “twelve archons,” Achamoth and Sophia, all to be passed (CT 13.2–8;
21.4–5; 22.4–14), we detect initiatic formulae and hymnic material reminiscent of
Valentinian ritual preparedness as gnōsis to guide post-mortem journeying (Irenaeus,
Adv. Haer. 1.21.5; Epiphanius, Pan. 36.3.1–6). But with the special focus on James
in Jerusalem and troubles there, on his successor being Addai (a disciple connected
to Edessa), and on women disciples (Salome, Mariam, Martha, etc.) and the archon
Adonn (CT 23–4; 26), special signs of Semitic (Jewish and Syrian) influences are
strong (Schoedel and Parrott 1988: 66–7). Interestingly the outlook of 1 ApocJas is
not inconsistent with Peter to Philip and both texts have a Jerusalemite setting.
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The Gospel of Judas

By far the most studied of the Tchacos documents and translated most (recently with
the Ohio fragment added) is the Peuangelion n-Ioudas (CT 3), presumed to be from
a second-century Greek Euangelion tou Ioudas (EvJud). It should be viewed among
other “Gnostic Gospels” (Kasser, Meyer, and Wurst 2006: 137–69; cf. Meyer 2005)
but has no equivalent in NHC. The narrative is again set in Jerusalem and only before
the arrest, from before [the last] “Passover” to Judas’s receipt of coins for “handing
over” Jesus to “the chief priests” (CT 3 [pp.] 33.6; 58.10–26 [Pagels and King 2007
notations, 1:2; 16]; cf. Mk 10:33), although Jesus seems able to enter the highest
heaven-world before the crucifixion (36.13–15 [3:1–3]). Again, by clear implication,
he does not suffer, because only a human form “bearing” Jesus has to die (56.11–14
[15:3–44]), exemplifying a binding thread in CT, that Jesus always rises above torture
and death. Judas is thus this gospel’s hero: in his betrayal he makes the necessary “sac-
rifice” of a body connected to Jesus for redemption to occur, the only worthy sacrifice
in a sea of other (Jewish and ordinary Christian) ones (38–40 [4–5]), Judas, if he is
warned (like James in 1 ApocJas) he will “suffer grief,” (35–6 [2:28]), is not the one
crucified (as in later Muslim speculation, e.g., Evangelium Barnabe 214–18). Indeed,
Judas is granted a special disclosure or gnosis in the heavens (57.21–58.9 [15:17–20])
about what the true redemption of “the Kingdom” is (35 [2:26]; 46 [9:20]), which in
this text involves a cosmic reordering. Jesus is not only dominant over the archons,
but destroyer of straying stars (55.18–20 [14:14–16]) and Judas’s soul and his star
will be high in the new order (57.19–20 [15:16]; cf. Förster 2009). Redemption
through celestial adjustments carries cosmo-apocalyptic implications, yet any Biblical
associations (Mk 13:25; Matt 24:29) are meshed with Babylonico-Hellenistic astro-
logical assumptions that great changes in the heavens always having fitting, often
catastrophic results on earth (Trompf 1979: 9–13: 176, 211–15; Kim 2008).
Although the text is too fragmentary to clinch it, Judas (as against the other
disciples of “standard,” already corrupted Christian faith limited by the twelve
zodiacally related aeons) might hope to rise to the higher, thirteenth heaven, as “the
thirteenth apostle” (DeConick 2009a: 255–7; cf. 2009b), and could hope to inte-
grate at death into the exalted, heavenly generation (genea) of Seth (= Christ) (49
[11:1–5]; 57.10–14 [15:12]; cf. 43–5 [8]‌), the only one that is imperishable, just as
some stars (which are like generations) will avoid perishing (41.2–6 [5:18]). Here
we come upon a “Sethian Gnostic” motif, reflecting a Gnostic “school of thought”
behind a related cluster of (mainly NHC) texts, which extols “the holy seed of Seth”
(e.g., NHC VIII.7.130) as undoing for the redeemed elect all that the gross creation of
the earthly Adam and Eve brought about on earth (see ch. 11). In EvJud, by implica-
tion the perishability of mortal mundane races derives from the “perishable Sophia”
(44.4 [8:7–10]) and the maker of Adam and Eve is Saklas and his angels (Saklas being
one of the names of the Sethian Demiurge, Sophia’s issue, and a Devil figure; see
Apocryphon of John [NHC II.1.11]), a positioning consistent enough with the other
CT texts. And EvJud has Jesus arising from the immortal Barbelo (35.18 [2:21–33]),
the highest aeon in Sethianism (e.g., NHC II.1.4–5). Still, that the gospel is decidedly
Sethian is disputable (Kim 2014: 92), its weaker links more like the Mandaeans,
who also do not show de-ritualizing tendencies found in Sethianism (Brankaer and
Bethge 2007: 377), and who similarly extolled the soul over uncertainties of spirit in
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the human composite (53–4 [13:12–15]; and see Nasoraia on Mandaeans, ch. 16).
The idea of a Christ-caused astral confusion shows up in the independent, albeit later
Pistis Sophia, with Sophia being redeemed into the thirteenth (Empyrean-looking)
aeonic heaven after the disturbance brought on by the crucifixion ([Amélineau edn.]
pp. 4–6). Distinctive in EvJud within its earlier context is the revelation that the cruci-
fixion salvifically transforms cosmic arrangements, and while sinners (including most
Christians) will remain in their misguided sinfulness, Gnostics will escape, and Judas
(not quite convincingly) will find some kind of exaltation in the transformation.
Interestingly, when Irenaeus mentions the heretics called Cainites “showing a
Gospel of Judas,” he draws connections with the idea that while “Sophia could habit-
ually take off anyone” she pleased, now Judas’s act in “the mystery of betrayal” has
“thrown everything into [cosmic] confusion” (I.31.1). The representation squares
well with EvJud. The Cainites, however, not necessarily starting as a Gnostic sect,
expressed wanton disaffection at the fledging Christian faith, siding with all the
Biblical anti-heroes (Satan, Cain, the first Enoch, the Sodomites, Esau, Korah, and
others, with Judas their final favorite). The short New Testament General Epistle
of Jude first tackled their influence in the eastern churches by the 120s (Trompf
2017: 974), before, further east by the 310s, the Zoroastrian magi eventually roundly
condemned the longstanding “heresy” of worshipping malicious Ahriman and his
demon hordes (Zaehner 1955: 8–25). The preoccupations of the Cainites and CT
authors, however, diverge widely, and EvJud was not the former’s production, but just
usable according to their idiosyncratic readings of it (Trompf 2010: 578–82). Those
who put together CT as a book, assuredly, readily saw it confirming their specu-
lative position, though whether they were inheritors of traditions by early “Judas
disciples” is hard to say (Kim 2014), and that these Cainites took inspiration from
non-canonical Jewish sources about the seed of Cain as against Seth is unlikely (cf.
Stroumsa 1984: 26–7, 83).
[Allogenes]
Of the CT tracts the untitled, critically damaged piece now called the Temptation of
Allogenes (see Scopello 2013) stands fourth. The condition of the CT 4 [pp.] 59–66 is
extremely poor, yet the Lafayette scrap helps with p. 60 and fragments pp. 64–6 look
more accessible through NHC XI, 3. The original work was in Greek, but Bohairic
features in the Sahidic dialect suggest an earlier Coptic translation. The initial setting
is on Mount Tabor, where Satan tempts “the Stranger” (Allogenes) with the world’s
riches, only to be rebuked (4, [p.] 59.27; cf. Matt 4: 8–10; om NHC XI.3.45). The
Stranger (Copt: shmmo), as in CT 1 is one distinctive Sethian nomenclature for Jesus(-
Seth), Epiphanius mentioning “books called Allogeneis” (apparently not all extant)
written in the name of Seth’s seven sons, themselves called “Strangers” (Panarion
XL. 7.4.-5). Seth, however, nowhere appears in NHC XI.3, though its concentra-
tion on the first (androgynous) aeon Barbelo is Sethian enough, as also its apophatic
approach to the great Hidden One (NHC XI.3.45–8; cf. Apocryphon of John, Berlin
BG 8502.2: 24, 6–25, 7 = NHC III, 1, 17–33; with Burns 2010).
The function of Allogenes in the CT collection looks to be access to the highest
revelation of divine power over the aeonic world, with Jesus as guide and overcomer.
In NHC XI.3 this partly unveiled high-ethereal world embodies final gnosis, and
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in it the elect find affirmation that they are divinely “good within” and “worthy”
(52. 10–24; 68.19), implying deeper initiation than in CT’s other texts, and com-
pleting an instruction process. The philosophy of ascent to higher disclosure in CT 4
suggests affinities with Zostrianos and Nicotheos (NHC VIII, 1 and VII, 5) (Turner
2001: 532–3) but also with emergent Neoplatonic and Hermetic speculations (e.g.,
NHC VI, 6; XIII; cf. Wire 1990: 176–8). Viewed as a whole, CT may well be the
“scripture book” of a marginal third-century Egyptian Gnostic group, using favorite
texts of different second-century provenances to take initiates from a basic reassur-
ance to full confidence in divine control over a transforming cosmos and in the
ultimate Stillness behind all (NHC XI.3.65–7). Thus not just EvJud, but the whole
codex represents a “unique form of Gnosticism,” fighting for its “authority” among
ideological competitors (cf. DeConick 2009a: 243, 255).
REFERENCES
Brankaer, Johanna, and Hans-Gebhard Bethge. 2007. Codex Tchacos: Texte und Analysen.
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Burns, Dylan. 2010. “Apophatic Strategies in Allogenes (NHC XI, 3).” Harvard Theological
Review 103 (2): 161–79.
DeConick, April. 2009a. “Apostles as Archons: The Fight for Authority and the Emergence of
Gnosticism in the Tchacos Codex and other Early Christian Literature.” April DeConick
(ed.). Codex Judas Papers: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex
(March 13–16, 2008). Leiden: Brill: 242–88.
——— 2009b. The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Jesus really Says. New York:
Continuum.
Förster, Niklas. 2009. “The Star of Judas in the Gospel of Judas.” April DeConick (ed.). Codex
Judas Papers: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex (March
13–16, 2008). Leiden: Brill: 325–36.
Haxby, Mikel. 2013. “The First Apocalypse of James: Martyrdom and Sexual Difference.”
Doctoral dissert., Harvard University, Boston, MA.
Kaler, Michael. 2009. “The Letter of Peter to Philip and its Message of Gnostic Revelation and
Christian Unity.” Vigiliae Christianae 63 (3): 264–95.
Kasser, Rodolphe, Meyer, Marvin, and Gregor Wurst (eds.). 2006. The Gospel of Judas.
Washington DC: National Geographic [new 2008 edn. with François Gaudard].
Kasser, Rodolphe, and Gregor Wurst (eds.). 2007. The Gospel of Judas: Together with a
Letter of Peter to Philip, James and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tcachos. Washington
DC: National Geographic.
Kim, Seonyoung. 2008. “The Gospel of Judas and the Stars.” Madeleine Scopello (ed.). The
Gospel of Judas in Context. Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Gospel
of Judas. Leiden: Brill: 293–304.
Kim, David. 2014. “A Secret Life of Minority: The Sethian Community of Judas in Tchacos
Gnostic Literature.” Korean Journal of Religious Studies 74 (3): 87–120.
Meyer, Marvin. 2005. The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical
Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
Pagels, Elaine, and Karen King. 2007. Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of
Christianity. London: Penguin.
Robinson, James. 2006. The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and his
Lost Gospel. San Francisco: Harper.
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Schoedel, William R., and Douglas M. Parrott. “The First Apocalypse of James (V, 3).” James
M. Robinson (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Leiden: Brill: 1988: 260–8.
Scopello, Madeleine. 2013. “The Temptation of Allogenes (Codex Tchacos, Tractate IV).”
Kevin Corrigan and Tuomas Rasimus (eds.). Gnosticism, Platonism and the Late Ancient
World. Essays in Honour of John D. Turner. Leiden: Brill: 117–37.
Trompf, Garry. 1979. The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought. Berkeley: University
of California Press: vol. 1.
———2010. “The Epistle of Jude, Irenaeus, and the Gospel of Judas.” Biblica 91 (4): 555–82.
———2017. “Epistle of Jude, II: Christianity.” Hans-Josef Klauck (ed.). Encyclopaedia of the
Bible and its Reception. Berlin: De Gruyter: vol. 14, cols. 293–5.
Wire, Antoinette C. 1990. “Allogenes: Introduction.” William W. Hedrick (ed.). Nag Hammadi
Codices XI, XII, XIII. Leiden: E.J. Brill: 173–91.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE MANDAEANS: WRITINGS,
RITUAL, AND ART
Brikha H. S. Nasoraia
F orming a unique indigenous group that have subsisted in the Mesopotamian

region from ancient times, the Mandaeans are the last surviving Gnostics.
Strict pacifists, wearing distinctive white garments, avoiding cutting their hair,
and rejecting male circumcision (Nasoraia 2017a), they have somehow managed
to survive persecutions and keep up their rich tradition near the confluence of the
Euphrates, Tigris, and Karun rivers, and now in diaspora (mostly in Western coun-
tries) (Nasoraia 2017b).
Mandaeans believe that they were keeping up their way of life in the Middle
East many centuries before the time of Jesus. Indeed, they take themselves to be the
first people on earth, as “Sons and Daughters of Light” descended from the cosmic,
secret Adam (Nasoraia and Trompf 2010: 401), but international scholarship usu-
ally places the Mandaeans as pre-Christian Gnostics. With John the Baptist being an
important historical figure for them and the last of their Teachers/prophets, and since
Mandaeans are fabled for their frequent baptismal practices, religious people and
priests being required to baptize themselves at dawn every morning, some scholars
favor their historical origins to be in the world of later Jewish advocates of baptismal
cleansing (since Brandt [1915]).
Mandaeans believe their baptism, indeed their whole religion, stemmed from
the Light-worlds (Worlds of Light) and was practiced earlier by the Light-world
Beings. It originated from Hiia (the Primal Perfect Source of “Life”) and from His/
Its primal manifestation as Manda d-Hiia (Messenger of the Light of Gnosis and
Spiritual Redeemer/Savior). Mandaeans hold that this Divine Knowledge (itself called
Manda d-Hiia) forms the “First ‘Science/Knowledge’ or Religion of (entire universal)
Life,” and that the “Religion of Manda/Gnosis” was eventually passed down to the
earthly (perfect) Adam, head of the human race’s first (perfect) family, from whom
Mandaeans also descend. Mandaeans, as unique Gnostics, believe that Manda d-
Hiia inspired and taught Adam two main things: first, the “Divine Knowledge and
Wisdom” (Manda-Naṣiruta); and secondly, the “Sacred Rituals” as practiced origin-
ally in the Light-worlds. This was to ensure that Adam and his race have Parwanqa
(Salvation), as well as Masiqta (the secret “Ascent” and direct “Access” to the Worlds
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— Brikha H. S. Nasoraia —
of Light), so that humans can successfully make Laufa (Union) with the Great Life
and these Heavenly Worlds through the purificatory practices of the mind, soul,
spirit, and the body (Nasoraia 2000a; 2004a; 2004b; 2010b), these Worlds’ higher
Beings not taken to be potentially threatening as in most “classic Gnostic” systems.
“Knowledge” (manda) as such, however, is not enough for reaching salvation. The
cultic constant rituals are even more important than Gnosis both for descending to
and living in the earthly realm, where there is much darkness and the soul (nišimta) is
imprisoned, and for “ascending to the soul’s native world of Light” (Gündüz 1994: 3;
cf. Buckley 1989; Nasoraia 2004b; Nasoraia and Crangle 2010).
The very first Mandaean baptism was solemnized by the heavenly, angelic Trainer
Hibil Ziwa (or Gabriel), sent by Manda d-Hiia to baptize the earthly Adam (Canonical
Prayerbook [= CP], 26–9). Without baptism, no Mandaean, above all his/her soul,
can attain the celestial Light-worlds (Rudolph 1978: 8–10), a belief explaining the
imperative baptism of infants.
Despite the importance of John the Baptist, though (see Book of John; Ginza
Rba [Yamina] [hereafter GY] V.4 and VII [the main Mandaean scripture, transcrib.
Petermann]; Harran Gawaita [hererafter HG] [pp. 3–8]; and Alf Trisar Šuialia, proem;
with Drower 1937: xxv, 2–7, 15–17, 258–63, 278–82), he is not mentioned much in
the movement’s (largely secret) ancient books and scrolls, being placed at the end of a
whole chain of events and not the founder of Mandaeism. Considering themselves the
original people of the earth, and thus the originator of the world’s races and religions,
Mandaeans trace true beginnings to when the Naṣoraeans, their earliest priestly
elite and chosen guardians of the secret Knowledge and True Wisdom (Naṣiruta),
descended to the earth through heavenly Light-worlds, some in “Light (otherwordly)
ships/boats,” in primordial time. The Naṣoraeans are considered the direct offspring
of Manda d-Hiia and the heavenly Secret cosmic Adam (Adam Kasia/Adakas), their
seed continuing in spite of great catastrophes and contaminations through time. If
John is their last, nonetheless crucial, Teacher/prophet, Mandaean-Naṣoraeans are
nonetheless supposed to be the last survivors left on earth, should humans ever face
extinction (Nasoraia and Trompf 2010: 398–403, 422–5).
With this kind of group identity, it is natural that many images of a mysterious
group of people have grown up in the Middle East, the Mandaeans, of mysterious
origin, being variously called Sabians (Sabaeans, Subbis), Nabataeans, Baptists
(Moghtaselah), Zadoqians, Harranians, Sabaaists, Dostaeans, Hanifis, let alone
Gnostics (Mandāyyē) and Observants (Nasorāyyē), names usually associated with
the keeping of the “Secret Wisdom” of the ages (start with Chwolsohn 1856: vol. 2;
Nasoraia 2012; 2018: 15).
The corpus of Mandaean texts constitutes an extraordinary phenomenon in its
own right, all written in Mandaic, an eastern Aramaic dialect (the closest to the
Babylonian Talmudic) with a unique script, which for Mandaeans carry southern
Babylonian (even ancient Median) associations (Nöldeke 1875: XIX–XXI; Moscati
1959: 11–14; see also Macuch 1965) historically prevenient to a Mandaean group’s
emergence in the Jordan Valley, or to one group following John the Baptist that fled
Jewish and Roman threats in the early first century CE to join their co-religionists in
“the Median Hills” (see HG [Drower], [pp.] 5–10). The Mandaic script also carries
a uniquely geometric quality related to the tradition’s remarkable “stick- figure”
art, giving us the largest extant body of Gnostic artistry from Antiquity (Nasoraia
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— The Mandaeans: writings, ritual, and art —
2010a: 200–10; 2013a). Mandaic scriptural texts, especially the esoteric ones, are
sacred, kept in perfumed cotton within large sandalwood boxes (Nasoraia 2013b).
In the vast literary body, scriptures being crucial are the Great Treasure or Ginza
Rba (GR) also called The Secret Book of Adam or The Book of Radiant-Light/
Enlightenment (mostly cosmology), the Canonical Prayer Book (CP) named the
Qulasta (for ritual), the highly important Book of John the Baptizer /The Book
of Kings (mostly about John the Baptist, Miriai, and cosmology), and many secret
scrolls, including Diwan Abatur (on the soul’s progress through the Purgatories),
Harran Gawaita (on the faithful’s flight from Jerusalem, and also the Last Days), The
Lesser “First World,” The Great “First World,” The Scroll of Exalted Kingship, The
Thousand and Twelve Questions (hereafter Questions) (on various ritual and initiatic
matters), and the particular esoteric The Rivers Scroll (Diwan Nahrawatha, hereafter
DN), and The Scroll of the Great Creation of the Image of Truth (hereafter DQRDK).
Written concerns with the zodiac, phylacteries, magical incantation bowls, and as yet
many unopened lead scrolls fill out the ancient broader picture (Macuch 1965).
Mandaean art, almost exclusively found in secret scrolls, has no parallel in the
history of the world’s artistic endeavors, even if some of its symbolism bears com-
paring with ancient Mesopotamian and early Christian renderings (Van Rompaey
2011: 50–7, 250). The style is cubo-geometric, formalistically laid out in arranged
clusters or within bordering, and is unique in accentuating dark lines against a white
background. Normally pictures follow a scroll’s sequence of thought, conveying a
“cosmic story” atmosphere (Nasoraia 2013a; 2013b; 2013c). Authors and artists
“co-participate” in cosmic creation, in the “making of books” qua holy work, and
through theurgic activity with formulae on incantation bowls, lead rolls, and other
objects (Segal and Hunter 2000). Every personal and environal object depicted seems
to stand in limitless space and radiate energy. Bodies of living beings are rendered as if
you can see through them, with faces that are spatially open, virtually always lacking
mouths, heads encircled by many points of radiation as halos, and hands sometimes
shown to cross vast spaces of the cosmos (e.g., Diwan Abathur [Drower], [pp.] 39–40
and images; Nasoraia 2010a: 200–348; 2013a; 2013b; 2013c).
The artistic symbols and their codes intentionally display how the earthly world
is not isolated, and that its creation and life arose, not by accident, but by direct
involvement of both the forces of Light and Darkness. Images of Hibil Ziwa (Gabriel)
often confirm this, as an impressively armed figure who is victorious Mediator and
Messenger, straddling light and dark, establishing life on earth, and mystically
embodying the Living water, or Masiqta, the same protective power for the soul to be
healed baptismally. While Manda d-Hiia is Universal Redeemer, Hibil Ziwa’s redemp-
tion role includes the earthly world (Nasoraia 2018; Figure 16.1).
The language in the GR expressing the emergence and unfolding descent of the
Light-world Beings, from Manda d-Hiia, is reminiscent of emanations issuing from
a hidden God in the “classic Gnostic systems,” but with significant differences. The
language of water and fecundity associated with living waters colors the cosmogonic
story throughout. Right from the start, when “Upon the Light-world was Life,” when
the Divine brought into being and suffused into the heaven-worlds,
From Life/Living One(s) Water came into being,

and from Water Radiance came into being.
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Figure 16.1 Image of Hibil Ziwa from the Rivers Scroll
From Radiance Light came into being,

and from Light the ’Uthras came into being.
(GY XV.379.3–8)
Many of the ’Uthras comprise the host of lesser Light-world beings making up a
fullness (or equivalent to the plērōma in “classic Gnostic” systems) and with celestial
realms involving deep dualistic or tripartistic systems of cosmic relations (Nasoraia
2004a; 2010a: chs. 3, 4), but it is concentration on cosmic water that distinguishes
the Mandaean cosmological myth-narrative.
Mandaean liturgy accompanies water rites. The central ritual action of the Mandaeans
is “immersion in water,” as Lady Drower stressed (1937: 100–1), though water not
only taken as symbolic of Life but “to a certain degree as life itself.” “The earth is like
a woman and the sky like a man, for it makes the earth fecund,” so “rain is regarded
as semen,” “fertilizing,” and also able to wash away “filth, … sin and impurity,” prom-
ising “everlasting life to the soul.” Most water, though, was not “life-giving”; it was
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Tahma/Mia-siawia, “a lifeless fluid which eventually passes out into the bitter waters
of the sea,” while “spiritualized vitalizing water,” only one-ninth part of all water, “is
drawn up to heaven to pass again into the heavenly Yardna” (or Jordan), the very fluid
brought into action by baptism, once used to carry the original Naṣoraeans in primor-
dial “cosmo-planetary boats,” and the cosmic Euphrates able to strengthen ’Uthras and
Light-world Beings drinking it (CP no. 198; cf. Yamauchi 1970: 84–5).
The (sacred) water for Mandaean rituals had to be fresh and running, specific-
ally from a river, stream, or spring. Not only Yardna, it was mystically Life itself or
Mia Hiia (Living Water/Water of Life); as a form of light (nhura) and mind (mana),
since Ziua (Illumining/Radiating) surges up from the Waters, Mandaeans believe that
a person being baptized “puts on robes of radiant light,” receiving enlightenment
of mana (Mind) and nišimta (soul) that in advancing stages grants Manda (Gnosis)
toward Naṣiruta (the highest spiritual Wisdom) (e.g., CP nos. 1, 13, 235; with
Franzmann 1989: 157–8; Nasoraia 2005: ch. 6; 2004a: e.g., 317, 33, 53–4, 56–9;
2004b). In comparative Gnosticism, baptism is what constantly redeems followers
from the entrapment of the body and the world.
The Mandaean “Water and River systems” are referred to as Kana (Rba) d-
Nišmata (“the (Great) Stem of Souls”), which interconnects and unifies all “Worlds
and Generations” (Almia u-Daria). In the extraordinary text called the Rivers Scroll
(Diwan Nahrawatha) we find Mandaean-Naṣoraeans deriving all waters, streams,
rivers, and their channels from a celestial prototypical “Source” –the First Yardna
(e.g., Questions [Drower], 110–11; CP nos. 58, 171, 293, 380), which later grows to
be the Light or Radiant Euphrates (DN Tbls. I-III). In this “Water Gnosis” water is the
cosmic “factory of unification” (called Mšunia Kušţa) between the Light and Earthly
worlds, in the Earthly World itself (Tbl. IV), and in the microcosm of the human
body (Nasoraia 2018). “Before all the worlds came to be,” anyway, “the Yardna was
brought into being by the power of the King of Light” (GY III. 69; 75.24–76.4).
Now in the Mandaeans’ mythic or “cosmo-historic” narrative (from GR and
other texts), before any “events” of colorful significance happen, the “spheres” of
Light (Nhura) and Darkness (Hšuka) [pre-]exist, and prima facie they might seem
to be eternally co-existent (e.g., Questions, 5, 135) (as in the Manichaean system),
but some texts explain clearly that Light is older than Darkness (e.g., CP no. 1. cf.
GY III.75; with Buckley 1978) and that God (Hiia), utterly indescribable and finally
hidden (as common in Gnostic paradigms), has been and always is and will be eter-
nally. All Emanations started with Hiia (Life) or the First [Great] Life (Hiia [Rbia]
Qadmaiia), who is perfect, totally full of Mind (Mana) and Knowledge (Manda),
as well as Radiance (Ziwa), Light (Nhura), Glory (’Qara) and ethereal Water (Mia
and Yardna), and holding the uppermost rank in the heaven-worlds. Hiia Qadmaiia
is also often defined as Mana Rba (the Great Mind) –equivalent to the Basilidean
Nous –and reckoned Lord of Light and the Heavenly Waters. As the GR narrates it,
When the Fruit was in the Fruit, when the Ether was in Ether, … the Great
and Glorious Mana was (there), from whom the mighty and great manas came
into being … The great Yardna (River of Life/Jordan) was created without end
and number. Plants grow beside it, happy and rejoicing; … And from the great
Yardna, Yardnas without end and beyond count came into being.
(GY III. 68–70)
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192
From the First Life emanated the Second Life (Hiia Tiniania), also called Yušamin,
who was God’s “very first Request” [out of nothing], yet who –comparable to other
Gnostic emanation theories –was lest perfect, problematically expanding worlds for
himself. Looking and moving downwards, Yušamin’s world was filled with “countless
and endless ’Uthras” (angelic Light-world Beings, actually always good and useful),
he himself first among them, and yet also many Škinatas (heavenly Dwellings, these
being ambitious for their own possibilities). By Yušamin “looking down” rather than
up (for “more” perfection), the result was a cosmic “requital,” the universe spreading
out dramatically into a “new spiritual world” (Haardt 1971: 353–4).
When the Second Life created ’Uthras, especially the “three ’Uthras” (CP no. 379),
he permitted them to produce Škinas/Škintas that “spread out” from the “bound-
aries” of the “upper” perfect part of the World of Light. At that critical moment when
the stage of the “Second Life” had begun, this instigated the end of the “Complete
Perfection,” the highest achievement characteristic of the previous stage of the First
Life called “the Great Fruit” (Pira Rba), after which the lesser perfection (the equiva-
lent to the classic Gnostic Plērōma or Fullness of Things) applies. Now, the three
’Uthras asked Yušamin if he created the “Yardna/Jordan of living water, so marvel-
lous,” and although told “the Yardna belongs to the Life,” they still petitioned him:
“Grant” us of your radiance and your light and of that which surrounds you and
we shall “proceed” and go “below” the Streams of water, “call forth” škinas for
you, “found” a world for you, and may the world belong to us and to you [i.e.,
the World of the Second Life].
(GY III.70)
The consequences of Yušamin’s diverted attention by the ’Uthras led to our world, its
lessened perfection, and its vulnerability to the Forces of Darkness. The Second Life
had shown the way for the emanations of the Third Life (called Abatur/Hibil Ziwa)
and the Fourth Life (Ptahil) (see Figures 16.2 and 16.3). At this point we can reflect
that the “Primordial Emanation” of the Four Lives –Hiia Qadmaiia, Yušamin, Hibil
Abathur/Ziwa, Ptahil –runs somewhat parallel with Manichaean cosmogenesis, also
involving “Four Lives” (Theodore bar Konai, Liber Scholiorum 2), although a spe-
cial Mandaean feature comes with Ptahil, whose creation is imperfect and incom-
plete (as with the “classic Gnostic” Demiurge figure), but who is not Satanic like his
Manichaean equivalent (cf. Nasoraia [as Saed] 2000b, c).
Ptahil is the demiurgic fashioner of the earthly world and bodies. A pale reflection
of the Egyptian Memphite creator-god Ptah, he is an inferiorized figure drawn from
the realm ruled by the Queen of Darkness (Qin), who sits akin to the demonized
Sophia of some classic Gnostic texts. The ’Uthras secure power from Yušamin and on
his orders penetrate to the “Place of Darkness.”
And the Second …

granted them some of his radiance
And instructed them to call forth a world.
… they went and descended to the Place of Darkness.
They called forth Ptahil-’Uthra,
… and set him in his realm/place.
(GY III.93–4)
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Figure 16.2 Image of Abatur at the Scales (from Diwan Abatur)
This was necessary in the cosmic process of the Four Lives because, even from “near
the Beginning,” Darkness was present, and, as the emanations descended, every-
thing of Light was endangered by being too close to Darkness and its overwhelming
effects (GY I-III, XII). The World of Darkness had expanded even more dramatic-
ally, threatening the balance of the whole universe –a predicament reminding of
Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism.
Significantly, there are two important “cosmic descents” of both Manda d-Hiia
(God angelically as Knowledge/Gnosis of Life [see above]) and Hibil Ziwa (Gabriel),
and texts show them involved in fixing the chaos or disorder of the Universe, and
limiting or controlling the vast expanse of the Worlds of Darkness (and their Forces)
before the world’s Creation. In these double involvements we find Manda d-Hiia iden-
tified with the cosmic redemption, Gnosis (Manda), or/and Life, or Living Water (Mia
Hiia) (CP no. 121), and Hibil Ziwa identified with Radiance (Ziwa), Light (Nhura),
Living Water (Mia Hiia), and the fertilizing Seeds of Life (Mazruta Haita) (DQRDK).
Thus Hiia (Life, i.e., God) used the forces of Manda d-Hiia and Hibil Ziwa to expand
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194
and “descend” to the Worlds of Darkness. We learn how Manda d-Hiia “descends to
the depths which have an evil stench” and in his other, more principal role as Living
Water (Mia Hiia) “transmutes the turbid water so that Life, Light, balance the world”
(GY XV.328; CP no. 121, with Rudolph 1965: 150–6, 205–20).
In the other great descent, we find Mia Hiia was sent to the earthly world in an
ethereal form by God or “the Life” (Hiia) Him/Itself. This Heavenly Water mixed
with Mia-Siawia and/or Mia-’Kumia (Black Water) to transform and create the life in
the earthly world in all its forms and kinds, over a very long time. In this descending
to Darkness Mia Hiia is clearly identified with Hibil Ziwa (i.e., Gabriel, the Angel/
Light-world Being/Force), a crucial figure in the Mandaean Creation story. We find
a unique image of Hibil Ziwa in DN (Tbl. III) as Lord over Creation, looking heroic
with stave and axe, commanding over cosmic Waters and over Dark Worlds below.
He is also, remember, Mazruta Haita (Bearer of the “Seeds of Life”), inseminating
the world where everything jostles for a place, spraying “the Perfume of the Water of
Life that stirred alive fish, creeping things, trees and earth and everything” (DQRDK
[Nasoraia], ll. 112–15, and see Figure 16.1).
Once the bridge between the heavenly and non-heavenly has been breached, cosmic
events flow into earthly, marred and “non-ideal” regions, in which embodied humans
are located. When compared to other Gnostic systems, though, the Mandaeans’ inspir-
ational vision of spanning heaven and earth is much less expressed in terms of dispersed
divine sparks or descending hierarchical powers, but more of a mystical stream (e.g., GY
XV). This vision sees an eternal two-way cosmic connection –upwards as well as down –
between always potentially accessible, strengthening Light-world Powers and hopefully
attentive humans below (esp. CP no. 52, more particularly participants in cosmic rituals,
particularly baptism) (Segelberg 1958). It is not necessary to take this linking in a lit-
eral sense geographically, but experientially Yardna is there, as the immediate mediating
agency to overcome the Trennung between immortal and transient realms.
In that cosmogonic and cosmological interests always take priority and concern
for human life in any detail has always been secondary, Mandaean preoccupations
are characteristically Gnostic (Rudolph 1960–1961). Above and beyond the GR the
most sacred writings are hugely concentrated on unfolding primordial events in the
Light-worlds, even though they are understood to affect life terrestrially and call for
spiritual union and ritual response (Crangle and Nasoraia 2010). Even the divine
breaching of heavenly and sub-heavenly worlds (as by Hibil Ziwa) bears on this pro-
clivity; humans live in the context of this (Manichaean-like) struggle between Light-
beings and the Queen (and King) of Darkness.
Significantly, the creation of the earthly world and the first Man (Adam) entails
considerable participation from the Dark-world, serious imperfection resulting as in
most other ancient Gnostic systems. For Mandaeism the “angelic” demiurge-figure
is Ptahil, the strange offspring of Hibil Ziwa and Zahr’il (a daughter of Qin, Queen
of Darkness), of both Light and Darkness, a cosmic balance being secured, with the
Sophia-type figure of Ruha (Qin’s eldest daughter), dark spirits, the Zodiac, the Seven
Planets, and the Dark Waters or Qin herself having their places (GY, 140, 144–8).
The material world can only emerge animated out of an admixture of Light and
Dark, and in its intermediate state the cosmic waters permeate between the Light
and the Dark (bridging the Manichaean-like chasm). This admixture comes through
two decisive creative acts by Ptahil: solidifying the earth to receive Yardna, making it
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195
flow to interconnect heaven and earth (in Mšunia Kušţa, the intermediate Realm of
Truth); and by creating Adam (Rudolph 1965; cf. Nasoraia [as Saed] 2000b, 2000c).
In the crucial text Diwan Abatur [Drower], certainly, the Third Life (Abatur) is viv-
idly drawn as the Guardian of the Gateway between heaven and earth, weighing and
judging as “the Scale” souls seeking to reach the heavens (e.g., CP nos. 74–5, 171; see
Figure 16.3); but it is through Ptahil and his cohorts that the channel is dug by which
the Light Euphrates reaches our world (CP nos. 15, 48, 66, 104; GY XIII; Ginza Rba
[Smala] IV; Drower 1960: 64–5; Nasoraia 2018; cf. Deutsch 1999).
As for Ptahil and Adam, we need to distinguish the celestial Adam and his earthly,
material form, the former (Adam Kasia/Adakas, “mystic” or “secret” Adam) preceding
the latter (Adam Pagria or “bodily Adam”). Adam Kasia, issuing from the Lord of
Greatness, embodies all the Divine Universal Being qua Primal Man, an archetypal,
representative Human. His creation is not clearly placed, though apparently some-
where in the Mšunia Kušţa, but Ptahil could only conceive of his possibility, to give
him true dominion over the world as a way of recovering what divinity had been
lost in matter. In the case of Adam Pagria, though, Ptahil made his body (pagra) and
Figure 16.3 Image of Ptahil (from Diwan Abatur)
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participated with Ruha and her Sons (the Seven Planets and Twelve Zodiacal signs) to
give him spirit (ruha), something brought from above, “from the Father’s House.” But
Adam was too difficult to complete, and Ptahil needed more divine assistance, which
came from on high as “emissaries” (Nišimta), granting Adam a soul with savior-or
Gnosis-Mana-type qualities, issuing from the First Life, that mysteriously enter Adam
unbeknown to “wicked Ptahil” (GY III, 100–4). This soul was cast into Adam by
“the Gnosis of Life.” Before embodied, Adam (Kasia) has a wife, Hawa Anana (Eve,
the heavenly Cloud, a curious watery fixture) and three Cosmic Sons, Hibi, Šitil, and
Anuš (Abel, Seth, and Enoch), suggesting the seed of Adam Kasia participates in the
cosmic stream of Life, his primal Soul linking heaven and earth like Living Water (GY
III, 93–113, V, X; DN Tbls. I-IV).
In a mystical sense, Adam Kasia in this beginning of ethereal generations is “soul”
to Eve’s “body,” and when Seth(-Abel-Enoch) arrives, he is the “soul” vis-à-vis Adam’s
“body” (Nasoraia 2004a; 320–8; Sundberg 1953–1994). The pure cosmic generations
multiplied in that idyllic “World of Truth,” and thus the seeds of Adam come to consti-
tute the (cosmic stream of) Naṣoraeans who will later descend to earth. In projecting
a perfect, primordial Adam, a feature common to other Gnostic (and related) myth-
ologies, all Mandaeans aspire to returning to his pure state (Nasoraia and Crangle
2010; Nasoraia 2010b) in their thinking by the “(two-ways/U-curve) journey of the
soul,” which is the same as the “journey of the (living) waters,” since the waters
carry “soul” (nišimta/mana) (see Drower 1960: 21–80; Nasoraia 2004a: 347–60).
The Earthly Adam, a lowly mirror of Adam Kasia, was created myriads of years
later, as the first (complete) human, after demiurge-like Ptahil had created a solid
world (e.g., GY III.100–104; X; CP nos. 1, 77, 165, 177, 138, 379). From then on
the story of the earthly order properly begins, and whereas most ancient Gnostic
world-systems do not develop a sense of the deep past (or long-term history/prehis-
tory), the Mandaeans conceived a very extensive one. Much ink has been spilt on
Gnostic emanationism generally and on the great cosmological “Preface” to worldly
developments we have just covered, but recently an in-depth account has become
available as to what Mandaeans pictured happening between cosmic beginnings and
the End of the ordinary time (Nasoraia and Trompf 2010).
After Adam there follows a period of 216,000 (solar) years (= “thirty ages” or
generations [daria]) before the first of four great catastrophes occur, a rare sense of
time-depth in typically unacculturated apprehensions of history in Gnostic literature
(see Trompf 1989: 375–6; yet cf. Aclepius 24–6). Whereas the first two catastrophes
are of the “sword” (and plague/pestilence) and of “fire,” only the third entails the
Flood (after a period of “fifteen ages/generations” or 100,000 years), with the waters
rising from above and below (as in GR 18), while the present, post-diluvian age is one
of polluted Air, and awaits a final catastrophe (also described in such texts as HG).
Of all the extremities, only this consummating one will come apparently as punish-
ment for sins, and by then the journey of all the Radiant Euphrates’s fresh water will
have completed its flow to its farthest, darkest, and saltiest reaches, before the whole
cosmos “rises again” to begin what can be called a giant U-curve back to the Divine
(HG 9; GY I, II, XVIII, etc. and see ch. 3).
Details of various Biblical characters in Mandaean tradition –of Seth, Noah, Shem,
Abraham, Moses and the Jews, Pharaoh and the Egyptians, Zoroastrians, Solomon,
Jesus, and John the Baptist –can hardly be covered here, but we find in them a
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distinctive and alternative Mandaean outlook on the Bible, and an unusual interest in
historical developments for a Gnostic group because the Palestinian memory factor is
stronger than the Hellenistic philosophico-speculative one. In HG, after dealing with
Jesus and the Baptist, an account of the Mandaeans’ flight from Roman Palestine before
the siege of Jerusalem prefaces detailed imaginings of the End-time (a link between
the same historical trauma and eschatology also being found in the Gospels [esp. Lk
21:20]). Still, the Mandaean approach to human affairs is most indelible in terms of
uniquely framed great ages (with catastrophic ends) and also zodiacal periods, and if
the Rivers Scroll depicts a divine flow to the many peoples of the earth (with streams
marked for “Egyptians,” “Alexandrians,” “Romans,” etc.), the approach is obviously
very synoptic and cosmically oriented (Trompf and Nasoraia 2010). Indeed, all events
gathered up represent the Universal Cosmic Being, a kind of Primal Man equivalent to
our microcosmic body. Hence the frequent phrase “the mouth of Euphrates,” because
the heavens are the head, Yardna the Mind, constrictions between heaven and earth
the neck, on to the rivers, even small circles or wellsprings, forming the artery system
(Širiania) (e.g., GY III.74–5; 83; John the Baptizer, pp. 271–2).
In nuce and to conclude, the Universal Body “works” by a kind of circulation. All
the secret knowledge and experience of the Upper Worlds, the divine beings, heav-
enly plants and creatures, the Guardian at the Gate, the entry and continuance of
Yardna/Radiant Euphrates in earthly and lower worlds, constitute Manda (Gnosis)
that is available to us, as enlightenment and pre-received experience, not as an earthly
redeemer-figure but Gnosis of Life (Lupieri 2002: 188–9). The availability comes and
goes constantly from top to bottom and back, and eventually the whole universe
goes back to the Head as its Source –“the Centre of the Centres” (Nasoraia 2013a,
2103c). It is as if Living Water encodes, or in Mandaean terms carries within itself,
the Mysteries (razia) of Life. But there has to be a balance: it is necessary for the lower
orders of things to be experienced (especially by humans), including matter, before
the process of Return (à la divine U-curve) can be completed for anyone and for the
All (even including creatures in the Worlds of Darkness in the long run). The human
rebaptisms contribute to and are necessary for this order, even for the “healthy bal-
ancing” of the heavens: in Mandaean understanding baptism is thus the substitute of
all sacrifices, combining physical and spiritual transaction in effect (Nasoraia 2004b).
This was probably John the Baptist’s view of things, yet though John is raised to
heaven and acts as a healer and semi-redeemer figure for angels and humans (e.g.,
GY V; Drower 1960: 66–80), more important in classic Mandaeism is Hibil Ziwa’s
cosmic journey, making the general process of cosmic circulation and balance pos-
sible, and thus structurally akin to Paul’s cosmic Christ.
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Sundberg, Waldemar. 1953–1994. Kushţa: A Monograph on a Principal Word in Mandaean
Texts, I-II. Lund: Lund University Press.
Trompf, Garry. 1989. “Macrohistory and Acculturation: Between Myth and History in Modern
Melanesian Adjustments and Ancient Gnosticisms.” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 31 (4): 621–48.
Trompf, Garry, and Brikha Nasoraia. 2010. “Reflecting on the ‘Rivers Scroll’.” ARAM
Periodical 22: 61–86.
Van Rompaey, Sandra. 2011. “Mandaean Symbolic Art.” Doctoral diss., La Trobe University,
Melbourne.
Yamauchi, Edwin M. 1970. Gnostic Ethics and Mandaean Origins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HERMETISM AND
GNOSTICISM
Jean-Pierre Mahé
H ermetism (as a religious doctrine of Antiquity, differing from Hermeticism, a

more general and rather modern attitude) is known to us through Hermetic
literature –i.e., Greek books ascribed to the Egyptian Hermes called Trismegistos –
the development of which extends over nearly six centuries (3rd c. BC to 3rd c. AD).
Although the astrological Hermetica have reached us in much later documents, they
appear as early as in the 3rd–2nd cc. BC. The alchemical texts appear in the 2nd–1st
cc. BC, the magical recipes somewhat later, and most of the philosophical treatises in
the 2nd–3rd cc. AD (Mahé 1982: 25–6, n. 139; Festugière 1942).
G N O S TIC AND HERMETIC NARRATIVE F ICTIO NS

Hermetic literature claims to have been interpreted (Hermes /hermeneus) from
hieroglyphic sources kept in the Houses of life (NHC [= Nag Hammadi Codices]
VI: 61, 20 and 30; 62, 15), i.e., the libraries of Egyptian shrines, as writings of
Thoth, the scribe of the gods. Originally Trismegistos is nothing more than a calque
of Thoth’s epithet aa aa aa ur “great, great, very great,” but it has been given various
interpretations. Some Hermetic authors suggest that Hermes was called the “Thrice
greatest one” because he taught that God consists in three ineffable powers (“Being,
Intelligence, and Life,” Scott and Ferguson 1936: 233, 275; “Unbegotten, Self-
Begotten, and Begotten One,” NHC VI: 57, 13–15; 63, 21–3). Others say either that
he “recognized himself” after his third earthly birth (Nock and Festugière 1946–
1954: vol. IV: 146), or that –being the third of his lineage –he translated into
Greek, after the flood, his grandfather Thoth’s hieroglyphic writings, which had
been handed over to him by his father Agathodemon (Nock and Festugière 1946–
1954: vol. III: clxiii).
The same kind of narrative fiction also occurs in Gnostic revelations. The Three
Steles of Seth (NHC VII: 118,10–127,22), for instance, was passed on to the Gnostic
community by a Gnostic of old, Dositheos. But according to the Sabaeans, Seth is
none other than Agathodemon (Adimûn), the teacher of Hermes, i.e., Idris (Stroumsa
1984: 137). In addition, since Gnosis consists in a threefold knowledge of God,
oneself, and the way, Hermes’s self-vision or self-recognition can be regarded as a
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— Hermetism and Gnosticism —
typically Gnostic experience, also depicted in the Second Apocalypse of James (NHC
V: 57, 5–19).
Thus, it is little wonder that Hermetic writings have often been adduced as evidence
of pagan, non-Christian, or even pre-Christian Gnosis or Gnosticism, both before
and after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic library (Reitzenstein 1904;
Bousset 1914; Jonas 1934: 6, 133, 154, 181, 200–3, 344–8; Quispel 1951: 9–10,
28–9; Stroumsa 1984: 138–43; Yamaguchi 1983: 69–72, 204–5). However, regarding
the Hermetic philosophical treatises –or at least some of them –as mirroring a spe-
cial kind of Gnosticism raises a wide range of problems, pertaining to chronology,
sources, possible connections with the Old and New Testaments, dualism, spiritual
conduct, and doctrinal consistency.
CHRONOLOGICAL IS S U E S
Non-Christian does not necessarily mean pre-Christian. The famous Hermetic reve-
lation of Poimandres (Corpus Hermeticum [= CH] I) contains so many Jewish elem-
ents –Biblical as well as liturgical –that it hardly can have been written after the revolt
of Bar-Koshba in 137 AD, which brought about the wiping out of the Alexandrian
Jewish community. But it cannot be much earlier than the very last years of the first
century AD. Thus it does not precede the emergence of Gnostic doctrines either in the
New Testament or in Patristic literature. Other philosophical Hermetica which have
reached us are certainly later. The discourse on Being born again (CH XIII), which
mentions CH I, was, e.g., written during the 3rd c. AD. Lost Hermetic collections like
the Sayings of the Good Genius (CH X, 25. XII, 1. 8), the General Lectures (CH X,
1. 7. XIII, 1, etc.), or the Detailed Lectures (Fragmenta Hermetica 30, in Nock and
Festugière 1946–1954: vol. IV) may date back to the 1st c. AD, but they are not from
before the Common Era, as far as philosophical –not astrological, alchemical, or
magical –writings are concerned.
However, if the development of Hermetic literature is chronologically parallel or
even slightly later than the elaboration of Christian Gnosticism, we must assume
either that Trismegistos has borrowed some motifs from the Gnostics, or that both of
them have earlier sources in common. This first assumption was set out by Stroumsa
(1984: 137–43), who, however, does not refer directly to Hermetic writings but to
comments by the alchemist Zosimos on the physica of Hermes mixed up with various
Biblical apocrypha. The second assumption, which is more widespread, does shed
light on well-known Hermetic texts. But before we discuss that point in further detail,
we need to explain how Hermetic authors make use of Jewish or Greek materials,
while claiming at the very same time that their books are directly translated from the
Egyptian.
WH AT IS MEANT B Y “EG YP TIAN S O U RCE S ” ?

We can easily suppress that contradiction if we accept the statement of the Egyptian
priest in Plato’s Timaeus 22a, that Egypt has been protected by the Nile from the peri-
odical floods of water or fire which have swept off so many nations and cities of old.
Therefore, Egypt displays to the sight of amazed visitors the enigma of its gigantic
monuments which have witnessed the life of primordial humankind conversing with
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— Jean-Pierre Mahé —
their gods. Nobody else but these gods have taught Hermes-Thoth, the first scribe,
the true names of everything; furthermore, they inspired him to carve secret hiero-
glyphic inscriptions on steles and obelisks and to write hieratic books, which he and
his descendants handed over to their sons from generation to generation.
Let us accept, at least temporarily, the data of this myth. As a result, Egypt is the
mother of any hidden knowledge concerning the genuine nature of all beings. The
sages of other nations necessarily depend on her. Which truths in Moses’s Genesis or
in Plato’s Timaeus cannot be traced back to Hermes-Thoth’s antediluvian writings?
Therefore, whoever took the risk of mixing up Bible and Platonism with some add-
itional ingredients such as Egyptian cosmogony or Jewish wisdom would by no means
bear the blame –so obnoxious to modern philology –of syncretism. On the contrary,
he might well be on the way to rediscover the primordial science of one unanimous
humankind, still speaking the language of their origins.
HERMETISM AND THE B IB L E

Many literal parallels with the Old Testament have been detected in the Corpus
Hermeticum (Dodd 1935). As to the New Testament, there are indeed unexpected
analogies and puzzling similarities. But it is rather difficult to provide clear- cut
explanations. For example, we read in Asclepius (= Ascl) 7 (Nock and Festugière
1946–1954: vol. II; Mahé 1982) –a free Latin translation of Trismegistos’s Perfect
Discourse to Asclepius, Tat, and Ammon –that man consists of two parts. One of
them is simple: it is called by the Greeks ousiodes, i.e. “essential” and by us “moulded
after God’s likeness”; whereas the second one is fourfold: the Greeks call it hulikon,
i.e. “material,” and we call it “earthly.” This is an obvious hint at the Biblical story of
the double creation of man: spiritual in Gen 1:26–7, and material in Gen 2–7.
However, it might also remind us of the sharing-out of Christ’s spoils among the
soldiers: according to Jn 19:23–4, the garments are divided into four parts. But as to
the seamless tunic, which consisted of one single piece of fabric woven from above
and had to remain complete, they were compelled to draw lots for it. No doubt, the
tunic is a metaphor for the indivisible essence of the ideal man. Thus, the incarnated
Word has taken on both the human flesh and the spiritual man. Can we conclude that
the Hermetic author has read John’s Gospel? Here it is rather unlikely if we take into
account the lexical contrast between the two texts.
Nevertheless, Jörg Büchli has gone as far as to regard the Poimandres as “a
paganized gospel.” Rejecting the Egyptian etymology of the title, peime nre “the
knowledge of Re,” i.e. the Sun God (Dodd 1935: 99, n. 1), he derives the name of the
revealer from the Greek and interprets it as “shepherd of men,” which he compares
with Jb 7:20, Jn 10, and various early Christian testimonies (Büchli 1987: 15–21).
Some objections might be raised. In support of the Greek etymology, Büchli quotes
CH XIII, 19, “your Intellect is the shepherd of your Word” and Zosimos’s mention
of “Poimenandra.” Indeed “shepherd of men” is a popular etymology of the name
Poimandres. Yet it does not belong to the author of the treatise but to later readers
and users. The origin of the name must be Egyptian, although several assumptions are
possible (Kingsley 1993).
As for Jb 7:20, the phrase “men’s guardian” appears only in the Hebrew original.
The Septuaginta reads instead “he who knows men’s intellect.” Since the Hermetic
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author had access only to the Greek version, the Hebrew cannot have had any rele-
vance to his work.
More generally Büchli bases his theory on a most useful lexical analysis of the text.
The problem is that Christian vocabulary normally includes many terms which also
occur in the Old Testament. In such cases it is difficult to decide whether the word is
Biblical or specifically Christian.
In addition, the demonstration would be more convincing if it rested not only
on lexical but also on phraseological and textual parallels. Indeed, some passages
of Poimandres are parallel with the fourth Gospel, but not literally to a degree that
bears evidence for direct borrowings. They rather suggest dependency on common
Hellenistic Jewish sources (Dodd 1975: 54–5, 72–3, 76). Therefore, despite some
apparent similarities, there is no trace of Christian influence on philosophical
Hermetic literature.
GNOSTICS AND HER M E TIS TS FACE D

WITH THE OLD TE S TAM E NT
Contrasting with the absence of the New Testament, the Septuaginta often show
through the surface of Hermetic writings. In this respect, they can be compared with
some of the “non-Christian” writings of the Berolinensis Gnosticus 8502, NHC and
Tchacos Codices, e.g., those of the so-called Sethian group. Both the Gnostics and
the Hermetists set out a critical exegesis of the Pentateuch and the Prophets, but with
opposite goals and diverging methods.
Except in some isolated treatises like the Paraphrase of Sem (NHC VII. 1) Gnostic
rewritings of the Old Testament keep close to the Biblical text. In contrast, the genesis
narrative of Poimandres (CH I, 4–19) is veiled, truncated, and hardly recognizable
(Mahé 1986: 39–41; on similarities with NHC VII. 1, see Mahé 1989). The reason
for this contrast is clear: unlike his Gnostic colleagues, who regard Moses as the real
author of the Pentateuch, the Hermetic writer believes that Moses is a plagiarist and
he aims at restoring the “Egyptian” revelation of Poimandres. As a result, not only
does he drastically change and abridge the traditional text, but he also strives to
flavor it with supposedly Egyptian elements. For example, since man has been created
male and female in the image of God (Gn 1:27), the Hermetic author does not hesi-
tate to depict the Creator as endowed with both sexes (arrhenothelus) like Egyptian
primordial deities (CH I, 15). Similarly, in CH III, which is also a rewriting of Gn 1,
the author inserts into the text a feature common to several Egyptian cosmologies
(Sauneron and Yoyotte 1959 :24) “a holy light gushed forth and, due to the sand, the
elements proceeding from the moist substance became solid (…). Whereas all things
were still indistinct and formless, the light elements freed themselves upward and the
heavy ones rested on the moist sand as on their foundations” (CH III, 1–2; see Nock
and Festugière 1946–1954: vol. I: 45, n. 5).
In the light of this allegedly authentic revelation, the Hermetic authors draw
conclusions opposite to both the Jews and the Gnostics. Far from being jealous like
the God of the Jews, the Hermetic God is totally devoid of envy (aphtonos CH IV,
3; V, 2; XVI, 4), which means he is generous towards all beings and does not regard
the various gods of humankind as rivals but as his own emanations. Indeed, he is
simultaneously “the only One and everything” (CH XII, 8; XIII, 17, 18; XVI, 3) and
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“nothing exists which is not also him,” so that “he has got all of the names because
everything has gone forth from this only father” (CH V, 10).
Consequently, unlike the Gnostics, Poimandres does not try to oppose the Jewish
God of the Law, Creator of the material world, to the unknown superior God from
whom the spiritual Pleroma has gone forth. On the contrary he has a strictly mon-
istic vision of the universe. Light is primordial and unlimited. Darkness, which
appears eventually, has got a limit, since “its extremity is crooked” (CH I, 4; we
read peperasmenon like Vergetius and NHC VII: 7, 24–7 “the root of Darkness was
crooked, heavy and harmful”). Therefore the elements of Nature have emerged from
God’s Will after it had received God’s Word, and they were molded into the material
world, according to the ideal archetype (CH I, 8).
Thus, originally all the elements were rational, i.e. filled with divine Word. However,
some of them secondarily became irrational because the Word, after its first creative
expansion, had to soar up from the lower part of the universe. The purpose of this
contraction is to allow space for the material world. It can be compared with the
Kabbalistic zimzum (Scholem 2003: 220–1).
M ON I STIC REINTEGRATION AND THE HE RM E TIC

WAY OF IMMO RTAL ITY
Thus monistic unity is previous to material duality, which tends to be suppressed
or reduced to his source. Man is situated in the middle of this process. First because
he alone among all living creatures is endowed with a twofold nature: material
and mortal through his body, essential (ousiodes), i.e. related to the divine essence,
through his soul and his intellect (CH I, 15; Ascl 7; DH [= Definitiones Hermeticae
ad Asclepium; J.-P. Mahé 1982; 1999] VI, 1). As a result, man occupies “a blessed
median position” (Ascl 6: feliciore loco medietatis), so that he can communicate with
earthly and heavenly beings and choose the highest and the best part of himself, since
“whoever has known himself comes back to himself” (CH I, 21). Then he can be, if
he decides so, “completely turned into the Essence” (CH X, 6). When this takes place,
the temporary duality of matter will be reduced to primordial unity.
Salvation through self-knowledge is clearly a Gnostic program. However, most of
the scholars who regard Hermetism as a form of Gnosticism (e.g., Bousset 1914: 691)
divide the Hermetic treatises into two groups: Gnostic (CH I; IV; X; XII; XIII) and
non-Gnostic (all of the others). Consequently, they state that there is no such thing
as a Hermetic doctrine. Writings ascribed to Trismegistos could as well have been
ascribed to Ostanes or Zoroaster. If we are to believe Festugière, “they just had to
change the names of the Sages, e.g., Egyptian priests, Persian or Chaldean magi,
Indian gymnosophists” (Festugière 1942: 18). “The name of Hermes has been used as
a label for a trend of opinion identical to that which has also been spread out under
the name of other prophets” (355).
That skeptical conclusion results from the contradictions that can be detected
between the Hermetic treatises. In the gnomology of Stobaei Hermetica XI, 2 (Nock
and Festugière 1946–1954), for instance, we read on the one hand “which is mortal
is not immortal” (30) and “God is good, man is bad” (19), and on the other hand
“which is mortal takes part in which is immortal” (36) and “the world is for man,
and man for God” (7). However, such contradictions do not really matter provided
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we regard Hermetism not as a philosophical system but as a spiritual way (Greek

hodos, Coptic hie), which is called “the way of truth” (SH IIB, 5), “leading to above”
(SH IIB, 8; CH IV, 11), “to the gates of knowledge” (CH VII, 2), “to the Beautiful”
(CH VI, 5), “to the Good” (CH I, 21), or “the way of immortality” (NHC VI: 63, 11;
see Mahé 1978: 132–3; 1982: 455–6; 1991; Fowden 2000: 12, 169–70, 209–10; van
den Kerchove 2012). Whereas a system is bound to maintain simultaneously all of its
dogmas, a way allows several successive positions, depending on how far the traveler
has progressed.
Road traffic normally requires vehicles (okhema, in Timaeus 41e. 44e; e.g., Intellect,
Word, and Soul serve as vehicles for each other in CH X, 13), sometimes guides (e.g.,
kheiragogos in CH VII, 2; hodegein in CH XII, 12), but also stages or stopping places,
which are called “degrees” (bathmos in NHC VI: 52, 13.54, 28.63, 9; Mahé 1992).
Like any other way, the Hermetic one can be taken in both directions: either from the
Immortal to mortality, i.e., downwards from God to earthly humankind –which is
the cosmo-anthropogonic direction –or reversely, from mortality to immortality, i.e.,
upwards, through the Seven planetary circles, the Ogdoad and the Ennead –which
is the soteriological direction. To go across that ten-storied road, God has endowed
man with three mental faculties, “Intellect, Word, and Knowledge” (NHC VI: 64,
9–10), from top to bottom. Since we at present are here below, we should start with
knowledge (gnosis) and then gradually proceed to word (logos) and intellect (nous).
Thus, unexpectedly gnosis is not the supreme goal of Hermetic contemplation, but
just the starting point of spiritual progress (CH IV, 9; on this point we disagree with
van den Kerchove 2012: 280–306, 321–4). We can understand this paradox when
we take into account that gnosis is first of all the opposite of agnosia, i.e., deliberate
ignorance of God. Gnosis consists in getting sure that God exists (CH XIII, 8) and
wants to be known (CH I, 31). Spiritual research is one and the same thing as reverent
piety (CH I, 27; VI, 5; IX, 4).
Once we have become aware of this necessity, the next step is to receive graduate
Hermetic teaching from the Word (Logos), who “enumerates (…) the complete series
of all beings” (SH XI, 1). But can human speech exhaust the concepts of God, Man,
and the World? Obviously not. Therefore spiritual progress still demands another
mental faculty, which is the intellect (nous) and “includes everything in an all-
embracing glance” (CH IX, 10). Nous is more than a mere human faculty. It “comes
from the very essence of God” (CH XII, 1).
Individual intellect has to be developed through intensive practice of spiritual
exercises (Hadot 1977; Mahé 2009: 75–86). Any humdrum sight from everyday life
can become a matter for contemplation, e.g., “a farmer casting seed upon the earth”
(CH XIV, 9–10); the sun’s influence on plants (SH XXI, 2; CH X, 2); “the circuit of
the moon and the order of the stars” (CH V, 3); the perfection of human body (CH V,
6); the experience of procreation (CH XI, 14).
A more difficult exercise called “becoming Aion,” i.e. Eternity, consists in
suppressing the limits between oneself and others, inside or outside, present, past,
and future (CH XI, 20; Mahé 2002: 79–80). Consequently human ascension along
the way is tridimensional. It simultaneously takes place in space, time, and within
oneself. Ascending back to the cradle of human intellect in the ninth sphere (Ennead)
also means reviving the first moments of creation and diving into the noetic, i.e., the
deepest, the inmost layer of one’s soul.
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Beyond the spiritual exercises, two Hermetic writings (CH XIII and NHC VI,
6) stage what seems to be a ritual of spiritual rebirth. Whether it is a real mystic initi-
ation or just literary fiction, a “Lesemysterium” (Reitzenstein 1927: 51–2, 243–5), is
still vehemently controverted. The Prayer of thanksgiving (Pap. Mimaut, Louvre 2391;
Ascl 41; NHC VI: 64, 20–65, 7; Mahé 1978: 164–7) enables us to bring the debate
to a close. It is inserted in a liturgical framework which vouches for the existence of
Hermetic books of common prayer and Hermetic brotherhoods (collegia / sunodoi)
in the 2nd–3rd cc. (van den Kerchove 2012: 223–71, 324–30; Mahé 2003: 11;
2007: 287). During the ritual the initiate is believed to get rid of his material body. He
no longer has a visible form, a color, or spatial dimensions (CH XIII, 3). Being born
again as “god, son of the One,” he is endowed with a new incorruptible “body, made
out of the divine powers” (CH XIII, 14). Therefore the duality of matter and mind is
suppressed and reduced to the primordial unity of Light and Intellect (CH I, 6).
Thus, philosophical Hermetism as a whole can be regarded as a spiritual way to
some kind of optimistic and monistic Gnosis. Unlike classical Gnosticism, Trismegistos
does not oppose a good spiritual God to a bad, clumsy, or jealous demiurge. The
presence of humankind here below is less of an accidental fall than the normal result
of divine creation: God wants to be known; he wants to have conscious eyewitnesses
of his works. Human bodies are necessary garments. Of course, flesh could become
dangerous if men were not endowed with reason. But bodies are by no means inescap-
able jails or traps set for souls by a malicious deity.
Although, due to his middle nature, man is apt to be led astray by fleshly or nar-
cissistic love, passions, and vices, he constantly keeps up his “word” (logos), i.e., both
his speech and his reason. He can decide at any time to dive into the intellect (CH
IV, 4). “You have the faculty of deciding to go astray and understand the contrary of
reality (…) You also have the faculty of becoming a god, if you want, for it is feasible.
Therefore just want it, understand and love: lo and behold, you have become it!” (DH
VIII, 6–7; Mahé 1999: 142–3).
In the eyes of Hermetic writers attachment to Egyptian traditions is no chauvinism.
It is just the recognition of a primordial revelation previous to positive religions and
common to humankind as a whole. Therefore it is not merely by chance that Hermetism
has been quoted by Patristic authors to bridge the gap between pagan wisdom and
Christianity, or by the Byzantine humanists of the eleventh c., like Michael Psellos,
who most likely edited the Corpus Hermeticum, to reconcile reason and revelation, or
by the Renaissance thinkers to loosen the vise of scholasticism and allow the study of
Greek philosophy. The Hermetic Nous is not exclusive but all-embracing.
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Bousset, Wilhelm. 1914. “Review of J. Kroll, Die Lehren des Hermes Trismegistus. Münster
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Büchli, Jörg 1987. Der Poimandres. Ein paganisiertes Evangelium. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr
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Dodd, Charles H. 1935. The Bible and the Greeks, London: Hodder & Stoughton.
——— 1975. L’interprétation du Quatrième Évangile. Paris: Cerf.
Festugière, André-Jean. 1942. La révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, I: L’astrologie et les sciences
occultes. Paris: J. Gabalda.
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Fowden, Garth. 2000. Hermès l’Égyptien: Une approche historique de l’esprit du paganisme

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Hadot, Pierre. 1977. Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. Paris: Albin Michel.
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Kingsley, Peter. 1993. “Poimandres: The Etymology of the Name and the Origins.” Journal of
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Mahé, Jean-Pierre. 1978–1982. Hermès en Haute- Égypte, vols. I, II. Québec: Presses de
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———1991. “La voie d’immortalité dans les Hermetica.” Vigiliae Christianae 45: 347–75.
———1992. “Hermetica philosophica.” Roger Arnaldez and Jean-François Mattéi (eds.).
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———1999. “The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistos to Asclepius.” Clement Salaman, Dorine
Van Oyen, William D. Wharton, and Jean-Pierre Mahé (eds.). The Way of Hermes: New
Translations of the Corpus Hermeticum and the Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to
Asclepius. London: Duckworth: 125–54 (Armenian version and Greek testimonies).
—— —2002. “Mental Faculties and Cosmic Levels in Some Hermetic Writings.” Søren
Giversen, Tage Petersen, and Jørgen Podemann Sørensen (eds.). The Nag Hammadi Texts
in the History of Religions. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences: 73–83.
———2003. “Théorie et pratique dans l’Asclepius.” Paolo Lucentini, Ilaria Parri, and Vittoria
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Mahé, Jean-Pierre, and Paul-Hubert Poirier. 2007. Écrits gnostiques. La Bibliothèque de Nag
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Scott, Walter C., and Alexander S. Ferguson. 1936. Hermetica IV. Oxford: Oxford University
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Stroumsa, Gedaliahu A. G. 1984. Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology. Leiden: Brill.
van den Kerchove, Anna. 2012. La voie d’Hermès. Pratiques rituelles et traités hermétiques.
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PLOTINUS AND THE

GNOSTICS
Francis Lacroix and Jean-Marc Narbonne
INTRODUCTIO N
While no extant source allows us to determine any direct link between the Gnostics
and Plotinus before his arrival in Rome –due to the lack of biographical infor-
mation during the 40 years or so he spent in Egypt –we know for sure that he
attended the abstruse teachings of Ammonius Saccas in an environment where the
Christian sectaries abounded, of which some were related to the Gnostics. Among
these Gnostic sectaries emerge what are called the Platonizing Sethians, a group that
relied on Plato’s dialogues to develop its own revelations (Turner 2001: 292–301;
Ferroni and Narbonne 2012: xxx; Mazur in Ferroni and Narbonne (forthcoming)),
as we can see in the Nag Hammadi corpus (NHC), inter alia in the Zostrian (VIII,
1) and Allogen (XI, 3), two books that, according to Porphyry’s Vita Plotini (VP
16), Plotinus was acquainted with during his teaching career at Rome. It is worth
noting that Porphyry did not himself know a lot about Plotinus’s early period of
teaching, during which he wrote no less than his first 21 treatises (Ferroni and
Narbonne 2012: xii). Thus, one can legitimately wonder if Plotinus acknowledged
these Gnostic theories at that time or at a specific moment later (that is, during the
writing of the first or middle period treatises, where 33 [II 9] Against the Gnostics is
situated), or even got acquainted with their doctrines back in his years in Alexandria.
However, since there is no clear evidence for this last option (Ferroni and Narbonne
2012: xv–xvii) we need to turn to the Enneads (or to the Vita Plotini) to establish
whether Plotinus had some connections with them at least from his first writing
period (treatises 1–21), or if they occurred at a punctual point later, after a par-
ticular set of events that happened in his school (Ferroni and Narbonne 2012: xxx).
We do indeed know from VP 16, 9–10 that Plotinus’s first pupil, namely Amelius,
wrote at his demand 40 books against the Gnostics and that Porphyry himself
addressed some refutations to them. From this information alone, one can conclude
that this conflict provoked an intense debate inside Plotinus’s school which cannot
be reduced to a single treatise or even to a tetralogy of treatises (treatises 30–33) but
prevailed during at least the whole of Porphyry’s sojourn at Rome (thus as early as
the writing of treatise 22).
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— Plotinus and the Gnostics —
Given that, we can assuredly state that the Gnostics’ speculations play a key role
in our possible understanding of Plotinus’s system. The aim of this paper is precisely
to determine some points of convergence and divergence between Plotinus and his
Gnostic friends and, at the same time, to highlight the significant role the latter played
in the philosophy of the former.
Different aspects of both teachings will be analyzed to pinpoint, on the one hand,
the ostensible affinities between the two, regarding (1): (a) the Platonician exegesis,
(b) the simplicity and ineffability of the First principle, (c) the metaphysic of eman-
ation by contemplative mode, (d) the concept of integral emanation, (e) the theory of
the three kinds of men, (f) the doctrine of salvation.
On the other hand, some doctrinal discrepancies will be underlined, bearing
witness to Plotinus’s autonomy of thought in many matters (2): (a) continuity versus
discontinuity in the procession of realities, (b) eternal versus temporal procession,
(c) the limitation versus illimitation of metaphysic levels, (d) the partial non-descent
of souls, (e) the practice of virtues, (f) the literary genre.
CONVERGING P O INTS
The Platonician exegesis
One cannot elude the striking resemblances between the Gnostics’ and Plotinians’
exegesis of Plato. Indeed, as Turner has already pointed out, the Sethian branch of the
Gnostics was acquainted with the Platonic tradition (Turner 2001: 179), but since it
is a common knowledge for every philosophical tradition in the Late Antiquity, we
cannot relate Plotinus and the Gnostics on the basis of this single piece of information.
However, the passages they both chose to interpret, which cannot be found in any
other extant Middle Platonist source, exhibit a close link between the two protagonists
(Ferroni and Narbonne 2012: cccvi). For instance, in his very first treatise, Plotinus
resorts to Diotima’s discourse in the Symposium (209 E-212 A): chapters 1–3 address
the beauty in the bodies (corresponding to the first level of ascension in 210 A 4-B
6); chapters 4–6 question the beauty in the souls (210 B 6-E 1); chapters 7–9 wonder
about the beauty of the First Principle (210 E 1–211 B 7) (Ferroni and Narbonne
2012: cccv). This exact scheme of interpretation, according to Turner, can also be
found in the Sethian apocalypses Zostrian and Allogen (Turner 2001: 178, 757).
Thus, Plotinus seems to be strongly related to the Gnostics, and that in the very first
treatise he wrote.
The simplicity and ineffability of the first principle

According to Plotinus, the highest reality, namely the One, is a pure transcendent
unity (9 [VI 9], 6, 20; 10 [V I], 8, 25; 30 [III 8], 9, 4; 32 [V 5], 4, 6–8; 38 [VI 7],
25, 14–16; 49 [V 3], 12, 51) that cannot be described (9 [VI 9], 3, 49–54; 30 [III 8],
9, 16–19; 32 [V 5], 6, 11–17; 33 [II 9], 1, 5–8; 38 [VI 7], 40, 38–41; 49 [V 3], 13–
16): “For knowing is one thing; but that is one without the thing; for if it is one
thing it would not be the absolute One: for ‘absolute’ comes before ‘something’. It is,
therefore, truly ineffable: for whatever you say about it, you will always be speaking
of a ‘something’ ” (49 [V 3], 12, 51–13, 2, trans. Armstrong 1966–1988: 117). Those
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— Francis Lacroix and Jean-Marc Narbonne —
characteristics can also be found in both Zostrian and Allogen, as we may note in
this passage: “Zostrianos, [hear] about the things you sought: [He] was a [unity]
and a single one, existing prior to [all those] that truly exist, an immeasurable Spirit,
completely indiscernible by anything else that [exists] in him and [outside] him and
[remains] after him” (Zost. 64.14–19, trans. Turner 2007: 567–8). The similarities
between these two texts are obvious, deriving from Plato’s description of the Beautiful
in the Symposium (201 C-204 E), the Good in the Republic (402 D ff.), and the One
of the first hypothesis in the Parmenides (137 A 7-B 4). It is worth noting that the
simplicity and the ineffability of the first principle can also be found in many Gnostic
texts, e.g., Allogen 50.17–24 more specifically for the ineffability principle: Tripartite
Tractate (I, 5), 65.15–19; Allogen 61.15; and for the simplicity: Zost. 3.7; 23.23–25;
30.25; 66.20; 67.20, 76.12–13; 79.17–22; 84.17; Marsanes (X, 1), 5.8–9.
The metaphysic of emanation by contemplative mode

Plotinus is famously known, especially in treatise 30 (III 8), for his extensive recourse
to the concept of contemplation (theôria) not only to express the innate desire of
men to contemplate higher realities, but also to describe the way by which each level
of being, through contemplation, produces the reality immediately next to itself.
But much less acknowledged is the fact that this unorthodox way of production
or generation, through active contemplation, was first elaborated by the Gnostics,
e.g., Irenaeus reporting: “They teach, too, that when Achamoth had been freed from
passion and had with joy received the contemplation [θεωρίαν] of the lights which
were with him, that is, of the Angels that were with him, and yearned after them,
she brought forth fruits after their image” (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses I, 4, 5; trans.
Unger and Dillon 1992: 33).
The concept of integral emanation

Both Plotinus’s and Sethian Gnostics’ conceptions of reality can be described as an
integral emanation system, which means that the entire reality, down to the end
including prime matter, proceeds ultimately or derived from a unique First principle,
notwithstanding the number and types of intermediaries one is willing to introduce in
each case. This monism –absent in Plato, Aristotle or Medio-Platonism –represents
a fundamental shift in the history of metaphysics. In Gnosticism it is the Cosmic
Soul or the Demiurge which, through a complicated process, generates matter (Adv.
Haer. I.2.3; 4.2; The Hypostasis of Archons [II, 4], 94, 1 sq.; On the Origin of the
World [II, 5], 99–100; Zost. 9–10), while in the case of Plotinus (25 [II 5], 4–5; 34
[VI 6], 1–3; see also Narbonne 2008; 2014), prime matter is a by-product and a sort
of last outcome of the One, emerging first as pure alterity and falling down from the
Intelligible realm, but being immediately seized up and ordered by the Cosmic Soul
and its subordinate soul-sisters.
The theory of the three kinds of men

Plotinus (5 [V 9] 1, 3–21; 38 [VI 7], 6; 47 [III 2], 8, 9–16) and the Sethian Gnostics
assume the existence of three kinds of men, inspired by different arguments in Plato
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(Phaedrus 248 A ff.; Phaedo 82 B; Republic 414 C; Timaeus, 90 A-C). While their
sources are basically the same, they take different paths in elaborating their respective
conceptions. For the Gnostics, there are three kinds of soul, namely the hylic, grounded
in the world down here, the psychic, somewhat an intermediary between sensible and
intelligible worlds, and the pneumatic, which is the soul of the Gnostics, the elected
ones solely to receive salvation (Adv. Haer. I.5.1; I.7; Clement of Alexandria, Excerpta
ex Theodoto 3.50.1–2). However, the Nag Hammadi corpus seems to offer a more
complex vision of the soul. Indeed, the Zostrian divides souls into four types, and then
into nine, by respectively combining the myth of reincarnation in the Phaedo (113 D-
114 E) and Phaedrus’s chariot (248 C) (Zost. 27 ff.). Nonetheless, the Gnostics appear
to be generally more exclusive in their approach to contemplative ascension, as we
can sense in different passages such as this one from the Zostrian: “Those who receive
baptism of truth, in knowledge, and those who are worthy, are kept safe. But those
who are not from this race (γένος) are (mere) ‘things’, and they return to their own
‘root’ ” (Zost. 24.19–25, trans. Mazur 2018: 46). Plotinus criticizes them vehemently
in anti-gnostic contexts (see 33 [II 9], 5, 1 ss.; 9, 28–60). For him, indeed, even though
some souls are of the first kind and naturally more gifted, it would seem still possible
for the souls of the second and third level to contemplate the higher reality too, since,
as he declares at one point, “every soul is a child of That Father” (16, 9–10). Thus,
Plotinus appears to be more inclusive than the Gnostics when he begins to criticize
them, but he looks almost as restrictive and elitist as they are on other occasions, for
one can also read even in the very same treatise 33 (II 9):
He has learnt that there are two kinds of life here below, one for the good and
wise [σπουδαίος] and one for the mass of men, that for the good and wise being
directed to the highest point and the upper region, and that for the more human
sort being of two kinds again; one is mindful of virtue and has a share in some
sort of good, but the common crowd is there, so to speak, to do manual work to
provide for the necessities of the better sort.
(33 [II 9], 9, 6–11, trans. Armstrong 1966–1988: 257)
Do the members of the mediocre crowd mentioned here really reach the higher real-
ities? According to this passage it remains quite doubtful, but one is sure though: this
possibility, as far as we can see, is nowhere explicitly expressed in the Enneads (com-
pare with 48 [III 3], 4, 45–8; see also 5 [V 9], 1; 47 [III, 2], 18). Thus, although
Plotinus objects to the Gnostics on this particular topic, he still seems to share some-
thing with them after all.
The doctrine of the salvation

Even though several details of their systems may vary, both enterprises, Plotinus’s articu-
late philosophy on the one side and Gnostics’ enthusiastic revelations on the other, have
one and only one end: to lead the student or the apprentice to the final vision of –or
contact with –the unsayable First principle or God. On this aim, to “escape in solitude
to the solitary” (9 [VI 9], 11, 51), is everything focused, so that one cannot but notice
the obvious parallel between the Zostrian “escape your bondage” (Zost. 131.10), on
the one hand, and the Plotinian “take away everything” (49 [V 3], 17, 38) on the other.
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DIVERGING P O INTS
The continuity/discontinuity of the intelligible procession
As opposed to what one observes in Gnostic patterns of procession, where errors,
repentances, and all sorts of corrections abound, what Plotinus describes as a “tra-
gedy of terrors” (33 [II 9], 6 and 13), the Plotinian sequence of realities is perfectly
consistent and ordered, declining of course in its way down, but in a regular and har-
monious manner, which ensures even to the sensible cosmos a suitable place and an
appropriate value in the total reality. Plotinus complained heavily about the so-called
condemnation or despising of the world by his fellow Gnostics (33 [II 9] 13 et passim).
The eternity and necessity of the emanation process

Closely connected with the previous argument is the defense by Plotinus of the eter-
nity of the world, the emanation activity being through and through an eternal phe-
nomenon (6 [IV 8], 6, 23–8), and it is for educational purposes only that one describes
step by step the successive apparitions of realities (10 [V 1], 6, 46–9; 33 [II 9], 3,
11–14; 7, 1–2; 8, 2–3). Both the model and what imitates it being eternal, wrong
are those who want to destroy the sensible world (31 [V 8], 12, 15–26) which has
its own beauty. Thus, it would be impossible to read in Plotinus a description of the
solely eternal father, e.g., in Irenaeus: “he existed in deep quiet and stillness through
countless ages” (Adv. Haer. I.1.4., trans. Unger and Dillon 1992: 23), or in Tripartite
Tractate: “For he existed before anything else had come into being except him alone”
(Tripartite Tractate (I, 5), 51.7–8, trans. Thomassen in Meyer 2007: 62).
The limitation versus multiplication of metaphysic levels

Plotinus grounds his metaphysic on the image of the Three Kings alluded to in the
pseudo-Platonic 2nd Letter 312 E 1–4 and claims that there are three –and neces-
sarily only three –transcendent principles (10 [V I], 8–10; 33 [II 9], 1–2; 6, 28–41;
38 [VI 7], 42). Although the Gnostics also draw a trinity of principles on the basis of
the 2nd Letter, they admit a multiplicity of supreme principles and of intermediaries:
And they appeared [through the one] who foreknows him, being an eternal space,
having become a secondary form of his knowledge, even the duplication of his
knowledge, the ungendered Kalyptos. And the truly existent ones also stood at
rest upon Kalyptos, for she accordingly knew him in order that those following
her might come into being having a place, and that those that come forth might
not precede her but might become holy and simple.
(Zost. 82.6–13, trans. Turner 2007: 573)
Plotinus opposes this configuration at the very beginning of his treatise 33 (II 9) Against
the Gnostics and many other times throughout it and elsewhere (e.g., 1, 23–5, 54–7;
2, 1–2; 4, 26–32; 6, 1–6, 14–15, 19–21, 24–35; 8, 26–9; compare with 10 [V 1], 8–10
and 38 [VI 7], 42), a position corresponding to the opening lines of Irenaeus’s Against
Heresies, which also mentions that the Gnostics introduce “genealogia infinitas”
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(I.1.2) in their fallacious discourses. We can observe this proliferation of principles

in the visionary ascent narratives of many Nag Hammadi treatises, where the elected
one rises through many different realities, even surpassing the Aeons in order to reach
the First (Zost. 11.9–14; 22.1–20; 44.1–11; cf. 46.17–31; Allog. 60.28–37; Marsanes
(X, 1) 4.10–23).
The partial non-descent of the individual soul

The theme of the partial non-descent of the individual soul is presented by Plotinus
himself as a sort of paradox in treatise 6 (IV 8), 8 (Narbonne 2008: 75ff.). Even though
some scholars (Merlan 1969: 10; Linguiti 2001; D’Ancona 2003: 57ff.; Chiaradonna
2005) have tried to trace back this theory to Plato, none of them has been able to
clearly tie it to any particular passage, with perhaps the exception of Thomas Szlezák
(1979: 167–205), who furnishes a good argument when he invokes a passage of
Timaeus (90 A), where Plato declares that the dominant part of the soul dwells in the
celestial realm and compares the human being to a plant with his head in the heaven,
as a possible root for the non-descent of the soul. However, Plato never explicitly
states –and let alone does he develop –the detailed theory we find in Plotinus. As
a matter of fact, we know that Plotinus was already aware of the Gnostics when he
wrote his first treatise (see point 1a), and another evidence of this is the appearance
of the term omoousios –which is known to be an original Gnostic neologism –in one
of his very first treatises (2 [IV 7]), 10, 19.
One can presume that the theory of the partial non-descent of the individual soul –
of all individual souls –is the Plotinian answer to the privileged status of the elected
Gnostics, declaring themselves to be consubstantial (omoousios) with the divine,
whereas Plotinus is concerned to attribute this faculty to all souls, insisting that: “one
ought […] not to think that only oneself can become perfectly good” (33 [II 9], 9,
27–8). As we know, Proclus criticized Plotinus for this very idiosyncratic doctrine
(Elements of Theology §211), the presence of which is nonetheless perfectly under-
standable, on the background of his opposition to them.
Another testimony of the Gnostic influence, which is different but parallel, is the
neusis of the World Soul. In his early writing 6 (IV 8), Plotinus summons many themes
that he will recall in his treatise Against the Gnostics (II 9 [33]), inter alia the neusis
of the soul:
For it [the soul] never expects anything of such a body, nor does any distraction
make it incline downwardly and takes it away from its superior and bliss con-
templation, but it always dwells among intelligibles, ordering this universe by its
peaceful power.
(6 [IV 8], 2, 51, trans. Armstrong 1966–1988: 405 (slightly modified))
But if they are going to assert that the soul made the world when it had, so to
speak, ‘shed its wings,’ this does not happen to the Soul of the All; but if they are
going to say that it made the world as the result of a failure, let them tell us the
cause of the failure. But when did it fail? If it was from eternity, it abides in a state
of failure according to their own account. If it began to fail, why did it not begin
before? But we say that the making act of the soul is not a declination but rather
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a non-declination. But if it declined, it was obviously because it had forgotten the

intelligible realities […].
(33 [II 9], 4, 1–11, trans. Armstrong 1966–1988: 235–37)
Plotinus’s account of the neusis in these two passages is consistent with the
corresponding term in the Coptic Nag Hammadi corpus, namely ⲛⲹⲣⲁï (Zost. 27.12;
see Poirier 2012: 620). While the Zostrian is probably the most relevant book for
our hypothesis, Paul-Hubert Poirier identifies many other passages from the NHC
where the term ⲛⲹⲣⲁï can be detected (The Apocryphon of John (II, 1).5.14; (III, 1).8.8;
(IV, 1).8.1 and BG 8502.2.28.7); The Gospel of the Egyptians (The Holy Book of
the Great Invisible Spirit) (III, 2).52.3.16–17; (IV, 2).63.25). Just this term of neusis
without any further evidence could cast a doubt on this hypothetical link, but the
vocabulary of 6 (IV 8) is similar to 33 (II 9) and some passages from Nag Hammadi
Corpus, so that we are indubitably led to admit a close connection between Plotinus
and the Gnostics. For example, one can compare the verbs ἐφάπτεσθαι (l. 2) with 33 (II
9), 5, 3 and the Zostrian, 129.2–16 [ⲛⲹⲣⲁï]: 2, 28, and ἀπραγμονέω (l. 28) with 33 (II
9), 2, 13; ἐμπόδιον (l. 44) with 33 (II 9), 17, 1–26, in chapter 2 of 6 (IV 8).
The practice of virtues

Heresiologists reported that the Gnostics did not observe virtue and were in fact
licentious (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. I.26.3; 31.1–2; Clement, Strom. III.5.40.2–3); both
attribute some curious sexual practices to many Gnostic traditions, and so Plotinus
too, declaring: “So pleasure is left for them, and what concerns themselves alone, and
what other men have no share in, and what is nothing but a matter of their needs” (33
[II 9], 5, 15–17, trans. Armstrong 1966–1988: 283). For him, the fact that they wrote
no treatise on virtue (line 27) proves by itself that they were not sagacious: “For it
does no good at all to say ‘Look to God’, unless one also teaches how one is to look”
(33 [II 9], 5); see also Schniewind 2003: 185–9). Even though no first-hand source
can bear out their alleged dissolute behavior (Mazur, in Ferroni and Narbonne (forth-
coming): 33 [II 9], comm. 17, 27–9), the fact remains that they wrote no book on the
matter and that the ethical portion of their revelation texts is quite thin, although we
can observe two passages from Zostrian and Allogen, where it is stated that self-inner
purity helps to reach the light, but nothing regarding the virtues is explicit (Zost.
11.9–14; Allog. 52.6–13; 56.14–27, as opposed to Plotinus, who stresses the import-
ance of virtue and inner peace in order to reach happiness (cf. 20 [I 3], 4–5; 36 [I 5]
et 46 [I 4]).
A philosophical and argumentative discourse (literary genre)

Nowhere more than in Treatise 33 (II 9) Against the Gnostics does Plotinus express
his own personal view about what he considers to be a real philosophical life, and
dwell upon the fundamental difference between his own attitude as opposed to the
custom and manner of his Gnostic opponents. For him, philosophy requires both the
serious study of ancient Greek authors (especially Plato), and the solemn practice of
virtue, and he is very critical about the absence of any real dialectical reasoning in the
writings of his opponents vis-à-vis:
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If they wish to disagree on these points, there is no unfair hostility in saying to

them that they should not recommend their own opinions to their audience by
ridiculing and insulting the Greeks but that they should show the correctness
on their own merits of all the points of doctrine which are peculiar to them and
differ from the views of the Greeks, stating their real opinions courteously, as
befits philosophers, and fairly on the points where they are opposed, looking to
the truth and not hunting fame by censuring men who have been judged good
from ancient times by men of worth and saying that they themselves are better
than the Greeks.
(33 [II 9], 6, 45–50, trans. Armstrong 1966–1988: 247;
compare with 33 (II 9), 6, 1–5; 10, 1–14; 10, 28–30; 11,
24–8; 14, 9–13, 36–45; 16, 36–9)
It is also in this very special treatise –in a situation where Plotinus is probably losing
some students or hearers to the benefit of his rival school –that we find his most open
declaration about what he calls his kind of philosophy:
The rest of their teachings I leave to you to investigate by reading their books,
and to observe throughout that the kind of philosophy which we pursue, besides
all its other excellences, displays simplicity and straightforwardness of character
along with clear thinking, and aims at dignity, not rash arrogance, and combines
its confident boldness with reason and much safeguarding and caution and a
great deal of circumspection: you are to use philosophy of this kind as a standard
of comparison for the rest.
(33 [II 9], 14, 36–44, trans. Armstrong 1966–1988: 281)
At the end, this question of the literary genre appears to represent the major point
of divergence between them. Generally speaking, one can state that Gnostic writings’
aim is to generate a spontaneous adhesion to dogma and an enthusiastic –even
uncritical –view of them, rather than a considered and rational evaluation. As Jean-
Pierre Mahé writes in his introduction to the Écrits Gnostiques: “They were less
eager to think about a doctrine or to elaborate a theoretical teaching than to conduct
souls, which does not appeal only to a systematic reflection, but also to emotion and
imagination. The linearity of reasoning and its rigorous dialectic are of a weak relief
for soul’s torpor” (Mahé 2007: xiv; we translate from French). On the other side, just
because they were more interested in convincing than rationalizing, and more intel-
lectual handymen than doctrine thinkers, they show more freedom in the interpret-
ation of the sources and appear at the time metaphysically more creative than their
contemporaneous fellows.
C O N C LUSION: THE P ECULIAR AS P E CT O F THE P O L E M IC

In this paper, we insisted on an important aspect of Plotinus’s writings that had been
neglected for a long time by many historians. But since the discovery of the Nag
Hammadi corpus, we have no cogent choice but to take a closer look at this central
polemic and to examine this exceptional confrontation between a Neoplatonic phil-
osopher and “scholar” on the one side, and some Gnostic celebrants and free-spirited
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thinkers on the other. Curiously, the successors of Plotinus will retain almost nothing
of this fiery debate with the Gnostics. One can nonetheless find a reference to the
Gnostics in the post-plotinian Neoplatonism, that is in Iamblichus (apud Stobaeus
Anthologion, I, 49, 37, 90), but they otherwise broadly opted to set aside this whole
debate and this important part of Plotinus’s writings, perhaps due to the historical
context, to wit the establishment of a more solid Christian orthodoxy, but this topic
is far beyond the aim of our present study.
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CHAPTER NINETEEN
GNOSTIC ELEMENTS IN ANCIENT

MAGICAL PAPYRI
Malcolm Choat
T he topic under discussion lies at the intersection of two categories which have
proven contentious and difficult to define. The debate over the sense in which we
should understand “Gnostic” (not to mention the modern neologism “Gnosticism”),
and indeed the value of the category in the ancient world, is of course longstanding,
and is treated elsewhere in this volume. No less, however, has the probity of using the
term “magic” for the set of ancient practices traditionally covered by the term, and
indeed the integrity of the category as an analytical field, been called into question
in recent decades: a representative sample of thoughts on this issue may be found
in essays in Mirecki and Meyer 2002, Meyer and Mirecki 2001, and Faraone and
Obbink 1991.
Here, I adopt a simple –if not wholly satisfactory –solution, by discussing the
appearance in those Greek and Coptic papyri traditionally labeled as “magical” by
modern scholars, of deities, divine figures, or associated cosmological or cosmogon-
ical narratives, which appear in works commonly classified in modernity as “gnostic.”
The source body will thus be the “Greek magical papyri,” first collected by Karl
Preisendanz (1973–1974), supplemented by collections such as that of Daniel and
Maltomini (1990–1992), and popularized in the translation edited by Betz (1992),
which incorporates the sections in Demotic ignored by Preisendanz (see also Brashear
1995; Ritner 1995). Alongside this are the magical texts in Coptic, collected (as far as
they were then known) by Angelicus Kropp (1930–1931), and translated by Meyer
and Smith (1994; see also Pernigotti 1995). The cultural background from which we
reconstruct Gnostic thought is, of course, more diverse, but notably includes texts in
the Nag Hammadi library and other related tractates, as addressed elsewhere in this
volume.
The intersection between the Gnostic and Magic worlds may be examined from
one perspective by examining Gnostic texts which reveal magical features. The
correspondences there encountered may be traced in more detail in the magical texts
themselves. Here we can make a broad distinction. There are a large array of magical
texts which invoke “gnostic” divinities as figures of power. Alongside these, we may
distinguish a much smaller number of texts that display a deeper influence of a system
or ritual we encounter in gnostic texts.
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— Malcolm Choat —
The partially overlapping worlds which brought forth the magical papyri and the
Nag Hammadi codices have been frequently noted. What accounts for this overlap
is more difficult to discern. On one reading, both the Nag Hammadi Library and
the Coptic magical texts are products of monastic tradition, and we should under-
stand them as representing different outworkings of the ritual knowledge embodied
within the monasteries. Both, however, embody preexisting traditions, the interaction
between which –and the site of much of the cross-pollination –might be placed before
monasticism. The central (but certainly not the only) locus of Coptic magical textual
production should be seen in monasteries; but in their scribal and ritual activity they
are heir to far older Egyptian and pan-Mediterranean traditions. However, the gnostic
texts which show an interest in magic, such as Holy Book of the Great Invisible
Spirit, Three Steles of Seth, Zostrianos, and Books of Jeu (extracts from which are
included in Meyer and Smith 1994), exist in the form in which we have them only
in copies which postdate the rise of monasticism, obscuring interactions which may
have taken place earlier.
Not only is some of the content of these texts overlapping with magical traditions,
but they include passages which seem to be drawn (perhaps at some remove) from
ritual contexts and use devices like the Greek vowels known from magical texts, as
well as collections of letters which resemble voces magicae. Furthermore, drawings
sometimes appear in these texts. If they are not “magical” texts per se, they indicate
how close these textual genres could be, even if the lines along which such material
could have been transmitted may be debated (Burns in press b).
When magical papyri first emerged in the nineteenth century, they were quick
to be labeled as “gnostic.” From the first examination in 1830, a number of papyri
now considered to be part of the “Theban Magical Library” were considered to
be “gnostic” in character, or even part of the “library of a gnostic Egyptian of the
second century” (Dosoo 2016b; Brashear 1991: 23–4; Brashear 1995: 3422–3). The
application of the term gnostic was largely abandoned by the time these texts were
definitively edited: as Griffith and Thompson noted when editing Papyri Demoticae
Magicae/Papyri Graecae Magicae XIV (the London-Leiden magical papyrus), “it
seems a misnomer to call the MS. gnostic merely because part of the stock-in-trade of
the magician and medicine-man were a number of invocation names which he either
picked up from the gnostics or derived from sources common to him and them”
(Griffith and Thompson, 1904–1909, I: 2–3).
Leaving aside the characterization of the ritualist who copied this text, the point
is well made. Nonetheless, the habit of calling magical and prayer papyri “gnostic”
persisted. Often such identifications have little to recommend them. In the sixth volume
of the The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Grenfell and Hunt published what they called a
“Gnostic Charm” (P.Oxy. VI 924 = Preisendanz 1973–1974: II P5a; Meyer and Smith
1994: 15, dated to the fourth century; see now de Haro Sanchez 2010: 135–6). They
stated that “the essentially Gnostic character of the charm is shown at the end by the
mystical symbols and the occurrence of the title Abrasax, a common Gnostic name of
the Supreme Being.” The “symbols” such as they are, are unremarkable, and the name
Abrasax is the only contact with any “Gnostic” tradition. In the “Gnostic Amulet”
published in the following volume of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (P.Oxy. VII 1060, sixth
century = Preisendanz 1973–1974: II P2 = Meyer and Smith 1994: 25) the words
Iaō sabaōth adone were the only elements which could support such a designation.
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— Gnostic elements in ancient magical papyri —
The name of a “mysterious deity” Sulicusesus (or “Sulikus or Sou[”?, as Preisendanz

read) in P.Oxy. XII 1478 (third/fourth century = Preisendanz 1973–1974: II XXVII)
seems to have been enough to call forth the title “Gnostic charm”. In P.Oxy. XII
1566 (= Preisendanz 1973–1974: II LXXXI; fourth century), the name Abrasax is
accompanied by a list of other names and voces magicae, which provide no further
support for the designation. The “three short gnostic charms” of the fifth and sixth
century published as P.Oxy. XVI 2061–63 feature Abrasax (2060), various combin-
ations of Iaō sabaōth adone, and less familiar divine names (e.g., Salamarthachi /
Salamantarchei). The same deity features in the fourth–fifth-century “Gnostic fever
amulet” P.Princ. II 107, but there is little elsewhere in the text to justify the title
given it by E. H. Kase. Such texts illustrate well the type of traces of “Gnosticism”
most commonly encountered in magical texts: a single divine title or name, or a few,
divorced from any larger context. Examples among the Greek and Coptic magical
texts could be easily multiplied (see Jackson 1989; Kühner 1980; McBride 1997).
In terms of lines of influence between the Greek magical papyri and the (in most
cases) Greek originals of the Gnostic texts, it seems likely that in many cases we
should consider these not as representing the “influence of Gnosticism … in the
magical papyri” (Dickie 2001: 201), but as magical elements in Gnostic texts. As
Howard Jackson has shown, names which occur in the Pistis Sophia and elsewhere in
the Gnostic corpus, such as Aberamenoth (a name given to Jesus), Agrammachamarei
(a name of the Invisible God), and Bainchoooch make much more sense as having
arisen in a magical context, and then been incorporated into a Gnostic system (see
also McBride 1997: 53; Brashear 1991: 23). Cogent arguments can likewise be made
that names such as Ialdabaoth (whose magical origin was already noted by Origen in
Contra Celsum 6.32), Barbelo, and even Abrasax were borrowed from the magical
tradition and systemized within Gnostic traditions (Jackson 1989; see also Evans
2015: 111–19; Burns in press a). A number of names of power are, of course, borrowed
in these magical texts from much more ancient Hebrew and Semitic traditions. Such
magical papyri in which figures such as this (most commonly Abrasax) are invoked
do not so much illustrate contact with Gnostic milieus as the persistence of vocabu-
lary long-used within the magical tradition.
There are thus two debates to be had. One is about the relationship between
Gnostic and magical traditions in the fourth–eighth century, a process largely taking
place –in so far as we can determine its contours –in bilingual or predominantly
Coptophone settings, many closely associated with monastic contexts. The other is
the relationship between the worlds which brought forth these traditions earlier in
the Roman period. Here, the worlds are less obviously contiguous. Yet if we eschew
anachronistic constructions of “magicians” in Roman Egypt and understand the
Egyptian priesthood to be the primary driver of the transmission of these ritual
texts, the realms may be closer than thought (Dieleman 2005; Frankfurter 1998;
McBride 1997). The Hermetic traditions visible in the Nag Hammadi library (and
more prominently of course in the Greek Corpus Hermeticum; see Fowden 1993)
were influenced, to be sure at some remove, by temple traditions extant in the Book
of Thoth and related Demotic texts (Jasnow and Zauzich 2005). This transmis-
sion was not direct, and concerns in any case Hermetic, not Gnostic thinking. Yet
it is indicative of the partially overlapping worlds in which magical and gnostic
texts were produced and transmitted in Roman Egypt. As seen above, it is not at all
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unlikely that many of the names and titles familiar from Gnostic texts which occur
in magical texts are there because they had long been part of magical vocabulary,
having arisen within that tradition and been borrowed by the composers of Gnostic
texts. This transmission may have been purely textual, as one can easily suppose
figures such as Basilides and Valentinus to have been familiar with magical texts. In
addition, we can with considerable ease imagine educated urban settings in which
Hellenized Egyptian priests mingled with philosophers (for one such late third-and
early fourth-century family from Panopolis in which these spheres overlapped see
Willis and Maresch 1998).
Among the Coptic magical papyri, the best known “Gnostic” text was called a
“Gnostic Tractate” (Trattoro Gnostico) already in its first publication (Rossi 1894),
and has been known as “Rossi’s ‘Gnostic’ Tractate” since this time. Yet despite Rossi’s
invoking of the Pistis Sophia and Bruce Codex in his introduction, this ritual for
protection against demons, sadly lost in a fire in 1904, presents no real affinity with
gnostic systems. As with the Greek papyri discussed above, the occurrence of divine
names familiar from Gnostic texts prompted the appellation.
These names and titles occur regularly in the Coptic papyri. They are likely to
have been transmitted within the magical tradition, though the possibility of more
direct influence from Gnostic traditions as they were translated into Coptic remains.
The latter may perhaps be thought more likely, given the contexts in which these two
types of texts were transmitted. Unlike in earlier times, when we must posit overlap-
ping ritual and scribal expertises interacting in a context we cannot quite detect, both
Coptic magical papyri and arguably Coptic Gnostic texts were produced and used in
a monastic context (Frankfurter 1998; 2017; Lundhaug and Jenott 2015).
It may be this closer coincidence which explains a number of names and concepts
in the Coptic magical papyri which seem certain to have entered magical texts from
the Gnostic tradition. Principal among these are the “four great lights” (Gospel of
the Egyptians III.2, 51, 17–19), Harmozel, Oroiael, Davithe, Eleleth (see Burns in
press a). The last two in particular are more commonly encountered. They are seem-
ingly fused into one being in Meyer and Smith 1994: 129 (BL Or. 6794), an invo-
cation for a good singing voice, and Davithe features as a supra-angelic being (so
Burns) in two closely related Coptic texts, which describe him as carrying a golden
palm-branch and having eyes which cast lightning (BL Or. 5987 = Meyer and Smith
1994: 70; P.Macq. I 1, ed. Choat and Gardner 2013). An amulet on gold from the
Getty Museum, perhaps from the fourth century (Kotansky 1980), and P.Mil. I 20
(= Daniel and Maltomini 1990–1992: II, 92), of the fourth or fifth century, provide
rare occurrences of Eleleth in Greek; in both the name occurs in a list of angelic and
divine powers. It is likely that Davithe and Eleleth quickly attained the status of inde-
pendent angelic beings of great power, whose appearance in a magical text need not
be predicated on any knowledge of the Gnostic cosmology of which they were a part.
In a small number of texts, however, they are invoked along with their fellow lumi-
naries as a set: Cairo Coptic Museum inv. 4958 names them as the “great luminaries”
(Meyer 2004); P.Heid. Kopt. inv. 685 (ed. Meyer 1996) lists the “four imperishable
mysteries” (8.6–9); and the “four (?) great inexpressible light enlighteners” are named
in P.Macq. I 1 (ed. Choat and Gardner 2013, 2.21–5; see also 5.12–6.13 and in the
drawing on p. 12 of the codex). In these cases, the names –sometimes with consid-
erable variation –have been transmitted together with their title. Yet there is little
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21
indication that anything has been carried forward into the new texts beyond the
names and the sense that these are figures of great power.
The occasions on which more than names and titles are at issue are rare. A Christian
charitesion possibly to be dated to the fourth– fifth century (Preisendanz 1973–
1974: II 21 = Meyer and Smith 1994: 36; see De Bruyn 2013), features a Greek text
with a Coptic subscription by the same scribe, whose name may have been Besodoros.
The acclamation which closes the Greek text echoes traditions visible in the Gospel
of Truth and Tripartite Tractate and indicates contact with a Valentinian milieu (De
Bruyn 2013; see also Burns in press b).
Finally, a set of three related texts evidence a deeper level of association with
Gnostic traditions. P.Macq. I 1, BL Or. inv. 5987, and P.Berl. inv. 5527 (text of all in
Choat and Gardner 2013) represent different forms of the same text. While P.Berl.
inv. 5527 preserves only the opening section of the invocation found in the Macquarie
and London texts, the three present a concentration of “Gnostic” terminology which
cannot be explained by random interaction with Gnostic traditions, and goes well
beyond the constellation of names and titles found in other Coptic magical texts. The
texts open with an invocation of the Baktiotha, a supra-cosmic figure of immense
power whose name might be best understood as an alphabetic construction to keep
secret its true name (Gardner 2016; cf. Dosoo 2016a). The Macquarie version then
features an invocation of “the Barbelo, the living Sophia, who was filled from the
two loins of the father and has begotten for us a perfect living Man.” Invocations of
Sabaoth “king of all the aeons,” the naming of the “four great lights” (see above), a
somewhat distorted version of the awakening of Adam in paradise by the enlightener,
historiolae featuring Ialdabaoth, and a version of the invocation of the Incorruptible
Child mentioning “Seth, the living Christ” all contribute to a far stronger association
with Gnostic traditions than those which feature in most magical texts. Sections of
the text also seem to feature reminiscences of actual ritual texts, now much garbled
in its transmission (Gardner 2016). Certainly, the scribes of the Macquarie codex,
London roll, and Berlin sheet, which variously transmit versions of this text, and
probably also the original compilers of the text they draw on, had little or no idea of
the nature or significance of the content. Despite this lack of knowledge on the part
of the various copyists, specific details can be excavated from even the most garbled
passages which demonstrate a qualitatively different relationship with its source
material than the general circulation of references to “Gnostic” names and titles com-
monly found in Coptic magical texts. It thus seems likely that a ritual text somehow
connected with the system now commonly termed “Sethian Gnostic” lies –at consid-
erable remove –behind parts of the invocation.
P.Macq. I 1 is not itself a “Sethian” ritual text, nor even a good or faithful copy of
one. It is not evidence of interaction with Gnostic theology or texts in the time it was
copied. It does, however, seem to provide evidence that at some stage in its textual
transmission a ritualist with knowledge of and access to both Gnostic and magical
texts combined these various sources of wisdom and ritual into a new vehicle of
ritual power. If we read this supposition alongside work stressing the likelihood of a
monastic context for both the Nag Hammadi Library (Lundhaug and Jenott 2015)
and magical production of text in late antique Egypt (Frankfurter 2017: 184–232),
we may find a plausible context for the production of such a ritual artifact. To be
sure, other contexts exist, such as the philosophical and Hermetic circles examined by
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Burns (in press b), or the village context such as that in which Dioscoros of Aphrodito
copied a spell for protection against evil spirits which incorporated material familiar
from Gnostic traditions (Meyer and Smith 1994: 22; see MacCoull 1987; Burns in
press b). But in these cases, we may be seeing the results of the Roman period over-
lapping interests discussed above, or the parallel transmission of earlier incantations
into Gnostic texts and the Christianizing magical tradition. In Late Antiquity, the
monastic context stands out as one in which the ritual coalescence we see in the
Coptic magical texts was demonstrably possible.
It is perhaps the development of this context in late antique Egypt that accounts
for the changed relationship between the “magical” and “Gnostic” realms in Late
Antiquity. In the Roman period, representatives of various religious, scribal, and
philosophical traditions partake of a shared vocabulary for constructing their ritual
and spiritual texts. They clearly moved in similar circles, and may in some cases have
had partly the same membership, without being in most cases contiguous entities.
It is this intertexuality which accounts for the majority of the “Gnostic elements
in magical papyri,” the transmission and adaptation of names of powers and titles
between ritual genres, often clearly from “magical” traditions into Gnostic, Hermetic,
and philosophical ones. If we fundamentally misunderstand the intellectual world of
Roman Egypt by conceiving of these as separate entities, we may at least contrast this
relationship with that we see in the Coptic material.
It is notable that the “four luminaries” do not appear in magical texts from before
the fourth century, and seem clearly to have been borrowed from Gnostic texts into the
magical tradition rather than the reverse (Jackson 1989: 70; 79 n. 8). Here we do not
witness recourse to a standard ritual terminology, but the influence of Gnostic texts
such as those whose Coptic translations are preserved in the Nag Hammadi library.
We should not imagine this influence to take the form of groups of “Gnostics” incorp-
orating their rituals into magical texts, but rather the formation of a ritual corpus in
contexts in which scribes and ritualists, many though not all within monasteries, had
knowledge of and recourse to a wide variety of traditions, which they used to formulate
a Christianizing magical tradition, elements of which are still practiced in Egypt today.
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CHAPTER TWENTY
MANI’S LIFE
Iain Gardner
M ani/Manes or Manichaios/Manichaeus was an Aramaic-speaking visionary, a

healer, preacher and public sage. He was born in Mesopotamia ca. 216 CE and
brought up in a religious community characterized by close adherence to a law of
formalized purification, including repeated ritual washing or baptism. In his youth
he experienced revelations from a heavenly Twin (variously described as an angel
or the paraclete-spirit) so that by the age of 24 he embarked on a life of mission
and teaching, declaring himself to be the “Apostle of Jesus Christ.” Mani travelled
extensively through the Sasanian Persian empire between the Caucasus and north-
west India, while his teachings achieved substantial success, including access to the
courts and aristocracy during the reign of Shapur I. Opposition from the Magian
hierarchy and a change of imperial policy led to his trial, imprisonment, and death
under Bahram I ca. 277 CE with the ascendancy of his rival the chief priest Kartir.
The self-declared Apostle came from a broadly Judeo-Christian heritage and is
now known as the founder of the religion of Manichaeism. In one of his best-known
teachings, which survives in both Coptic and Middle Persian (Gardner and Lieu
2004: 109, 265–8), he explains the ten reasons why his religion is better than all
others. Notable amongst these claimed advantages is the emphasis upon universality
compared to previous messengers such as Jesus, Buddha, and Zarathushtra, and the
limited truths taught in the communities they had established. In contrast Mani’s
revelation has spread to every country and is known in all languages, its truth fixed in
the divinely inspired books that he himself had written down, and through which the
truth of all things could be learnt and would never again be lost or corrupted.
The understanding of who Mani was and the details of his life have advanced sub-
stantially due to a series of spectacular manuscript discoveries, especially of writings
belonging to the community itself rather than to its opponents. These include a wealth
of fragmentary texts recovered from Central Asia in the early twentieth century,
written in Iranian languages and Uighur Turkic, substantial papyrus and parchment
codices from Egypt in Coptic and Greek, and new sources from China evidencing
the religion’s later success in east Asia, most recently of beautiful hanging scrolls of
paint and gold on silk. Much of this material is still in the process of being edited and
published for the first time; and the somewhat bewildering spread of material in often
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— Iain Gardner —
little-known languages, combined with the technical detail of the textual editions, has
made recent developments in the discipline difficult to follow for the non-specialist.
The following summary will focus on the core facts and problems regarding Mani’s
life and mission, what is known of his writings, and the narrative of his death that
played a dominant role in the memory of the community he founded.
Mani is often taken to have been the Apostle’s personal name, but it may rather
have been a religious appellation or a title. There are two forms used across a range
of ancient sources: The shorter was m’ny in its original Aramaic; the longer is
Manichaios in Greek and Coptic, Manichaeus in Latin, m’ny’xyws in Middle Persian.
Various etymologies have been suggested. A derivation from the Greek word to
be “mad,” favored by Augustine and common throughout the polemical tradition,
provided great scope for ridicule but cannot be taken seriously. It may explain why
some community sources duplicated the /n/to read Mannichaios or Mannichaeus,
providing a more attractive meaning as the one who pours out manna (with the
Greek verb cheō “to pour out”). Further etymologies such as from the Sanskrit mani
meaning “jewel,” or the common Hebrew name Menachem meaning “comforter,” are
superficially appealing but have not been favored by recent research.
The great majority of contemporary scholars place Mani’s origins among the
Aramaic-speaking population of Sasanian Mesopotamia. There is substantial evi-
dence that eastern Aramaic was his native language and the one in which he wrote
the majority of his writings, drawing on a religious culture closely related to those of
early Christian Syriac, Mandaic, and Jewish Babylonian sources. The consensus is that
the name should be derived from the word mānā meaning “vessel” or “garment,” a
term with wide utility in the relevant religious literatures and especially in Mandaean
texts, where it developed a fundamental technical terminology regarding the world of
light. Christian opponents writing in Syriac alternated their use of the Greek-derived
slur “mad” with insults based on this Aramaic term, such as “vessel of wickedness”
or “vessel of the evil one.” Ephraem Syrus even indulges in what appears to be a
deliberate word-play when he states: “Mani (Mny) has become a garment (mānā)
that destroys those who wear it” (c. Haereses, hym. 2.1; and see Tubach and Zakeri
2001: 276–7).
In the 1920s, Schaeder (1927: 88 n.1) suggested that the longer form of the name
should be derived from the Aramaic Mānī ḥayyā meaning “the living Mani”; later
scholars extended the derivation to mean “living vessel” (mānā ḥayyā) and wondered
whether the whole form might be understood as a religious title. However, the diffi-
cult final /y/rather than /a/of m’ny remained unexplained. More recently, Durkin-
Meisterernst (2012: 2– 3) has sought to explain this as the first- person singular
possessive suffix, thus “my vessel,” and drawn attention to Acts 9:15 referring to Paul
before his conversion: “… he is the vessel of my choice.” Given Mani’s known mod-
eling upon Paul as an Apostle of Jesus Christ, he argues that the longer form of the
name Manichaios will mean “my vessel, life” or “my living vessel,” and thus makes
a particularly direct statement about divine election. This etymology is attractive as
a religious name given to the boy within the closed baptist community of his youth.
There are a number of traditions about Mani’s birthplace and parents, of which
the most widespread names his father as Patticius, Patig, Fatiq or similar. A com-
monly cited source is the account of the religion collated by the tenth-century Arabic
historian Ibn al-Nadim in his Fihrist, which relates how the father heard a heavenly
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— M a n i ’s l i f e —
voice in the temple instructing him to join a community in the marshlands known as
“those who wash themselves” (Gardner and Lieu 2004: 46–7). His wife was pregnant
with Mani, and so it was after the birth that Fatiq sent for the child to join him. This
story appeared confirmed after the 1969 discovery of a miniature codex in Greek
known as the Cologne Mani-Codex. The work, properly entitled Concerning the
Birth of his Body, provides unique and detailed information about the Apostle’s sect-
arian upbringing and the generation of the new church (Gardner and Lieu 2004: 47–
73). The “body” or sōma of the title is to be understood primarily in this sense, as
the incarnation of the divine in the life of the church rather than the growth of the
physical body of Mani. Although the Greek text is poorly preserved in its latter part,
as it progresses through the public mission of the Apostle after he has separated
from the sect in which he had been brought up, there are substantial passages extant
that relate to his youth among those it calls the baptists and his eventual split with
their leaders. In all this Mani is guided and protected by an angel termed his Twin or
companion (syzygos) who instructs him in the secrets of who he is, of his Father on
high (the God of truth) and the heights and depths of the cosmos. This is the gnōsis,
the divinely revealed teaching that will be written down in the scriptures and upon
which the religion will be founded. A fuller and systematized account of this wisdom
occurs in one of the Coptic texts known as the Kephalaia or Chapters, the largest
of all known Manichaean doctrinal compilations, the editing of which began in the
1930s and is still in process. Here the Twin is named as the living Paraclete, the Spirit
of Truth (see John 14:16–17), who descends and speaks to the Apostle unveiling the
hidden mysteries: the conflict between light and darkness, the construction of the sun
and the moon as the abodes of the gods, the fashioning of Adam and the mystery of
the tree of knowledge, the apostles who were sent to the world, and so on. It was a
revelation of “the All” by which Mani was understood to have come to know every-
thing (Gardner and Lieu 2004: 73–5). In the Kephalaia he is regularly termed the
“Enlightener” or phōstēr.
Central to the biographical narrative of the Mani-Codex is a certain Pattikios, and
it is clear that this is the same person as the Fatiq of Ibn al-Nadim’s source material,
and that the baptists of the Greek text are the same sect as referred to in the Arabic.
The story can be summarized in brief. When Mani denounces the practices of the sect,
especially as regards ritual washing and the categories of pure and impure foods, Sita
the presbyter and other elders of the community accuse him and order him to appear
before their assembly. They also summon Pattikios and say to him: “Your son has
turned aside from our law and wishes to go into the world …” Mani defends himself
by recalling a number of revelations and visions received by Alchasaios, the leader
(archēgos) of the rule, and other famous fellow-baptists, and asserts that his own
practice is what he has learned from them. His accusers become angry at this and
physically assault him until Pattikios intervenes and Mani is released. In this famous
sequence, which forms much of the core of the best-preserved part of the Greek
codex, we learn that Pattikios is a house-master (oikodespotēs) in the community, a
position of seniority with especial responsibility for the young Mani.
It is entirely possible to read the references to “your son” and “your father,” in a
communal or quasi-monastic setting, as standard assertions of spiritual authority and
nothing to do with actual parentage. A recent study (Gardner and Rasouli-Narimani
2017) has demonstrated that all the explicit accounts of Mani’s parentage come from
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very late or anti-Manichaean sources. The narrative mechanism in a text such as

the Fihrist, with its story of the heavenly voice in the temple, is driven by the need
to explain how the figure of Fatiq (Pattikios) as a leading member of such a celibate
group could have come to have had a son with him there. In these religious com-
munities, and this became characteristic of the Manichaean church itself, it was a
common practice for a child to be given to a monk or an elect and brought up as
an acolyte or helper for that senior figure. This is the basis of the counter-narrative
found in early Christian and polemical sources about Mani’s origins that depict him
as a servant-boy of unknown origin. The hagiographic and miraculous coloring of
the community’s own traditions are very apparent, and it is difficult to determine
historical details in the biography prior to the Apostle’s public mission, beyond his
upbringing within a Jewish-Christian baptist sect belonging to the Aramaic-speaking
communities of southern Mesopotamia. The divorce between the ritual-based law
or nomos of this group and the gnōsis of Mani is ascribed to divine election and the
revelations by the Twin, masking the historical genesis of his teachings.
The date of Mani’s birth (ca. 216 CE) is itself a supposition based on the numerical
stylization of the Apostle’s earthly life whereby he received a first revelation by his
Twin at the age of twelve, a second, definitive revelation and the announcement of
his public mission at 24 (240 CE), and death at 60 (276–277 CE). In the memory of
the church the revelation of apostolic truth, breaking into history according to divine
purpose and election, came to mark a decisive moment that completed what came
before and inaugurated a new order. This was fixed as the time of proclamation when
everything that is and all that was and all that will be was made known. The event
was tied to the most momentous event of the era, the coronation of King Shapur I,
as is made clear in Concerning the Birth of his Body (Gardner and Lieu 2004: 50):
… When] I was twenty-[four] years old, in the year in which Dariadaxar (i.e.
Ardashir) the King of Persia conquered the city of Hatra, and in which his son
King Sapores assumed the mighty diadem, in the month Pharmouthi on the
eighth day according to the moon, the most blessed lord had compassion on me
and called me to his grace and sent to me my Twin who in great [glory …
The marvellous synchronicity between the divine revelation, the start of Mani’s public
mission, and the crowning of King Shapur was confirmation of his divine election and
status. In the community’s memory these events were drawn ever closer together so
that, in the source utilized by Ibn al-Nadim for his Fihrist, Mani revealed himself on
the very day that Shapur became king. It was a Sunday, the first of Nisan, and the sun
was in Aries (probably April 240 CE).
Further, the tradition came to tie these events to Mani’s first audience with the new
king, to Shapur’s granting of approval, and thus a relationship between the era of the
apostolate and that of the great ruler himself. Scholars have been curiously accepting
of these alignments, and there have been learned discussions of the Apostle’s influence
upon the religious policy of the imperial court. In reality, the evolution of his teachings
and the question of access to the King of Kings must have been a much more gradual
process. We know that he wrote a series of books but have little idea of their develop-
ment or sequence, nor of the context for his presenting an account of his teaching to
Shapur in Middle Persian (the Shabuhragan; MacKenzie 1979/1980). Mani was also
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remembered and renowned as a painter of great skill, and the didactic use of images
and drawings is a notable feature of the continuing tradition (Gulácsi 2015).
The community developed a genre of highly stylized narratives, replete with miracu-
lous healings, visions, and conversions, that were set in the courts of the Sasanian
empire; but it is extremely difficult to place the Apostle’s journeys and the devel-
opment of his nascent community in any kind of historical framework across the
years of public mission from ca. 240 to the 270s, even though it is recounted how he
travelled to places as diverse as Azerbaijan and India. In the Fihrist there is a list of
his canonical Epistles where are found letters to Armenia, Edessa, and Hatta on the
east Arabian coast. We read of terrible journeys through the mountains and storms.
In the enigmatic text Salmaios’ Lament there is a strange travelers’ tale about a sea-
voyage and a whale that implores mercy, and another about a great lion who is Pilate
reincarnated: Mani meets him on the road and forgives him. A Sogdian fragment of
the mission-history recounts the conversion of a king at Erevan by Mar Gabryab.
There are reports of how Mar Adda converted the queen of Tadmor (i.e., Palmyra).
A famous legend tells of how Mar Ammo confronted and passed by the spirit of the
border to the east and entered Kushan. In the Kephalaia it is astonishing to find Axum
listed among the four great kingdoms of the world.
The Apostle’s own life and those of the first generation of disciples were
characterized by travel and missionary endeavor, and it must have seemed that this
revelation had spread to every country. However, the very fragmentary nature of the
surviving sources, the impress of hagiography, and the almost complete loss of the
scriptures mean that we are left with little more than glimpses and embellishments.
A good example is the story of Mani at the court of the King of Turan, historically a
client-kingdom in modern Baluchistan that was controlled by the early Sasanians. The
narrative is found in various versions from across the religion’s spread to both east
and west. Characteristic features include the king’s great reverence for the Apostle, his
recognition of him as the Buddha, and a joint ascent with visions of the heavens, the
celestial bodies and the work of the religion. It is declared that Mani has the greatest
wisdom, and the episode is closed with the formal acceptance of the faith by all.
Various lists of Mani’s writings survive, evidencing formalization into a scriptural
tradition and the important role played by Manichaeism in the development of the
actual concept of what a religion is (BeDuhn 2015). None of the texts survive in any-
thing like their original entirety, and there is no convenient collection of the available
evidence, significant parts of which have not been published. Useful summaries can
be found in Gardner and Lieu 2004: 151–75, Tardieu 2008: 31–56, and Baker-Brian
2011: 66–95, but must be used with caution. However, the opening of the Apostle’s
Living Gospel is extant in both Greek and Middle Persian, and provides what is per-
haps the most important introduction to his self-understanding in his own words
(quoted after Gardner and Lieu 2004: 156–7):
I, Mannichaeus, Apostle of Jesus Christ, through the will of God, the Father of
Truth, from whom I also came into being. He lives and abides for all eternity.
Before everything he is, and he remains after everything. Everything which has
happened and will happen, is established through his power. From him I have my
being, and I exist also according to his will. And from him all that is true was
revealed to me and from (his) truth I exist. I have seen (the truth of eternity which
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he revealed). And I declared the truth to my companions; I preached peace to the

children of peace; I proclaimed hope to the undying generation; I chose the elect
and showed the path leading to the height to those who will go up according to
this truth. I have proclaimed hope and revealed this revelation; and have written
this immortal gospel, in which I have put down these pre-eminent secret rites
and declared great deeds, indeed the greatest and holiest of supreme deeds of
power. These things I have made known (to those who live in accordance with)
the vision of supreme truth which I have seen, and the most glorious revelation
which was revealed to me.
The same characteristic introduction of himself by reference to Jesus Christ is found

also throughout the Apostle’s Epistles, of which a substantial number of fragments
and quotations survive in a diverse set of languages. What is perhaps most interesting
about these is the practical emphasis on the community, on ethics and the organ-
ization of the churches. Further, the survival of numerous personal letters written
by Manichaean believers in fourth-century Egypt evidence how they modeled their
everyday behavior and relations on the example of the Apostle, inculcated by Mani
through these Epistles which were collected, copied, and circulated even amongst
the lay followers or catechumens (Gardner 2013). These matters demonstrate how
a gnōsis was lived in the world, and their concerns contrast with the more abstruse
details of doctrine discussed in the Kephalaia, which was a product of the scholastic
tradition of the elect. Here are found those fantastical worlds of multiple gods and
demons that were such a focus for opponents and commentators upon the religion
(for a convenient summary see Gardner and Lieu 2004: 8–21). It is difficult to know
how much of this latter material was actually central to the Apostle’s own teaching
or in what form it was developed in his lifetime, although works such as the Book of
Mysteries and the Book of Giants (both mostly lost) do demonstrate his interests in
arcane knowledge.
Although there have been attempts to detail the chronology of Mani’s travels from
the start of his public life, beginning with the journey to India by sea and then return
via Turan ca. 240 CE, the first firm historical anchor may rather be the mission to
Alexandria and the Roman empire led by his disciple Mar Adda in the 260s. By a
remarkable fortune, important details relating to this are preserved in remnants of
church history recovered from Central Asia, especially the Middle Persian text M2
that belongs to a work entitled The Coming of the Apostle into the Countries. This
and other surviving fragments have enabled scholars to track the penetration of the
religion through Syria into the Mediterranean world, using the desert city of Palmyra
as a bridgehead. Although the narratives of healings, visions, and conversions at the
court there evidence the usual hagiographic stylization, it appears that this occurred
during the reign of Queen Zenobia. The Apostle himself was based in Seleucia-
Ctesiphon, from where he directed the mission, and the late 260s must have been the
high-point of his career before increased opposition among the Sasanian aristocracy
and Zoroastrian priesthood led to persecution, wandering, and exile.
It used to be supposed that the final journeys and trials of Mani occurred only after
the ascendancy of Bahram I, but a recent reevaluation of the evidence (Gardner 2015)
shows that these had already begun during the time of Shapur I, and that internal
exile continued under his successor Hormizd I before culminating with the Apostle’s
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fateful last days of imprisonment and death at the direction of Bahram (perhaps 26
February 277 CE). The martyrdom was memorialized as a “crucifixion,” the fate of
all true messengers of God, and commemorated at what became the most important
annual festival of the church, that of the Bēma. This was a liturgy of repentance and
renewal for the community; and an anticipation of the glorious return and judgement
by Jesus (thus bēma “judgement seat”) that would herald the final victory of good
over evil. Mani’s death was the core historical event for the new community, the tra-
gedy through which the church had been born. The records of the hours and the days
of his suffering structured consciousness and praxis, and the literary cycle known as
the Discourse about the Crucifixion was itself built around a core stratum of text
known as the Apomnēmoneumata (“memorials”). This became one of the great reli-
gious passions, comparable to those of the Shi‘a and the Christian churches.
The basic structure of the literary cycle as it is now understood by scholars can
be summarized as follows. It evidences a marked tendency to exonerate Shapur and
Hormizd whilst focusing on the actions of the evil tyrant Bahram, and thus tele-
scoping events into a final ritual month of dates and times. It was these that provided
a framework for the community’s continuing memory and the annual reenactment
of the tragic events. The influence of the Christian passion from the gospels can be
noted, including characteristic features such as prophecies of the storm ahead, the
entry into the city, the mourning women, and so on.
The cycle began with events in the reign of King Hormizd, but recalling signs of
favor shown to the Apostle by King Shapur. Mani’s final journeys in Mesopotamia
are recounted, together with instructions to the faithful and intimations of the coming
crucifixion for those able to perceive them. A particular feature is his relationship with
the vassal-king Baat, who appears to have been appointed to oversee him in internal
exile in Armenia but who himself (it is indicated) became a believer. Then follow the
Apostle’s entry into Belapat, which is the royal city of Gundeshapur in Susiana or
Khuzistan, and the plots and accusations made against him by Kartir the chief priest,
the Magians, and other leading persons at court. A first peak is reached with Mani’s
interview before King Bahram in person and his declarations of innocence, followed
by details of the false charges, the bitter shackling, and the imprisonment. The fare-
well speeches to members of the community are recounted verbatim and at length,
and must be counted to piety rather than to the historical record. The ultimate tra-
gedy approaches with the giving of the Apostle’s final writing (the Seal Letter) and
other insignia such as his staff and robe, linked to his appointment of Sisinnios as his
chosen successor. The climax is Mani’s death, followed by the dispersal of his body
and the ascent of his soul. The literary cycle closes by comparison to the crucifixion of
Jesus and other righteous apostles. Within the narrative there are obviously important
historical details to be discerned, but precise facts such as the actual charges against
the Apostle and the events of his final days are heavily overlaid with hagiography and
religious sensibility. It appears that Mani died in chains in prison after lengthy torture.
It is important to conclude with a few words about the community and its practice,
as Mani’s teaching was not just a gnōsis but also a way of being in the world. He was
himself brought up within the confines of a narrow religious sect, and his teachings
made radical demands upon his followers. The issue of obedience versus deference to
society was the focus of the accusation that the Christians were only half-believers
who had betrayed the teachings of their savior, Jesus. The sudden arrival and even
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the visual appearance of these new ascetics from the late third century onwards may
well have contributed to the rise and popularity of Christian monasticism through
Egypt, Syria, and the eastern churches in the decades that followed. In Persia Mani
was accused of having led astray the world.
The teachings that underpinned this new ethic provoked fierce polemic from the
priests and religious leaders, both Christian and Zoroastrian, and equally the imperial
authorities both Roman and Sasanian. The belief that the divine substance was scattered
through all the material world but especially in plant life directed devotion towards
fruits and vegetables as vessels of the living soul. Christian polemic focused on the com-
plex food rituals intended to liberate this divine light from matter and pain, and accused
the Manichaeans of worshipping the sun and the moon (these were the homes of the
gods and portals to the world of light). Mani’s negative account of creation, and fierce
antipathy to all matter, violence, and sexuality as intrinsically demonic, was abhorrent.
The whole and only rationale for history, and the continuation of human existence, was
the liberation of the light elements from the dark. The Manichaean attitude to marriage
was a complete reversal of societal norms, because it was the act of procreation itself
that was opposed for its consequent imprisonment of the divine light in new bodies.
Moreover, if a peasant works the land, or if a craftsman uses his tools or the soldier his
weapons, then they harm and pain the living soul. The same applies to any speech that
calls for such activities, or incites immorality, anger or envy.
The principal symbol was that of the Cross of Light, the universal divine stretched
and bound upon matter. Particularly the Cross was associated with plant life as
manifested in sweetness, color, and translucence, in comparison to the heavy car-
nality and odor of flesh. The role of the elect was to consume food and drink with
as high a percentage of light as possible, such as melons, radishes, and cucumbers;
and, indeed, they were much concerned with the classification and preparation of
foods, which inevitably attracted the scorn of their opponents. Meat and wine were
regarded as dominated by the dark elements that would weigh down the believer
striving for personal purification and lead directly to sensuality and ignorance. On the
positive side, while the very act of eating caused pain to the light elements, the body as
a microcosm of the universe also functioned as a machine for liberation of the living
soul, so that the righteous person could literally discard the gross elements below and
breathe forth angels to rise above. All this was demonstrated and achieved through
the digestive processes and body’s products.
Such an ethic could only be fulfilled by a small group of people. Yet, the goal that the
Apostle felt to be his call was the foundation and propagation by mission of a world-
wide community. The compromise was achieved by instituting a two-tiered structure
incorporating a doctrine of transmigration of souls. The inner circle were the elect
(“the virginal”) who lived a life of extreme asceticism and constant travel, around
which a greater number of hearers or catechumens (“the continent”) gathered, who
were able to serve and profit from the piety and righteousness of the spiritually more
advanced. Catechumens were allowed to marry and carry out normal daily activ-
ities; but they were obliged to see to the alimentary and other needs of the monastics,
whose daily meal was the fundamental ritual practice. This duty, termed soul-service,
brought merit to the hearers, who could hope to advance to perfection in a future life.
The Christian bishop Augustine, himself a Manichaean hearer or auditor in his youth,
explains (Gardner and Lieu 2004: 188):
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However, they claim that not only do the powers of God effect this purga-
tion and liberation of good and evil throughout the whole universe and all of
its elements, but also that their own elect achieve the same results by means
of the food of which they partake. And they state that the divine substance is
intermingled with this food just as it is with the whole universe, and imagine that
it is purified in their elect by the mode of life which the Manichaean elect live,
as if their mode of life were holier and more excellent than that of their hearers.
For they would have their church consist of those two classes, elect and hearers.
Moreover, they believe that this portion of the good and divine substance which
is held mixed and imprisoned in food and drink is more strongly and foully
bound in the rest of men, even their own hearers, but particularly in those who
propagate offspring.
As the final Apostle Mani led the community he had founded. After his “crucifixion”
he was believed to have risen to the moon to wait in attendance upon the faithful and
those liberated souls who would ascend there on their pathway to the New Aeon.
It is recorded that he handed over temporal authority to his disciple Sisinnios, who
was himself martyred in the continuing persecutions of the later third century and
succeeded by Innaios. The leader, the archēgos or imam, had his seat in the urban
environment of Seleucia-Ctesiphon (al-Mada’in) into the Abbasid period. Institutional
authority was mediated downwards via twelve teachers, thence to the bishops, the
elders, and so to the general body of the elect (both male and female), and the lay
hearers. The later history of the community in the Mediterranean world, the Levant,
and Mesopotamia is difficult to trace exactly, due to the repeated persecutions and
indeterminate accusations of heretical belief and practice under both Christian and
Muslim rule. In later centuries the hierarchy seems to have been better preserved in
Central Asia, especially whilst it was the dominant religion in the Turfan area during
the second Uighur kingdom of the tenth to twelfth centuries. Here the believers finally
had the freedom to worship openly, to observe their regular fasts, and to develop
church practices and institutions. The final phase of the religion’s history was in
China, where Manichaeans continued as a recognizable community in Fujian through
to the early modern period.
REFERENCES
Baker-Brian, Nicholas J. 2011. Manichaeism: An Ancient Faith Rediscovered. London and
New York: T. & T. Clark.
BeDuhn, Jason. 2015. “Mani and the Crystallization of the Concept of ‘Religion’ in Third
Century Iran.” Iain Gardner, Jason BeDuhn, and Paul Dilley (eds.). Mani at the Court of the
Persian Kings. Leiden: Brill.
Durkin-Meisterernst, Desmond. 2012. “Eznik on Manichaeism.” Iran and the Caucasus
16: 1–11.
Gardner, Iain. 2013. “Once More on Mani’s Epistles and Manichaean Letter- Writing.”
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 17: 291–314.
———2015. “Mani’s Last Days.” in Iain Gardner, Jason BeDuhn, and Paul Dilley (eds.). Mani
at the Court of the Persian Kings. Leiden: Brill.
Gardner, Iain, and Samuel N. C. Lieu. 2004. Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire.
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Gardner, Iain, and Leyla Rasouli-Narimani. 2017. “Patīg and Pattikios in the Manichaean
Sources.” Samuel N. C. Lieu et al. (eds.). Manichaeism East and West. Turnhout: Brepols.
Gulácsi, Zsuzsanna. 2015. Mani’s Pictures. The Didactic Images of the Manichaeans from
Sasanian Mesopotamia to Uygur Central Asia and Tang-Ming China. Leiden: Brill.
MacKenzie, David Neil. 1979/1980. “Mani’s Šābuhragān” (I/II). Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies 42: 500–34 and 43: 288–310.
Schaeder, Hans H. 1927. Urform und Fortbildungen des manichäischen Systems. Leipzig and
Berlin: Teubner.
Tardieu, Michel. 2008. Manichaeism (trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise). Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
Tubach, Jürgen, and Mohsen Zakeri. 2001. “Mani’s Name.” Johannes van Oort et al. (eds.).
Augustine and Manichaeism in the Latin West. Leiden: Brill.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE MANICHAEAN PATH

TO SALVATION
Jason David BeDuhn
M anichaeism is a now extinct religious system, a fully institutionalized “Holy

Church” that arose at the intersection of the Judeo-Christian tradition of the
Levant with religious cultures further east in Asia –in Mesopotamia, Iran, and India.
Characterized by dualism, asceticism, and an acute sense of worldwide mission, it
originated in the teaching of Mani (216–277 CE), reportedly of Parthian parentage,
but raised in an Aramaic- speaking Jewish- Christian community known as the
Elchasaites. He experienced visions in his youth that made him aware of a panthe-
istic presence in the world that he was called upon to help liberate from its suffering.
He broke with the Elchasaites circa 240 CE, visited India, and upon his return to
Mesopotamia formed his own religious community. He proselytized throughout Iran
and Mesopotamia, and sent his disciples further afield to India, Central Asia, and
the Roman Empire. By the time of his death as a prisoner of the Persian king, Mani
had succeeded in establishing a well-organized institutional structure that spread and
preserved his teachings for more than a thousand years.
Manichaeism arose in a highly cosmopolitan culture, in full awareness of ante-
cedent West Asian religio-ethnic traditions. According to Manichaean teaching, Mani
was the last of a series of divinely inspired prophets that included Zoroaster, the
Buddha, and Jesus Christ. These divine messengers were sent to particular regions
of the earth, in order to periodically reform the true message from the corruption of
time. Mani brought the latest restatement of truth, and took the novel precaution of
committing it to writing himself, as well as depicting core concepts in pictorial form,
rather than trusting his disciples to hand it down correctly. The rich Manichaean
literary and artistic tradition is now reduced to fragments discovered in the twen-
tieth century mostly in China and Egypt, precariously supplemented for the modern
researcher by polemical accounts from the religion’s enemies.
Manichaean material was an integral part of the data on the basis of which typo-
logical definitions of “Gnosticism” were formulated a century ago, and its associ-
ation with the historical phenomenon still persists in popular presentations of
Manichaeism as a religion “of the Gnostic type,” or even as the culmination of the
ancient movement of “Gnosis” (Markschies 2003). This typological association of
Manichaeism with Gnosticism originated at a time of heavy reliance on polemical
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— Jason David BeDuhn —
accounts that represented Manichaean teachings through the lens of Western philo-
sophical categories and theological themes, such as the dichotomy of matter and
spirit, the concept of a monadic essential soul, and the “fall” of that soul through
fault or sin. Interpretation of Manichaeism was shaped further by evident similarities
to Gnostic literature in its concept of an original transcendent realm, elaborate myth-
ology, and fraught relationship to Jewish narrative traditions. Subsequent work in
Manichaean Studies on the basis of new primary sources, however, has revealed the
degree to which Manichaean teaching defies familiar Western categories of thought,
and its similarities to Gnostic material are to be explained largely by common
dependence on regional mythological and apocalyptic traditions from which Gnostic
and Manichaean communities independently derive (BeDuhn 2015). In this light,
it becomes clear that Manichaean associations with late antique Gnosticism are
tenuous at best, and that it represents a distinct formulation of solutions to the sorts
of concerns that also gave rise to Gnostic traditions.
MANICHAEAN MYTHOL O G Y, CO S M O L O G Y,
AND ANTHRO P O L O G Y
Manichaean doctrine is premised on a material and ethical dualism, set forth in a
grand mythic narrative of the origin, current condition, and future resolution of the
clash between light and darkness, good and evil: the account of the “Two Natures
and Three Times.” While its detailed complexity could only have been mastered by a
small number of experts, its general tenor and recurring themes shaped the outlook
of every adherent, and was constantly reinforced through a rich hymnic tradition.
Mani related his own visions and insights to commonalities he identified among prior
religious traditions, and on this basis hypothesized an Ur-myth with its attendant
cosmogonic and cosmological models of reality. From this angle, he can be viewed as
a synthesist and syncretist; and yet he elided the different conceptions of human exist-
ence, stances towards the cosmos, and normative models of conduct found in these
antecedent traditions by the controlling premises of his own original vision.
The known cosmos is a mixture of two antithetical realms of being, originally sep-
arate and eternally incompatible. The realm of light is a wholly good, harmonious
universe in which God, the “Father of Greatness,” dwells with innumerable light
beings, one with him in substance and character. The realm of darkness is a wholly
evil, chaotic universe dominated by a King of Darkness and his female counterpart.
At the beginning of time, the realm of darkness perceives and covets the realm of
light, and attacks it, unaware of the harm contact with it will bring to itself. The
prescient Father of Greatness fends off this aggression by putting forth a series of
emanations to act out a strategy of containment and ultimate re-separation of light
and darkness. In the primordial battle, one of these emanations, the “First Man” or
“Primal Human,” armed with five elements, enters into mixture with darkness and
its antithetical five elements, constraining it and forestalling a breach of the bound-
aries of the realm of light. Everything in the known cosmos is a mixture of these
conflicted substances and forces, engaged in a struggle for mastery, and the point
of Manichaean instruction is learning to identify oneself with the forces of light
and goodness and to strive for their ultimate re-separation from entanglement with
darkness and evil.
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— The Manichaean path to salvation —
Common clichés about the Manichaean stance toward the world can now be
corrected with a more nuanced grasp distinguishing it from other dualist and anti-
cosmic positions. Mani and the Manichaeans did not consider the world to be evil, but
accepted the real presence of evil within it. They viewed the cosmos as a temporary
space –a “bubble,” as it were –inside the evil realm, within which forces of good
operate to rescue, purify, and extract portions of divinity that have become entangled
with darkness in a successful effort to defend the pristine and purely good realm of
light. It is constructed and managed by good emanations of God –in striking con-
trast to Gnostic cosmological views (BeDuhn 2016). Manichaean cosmology, then,
represents a detailed schematic of the cosmos as a mechanism of salvation, know-
ledge of which enables Manichaeans to conceptualize and operationalize their ethical
and ritual practices within a set of processes operating on a cosmic scale.
Manichaean anthropology, by contrast, understands human beings to have a
demonic origin, crafted by the forces of darkness as a counter-move to prevent the
liberation of light from its mixture in the cosmos. The human form itself is copied
from a divine model, spied by the forces of darkness as it flashed in the sky. “When the
Messenger revealed his image in the world, the archons and the powers of the world
saw his image. According to his image they built their forms, which are Adam and
Eve” (Berlin Coptic Kephalaia [= 1 Ke] 55, 133.12–15, translation by the author). This
creation of human beings in imitation of the fleeting vision of a divine form above is
an element of the story with certain parallels in the Gnostic mythologies found in some
of the Nag Hammadi texts and reported by Patristic authors. As in those accounts,
for the Manichaeans, too, the human form becomes an imprisoning depository of
divine soul in its exile from its original transcendent realm. In parallel with natural
processes of liberation throughout the cosmos, the forces of good undertake to liberate
the divine light in human beings. Appropriate to the higher consciousness achievable
by the larger concentration of soul in human beings, the process in this case takes the
form of awakening and instructing the individual into the true nature of the cosmos,
and the course of action to be taken in response to that realization.
THE MANICHAE AN S O U L

In a passage in the Coptic Manichaean Psalm-Book, the poet tells how the savior
came to him, and brought a mirror so that he could see the inner truth about himself.
A Gnostic, of course, would be shown his or her true self, a divine soul, in all of its
pristine, pure beauty, destined for heaven. The Manichaean poet, however, gazes into
the mirror and sees the universe (2 Ps 21.18–20, in Allberry 1938: 21). In another
passage reminiscent of a Gnostic scene, the savior comes to Adam, slumbering in
illusion in Eden. He awakens him and reveals to him his own soul (napšeh), spread
out through the world and subject to its trials and tribulations (Theodore bar Konai,
in Reeves 1992: 193). These two texts, supported by countless others, point to a key
aspect of the Manichaean understanding of what we may only conventionally term
the soul. Mani is quoted as saying: “You yourselves must be purifiers and redeemers
of your soul, which is established in every place, so that you [may be counted] to the
company of the fathers of light” (1 Ke 26, 77.18–20, in Gardner 1995: 78). What
does it mean to have one’s soul “established in every place”? In the Manichaean
account, the individual soul is but a fragment of an original, larger soul invested in the
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whole cosmos. This universal entity is called the Living Soul or the Living Self, and is
dispersed through the world, not only in humans but in all living things. A higher con-
centration of divine elements within Adam, however, and following Adam all humans,
creates a critical mass for consciousness. “As for Adam, the formation of his soul fits
over the correct distribution of the elements; therefore, he has intelligence surpassing
that of the other creatures and beasts” (1 Ke 64, 157.16–20, in Gardner 1995: 166).
When Manichaean sermons and hymns call upon the believer to “remember” what
he or she was before, it is to remember not a personal story of life in heaven and sub-
sequent fall, but a common story of a collective self, an entity that has undergone a
dramatic and traumatic history encompassing all life. One remembers that one is part
of a greater whole, and that a major part of suffering is one’s condition of fragmenta-
tion from this greater whole. For the Manichaeans, therefore, the soul is simply that
divine substance that has become enmeshed with darkness and evil and in that mixed
condition produced all that we see around us in the cosmos. This divine substance is
usually described in terms of five elements: ether, wind, light, water, and fire. These
living, energized materials are what sustain the universe, and each individual within
it. The Turkic Xwāstwānīft, a confessional script, has the Manichaean reciters ask for
forgiveness “if we have said that our own spirits are separate from the sun and the
moon” (§IIB, in Clark 2013: 89). Ephrem Syrus reports that the Manichaeans insist
that “honor and dignity should not be given to humanity alone, but rather to all the
portions of light because they all derive from a single great and glorious essence”
(Prose Refutations, 115.9–18, in Reeves 1997: 231).
We should not be misled by the use in Western Manichaean texts of the conven-
tional terminology for a “soul” or “spirit” into thinking they mean some sort of fixed,
monadic, personal essence. In Iranian, for example, Manichaeans used three different
terms to cover different components that might be encompassed in simpler concepts
of “soul”: gy’n, gryw, and rw’n. Fortunately, we actually have entire texts dedicated
to this subject in Iranian. If we read the hymns devoted to the Living Soul (Parthian
gryw jywndg, Middle Persian gryw zyndg), we discover that they are entirely devoted
to the tragedy of the five divine elements struggling to free themselves from darkness
(Durkin-Meisterernst 2006). Nothing in them reflects the ruminations of an indi-
vidual human soul. The Sermon on the Soul (Gy’n Wyfr’s), likewise, states that if one
is to be saved, one must know the names of the soul: ether, wind, light, water, and fire.
These five elements are in all things, and in fact make the very existence of all things
possible. The physical cosmos exists only because these divine substances provide the
essential energy of creation and reproduction (Sundermann 1997).
Yet the division and dispersal of these divine elements does not reflect their original
and natural state, wherein they constituted a single divine essence that was captured
and cut into pieces by the forces of evil at the dawn of time. All of the differentiations
of profane existence derive from evil, especially that most significant differentiation
between male and female, but including “all the likenesses and images of every shape”
(1 Ke 40, 105.7, in Gardner 1995: 109). Another passage elaborates this point:
For all these names […] are a single […] since the beginning … but they separated
into all these parts in this first contest. They became set in all these altered forms,
and these many names. Of course, if now all these varieties are laid bare, and
stripped of all these appearances, [and] parted from all these names, they will
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gather together [and] make a single form, and a single name, unaltered and
unchangeable forever in the land of their original essence, from which they were
sent forth against the enemy.
(1 Ke 72, 178.13–23, in Gardner 1995: 187–8)
The goal of overcoming separation and fragmentation, and reuniting as a single

divine essence, certainly shares some of the concerns and experiential anxiety reflected
among Gnostic traditions, but it is not achieved simply by knowing one’s true nature
and origin. One cannot simply look inside and see a soul, whole and intact, hidden
within the body. Instead, one must begin the reunification process within oneself,
because the soul is not simply hiding there to be discovered; it lies in shards awaiting
reconstruction.
T H E HUMAN INDIVIDUAL IN ITS CO NG E NITAL

CONDITION AND ITS RE F O RM
As a divided entity, the individual contains fragments of the five elements mixed in
with all kinds of contrary forces. The sheer quantity of divine material in the human
allows a certain level of consciousness to emerge, but that consciousness is always
being co-opted by the brute drives. The “mother” of the demonic drives, Az in Iranian
sources, is “mixed into this body … (and) scans for what her concupiscences and
passions can provoke” (M801, in Henning 1936: 35). Contact with the world means
contact with elements of both good and evil. These contrary forces travel everywhere
together. Humans are born from their mixture in reproduction and sustain their lives
by eating food which itself has both qualities in it. Manichaeans have responsibility
for the life in the foods they eat, and whether it is channeled into good or bad deeds,
towards the realm of light or towards the realm of darkness.
Every day, whenever we think wicked thoughts, whenever we say sinful words
that we should not say, whenever we do sinful things that we should not do, by
these evil deeds and sins we make our own spirits suffer pain. And the Light of
the Fivefold God that we eat every day goes to a wicked land because our own
spirits and our souls have behaved to the liking of the insatiable and shameless
demon of greed … by thought, word and deed, and by seeing with the eyes,
hearing with the ears, speaking with the tongue, touching with the hands, and
walking with the feet, we are forever and unceasingly causing pain to the Light of
the Fivefold God (that is) in the dry and moist earth, in the five kinds of creatures
and beings, and in the five kinds of plants and trees.
(Xwāstwānīft §XVB-C, in Clark 2013: 92–3)
In this way, evil seeks to retain control over the good divine substance and recreate
its subjugation in every generation through reproduction. Resistance to this regime
of evil within oneself and avoidance of causing harm to the divine soul in all things
provide the motive for Manichaean asceticism.
Manichaean practice entailed a rigorous behavioral code, designed to avoid
harming the world soul in all things as much as possible, as well as ritual practices
intended to aid the process of its liberation (BeDuhn 2000). Outbursts of anger,
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impatience, stupidity, greed, hatred, and violence attest to the mixture of evil with
good in the human body. The evil elements must be identified for what they are,
repented, resisted, and ultimately overcome by the Manichaean. Due to a number
of adventitious factors, individuals have different capacities for this task, and con-
sequently the community is divided into two grades. The first, that of the elect, was
made up of those willing and able to take on the most vigorous form of self-discipline,
involving celibacy, poverty, and a wandering life preaching the faith. These had the
ability to transmute material elements within their bodies, freeing soul fragments
from the food brought to them, as well as the potential to achieve liberation at death.
Those unable to adopt this life were called auditors or catechumens, who remained
engaged in hearth and home, but supported the elect while striving for advancement
in the faith through moral growth and a better rebirth.
Since all of the divine light or soul that entered into mixture with darkness or
evil did so at the dawn of time, and its liberation takes thousands of years, it passes
through many bodies and many individuals; nevertheless, it would be an oversimpli-
fication to equate this passage of the soul’s substance through time with reincarna-
tion, as that term typically is used. Ordinary humans, even Manichaean laypeople,
do not experience metempsychosis at death, that is, their intact souls do not transmi-
grate to other bodies. Rather, the separable divine elements are reprocessed into new
forms through “transfusion” or “decantation” (metaggismos). The individual identity
is disassembled in and recycled through a multitude of pathways (fourteen in all,
according to one account) to a variety of destinies. This is why Mani begged off the
obligation to depict the destiny of the Manichaean layperson in his Picture Book. The
fate of the elect and the inveterate sinner can be shown quite clearly: unified salvation
and collective damnation respectively. But the post-mortem experiences of the soul of
the auditor cannot be shown, “because he shall not be purified in a single place” (1
Ke 92, 236.3, in Gardner 1995: 242).
The fragmented, congenital condition into which all are born can only be changed
by a further infusion of divine light, a soteriological intervention in the form of an
act of grace.
[T]‌he divine nature is dead and Christ resuscitates it. It is sick and he heals it. It
is forgetful and he brings it to remembrance. It is foolish and he teaches it. It is
disturbed and he makes it whole again. It is conquered and captive and he sets it
free. It is in poverty and need, and he aids it. It has lost feeling and he quickens
it. It is blinded and he illumines it. It is in pain and he restores it. It is iniquitous
and by his precepts he corrects it. It is dishonored and he cleanses it. It is at war
and he promises it peace. It is unbridled and he imposes the restraint of law. It
is deformed and he reforms it. It is perverse and he puts it right. All these things,
they tell us, are done by Christ … for the very nature and substance of God, for
something that is as God is.
(Augustine, De nat. boni 41, in Burleigh 1953: 340)
Whether identified as Christ, or as a particular agency of the savior’s work, the “Light
Mind,” it awakens the sleeping and gathers the scattered (1 Ke 11, 44.11–12, in
Gardner 1995: 50); it takes control of the senses as the gateways of the body (1 Ke
56, 142.2–143.32, in Gardner 1995: 149–50). Freeing and gathering the divine light
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or soul within the body, the Light Mind puts it into shape, adds complementary qual-
ities, and thus forms the New Human.
The soul that wears the body, when the Light Mind will come upon it in the power
of wisdom and obedience, shall be purified and sealed and made a New Man.
There is no trouble in it, nor confusion nor disturbance … And they find you at
ease and tranquil, as you are well-governed in your behavior … Even your deeds
are orderly, being well constructed after their manner, and your wisdoms [are in]
order, as your words […] your soul is carefree within you, ascending like a bird.
(1 Ke 86, 215.1–216.13, translation by author)
The Manichaeans considered this transformational change to be a “second,” true

birth, because the soul for the first time emerges as a unified entity from its congenital
fragmentation.
It is not this birth that makes us male and female, Greeks and Jews, Scythians and
barbarians, in which God is at work when he forms a person, but it is that birth
which restores us –after we have been stripped of every difference of nationality,
sex, or condition –to oneness in the image of him who is one, that is, Christ …
A man, then, is made by God when he is made one from many, not when he is
divided from one into many. But our first, that is, our bodily birth, has divided us;
our second, that is, our intelligible and divine birth, unifies us.
(Augustine, C. Faustum 24.1, in Teske 2007: 382)
As a conglomeration of divine substance, concentrated in sufficient quantity to cross

the threshold to consciousness, the human soul possesses the potential to hold itself
together and continue along a process of ever-increasing re-unification. If it fails to
hold on to that consciousness, or if it fails to find “the open gate” through which
it can continue its ascent, that soul will, at death, fly apart once again into its sep-
arate components. It needs to find a form, a permanent cohesiveness that survives
mortality, a “body” divested of the pollutants that undermine its unity and clarity.
Manichaean teachings bring the true “commandments of the savior, [so that you]
may redeem the soul from [annihilation] and destruction” (Cologne Mani Codex [=
CMC] 84.20–85.1, in Cameron and Dewey 1979: 66–9).
Liberation and unification of the soul entails a web of interconnections between
self and cosmos. All of one’s actions are an investment of the soul’s substance into the
larger world, back into mixture from which it is trying to free itself; the traces of these
deeds must be recovered as parts of the soul. “They too shall not be lost. Rather, they
shall be drawn only to the transfusions and suffering. Afterwards they come into the
hands of the angels and are purified” (1 Ke 90, 225.27–29, in Gardner 1995: 233,
slightly modified).
They shall loosen their bond and ascend from heaven and earth, from the trees
and the fleshes. They are loosened from every place wherein they are and go to
the heights … They are cleansed in [the] firmaments of the heavens and go before
him. There are some also among his limbs that shall be freed with him, at the time
when he comes out from his body. There are others that shall be freed after him
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from the bonds of the earth and that of the creatures. [They] go and reach him
in the land of the living … He is healed, so that he will be gathered in, all of him,
and go up to the land of the living.
(1 Ke 90, 226.16–19, 227.19–228.2, in Gardner 1995: 234–5)
All of the substances and energies of our physical presence, those with which we
are born, those added to us through eating, and those dispersed by us through our
actions, are part of the “soul” that constitutes us and for which we are responsible.
One’s “soul” is not complete without an account and a “collection” of all these deeds,
the behaviors that are the manifestation of one’s self.
Just as a child represents a new parcel of divine substance, supplied ultimately by
the food eaten by its parents, and subjected once again in the evilly designed human
being, so the celibate elect produce a new parcel of divine substance from the food
offered to them as alms, channeled not into reproduction but liberating ritual.
Because it is not reinvested in a child, this parcel of light can ascend to the realm
of light, its tribulations at an end. “This soul that comes into (the elect) in the pro-
cessing of his food day by day, shall be made holy, cleansed, purified, and washed
from the adulteration of the darkness that is mixed in with it” (1 Ke 79, 191.16–19,
in Gardner 1995: 200, slightly modified). Separation of light and darkness in the
mixed elements ingested by the elect entails progressive stages of purification, each
according to a particular controlling “image.” At the first stage, those substances
belonging to the fleshly (somatic) image are peeled away from the other elements.
The latter, in turn are divided at the second stage, some becoming the psychic image
because they are not suitably prepared to be liberated, expressing themselves as
negative emotional states such as anger and desire. Finally, at the third stage, the
spiritual (pneumatic) image emerges as the New Man, “which the Light Mind forms
in him” and the “Light Virgin … sculpts and adorns” (1 Ke 114). In other words,
at each stage, the metabolized food sloughs off the elements appropriate to each
image; the rarefied and pure substance that reaches the spiritual image is on its way
to liberation.
So this is how the living limb shall be [purified] and live, the one that comes into
the body of [the] righteous one from without through the processing of food
of various kinds in this way. The living soul is cleansed entirely every day and
traverses these three images.
(1 Ke 114, 270.8–13, in Gardner 1995: 276, slightly modified)
Just as the macrocosm functions as a machine to filter light from darkness and restore
pristine duality once again, so the human microcosm operates for the same purpose,
and in much the same chemical-mechanical way. Yet, while the cosmos has been
designed and constructed for this work, the human must be converted to it through
a religious transformation.
PE RSONAL AND COSM IC E S CHATO L O G Y

The soul, unified and awakened within a person, and perfected through rigorous self-
examination and discipline, achieves salvation and ascends to the realm of light at the
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point of the individual’s death. Only the Manichaean elect attain sufficient solidifica-
tion of a coherent soul to make this ascent.
When death comes to one of the elect, Primal Man sends him a light shining deity
in the form of the Wise Guide. With him are three deities, with whom there are
a drinking vessel, clothing, headcloth, crown, and diadem of light. There accom-
panies them a virgin who resembles the soul of that member of the elect [i.e., the
form preselected by the apostle in heaven that corresponds to that individual].
Then there appear to him the devil of craving and lust and the devils. When the
member of the elect sees them, he seeks the aid of the deity who is in the form of
the Wise, and the three deities who come close to him. When the devils see them,
they turn back fleeing. Then they take the member of the elect and garb him with
the crown, the diadem, and the garments. They place the drinking vessel in his
hand and mount up with him in the Column of Praise to the sphere of the moon,
to Primal Man and al-Bahijah, the Mother of the Living, to where he at first was
in the gardens of light. As for the body which is abandoned and cast down, the
sun, the moon and the light shining deities abstract from it the forces which are
the water, fire, and ether, and which ascend to the sun, becoming divine. But the
rest of the body, all of which is darkness, is flung to the lower regions.
(al-Nadim, Fihrist, in Dodge 1970: 795)
Manichaean funeral hymns give voice to this individual soul, at its moment of crisis,
trying to preserve its unity against the onslaught of divisive forces, wishing to save
itself from dismemberment and destruction. According to a Chinese text, “If there are
any pure diannawu (Sogd. δynʾβṛ ‘elect, clerics, priests’) who in this way cling firmly
to the unsurpassed True Law and until the end of their lives do not backslide, (then)
after their death their Old Man, with the unenlightened dark power of his horde of
soldiers, will fall into hell, never to escape. Thereupon the Light-Nous, leading the
pure family of his Army of Light, will go straight into the Realm of Light; (these
masters) will have no more fear and will be perpetually joyful” (Lieu and Mikkelsen
2017: 35).
The liberation process has its end when as much of the divine soul as possible has
been extracted from mixture with darkness by both human and cosmic processes.
The cosmic superstructure collapses, and a great fire smelts the last, minute traces of
liberatable soul from the mixture, forming it into the “Last Statue,” which ascends
to complete the restoration of the realm of light (1 Ke 17, 55.21–22, in Gardner
1995: 60). The dross of this smelting process becomes an impermeable seal around
the realm of darkness, shutting it in on itself forever.
This is the way that the binding of the enemy will come about, in a fetter that is
burdensome and strong, one from which there is never escape; because [they have
achieved] this binding and bound it for ever. And they have achieved its being set
apart, and it has been set apart for ever.
(1 Ke 41, 106.1–4, in Gardner 1995: 110, slightly modified)
True to their core dualism, Manichaeans did not expect an annihilation of the principal
of evil; but its permanent incapacitation provided a suitable, if not perfect solution.
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The fly in the ointment of this ending to Manichaean salvation history was the fate of
some portion of the divine soul, which became so inextricably entwined with darkness
that it could never be freed, to the great grief of both itself and its compatriots who
must leave it behind (1 Ke 59, 149.29–150.16, in Gardner 1995: 157–8).
Therefore, due to the result of the erring souls, all the apostles and the fathers, the
revealers of the good and the true prophets, surrender [themselves] to every labor
and every aweful necessity. So that the (souls) might be saved from the second
death. Not a single one of all the apostles wished to receive his reward on earth;
but spent all their time in affliction, suffering and being crucified in their body, so
that they might redeem their souls from that loss [and] ascend to this eternal rest.
(1 Ke 59, 150.23–32, in Gardner 1995: 158)
Here the moral and the chemical categories of Manichaean discourse lose any dis-
tinction, as even the tiniest fragment of divine light possesses the personified qualities
typically associated with human individuality, responsibility, and the potential tra-
gedy of its fate.
CONCLU S IO NS
In the opening of his Gospel, Mani declares, “I have chosen the elect, and I have shown
a path to the height to those who ascend according to this truth” (CMC 67.7–11, in
Cameron and Dewey 1979: 53). We see a determined consistency in the Manichaean
conception of salvation –not just human salvation, but the salvation of all life from
death. All the elements of life are processed in analogous ways: extracted, collected,
purified, unified, formed, and so in the perfected form of “souls” or “angels” trans-
mitted to the divine realm. At the human level of this vast cosmic project, know-
ledge –gnosis –is essential. One must know the origins and nature of the world, and
of oneself. One must know the distinguishing marks of light and darkness, good and
evil. Yet this knowledge in itself does not save. Rather, it forms the basis on which the
Manichaean acts in ways that will achieve salvation. The Manichaean must follow a
strict moral code, designed to inflict the least possible harm on the divine soul in all
living things. The Manichaean must perform a ritualized scrutiny of one’s own mind,
will, intentions, emotions –sorting out what one finds there into dualistic categories,
identifying with one set and repudiating the other. The Manichaean must carry out
practices to reinforce and maintain this distinction between true self and invasive
other, including confession of sins, prayers for assistance, and hymns that repeat over
and over again the truths one has learned. And the Manichaean must play his or her
role in the ritual work of liberating the divine soul in all things, not just in oneself.
Just as the individual is a part of that being that sacrificed itself to defend the realm of
light, and accepted the suffering of mixture with darkness, so too the individual has
a mission to gather and collect its severed parts into unity again, and facilitate their
collective return home.
This powerful narrative and sense of mission propelled the “Holy Church” of Mani
from its Mesopotamian homeland to the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the Old World,
and across a millennium and a half of history. It is not possible to detail that rich his-
tory here; it entailed not only the careful transmission of Mani’s original texts and
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images, but also a dynamic and deliberate program of translating Manichaean ideas
into the vernacular of regional religious and cultural traditions. Later Manichaean
leaders followed through on Mani’s original insights into commonalities among
different religious cultures, and invested great effort in explaining Manichaean ideas
in Christian terms to Christians, Zoroastrian terms to Zoroastrians, Buddhist terms
to Buddhists, and countless other local religious vocabularies. Amid this discursive
fluidity, the core dualistic ethos with its attendant disciplinary and ritual practices
remained constant, with only minor elaboration of forms, throughout the life of the
Manichaean community, until the very existence of the community became untenable.
REFERENCES
Allberry, Charles R. C. 1938. A Manichaean Psalm-Book, Part II. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
BeDuhn, Jason. 2000. The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
———2015. “Apparatus of Salvation: Formation and Function of the Manichaean Cosmos.”
Therese Fuhrer and Michael Erler (eds.). Cosmologies et Cosmogonies dans la Littérature
Antique. Genève: Fondation Hardt: 219–52.
———2016. “Secrets of Heaven: Manichaean Cosmology in its Late Antique Context.” Anna
Van den Kerchove and Luciana G. Soares Santoprete (eds.). Gnose et Manichéisme: Entre les
oasis d’Égypte et la Route de la Soie. Hommage à Jean-Daniel Dubois. Turnhout: Brepols.
Burleigh, John H. S. 1953. Augustine: Earlier Writings. Philadelphia: Westminster.
Cameron, Ron, and Arthur J. Dewey. 1979. The Cologne Mani Codex: “Concerning the Origin
of His Body”. Missoula: Scholars Press.
Clark, Larry. 2013. Uygur Manichaean Texts, Volume II: Liturgical Texts. Turnhout: Brepols.
Dodge, Bayard. 1970. The Fihrist of al-Nadīm. New York: Columbia University Press.
Durkin-Meisterernst, Desmond. 2006. The Hymns to the Living Soul: Middle Persian and
Parthian Texts in the Turfan Collection. Turnhout: Brepols.
Gardner, Iain. 1995. The Kephalaia of the Teacher: The Edited Coptic Manichaean Texts in
Translation with Commentary. Leiden and New York: Brill.
Henning, Walter B. 1936. Ein manichäisches Bet-und Beichtbuch. Berlin: Verlag der Akademie
der Wissenschaften.
Lieu, Samuel N. C., and Gunner B. Mikkelsen in association with Lance Eccles, Enrico Morano,
Nils A. Pedersen, Nicholas Sims-Williams, and Aloïs van Tongerloo. 2017. Tractatus
Manichaicus Sinica. Pars prima: Text, Translation and Indices. Turnhout: Brepols.
Markschies, Christoph. 2003. Gnosis: An Introduction. London: T. & T. Clark.
Reeves, John C. 1992. Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants
Traditions. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press.
———1997. “Manichaean Citations from the Prose Refutations of Ephrem.” Paul Mirecki
and Jason BeDuhn (eds.). Emerging from Darkness: Studies in the Recovery of Manichaean
Sources. Leiden, New York, and Köln: Brill.
Sundermann, Werner. 1997. Der Sermon von der Seele. Eine Lehrschrift des östlichen
Manichäismus. Edition der parthischen und soghdischen Version mit einem Anhang von
Peter Zieme. Die türkischen Fragmente des “Sermon von der Seele”. Turnhout: Brepols.
Waldschmidt, Ernst, and Wolfgang Lentz. 1926. Die Stellung Jesu in Manichäismus.
Berlin: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
INSIGHT AND MEANS IN CHINESE

MANICHAEAN TEXTS
Gunner B. Mikkelsen
I t is evident from the preserved Manichaean texts in Chinese that Manichaean

missionaries to China emphasized and based their mission on their universalist
prophetological doctrine that Mani and the Buddha Śākyamuni were both Light-
envoys who had brought the truth to humankind. In the official presentation of Mani
and his religion to the Tang emperor Xuanzong by a Manichaean bishop in 731, i.e.,
the Compendium of the Teachings of Mani, the Buddha of Light (Moni guangfo jiaofa
yilüe 摩尼光佛教法儀略), a copy of which was found in the famous Mogao “library”
cave at Dunhuang in the first decade of the twentieth century (British Library, S.3969
and Bibliothèque Nationale, P.3884), Mani carries the title of “Buddha of Light”
(guangfo 光佛, an epithet of Amitābha; col. 11; Haloun and Henning 1952: 189 and
pl. 1; cf. Tajadod 1990: 88, 176–7) and is hailed as a “King of Law who has perfect
insight (knowledge, gnosis)” (juzhi fawang 具智法王; cols. 6, 10; a dharmarāja who
has jñāna [see ch. 26]) and a “Healing King,” distributor of the “remedy of the Law”
(fa 法; Dharma) (cols. 12–13). His miraculous birth (emerging from his mother’s chest)
in a royal palace in “Assuristan” is described in terms similar to that of the Buddha
Śākyamuni (cols. 18ff.), who himself is referred to as a sage, who –just like the sages
Mani and Laozi, China’s “Old Master” –had “perfected his nature” and “become
awakened to the Way (Dao 道)” (cols. 14–15). Mani, the Buddha of Light, “under-
stood the Way” and the “principles” of Light and Darkness, and, importantly, like the
Buddha Śākyamuni he spent his life expounding the doctrine of skillful or expedient
means (Chin. fangbian 方便; Sanskrit upāya): “For sixty years (Mani) elucidated (the
meaning and practice of) skillful means” (col. 30; Haloun and Henning 1952: 191).
The concept of skillful means is prominent in Mahāyāna texts, expounded espe-
cially in the Lotus Sūtra, the Teachings of Vimalakīrti Sūtra, and the Upāyakauśalya
Sūtra, in which it denotes stratagems, devices, or expedients employed by buddhas,
bodhisattvas, and other enlightened practitioners, who use their “skill in means” (Skt.
upāya kauśalya) to help sentient beings to enlightenment, open the Dharma to them,
and guide them on the road to nirvāṇa (see esp. Pye 1978 [2003]). Skill in means
is –as concisely defined by Edward Conze –“the ability to bring out the spiritual
potentialities of different people by statements or actions which are adjusted to their
needs and adapted to their capacity for comprehension” (1980: 48). In Buddhism,
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— Insight and means in Chinese texts —
skillfulness and insight are interdependent; without insight into the true character
of things skillful means cannot be employed effectively, and without skillful means
insight cannot be imparted in people, or people cannot be drawn to the Dharma.
Insight and skillful means are, it appears, as interdependent in Chinese Manichaean
texts as in Mahāyāna texts. Manichaean gods, or “buddhas” as they are called repeat-
edly, and especially the Light-Nous (Light Mind), the main protagonist in the micro-
cosmic battle against the forces of darkness in the human mind and body, employed
skillful means, and the Manichaean Elect, thanks in particular to the Light-Nous’s
efforts, brought awakening/enlightenment and insight to people by employing accom-
modative means in their missionary work.
T HE LIGHT-N OUS, INS IG HT, AND M E ANS

In one of the gāthās preserved in the Chinese Manichaean Hymnscroll from Dunhuang
(British Library, S.2659), the Light-Nous (Chin. Huiming 惠明 [= 慧明 “Wise Light”])
is praised as a King of Law, who is “ignorant of nothing,” draws people away from
“deadly error,” and “teaches good sons with wisdom (zhihui 智惠; Buddh. Skt. prajñā)
and skillful means (fangbian)” leading to the liberation of the Light-bodies (i.e. five
sons of First Man, five-part soul) from fetters, and the return of the “Buddha-family”
(fojia 佛家; Skt. buddhakula, in Mahāyāna five qualities or aspects of prajñā) to the
Realm of Light, where they will be eternally happy (cols. 229–34; Tsui 1943: 195–6).
The gāthā also expresses that comprehension of the “five lights,” awareness/know-
ledge of the incarceration of the “Light-power,” and decision to cultivate the true
Dharma will lead to redemption (col. 228).
The salvific work of the Light-Nous is the central theme of the “Sermon on the
Light-Nous” attributed to Mani. The importance of this text in the Manichaean
church in East and West is indicated by the number of versions of it in Parthian,
Sogdian, Old Uyghur, and Chinese, discovered at Turfan, and the inclusion of a
version in the Coptic Kephalaia (38th chapter) from Medinet Madi and the existence
of a lengthy well-preserved version in Chinese from Dunhuang, the so-called Traité
(National Library of China; BD00256), which probably dates to the second half of
the eighth century or first half of the ninth. In the prologue to the Buddhisized (in
fact, “sutrafied”; Mikkelsen 2014) sermon in the Traité, the disciple Addā asks Mani,
the Light-envoy, about the employment of skillful means by “the various hallowed
ones who ever appeared in the world” –how skillful means were used in the world
mission “to rescue the Light-nature (mingxing 明性) and free it from the multitude
of sufferings so that it might finally achieve peace and happiness” (cols. 2–3; trans.
Lieu and Mikkelsen 2017 [hereafter Tractatus]: 3), i.e., reach the Realm of Light (anle
安樂; a name for Buddhist Skt. Sukhāvatī, the Pure Land of Amitābha; Mikkelsen
2009). In his description of the Light-Nous’s work as redeemer of the Light-nature
(soul) incarcerated in the human body or Old Man, Mani explains that the Light-
Nous employs “excellent skillful means” or “skill in means” (shan fangbian 善方便;
upāya kauśalya) by which he “seeks and rescues the Light-nature in the carnal body
so that it might be delivered” (cols. 71–2; trans. Tractatus: 19). He makes the soul
redeemable by causing five virtues called “Five Gifts” (wushi 五施), i.e., Compassion,
Sincere Faith, Perfection (or Contentment), Patience, and Wisdom, to “emerge by
transformation” (huachu 化出) from his own five limbs –Light-Thought (Nous),
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248
— Gunner B. Mikkelsen —
Light-Feeling, Light-Reflection, Light-Intellect, and Light-Reasoning – and “cover”

the five Light-elements incarcerated in the body, viz. Pure Air (ether), Wonderful Wind,
Light-Power, Pure Water, and Pure Fire (cols. 72–4; Tractatus: 19). The Light-Nous is
described as a “skillful husbandman” (an image paralleled in the Kephalaia; 1 Ke 96;
Böhlig 1966: 245.8–16; Gardner 1995: 251) who levels the five lands of darkness and
with his “sharp axe of wisdom” fells the five poisonous trees of death, i.e., the trees
of Unenlightened Dark Thought, Feeling, Reflection, Intellect, and Reasoning, and
then plants his own five jeweled trees of light, i.e. of Thought, etc., on the five puri-
fied lands (cols. 147–83; Tractatus: 39–46). The actions of the Light-Nous are com-
parable to those of all Light-envoys bringing the true religion to mankind with the
purpose of rescuing the suffering “five Light-bodies,” who “forgot their feelings, as
if mad or drunk” after their imprisonment by the Demoness of Greed (Tanmo 貪魔;
Parthian Āz “Greed,” the evil mother of all demons) in the human body, resulting in
that person becoming deluded and “confused in his mind” and forgetful about his
origins and “what formerly gave him joy,” as if he was hanging head-down in a cage
of intertwined venomous snakes (cols. 43–8; Tractatus: 13).
If an Envoy of Light appears in the world to instruct and convert the multitude
of beings and cause them to be delivered of all their sufferings, first he causes the
sound of the Wonderful Law (miaofa 妙法; Skt. saddharma) to descend through
the gateway of their ears; next he enters the old dwelling and with great magical
spells, he imprisons the multitude of venomous snakes and all the ferocious
beasts, no longer allowing them to remain at liberty. Furthermore, armed with
the hatchet of wisdom, he cuts and fells the poisonous trees, and tears up their
roots together with all the other weeds and grasses. At the same time, he orders
a palace purified and splendidly adorned and a throne (for the preaching) of the
Law placed there, then he sits on it. In the same way, when a king has crushed a
malevolent enemy kingdom, within it he adorns an elevated hall, and installing
a jewelled throne, he judges all men fairly, good and evil; this Light-Nous Envoy
acts in the same manner.
(Traité, cols. 52–7; trans. Tractatus: 15)
It is possible that the human soul already from the beginning of an individual’s life
possessed its own five limbs, Thought and the other mental faculties. As Werner
Sundermann has pointed out, the Parthian version of the Sermon states that the Light-
Nous “raises” or “lifts up” (pdr’zyd) the five limbs of the soul before planting the
blessed trees. The limbs may have been suppressed by dark powers, and he redeems
them (Sundermann 1995 [2001]: 258; 1992: 66–7, §26; Tractatus: 38). A fragment of
a parallel in Old Uyghur similarly has: “… he pulls above and raise[s …] the limbs of
the soul …” (U199; Zieme 1995: 260–1; Tractatus: 38). The corresponding passage
in the Traité reads: “Then the five kinds of pure limbs of the Light-nature were grad-
ually able to develop; these five limbs are: Thought, Feeling, Reflection, Intellect,
and Reasoning” (cols. 153–4; trans. Tractatus: 39; see also Chavannes and Pelliot
1911: 559, and Schmidt-Glintzer 1987a: 88; further on the matter: Tractatus: xxxix–
xl). In any case, the presence of the five limbs, Thought, etc., in the human mind is
essential to its receptiveness and capability to achieve gnosis, and it is clear that the
Light-Nous fells the evil trees with all their bad qualities and plants the good trees
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with good qualities, turning the Old Man into a New. As Mani then explains, when the
five lands of the five limbs are entered by the twelve forms of the Light-Nous, i.e., the
qualities of Great Royalty, Wisdom, Constant Victory, Joy, Zeal, Equanimity, Faith,
Patience, Honest Thought, Meritorious Deeds, Complete Concord, and Total Light
of Within and Without, “an immeasurable light grows in them” and each bears fruit
which manifest themselves in all Manichaean followers (cols. 220–4; Tractatus: 57).
THE ELECT, INSIGHT, AND M E ANS

One of the five jeweled trees of life planted by the Light-Nous in the ground of the
“original nature” (benxing 本性, col. 171; also guangming benxing 光明本性 “ori-
ginal nature of light,” cols. 35–6) or, as it also called, “own-nature” (zixing 自性; col.
185) –a term used in Mahāyāna Tathāgatagarbha sūtras (Skt. svabhāva “own-being,”
inherent existence) for the true nature of the Buddha –consists of qualities and skills
essential to the Elect’s ability to effectively perform missionary work.
Then he planted the Tree of Reasoning. The root of this Tree is Wisdom, its trunk
Complete Understanding of the meaning of the Two Principles (i.e. of Light and
Darkness), its branches Skill in debating the Radiant Law, its leaves Familiarity
with using arguments in a manner appropriate to the circumstances, Ability to
crush heterodox doctrines, and Honour and Affirmation of the True Law; its
fruits are Skill at questioning and answering, and Excellence in appropriate argu-
ment according to the circumstances; its taste is Excellence in using parables to
make men understand, and its colour is the Agreeable and Pleasant Words which
make one’s expositions pleasing to the multitude.
(cols. 179–83; trans. Tractatus: 45–6)
Mani explains that the Elect must constantly apply themselves to the study and
teaching of wisdom (zhihui 智惠; cf. Buddh. Skt. prajñā) and skillful means (cols. 242–,
295–6) in order to be “continually capable of bringing joy to the multitude” (289–90)
and “cause them to take the right course” (292–3) (Tractatus: 63, 79, 81). Enlightened
masters must employ them in their teaching of all people as effective weapons against
the forces of darkness, causing their darkened minds to become enlightened. As the
Traité and other Chinese texts clearly demonstrate, the Manichaean Elect mastered
techniques of accommodation: like Mani they skillfully taught “according to the
circumstances.” The texts are teeming with Buddhist technical terminology (Schmidt-
Glintzer 1987b; Bryder 1994; terms transcr. from Skt.: Mikkelsen 2006: 100–12)
and verbiage, known and attractive to many Chinese, and not least –as one would
expect – soteriology-related; e.g., foxing 佛性 “buddha-nature” (Hymnscroll, cols. 39,
76, 93, 105, 117, 395; Skt. buddhatā) and faxing 法性 “dharma-nature” (Hymnscroll,
cols. 56–9, 75; Skt. dharmatā) –in addition to the terms mentioned here.
A large part of Mani’s sermon (col. 230–316; Tractatus: 58–85) is dedicated to the
twelve qualities (“forms”) or jeweled trees of the Light-Nous that the holy denavars,
the enlightened Elect, must possess and let grow within them in order to effectively
carry out their work. Mani concludes his sermon by stating that the fruits of these trees
will lead to everybody (everyone possessing a body) having the ability to escape the
cycle of “birth and death” (shengsi 生死; the Buddhist term for transmigration; Skt.
249
250
saṃsāra) and victoriously enter the “Place of Peace and Happiness” (anle chu 安樂處,
Sukhāvatī, i.e., the Light-world; cols. 314–16; Tractatus: 85). Mani, the “Thus-come”
(如來 rulai; Skt. tathāgata), is then praised for his sermon by the gathered mushe 慕闍
(teachers), who assure him that they will nourish the twelve unsurpassed jeweled trees
at all times to ensure their perfection.
In this way, the Water of the Law will wash away all our impurities and our
serious blemishes so that our Light-Nature will be constantly pure.
In this way, the Medicine of the Law and great magical spells will exorcise and
treat our grave illnesses from ages past so that they may be entirely removed.
In this way, girt with the strong armament of wisdom, we shall stand up to our
hateful enemies and on every occasion obtain a crushing victory.
In this way, adorned with the marvelous clothes and head-dresses of all forms,
we shall at all times obtain perfection.
In this way, the Light-Models of the original nature will be imprinted on us so
that they are never lost.
In this way, the varied flavors of sweet viands will fully satisfy us, removing all
hunger and thirst.
In this way, countless strains of wonderful music will delight us, driving away
all worries.
In this way, extraordinary jewels of every kind will be bestowed on us, making
us rich and opulent.
In this way, the Light-Net will trawl for us in the sea of fire, depositing us safely
in the precious ship.
(cols. 332–9; Tractatus: 89–90)
Mani’s sermon made their hearts/minds become “aware” (kaiwu 開悟) enabling them
to “walk the straight path.” They “only wish that in the future all Light-natures may
be able to encounter a Gateway of Light such as this; if they see it and listen (at it),
as did the hallowed ones of the past and as we ourselves have done today, then their
hearts, hearing the joyful news of the Law, will be able to open and become aware;
by worshipping deeply and making obeisance, they will accept (this teaching) without
feeling doubt or anxiety” (cols. 342–4; Tractatus: 89–90).
INSIGHT AND L IB E RATIO N

Individual awakening and salvation, the essentiality of complete knowledge for eman-
cipation and return to the Realm of Light, etc., are recurrent themes in the Manichaean
Hymnscroll. A stanza of a hymn concerning the five lights states that people who
“suffer in the transmigration of hell, in the fire of the kalpa of destruction and the
eternal confinement, do this because they do not recognize (shi 識, also “be aware of,
know, understand”; cf. Skt. jñāna/vijñāna) the five Light-bodies (i.e., the light-soul)
and therefore are “severed from the Country of Peace and Happiness” (col. 247; trans.
Tsui 1943: 197). By examining carefully and understanding the reasons why “the five
buddhas of light” have come into the material world, one becomes a “wise one” (zhizhe
智者) who stops all evil doings and then is reunited with the “originator,” the Father of
Light/Greatness (cols. 245–6). As explained in a hymn on “impermanence,” wise men
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251
will wake, know, and then cultivate themselves by “parting with affections, prosperity,
and pleasures” and thus “be spared from sinking into the three poisons (Buddh. desire/
concupiscence, anger/resentment, and folly/stupidity) and five desires (Buddh. desires
of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body), and as a result “gain nirvāṇa, the Pure Land
(jing guotu 淨國土)” (cols. 118–19). The awakened knowing person must “cultivate
industriously his wisdom and abide by the Law and give up altogether all bad habits
and manners” (114). A man “who seeks liberation, must become aware and under-
stand,” and he must “give alms, practise fasting, read and study diligently,” “accept the
pure commandments,” “follow good rules and manners,” etc. (112–13). Knowledge of
the divine origin and “history” of the light/buddha-“nature” within oneself is essen-
tial for its liberation; knowledge leads to self-cultivation, correct action, and good
karma, which in turn leads to (eventual) escape from the birth-death cycle and return
to the Realm of Light (see also ch. 21). This understanding the Manichaeans seemed to
have shared, to a great extent, with the Buddhists, and their Chinese audiences would
have seen Manichaean soteriology as closely akin to Buddhist. How closely related
Manichaean soteriology is to Buddhist soteriology is not fully understood, but it is dis-
tinctly possible that the Manichaean Elect composing texts in Chinese and translating
texts into Chinese in the eighth century dressed some of their teachings in a Buddhist
garb not solely for missionary purposes.
Figure 22.1 Fourteenth-century relief of Mani, the Buddha of Light,

in Cao’an temple, Jinjiang, Fujian
Source: photo G. Mikkelsen
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25
REFERENCES
Böhlig, Alexander. 1966. Kephalaia. Zweite Hälfte. Lieferung 11/ 12 (Seite 244– 291).
Manichäische Handschriften der staatlichen Museen Berlin. Band 1. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Bryder, Peter. 1994. “Buddhist Elements in Manichaeism.” Ugo Bianchi (ed.). The Notion of
“Religion” in Comparative Research. Selected Proceedings of the XVIth Congress of the
International Association for the History of Religions, Rome, 3rd-8th September, 1990.
Roma: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider: 487–90.
Chavannes, Édouard, and Paul Pelliot. 1911. “Un traité manichéen retrouvé en Chine.” Journal
asiatique, 10ème sér., 18: 499–617.
Conze, Edward. 1980. A Short History of Buddhism. London: Allen and Unwin.
Gardner, Iain. 1995. The Kephalaia of the Teacher: The Edited Coptic Manichaean Texts in
Translation with Commentary. Leiden: Brill.
Haloun, Gustav, and Walter B. Henning. 1952. “The Compendium of the Doctrines and Styles
of the Teachings of Mani, the Buddha of Light.” Asia Major NS 3: 184–212.
Lieu, Samuel N. C., and Gunner B. Mikkelsen in association with Lance Eccles, Enrico Morano,
Nils A. Pedersen, Nicholas Sims-Williams, and Aloïs van Tongerloo. 2017. Tractatus
Manichaicus Sinica. Pars prima: Text, Translation and Indices. Turnhout: Brepols.
Mikkelsen, Gunner. 2006. Dictionary of Manichaean texts, Vol. III. Texts from Central Asia
and China, Part 4: Dictionary of Manichaean texts in Chinese. Turnhout: Brepols.
——— 2009. “Sukhāvatī and the Light-World: Pure Land Elements in the Chinese Manichaean
Eulogy of the Light-World.” Jason D. BeDuhn (ed.). New Light on Manichaeism: Papers
from the Sixth International Congress on Manichaeism. Leiden: Brill: 201–12.
———2014. “Manichaeism Meets Chinese Buddhism: Some Comments on the ‘Sutrafication’
of the Sermon on the Light-Nous.” Zhang Xiaogui 张小贵, Wang Yuanyuan 王媛媛, and
Yin Xiaoping 殷小平 (eds.). San yi jiao yanjiu –Lin Wushu xiansheng guxi jinian lunwenji
三夷教研究 — 林悟殊先生古稀纪念论文集. Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe: 50–63.
Pye, Michael. 1978. Skilful Means: A Concept in Mahayana Buddhism. London: Duckworth.
2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2003.
Schmidt-Glintzer, Helwig. 1987a. Chinesische Manichaica. Mit textkritischen Anmerkungen
und einem Glossar. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
—— —1987b. “Das buddhistische Gewand des Manichäismus. Zur buddhistischen
Terminologie in den chinesischen Manichaica.” Walther Heissig and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit
(eds.). Synkretismus in den Religionen Zentralasiens. Ergebnisse eines Kolloquiums vom
24.5. bis 26.5.1983 in St. Augustin bei Bonn. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz: 76–90.
Sundermann, Werner. 1992. Der Sermon vom Licht- Nous. Eine Lehrschrift des östlichen
Manichäismus. Edition der parthischen und soghdischen Version. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
———1995 [2001]. “Who is the Light-νοῦς and what does he do?” Aloïs van Tongerloo in coll.
with Johannes van Oort (eds.). The Manichaean ΝΟΥΣ. Proceedings of the International
Symposium Organized in Louvain from 31 July to 3 August 1991. Turnhout: Brepols: 255–
65 (Repr. in Christiane Reck et al. (eds.). Manichaica Iranica: Ausgewählte Schriften /von
Werner Sundermann. Roma: Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, vol. 1: 27–38 with
addenda et corrigenda).
Tajadod, Nahal. 1990. Mani le Bouddha de Lumière: Catéchisme manichéen chinois. Paris: Cerf.
Tsui Chi. 1943. “Mo Ni Chiao Hsia Pu Tsan: The Lower (Second?) Section of the Manichæan
Hymns.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 11 (1): 174–219.
Zieme, Peter. 1995. “Neue Fragmente des alttürkischen Sermons vom Licht-Nous.” Christiane
Reck and Peter Zieme (eds.). Iran und Turfan: Beiträge Berliner Wissenschaftler, Werner
Sundermann zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz: 251–76.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FROM “ZURVANISM” TO MAZDAK
Garry W. Trompf and Milad Milani
C ommonly taken as a Zoroastrian “heresy,” the accentuation of Zurvan (divinity

of Time) as generating the two Great Spirits, the beneficent Ohrmazd and malevo-
lent Ahriman, as a singular primordial deity behind them, bears the appearance of “a
Gnostic turn” in ancient Iranian religious history. Mainstream Zoroastrian dualism
has Ahura Mazda, the “Wise Lord” behind all things, bringing forth “Twin Spirits”
(mainyū) (Gathas, Yasn. 30. 3–4), first an extension of Himself as Holy Spirit (Spenta
Mainyu) and then his own Adversary (originally “the Lie” or Drug, later named Angra
Mainyu, Ahriman, etc.) (e.g., 45. 2; 47. 2; 49. 2; Avestan yasht 15. 43; [Greater]
Bundahishn 12; with Aristotle apud Diogenes Laeertius, Vitae philosophorum 1.2.6).
The teaching of Zoroaster (Zarathustra) in traditional (Medo-) Persian understanding
is that of a distinctly ethical dualism: followers are enjoined to choose Ahura Mazda
or Ohrmazd (Wise Lord) and Asha, the truth and righteous way, against the evil
of the Destroyer (Angra Mainyu) or false one (Drujvant). If in Zoroaster’s hymns
the Spenta Mainyu is Creator of our world (e.g., 46. 9; 51. 7), He is an extension
of Ohrmazd, who alone in due course is taken in the mainstream tradition as “the
Creator” (Boyce 1975–1991: vol. 2, 119–20) as well as final Victor over the “accursed
one” (as a still recited later creed has it: Pandnāmak-i Zartusht, 2, 12). The question
as to when, how, and why the principle or creative being of Zurvan was posited as
prior both to the good Ahura Mazda and wicked Ahriman has been a matter of schol-
arly controversy (starting from Spiegel 1871–1878: vol. 2, 175–87), and one impin-
ging on continuing attempts to fathom so-called Gnosticism.
According to the one substantial monograph on “Zurvanism,” by Oxonian Robert
Zaehner (1913–1974), who patiently mustered the primary sources, what is called
the Mazdaeist (or “orthodox Zoroastrian”) establishment was settled during Persia’s
Sasanian dynasty (224–651 CE). On Zaehner’s reading, efforts at restoring the faith,
largely through long toil of high priest (or Magus) Kartir Hangirpe, meant that
deviant positions not in conformity with the teachings in the “canonical Avesta,”
including the accentuation of Zurvan, faced suppression. Anti-heretical strictures
occurred under Shapur I (240–270), Bahram I (271–274), Shapur II (309–379), and
especially Chosroes I (531–579) (Dēnkart 4; Letter of Tansar 3; Kartir Inscr. [Naqsh-e
Rajab]), with Zurvanists being referred to as materialists or Zandīks alongside
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— G a r r y W. T r o m p f a n d M i l a d M i l a n i —
the Gnostic- related Manichaeans whom Kartir notoriously persecuted (Zaehner

1955: esp. 23–4, 40–7, 267). With certain swings, however, Zurvanists did have their
times of support from some rulers, Zaehner singling out Yezdigird I (399–420) and II
(438–457), but if there was any “official religious change” it would only be to correct
the Zoroastrian cosmogonic myth, clarifying that a single principle lay behind all,
so giving the Zoroastrian “church” better philosophical legitimation. Not affecting
developing ritualism, Zurvanism’s basic impact was to encourage a materialist and
fatalist outlook toward behavior, useful for maintaining control, stratification, and
social roles. Far from being Gnostic, on Zaehner’s assessment Zurvanists taught that
everything depended on being “favored by time” or not (see Bund. 1.25; Menoki-i
Chrat 22–3, 47, 51), thus explaining the later, non-theistic-looking strand in Persian
thought utterly preoccupied with destiny, as with Abu Firdousi in the Shahnameh
(Zaehner 1955: 242–6, 256–7, 271–7; 1961: 236–7) and then Omar Khayyām’s
Rubāiyāt (e.g., Pourhosseini 2014).
Other scholars reacted against Zaehner. London’s Mary Boyce (1957: 305; 1975–
1991: vol. 2, 233–41; 1979: 68–71) stressed the venerableness of the Zurvanist view,
with its half-a-
millennium- long persistence before Sasanian times reflecting pos-
sible Median input, certainly Greek philosophical influence on Iran from the late
Achaemenian times into the syncretistic Hellenistic and Parthian periods (ca. 300 BCE
on). For Boyce Zurvanist views must have received more continuous royal backing
under the Sasanians (even by Shapur I), allowing it periods to act with organiza-
tion against Christians and Manichaeans. Sufficient prior scholarship, in her view,
had Mazdaists and Zurvan followers accepting each other as “two branches of the
Zoroastrian church,” not bitter rivals. By propensity Zurvanism was more out-
wardly accommodating, incorporating those famed “Chaldaic”-Babylonian astro-
logical preoccupations with time and fate, as well as the Hellenistic cosmological
stress in positing a primal unity, not duality (the Greeks also absorbing the Great
Year and astronomic lore from Mesopotamia). Boyce’s arguments loosely connect
to the Germanic lines of scholarship tracing the Gnostic thread in ancient reli-
gion back to Persia, from Wilhelm Bousset ([1919] 1979) through Henrik Nyberg
(1938: 271–4) to Geo Widengren (1938: 94–145), with Zurvan as Lord of Destiny
said to inform not only the Hellenistic cults of Chronos Apeiros and Aion (personified
Time), but also “classic Gnostic” texts on ages and powers (aiōnes) named in great
detail (Reitzenstein 1921: 151–250). That both Zurvan and/or Ahriman may have
figured in the Mithraic mystery religion popular among Roman soldiery (cf. Bivar
1975: 277) has suggested a westward infiltration of Zoroastrianism in its Zurvanic
guises (Zaehner 1955: 30, 38, 137–43). In more recent critical work reacting against
Zaehner, however, by Israeli iranologist Shaul Shaked (1992), who is appreciated by
Dutch classicist Albert de Jong (1997: 335–7), the significant absence of any specific
ancient (as against later Islamic) references to Zurvanis as heretics makes it obvious
that Zurvanism has been over-demarcated as “a coherent religious entity” in Western
scholarship, even Boyce succumbing to a forced “social fabrication” of it.
ZURVANITE G NO S IS ?
It makes one wonder whether we are left with various “Zurvanite faces of
Zoroastrianism,” unsure if we can assert they are in some sense “Gnostic.” Of course we
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25
— From “Zurvanism” to Mazdak —
can still ask, on what grounds would we at least associate “Zurvanism” with Gnostic
tendencies? First, Zurvan is posited as a somewhat uninvolved (though not concealed)
deity lying behind and generating the divine twins Ohrmazd and Ahriman, who then
become the lively protagonists in the battle between good and evil through cosmo-
history. When late Neoplatonist Damascius fled to Chosroes I’s court, he recalled an
allusion to relevant views of late Achaemenian times by the Aristotelian Eudemus
of Rhodes (320s BCE, after Alexander’s conquests). For “the Magi and all Aryans,”
in Eudemus’s words (Dubitationes et solutiones de principiis, apud Damascius, De
Principiis 20), out of “everything wholly intelligible and unified, called Place (Topos)
or some say Time (Chronos), there issues either a good and bad god, or light and
darkness before these.” The magoi posit “a double ‘cosmic-clustering’ (sustoichia) of
higher beings,” Ohrmazd governing one, Ahriman the other. Here the tantalizing idea
of the cosmos arising through a duality seems bettered by appealing to a primal One,
a philosophically sophisticated, Hellenistic move, though nonetheless still honoring
the oldest (Gathic) teaching of Zoroaster, who pictured Ahura Mazda and the Drug as
“twins,” as both creators (of “Life and Non-Life”), and each heading many good and
evil spirits –the choices of two bad ones (daevas) first bringing pollution to mortals
(Yasn. 30: 4, 6, 10). In an anonymous Syriac source “On the Errors of the Magi,”
Zurvan also unfolds divine extensions of himself as growth, maturity, and decay (a
very Hellenistic paradigm; Trompf 1979: 22–83), indicating background governance
but not direct intervention in the outcome of the cosmic Ages. These features, the
concepts of a remote First Cause,” of “the lesser Creator” (mainly Ohrmazd), and “the
Three Times,” are sufficient in Boyce’s mind to help “account for the enormous influ-
ence” this Zurvanite thrust “came to exert on many Gnostic faiths” and their preoccu-
pation with aeonic emissions from the Hidden God (1979: 69–70).
A complication presents itself, however, when details of the myth of Zurvan are
considered in related versions by early Church Fathers, especially the Syrian Theodore
of Mopsuestia (apud Photius, Bibliotheca 81) and the Armenian Eznik of Kolb
(Refutationes 2.1) of the fifth century CE, both deprecating the narrative. The myth
implies Zurvan, Lord of time, is flawed. On Eznik’s account, he offers sacrifices for a
millennium so as to generate a son, but because he doubted their efficacy, Ahriman, who
learns from his twin Ohrmazd before birth that the first-born would be king, pierces
Zurvan’s womb before his brother emerges. Putrid, dark, and rejected as he is, Ahriman
impels Zurvan to keep his promise about the firstborn and is allowed “to rule the world
for 9,000 years,” albeit doing so “under Ohrmazd’s supervision,” with the latter taking
the final rule thereafter as the real result of Time’s sacrifices. Not only does Time prove
rather inadequate, though, but the Evildoer has the lion’s share of manipulation over
creation, so that, as in “the classic Gnostic” picturing (as also in Zoroastrian-affected
Manichaeism), the present human condition is the bleak result of a cosmic tragedy.
Interestingly, protagonists for the Gnostic(-related) dualist Manichaean religion
reacted against such a cosmogony that twinned light and darkness instead of recog-
nizing a great chasm between them (for the texts Zaehner 1955: 421, 439). This may
well have been because they recognized in Zurvanist teaching a close competitor, for
under Shapur I (in ca. 241) Zurvān was the name Mani chose for the supreme Father of
Greatness and Light (Kephalaia 21), and Ohrmazd gets ranked as the Primal Heavenly
Man who comes to fight for the original gods of light against Ahriman, the Devil, and
his dark minions (Manichaean Xuāstvānīft 1). Meanwhile, if Zurvanism was a form
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256
of Zoroastrianism or a special deviation from it in Sasanian times, it certainly did pre-

sent problems for the Mazdaist mainstream believers, since it put in doubt the positive
value of Creation by Ohrmazd. How better to handle Hellenistic-looking philoso-
phizing than by restricting the role of time in the “decidedly orthodox” Bundahishn
(e.g., 1.17–25; and also the Denkard (e.g., 3 192, 277), to confirm that Ohrmazd
was always basically in control of things throughout cosmic history? This would also
account for compromises in the Zurvanists’ cosmo-history after the Muslim takeover
of Persia, that concede more to Ohrmazd’s creative role. In the standard “Mazdaean-
orthodox” depiction of the millennial Ages, during four tri-millennial periods, in the
first period Ahura Mazda as the Creator is dominant in the contest between good and
evil and only in the third (our time) does the Evil One hold too much advantage (Bund. 1,
3, 30, 34; Denk. 3.166, 368; cf. Theopompus apud Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride
46; with Boyce 1975–1991: vol. 1, 230–5). In a thirteenth-century dialogue between
Zurvanite-affected Magians and Muslim doctors, the Ohrmazd/Ahriman struggle
is generally tighter overall, with appeals to Time explaining it. Time was the only
uncreated thing, and “Time, eternal, is the Creator,” so that whatever Ohrmazd did
as Creator, when he made manifest “time of the long dominion” (i.e., the millennium-
long zodiac phases and all cosmo-history) and brought everything into being in the
first three thousand years, “he did with the aid of Time,” whose reason for creating
Ahriman was a matter of dispute. That “evil should ever have been created” causes
only “a veil” of incomprehension, believers being left “to busy themselves in service”
and “leave to God His own concerns” ([second] ‘Ulemā i Islām [Zaehner 1957, doc.
Z37], 8, 10, 15, 17, 21–3, 30–1, 36, 50).
If the Zurvanite thread has a Gnostic-associated aspect to it, it lies in the sense
of a predetermined problematic and destabilized arrangement of things toward
which people are resigned to suffering or from which immortal souls might even-
tually escape (‘Ulemā, 21, 38). In Zurvanist thought the world is quite a Gnostic-
looking one of terrible faults. In any account of “the Gnostic World,” we should
not be deterred from looking back in time to ponder possible Zurvanic influences
on “classic Gnostic” concepts of divine “hierarchies” issuing from “one Supreme
Being” (Boyce 1975–1991: vol. 3, 464). Intriguingly, there are fragmentary hints of
Zurvanite speculations of emanations from Infinite Time (Zaman i akanārak), as
Long Dominion, Permanence, Discomfort, Fate, Desire to Create, that imply an inner
cosmic slide into ambiguity (Bund. 1.22), and in turn Ohrmazd and Ahriman work
through cosmic extensions of their power, by good Amesha Spentas and bad daevas
respectively (Denk. 4.3–10, 38). But perhaps we should also look forward. The con-
cern with such divine extensions shows up in another deviation of Zoroastrianism
close to the incursion of Islam –Mazdakism. And again, the allowance of Ahriman to
exist generates the thought that even out of evil something beautiful can arise. Eznik
has already told us that Ahriman rejoiced in his ability to create the beautiful peacock
if not much else (Refut. 2.8), and later we find in Yezidism the abandoned Peacock
Angel fallen from heaven transformed into a positive Lord (see ch. 33).
MAZDAK’S G NO S IS
As for Mazdakism, it more readily complies with a Gnostic worldview than
Zurvanism, since its principal doctrine appears to be one of emanationism. Mazdak,
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— From “Zurvanism” to Mazdak —
with brief royal support later in Kavad I’s reign (498–524), was a priestly social
reformer trying to subvert the stranglehold of the Persian nobility with a com-
munistic program of shared possessions, even women. Justifying his reforms as an
“interpreter of the Book of Zoroaster, the Avesta,” as Arab historian Al-Mas‘ūdī (d.
956) avers (Yarshater 1983: 997), Mazdak expounded Zoroastrianism along eso-
teric, Gnostic-looking lines, after his teacher Zardusht Khorragan (Al-Shahrestānī
[d. 1153], Kitāb al-Milal [1842 edn.] vol. 1, pp. 192–3). He incorporated light sym-
bolism to demonstrate a philosophy of love and social emancipation, re-presenting
Zarathustra’s message with a view to “heal” the perceived “ills” of the time. His
approach, however, can hardly be reduced to an economic and social platform.
An essential gnosis resides at its core, though not deriving from older Gnostic
antinominanisms (Crone 1991: 29). But because his teaching appeared as an alter-
native to the mainstream, indeed in contradiction to the “established church,” it
became political. Kavad renounced his affiliation and left the Mazdakites to a hor-
rible fate at the hands of his son Chosroes I, Mazdak being tortured to death in 524,
and the entire community apparently been wiped out by 528 CE (Milani 2013: 103–
6, 144–6).
Mazdakism may have been influenced by Manichaeism, but it differs enough
to constitute an independent assessment. The doctrine of Mazdak affirms the ori-
ginal antagonism of Light and Darkness, and that Light is more dominant than
Darkness: “Light is endowed with knowledge and feeling, and acts by design and free
will, whereas Darkness is ignorant and blind, acting randomly and without direction”
(Yarshater 1983: 1006). The notion of good and evil comes into play as a result of
the Mixture (as with Zoroastrian and Manichaean cosmogonies), initiating Creation.
For Mazdak, this period of intermingling is fatalistically coincidental, as will be the
time of Separation (of Light and Darkness [good from evil]). Mazdak prescribed the
subduing of passions because of the corruption of materiality (Shaki 1985), though
less because he considered women and possessions to be commodities than from the
insight that they were among sources of five (demonically personified) vices: wrath,
hate, envy, need, and greed, and thus of strife (Bausani 1959: 120).
The Mazdakites speak of three essential elements, Water, Fire, and Earth, from
whose intermixing arise two archetypes: the “Director of Good” and the “Director of
Evil,” one from the pure essence and the other from impure (Shaki 1985). Primordial
Zurvan’s gestation and Zurvanite references to four hypostatized “elements” (Zaehner
1955: 219) are absent. In the reformist Mazdakite theological scaffolding matters are
portrayed analogically in terms familiar to the royal court. “As the king of kings is
seated in the world below,” Mazdak’s “object of worship” is the Lord seated upon
a “throne in the world above,” the Supreme Being having “the Directors” or Four
Powers who stand before him. These are Discernment, Understanding, Preservation,
and Joy, like four officials standing before the king (Judge, Priest, Warrior, Minstrel).
The Directors have their opposite in the form of blindness, ignorance, neglect, and
sorrow. Since choice is a key (characteristically Zoroastrian) formula in Mazdak’s
teaching, the Four Powers direct the world with the help of the Seven Viziers, who “act
within” Twelve other (Amesha-Spenta-looking) Spiritual Powers (Shaki 1985: 528–9;
Yarshater 1983: 1007). When the powers of the Four, the Seven, and the Twelve are
fused in a person, that human being then “becomes godly” and is then relieved from
religious duties and obligations. The Supreme Being rules by the power of the letters
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whose totality forms the Supreme Name, the comprehension (basically Gnosis) of
which accesses the Great Secret –life beyond blindness and ignorance.
REFERENCES
Bausani, Alessandro. 1959. Persia religiosa: Da Zaratustra a Bahā’u’llāh. Milan: Saggiatore.
Bivar, Adrian. 1975. “Mithra and Mesopotamia.” John R. Hinnells (ed.). Mithraic Studies:
Proceedings of the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies. Manchester: Manchester
University Press: vol. 2, 275–89.
Bousset, Wilhelm. [1919] 1979. “Der Gott Aion.” Wilhelm Bousset. Religionsgeschichtliche
Studien: Aufsätze zur Religionsgeschichte des hellenistischen Zeitalters (ed. Anthonie
Verheule). Leiden: E. J. Brill: 192–230.
Boyce, Mary. 1957. “Some Reflections on Zurvanism.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies 19 (2): 304–16.
——— 1975–1991. A History of Zoroastrianism. Leiden: Brill, 3 vols (vol. 3 with Frantz
Grenet).
——— 1979. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Crone, Patricia. 1991. “Kavād’s Heresy and Mazdak’s Revolt.” Iran 29: 21–42.
De Jong, Albert. 1997. Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature.
Leiden: Brill.
Milani, Milad. 2013. Sufism in the Secret History of Persia. Durham, UK: Acumen.
Nyberg, Henrik. 1938. Die Religionen des alten Iran (trans. Hans Schaeder). Leipzig: J.
C. Hinrichs.
Pourhosseini, Parisa. 2014. “Zurvanism and its Influence on Post-Islamic Persian Literature,
with Ferdowsi as a Case Study.” Masters thesis, University of Sydney.
Reitzenstein, Richard. 1921. Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium: Religionsgeschichtliche
Untersuchungen. Bonn: Marcus & Weber.
Shaked, Shaul. 1992. “The Myth of Zurvan: Cosmology and Eschatology.” Ithamar Gruenwald,
Shaul Shaked, and Gedaliahu Stroumsa (eds.). Messiah and Christos: Cosmogony and
Eschatology: Studies in the Jewish Origins of Christianity Presented to David Flusser.
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 219–40.
Shaki, Mansour. 1985. “The Cosmogonical and Cosmological Teachings of Mazdak.” [Special
Issue of] Acta Iranica, vol. 11: Papers in Honour of Prof. Mary Boyce. Leiden: Brill: 527–43.
Spiegel, Friedrich von. 1871–78. Erânische Alterthumskunde. Leipzig: Engelmann.
Trompf, Garry. 1979. The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, vol. 1: From
Antiquity to the Reformation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Widengren, Geo. 1938. Hochgottglaube im alten Iran: Eine religionsphänomenologische
Untersuchung. Uppsala: Lundequistka Bokhandeln.
Yarshater, Ehsan. 1983. “Mazdakism.” Ehsan Yarshater (ed.). The Cambridge History of Iran.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: vol. 3, pt. 2, 991–1024.
——— 1961. The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHRISTIAN GNOSIS: FROM CLEMENT

THE ALEXANDRIAN TO JOHN
DAMASCENE
Doru Costache
C hristianity has emerged in history as a community of learners, disciples of a

Teacher, Jesus Christ, and his successors, the apostles. More a philosophical
school than a religious movement, from the outset Christianity has focused on the
teaching and wisdom of the Founder, which it construed as “the way” to knowledge
and perfection. Gnosis, the knowledge revealed by the Teacher and explained by his
successors, was interwoven with the practical life, or the virtuous and spiritual experi-
ence, and so inherent to Christianity. Holistically understood, the gnostic dimension
was nevertheless central for many theologians, from the second to at least the eighth
Christian century. Herein I offer glimpses of their elaborations, pointers to a phenom-
enon whose breadth and complexity far exceed the parameters of this chapter.
CLEMENT THE AL E X AND RIAN

Echoing the journey of Justin Martyr a generation earlier, Clement, whose life roughly
spanned from the mid-second century to the early third, embarked on a philosoph-
ical quest which led him to the discovery of Middle Platonism and culminated with
his Christian conversion. His conversion occurred under the guidance of Pantaenus,
in Alexandria, Egypt. He established there a school of Christian philosophy –per-
haps modeled after the Roman school of Justin and surely that of his teacher. As
a master of Christian philosophy and perhaps an Alexandrian presbyter, Clement
structured his teaching by the classical paideia, with a Christian twist. Paideia, richer
than modern education in that it entailed both curricular training and formative
dimensions, prescribed advancement through successive stages of learning up to
the highest state of intellectual and moral perfection. Similarly, Christian pedagogy
presupposed a gradual initiation of a convert, from the status of “catechumen” to
that of “enlightened,” and finally “believer.” Clement combined the two traditions
into one complex process of philosophical pedagogy, which progressed from the
preparatory phases of paideutic training to the “holy gnosis” of the higher stages
of Christian initiation (Choufrine 2002: 17–32). His major works, Exhortation
(= Exhort.), The Tutor, Stromateis (= Strom.), and the loose parts of The Teacher,
illustrate the curriculum.
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260
— Doru Costache —
Clement was concerned with perfection, which, as depicted for the Alexandrine
intelligentsia, he construed complexly. Perfection was unreachable without the cur-
ricular stages of theoretical and practical disciplines (Strom. 2.5.24) such as music,
arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, dialectic, and philosophy. As much as gazing upon
“things divine” and contemplating “the great mysteries of existence” (Strom. 7.10.55;
1.28.176), one learned how to “till the soil, make geometrical measurements, and
philosophize” (Strom. 6.8.65). Above all, one aimed at gnosis –“the perfection of
the human being as a human being” (Strom. 7.10.55). Theological gnosis was the
fulfillment of human existence. This was so because “the human being was made pri-
marily for the knowledge of God” (Strom. 6.8.65). To attain gnostic perfection, one
progressed from catharsis (Strom. 5.11.70) to the “little mysteries of the teaching”
and the “great” mysteries of contemplation (Strom. 4.1.3; 5.11.71), culminating
in divine vision (Strom. 5.11.71; Lilla 1971: 163–9). Gnosis amounted therefore
to more than an intellectual accomplishment. It constituted a holistic “way of life
and thinking in concord with and adherence to the divine Logos” (Strom. 7.10.55),
entailing one’s reference to a transcendent paradigm. The gnostic had to observe in
everything the wisdom of Christ, Logos incarnate –in faith (Strom. 2.4.16; 2.5.23),
grace (Strom. 5.12.82; 7.7.44), and virtue (Strom 2.10.46; 7.1.3; Prophetic selections
37.1). Consequently, Christianity was the privileged framework for achieving gnosis.
Building on “Mosaic philosophy,” shaped after the Platonic curriculum of ethics,
physics, and epoptics (Strom. 1.28.176), Christianity was the perfect gnosis. Variously
termed “gnostic tradition,” “holy gnosis,” and “ecclesiastical gnosis” (Strom. 5.10.63;
3.9.67; 7.16.103), the Christian tradition made possible one’s advancement from
a naïve faith and preconceived ideas to a mature knowledge and wisdom (Strom.
7.10.55). This process was guided by elders (Bucur 2015: 17–19), who delivered the
wisdom of Christ revealed to the apostles and the prophets (Strom. 6.7.61). This
interplay of Old and New Testament authorities in the handing on of ecclesial gnosis
was typically Clementine. Elsewhere he added to this framework the Logos’s cosmic
revelation (Exhort. 1.2; Costache 2013a: 122–4). The common denominator for
these channels of divine knowledge –the cosmos, the prophets, the apostles, and the
elders –was their reference to Christ, Logos incarnate, who sang the universe into
existence, spoke through the prophets, and communicated the truth to his disciples,
who have then instructed the elders. Clement returned frequently to the centrality of
Christ to the gnostic tradition (Strom. 5.10–11; 6.7.57–8; Lilla 1971: 158–63).
Actually, Christian gnosis was perfect because the one who was its source possessed
perfect knowledge (Strom. 1.20.97; 6.7.55; 6.8.70). Christ circumscribed the
universe’s present, past, and future (Strom. 6.9.78). Moreover, as creator Logos, Christ
was the “primary meaning” of the universe (Strom. 5.11.71) and its inner measure
(Exhort. 1.5; 6.68). Consequently, when the Clementine gnostic “contemplated and
comprehended” the “great mysteries of the universe,” he or she acquired a pro-
found knowledge of Christ, the foundation of the cosmos. Ultimately, what the “holy
gnostic” (Strom. 2.20.104; 4.23.152) sought was complete gnosis, an understanding
of the universe in the light of its measure. Contemplation proceeded gradually from
the visible world to the invisible and then to the vision of Christ as Logos (Strom.
5.10.66; 5.11.71). Acknowledged as “gnosis and spiritual paradise,” “true gnosis and
light,” and God’s Son who “offered and revealed” the understanding of the universe
(Strom. 6.1.2; 6.7.61), Christ was the supreme object of gnostic contemplation.
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— C h r i s t i a n g n o s i s : f r o m C l e m e n t t o Jo h n —
All Christians were called to divine gnosis, but Christ offered the deepest
teachings only to worthy recipients (Strom. 1.1.13). In a way, supreme know-
ledge was not for all (Strom. 1.12.55). This caveat does not denote Clement’s
adherence to the “gnostic” elitism of his Alexandrian contemporaries. What he
meant was that gnosis was attainable through diligent study and strenuous ascesis.
Gnosis was available for the studious and pure, who, like Abraham and Moses,
had undertaken the transformative process facilitated by the curriculum (Strom.
1.23.153; 2.5.20; 5.11.73; 6.10.80; Choufrine 2002: 86–7). The need for purifi-
cation, alongside study, was motivated by the view that gnosis, as “the pure light
which enlightens those pure among the human beings,” required an existential
compatibility from its seeker (Prophetic selections 32.3). It required transform-
ation. Thus, Clementine pedagogy aimed at personal transformation by way of a
gnostic process that led to enlightenment.
ATHANASIUS OF AL E X AND RIA

Almost nothing is known of Athanasius’s (d. 373) life before his public ascension after
325. Scholars doubt that his education included higher training (Louth 2004a: 275).
Perhaps an autodidact, Athanasius displayed nevertheless a sense of tradition which
entailed familiarity with an Alexandrian forebear and Clement’s onetime disciple,
Origen. He must have become familiar with Origen’s ideas both directly, through
study, and indirectly, by drawing on older Origenist contemporaries such as Antony
(Casiday 2002: 211–20). That he appreciated Origen is well known (Louth 2007: 75–
6). But when they refer to his dependence on earlier traditions, scholars do not connect
Athanasius with Clement. Nevertheless, even without displaying the structured peda-
gogy of Clement, his construal of gnosis followed similar principles. He maintained
that gnosis was attained by answering the divine call to know God through faith,
faith manifesting a disposition of the soul which was conditioned by ascetic purifi-
cation (Life of Antony [= Ant.] 77.3–4; 78.1). Elsewhere he referred to grace, faith,
and virtue as prerequisites of superior knowledge (Against the Gentiles [= Gent.] 30,
33). These elements, and some of the following ones, correspond to Clement’s holistic
gnosis.
Athanasius believed that the call to divine gnosis was imbedded in human nature.
God had made humankind in the image of God’s Son, enabling it to know the Father
and his Logos (Gent. 2). Moreover, God conditioned humankind towards God’s
likeness so that it can understand the world and grasp the eternity of its creator. But
the human mind was able to exercise contemplation proper, a “perception of things
intelligible,” only if it maintained likeness to God and an ascetically purified heart
(Gent. 2.15–35). Within the same context Athanasius deployed an arsenal of epis-
temological terms. There, on a single page we find the following concepts related
to ratiocination and knowledge, in the order in which they unfold: notion, thought,
contemplation, science, conceptualization, gnosis, capacity to represent reality, know-
ledge of the divine, understanding, power of the mind, realization, vision (Gent. 2;
cf. 31, 33).
Together with this complex vocabulary and the theological presuppositions earlier
outlined, Athanasius understood the acquisition of divine gnosis as a gradual process
which, like for Clement, began with the contemplation of the universe to end by gazing
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upon the divine. Without the material being organized in this precise order, within
Gent. 2 four steps are discernible: examining things created; discerning God’s provi-
dence; realizing God’s eternity and the creation’s ephemeral condition; and contem-
plating the Logos, the image of the Father, as “divine gnosis”. Athanasius represented
the cosmos as a book out of which, as from Scripture (Blowers 2012: 319), one
learned the mysteries of the cosmos and its creator (Gent. 34). An accurate reading
of the cosmic book required a sharp mind, whose gnostic aptitudes were enabled by
ascetic purification and contemplative exercises (Gent. 34). It appears that, informed
by Clement, Athanasius’s gnostic program was ultimately inspired by Antony, depicted
as a Christian sage (Ant. 14.2–3) whose wisdom, drawing on personal experience,
exceeded that of his pagan counterparts (Ant. 72–80). This illustration lends sub-
stance to the ideal of Christian gnosis as an existential accomplishment.
THE CAP PAD O CIANS

The Cappadocian fathers, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and Gregory
of Nyssa, flourished in the second half of the fourth century. Whereas they shared
interests and approaches, they were not always in agreement (Louth 2004b: 289). Of
interest is their depiction of Moses as paradigmatic for the gnostic quest –a depic-
tion in which reverberate motifs pondered by Philo, Clement, Origen, and perhaps
Athanasius.
Basil (d. 379), a bishop of Cappadocian Caesarea for less than ten troubled years
and an elegant writer, is considered an ecclesiastical administrator and staunch
Nicene theologian rather than a thinker concerned with divine gnosis. This view
must change. I have shown elsewhere (Costache 2013b: 111–14) that even works
not taken as relevant for mysticism, such as the Homilies on the Hexaemeron
[= Hex.], display signs of Basil’s traditional mind. At close inspection, one finds
therein heuristic devices, typical for the mystagogical approach, meant to stir the
intelligent reader’s desire to seek higher gnosis. Basil recommended in the prolog
that the cosmos be approached with an inquisitive reason, purified senses, and a
discerning mind untainted by worldly cares, able to identify the divine signature in
things created. Also there, Basil introduced Moses as an illustration of how gnosis
should be attained (DelCogliano 2010: 81, 86), through a gradual process of personal
transformation. Being trained in the Egyptian sciences, the prophet proceeded to
purify his mind and life. Purification facilitated his progress in the “contemplation
of beings,” which he exercised for 40 years, after which he “beheld God, as much as
possible for the human being to see” (Hex. 1.1). This depiction is typical for the triple
pattern –purification, contemplation, theological gnosis –encountered in earlier
authors. Elsewhere, Basil added important notes on divine gnosis. Knowledge of God
was a gift apportioned to the seekers, an illumination for whoever had “purified the
eye of their soul” (Against Eunomius [= Eun.] 1.1,7). The source of enlightenment
was Christ, who granted “access to gnosis” (Eun. 1.26) and mediated one’s union to
God (Eun. 2.19). Even so, the superior knowledge attained by saints like Paul did
not exhaust the ocean of divine mysteries (Eun. 1.12–14). Attainable to some extent,
gnosis may have remained an ever-elusive target.
Basil’s onetime friend, Gregory the Theologian (d. 390), for a while bishop of
Constantinople and the best educated of them (McGuckin 2001: 35–83), displayed
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a more consistent interest in writing on gnosis and perfection. He affirmed an inex-

tricable connection between lofty discourse, an experientially authenticated know-
ledge, and personal worthiness (Beeley 2008: 35, 65–7, 101, 251). Thus, anyone who
did not qualify for theological gnosis had to refrain from discoursing on it, even
from listening to it (Theological Orations [= Theol.] 1.3). Gnosis was conditioned
by the existential isomorphism between subject and object –the human mind and
the divine reality –which, in turn, was contingent on the human mind’s purifica-
tion. The genuine teacher was the accomplished gnostic who, like Moses, has under-
taken catharsis. The isomorphism between subject and object, or, better, the human
and the divine subjects, was required because gnosis was a participatory experience.
Paraphrasing the Exodus narrative about Moses climbing up Sinai (Theol. 2.2–3;
Oration 20.2), Gregory described one’s attainment of divine gnosis as ascending to
the condition of “becoming a relative of God,” so participation in the divine. This was
not the same for all. Symbolically illustrated by the elders who accompanied Moses,
“the worthiness of their purification” or personal catharsis conditioned their level of
participation; some of them could not climb too far, others fell short of reaching the
top. Worthiness dictated why few people could approach the cloud of divine mystery,
having access to the hidden wisdom and gnosis –the top of the mountain as it were –
while the many struggled with the externals of the Law, at the foothills of Sinai. Those
attached to “material things” remained foreign to “contemplation and theology.”
Consequently, Gregory warned them not to approach “the height of vision,” indeed
“divine glory.” Nevertheless, like in Basil, given God’s transcendence, the culminating
gnostic experience of divine vision remained imperfect even for the worthy ones, the
existential isomorphism between the subjects notwithstanding.
Lastly, Basil’s younger brother, Gregory (d. ca. 395), bishop of Nyssa, is unani-
mously acknowledged as the spiritual master among his peers (Louth 2004b: 197).
This scholarly acclaim refers to the many writings he dedicated to the topic of interest,
not the traditional criteria concerning matters of gnosis or mystical theology. Below
I focus on his approach to the Sinai narrative illustrated by Life of Moses, where
Gregory redrafted already familiar motifs (Blowers 2015: 9–16). It is there that, while
interpreting the scriptural account, he described superior knowledge as an ascent
of “the mountain of divine gnosis” (2.152.8). In dealing with the text, he neverthe-
less followed the triadic outline of perfection encountered in the foregoing authors.
According to him, Moses travelled in stages from “the contemplation of beings” to
“the knowledge of the divine power” which has created the universe, to then ascend
“there, where God is” (2.167.3–4, 7–12; 2.169.3–5). The experience amounted to
a divine “mystagogy,” an “ineffably mystical initiation” of Moses in higher gnosis
(1.42.1, 4), which crowned the seeker’s efforts of catharsis (1.42.5–17). Thus, ascesis,
or rather virtue, and divine revelation conditioned gnosis. Gregory highlighted that
the commandments delivered a “teaching for virtue” which led the gnostic moun-
taineer “to the heights of virtue” (2.152.1–2; 2.153.2–4). Virtue exceeded ethics,
being charged with epistemological significance. In his words, “the head” of all virtue
was gnosis, the “respectful thought concerning divine nature” (1.47.2–5; 1.47.9–10).
However, virtue was one’s “way towards gnosis” (2.154.1–2; 2.157.5–12; 2.166.1–8).
This understanding echoes the traditional conviction, earlier discussed, that gnosis
required an ascetic reshaping of life. But in Gregory virtue and gnosis appear to have
overlapped as much as gnosis and perfection did in Clement.
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In becoming virtuous through ascetic purification, Moses concluded the “divine

ascent” by “entering the innermost sanctuary of divine mystagogy,” thus “becoming
an initiate of the ineffable” with insights into the “abyss of divine gnosis” (1.46.4–5;
2.161.7; 2.164.7; 2.167.8–9). This achievement crowned the contemplative effort
of piercing beyond the “phenomenal universe” and embracing “the invisible and the
unreachable” (1.46.7–8; 2.153.17–18; 2.163.4–5; 2.169.7). Virtue, it seems, trained
him to humbly realize that, given the caesura between the created and the uncreated,
“the divine is there, where understanding cannot reach” (1.46.9–10). Ultimately,
gnosis remained work in progress. This realization prompted Gregory to phrase
gnosis paradoxically: Moses managed “to see by not seeing” through the veils of a
“luminous darkness” (2.163.6–8; 2.164.1–4). Possibly for the same reason, Gregory
developed the notion of epektasis or the endless ascent toward God, as another way
of saying that gnosis was a never-ending chase after the divine.
Although the Cappadocian fathers maintained distinctiveness from one another,
they were agreed on matters mystical. As illustrated by their views of Moses, supreme
gnosis was made accessible by one’s corresponding purification and advancement
in virtue, one’s personal transformation. The measure of personal transformation
conditioned one’s level of receptivity towards divine revelation. Thus articulated,
gnosis was irreducible to reasoning and the accumulation of information; it was,
instead, a holistic experience where knowledge and life mingled in the making of a
renewed human being –forever drawn to reach the unreachable.
EVAGRIUS PONTICU S
A Pontian intellectual trained by the Cappadocian fathers and several desert elders,
Evagrius (d. 399) referred to the early Alexandrians both directly (Casiday 2013: 13–
17) and through the lens of the Cappadocians, particularly Gregory of Nyssa (Ramelli
2015: 165–71). Throughout the Evagrian corpus one discovers the same interest in
triadic patterns discussed above. This is obvious in his works, The Practical Treatise
(= Pract.), The Gnostic, and Gnostic Chapters, which mirror Clement’s trilogy of The
Tutor, Stromateis, and The Teacher. The same interest transpires in the way Evagrius
has organized his reflection. Significantly, he construed Christianity as “the teaching
of our Savior Christ that consists of the practical, physical, and theological stages”
(Pract. 1). Whereas his entire corpus is a monument to the quest for Christian gnosis,
unless otherwise stated herein I exemplify the topic of interest by considering The
Gnostic.
The writing explores matters of monastic life superior to what pertains to basic
asceticism, such as contemplation, compassion, discernment, and prayer. These
were the main qualities and activities of the holy gnostic. Evagrius shared with the
Cappadocians the view that to reach perfect knowledge was impossible in the pre-
sent circumstances (23). Nevertheless, the advanced possessed a comprehensive grasp
of reality (16). This holistic perception corresponded to an existential accomplish-
ment since, as highlighted in the prologue of Pract., virtue, dispassion, faith, and love
made possible the contemplation of nature and the ultimate blessedness. Typically,
this achievement required the triadic path of the “practical” purification and pro-
gress in dispassion, the “physical” discovery of the truth hidden in all things, and
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the “theological” turn from things material to the “first cause” of everything (49). In
walking this path, the gnostic was able to grasp the principles of beings and make
proper use of them (15). For this reason, the gnostic was the best aid for others in
matters of reaching perfection (22), and the most qualified guide to the knowledge of
created and divine realities (13).
There is indication that, while inspired by the desert elders he encountered,
Evagrius’s sketch of the gnostic borrowed nevertheless from Clement. But, to legit-
imize his interpretation, Evagrius made mention of more recent authorities, namely,
“Gregory the righteous” (either the Theologian or the bishop of Nyssa), “the pillar of
the truth, Basil the Cappadocian,” “Athanasius, the holy luminary of the Egyptians,”
“Sarapion, the angel of the Church of Thmuis,” followed by “Didymus, the great and
gnostic teacher.” Since the passages attributed to them cannot be traced to known
writings, it is likely that Evagrius either referred to their oral preachings or used them
as springboards for his views.
With reference to Gregory he noted (44) that the master correlated the four Stoic
virtues –prudence, courage, moderation, and righteousness –and the contemplative
undertakings of the gnostic. The virtues oriented the gnostic’s mind towards worth-
while objects and away from vain hypotheses. The virtues regulated also the manner in
which the gnostic shared insights with others. Proportional to the audience’s aptness,
righteousness demanded that the more advanced disciples received the teaching in
obscure statements, which incited them to ponder matters, whereas simple folks were
granted a clear instruction, for their immediate benefit. Turning to Basil, Evagrius
(45) pointed out that the Cappadocian had drawn a sharp line between human and
divine gnosis. Human knowledge was acquired by way of assiduous study and did not
require ascesis. In turn, being acquired through gracious illumination, divine gnosis
was nonetheless conditioned by the “righteousness, gentleness, and mercifulness” of
the dispassionate. Given the aspects of purification and illumination, divine gnosis
was associated with a perception of the mind’s ethereal light during prayer.
Moving on, Evagrius (46) pointed out that Athanasius was concerned with how
the gnostic faced the snares of the evil one and the requirement of enduring trials
nobly. But the main feature of the Athanasian gnostic was generosity –an “eagerness
to feed those that present themselves” in order to learn the ways of true knowledge. In
turn, Evagrius (47) observed that Sarapion emphasized the existential impact of “spir-
itual gnosis.” Using Platonic anthropology, Evagrius’s Sarapion preached that gnosis
furthered the catharsis of the mind, healed the natural aptitude of anger through love,
and controlled the appetitive energy through abstinence. Lastly, Didymus, Evagrius
has shown (48), construed the gnostic as “always exercising” by contemplating the
universe and people’s worthiness. The exercises included memorizing the discoveries,
understanding the world and its diversity, together with discerning the advancement
“in virtue and gnosis” of those who spiritually redrafted their lives. Spiritual exercises
and the attainment of gnosis were entwined.
With Evagrius, together with a return to Clement’s rigorous depiction of the
“philosophical life” leading to gnosis, the corresponding views of Athanasius and the
Cappadocians, who preferred to theorize about scriptural figures, have been aligned
with the concrete circumstances of the desert ascetic life. At the forefront of Evagrius’s
theorizations on the attainment of gnosis was the figure of the holy gnostic.
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MAXIMUS THE CO NF E S S O R
The greatest Byzantine theologian, Maximus (d. 662) is usually credited with achieving
a creative synthesis of previous traditions, together with exploring new avenues
pertaining to mystical theology. Of interest is his construal of gnosis, within which
the ethical and ascetic prerequisites observed by Clement and Evagrius intersected
with the revelational vantage point of the Cappadocians –against the backdrop of a
spiritual reading of scriptural passages, specific to the Alexandrian tradition. Similar
to the foregoing authors and many others after them, such as Macarius, Diadochus of
Photiki, Mark the Ascetic, and Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus’s view of gnosis
was at the forefront of his theological endeavors, irrespective of the genre to which
his writings belonged. Symptomatically, in Chapters on Love 1.4 he pointed out that
true love of God becomes manifest when one prioritizes divine gnosis to knowing
anything else. Likewise, in the beginning of On the Our Father (1) he entreated God
to lead him to an understanding of the mysteries encoded within the words of the
prayer. The prayerful approach to higher knowledge features also in To Thalassius
48, which has the seekers striving to arrive, through praxis and contemplation, at
the inner chambers of God’s house where, “with never silent voices, they sing the
gnosis of things ineffable.” Furthermore, his Mystagogy searches for gnosis through
liturgical symbols. That said, in the tradition of Evagrius’s Gnostic Chapters and
their fifth-century replica written by Diadochus, the Confessor produced a typic-
ally monastic treatise in sentence form, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology and
the Incarnate Economy of the Son of God, relevant to the scope of this study. Unless
otherwise stated, in what follows I focus on this work.
Echoing the Aristotelian distinction between theoretical and practical wisdom,
Maximus referred to the “double” nature of gnosis, namely, “scientific” or theoretical,
and “actively practical” or the experiential grasp of reality (1.22). The second, applied
dimension was associated with the observance of divine commandments, but essen-
tially did not differ from the theoretical dimension; the object of both types of gnosis
was the divine principles of things created. The passage seems to favor the applied
gnosis. This choice, which may represent a deliberate counterpoint to the Aristotelian
primacy of theoretical wisdom, alludes to the general patristic opinion that genuine
knowledge was conditioned by ascetic fortitude. Consequently, the experiential
grasp of reality presupposed purification through the “practice of the virtues,” the
“attainment of dispassion” (1.32), and humility (1.18–20). Advancement in virtue
and dispassion was required in order for the seeker to “shake off” the preconceived
opinions about things and so reach the “inner principle of truth” or the “foundation
of real knowledge” (2.75; 1.21). In addition to purification, the Maximian gnostic
had to consider the objects of interest through Christ’s life, taken as a theoretical
lens. Alongside deciphering “all the enigmas and types within Scripture,” the vantage
point of “the mystery of the Logos’s embodiment” enabled one to grasp “the science
of the visible and the noetic creations” (1.66). Furthermore, Christ’s cross, burial, and
resurrection facilitated the comprehension of the inside of things and the purpose
for which all were made. Only thus, by collecting “the inner principles of created
beings,” could one have “received portions of the loaves of gnosis from the hands of
the Logos” (1.33), finding noetic nourishment in things created, “the divine gnosis
they contain” (1.32; 1.18; Bradshaw 2010: 818–19). Elsewhere, and more simply
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stated, “true knowledge” was accessible through faith (1.9), but not without a direct
divine input –“the revelation by grace” (1.17) or the “divine illumination” (1.31).
Thus, the gnostic quest was an interactive experience, an event of divine-human com-
munion (1.30; 2.32).
Purification and natural contemplation led to divine knowledge. It is plain that
Maximus construed the gradual attainment of gnosis according to the ancient tradition
of the three stages (Blowers 2016: 74–7), even though at times, like in To Thalassius
10, he rendered these stages in variant terms such as fear, advancement, and perfec-
tion. Equally traditional was his interest in identifying the triple pattern in scriptural
contexts. For example, and perhaps drawing on Origen’s First Homily on Genesis,
he produced a synthetic interpretation of the days of creation as a triadic advance
towards perfection and spiritual knowledge. For him, the six days typified the ascesis
that was conducive to virtue, the seventh day represented the apophatic approach of
the contemplatives to the “ineffable gnosis,” and the eighth corresponded to the cul-
minating deification of the worthy ones (1.55). The attainment of gnosis amounted to
a state of blessedness or “mystical joy” (2.24), which in the here and now was limited
by corporeality (2.87). The last nuance is reminiscent of Evagrius. That said, together
with Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus believed that the path of gnosis was an endless one
and that, motivated by desire (Cooper 2015: 363–6), the human being was called to
“advance from one virtue to a greater virtue and ascend from a certain knowledge
to a higher gnosis,” aiming to reach the heavenly tabernacle of God (2.77) and so
become “the dwelling place of God” (1.53). Even so, or rather due to this asymptotic
ascent to God, the Maximian gnostic was, similar to its Clementine and Evagrian
prototypes, not isolated; he or she was someone able to “feed thousands,” “cure every
disease and infirmity,” “healing the sick, and through hope restoring devotion to those
who have lost it” (1.33).
JOHN DAM AS CE NE
Born in Damascus to a wealthy family, John (d. 749) lived as an erudite monk in
the Palestinian monastery of Saint Sabbas, where he wrote treatises, orations, and
liturgical hymns. For reasons that remain obscure, he composed a trilogy on aspects
pertaining to gnosis, The Fount of Knowledge (= Fount), dedicated to his supposedly
foster brother, Cosmas, bishop of Maiuma (Louth 2002: 31–7, 44–6). According to
the prolog to the trilogy, the Damascene adopted the selective approach of the famous
Basilian bee (see Address to Youth 4) when searching the elements of proper thinking
within the classical tradition, which he discussed in the first part, Philosophical
Chapters (= Phil.); then he disclosed, in Against the Heresies (= Her.), a range of doc-
trinal errors, maybe samples of incorrect thinking (as implied elsewhere within the
same preface, “I shall refute all ordinary and falsely called knowledge”); and then,
in On the Orthodox Faith (= Orth.), proceeded to explain the truth preached by the
God-inspired prophets, the divinely taught apostles, and the God-bearing shepherds
and teachers. Herein I refer to passages that strictly treat the prerequisites and the
acquisition of superior gnosis.
In the first part of the trilogy, from chapter three onwards, John discussed the
various kinds of curricular knowledge, theoretical and practical, that we have
encountered in Clement and Maximus. And although the study of the disciplines,
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particularly dialectic, makes for most of the remaining work, the earlier chapters,
including the prolog of the trilogy, include significant caveats in relation to genuine
gnosis. The relevant chapters summarize the earlier elaborations on the Christian
gnostic tradition.
The Philosophical Chapters abruptly begin by stating that gnosis is proper to
rational beings as much as ignorance is the province of irrationality. John explained
within the same place that the soul’s mind has an “eye of sorts” or a “gnostic faculty”
by which it can acquire knowledge and understanding. For the human mind, there-
fore, “there is nothing of greater value than gnosis” and in its absence reason abides in
darkness. The darkness of ignorance, furthermore, translates as a condition of infer-
iority to irrational beings, a state to which human beings condemn themselves through
intellectual neglect. Instead, reason flourishes when it attains “the true knowledge of
things that are” (Phil. 1). But to know things for what they are, human reason should
persist in its quest for the truth. In the Damascene’s words, “let us search, let us enquire,
let us examine, let us question” (Phil. 1). There is nothing that the mind should take for
granted. One should not be complacent, satisfied with untested information. This con-
viction echoed Clement’s and was somehow at variance with the monastic common-
place that curiosity, in popular parlance, killed the cat. One must knock hard at the
doors of gnosis in order “to see the beauties” behind them and vigorously dig “to find
the treasure of gnosis and delight in its wealth” (Phil. 1). As he proved in the second
book of Orth., this included scientific enquiry, not just theological aptness.
John’s conviction that true knowledge can be grasped by the polymath “lover
of learning” only through “diligence and effort” was not the only prerequisite. He
believed likewise that gnosis required “before everything and after everything” God’s
gift of grace (Phil. 1). Elsewhere (Orth. 1.1; Adrahtas 2003: 110–11; Louth 2002: 90–
2), instead of grace he referred to a gradual divine revelation –in the harmony of
nature, in the Scriptures, and in the gospel of Christ –a schema which is reminiscent
of Origen’s and Maximus’s theory of the three embodiments of the Logos (Blowers
2016: 78, 139–40). Ultimately, Christ, “the very wisdom and truth” in whom “all
the treasures of gnosis are hidden,” was the one who led the soul from ignorance
and falsehood to the truth (Phil. 1). What matters is that for John there was no rift
between scientific enquiry and theological knowledge. But, as much as diligence in
study, neither grace nor revelation could have sufficed either. John iterated again and
again that one had to be personally worthy to acquire gnosis. For instance, in the
prolegomenon to Fount and by way of rhetorical interrogations, he claimed that,
his own impure mind being sullied “with every sort of sin” and “the rough waters of
thoughts,” it cannot have served as a mirror to God nor can it “utter things divine and
ineffable.” Within the same preface he added that it would be unpardonable to pre-
tend to know when one was in fact ignorant. One had to be sincere therefore, we read
elsewhere (Phil. 1), cultivating attentiveness, maintaining the inner eye unclouded by
the passions, and a mind free of material interests. At the end of the same chapter,
the Damascene added: “if we approach gnosis not as a vain pursuit and with humble
thinking, we shall be ready for what is desired.” We find here, again, the ascetic and
existential criteria upheld by his traditional forebears. Humility was instrumental
for the gnostic pursuit. It prompted one to call on the Lord, “our guide,” and so,
through obedience to him, become an “imitator of Christ.” Walking in the footsteps
of Christ, in turn, led one “from the lowest place to the highest,” which amounted
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to becoming graciously illuminated, more precisely the possessor of a purified heart

and an enlightened mind (Fount, preface). The perfect exemplification of this tra-
jectory was again the experience of Moses, who reached dispassion and abandoned
preconceived ideas, which enabled him “to receive the divine vision” and know the
very name of God (Fount, preface). John Damascene construed gnosis as a holistic
experience which involved “our whole soul and our whole understanding” (Phil. 1).
As Louth (2002: 37) had it, the trilogy defined “what is to be a Christian, understood
less as a set of beliefs […] than as a way of life.”
In conclusion, gnosis was central to the early Christian experience, being construed
as a holistic, existentially and intellectually complex achievement, which entailed
ascesis, virtue, training, study, theological acumen, grace, and faithfulness to divine
revelation.
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McGuckin, John A. 2001. St Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood,
NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Ramelli, Ilaria L. E. 2015. “Evagrius Ponticus, the Origenian Ascetic (and not the Origenistic
‘Heretic’).” John A. McGuckin (ed.). Orthodox Monasticism Past and Present. Piscataway,
NJ: Gorgias Press: 159–224.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
GNOSTIC VICISSITUDES IN
LATE ANTIQUITY
Garry W. Trompf
COMPETING PARTIE S
The period between the first flourishing (and building) of Christian churches ca. 290
CE under the emperor Diocletian (before the Great Persecution, 303–311) and the
first territorial expansions of Islam (632–656) is pivotal in the history of the Gnostic
trajectory of thought. By 300 never had the relevant parties in philosophical debates
been in such a good position to contend. Neoplatonism, strong in the Syrian Near
East, had received a fillip from Porphyry of Tyre’s unlikely sponsor Gallienus (sole
emperor 260–268) (Bray 1997: 244–66) and the philosopher had edited Plotinus’s
work by the end of the century, with his student Iamblichus working on a commen-
tary of the (Zoroastrian-associated) Chaldean Oracles (Lloyd 1967: 283–300). The
extant Egyptian Hermetic treatises were being circulated, often as a united corpus,
headed by the treatise Poimandres probably to present an antidote to rampantly
growing Christianity (Haenchen 1956), yet they were apparently detached from the
so-called “perfect sermon” of Asclepius. Certainly Hermetic cosmology was written
up, with plural divinities, to outclass Genesis (thus Corp. Hermet., Libell. 3.1–3b
[Scott, vol. 3, pp.110–12]), the Sun epitomizing “god-ness” ([Latin] Asclep. 10.1–
6), while Gnostics were discredited for saying the world was bad ([Coptic] Asclep.
[NHC = Nag Hammadi Codices] VI.74–5). Neoplatonists, now with some pretension
to offer “universal salvation” (Simmons 2015), were becoming increasingly antagon-
istic to the Christians and more “pro-establishment” (Porphyry, Kata Christianōn apud
Macarius Magnes, Apocrit. 2–4; Iamblichus, De mysteriis Aegyptiorum), also dissoci-
ating themselves from “classic Gnostics” (Plotinus, [Contra Gnosticos for] Enneads
2.9; Porphyry, Vita Plotini 16). The stronger Gnostic schools, both Valentinian and
Sethian, were apparently trying to achieve rapprochement with (Neo- )Platonists
(note NHC VII.9; X.1, 3; and see Turner 2001: 179–200), Sethians and Plotinus
apparently deploying Plato’s spurious second Letter to assert their own versions of a
fallen Sophia (Mazur 2017). And Gnostics used Hermetic texts, including Asclepius
(NHC VI.6; VI.8). Theurgic interests linked Gnostics and Hermetists closer together
(at least in Egypt) than either to Neoplatonists, but gnostikoi were less interested in
participation in the divine by enlivening idols ([Latin] Asclep. 23–4) than in the gnōsis
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of aeonic names, to “call them out” for protection in a death journey of ascent to their
hidden Deity, using names like Iao or Sabaoth common to Egyptian magicians (e.g.,
Papyri Graecae Magicae XII [PJ 384(v), Preisendanz, vol. 2]); cf. also Pearson 1992)
and disclosing magical diagrams of ascent (e.g., Origen, Contra Celsum 6.24–5).
Zoroastrian-affected Gnostics speculated that Spirit (pneuma) ultimately controlled
the struggle between Light and Darkness, until the final Resolution (Paraphrase of
Shem [NHC VII.1] 1–3, 44–6); while Gnosticizing Christians also showed interest in
Mithras and Mithraism, accentuating ascent to Light through an aeonological world
(Liturgia Mithraica [Papyr. Graec. Mag. (Preizendanz) vol. 1], IV. 628–57, 696–724;
van den Broek 2013: 142; Mastrocinque 2017). The unveiling of “mysteries” (illu-
minating the dark) was a favored conceit across the board.
With Light and Sun accentuated among these philosophical competitors, it was
little wonder that Roman emperors would favor solar worship to hold the hugely dis-
parate cults of the empire together (Halsberghe 1972), and if Constantine converted
from following Sol Invictus to the Christian God (ca. 312), a move in keeping with
massive religious change, it is hardly insignificant that his apostate nephew sought a
revived pagan unity (361–363) in terms of Platonic philosophy and devotion to the
Sun (Bowersock 1978: 79–93; cf. Julian, Basil. Hellion). Church leaders affected by
the Alexandrian school of Christian gnōsis were ready to eulogize (with sun imagery)
those tolerant emperors who also looked kindly on philosophers (e.g., Dionysius
Alexandrinus, Epistula festalis 10 [261], apud Eusebius Caes., Historia ecclesiastica
7.23.2; Eusebius, Laus Constantini 1 [335], with Trompf 2015: 47–50), while trad-
itionalist Egyptians longed for their own kingship to return –“out of the Sun”
(Oracula Sibyllina, apud Lactantius, Insitutiones divinae 7.18). Eusebius of Caesarea,
as Origen’s champion, could still rate critics of old polytheisms like Zoroaster, Plato,
and Porphyry among preparers of the Gospel (Praeparatio evangelica 1.10; 3.0–4.11;
11–12) yet disdain Gnostic heretics (Hist. eccles. 4.7, 11); it was little wonder he
sympathized with Arianism (started 318), which “Platonized” the Logos toward
being a “created Demiurge” (Stead 1964). Gnostics possessed their own bodies of
scripture, the Tchacos book with the Gospel of Judas perhaps the prize possession of
a marginal group (dated 280s) (ch. 15), and Christian (possibly Pachomian) monks
were still making serious work of copying the varied Gnostic-connected texts we call
the Nag Hammadi Library (in the 350s, well after early decrees limiting the use of
deviant texts), presumably both to benefit and oppose (Lundhaug and Jenott 2015).
One orthodox-sounding text useful for ascetic discipline, Instructions by Silvanus
(NHC VII.4), apparently deploys Platonic and Stoic disparagement against animal-
like, passionate behavior (e.g., Plato, Respublica 571C- 572B; Marcus Aurelius
Meditationes 6.16) to curb temptations of the flesh (NHC VII.4 esp. 87, 104–5).
Against this background, the following entry highlights some important
developments in the history of Gnostic speculation from 300 to 650 CE, discussing
intersecting and competing lines of thought.
Ca. 300, in the midst of such competition for attention, a remarkable text appeared
under the authorship of “Adamantius,” one name for Origen, but in this case by
an admirer of his argumentative power, probably Methodius of Olympus (d. 311),
and written in Edessa or Myra (now southern Turkey). In arguably the last great
(fully extant) dialogue (or rather multilogue) in Antiquity, an Orthodox Christian
(Adamantius) takes on two Marcionites (with varying views, neither strictly Gnostic),
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— Gnostic vicissitudes in late antiquity —
a follower of the Gnosticizing thinker from earlier Edessan times Bardesanes, and two
disciples of the Valentinian Gnostic church (with slightly different opinions). A pagan
adjudicator, Eutropius, who tends to favor Adamantius’s arguments along the way,
rules him the winner and himself turns to the “true faith” (De recta in Deum fide
865c-d[f16] [Bakhuyzen]). The debate mainly turns around two issues: whether the
true God did or did not create this world; and whether the body can inherit salvation.
Adamantius argues for the continuity of the Biblical God’s relation to humanity (831;
866–8) and argues for the worthiness of the body to be saved and resurrected (as
“the spiritual body” of 1 Cor 15:44), while the Marcionite and Valentinians concur
in denying the God of Christ was responsible for the Creation, and all Gnostics main-
tain that Good could not have produced the Evil of this world, and that “ ‘this body
of death’ (Rom. 7:24) fetters the soul and causes all evils” (Recta 864d; 826b21;
834a-b2; cf. 805a3; 822c2; 836b; 841a; 844e-45d; etc.). The “public exchange” is
distinctive of cultural shift for quoting variant Biblical texts and clashing interpret-
ations rather than appealing to the philosophical hall of fame.
The ongoing life of all parties, by implication, was strong enough to warrant an
open debate, and we can infer that, while the orthodox defender and (changing)
pagan clearly look to be given advantages, the disputation is civil and not belligerent.
Signs are there that theologies of the non-orthodox groups have been moving on,
internal debates producing new positions, though caution is needed as to how well
positions are represented. The Marcionites are divided over whether there are three or
two ultimate Principles (Good God/Demiurge/Devil, or Good/Evil) (805a; 822a), and
the Valentinians, clearly a “school” still to be reckoned with (cf. Layton 1980), differ
over whether Evil derives from the qualities of matter or matter itself (844d-e; and see
Pretty 1997: 7). The presence of the Bardesanean Marinus (with two chances to put
his case [in pts. 3 and 5]) is significant, since from the time he propagated his special
doctrines in Edessa (greater Armenia) and Hierapolis (Syria) in the decades before
and after 200, Bardesanes’s opus laid the basis of an influential school of thought
in the Roman/Persian imperial interface, mediating Babylonico-Zoroastrian, Biblical,
and Hellenistic insights (Drijvers 1966: 138, 225). His works against Marcion and
Valentinus, written in his earlier “orthodox” years, adopted dialogical form –a
cue for De Recta –indeed Bardesanes urbanely defended a dialectically grounded
Christianity, adapting yet thwarting strong Platonic, Stoic, and Hermetic impacts
in his area (Denzey 2005: 161–3, 168–72; Gibbons 2012), and some say inspired
Manichaeism (Lieu 1992: 59). Ephrem Syrus of Nisibis tarred him with much the same
brush as Marcion and Mani in the 360s, while conceding his strengths against pagan
philosophy (Sermo ad Hypatium II.5 [Mitchell, vol. 2]), and he evidently expounded
emanationism, assessed good and bad astral influences, but countered fatalism (e.g.,
Coniunctiones astrorum [Graffin]; et apud Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 6.10),
presenting a faith, Gnostic-touched, that met common anxieties over cosmic powers
at the time (cf. Dodds 1965). His wisdom teaching between “West and East” pro-
viding a serious competitor to orthodoxy until the impact of the Doctrina Addai
(written ca. 400), which carried new details about letters exchanged between Jesus
and the Armenian toparch Abgar and about Thaddeus’s apostolic labors at Edessa
(Wood 2010: 1–37).
In the fourth century, a key pre-orthodox “extra-Scripture” at Edessa was the
apocryphal Acts of Thomas, about Judas Thomas Didymus’s apostolic journey to
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India. The Acta contains the beautiful Syriac “Hymn of the Pearl,” usually ascribed
to Bardesanes, that gives the highest rankings in heaven to the King of Kings (the
Father), the Queen of the East (Mother), and the redeemer of the world their Son
(Act. Thom. 111.58–60; cf. Ephrem, Hymni contra haereses 55.10 [Beck]). The
main continuities in Bardesanean thought were an absolute separation of Good and
Evil, without God’s involvement in the latter; the Son’s saving power only being
possible through using a special non-material (“docetic”) body; and a denial of the
resurrection of the body (“an unclean garb”) (108.9–10; 111.62; Ephrem, Disc.
32–40). In the Adamantius Dialogue a greater Zoroastrian influence shows up with
Marinus’s arguments, the good God and evil Satan both being uncreated, though
the former supreme (De Recta 834c3), and we know Bardesanean thinkers now
accentuated the “Divine Mind” (Drijvers 1966: 101, 110), like Zarathustra’s Vohu
Manah, these views reflected at this very time in the “newly established” Persian
Mazdaism under the Sasanians (possibly against Zurvanists) (Zaehner 1955: 6–52,
77–8). Such shifts also chimed with consolidating Manichaean cosmology, which
dispensed with Zurvanist talk of Ohrmazd/Zurvan and Ahriman as virtually equal
“brothers” (Xuāstvānīft 1.3–4) and evoked more the Father of Greatness and
Mother of Life, the latter sending her Son, “the Primordial Man,” to “tangle in
battle with the Primordial Devil” across the narrowing Chasm between Light and
Dark (Mani apud Al-Nadīm, Fihrist 9.1). Mani also discarded Bardesanes’s view
that the soul could “rise” while still in the body (Drijvers 1966: 204–5). Positions
could alter to address competing ideas.
T WO SUB STANTIAL LATE A NTIQU E TE X TS : PIST IS

SO PHI A AND Z OST RIAN OS
In Diocletianic times, it seems, emerges the enigmatic Sahidic Coptic text Pistis Sophia
(PS), the longest of a cluster of known Egyptian texts in Wisdom’s name (Puech and
Blatz 1990: 361–72) and the longest Gnostic text bequeathed to us from Antiquity.
It reveals an attempt to accommodate Gnostic concerns to mainstream (Jewish-)
Christian views and to Egyptian (theurgically oriented) approaches to astrology in
a new approach to the aeon Sophia, often depreciated as producing the Demiurge-
creator (sometimes called Yaldabaoth) of our mistaken world (e.g., Apocryphon of
John [NHC] 2.1.9–12). Here the Gnostic cosmos or Pleroma has become an object
of considered reflection, a “generalized product” rather from the immediate, taut
attention of discovering some new way out of a hostile world (pace NHC I.5; II.5).
Thus the whole “Treasury of the Light” issuing from “the Great Invisible One” seems
filled out to accommodate all parties, as “the Triple Powers, Forty-eight Invisibles,
with all their Regions, their Aeons and their Orders” and all manner of resulting
emanations, as
ungenerated, autogenerated, generated, stars, singular properties, archons,

powers, rulers (archontes), archangels, angels, ushers (dekanoi), servitors, and all
the houses of their spheres and all the hierarchies within all of them,
including also “tyrants,” “evildoing” aeons and archons, and the “fate-incurring
twelve (planetary) aeons” from whom horoscopes are read (PS [Schmidt] 1.1, 14–16,
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20, 23, 27–8; cf. 2.64–6), Here Gnostic terms (including the Barbelo Gnostic triadic
expression of God) sit in ideational rapprochement with increasingly more widely
disseminated New Testament words for invisible presences (Lk 2:13; 1 Thess 4:16;
Col 1:16; Ephes 2:2, 6:16; Rev 5:11, 12:7–8), and Jesus, coming and going between
the lower heavens (“the First Mystery”) and earth after his resurrection or even before
it (cf. e.g., Jn. 3:13; Apocalypse of Peter [NHC] VII.3.70), is presented as in control of
all powers challenging him. By inheriting a cosmic bodily garb (his “light vesture”),
he can confidently throw at least the lower ranks into “agitated conflict” and “out
of their circles” for his reordering purposes, to help souls (of humans and animals)
locked in the Mixture (kerasmos [sic]) of Light and Destruction (PS 1:1, 3–4, 6–9, 15,
18, 23, 25–6; cf. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.30.4–6, 12 (on Ophism); Second Treatise of
the Great Seth [NHC] VII.2.51–52; Evangelium Judae 55:18–20; and note on cosmic
mixture, the Zoroastrian Pad gumēzisn [(Greater) Bundahishn 1.26], the Mandaean
tahmia [Diwan Nahrawata Tbl. 1, col. 2] and Manichaean mixis [Severus Antioch.,
Homiles 123]).
And so it is that Jesus is in a position to “redeem” (Pistis) Sophia from being
trapped in a chaos (below the empyrean but above the twelve planets) and restore
her to her proper place in the thirteenth heaven (PS 1.29; 2.74–76). By now Sophia
was a highly controversial figure in Alexandria: since the Septuagint, the “Middle-
Platonic-looking” philosophic Jew Philo, the Hermetica, Isis devotees, and Christian
cosmological theologian Origen all extolled Wisdom/Sophia positively in processes
of Creation, and took the material world as good; and since Gnostic literature
expressed discordant views about her –from veritable “Whore” (Second Treat.
VII.2.50) through overly independent Force (Hypostases of the Archons II.4.94–95)
to consort of “Pistis cosmic Man” (Eugnostos [NHC] III,3.77–78) –some move to
get around this “Gnostic weakness” was almost predictable. The earlier, Valentinian
distinction between a higher Sophia and an outcast one (Achamoth) (Ptolemaeus,
apud Irenaeus, Adv. Haeres. 1.4.1–1.5.2) is unacknowledged, as is the teaching that
Christ redeemed the lower Sophia through his Incarnation (Ophism, apud Irenaeus,
I.30.12–13), and PS treats Sophia just as one. Thus right from the start of her story,
recounted to the disciples by Jesus, she is relieved from blame for her fall as one who
had been hated and pursued downwards by spiteful powers, when she really did
“have faith in the Light of Lights” and repents, and now needs God to “avenge” her
(PS 1.29–32).
From Bk. 1.33 to Bk. 2.82, interestingly, PS contains prayers from the (LXX)
Psalms (68–70, 106–8, etc.) and The Odes of Solomon (this anti-Marcionite, perhaps
also anti-Manichaean work from Syria being a late inclusion in some LXX versions
[Drijvers 1981; cf. Lattke 1979–1998]). Through evoking them the two Marys, Peter,
Philip, Martha, and other disciples seem to participate with Jesus theurgically in
Sophia’s intensive course of repentance, release, and restoration to her place in the
thirteenth aeon (2.76), and be themselves blessed. Such concessions to “orthodox”
Christianity admitted (cf. also Ascen Isa 6–11), however, it is a paradox that whereas
PS portrays Jesus as master over Fate (1.25.11–16; 27.4–10; 29.10–17, and from
2.84), and as causing a cosmic readjustment that tricks the magicians who read
horoscopes, in the end it is confessed that the magicians will eventually work out
what heavenly configurations apply and read them accordingly (1.29–30; cf. van der
Vliet 2005: 524–6). If Bardesaneans affirmed human freedom yet accepted astrology
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for illustrating divine governance (Trompf 1979: 206, 211), PS’s Egyptian author
can never have his Jesus completely undo what is eternally ordained, and it is as if
Christianity and magic have to come to terms with each other (Meyer and Smith
1994; Noegel et al. 2003).
Interestingly, the longest tractate from the Nag Hammadi Library, the badly
damaged Zostrianos, labours a similar sense of detailed gnosis of supra-terrestrial
realms. Possibly the last work of the collection, a late third- century text book
straightway attacked by Neoplatonist Amelius after he retired to Syria in 269
(Porphyry, Vit. Plot. 16–17), it presents an extraordinary vision of celestial realms by
its hero Zostrianos, guided by “the Angel of Light” and “the Son of the Father” (NHC
VIII.1.3.29; 13.1.10–11). Apparently the author deliberately outmatches all others
for giving the greatest number of names of aeons in the cosmos, in a strangely arti-
ficial “overview,” without describing characteristics of any but the greatest of them.
The late eclecticism here signs off in the name of Zoroaster, clinching authority from
the one taken as the greatest magician (132 finis) (cf. Boyce and Grenet 1991: 494–5,
550–3). It also honors Sethian speculation (the primordial virgin male/female Barbelo
as first aeon of “the Triple-powerful Perfect Spirit,” the cosmic mistake engendered
through Sophia, the “great seed of Seth,” etc.) (VIII.1.10.15–16; 16.6; 27.11; 130.17;
cf. Allogenes [NHC XI.3], and see Turner 2000: 116–31), maintains the Valentinian-
associated distinction between three types of humans (elect, transformable, and lost)
(e.g., VIII.1.1.7; 6.7–9; 73.15–20), deploys Middle Neoplatonic categories for the
highest Beings (reality, essence, mind, image, actuality, etc.) and celestial metempsy-
chosis (Sieber 1973: 238; Burns 2014: 97–100), and strikingly adopts Mandaean-
derived insights about cosmic waters. The author has edged away from Christian
teachings but Jewish names are everywhere and we find features in common with the
movement extolling John the Baptist, Mandaeism consolidating into an important
Gnostic contender under the Sasanians (van Bladel 2017: 7–25).
The Mandaeans transformed the paradigmatic myth of divine infiltration into the
cosmos from that of sparks to water. Instead of humanity’s link to the True God
being that of dispersed light-sparks from Sophia (whether she is considered posi-
tively or fallen) the connection is focused on Living Water, which flows out from a
single divine stream (suggested by deltas or irrigation). Thus recurrent baptism in
running (“living”) water keeps up a circular celestial/terrestrial interaction (see ch.
16). Significantly, Zostrianos undergoes heavenly baptisms in order to “pass through”
into the heaven-worlds in “a highway of ascent” (VIII.1.5–7; 19.4–5; 44.15; and see
Turner 2001: 603–7), just as for Mandaeans such baptisms were to be received on their
death-journeys (Qolasta [Canonical Prayer Book] [Drower] 9–10, 13, 29). Zostrianos
has to pass through bridging aeons of “Transmigration” and “Repentance,” something
parallel to Mandaeans’ “Guardian of the Gate” (Abathur), indeed PS also mentions
different Gatekeepers as Gnostic equivalents to the traditional Egyptian ma’at (e.g.,
1.25; 2.76; cf. 1.6). Reaching the other side, where he achieves a high angelic/mes-
senger role (cf. 2 Enoch [A]‌22:10), Zostrianos finds it is the “Vitality” of the “perfect
Water of Life” that is Gnōsis (for Mandaeans, Manda), being “behind all existence,”
a “fountain” of “self-begotten water” that is “a single source which divides into many
parts yet joins with the whole again,” and through which “the scattering of man
is saved” and “strengthened by the savior sent by the gentle Father” (esp. 15.5–12;
17.11–12; 22.22–23.21; 45.4–5; 131.17). Most classic Gnostics (Valentinians the
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clearest exception) and the Manichaeans took water baptism, as against putting on
the garment of light (e.g., NHC I.5.127–9; II.6, 131; III.2.64–5), to be ritually useless,
since “it came from the earth” (NHC VII.1.30; IX.3.31; with Cirillo 2009: 54–8; yet
cf. Turner 2001: 238–49, on Sethian rites, and see NHC V.5.84 on cloud baptism).
In Zostrianos, nevertheless, light (in perfection and ineffability) and Mind are hardly
forgotten (esp. 74–5), although whether the reference to “mind power” issuing from a
Single Source derives from Gnostic or Middle-to-Late Platonic ideas is hotly debated
(cf. Marius Victorinus, Adversus Arium 1.49–50; and see Drecoll 2010: 197–212).
Pro-astrological features in Zostrianos, we should admit, would actually be alien to
Mandaeans (and Manichaeans).
LATER DEVEL O P M E NTS

The kinds of intersections, borrowings, and competitions we have documented here
continue in later modes of Gnostic thought. As is widely recognized, though, what
we call “classic” (mostly “Christianizing”) Gnostic parties dissipated during the
fourth century. Whether this was due to imperial (and consequently also episcopal)
policies to stamp out heretics (Eusebius, Vita Constantini 3.65; and see Franzmann
2005) is a matter of ongoing debate. The reality was more that religions able to
“network” effectively across cities and peoples congealed into the big contestants –
state-sponsored Christianity from the 330s (managed by bishops), Mithraism (based
on military connections), informally liaising branches of Great Mother worship
(especially the Isis cult), and, among the Gnostic groups, Manichaeans. Fourth-
century Manichaeism was more widespread than “mainstream Christianity,” and
its followers could express their faith openly enough under post-Diocletianic Rome,
at least as far as the North African evidence shows (e.g., Kellis Copt. 25; 29 [see
Gardner 2013: 303–5; Secundinus, Epist. ad Augustinum). Specifically associated
with John the Baptizer, the Mandaeans survived, somewhat like the Samaritans, as
an “ethno-religious minority” on the Euphrates (Trompf 2013). Less well organized,
certainly more regionally confined Gnostic parties began to fade or blend into other,
bigger concerns. Fissures show up among Valentinians (e.g., Authentikos Logos
[NHC VI.3]; cf. Tervahauta 2015: 92–4), while, becoming estranged from Platonism,
the Sethians fragmented (Marsanes [NHC X.1]; Bruce Codex [untitled]; cf. Turner
1986: 83–5).
A later derivative of Sethian-related Gnostic activity, admittedly, affected Armenia
with the Archontics, whose protagonists (Peter the Anchorite and Eutaktos) pur-
posely simplified their aeonic system. Through their books of Harmony and use of
The Ascension of Isaiah, they extolled the Sophia-like Luminous Mother living in the
eighth heaven, rejected Sabaoth, God of the Jews, and his offspring the Devil (ruling
over the world from the lowest heaven), and held that Seth was preserved from being
inseminated by the Devil through Eve like unfortunates Cain and Abel (Epiphanius,
Panarion, 40.2.4–40.74). A notorious episode to the West had charismatic lay ascetic
Priscillian espouse a Manichaean-touched Gnostic teaching in Spain, and, after being
rebuffed by ecclesiastical reactions, his appeal resulted in death for sorcery by the
(usurper) emperor Magnus Maximus in 385, much to the sadness of the more astute
orthodox leaders, who opposed capital punishment by Christians and who sensed
the martyrdom of Priscillian and his close companions would only strengthen his
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movement and throw bad light on abetting and worryingly corrupt clergy (Sulpicius
Serverus, Chronica 2.46–51; cf. Trompf 1994: 583–5).
Priscillianist doctrines were indicative of the way late “antique Gnostic outbursts”
were to be perceived, basically as dualist and eo ipso Manichaean. Priscillian him-
self, ironically, preferred all Manichaeans to be executed as magicians (Tractates
[Würzburg] 1, pp. 22, 24), and perhaps was more influenced by other Gnostic
sources, such as the Marcosians, attacked by Irenaeus but still active in Gaul, and
Mark of Memphis, who came to Spain from Egypt (Chadwick 1976: 20, 201). Still,
his apparent reckoning of Satan as primordial as the Father, of bodies as products of
the Devil and souls as divine substances, and use of apocryphal Acts (including Acta
Thomae) favored by Mani’s disciples (esp. Orosius, Consultatio sive Commonitorium
2–3; Pope Leo I, Epist. 15; Turibius, Epist. 5 [Migne, Patr. Lat. vol. 54, col. 694C])
makes his Gnosticizing clear enough, as also his astrologico- magical interest to
counter cosmic principati, who had bound all souls descending from God to fate
and in evil bodies until Christ’s saving act on the cross (Chadwick 1976: 192–200).
His prayers in the nude, however, and in the company of women, would seem more
Marcosian and magically oriented. Priscillianism is unassociated with sexual ritual,
such as using semen in the sacrament by the Gnostic Borborites, known to attract
followers in Alexandria into the fifth century (Hanegraaff and Kripal 2011: 11–12),
and any idea that the first aeon of God should be feminine (Mary, before Jesus), as
known later (ca. 595) from Gaul (Gregory Turonensis, Historia Francorum 10.25;
Doat Coll. [BN Mss], vol. 27, pp. 132r-138v), is also absent.
The uniformly accepted Gnostic assumption that souls originated in the divine
and descended into matter, expectedly, eventually cast a shadow of suspicion on the
Christian theology setting most store by the pre-existence of souls, Origen’s, who
took the soul of Christ to be the same as ours though “forged to God like an iron in
the fire” (De principiis 2.6.3; 8.3[i]‌[Lat.], 5). Once the “prevailing orthodoxy” took
each human soul to be created de novo at birth, from Jerome’s campaign after the
translations of Origen into Latin by Rufinus of Aquileia, and through the Councils of
Alexandria (400) to Constantinople (553), Origen was tainted with Gnostic heresy, at
times considered the cause of both it and Arianism (see [highly persecuting] Patriarch
Theophilus of Alexandria, Homilia [against Origenists] (BM Ms Or. 3581 A [43]);
Evagrius Ponticus, Kephalaia gnostica [Guillaumont]). Platonic philosophy, under-
standably, earned the same associations as the Christian Byzantine empire congealed
ideologically. True, a scintillating, ascetical young Proclus Lycaeus shored up the
defenses of Athens’s Academy in the 430s by systematizing a Platonic theologia,
positing a hierarchized cosmos emanating from the One into myriad entities through
the divine Intellect (Nous), with insights affected by the Chaldean Oracles as to how
the soul can free itself from horoscopic fate, evil forces, and materiality (Stoicheiōsis
theologikē). But a Christian theological subversion and replacement of this came from
behind the scenes and pseudonymously in the name of Dionysios the Areopagite (see
Acts 17:34), probably by 490. Using Proclus’s Platonic model of form before matter,
the author visions a Celestial Hierarchy in which the angelic and earthly orders are
symbolically paralleled. Three series of angels descend in nine grades (Neoplatonic
Enneads!) in lessening refractions of the divine light (Jarry 1968: 223–4). Uncannily
this provided the perfect basis for later Orthodox theologies of Gnosis (e.g., Maximus
Confessor, Mystagogia [in 630]), and for theological training to include pagan
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philosophy (as esōterika) while bridling dangers in Neoplatonism and its “heresiarch”
Proclus (Mariev 2017). Over in the Latin West the ultimately unknowable God could
be seen as mediated through a hierarchized cosmos and at least higher knowledge
achieved (John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon [867]).
At that special transition-point between the rise of Islam, the weakening of the
Byzantine Empire, and the expansion of later barbarians (especially the Bulgars), the
last great late antique “new outburst of Gnostic activity” occurred, or should we say
dualism, a blend of Zoroastrian, Marcionite, and Manichaean threads that betokened
the undercover history of heresy in and around the Byzantine world and on into
early Ottoman times (J. and B. Hamilton, with Stoyanov 1998). Indeed, Paulicians
have been rightly considered the background influence behind renowned dualist
movements in the medieval West (see ch. 35) and, nota bene, not all dualisms are
Gnostic (Fontaine 1993–1994).
Known first from Armenia from the 540s, mainly with Constantine “Silvanus”
of Mananalis, a district north of Edessa, a century later (Garsoïan 1967: 78, 80–1),
Paulicians distinguished good and evil deities, worshipping only the God of the
New Testament and not of the Old (the Demiurge), and taking Christ to des-
cend docetically (perhaps aphthartodocetically) to redeem us from the Demiurge’s
evil world of matter and the body (Ms Sinaiticus Graecus 383. 1–2, 4, 9–17 [fols.
148v-149r]). The Bad Spirit, though, was apparently not uncreated like the Good,
but developed reactively from the latter, reflecting more the Syrian than the Iranian,
or Valentinian than Manichaean, type of dualism (as theoretically distinguished by
Hans Jonas [1963: 237]), unless further research on influences by the Syrian Audian
sect will instruct otherwise (see ch. 28). Accepting most but not all of the New
Testament, Paulicians extolled Paul’s letters (including that to the Laodacians, the
known text of which welcomes release from mortality [Lat. vv 6–8]) –hence the epi-
thet Paulikianoi. Unlike Marcionites, however, they used all Four Gospels (not just
Luke), and venerated the Johannine corpus (excluding Revelation, little known in
Armenia). They took John 5:37 on the Father the Jews had “never seen” to refer to
the true God (Petrus Sicilianus [870], Historia Paulicianarum, prolog. 38 [Hamilton])
though whether they read John’s “royal officer” (Jn 4:46) and “ruler of this world”
(Jn 12:31; 14:30) as the Old Testament God (cf. 2 Cor 4:4; Ephes. 2:2) is unknown
(see Heracleon, Commentarium in Ioannis [Brooke and Völker] Frags. 1, 40 (cf.
ch. 35); with such ideas rating no mention in Nonnus Panopolis [Armen., ca. 550],
Paraphrasis in Ioannis [Thomson] 1.1 [1:3b]; 2.12 [12:31b-32]; 14 [14:30b-31a]).
Despite their negative attitudes to matter and corporeality, most Paulicians spurned
Manichaeism, having no dietary prohibitions, and associating Mani with the Buddha
(Petrus Sicil., 78), perhaps reflecting the Eastern Church abjuration formulas against
those “identifying Zarades (Zoroaster), the Buddha and Christ as the same being”
(see De Lubac 1952: 26), certainly wanting to avoid heavy penalties on Manichaeans
(Codex Iustinianus 1.5.3–5). Paulician opposition to crosses and church-buildings
brought sympathy from iconoclast emperors (Leo III the Isaurian; Leo V the
Armenian) and some rapprochement with Muslims (e.g., Barnard 1974: 104–18).
Concern with astral and/or aeonic powers had dropped away, but more because they
wanted to recover a preconceived pristine apostolicity, not through discerning, like
ex-Manichaean Augustine, that the “forces of darkness” should not be foisted on to
an inimical cosmos and “disowned as alien from the real self” (Markus 1990: 47).
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
JÑĀNA: GNOSTIC TENDENCIES
IN EARLY HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM
Gregory Bailey
W hile Gnosticism as a subject of interest in the history of Christianity has

produced raging debates for the past hundred years, the same cannot be said
for the appropriation of gnostic concepts to the study of early Indian religions. Few
scholars working on early Hindu and Buddhist texts have attempted to justify use of
the term “gnostic” as a descriptor of certain ontological and epistemological concepts
central in the two religions, even when they have used it. Yet the word gnostic as an
adjective relating to certain experiences and forms of knowledge comes up often. It is
likely it has been taken over into Indological writings on the basis of parallel concepts
found in writings on “Christianizing Gnosticism,” and if so we are certainly justified
in questioning whether gnostic concepts help in understanding early Indian religious
materials. Certainly, parallels to what is found in classic Gnostic literature can be
sought in Indic texts and practices, even if the contexts behind their development
were different from what is found in ancient India.
Intuitively one might think it easy to trace a strong Gnostic element in the scho-
lastic streams of Hinduism and Buddhism, though less so with Jainism. If Gnostic
tendencies are accepted as comprising a particular kind of search for truth within the
person, with the concomitant belief that the external world is considerably devalued in
relation to both the search and that which is to be discovered at the end of the search,
then there is much to be found in early Indian religion. Given an abiding emphasis on
intuitive knowledge as the vehicle for acquiring that correct knowledge of the S/self
that liberates one from ordinary existence, extensive use of light and dark symbolism,
a radical duality between the life of the spirit and the life of the world, a strong ascetic
tradition dedicated to creating the appropriate conduct for the discovery of the true
self, and myths of the degeneration of humanity; then all the thematic conditions
are seemingly there which replicate what various scholars have defined as “classic
Gnosticism.” And the clincher would be the direct etymological connection between
the Greek word gnosis and the Sanskrit word jñāna. But here all sorts of difficult
qualifications need to be introduced. And these still apply if we distinguish between
gnostic tendencies, as described in terms of the above characteristics, and what have
been interpreted retrospectively as the various forms of Christian Gnosticism.
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— Gregory Bailey —
DEFINITIO NS
A general paraphrase of Gnosticism provided by analyst of theological trends, Joe
Morris, though conditioned by interpretations of early Christian doctrine (cf. King
2003: 2), easily allows the inclusion of certain streams represented in early Indian
literature:
Salvation from sin, original or otherwise, was not a goal of Gnosticism. Their
[sic] goal was release from unconsciousness and ignorance, or incomprehension.
Humans who possess the divine spark can find their freedom only in learning
of its source, how it came to be entrapped in the material world, and how it
can escape to return to its original realm. This important theme of gnosis takes
us back to the beginning of our search. Gnosis is the liberating knowledge that
enables release from the material evil world. This knowledge was ‘special’ and
qualitatively different from, and transcendent over, the simple faith of the Church.
… it is significant to note that salvation was potential in everyone. It was not vic-
arious, but individual. Individuals saved themselves.
(Morris 2008: 22)
With some qualifications, but with the exception of lack of concern for sin, this could
easily paraphrase what is found in certain places in late Vedic, Hindu, and Buddhist
literature.
In scholarly articles on both Buddhist and Hindu texts over the past 50 years there
is a consistent occurrence of the word gnosis –though significantly not Gnosticism
itself –usually in conjunction with the word jñāna or “knowledge.” Such occurrences
assume a knowledge of what gnosis might mean as an overarching ontological or
epistemological category rather than defining it precisely. Arguably definitions of
jñāna in both ontological and cognitive senses are what the classical texts of Hindu
and Buddhist philosophy strive to achieve, yet Indologists and Buddhologists use the
word gnosis seemingly without need for accompanying explanation. An exception is
a recent article by David Gray, who writes that,
The Buddhist traditions are replete with meditation practices that focus upon,
or seek to transform, the human sense powers. Buddhism is arguably a gnostic
religion, one that sees salvation as resulting from the attainment of knowledge.
This knowledge, however, is not the mundane knowledge of worldly matters
(laukikajñāna), but rather ‘ultimate knowledge’ (lokottarajñāna) or the gnosis of
ultimate reality. This special knowledge, also known as the gnosis of a Buddha
(buddhajñāna), involves a special ‘yogic perception’ (yogipratyakṣa), a direct
knowledge of ultimate reality attained via meditative practices.
(Gray 2011: 46)
This also applies to the dominant teachings of the Upaniṣads, important foundational
texts in the development of Hinduism.
In Sanskrit what would be the equivalent term for gnosis and Gnosticism? In both
Hindu and Buddhist literature it is the word jñāna and its cognates. It is the pre-
eminent signifier designating a condition of knowledge capable of liberating its agent
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— Jñāna: gnostic tendencies —
from ongoing rounds of rebirth, while also enabling a person to lead a contented tran-
quil life in their present existence. In inventing an equivalent to the word Gnosticism
we would gloss something like jñānatā (which seems not to be attested) or jñānatva,
which is attested, both perhaps translating literally and clumsily as “knowledgeness”
along with a compound such as jñānavāda, “doctrine of knowledge.” Nowhere do
we find a term like jñānavāda that could translate as “the doctrine of knowledge”
or jñānadarśana in the specific sense of “philosophy of knowledge” (though, as we
shall see, such does occur with special import in Buddhist and Jain texts). The term
jñānayoga, however, is well known from the Bhagavadgītā as summarizing the range
of doctrines that might fall under the gnostic framework described in this chapter.
The general lack of an appropriate technical terminology, in any case, is no indica-
tion that jñāna was not central to different religious (primarily ascetic) paths and
tendencies focused on liberating knowledge. Note how samyagjñāna “correct know-
ledge,” and mithyājñāna “false knowledge” as the opposite of liberating power/pro-
cess, might validly indicate knowledge as gnosis, even if these abstractions only occur
rarely in the Upaniṣads and very occasionally in the Mahābhārata (e.g., Bk. 14.7.23
and 12.308.149).
UPANIṢ A D S
In the Upaniṣads the achievement of the cognitive realization of the absolute iden-
tity of the brahman with the ātman is the stuff of jñāna. However, the word jñāna
is not especially common in the early Upaniṣads (600 BCE), appearing more often
in the middle Upaniṣads (300 BCE and beyond) and in later theistic ones such as
the Mahānārāyaṇa, the Maitrāyaṇīya, and the Śvetāśvatāra, all composed around the
beginning of the Common Era. From the earliest texts, though, a cultivated disdain
for the world understood as a set of material and psychological conditions –specif-
ically expressed as a critique of desire and the false identification of the body with
some kind of ultimate reality, which by definition must not be subject to time and
space, therefore the opposite of the material body and psychological states –is a fun-
damental axiom. Their basic proposition is that escape or liberation from an ongoing
round of rebirths, in an existence evaluated as inescapably unsatisfactory, rests on
gaining and then cultivating an insight into the direct ontological identity between the
self (ātman) within the person and the cosmic Self (Brahman), with emphasis every-
where placed on first knowing the ātman.
To attain intuitive knowledge of this deep connection is often regarded as the secret
Upaniṣadic teaching and its goal. It is this knowledge, given usually to a male, and
allowing direct insight into the ontology of ātman and of the external world, both
mental and physical, which is not ātman, that is called jñāna. It also includes fully
understanding the habitual mental conditions mediating the interaction between the
ātman and the external world, conditions simultaneously acting as an obstruction for
the ātman to cognize itself as it really is. Accordingly, much found in the Upaniṣads
explores the immense difficulty in understanding by use of the mind –itself grounded
in a sense of mistaken identity –an ontological condition existing beyond the mind.
The texts use symbolism and paradox to try and achieve this.
In the earliest Upaniṣads strenuous attempts are made to distinguish the ātman
from everything else around it. Chaṇḍogya Upaniṣad brings up the ontological
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difference and evaluates it in terms of pleasure and pain. In doing so it raises the
henceforth commonly used distinction between what comes to be called worldly or
“lower” knowledge as opposed to the higher knowledge of the ātman. The student
Nārada confesses to the teacher Sanatkumāra that he knows many different texts and
at least six different forms of specialized knowledge, all called vidyās. Immediately he
acknowledges the inadequacy of this form of learning:
Here I am, a man who knows all the Vedic formulas but is ignorant of the self
(evāsmi nātmavit). And I have heard it said by your peers that those who know
the self pass across sorrow (tarati śokam ātmavid iti). Here I am, sir, a man full of
sorrow. Please, sir, take me across to the other side of sorrow.
(7.1.2 [Olivelle])
Sanatkumāra says in return: “Clearly, all that you have studied is nothing but name”
(7.1.3).
Answers to Nārada’s request are given everywhere in the Upaniṣadic corpus
through expository teaching, most transparently in the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad, where
gnostic elements abound, as for example:
By truth can this self (ātmā) be grasped –

by austerity, by right knowledge (samyagjñānena),
and by a perpetually chaste life.
It lies within the body, brilliant (jyotirmayo) and full of light,
which ascetics perceive (paśyanti),
When their faults are wiped out.
(Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 3.1.5 [Olivelle])
Apart from light symbolism, the self itself is scarcely characterized, a typical feature
of Upaniṣadic narrative. Two modes of knowing it are asserted. It can be “grasped,”
the verb labh commonly used here to designate the acquisition of material things and
intellectual concepts. In contrast, the verb paś is normally translated as “perceive” or
“see.” Both together suggest a mode of knowing through direct vision, the object/sub-
ject of which vision will be developed through analytic application of jñāna. But there
is more. Four modes are available for “acquiring” the self and they delimit the lifestyle
practices for cultivating knowledge of the ātman. Of these, austerity (tapas) and “a
perpetually chaste life” (brahmacarya) constitute two of the fundamental behavioral
practices in all the ascetic traditions of India –Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain.
Another passage of the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad denies the relevance of some of these
techniques in gaining knowledge of the ātman, while maintaining the centrality of
jñāna:
Not by sight, not by speech, nor by any other sense;

not by austerities or rites is he grasped (gṛhyate).
Rather the partless one is seen (paśyate) by a man, as he meditates,
where his being has become pure,
through the lucidity of knowledge.
By thought is this subtle self to be known,
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into which breath has entered in five ways.

By the senses is laced the entire thought of people
In which, when it is pure, this self becomes disclosed.
(3.1.8–9 [Olivelle])
Is there a contradiction between the statement that the ātman cannot be grasped
by sight, but can be seen by a man who is purified by the “lucidity of knowledge”
(jñānaprasādena)? Not necessarily, if the verse is interpreted as stating that the senses
(such as the eyes) are inadequate in providing a knowledge of the ātman gained only
when the person’s mind is purified of the influence of the sense organs, an idea recur-
ring constantly in the texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Lucidity arises from purity, but
both are directly related epistemologically in the process of the ātman knowing itself.
Thus the person who has meditated attains a vision of the ātman through jñāna when
that specific form of knowledge and the mental organ which does the knowing, is
not tainted by worldly things, in which case the requisite knowledge might be called
vijñāna. For vijñāna remains important in having a function in distinguishing what is
ātman from what is not ātman. And the acquisition of jñāna does not necessarily arise
from austerities or sacrificial rites: correct vision is enough.
Whilst austerities might have a place in consolidating the contemplative lifestyle of
the seer who seeks the right jñāna, fundamental is the vision transcending the sense
organs. Modes of knowing something that involve the vague sense of “grasping” or
“obtaining” relate more to knowledge of psychological and material things and are
really obstructions to the kind of intuitive knowledge jñāna defines and which arises
in conjunction with seeing. Seemingly tautological, this is a kind of seeing that is
qualified already by a foundation in jñāna. Even here, though, the exact meaning of
jñāna may elude us except for the implication that it is the specific knowledge that
knows the ātman. Other forms of knowledge derived from the senses do not. Yet
later, commonly in post-Upaniṣadic literature, jñā is used in the compound sarvajña
“the one who knows everything” to indicate knowledge of everything, including the
psycho-material world.
Nothing is ever simple, of course, and in 3.1.9 of the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad cited
above the verb vid is used to designate knowledge of the “subtle self.” Its choice
correlates knowledge of the self with the functioning of the mind/consciousness. The
latter is pervaded by the functioning of the five senses, and only when it is somehow
purified of these does the ātman reveal/disclose itself to it. Once more this implies a
temporary cleansing of the mind of the influences of the senses, foreshadowing what
is found in later literature of a more technical nature where the permanent self shines
on to the buddhi or the spiritually highest part of the mind. All sorts of methods to
know the ātman can be tried, but all will be pointless unless jñāna is allowed to come
forth purified and so unobstructed by the worldly knowledge associated with the
senses.
Later Upaniṣads have a higher concentration of the word jñāna and associated
concepts, and it is hardly coincidental that they also show signs of early forms of
the Sāmkhyā philosophy, subsequently developing as the purest expression of gnosis
in Indian philosophical schools. The Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad connects the word
jñāna with mokṣa, the preeminent word for “liberation” in later Sanskrit litera-
ture. One passage (6.20) summarizes what is found in earlier Upaniṣads while also
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reflecting new developments in the understanding of ātman that will recur often in
the Mahābhārata:
When by means of the self, and through the quiescence of the self, one sees the
self shining, which is more subtle than the subtle, then having seen the self by
means of the self, one becomes selfless. Because of being selfless it [the self] is
considered to be without enumeration into categories and without a source. This
is the highest secret and it has the characteristic of liberation.
Everything pertaining to gnostic knowledge is here: a fundamental ontological dis-

tinction between mind and self, knowing by vision, secrecy, lacking any origin, the
self knowing itself through its self, and a new addition, the inclusion of mokṣa as a
key word pointing to the ontological status of the ātman as escape from continuous
rebirths.
THE MAH Ā B H Ā RATA

It is especially in Book 12 of the Mahābhārata (200 BCE – 200 CE) that jñāna as
word and associated concept becomes significant, because in it the important phil-
osophies extant at the time of its composition are being developed, consolidated,
and critiqued. This is interestingly contemporaneous with the “classic Gnosticism”
in the Romano-Hellenistic world, and at a closely similar period jñāna becomes very
important in Mahāyāna Buddhist texts as a technical term, already prefigured earlier
in Pāli sources. Technical terms found in the Upaniṣads are also commonplace in the
Mahābhārata, with the addition of new ones such as saṃsāra “the world conceived as
a round of rebirths and constant movement” and mokṣa or “liberation from rebirth
and immersion in mental stillness.”
A fine example of a move towards a gnostic knowledge and what results from it is
given in the great epic at 12.188.1–5.
Bhīṣma said, ‘Look here, prince, I will tell you about the discipline of meditation
that has four components. By knowing (jñātvā) it, the great sages reach eternal
perfection in the world.
The yogins practice meditation in such a way that it is exceedingly well
accomplished. They are great sages, who are satiated with knowledge (jñānatṛptā)
(or gnosis [Wynne]) and their minds are in great repose. Prince, they are not reborn,
they are freed from the evils of transmigration, they do not experience the evils
of birth and are stationed firmly in their own being. They are beyond the dual-
ities, they are constantly pure in knowledge, and are liberated, and rest always in
a place that is without attachment, without debate and brings peace to the mind.
In that place the sage should hold his mind perfectly focused, completely
attached to his own repetitive practice, sitting like a stick, his senses rolled into
a ball.’
This yet again illustrates the sharp contrast drawn between those who practice medita-
tion to acquire jñāna and everyone else who lives in the world of constant movement,
that is, saṃsāra, with all the enduring flaws of which it is composed. Many negatives
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will be noted in the language used, deliberately highlighting the total negativity of
saṃsāra and the bliss and repose of its opposite.
A different way of expressing a more positive side to this comes in the previous
chapter of the Mahābhārata, one introducing the important concept of buddhi:
As someone crossing a wide river has no anxiety when he is aware of the further
shore, so too it is with those who know about the Over-Self, absolute isolation
(of the soul in beatitude, kaivalya), the highest Knowledge. When a man has
insight into the entire coming and going of beings here and has examined it grad-
ually with his Intellect (or with awakened understanding[s]‌, buddhi), he gains the
highest blessedness from that.
(12.187.53–54 [Fitzgerald])
Two different verbs, vid and budh, designate the act of knowing. To this can be added
the noun buddhi as the “organ/locus” of knowing and jñāna as the cognitive con-
dition whose subject/object of knowledge is the adhyātman, another word for the
ātman. Emphasis placed on jñāna as knowledge cultivated through the buddhi is
central in the Sāṃkhyā philosophy in the Mahābhārata and leads to a differentiation
of that system of thought from Yoga and a refinement in the understanding of the
dualistic nature of existence, elaborated in the previous passage cited above.
Sāṃkhyā philosophy, which so dominates these chapters, may well represent the
high point of gnostic developments in Hindu literature. James Fitzgerald points out
that in the Mahābhārata (and possibly the Maitrāyaṇiya Upaniṣad) there is a tendency
for Yoga and Sāṃkhyā to be conflated in terms of some of their principal doctrines, but
he notes a widening divide between both in the Mahābhārata Book 12. He asserts that
The goal of Sāṃkhya is to achieve a radical (and ‘mokṣa-conferring’) disaffection

from the world, a radical purging of egocentrism and desire from one’s taken for
granted understanding of the world with oneself in it. This disaffection, called
vairāgya (a dissociation from life’s motivating stimuli at the visceral level of a
person’s being) is effected by the systematic, enumerative contemplation of the
entire system of the world. The word Sāṃkhya signifies ‘comprehensive intuition,’
or ‘all-gnosis,’ and its cognates signify ‘enumerate, know the whole of some com-
plex entity by itemizing and totaling every component of it.’
He goes on rightly to argue that this parallels the fundamental teachings of early
Buddhism and concludes that, “This convergence of motives and themes prompted
some thinkers to argue for a ‘gnostic’ approach to mokṣa, one that de-emphasized
those aspects of yoga that were concerned with mastering and using entities in the
world by exercising acquired yogic power in the fashion of a God, a Lord, an īśvara”
(Fitzgerald 2015: 9).
Sāṃkhyā and Yoga do undergo further developments in later centuries. There can
be no doubt that the Sāṃkhyan philosophy, with its sophisticated enumeration of the
material and psychological world and the highest self into 26 components, becomes
a mode of radically devaluing the world of saṃsāra, more so than Yoga itself, and a
technique for acquiring a perfect understanding of the self (puruṣa) and everything
(prakṛti) opposite to it.
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BUDDHIS M
The words gnostic and gnosis are used to a much greater extent in writings on
Mahāyāna Buddhism than in studies on earlier Buddhism or Hinduism. Not only is the
idea of a special kind of knowledge stressed –one leading to a non-dual understanding
of existence –but also the conception of a special “knowledge-body” of the Buddha,
with the accompanying belief that a germ of Buddhahood (tathāgatagarbha) exists in
all individuals, awaiting only to be discovered. As the epitome of this is the Buddha’s
body called dharmakāya, a body of pure knowledge, one that exists in distinction from
his nirmāṇakāya, the body any Buddha assumes to attract followers and bring them on
to the path of buddhahood by the application of different methods (Radich 2016: 30–
6). In later Tantric Buddhism the idea of a gnostic body of the Buddha is developed,
one having both cognitive and ontological aspects, and is connected with the idea
of śūnyatā or the absence of any permanent substrate in all things as the defining
characteristic of existence. These ideas are mostly developed in highly scholastic texts
after the seventh century CE, accessible only to a very small group of adepts. Michael
Radich (2011: 229) notes that the sense of a gnostic body of a Buddha regarded as
being immortal is implied in Pāli texts, yet it is especially in Mahāyāna texts in Sanskrit
and their Chinese translations after the fourth century CE that the refinement of the
concept of the gnostic body of the Buddha proceeds with considerable analytic skill.
Gnostic tendencies in the most general sense can already be perceived in the
Buddha’s first sermon, especially in a statement often found in the Pāli Canon:
Thinking that, ‘This is the noble truth relating to suffering,’ in the absence of
things unheard of before, monks, in me vision (cakkhum) arose, knowledge
(ñānam) arose, insight (paññā) arose, wisdom (vijjā) arose, light (āloka) arose.
(Dhammacakkapavattanasutta [in Vinaya Pịaka (Horner)]
vol. 1: 11; also Saṃyutta Nikāya [Feer] vol. 5: 422)
This narrates the Buddha’s assessment of his own experience in gaining an intui-
tive knowledge of the four noble truths at the time of his Enlightenment. The
modes of knowing that have arisen, we note first, have done so “in the absence
of things unheard of before” (ananussutesu dhammesu). The term anussutesu
can be taken as referring to existing learning, probably brāhmaṇical oral trad-
ition. In the five components that have arisen two are seemingly physical: the eye
(cakkhum) or vision and light, that is, the sense organ which sees light, and three
more abstract properties: “knowledge,” “insight,” and “wisdom.” Of these, know-
ledge and insight are related, with the latter being a deepening of the former, and
developed through extended meditation (see also Saṃyutta Nikāya vol. 5: 179).
But each of these three collectively conveys the union of analytical and intuitive
knowledge, with both of these coming from the mind and the other two more
“physical” components combining with these to denote a kind of seeing blended
with an accompanying intellectual content, a similar combination also found in
the Upaniṣads.
Intuitive vision is the essential vehicle for perfect understanding of the four noble
truths, and also brings with it the self-confirming knowledge that one knows exist-
entially one understands them. It is gained either by a flash of insight henceforth
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cultivated by sustained meditation, or by a secret instruction from the Buddha, or by

adoption of an ascetic lifestyle accompanying a program of meditation and restraint
of the senses. In the Buddha’s case it resulted from six years of learning about the
nature of existence and of the self (or the illusion of it), accompanied by rigorous
meditation. His was the model lifestyle by which this knowledge/vision could be
attained and then cultivated in such a way that it completely altered his view of exist-
ence in a wholly existential sense. This new view could be understood intellectually,
but to be fully life-transforming it had to be both known and seen in a unified way.
As in the Upaniṣads, the acquisition of jñāna brings with it a complete reevaluation
of the physical and psychological world such that one’s worldly behavior completely
alters.
The real “Gnostic” developments in Buddhism emerge in Mahāyāna texts after
the fourth century CE and especially with the development of Tantric Buddhism
after the seventh, though such developments are surely implied in earlier texts.
They involve the construction of a technical vocabulary around three factors: the
idea that all Buddhas are immortal and have bodies consisting of pure know-
ledge; the belief that the original nature of sentient beings is purity of mind and
that all people possess this purity (the potentiality for Buddha nature) but allow
it to be obscured or kept in an impure state (by conceptualization resulting in
false beliefs about themselves and the world); that the original pure mind can be
accessed through direct realization, the acquisition of liberating jñāṇa shining into
the mind. Given that the mind/body is so tainted with ignorance and craving, but
that the Buddha body or gnostic body is utterly purified of this because it is omnis-
cient, then certain meditational processes were developed whereby purification of
the tainted mind could be achieved.
In dealing with some late (eleventh-century) Kālacakra Tantras, Vesna Wallace
points out that “the Gnostic Body can be considered a body in the sense that it is a
limitless, space-like form encompassing all appearances within itself and a habitat of
the corporeal world. For this reason, it is at times referred to as a bodiless (anaṅga)
body.” And that
It is perceptible only to the mind because it is nothing other than the reflec-
tion of one’s own mind, since the mind is able to perceive its own reflection due
to its innate luminosity; and this very luminosity of the mind is said to be an
appearance of the other three Buddha bodies.
What she calls the Gnostic body has two components: “The indivisible unity of these
two –emptiness and bliss –is termed the Gnostic Body (jñāna-kāya) and defined as
the embodiment (kāyatva) of the gnosis of all the Tathāgatas. The term kāya here
clearly subsumes the meaning of a ‘collection,’ suggesting that the phrase jñāna-kāya
is to be interpreted here as a ‘set of bliss and gnosis’ ” (Wallace 2009: 48, 50). Because
it pervades everything then it exists in the body of all sentient beings but can be
known only when the mind is purified of false views such as belief in the ego “I” as
constituting something like a permanent self.
As we find in the earliest Buddhist and Hindu texts on meditation the theme of
purity as a process of clearing the mind of obscuring mental limitations that cause
an existentially mistaken view of existence is foundational in all of these religious
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tendencies we might call Gnostic. Francesco Sferra captures this as it applies generally
to Mahāyāna teachings:
that pureness is the original (or adamantine) nature of things, and that its mani-
festation corresponds to the more or less gradual revelation of knowledge and to
the disappearance of the kleśas, i.e., impurities, beginning with attachment. The
gradualness with which all this occurs and the employment of several means,
which range from the observance of specific rules of conduct to the celebration of
liturgical ceremonies and the practice of yogic techniques, authorizes us to speak
of a process of purification.
And further that “This knowledge, which is free from notions of Self and Other and
is similar to the ether, immaculate and void, the very essence of existence and non-
existence, supreme, and the fusion of wisdom and means, of passion and absence of
passion, arises from direct personal experience” (citing Hevajra Tantra I.10.7) (Sferra
1999: 91–2).
INSTITUTIO NAL
Evidently, though a technical vocabulary was appearing from the time of the early
Upaniṣads, and was developed in both brāhmaṇical and Buddhist circles, it becomes
refined and disputed only in the Mahābhārata, and early Mahāyāna literature. These
texts provide a foundation from which really serious institutionalized argumentation
takes place and the technical terms then represent distinct systems of thought whose
parameters are reasonably clear.
To what extent do these systems of thought represent heretical positions against
something regarded as orthodox? Surely none do. While the texts of the three main
religions reveal a high level of plurality and examination of divergent opinions,
there were no attempts to define orthodox and heterodox. Moreover, these intel-
lectual differences did not extend beyond intellectual circles, to say the least, as the
arguments between these groups were too difficult for any but the most learned. Nor
was there any kind of institutional arrangement or real desire to distinguish heretic
from orthodox.
If modes of behavior may have constituted another framework of difference, even
here the idea or “preconceived category” of the holy man –including those who
would have followed the meditational paths leading to the cultivation of jñāna –
would have overwhelmed most specific objections, except from brahmins who were
observing and monitoring the rigidifying of the systems associated with social class.
Asceticism and the mendicant life style had been so well developed and been trad-
itional for at least four centuries by the beginning of the Common Era that there need
not have been any kind of adverse reaction to them by the populace.
CONCLU S IO N
As a search for a permanent reality –whether a self or a non-self –untouched/unsullied
by any influences from the interaction between the mind and the external world, early
Indian religions offer several related theories and accompanying sets of appropriate
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conduct designed to give a vision of intuitive knowledge (jñāna) and to cultivate it

further once experienced. In several important respects these correlate with what
scholars in the twentieth century have defined as Gnosticism, but it is extremely likely
that these developments in India were independent of those in the Near East, and of
course they developed in a totally different intellectual context.
REFERENCES
Fitzgerald, James. 2015. “ ‘Saving Buddhis’ in Epic Mokṣadharma.” International Journal of
Hindu Studies 19 (1–2): 97–137.
Gray, David. 2011. “Experiencing the Single Savior: Divinizing the Body and the Senses in
Tantric Buddhist Meditation.” Thomas Cattoi and June McDaniel (eds.). Perceiving the
Divine Through the Human Body. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 45–65.
King, Karen. 2003. What is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press.
Morris, Joe. 2008. Revival of the Gnostic Heresy: Fundamentalism. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Radich, Michael. 2011. “Immortal Buddhas and their Indestructible Embodiments –The
Advent of the Concept of Vajrakāya.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist
Studies 34 (1–2): 227–90.
—— —2016. “Perfected Embodiment: A Buddha- Inspired Challenge to Contemporary
Theories of the Body.” Barbara A. Holdrege and Karen Pechilis (eds.). Refiguring the Body.
Embodiment in South Asian Religions. Albany, NY: SUNY Press: 17–37.
Sferra, Francesco. 1999. “The Concept of Purification in some Texts of Late Indian Buddhism.”
Journal of Indian Philosophy 27: 83–103.
Wallace, Vesna. 2009. “Why is the Bodiless (anaṅga) Gnostic Body (jñāna-kāya) considered a
Body?” Journal of Indian Philosophy 37: 45–60.
Wynne, Alex (trans.). 2009. Mahābhārata Book Twelve: Peace, vol. 3: The Book of Liberation.
New York: New York University Press /JJC Foundation.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE DISCOURSE OF TRUTH

IN CHINESE TIANTAI
BUDDHISM: “GNOSIS
BEYOND GNOSIS”
Haiyan Shen with Brikha H. S. Nasoraia
T he key issue in the teaching of Buddhism concerns truth. It is one’s realization

of truth that leads one to reach enlightenment. In sixth-century China, master
Zhiyi 智顗 (538–597 CE), founder of the Chinese Tiantai 天台 Buddhist school,
correctly understood the importance of the issue of truth and had launched the
whole discourse on truth in his work The Profound Meaning of the Lotus Sutra
(Miaofa lianhuajing xuanyi 妙法蓮華經玄義, in Chinese Tripiṭaka [Taishō edn., vol
33, No. 1716], pp. 698b–707a) (hereafter Xuanyi) (with Shen 2005). To him, truth
is an object to be viewed, seeing that truth is subjective to one’s conception. The con-
ception of truth determines one’s level of realization, from which each category of
objects as truth can be divided into four levels. These four levels are arranged hier-
archically relating to the Four Teachings according to Zhiyi’s system of classification,
with which four levels of enlightenment are derived. Zhiyi’s painstaking discussion
of objects as truth is demonstrated in his comprehensive view of the six categories
of truth as a whole. These six categories are interconnected and interpenetrated,
and thus can illuminate each other in unveiling the ultimate reality of all dharmas.
Through his discourse of truth, Zhiyi established a practical course of attaining
enlightenment in terms of what truth is, how truth can be approached, and how uni-
versal salvation can be realized.
Zhiyi regards the issue of truth to be vital, because truth is the foundation on
which the essential teaching of the cause (of self-realization) and the effect (of liber-
ating others) of Buddhahood is based. Zhiyi’s discourse of truth in his work Xuanyi
provides us a comprehensive picture of his theory of truth with two perspectives.
First, truth is not an abstract concept, but is concerned with objective reality.
Although truth itself is indescribable and inconceivable, its content that reflects
objective reality can be described and presented. Thus, truth is described in six cat-
egories as Ten Suchnesses, Twelvefold Causality, Four Noble Truths, Two Truths,
Threefold Truth, and One Truth.
Second, by classifying each category of truth in four types, he associates truth with
one’s conception. This means what Zhiyi is concerned with is not merely truth itself,
but also how truth is conceived, since the attainment of truth is associated with one’s
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— The discourse of truth in Buddhism —
subjective mind. For this reason, correctly presenting what truth is and addressing
various conceptions of truth are equally vital.
In Zhiyi’s system of understanding Buddhism, truth pertains to liberation, know-
ledge concerns truth, and practice is the means to obtain knowledge in penetrating
truth. Apparently, truth as substance, knowledge as gist, and practice as means are
three indivisible components that constitute Buddhism. Zhiyi emphasizes that know-
ledge as understanding relies on diligent practice to be obtained, practice must be
guided by knowledge, and knowledge will not be correct without concerning truth.
Only with knowledge as the eye and practice as the foot can one conceive truth and
reach enlightenment. Both practice and knowledge are indispensable, and together
they provide conditions to allow a person to gain religious accomplishment. Without
practice, there would not be the fruition of enlightenment; and without knowledge,
practice cannot accomplish anything (Xuanyi, pp. 693a–696a).
ZHIYI’S DISCOURS E O F TRU TH

Zhiyi’s discussion of Objects as the Ten Suchnesses, as the Threefold Truth, and as the
One Truth centers on the issue of what truth is. The One Truth is synonymous with
the Ultimate Truth, i.e., the One Truth is the Ultimate Truth and the Ultimate Truth
is the One Truth. This conveys that the Ultimate Truth underlies all dharmas and can
include all categories of Objects as truth. The Threefold Truth describes the three
aspects that constitute the Ultimate Truth as true reality. True reality is simultaneously
empty and provisional, and this is the Middle Way that represents the Ultimate Truth.
In other words, all dharmas (entities) are insubstantial and thus empty, but they are
also temporarily existent with names, and thus provisional. This view of the Middle
Way is taken by Zhiyi to embody the Ultimate Truth. The Ten Suchnesses concretely
describe the characteristics of the Ultimate Truth. This means that the Ultimate Truth
is characterized by nature, appearance, substance, power, function, causes, conditions,
effects, retributions, and beginning-and-end-ultimately-alike.
Therefore, the final purpose of Zhiyi’s scheme in distinguishing various levels of
attainment is to vehemently stress the enlightenment of Buddhahood that everyone
should strive for. The highest level would seem an equivalent to the attainment of
Gnosis (as deepest Knowledge and Truth) in Gnostic systems, yet if its attainment
involves an intricate pathway, this level brings a state “beyond Gnosis” altogether.
ZH I YI’ S SYSTEM OF ELAB O RATING TRU TH IN

ITS SIX CATE G O RIE S
Zhiyi’s discourse of truth intends to present all theories of truth in Buddhism.
There are altogether six categories in elaborating truth, and each of them is
classified into four types corresponding to the Four Teachings (Chappell 1983).
This is Zhiyi’s endeavor to define systematically what truth is in the context of
the Four Teachings. To the disciples of the Four Teachings, truth that is taught by
the Buddha is understood differently, and these different types of understanding
reflect a gradual progress: from the initial understanding of truth in the Tripiṭaka
Teaching, gradually ascending to the understanding of truth in the Common
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— Haiyan Shen with Brikha H. S. Nasoraia —
Teaching, in the Separate Teaching, and finally to the ultimate understanding of

truth in the Perfect Teaching. By doing so, Zhiyi establishes his own comprehensive
theory of Buddhist truth. By classifying each of the six categories of truth into four
types, all six categories are equally important in fulfilling the task of universally
liberating living beings. Having defined what truth is in six categories, the second
part reveals the fact that although truth can be presented in different categories,
these categories share the same reality as the Ultimate Truth.
1. The Ten Suchnesses

The first category Zhiyi sets up in elaborating truth is the Ten Suchnesses, which
can describe the characteristics of reality (Hurvitz 1960–1962). To reiterate, they are
suchness of appearance, nature, substance, power, function, causes, conditions, effects,
retributions, and beginning-and-end-ultimately-alike. The Ten Suchnesses is elaborated
in relation to the Ten Dharma-realms (hell-dwellers, hungry ghosts, animals, asuras,
humans, heavenly beings, śrāvakās, pratyekabuddhas, bodhisattvas, and Buddhas), as
sentient beings are what constitute the Ten Dharma-realms. The first nine realms belong
to the relative truth, the Buddha-realm the ultimate truth, and each of the ten realms
is characterized by the Ten Suchnesses. Seeing that the Ultimate Truth is reflected by
the Ten Dharma-realms that consist of the relative and ultimate, this Ultimate Truth
embraces both the relative and the ultimate (Xuanyi, pp. 693a–696a).
2. The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination

The second category of truth is the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination (ignor-
ance, volitional activity, cognition, name and form, six senses, contact, sensation,
desire, attachment, existence, rebirth, and old age-and-death) (Xuanyi, pp. 698b–
700c). As a result of the disciples of the Four Teachings understanding the truth of
the Twelvefold Causality differently, there are four types of the Twelvefold Causality
corresponding to the Four Teachings suitable to different faculties of beings either
dull or sharp, including the following:
i. Twelvefold Causality of Origination and Extinction of the Conceivable. This is the

doctrine taught by the Buddha to disciples of the Tripiṭaka Teaching with dull fac-
ulties. The first two links of the Twelvefold Causality “ignorance” and “volitional
activity” are conceptually understood as the actual cause of the six worlds of trans-
migration, and all entities in these worlds constantly arise and perish. Therefore, it
is called “Twelvefold Causality of Origination and Extinction of the Conceivable.”
ii. Twelvefold Causality of Neither Origination Nor Extinction of the Conceivable.
This is the doctrine designed by the Buddha for disciples of the Common Teaching
with sharp faculties. The Twelvefold Causality is understood as empty of substan-
tial Being, and thus illusory. Since ignorance and the rest of the twelvefold links
up to old age-and-death are as illusory as emptiness, nothing is in fact originated.
Correspondingly, if there is no origination, there is no extinction either. Therefore,
it is called “Twelvefold Causality of Neither Origination Nor Extinction of the
Conceivable.”
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iii. Twelvefold Causality of Origination and Extinction of the Inconceivable. This is

the doctrine that is addressed by the Buddha to disciples of the Separate Teaching
with either dull or sharp faculties, for the purpose of disproving Śrāvakayāna
and expounding Mahāyāna. This type of understanding the Twelvefold Causality
associates ignorance with one’s mind. From the mind of ignorance, all dharmas
within and beyond the three realms (desire, form, and formless) arise. Ignorance
in this context refers to the infatuation of the Two Vehicles with nirvāṇa (release
from a state of suffering), which results in rebirth in the form of mentally created
bodies (e.g., their rebirth is not an ordinary and physical one, but non-physical
“mind only” bodies), which is beyond conceptual understanding. In view of the
rebirth and death that is the transformation of the sages, the Twelvefold Causality
of Origination and Extinction is inconceivable.
iv. Twelvefold Causality of Neither Origination Nor Extinction of the Inconceivable.
This is the doctrine taught by the Buddha for people with sharp faculties of the
Perfect Teaching. The purpose of this doctrine is to reveal the principle that is
contained within phenomenal appearances. The principle and the facts are per-
fectly identified with each other, in a sense that they include each other. One might
call this the “ultimate Gnosis,” but only with caution.
Of these four types of understanding, the ultimate understanding of the Twelvefold

Causality belongs to the Perfect Teaching, by which reality is described as neither
origination nor extinction and is inconceivable. The inconceivability is spoken of in
terms of identifying principle with the facts with Zhiyi’s theory of the Buddha-nature
as the Triple Cause of Buddhahood (Fundamental Cause, Understanding Cause, and
Conditional Cause). The Buddha-nature as the Triple Cause of Buddhahood is derived
from identifying the Threefold Course of Ignorance (Affliction, Karma, and Suffering)
with the Threefold Virtuous Quality of Buddhahood (Bodhi-wisdom, Liberation, and
Dharma-body).
The three causal links “ignorance” as the cause in the past, “desire” and
“attachment” as the cause in the present belong to the Course of Affliction. This is
because “ignorance” as the cause in the past and “desire” and “attachment” as the
cause in the present lead to the effect of present existence and future existence. Since
there is the existence of transmigration, these three links are taken as the Course
of Affliction. This course is identified with Bodhi-wisdom, which constitutes the
meaning of the Buddha-nature as the Understanding Cause of Buddhahood. If one
understands what ignorance is, ignorance will not arise. Such an understanding is
Bodhi-wisdom, which is conducive to the attainment of enlightenment. Affliction and
Bodhi-wisdom are identical to each other, in a sense that affliction is a necessary con-
dition for one’s wisdom to arise.
The two links, “volitional activity” as the cause in the past and “existence” as the
cause in the present, are ascribed by Zhiyi to the Course of Karma. This is because
“volitional activity” and “existence” are the conditions from which karma is formed.
This course is identified with liberation, which constitutes the meaning of Buddha-
nature as the Conditional Cause of Buddhahood. The Course of Karma is evil, for
it keeps one in the world of transmigration. Nevertheless, because of evil, one is
motivated to aspire to cultivate practice in order to reach freedom from saṃsāra. In
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a sense that those karmic deeds are what inspire one to strive for liberation, karmic
deeds and liberation are identical to each other.
As the result of the previous two types of course (affliction and karma), the course
of suffering is formed. Zhiyi considers the Course of Suffering as the combination
of the five links as the effect in the present, i.e., consciousness, name-and-form, six
senses, contact, and sensation, and the two links as the effect in the future, i.e., rebirth,
and old age-and-death. This course is identified with the Dharma-body (dharmakāya),
which constitutes the meaning of the Buddha-nature as the Fundamental Cause of
Buddhahood. Since the difference between suffering and dharmakāya is simply a pro-
duction of discrimination in one’s mind, the identification between the two is thus
possible when one’s mind no longer discriminates. Without mind discrimination, one
realizes that suffering and dharmakāya are part of the same integrated reality. Zhiyi
concludes that this identification is made in view of the Middle Way, from which the
meaning of the “Twelvefold Causality of Neither Origination Nor Extinction of the
Inconceivable” is derived.
In Zhiyi’s system, these four types of understanding indicate a gradual progress,
which leads to final and supreme understanding of the Perfect Teaching (what might
be called “final Gnosis”). The last type of the Twelvefold Causality is subtle, because
liberation is not attained by separating ignorance from liberation, but by recognizing
a single reality in which the principle and the facts are perfectly integrated. In other
words, the Threefold Course of Ignorance is identical to the Threefold Virtuous
Quality of Buddhahood (as stated above). A logical conclusion drawn from this iden-
tification is that one does not need to depart from the former in order to seek the
latter. Since these two are identified as the same reality, the tendency for people to
separate them as two different realities is prevented.
3. The Four Noble Truths

The third category of truth concerns the Four Noble Truths (suffering, cause of
suffering, extinction of suffering, and the path leading to the extinction of suffering)
(Xuanyi, pp. 700c–702a). They are understood in four ways corresponding to the
Four Teachings.
In the Tripiṭaka Teaching, the Four Noble Truths are interpreted as Origination
and Extinction; in the Common Teaching, the Four Noble Truths are interpreted as
Neither Origination Nor Extinction; in the Separate Teaching, the Four Noble Truths
are interpreted as Immeasurable; and in the Perfect Teaching, the Four Noble Truths
are interpreted as No-function.
In other words, disciples of the Tripiṭaka and Common Teachings are with dull facul-
ties, and truth for them is emptiness as the Absolute Truth; and disciples of the Separate
and Perfect Teachings are with sharp faculties, and truth for them is the Middle Way.
However, disciples of the Separate Teaching are more deluded in terms of the Middle
Way. This means that the bodhisattvas can only see no-emptiness of dharmas with the
view of the Middle Way, with which they are motivated to enter the mundane world to
save beings, but cannot identify Emptiness with the Provisional Existence. On the other
hand, disciples of the Perfect Teaching are able to perceive an integrated reality with
the view of the Middle Way, and therefore the Middle Way in the Perfect Teaching is
the perfect view of reality. The significance of this perfect view of reality lies in the fact
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that it dissolves all differences among the Four Teachings, whereby the coarse or subtle
teachings are merged into a single reality of the absolute subtlety.
4. The Two Truths
The fourth category of truth concerns the Two Truths (Worldly and Absolute Truth)
(Swanson 1989). The Worldly Truth concerns empirical existence, and the Absolute
Truth concerns emptiness of existence. The issue of the Two Truths preoccupied the
Buddhist discourse before Zhiyi. Therefore, Zhiyi’s interpretation of the Two Truths
is his attempt to summarize systematically various views of the Two Truths and to
present his own view of the Two Truths within the framework of the Four Teachings
(Xuanyi, pp. 702a–704c).
The first view of the Two Truths refers to the Two Truths of Real Existence. In
this view, the Worldly Truth concerns real existence, and the Absolute Truth the
extinction of real existence. Real existence as the Worldly Truth refers to all senses,
sense-organs, and their objects. Emptiness as the Absolute Truth can only be attained
through extinguishing these entities. Considering that this view of the Two Truths
of Real Existence takes dharmas in this spatial-temporal world as something that
really exists, it corresponds to the Tripiṭaka Teaching. This is because the Tripiṭaka
Teaching holds that dharmas (or entities) as mundane phenomena are substantial.
The second view of the Two Truths refers to the Two Truths of the Emptiness of
Illusory Existence. Zhiyi’s definition is that Worldly Truth refers to illusory existence,
and Absolute Truth identifies this illusory existence with emptiness of substantial Being.
This view of the Two Truths rejects the validity of the first view of the Two Truths,
because the meaning of the Worldly Truth and the Absolute Truth in the first view
cannot be sustained simultaneously. If real existence as the Worldly Truth is presented,
the Absolute Truth cannot be sustained, because the attainment of the Absolute Truth is
based on the extinction of real existence. However, if real existence is extinguished, the
Worldly Truth cannot be sustained. On the other hand, the Two Truths in the second
view can be sustained, because illusory existence is taken as the Worldly Truth. This
means that one does not have to extinguish existence in order to attain an encounter with
the Absolute Truth. The illusory existence as the Worldly Truth indicates the meaning of
non-substantiality of existence, and this meaning is the Absolute Truth. Therefore, these
two truths are identical to each other. This view of emphasizing emptiness of exist-
ence corresponds to the doctrine of emptiness in the Common Teaching, because this
teaching holds that existence is empty right therein due to its illusory nature.
The third view of the Two Truths refers to the Two Truths of the Illusory Existence
as Empty and not Empty. Zhiyi defines that Worldly Truth refers to illusory exist-
ence, and identifying this illusory existence with both emptiness and not emptiness
is the Absolute Truth. The content of the Worldly Truth is the same as in the above
second view that takes illusory existence as the Worldly Truth, but the content of
the Absolute Truth entails three levels of understanding, forming three types of the
Absolute Truth. These three types of Absolute Truth along with the respective type of
the Worldly Truth form three types of the Two Truths. These three types of the Two
Truths correspond to the doctrine of the Common Teaching, the Separate Teaching
directing the Common, and the Perfect Teaching directing the Common. The Two
Truths is spoken of in terms of outflow and no-outflow. Outflow is an expression for
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a person who still has defilement, and is taken to represent the Worldly Truth; and
no-outflow refers to the person who has severed defilement and attained śrāvaka lib-
eration, and is taken by Zhiyi to represent the Absolute Truth.
The first person of the Common Teaching considers “neither with outflow” as
the Absolute Truth, and “nor without outflow” as to get rid of attachment to no-
outflow. This level of attainment is to enter the state of no-outflow by destroying one’s
attachment to no-outflow.
The second person of the Separate Teaching directing the Common, advances
from the viewpoint of the Common Teaching to that of the Separate Teaching. He
considers “neither with outflow” and “nor without outflow” to be two extremes,
and the Middle Way as the principle is identical to the Absolute Truth. However, this
Middle Way is obtained by transcending either of the two extremes rather than by
identifying “neither with outflow” with “nor without outflow”.
The third person of the Perfect Teaching directing the Common advances from
the viewpoint of the Common Teaching to that of the Perfect Teaching. This means
that one immediately realizes that the double negation of “neither with outflow nor
without outflow” demonstrates the Middle Way of affirming all aspects of reality as
an integrated unity.
The fourth view of the Two Truths refers to the Two Truths of the Illusory Existence,
all tending toward Emptiness and No-emptiness. Zhiyi explains that the Worldly Truth
in this fourth view is the same as that in the second and third views of the Two Truths
concerning illusory existence. The Absolute Truth means that illusory existence that
is supposed to be empty is not empty. This is to say that although illusory existence
is empty, from the perspective of the provisional existence, it is not empty. This type
of the Two Truths corresponds with the Separate Teaching, for this teaching takes the
provisional existence into account for the sake of saving living beings.
The fifth view of the Two Truths refers to the Two Truths of Illusory Existence and
Emptiness, and neither Existence nor Emptiness. Differed from the above three types
of the Two Truths (from the second to the fourth one) that only take illusory existence
as the Worldly Truth, Zhiyi asserts that in this fifth view, the Worldly Truth identifies
illusory existence with emptiness. The Absolute Truth is embodied in a double neg-
ation of existence and emptiness (e.g., neither existence nor emptiness). This type of
the Two Truths corresponds to the Separate Teaching.
The sixth view of the Two Truths refers to the Two Truths of the Perfect entering
the Separate. The Worldly Truth in this sixth view is the same as in the above fifth
one, but the Absolute Truth means neither existence nor emptiness, and all dharmas
tending toward neither existence nor emptiness. However, Zhiyi reminds us that
no-emptiness as the Absolute Truth underlies different implications in the Separate
and the Perfect Teachings. In the Separate Teaching, “no-emptiness” entails a dili-
gent religious practice to realize the principle of no-emptiness. In order to reveal this
principle, one has to utilize skillful means of practicing cultivation. In the Perfect
Teaching, however, “no-emptiness” means that this principle is not just the object to
be cognized, but it is endowed with all Buddha-dharmas, i.e., the principle embraces
all dharmas or entities in the empirical world.
The seventh view of the Two Truths refers to the Two Truths of the Perfect Teaching.
The Worldly Truth in this last view is the same as in the above fifth and sixth ones.
The Absolute Truth, however, incorporates all views of emptiness and existence. This
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view is beyond conceptual understanding, for the Worldly and the Absolute Truths
are mutually identified with each other. To be more specific, the inconceivability of the
Two Truths means that they are not different, and yet they are in polarity.
To Zhiyi, although there are seven views of the Two Truths, they are interrelated
with each other, seeing that the real intention of the Buddha is to eventually expound
the truth according to the Buddha’s own knowledge. It is evidenced by sudden reve-
lation of the Ultimate Truth in the Lotus Sūtra that enables all believers of both
Śrāvakayāna and Mahāyāna to enter the terrace of the lotus blossom (a representation
of subtle enlightenment).
5. The Threefold Truth
The fifth category of truth concerns the Threefold Truth (Ng 1993), and there are
five types of the Threefold Truth in reference to seven views of the Two Truths. The
above first two views of the Two Truths are not in the scheme of the Threefold Truth,
but the rest of the five views do contain the Middle Way, from which five types of the
Threefold Truth are formed. These five categories of the Threefold Truth are discussed
in the light of the concept “outflow of defilement” (representing the view of the
Worldly Truth) and “no-outflow of defilement” (representing the view of the Absolute
Truth). These two phrases designate the phrase “neither with outflow nor without
outflow,” which is a comprehensive view of the Middle Way. However, each of the
five types of the Middle Way entails different implications (Xuanyi, pp. 704c–705a).
In the first type of the Threefold Truth, the Threefold Truth of the Separate
Teaching Entering the Common Teaching, “outflow of defilement” refers to the
Worldly Truth, and “no-outflow of defilement” (i.e., attainment of emptiness) refers
to the Absolute Truth.
In the second type of the Threefold Truth, the Threefold Truth of the Perfect
Teaching Entering the Common Teaching, the two truths are the same as those in the
above first type, but the understanding of the Middle Way progresses.
In the third type of the Threefold Truth, the Threefold Truth of the Separate
Teaching, the two truths are derived from the understanding of the provisional exist-
ence as existence and emptiness, or neither existence nor emptiness.
In the fourth type of the Threefold Truth, the Threefold Truth of the Perfect
Teaching Entering the Separate Teaching, the two truths are the same as in the third
type, concerning the provisional existence being existence and emptiness, or neither
existence nor emptiness.
The fifth type of the Threefold Truth, the Threefold Truth of the Perfect Teaching,
denotes an integration of all three aspects.
6. One Truth
The sixth category of truth concerns the One Truth (Xuanyi, p. 705a). The One Truth
is a logical deduction from the above-illustrated Threefold Truth. The One Truth is
Zhiyi’s ultimate understanding of truth, which demonstrates that there is only one
Ultimate Truth regarding the true nature of reality. From the perspective of one reality
(which entails non-duality), Zhiyi considers the Two Truths to be yet skillful means
for the purpose of revealing the One Truth.
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According to Zhiyi, the perception of reality is related to the state the person is
in. A deluded and drunk state causes mistaken views to arise, from which reality is
wrongly perceived. This is the state of the voice-hearer. Mahayanists are in a sober
state, and can correctly perceive reality as an integrated unity. Nevertheless, the truth
that is verbalized is still relative due to the inadequacy of language. Ultimately, truth
cannot be explained and is beyond language, since any attempt to verbalize it would
only result in distorting it. Hence, No Truth conveys most adequately what real truth
is, which is characterized as quiescent, even beyond ultimate Gnosis.
SI X G ROUPS OF CORRELAT IO N AM O NG VARIO U S

CATEGORIES O F TRU TH
Furthermore, Zhiyi correlate the above six categories of truth, through which all truths
are viewed as an inseparable whole, for they are related to each other in conveying the
same reality that bears various aspects (Xuanyi, pp. 705b–707a). What Zhiyi intends
to say through this correlation is that truth is featured by both multiplicity and unity.
The feature of multiplicity legitimizes all six categories of truth as addressing different
aspects of reality, and the feature of unity enables all six categories of truth to be unified
in forming an integrated reality. The function of these two features is demonstrated
by Zhiyi’s system of classification in terms of the Four Teachings. Within the frame-
work of the Four Teachings, each category of Objects as truth that is classified into
four types can correlate with one another. With each group of correspondence in an
expanding pattern, incorporating all its previous categories of objects, all categories
come to be unified under the One Truth, as the following chart shows:
i. Twelvefold Causality
↓
Ten Suchnesses
ii. Four Noble Truths
↓
Ten Suchnesses, Twelvefold Causality
iii. Twofold Truth
↓
Ten Suchnesses, Twelvefold Causality, Four Noble Truths
iv. Threefold Truth
↓
Ten Suchnesses, Twelvefold Causality, Four Noble Truths, Twofold Truth
v. One Truth
↓
Ten Suchnesses, Twelvefold Causality, Four Noble Truths, Twofold Truth,
Threefold Truth
From the above listed groups of combinations, we can see how various types of
truth function as the annotation for each other. Hence, these two aspects designate
vertical and horizontal dimensions respectively, and visually elucidate the state of
Buddhahood –a “Gnosis beyond Gnosis.”
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REFERENCES
Chappell, David (ed.). 1983. Tiantai Buddhism: An Outline of the Fourfold Teachings.
Tokyo: Daiichi-Shobo.
Hurvitz, Leon. 1960–62. Chih-i (538–597): An Introduction to the Life and Ideas of a Chinese
Buddhist Monk. Bruxelles: Institut belge des hautes études chinoises.
Ng, Yu-Kwan. 1993. Tiantai Buddhism and Early Mādhyamika. Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press.
Shen, Haiyan. 2005. The Profound Meaning of the Lotus Sutra: T’ien-t’ai Philosophy of
Buddhism. Delhi: Originals, 2 vols.
Swanson, Paul. 1989. Foundations of T’ien-t’ai Philosophy: The Flowering of the Two Truths
Theory in Chinese Buddhism. Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press.
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MEDIEVAL
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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
QUESTIONS OF GNOSTIC INFLUENCE

ON EARLY ISLAM
John C. Reeves
O ver the course of at least the past two centuries, scholars have devoted a
number of studies to the discernible roles played by ideologies associated with
constituents of the “Gnostic World” in the conceptual and historical development of
both the Jewish and the Christian religions. Less attention, however, has been given
to the ways in which Islam may have interacted with some of these same gnostic
movements. The present essay offers a brief survey of this understudied topic. But
before addressing questions about possible gnostic currents flowing through early
Islam, we need to specify the spatial and temporal parameters of the materials this
particular essay will discuss.
“Early Islam” serves herein as a marker for religious movements arising during
the seventh through tenth centuries of the Common Era within the Near and Middle
East, North Africa, and Central Asia who privilege the prophetic office of Muḥammad
and accept the revelatory status of the distinctive scripture which his adherents were
promulgating. We will in other words not confine our presentation to a restricted
geographic or chronological locale like that of the Ḥijāz in the seventh century, but
will instead endeavor to provide coverage of a broader area and time period than is
customarily the case in such studies.
A term like “Gnostic” presents a potentially more complicated problem, given the
rightly recognized issues which surround the scholarly use of labels like “Gnostic”
and “Gnosticism” as taxonomic categories for characterizing certain types of religious
texts and behaviors (Williams 1996; King 2003; Burns 2016). In the present essay,
we avoid using the noun “Gnosticism” as an unqualified marker, but we will employ
the adjective “Gnostic” when speaking about a type of religious stance or attitude
which values individual or communal possession of a particular kind of “Gnosis”
whose sponsors and articulated claims begin to attract a broad literary notice in the
Mediterranean world during the first few centuries of the Common Era. The more
generic “gnostic” will be used when tendencies rather than specific movements are
denoted.
“Gnosis” can be succinctly defined as the invocation of a “revealed knowledge”
(Greek gnōsis) about the origins and structure of the divine and material worlds
and the nature of their mutual commerce. It is a conceptual constant in those
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— Jo h n C . R e e ve s —
epistemological systems which privilege supernatural revelation over the other kinds
of knowledge that people themselves can produce through observation, experiment,
or logic. This distinct category of revealed knowledge is foundational for religions
like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam that ground their doctrinal systems in the impar-
tation of a corpus of teachings whose ultimate source lies in the supernal realm. But
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are not typically cast as “Gnostic” religions in the
sense we are employing. The literature assigned to “classical gnosis” –the kind of
gnosis exemplified within the eastern Mediterranean world of Late Antiquity (i.e.,
the Nag Hammadi corpus and other Coptic writings from the Berlin, Bruce, Askew,
and Tchacos codices) –displays a distinctive discursive style which permits its isola-
tion from the other systems and modes of speech within which it typically lurks. It
is non-egalitarian and intellectualist, and it is deliberately couched to appeal to the
small circles of literati who could appreciate the subtle complexities and ambiguities
of written texts and their polysemous interpretative possibilities. It organizes and
maps the orders of existence according to a largely stable set of simple binary oppos-
itions such as those of light and darkness, good and evil, male and female, knowledge
and ignorance, and spirit and matter. It also typically displays at least three principal
notions: (1) an assertion that the highest deity is not identical with the entity(s) who
created the material universe; (2) a claim that the spiritual component of the human
body is akin to that highest deity and/or its immaterial realm; and (3) an assurance
that the Gnosis acquired about this troubling situation is salvific and redemptive
(Marjanen 2008: 204, 210–11). It furthermore possesses notable overlaps in interest
and expression with the often-associated currents of apocalypticism, esotericism,
mysticism, cultural elitism, and pseudepigraphy (or false authorship).
By and large classical Gnosis wields an idiom of articulation wherein there come
to the fore certain actors, characters, and events drawn from the Biblical universe
of discourse, where the term “Biblical” here connotes its broadest possible scope,
encompassing both canonical and non-canonical writings and traditions (Bowley and
Reeves 2003; Reeves 2010). These components are, however, divested of their ethnic
or nationalist significance in favor of one that is trenchantly mythological and cosmic
in scope. Gnostic proclivities appear to flourish among Biblically based communities
especially within some factions of the Jesus-oriented movements of the first few cen-
turies of the Common Era, only to fade from the literary register after the rise and
imposition of the post-Constantinian varieties of Christian “Orthodoxy” in the West
and in Byzantium. To judge from the heresiological literature, Gnostic groups seem to
retain their vitality in the Christian East for a much longer period of time, and there
is suggestive evidence that their communities and texts continued to survive, circulate,
and even provoke fresh avenues of philosophical inquiry and religious speculation
within the Islamicate world well into the medieval period.
Additional religious movements which, rightly or wrongly, are sometimes brought
under the umbrella of Late Antique “Gnosis” include Greco-Egyptian Hermeticism,
Marcionite Christianity, Manichaeism, and Mandaeism (e.g., Jonas 1963). The
Hermetic corpus, consisting of both philosophical and technical treatises associated
with the teachings of Thoth/Hermes (Struck 2004), had a major impact upon the
development of the occult sciences in the Islamicate world. Since its influence therein
has been well documented elsewhere (e.g., van Bladel 2009), no further discussion is
required here. While neither Marcionism nor Manichaeism meet all three of the criteria
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— Gnostic influence on early Islam —
listed above for the delineation of a “Gnostic” brand of religiosity (Marcion rejected
a divine affiliation for humanity, whereas Mani taught that the physical universe was
planned and created by agents of the Realm of Light), Islamicate sources very fre-
quently subsume discussions of Marcionite and Manichaean teachings and practices
under classificatory labels that also incorporate more obscure local representatives of
what appear to be authentically Gnostic forms of religious expression. These same
discussions moreover sometimes include recognizable descriptions of Mandaeism, an
indubitably Gnostic form of religious expression and practice attested in central and
southern Iraq and southwestern Iran whose historical roots remain obscure, but which
may be reliant upon the merger or convergence of an indigenous Mesopotamian sect
with “a Palestinian gnostic group that came to Babylonia” (Shaked, Ford, and Bhayro
2013: 6). In our discussion below, we therefore expand the scope of our marker
“Gnostic” in order to embrace these outliers.
THE QUR’ Ā N AND GN O S TIC CU RRE NTS

Since we have discernible “Gnostic” interest in Jewish and Christian scriptural
formulations, and since the Qur’ān is firmly emplotted within a Biblical universe
of discourse (Reeves 2003; Reynolds 2010), it seems only natural to ask whether
there are any Qur’ānic episodes, locutions, or structural elements that echo textual
materials associated with classical Gnosticism, or with conceptually allied contem-
porary movements like those mentioned above. A possible nexus between the birth of
Islam and “gnostische Judenchristenthum” was strongly endorsed by the influential
church historian Adolf von Harnack (1909: 529–38). Attempts, however, to explain
Qur’ānic vocabulary in terms of Gnostic antecedents or alleged parallels have not
proven particularly compelling (e.g., Widengren 1955: 162–77). Does the curious
reference to “nineteen” angels who oversee the punitive fire of Jahannam (Qur 74:26–
31) echo the sinister role which the seven planets and twelve zodiacal signs (12 +
7 = 19) play in certain Gnostic cosmologies (Ahrens 1935: 30–1)? The parallel is
admittedly intriguing, but ultimately inconclusive. On the face of it, the Qur’ānic
emphasis upon the unicity of God (tawḥīd) argues against such dependence (Halm
1982: 6–7; Madigan 2006: 80–1). On the other hand, the strident polemic directed
against those who mistakenly or deliberately associate other divine powers or beings
with God (mushrikūn), usually thought to be polytheists and/or adherents to various
binitarian or trinitarian theologies among seventh- century monotheistic groups,
works equally well against devotees of Gnostic systems, which typically situate mul-
tiple powers or divine worlds (aeons) in Heaven.
The unconventionality of certain aspects of the Qur’ān’s teachings about Jesus,
such as its allusions to legends emanating from apocryphal works (e.g., the animation
of clay birds in 3:49; 5:110) and its seemingly heterodox understanding of the cruci-
fixion and resurrection (4:157–9), has prompted some scholars to point to contacts
with Biblically allied sectarian groups who espoused Christological doctrines which
were rejected by advocates for what became acceptable articulations of orthodox
Christian dogma. Such groups, commonly labeled “Jewish-Christian,” in that they
are described as combining belief in the special status of Jesus together with most
elements of traditional Jewish practice, “often [exhibit] … some easily identifiable
Gnostic theologoumena” (Stroumsa 2015b: 141; Crone 2015; 2016). A lingering
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presence of “Jewish-Christian” groups in the wilderness regions of Syria, Palestine,

Arabia, and Mesopotamia long after the triumph of orthodoxy in the West is spor-
adically attested by writers like Hippolytus, Epiphanius, Jerome, John Damascene,
Theodore bar Konai, and Ibn al-Nadīm (Reeves 1996: 42). Since the Qur’ān also
refers at three places (2:62; 5:69; 22:17) to a contemporary scripturally based reli-
gious community it terms the “Ṣābians,” a group whose historical identity in the
context of seventh-century Arabia was already opaque to the earliest authors of
tafsīr, but whose name can be plausibly connected with common Semitic stems for
“ritual baptism” (ṣb’/ṣb‘), scholars have not been shy in attempting to connect both
these “Jewish-Christian” groups and the Qur’ānic Ṣābians with “baptizing” Jewish-
Christian sects such as the Ebionites or Elchasaites (the latter an orientation dubbed
“gnostischer Ebionitismus” (by Schoeps 1949: 325; cf. Roncaglia 1971: 104), or
simply “all forms of gnosticism” (Pedersen 1922: 390), or even later groups who
arguably emerged from such behavioral milieux, such as the Mandaeans or even the
Manichaeans (Gil 1992: 14–22; de Blois 1995). Here we must be mindful of Kurt
Rudolph’s warning that “baptist” and “gnostic” are hardly synonymous modifiers
(Rudolph 1999: 473; cf. Strecker 1971: 270), and we should also resist facilely
equating vague terms such as “apocryphal” with “gnostic.” Yet there is at least one
distinctive teaching espoused in nascent Islam that is especially reminiscent of this
quasi-gnostic Jewish-Christian soil.
The most suggestive affinity between Jewish-Christian sects like the Elchasaites,
certain religions like Manichaeism, and the conceptual world of the Qur’ān lies in the
realm of prophetology. One ideology which their discursive realms share is that of an
official series of divinely vested messengers or prophets who have been dispatched to
the physical world in order to communicate a set of revelatory truths to humanity.
This notion is sometimes couched in terms which view these prophets as the bearers
of what is essentially a common message that requires periodic renewals or updating
due to lapses in observance, distortions of language, and corruptions in content that
have eroded the core of the revelation over the course of history (cf. above ch. 3). An
authoritative articulation of this message in a written scriptural format is often held
to be the most effective way of protecting its integrity, although even an ostensibly
fixed registration in this tangible form is still subject to both accidental and deliberate,
even malicious, tamperings and omissions. Fortunately a pristine archival copy is per-
manently housed in Heaven which can serve as a template for the religious reforms
and renewals announced by the succession of prophets (Ahrens 1935: 52; Widengren
1955: 115–61). These approved chains of prophetic succession vary in their struc-
tural details among the different groups for whom we possess reliable evidence
about their advocacy of such prophetological schemes, but practically all of them
accord prominent roles to Adam, Jesus, and the last named prophet in their sequen-
tial rosters. Virtually all of this pre-Islamic prophetic ideology possesses suggestive
parallels within the Qur’ān, wherein we learn that Muḥammad shares and replicates
the experiences of his prophetic predecessors (e.g., 4:163), that each prophet revealed
the same message and book to humanity (e.g., 2:213; 42:13), and that Muḥammad
himself constitutes the final link in the chain of prophetic succession as the “seal of
the prophets” (khātam al-nabiyyīn; 33:40). This title is especially interesting in view
of certain testimonies about its application to the third-century Babylonian prophet
Mani, as well as the way in which the language of “sealing” is rhetorically exploited
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by both Jewish-Christian and Manichaean sources (de Blois 2004; Rubin 2014;
Stroumsa 2015a).
The possibility that early Islam may be specifically indebted to Manichaeism
for some of its prophetological and scriptural fixations is one that some scholars
have explored (Friedlaender 1910–1913: 238–9, 246–54; Clemen 1921; Schaeder
1925: 213–18; Ahrens 1935: 130–2; Andrae 1960: 100–8; Reeves 1996: 209–11;
Powers 2015). Of especial interest in this connection then is a report found in the
ninth-century historian (d. ca. 820) Hishām ibn al-Kalbī, a respected and oft-cited
authority on pre-Islamic Arabian religious customs. He transmits a roster which iden-
tifies certain Arab tribes or various individuals inhabiting Mecca as Christian, Jewish,
or Zoroastrian prior to the advent of Islam. He continues by relating the following
intriguing information about Muḥammad’s tribe:
Zandaqa (Manichaeism?) was practiced by some members of the tribe of

Quraysh. ‘Uqba b. Abī Mu‘aỵ, Ubayy b. Khalaf, al-Naḍr b. al-Ḥārith, Munabbih
and Nubayh, both sons of al-Ḥajjāj, al-‘Aṣ b. Wā’il, and al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra
were zanādiqa. Mujāhid reports: ‘I asked Ibn ‘Abbās, Where was it that they
encountered zandaqa?’ He answered, ‘In Ḥīra. They would market their wares
there, and (there) they met Christians who instructed them (in zandaqa).’
(Monnot 1986: 32–3)
Zandaqa is a term of disputed origin that was used by ‘Abbāsid jurists “to denote a
broad spectrum of dualist speculation and antinomian behavior” (Reeves 2011: 18)
and especially Manichaeans. This tradition is persistently echoed by later tradents,
who often identify these same individuals as zanādiqa, but whose value as independent
witnesses to a Manichaean presence in early seventh-century Mecca is correspondingly
suspect. Nevertheless, their allegations about zindīq members of the tribe of Quraysh
at Mecca –who supposedly learned their heresy at Ḥīra –during the late sixth and
early seventh centuries may possess significance for an assessment of the spread of
Manichaeism throughout the Arabian peninsula. Muhammad Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 860) in a
pericope entitled “Zandaqa among the Qurayshites” lists the names and eventual fates
of eight individuals allegedly involved in zandaqa: Abū Sufyān, ‘Uqba b. Abī Mu‘aỵ,
Ubayy b. Khalaf, al-Naḍr b. al-Hạ̄ rith, Munabbih and Nubayh, both sons of al-Hạ jjāj,
al-‘Aṣ b. Wā’il, and al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra. With the exception of Abū Sufyān, these
are the same zanādiqa mentioned by Hishām ibn al-Kalbī. Ibn Ḥabīb concludes by
stating that “they learned zandaqa from the Christians of Ḥīra, and none of them (the
aforementioned tribal members) embraced Islam except for Abū Sufyān” (Taqīzādeh
and Šīrāzī 1956: 337). Ibn Qutayba (d. 889) reports “and zandaqa was present among
the Quraysh which they adopted from Ḥīra” (Taqīzādeh and Šīrāzī 1956: 102).
If this information is accurate (it should be noted that Ibn al- Kalbī report-
edly consulted archival documents stored by Christian churches and monasteries
in Ḥīra), it still need not be the case that the zandaqa allegedly embraced by the
Banū Quraysh was bona fide Manichaean. As noted above, the term zandaqa was
wielded by later Muslim writers as a pejorative label to brand a wide variety of
dualist religious speculation, only some of which was genuinely Manichaean, and
it was also used by them to denote outrageously libertine behavior, a signification
which would ill fit an authentically Manichaean connotation. The literary context of
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Hishām ibn al-Kalbī’s report would suggest that an organized religious community
is intended, but in the absence of independent evidence it remains unclear just which
dualist system or moral aberration lurks behind the zindīq label. The thirteenth-
century historian Ibn Sa‘īd al-Andalusī explicitly equates the Sasanian ruler Kavād
I’s (488–531) temporary flirtation with the Mazdakite movement, a Zoroastrian sect
founded by Mazdak in the early sixth century, with a conversion to zandaqa, and Ibn
Sa‘īd records an effort by that monarch to promulgate this novel ideology among
the vassal Arab tribes in Ḥīra and the Arabian peninsula (Našwat al-̣arab fī ta’rīkh
jāhilyyat al-‘arab [‘Abdul-Rahman, 1982], vol. 1, p. 327). It is hence possible that the
zandaqa reportedly rampant among the Quraysh was not actually Manichaean, but
Mazdakite in nature. However, one would hardly expect to learn about Mazdakite
teachings from “Christian teachers,” whereas Manichaeism is consciously Christian
in its prophetology, exegetical grounding, and eschatology. Given the now attested
early presence of Manichaean emissaries in Ḥīra (Tardieu 1992), it seems more plaus-
ible to conclude that the zandaqa promulgated from that center by Christian tradents
would have been indeed Manichaean in identity.
It must, however, be borne in mind that Hishām ibn al-Kalbī’s specific applica-
tion of the label zandaqa to certain members of the Banū Quraysh may reflect a
retrojected ‘Abbāsid polemical attack upon that movement’s political adversaries.
Melhem Chokr has perceptively recognized that the individuals accused of zandaqa
in his report are viciously castigated in the sīra-literature as enemies of the mission of
the prophet Muḥammad; moreover, several of them would have familial or political
connections with the overthrown Umayyad caliphate (Chokr 1993: 309–15). Perhaps
the charge of zandaqa functions in this report as a belated rhetorical caricature with
no historical substance, much like the employment of the congeners “Manichee” or
“Gnostic” in the vocabulary of Christian heresiography. If this is in fact the case,
scholars can no longer blithely appeal to the testimony of al-Kalbī as indisputable
evidence for the proliferation of Manichaean doctrines in pre-Islamic Mecca.
TRACES OF GNOSTIC CU RRE NTS IN THE

WORLD OF EARLY IS L AM
While the evidence for Gnostic influence upon Muḥammad or the Qur’ān remains
tenuous, it is indisputable that Gnostic literature of various stripes continued to cir-
culate and win admirers within the Islamicate world during the first few centuries.
One can easily demonstrate the vitality of recognizably gnostic streams of religiosity
among a variety of religious communities in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran during
Late Antiquity and the initial centuries of Islamicate sovereignty. A fascinating issue in
their study lies in trying to frame a plausible historical explanation for their lingering
presence in the East. Were gnostic currents simply indigenous to this region? Or is
their presence there due primarily to an eastern flight and resettlement of peoples and
ideas from an increasingly less tolerant West (e.g., Drower 1953)? Or should some
combination of these two explanations be envisioned?
It has been argued by some scholars that a number of the writings attested in
Coptic translation among the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic texts are ultimately
of Syro-Mesopotamian origin because they exhibit linguistic and cultural features
suggesting such a provenance. The cycle of traditions surrounding the apostle
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31
Thomas (Gospel of Thomas, Acts of Thomas, et al.) falls into this category (Layton
1987: 360–4). Many of the so-called “Sethian” Gnostic texts (such as the Apocryphon
of John and the Apocalypse of Adam) may also emanate from this region (Koester
1995–2000: 2:212–24). The Coptic Paraphrase of Shem (NHC VII,1), a work pos-
sibly known in the West by “Hippolytus” (Refutatio 5.19–22) under the name The
Paraphrase of Seth, exhibits some intriguing linkages with Syro- Mesopotamian
dualist thought (Roberge 2010). The odd appearance of the character string “Shālt”
(š’lt) in an “Adam and Eve book” attributed to the early Muslim tradent Ka‘b al-
Aḥbār (d. 652/653?) might be the result of an accidental corruption of the Gnostic
cognomen “Sethel/Shitil” (štyl), an angelic designation which is often used in place of
the name Seth among Syro-Mesopotamian Gnostic circles (Al-Hasan al-Hamdānī, Al-
Iklil [930s] [Löfgren] 1:25.12ff.). Equally fascinating is a report found in the writings
of the early eleventh-century Iranian qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār (d. 1025) about a particular
religious group “maintaining that they are of the religion (dīn) of Seth and that he
had been sent to them. In their possession is his book which God revealed to him”
(‘Abd al-Jabbār, Al-Mughnī fī abwāb al-tawḥīd wa’l-‘adl [Husayn], vol. 5, p. 152, lns.
15–16). Also suggestive in this regard is the important role assigned to Seth in early
Ismā‘īlī thought as the waṣī (“deputy” or “legatee”) to Adam in his capacity as the
first of a sequence of prophets proclaiming a revelatory religion to humankind: Seth
taught a small group of initiates the “secret meaning” (bāṭin) of this religion’s rites
and behavioral precepts (Halm 2004: 166). Some gnostic traditions associated with
the “Sethian” brand were apparently known in the East.
Another sect of undisputed Syro-Mesopotamian pedigree, the ‘Audians, reportedly
utilized textual traditions that eerily echo those that were subsequently recovered
by modern scholars within the Nag Hammadi collection of tractates. According
to Theodore bar Konai, the late eighth-century Nestorian bishop of the southern
Mesopotamian city of Kashkar, the ‘Audians utilized in addition to the Bible cer-
tain pseudepigraphic apocalypses, and he proceeds to provide his reader with sev-
eral representative citations from these suspect works (Theodore bar Konai, Liber
Scholiorum [Scher, vol. 1], 2:319.29–320.24):
Writing in an apocalypse which bears the name of Abraham, one of the creators
speaks thusly: ‘The world and the created order were made by Darkness and
six other powers.’ It says moreover: ‘They beheld by how many divinities the
soul is purified, and by how many divinities the body was formed.’ It says fur-
ther: ‘They asked, Who compelled the angels and powers to form the body?’
And in an apocalypse attributed to John, it says: ‘(As for) those rulers that I saw,
my body was created by them,’ and it lists the names of the holy creators, when
it says: ‘My wisdom created flesh, understanding created skin, Elohim created
bones, my kingdom created blood, Adonai created sinews, anger created hair,
and thought created marrow.’ This (material) was taken from Chaldean doctrines
… It states in the Book of the Strangers in characterizing God: ‘God said to Eve,
Conceive a child with me before the creators of Adam come to you!’ And the
Book of Questions says in representing the rulers: ‘Come, let us lie with Eve, for
that one who is born will be ours!’ It goes on to say that ‘the rulers led Eve (away)
and lay with her before she could come to Adam.’ And when characterizing the
rulers, the Apocalypse of the Strangers states: ‘Come, let us cast our seed in her,
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and let us do it with her first so that the one who will be born from her will
be under our control.’ And it says moreover: ‘They led Eve away from Adam’s
presence and had sexual intercourse with her.’
Related less verbose testimonies about the apocryphal library of the ‘Audians are
found in the universal chronicles of the eastern Christian writers Agapius (Vasiliev
1911: 562.6–4.2) and Bar Hebraeus (Nau 1919: 259.9–60.7). Almost all of the
quotations which Theodore bar Konai or these later chroniclers cite have been suc-
cessfully correlated with much earlier Gnostic works like the Apocryphon of John,
the Hypostasis of the Archons, and the Books of the Strangers which were independ-
ently known from the Nag Hammadi discovery or the reports of critics like Porphyry
and Epiphanius (Puech 1978: 1:271–300). The crucial difference is that these works
are being quoted in the Islamicate world in the late eighth century and thereafter in
Syriac and Arabic language versions, as opposed to the Greek and Coptic renditions
circulating in the West during the third and fourth centuries. And inasmuch as the
information which Theodore bar Konai provides about eastern dualist sects, such
as the Manichaeans and the Mandaeans, is congruent with the surviving literature
produced by such groups, his testimony shows that authentic specimens of recogniz-
able gnostic works continued to circulate in the Muslim East during the final cen-
turies of the first millennium CE.
Within the ninth chapter of the remarkable Arabic- language encyclopedia of
authors and books entitled Kitāb al-Fihrist compiled by the tenth-century Baghdadī
bookseller Abū’l-Faraj Muḥammad b. Isḥāq al-Warrāq (d. 995?), a bibliophile usually
referred to by scholars as Ibn al-Nadīm, occurs a sequential presentation of what he
dubbed “the schools of Chaldean dualists” (madhāhib al-thanawiyya al-kaldāniyyūn),
a felicitous taxonomic rubric that neatly encapsulates these groups’ local connections,
linguistic proclivities, and alleged conceptual affinities. Among his descriptions of
these madhāhib (Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist [Tajaddud], pp. 391–408; [Dodge trans.], vol.
2, pp. 773–825) we find what is certainly the most prolix and arguably the most valu-
able Arabophonic treatment of the Manichaeans, a religious movement that continued
to harbor adherents even in Ibn al-Nadīm’s day. He also includes therein discussions
of the Dayṣāniyya; i.e., the followers of the teachings of the second-century Edessan
philosopher Bardaiṣan (d. 222); the Marqiyūniyya (Marcionites), descendants of the
followers of what may have been the earliest form of the Christian kerygma to pene-
trate certain regions of Roman and Persian Mesopotamia; local “baptist” commu-
nities like the Mughtasila and the so-called “Ṣābians of the marshlands” (this latter
movement probably the group we know as the Mandaeans); certain rogue Zoroastrian
reformist movements like those set in motion by the social agitators Mazdak and
Bihāfarīd; and at least a dozen other smaller non-monotheistic collectives devoted to
the pronouncements of individual teachers or the instantiation of curious doctrines.
One of these, the Dustīyūn (Dositheans), is credited with a cosmogony that displays
certain affinities with the one that is described in much greater detail within the Coptic
language Paraphrase of Shem (Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist p, 403, lns. 18–21). While Ibn
al-Nadīm is expressly reliant on earlier authorities or sources for much of the infor-
mation which he imparts about these formally aberrant groups, he also provides us
with unique materials alongside some valuable first-hand observations and anecdotes
about the fortunes of these groups and the survival of their writings and ideological
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interests within contemporary Muslim society at the beginning of the second millen-
nium CE. Like Theodore bar Konai two centuries before him, he serves as a valuable
witness to the persistent vitality of gnostic groups, ideas, and literary articulations in
and around the ‘Abbāsid capital.
The arresting information imparted by later eastern tradents like Theodore bar
Konai and Ibn al-Nadīm raises some intriguing questions. What was the fate of those
biblically allied authors and communities who were the producers and the consumers
of recognizably Gnostic works like the Apocryphon of John or the Paraphrase of
Shem? Were they completely engulfed by the rising tide of what was institutionally
defined as acceptably orthodox patterns of practice and discourse? Are there any
indications that a studied dissembling within and among orthodox groups afforded
opportunities for the preservation of a gnostic orientation within the hardening
boundaries of the mainstream religions? Theodore bar Konai and Ibn al-Nadīm cer-
tainly provide some critical evidence for the regional survival of factions, ideologies,
and perhaps most importantly, scriptures and interpretative traditions that are intim-
ately linked with classical Gnostic expressions.
G N O STIC CURRENTS AND E ARLY S E CTARIANIS M

IN ISLA M
The most frequent appeal to the possible influence of gnostic concepts or ideologies in
Islamic theological discourse can be found in the modern scholarship surrounding the
early formulation of Shī’ite Islam in southern Mesopotamia, particularly among those
groups who were labeled as “extremists” (ghulāt) by their critics. Even prior to the
explosion of interest in Gnostic literature facilitated by the twentieth-century discov-
eries and publications of primary sources, important insights about the likely nexus
between gnostic thought and early Shī‘ism had been made by Israel Friedlaender and
Michelangelo Guidi (Friedlaender 1907; 1908; Guidi 1935). These and subsequent
scholars highlighted conceptual similarities visible between formally distinct textual
corpora, with a common vocabulary exploiting binary oppositions such as light and
darkness or spirit and matter, with a common interest in viewing authority figures
and community leaders as pre-existent emissaries or emanations of the divine realm,
a shared fascination with a cyclical progression of a fixed number of authoritative
teachers, some of whom may temporarily experience removal (“occultation”) from
human society (see ch. 3) and a common tendency toward dissimulation (taqiyya) as
a social survival tactic.
One figure that has been branded as “possibly the most ancient of Shiite gnostics”
(Corbin 1993: 76) is Mughīra b. Sa‘īd al-‘Ijlī (d. 737), a ghulūw teacher who
propounded a distinctive theosophy, cosmogony, and anthropogony that exhibits a
number of intriguing overlaps with the ideas and themes found in some gnostic texts
(Tucker 1975b; 2008: 52–70; Wasserstrom 1985–1986). According to Mughīra, God
was a “Man of Light” wearing a “crown” on his head and possessing a body whose
parts corresponded with the letters of the ’abjād alphabet. In the Creation story that
is attached to his name, it is said that two seas (cf. Qur 25:53) were formed from
God’s perspiration, one dark and salty and the other luminous and sweet. Catching
sight of his “shadow” in the water, he attempted to grab it, but it flew off. Eventually
capturing it, he destroyed it, saying: “It is not appropriate that there should be with
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me a god who is other than me!” He then created the whole of the created order from
those two seas, and he also created the “shadows” (aẓilla) of human beings, which
are the ethereal celestial prototypes of those who would eventually be born into the
material world (Crone 2013: 210–14). The first human “shadow” to be created was
Muḥammad (according to Shahrastānī, Mughīra taught that the first human beings
were Muḥammad and ‘Alī), and he was sent as Prophet by God to humanity while
still in this “shadow” state. Finally, Mughīra put great emphasis upon having know-
ledge of the “Greatest Name of God”: those who were in possession of it would be
able to resurrect the dead.
Yet another early extremist figure and self- proclaimed prophet was Bayān
b. Sam‘ān (d. 737). Much of his peculiar doctrine was generated from a literal reading
of scriptural texts. He taught that there were two gods, one who was greater and
who inhabited heaven, and one who was on earth. This bifurcation has reminded
some scholars of analogous claims purportedly found in Marcionism (e.g., Tucker
2008: 44–5), yet it is more likely the result of a literalist exegesis of Qur 43:84 (“He
Who is God in heaven, and God on earth”), where the repetition of the lexeme “God”
was read by Bayān as referring to two distinct divine entities. He taught that the
occurrence of the word bayān (“manifestation”) in Qur 3:138 was actually a coded
reference to himself and the advent of his own prophetic mission. Like Mughīra,
he taught that God had an anthropomorphic form (memorably a strong feature of
Audianism), but he insisted that this form was destined to disappear, except for God’s
“face” (cf. Qur 28:88; 55:26–7). He was also reportedly an adept in the magical
manipulation of the Greatest Name of God (Tucker 1975a).
Other ghulāt figures and sectarian groups also overlap in fascinating ways with
earlier or contemporary forms of gnostic religious expression. Abū Manṣūr al-‘Ijlī
(d. 742) claimed that God made him ascend into His presence in heaven, addressed
him as “My Son” using the Syriac language, and patted him on his head. He also
asserted that the “fragment” (kisf) which fell from heaven that is mentioned in the
Qur’ān (52:44) was actually himself (Tucker 1977; 2008: 71–87). A group such as
the Khaṭṭābiyya (Halm 1982: 199–217), an early Shī‘ite messianist sect reportedly
founded by one Abu’l-Khaṭṭāb (d. 755), was initially associated with Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq,
the sixth imam of Twelver Shī‘ism, but Abu’l-Khaṭṭāb was reportedly repudiated
by the imam when he “deified” Ja‘far. This same sect is identified by some sources with
the Mukhammisa or “Pentadists” (Halm 1982: 218–25) and with nascent Ismā‘īlism
(Sevener Shī‘ism), where “pentads” or five-fold sets of entities or terms play a prom-
inent role in some of their cosmogonical and cosmological traditions, a structural
principle shared with Manichaeism. This same Abu’l-Khaṭṭāb may also be identical
with the character bearing that name who occurs several times in the Umm al-Kitāb
(cf. Qur 3:7; 13:39; 43:4), a curious treatise “shrouded in mystery” which appears to
have originated among proto-Shī‘ī sects in southern Mesopotamia, but which now
only survives in a few Persian manuscripts that were preserved in central Asia by cer-
tain extremist groups (coming to Western scholarly attention in the early twentieth
century) (Ivanow 1932; 1936; Halm 1978: 142–68; 1982: 113–98).
The Umm al-Kitāb displays a number of themes and motifs that scholars have
sought to link with various currents of Syro-Mesopotamian Gnostic thought, espe-
cially Manichaeism. As in the theosophical teachings associated with Mughīra, God
has an anthropoid “body of light” which manifests in pentadal extensions termed five
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“limbs,” five “primal lights,” and five “excellent (or pure) ones” who are identified
with Muḥammad, ‘Alī, Fāṭima, Ḥasan, and Ḥusayn. These important characters are
also likened to the “five trees in Paradise,” an image that occurs in both Thomasine
and Manichaean literature. The fixation on pentads recalls the ghulāt sect of the
Mukhammisa or “Pentadists,” and one might compare the “five limbs” or “shekinahs”
ascribed to the Manichaean Father of Greatness (Theodore bar Konai, Lib. Schol.,
2:313.15–17), or the similar pentadal conceptions of the Godhead found in the
Syrian Gnostic teacher Basilides, the Acts of Thomas, or the Coptic Apocryphon of
John (Halm 1982: 194–5). The movement in creation from immaterial light through
“shadows” to eventually material bodies is a process that is fueled by sexual lust
and procreation. Human souls are fallen sparks of light, and their exile on earth is a
punishment for their forgetfulness about their divine origin. Salmān, the first of the
seven planetary angels, serves as the prototype of the rescued or redeemed human
who acquires true gnosis. He is portrayed as engaged in a struggle with an adver-
sarial entity named ‘Azāzi’īl, a label which possesses obvious connections with Jewish
Enochic and other esoteric tractates (Halm 1978: 105–7; Wasserstrom 1994: 101–3)
and also used of Iblis (Satan) in some Islamic traditions (Jarîr al-Ṭabarī, Ta’rīkh [920s]
[Rosenthal, vol. 1], p. 254). The vertical layers of the cosmos are each imagined as
inhabited by a pentad of persons, angels, or symbolic forms, and with a distinct color,
separated from one another by “veils” but each joined to all the others by “chains
of light.” It has even been argued that some portions of the Umm al-Kitāb may have
been adapted or translated from an earlier Manichaean writing in Middle Persian
or Sogdian (Bausani 2000: 151–7). Continued close study of the Umm al-Kitāb
along with kindred ghulāt treatises like the Kitāb al-ashbāḥ wa’l-aẓilla or “Book of
Phantoms and Shadows” (Asatryan 2015) should yield rich rewards to those seeking
to uncover further possible connections with earlier or contemporaneous strands of
gnostic religiosity.
CONCLUDING RE M ARKS
Isolating specific gnostic contributions to the religious thought of Muḥammad and
the diction of the Qur’ān remains a problematic enterprise. But the persistent and
recurrent flowering over the course of the last half of the first millennium within the
Islamicate world of a bewildering variety of seemingly indigenous forms of gnostic
thought –e.g., Manichaeism, Mazdakism, Mandaeism, the Islamic extremist ghulāt
sects, and the still shadowy Jewish groups associated with the production of eso-
teric apocalypses and the ma‘aseh bereshit literature (with Sefer Yeṣirah, and the
hypothesized eastern sources of Sefer ha-Bahir) –signals the vibrant vitality of gnostic
and quasi-gnostic ideologies in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran during this period.
These movements find their most compelling analogues and most plausible root of
origin within the ideological and exegetical traditions produced, treasured, studied,
and transmitted during the Late Antique and early medieval eras among an indeter-
minate number of Biblically based and allied fringe movements that flourished in cer-
tain regions of the Ḥawrān, the Transjordan, the Negev, the Ḥijāz, and Maysān, the
last named area once aptly characterized by Han Drijvers as a “crucible of religions”
(Drijvers 1966: 204). A number of scholars have rightly remarked upon the manifold
linguistic, thematic, and literary linkages that are visible among these movements, and
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it seems likely that a continued close comparative study of their textual productions
will yield yet further instances of the catalytic role played by gnostic currents in these
intriguing cross-cultural interactions. It is our hope that the ideas discussed in the
present essay will actively encourage and stimulate such efforts.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
AN AGENDA FOR THE STUDY

OF EARLY SHIʿI COSMOLOGIES
Mushegh Asatryan
T H E HISTORICAL SETTIN G AND THE S O U RCE S

Let me begin by defining what I mean by “early Shiʿis” (“Shi‘ites”) and what by “cos-
mology.” By the former, I refer to a community of Muslims who lived between the
early eighth and the late ninth centuries in Iraq, and who viewed the line of the Prophet
Muhammad’s male descendants, called Imams, as his sole legitimate successors. By
the latter I refer to the imagined structure of the universe, which encompasses the
origin and fate of humans, their relations to God, and the cosmic and worldly role of
the Imams.
Chronologically, I focus on the period between the emergence of a distinct Shiʿi
group identity in the early part of the eighth century in the Iraqi town of Kufa, and the
period when the line of the living Imams ceased to exist, thus ushering a new period
in the history of Shiʿism. The identity of the Shiʿi community was mainly centered on
the notion of the guiding role of the Imams (Amir-Moezzi 1994), and was marked by
various rituals, such as prayer and pilgrimage (Haider 2011). The Imams were viewed
as supreme guides of humanity appointed by God, and some even attributed to them
superhuman and divine characteristics. For their utter devotion to the Imams, the
latter group among early Shiʿis were called “extremists” (Arab. ghulāt, henceforth,
Ghulat; Gerami 2012; Qadi 2003).
The sources on the cosmological ideas of the early Shiʿis are threefold:
heresiographies, collections of stories about the words and deeds of the Imams
(hadīth), and close to 30 now surviving complete and fragmentary treatises that were
produced by the abovementioned Ghulat.
The heresiographic accounts are sketchy and written with polemical goals in mind,
hence the information they provide cannot be used independently. Furthermore, the
earliest heresiographies describing early Shiʿi cosmologies date from the early tenth
century, i.e., well after the period they describe (van Ess 2011). Collections of hadīth,
on the other hand, are firsthand accounts of the early Shiʿi cosmological doctrines.
They contain reports claiming to be narrated on the authority of the Imams them-
selves or their close associates, and have in most cases undergone oral transmis-
sion before being recorded. And although the authorship and dating of individual
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— Mushegh Asatryan —
reports are mostly impossible to verify, the majority of them can be firmly dated to
the period under study. Firstly, this is because some of the collections were actually
compiled during this time. Secondly, even later compilations contain traditions that
have originated at earlier dates, and some reports in fact overlap with those found in
the earlier compilations (Haider 2011: 34; Newman 2000).
Whereas the hadīth reports are rather short, mostly several lines long, the third group
of texts, i.e., the Ghulat sources, feature several full-fledged, book-length treatises
and countless shorter fragments of works cited in later writings. The authorships of
individual treatises are often moot, but most of the corpus of Ghulat writings like-
wise date from the period under study, and are hence directly relevant for this essay
(Asatryan 2017). As such, this group of sources constitutes the richest repository of
information about Shiʿi cosmologies, primarily because the length of each individual
text allows for an exposition that is much fuller and more systematic than that found
in hadīth reports. It should be noted that there is much common material in the
two types of sources and that hadīth not only sometimes articulate ideas similar to
those found in the Ghulat corpus, but they frequently replicate fragments of Ghulat
writings almost verbatim. I will discuss these instances below.
I divide the discussion that follows into two parts, based on the types of sources
examined. I begin by presenting the cosmological ideas found in hadīth, and conclude
by presenting the cosmological system of the Ghulat corpus. Because of the small size
of individual hadīth, the cosmology articulated in such compilations is somewhat frag-
mentary and non-uniform. The Ghulat corpus, on the other hand, demonstrates a much
greater degree of uniformity, and despite the inevitable variations between individual
treatises, it does nevertheless contain an inventory of themes recycled from one text to
another. I will omit discussion of the heresiographies because of the shortcomings noted
above. Also, since this paper stands as an agenda for the study of early Shiʿi materials,
my observations about “Gnostic features” in them will be cursory, at the end.
THE HAD Ī T H CO RP U S
The cosmological and cosmogonic accounts of the Shiʿi hadīth corpus are “numerous,
disorderly, coming from diverse horizons, and at times contradictory” (Amir-Moezzi
and Jambet 2014: 104). Hence, anyone attempting to write a complete account
of early Shiʿi cosmology must cherry-pick to some degree. In addition, not all of
the cosmological material in it is distinctly Shiʿi. Some accounts of the world’s cre-
ation largely coincide with that presented in other Islamic traditions and follow the
Qurʾanic narrative. These include the creation of the world in six days, the making
of the Pen (al-qalam), of God’s throne (al-ʿarsh), and the creation of humans (Yaʿqub
al-Kulaynī, Kitāb al-Kāfī (The Sufficient Book) [first half of the tenth century] [Shams
al-Dīn, vol. 1]: p. 179; Amir-Moezzi 1994; Amir-Moezzi and Jambet 2014: 104–5).
There are, however, several salient themes recurring across a number of traditions,
which allow one to detect a distinctly Shiʿi worldview. Chief among these are the
superhuman figure of the Imams and their pre-existence before the creation of the
world. Another is the creation of the believers and their position vis-à-vis the Imams
on the one hand, and the unbelievers on the other.
Numerous traditions of the Shiʿi corpus talk about the pre-existence of the Imams
before all else had been created –as luminous entities, called “shadows” (azilla) or
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— An agenda for early Shiʿi cosmologies —
“apparitions” (ashbāh). One tradition tells us that the Imams had existed before
everything else, as shadows praising and glorifying God, until He decided to create
the world and to give the knowledge of that to them (al-Kulaynī, Al-Kāfī, p. 512).
In another the first thing that God created were Muhammad and his family, the
Imams that is, who were apparitions of light and luminous bodies (Furāt al-Kūfī,
Tafsīr (Interpretation) [ca. 900] [Kāzim], pp. 74, 371, 552; al-Kulaynī, p. 513; and
see Rubin 1975: 99–100).
The notion of azilla and ashbāh is one of the commonalities between the early Shiʿi
hadīth and the Ghulat corpus, where the idea has been elaborated in much greater
detail and more systematically (Asatryan 2017: 64–78). This indicates that the early
Ghulat were not a socially distinct entity and formed part of the early Shiʿi commu-
nity. In some cases, furthermore, the parallels between the two groups of texts are
much more direct. One hadīth copies, almost word for word, the opening of one
Ghulat treatise with a rather unusual creation story (al-Kulaynī, pp. 164–5; and for
the Ghulat versions see Asatryan 2016). In the hadīth version, it begins by telling
how God created a mysterious name from letters (or sounds, hurūf), then made from
it three names, and made for each of these names four pillars. Then He created 30
names for each of the pillars. Then God hid the one name (that had been created in
the beginning) in the three names. In the Ghulat version, which is much longer, the
overlapping text is just slightly different (Asatryan 2016).
One of the central themes in the descriptions of the Imams is the notion of the divine
Light that, beginning from Adam, traveled from generation to generation, through
the Prophet Muhammad and into the line of the Imams (Amir-Moezzi 1994: 40–1;
Rubin 1975). In many hadīth, the Imams are endowed with superhuman knowledge
and abilities (of course, there are hadīth rejecting this, too, but I have already noted
the non-uniform and contradictory nature of this genre). For example, they know
“God’s greatest name,” which endows them with immense power. They also under-
stand all the languages of humans and of animals, they know about the future and
about the invisible world (al-ghayb). They perform a large number of supernatural
actions, such as levitating, commanding objects, reviving the dead, traveling over long
distances, becoming invisible, and so on (for a detailed list and a discussion see Amir-
Moezzi 2011: 193–229). So central was the position of the Imams in the scheme of
the universe that a number of hadīth state that God will never leave the earth without
an Imam. And if just two people are left alive on earth, one of them will necessarily be
an Imam, for if left without one, the earth will sink (Saffār al-Qummī [d. 903], Basāʾir
al-darajāt, (Perceptions of the Degrees) [Kuchabāghī], pp. 527–32).
With regard to the world of humans, the Shiʿi hadīth corpus articulates a starkly
dualist worldview, where the believers are pure and luminous, and the unbelievers evil
and dark. The special position of the believers is marked through their special relation-
ship with the Imams, to whom they are bound with a bond of loyalty and friendship
(walāya). They entered into this bond following a primordial covenant (mīthāq).
According to a recurring tradition, the fifth Imam Muhammad al-Bāqir stated that
God took a covenant “from our party” (min shīʿatinā) that they should exercise
walāya toward the Imams, and that they should recognize God’s divinity (rubūbiyya)
and Muhammad’s prophecy (nubuwwa) (Saffār, Basāʾir, pp. 121–2; Muhammad al-
ʿAyyāshī [d. ca. 932], Tafsīr [al-Mahāllatī], vol. 1, p. 181; ʿAlī al-Qummī, Tafsīr [950s]
[al-Jazāʾirī], vol. 2, p. 391; with Dakake 2007: 103–4; Amir-Moezzi 1994, 34).
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The distinction between the two parts of humanity is determined from the outset.
Thus, some hadīth state that God created the believers (al-muʾminīn) from His light,
then took the covenant of walāya from them (Saffār, p. 112). The distinction between
believers and unbelievers is at times described in much more physical terms. Thus, the
former are made from the clay of Paradise while the latter are made from the clay
of Hell (Saffār, p. 47). In some other traditions, the picture is much more complex,
as it includes a symmetrical hierarchy of creatures, with the Prophet and the Imams
and their party on the one hand, and the enemies of the Prophet and the Imams with
their respective party on the other. The differences between the two groups are rooted
in the matter they are made of (there are various versions of the story; here I follow
that of Saffār p. 45; cf. Amir-Moezzi 1994: 38–9, 166). According to this story, the
Prophet and the Imams are said to be made from the clay of ʿilliyūn and their hearts,
from clay that is above ʿilliyūn (the latter is a Qurʾanic term which, according to
Muslim exegetes, denotes one of the highest levels of Paradise). The hearts of their
party, meanwhile, are also made of the clay of ʿilliyūn and their bodies, from clay that
is below it. Their adversaries are arranged in a symmetrical way. The enemy (ʿadū)
of the Prophet’s family is made of the clay of sijjīn (identified with one of the lowest
levels of Hell), and their hearts from clay that is more vile (akhbath). The hearts of
their party are made from the clay of sijjīn, whereas their bodies are made from clay
that is below that.
THE GHULAT CO RP U S
The dualism found in the early Shiʿi hadīth corpus is articulated much more system-
atically in the Ghulat writings. The cosmology of the Ghulat texts presents a world
that stretches from an ineffable God, called “the Meaning” (al-maʿnā), down into the
world of humans, animals, and inanimate beings. Due to good deeds, humans are able
to leave the physical world and ascend into the world of spiritual beings, drawing
closer to God. Bad deeds, conversely, necessitate the rebirth of humans into bodies
that are increasingly more impure and lowly, such as animals, plants, and minerals.
Likewise, God may descend into the world of humans by donning a material body.
In what follows, I will describe four cosmological themes present in Ghulat texts: the
myth of Creation and Fall; the notion of the Chain of Being; the teaching about the
transmigration of souls and metamorphosis; and the idea of God’s appearance in
human form.
Several accounts of the Creation myth survive, and while they differ in some details,
most agree on the following elements: God’s Creation of the world and of humans,
His summon to believe in Him and to know Him, and the inability or the unwill-
ingness of some to respond to this call. For example, the text Kitāb al-marātib wa
l-daraj or The Book of the Degrees and the Stages, surviving in two fragments (within
Muhammad ibn Nusayr [d. 873], Kitāb al-mithāl wa l-sūra, (The Book of Likeness
and Form), and Muhammad al-Jillī [d. after 1009], Hāwī l-asrār, (The Container
of Mysteries), both in Mūsā [= Abu Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā] 2006: vol. 1, p. 230
and vol. 2, p. 184), presents the following scene. In the beginning, God created spir-
itual entities who had luminous bodies, and who neither ate nor drank. He appeared
among them in their own shape and displayed to them His power. He then called
them to recognize His dominion and gave them intellect to distinguish truth from
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falsehood and good from evil. After this call, some responded and some defied His
call, thus Creation was divided into two parts, believers and infidels.
The treatise Kitāb al-sirāt or The Book of the Path by Mufaddal (pseudo-)al-Juʿfī
[late 700s] [ʿAbd al-Jalīl,] pp. 114, 137–8) presents a similar picture, but here God
issues two calls. After creating humans and informing them of His lordship over them,
he issued the first call, to which none responded. This refusal, however, was without
any malice on their part. It is after His second call, however, that some people were
damned and fell from His grace for refusing to respond. God hid himself from these,
and because of their rejection they remained damned to Hell. Those who responded,
on the other hand, perceived Him to various degrees.
Two more texts, Kitāb al-haft wa l-azilla or The Book of the Seven and the Shadows,
and Kitāb al-ashbāh wa l-azilla, The Book of the Apparitions and the Shadows, intro-
duce a further detail missing in the above texts, but abundantly found in the Shiʿi
hadīth corpus, namely, the idea of the azilla and the ashbāh, or the shadows and
apparitions (see on this, Asatryan 2017: 64–78). According to the former text, at the
dawn of creation, before anything else, God created luminous entities called azilla,
who praised and glorified Him. From these he created another set of creatures, called
ashbāh, after which He made Adam and his progeny (pseudo-al-Juʿfi, Kitāb al-haft
[Tamer], p. 20). According to the other text, God first made the apparitions, then the
shadows, then the souls (Kitāb al-ashbāh, paras. 1–3 in Asatryan 2015: 13–14, 56–7).
In both accounts, this is followed by the fall of humans for misunderstanding His call.
The universe, according to the Ghulat, is made in a dualistic fashion, with a
luminous world of spiritual beings presided over by God, and with a dark world
of matter underneath. Humans stand at the juncture of these two worlds by virtue
of possessing a luminous soul and a material body. Virtue and spiritual effort move
them up into the luminous divine realm. Conversely, sins make them to be reborn (or
become transformed) into creatures of an increasingly lower order. Ascent into the
divine realm happens as humans traverse seven degrees of spiritual perfection. These
successive degrees, called darajāt (sg. daraja) or manāzil (sg. manzila), are increasingly
more luminous and increasingly more difficult to attain, and are collectively called
sirāt, literally, “path.” Several texts describe this path and in almost all, the names of
these degrees are the following, in order of ascent: the Tested (mumtahan), the Devout
(mukhlas), the Elect (mukhtass), the Noble one (najīb), the Chief (naqīb), the Unique
one (yatīm), and the Gate (bāb). Believers are able to leave the state of humanity and
to attain to increasingly higher degrees thanks to good deeds, devotion, and effort.
In each successive stage, they receive more of the esoteric (bātin) knowledge, and
having internalized it, merit ascent into higher ones. In each of the degrees, the bodies
that believers acquire are increasingly purer and more luminous. Upon achieving the
highest degree, that of the Gate, the believer achieves superhuman abilities and abso-
lute knowledge (pseudo-al-Juʿfī, al-Sirāt, pp. 72–9, 81, 115, 130, 153–4, 157, 160;
Muhammad ibn Nusayr (d. after 868), al-Mithāl [Mūsā 2006: vol. 1], pp. 230–43;
Kitāb al-hujub wa l-anwār, (The Book of Veils and Lights) [also in Mūsā, vol. 6],
p. 51; Kitāb al-anwār wa l-hujub, (The Book of Lights and Veils) [Mūsā, vol. 6],
p. 86; and Umm al-kitāb, (Mother of the Book) [in Ivanow 1936: 79]).
Just as good deeds necessitate ascent into the luminous realm, sins move humans
down into darker, material ones through rebirth into sub-human forms. The gen-
eric term used for reincarnation, especially as found in heresiographic literature, is
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tanāsukh, but in Ghulat texts this denotes just one type of rebirth, from one human
body to another. Grave sins are punished by rebirth into animals (denoted by the
terms maskh and masūkhiyya) or plants and minerals (raskh), and according to some
texts, transformation occurs through rebirth after an individual’s death (pseudo-al-
Juʿfī, al-Sirāt, pp. 129, 138, 185), while others suggest that it occurs during one’s life-
time (Kitab al-ashbāh, paras. 11, 13).
Some accounts note that after descending into lower forms, sinners may return
to the condition of humanity after fulfilling their dues (Kitāb al-akwār, The Book of
Turns [Mūsā], p. 186; Ibn Nusayr, al-Mithāl, p. 232). And one text states that God
may summon people back from the state of transformation (Kitāb al-hujub, p. 21).
The idea that earned the Ghulat the most ire was viewing the Imams and the
Prophet Muhammad as superhuman or divine beings. If most heresiographies accuse
the Ghulat of straightforwardly deifying the Imams, however, original Ghulat writings
show a more complex picture, as the extolment of the Prophet and his descendants
took many forms. One was the notion of “delegation” (tafwīd), whereby Muhammad
was believed to have been delegated to create the world on God’s behalf and to
care for it (Hasan al-Harrani [late tenth century], Haqāʾiq asrār al-dīn, Truths of
Religion’s Mysteries [Mūsā, vol. 4], p. 45; Al-Jillī, Hāwī l-asrār [Mūsā, vol. 2], p. 203;
Ibn Nusayr, al-Mithāl [Mūsā, vol. 1], p. 211). Another was the idea that he was the
human incarnation of God. Finally, a number of texts explicitly state or implicitly
imply that Muhammad or the Imams are divine (Ibn Nusayr, al-Mithāl, 223) and
one even combines the notion of ʿAlī’s deification with the idea of delegation, stating
that “God is Amīr al-Nahl [ʿAlī’s epithet], and Muhammad is his apostle […] God
created him and delegated to him the affairs” (Ādāb ʿAbd al-Muttalib or ʿAbd al-
Muttalib’s Rules [Mūsā, vol. 6], pp. 265, 270, 281; for more examples see Asatryan
2017: 98–111).
In conclusion, I note with interest certain Gnostic-looking features in the texts here-
with covered. Thus, for example, the praise of God by the shadows and apparitions
(azilla and ashbāh) at the beginning of Creation, recorded both in the Ghulat corpus
and in Shiʿi hadīth, echoes the scene of God’s glorification by the heavenly servants in
the Sethian Gnostic literature (Asatryan and Burns 2016: 76).
Another feature is the descent of God onto earth in human guise; or, the ascent
of the seeker into the divine realm and his subsequent descent back into the human
realm, as described in Ghulat texts (e.g., al-Sirāt, 79–80). Similar to this, Sethian
literature describes Seth’s descent onto earth to intercede on behalf of his seed; or
the ascent of human seers into heaven to obtain the vision of God and to return
to earth, where they preach to the seed of Seth. The second well-known Ghulat
motive that seems to have (rather less clearly formulated) antecedents in Sethian
Gnosticism is the reincarnation of souls. The Sethian text Zostrianos describes how
after death, human souls ascend to aeons known as “repentance,” “sojourn,” and
“self-begotten.” According to Dylan Burns, this is likely a description of reincar-
nation because in contemporary Greek thought, human souls underwent met-
empsychosis in these celestial regions (Burns 2014: 97–100; Asatryan and Burns
2016: 74).
It is impossible at present to speak of direct textual “borrowings” from Gnosticism
in early Shiʿi materials (Asatryan and Burns 2016: 59, 85–6). The similarities between
Sethianism and related Mesopotamian traditions on the one hand, and early Shiʿi
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materials on the other, are likely to be because all of these traditions existed in the
same broad geographic region, and early Muslim converts combined the religious
vocabularies of their former religions with that of nascent Islam.
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University Press.
Haider, Najam. 2011. The Origins of the Shiʿa: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-
Century Kūfa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ivanow, Vladimir (ed.). 1936. “Umm al-kitāb.” Der Islam 23: 1–132.
Newman, Andrew. 2000. The Formative Period of Twelver Shiʿism: Hadith as Discourse
Between Qum and Baghdad. London: Routledge.
Qadi, Wadad al- . 2003. “The Development of the Term Ghulāt in Muslim Literature
with Special Reference to the Kaysāniyya.” Etan Kohlberg (ed.). Shiʿism. Burlington,
VT: Ashgate.
Rubin, Uri. 1975. “Pre-existence and Light: Aspects of the Concept of Nūr Muhammad.” Israel
Oriental Studies 5: 62–119.
Van Ess, Josef. 2011. Der Eine und das Andere: Beobachtungen an islamischen häresiographischen
Texten. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
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CHAPTER THIRTY
CLASSIC SUFISM AND GNOSIS
Milad Milani
INTRODUCTIO N
In the history of religions the “Sufis” (sūffiyah) represent the mystical interpretation
of Islam.
The understanding of “gnosis” as a hidden system of knowledge and practice, and
the category of “gnostic” denoting historical groups belonging to the Greco-Roman
world of early Christianity, is only accidentally related to Sufism, mainly because
of tentative translations of the Arabic “arif and ma‘rifa as “gnostic” and “gnosis,”
respectively. Gnosis in this sense is, nevertheless, important to Western Sufis, as Mark
Sedgwick shows (ch. 48). Gnosis in the sense of ma‘rifa, the soul’s experience of the
divine that is related to what is known as “mystical experience,” is directly relevant
to classic Sufism. Gnosis in this second sense is important to Sufism, not so much as
a category, but rather because of the nature of classic Sufi approaches to religious
doctrine. There is also another sense in which Gnosis could be justified, as grounded
in historical study, which is related to possible correlations of typically “Gnostic”
movements of Antiquity, such as Manichaeism, Mandaism, and Daysanism (chs. 3,
16, 21, and 25; cf. Halm 1982; 1996), and to Islamic equivalents to “Gnosticism”
among the Shi‘a, with the systematic development of ma‘rifa among the batiniyya
(esotericists) (e.g., chs. 29, 31, 32). But this sense will not be addressed here.
The appearance and application of “gnosis” in Islamic mysticism would be more
accurately comparable to its usage among the writings of early Church Fathers and
generally in Eastern Orthodox theology (ch. 24) rather than the way in which it was
utilized in gnostic sectarian movements. A key distinction is that gnosis was probably
not seen by the Sufis as secret or hidden knowledge per se, which was known only
by an elect few, but rather that they were recipients of spiritual knowledge or specific
knowledge of the divine, partly as a result of a mature understanding of religion,
but more specifically through insight as experienced in contemplation of the divine.
Here experience takes precedence over knowledge, which puts into doubt the label
“Gnostic” for the Sufi and even “Gnosis” for their method. While ma‘rifa is indeed a
technical term employed by the Sufis, to say the intended meaning or translation of
the term and its usage is “gnosis” is not a given. Another reason for the disparity is an
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— Classic Sufism and gnosis —
important one, which is based on the evolution of the Sufi tradition in Islamic history.
Sufism, unlike the label “gnostic” placed on the sect the Church deemed beyond the
creed, was neither a sect of Islam, nor a movement that was seen in strict opposition
to a “church.” In this sense, Sufism had not a divergent or discordant view of Islam,
but rather, and in principle, an alternative view about the nature of religious experi-
ence. Difficulties in assessing the role of “gnosis” in Sufism arise from related diffi-
culties in identifying “Sufis” in their variety, since the label was often employed for
anonymity and sanctuary by dissident groups within the Muslim world. As for Sufis
proper, which is to refer to the mystical tradition of Islam (tasawwuf), in this sense
they were not gnostics.
Nevertheless, the focus of this chapter is not a comparison between Sufism
and Gnosticism, but rather about the appearance of gnosis in Sufism. There are
many instances where the concept of gnosis, as generally conceived in the manner
described above, as spiritual insight and the mystical illumination which is derived
from it, can be properly applied to Sufi practitioners of the classic era. This special
knowledge that is the product of mystical experience can be agreed to account for
gnosis in classic Sufism, this being a knowledge that is available to all who seek a
personal and direct knowledge of God. Given this, we can even begin to move away
from the sometimes forced correlation between “gnosis” and ma‘rifa, and consider
the relevance of the term tadjalli as pertinent to the experience of the Sufis. This term
defines an illumination process that ultimately reveals divine knowledge as located
in one’s heart. Gnosis, conceived in this way, corresponds with inner intuitive experi-
ence and theophany. The term “gnosis” can still be retained when referring to classic
Sufism because it is applicable through its reconfiguration as theosophy, loosely used
(in exclusion of its much later adoption by the Theosophical Society [chs. 2, 44]),
and insofar as Sufis maintain that knowledge of God can be achieved through spir-
itual ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual relations, i.e., between master
and disciple. This is something best equated with the term dhawq (taste). As such,
gnoseology (Arab. ma‘rifa Fars. ‘irfan) is also a pertinent term in determining the
practical aspect of the Sufi classical approach to the theory of knowledge; useful for
determining Sufi understandings of metaphysical, immediate, and intuitive theories
of knowledge.
The term “gnosis” in classic Sufism has a range of meanings that need to be
considered in its varieties of expression as found in the literature and language of the
Sufis in that period. The gauge for this chapter is the identification of a series of terms
that correspond with “gnosis,” but which are not singularly sufficient definitions.
These are tadjalli (theophany), dhawq (taste), and ma‘rifa (intuitive knowledge).
Gnoseology is here used to convey a general approach to the theory of metaphysical
knowledge among well-known mystics of Islam, and will be explored accordingly.
As such, this chapter provides an outline of the development of the categories of
knowledge among Sufis of the classic period. Earlier Sufis were not inept or deficient
in their “gnoseology”; rather, despite the paucity of information on early figures,
what can be gleaned from the later biographical tradition is at the very least enough
to suggest that these early Sufis had a profound interaction with their religion (Ali
Hujwuri [flor. 1030], Kashf al-Mahjoub IX–XII). The activity of Sufi gnoseology is
an early occurrence, and continues to be developed in greater detail by Sufis exposed
to Hellenic thought. This later period (for which there is an abundance of material
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— Milad Milani —
sources) offers relevant exegeses on theosophy, emanationist ontology, and complex

metaphysics in the writings of mystics based on Avicennian principles, some of whom
categorize a reformulation of familiar terms –tadjalli, dhawq, and ma‘rifa –in their
theory of knowledge.
C O MPARISONS WITH GN O S TIC S E CTARIANS

To be clear, there are, from a comparative point of view, important similarities
between Sufis and Gnostics that virtually compel one to draw the conclusion of an
actual link, though it would be a mistake to consider these as faits accomplis. Sufis
espoused experience as key, whereas Gnostics espoused knowledge. Sufism was never
categorically outlawed, though sporadically scrutinized, and thus remained an indel-
ible part of Islamic tradition. Insofar as we can make comparisons, we ought to take
into serious consideration the similar predicament Sufis and Gnostics had in facing
mainstream religious hostility. The comparison obviously becomes more pertinent for
the later period of Islam, when Sufis find themselves in increasing opposition to the
legalists or legists. Certain instances that can be recalled from the fates of early Sufi
martyrs, such as Hallaj (m. 922), Hamadani (m. 1131), and Suhrawardi (m. 1191),
demonstrate a process of marginalization of such Sufis with extreme views, since they
were perceived to contradict mainstream attitudes (Milani 2018). This antagonism
could serve as a tentative basis for comparing what happened in the early Christian
world, with regard to the condemnation of Gnostic sects by Christian heresiologists
(especially by Epiphanius in the Panarion), and the way in which the Sufis were held
in contempt by the influential class of Islamic scholars (‘ulama). Even when politically
moderate or quietist Sufis such as Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), Rumi (d. 1273), and Attar (d.
c.1220) are considered, a comparison can be made with the ancient Gnostics in view
of subtle differences of doctrinal interpretation.
To be more precise, there were four identifiable points of belief among the ancient
classic or “Christianizing” Gnostics that set them apart from other Christians, namely,
their belief in:
1. emanationism –which departed from absolute monotheism;

2. divine sparks –which emphasized spiritual knowledge over against faith;
3. the unknowable God –who was deemed greater than the known creator/demi-
urge responsible for corporeal existence; and
4. personal knowledge –which stood in contrast to ecclesiastical authority.
While the Sufis did not diverge from the Islamic worldview, there are subtle markers
of distinction in the ways by which they perceived its content, though within the
limits of Muslim understanding. Therefore, if the above four points do not completely
correlate with Sufi understandings, parts of them do correspond with their subtle
deviations from Islamic Sunni orthodoxy. In general, Sufis have held that there is an
inexplicable link between human and divine, and as such the Sufi method is based
on fostering such a connection, albeit in no strictly regulated way. Thus, one can
speak about a form of emanationism, as do high-medievals Suhrawardi (cf. Hikmat
al-Ishraq) and Ibn ‘Arabi quite overtly (cf. Fusus al-Hikam; Futuhat al-Makkiya),
as one can also speak about the “spark” of the divine within, as alluded to by both
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Fariduddin Attar (Mantiq al-Tayr) and Jalaluddin Rumi (Mathnawi e Ma’nawi),

without having to project Gnostic views on to Sufism. The last two points considered,
it can be argued that the Sufis perceived the divine in a way that was distinct from
normative Muslim understanding, though it is not exactly clear what this was all
about, and also that this distinct approach stemmed from a deeply personal engage-
ment with the divine as opposed to merely following religious prescriptions (Milani
2013; cf. Schimmel 1975).
What we can assume from any comparison that is to be made is the inequality that
both Gnostics and Sufis were experiencing during the institutionalization process of
religious authority in their respective times. In terms of an overall comparison, they
have in common their approach to, and interpretation of, religion that positioned
them in increasing opposition to the religious authorities and thus the mainstream
expression of religion.
EARLY DEVELOP MENTS IN S U F I G NO S E O L O G Y

The trajectory of the Sufi tradition is based on the emphasis placed on the funda-
mental spiritual quality of Islam, out of which emerged the mystical category in that
same religion. The Sufi focus was on the spirit of the revealed scripture and law, and
thus not on a rejection of formal religion. Coming on the scene in the middle of the
ninth century, the Sufis, therefore, did not make a sharp break with either tradition
or doctrine; instead they weaved through it, playing a key role in shaping Islamic
history from within (Milani 2018). Their knowledge of the divine was derived from
their insight into the Qur’anic text and the Hadith corpus (holding the Sunnah or
authoritative traditions of the Prophet), which for them contained the mysteries that
pertained to the substance of Revelation and the person of Muhammad, giving rise
to the notion of inward religion or religion of the heart. This idea was elaborated on
by several well-known Sufis, but it was most famously the subject of Attar’s poetry
(Musibat Nameh), postulating that the actual journey begins after the wayfarer has
journeyed outwards into the world and finally turns to journey within.
In this way, the Sufis have much in common with the early Church Fathers in the
preceding centuries. The writings of pseudo-Macarius, for instance, in a strikingly
empiric or even physical idiom, focus on knowledge gained through the direct experi-
ence of the divine and expound on the individual’s receptivity to the inner realities of
religion. The faithful, he says:
are taught by God. His very grace writes in their hearts the laws of the Spirit.
They should not put all their trusting hope solely in the Scriptures written in ink.
For divine grace writes on the ‘tables of the heart’ (2 Cor 3:3) the laws of the
Spirit and the heavenly mysteries.
(Macarius, Homily 15.20 [Maloney, p. 116])
The Sufis’ mysticism, furthermore, is concentrated on an experiential appreciation of

the divine, which is described as dhawq (“taste”), affirming that knowledge is based
on sensory experience. As Macarius writes, “it is similar to those who ‘have tasted the
divine grace, have been made partakers of the Spirit’ (Heb 6:4)” (Macarius, Homily
15.36 [p. 122])
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Of course, the “mysticism” of the early Church Fathers is squarely based not only
on their profound knowledge of Biblical scripture, but also on their personal experi-
ence –in having “tasted” the spirit of the divine. Likewise, the experience of the Sufis
is rooted in Muslim scripture, the Qur’an as well as the Hadith, from which they
draw inspiration and “partake” in the divine mysteries. At the same time, this betrays
a dynamic interaction, which is not contained either by the framework of tradition or
by what is written scripture. Abu Sa’id Abul Khayr (d. 1049) said,
… the infinite Word of God that was sent down to Mohammed is the whole … of
the Koran; but that which He causes to come into the hearts of His servants does
not admit of being numbered and limited, nor does it ever cease.
(quoted in Nicholson 1994: 59)
I mention this because even though Sufism is firmly rooted in the Islamic tradition, the
Sufis’ mention of the mysteries they experienced and expounded upon seems to allude
to a broader experiential horizon or a more comprehensive frame of reference. In par-
ticular, the discerning impetus for mystical analysis of the Islamic canon in the ninth
century has more than an assumed correlation with the Eastern Christian exegesis on
the divine mysteries, especially given the presence and influence of Hellenism in the
world of Islam from the ninth century onwards. The distinctive shift in the modus
operandi of the emerging Sufis, during this period, brings into focus the Hellenic
impetus for mystical examination so prevalent in Late Antiquity. Having had such a
combined external trigger (Christian and Hellenic), the source of Sufi mysticism was
nonetheless found on the fertile soil of Islamic scripture and Prophetic biography
(Massignon 1992 (1954): 63–8; see also, Milani 2013: 220–2; 2018: 40–7).
SUFI GNOSEOLOGY AND IS L AM IC S CRIP TU RE

The Sufis had taken up the task of relating the unbounded remit of the Prophet’s
revelation. As already noted in the passage attributed to Abu Sa’id, this was done
with the understanding that the unfolding of Islam in history was a dynamic pro-
cess, having consisted of grasping the overt message of the Revelation, the example
of Muhammad as the Muslim par excellence, as well as what was yet to be disclosed,
but which was already contained within the Revelation. Though the Sufis did not dis-
pute that Muhammad was the last of the prophets sent by God, there remained the
implicit view that “apostleship,” in the loose sense, had not ended. In subsequent lit-
erature, Sufis were known as the “friends” of God, Awliya’ Allah, which was to imply
those intimate to Him, often also translated as “saints.” This approach to religiosity
is well documented in the poetry of the Sufis, but most readily available in the bio-
graphical compilation of Attar’s Tazkirat al-Awliya –that is to say, those Sufis whom
he distinguishes as mystical saints. What this meant was that the Sufis, through their
penetrative insight into Muslim scripture, were able to discern a greater potentiality
of Revelation and Muhammad’s prophetic experience.
While mainstream religiosity was being curtailed by the written form and
constrained under the increasing weight of legalism, the mystics sought to place much
more emphasis on what was present to the heart (through mystical contemplation),
yet absent to the eye. Certain verses of the Qur’an and a number of privileged hadith
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accounts are classic citations for Sufi hermeneutics. The scriptural references were
in themselves rich with interpretive quality, yet what the Sufis were able to demon-
strate was that these also facilitated a meaning beyond the apparent, either by way
of interpretation or by allusion and/or implication. For instance, a key verse such as
Qur. 7:172 (alasto be-rabbekom, qalu bala shahedna), which signifies a primal form
of human cognition of the Divine, can indeed be taken as nothing more than a con-
tractual pledge at the dawn of human Creation. But in a Sufi mystical context it is
utilized as a basis for discussing God-consciousness. The connection, in turn, which is
later made between awareness of self and knowledge of God is available in the form
of the well-known hadith “who knows himself knows his Lord” (man ʿarafa nafsaho
faqad ʿarafa rabbaho). This narration, while dubious in authenticity, does retain its
value for what it conveys; it teases out the inherent meaning within Scripture that it
was possible to ascertain direct knowledge of God through self-consciousness, and
without the need for rational proof.
For the Sufis, another commonly cited source was the collections of hadith qudsi,
or “sacred hadith,” which signified a Prophetic statement with its meaning being
communicated by God and its wording or phrasing formulated by Muhammad. Two
of the best known are “I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known, so I created
the world” (konto kanzan makfian), and “Heaven and earth contain Me not, but the
heart of my faithful servant contains Me” (waseʿani qalbo ʿabdi al-moʾmen). The
former locates the genesis of human cognition in [the mind of] God, who desired to
be known through the act of Creation. The latter pinpoints the human heart as the
site where God’s knowledge reaches completion.
Differences of ontology, however, are important for understanding the variation
in Sufi interpretation of Scripture. Admittedly, the subtlety of the written form in
Sufi literature makes it impossible to determine for certain whether there are actual
differences or if these are read into the text by the beholder. In a fairly standard
format, the Islamic tradition maintains the transcendence of God whose continued
presence is mediated by the revealed holy text of the Qur’an. The Sufis were careful to
build their ontology on the basis of God’s preeminence. Rumi, for example, theorized
on the principle of opposites, whereby, by knowing one’s self as nothing before God,
one would be better made aware of the divine majesty of God. Countless examples
in his poetry point to a technique of self-examination, which is prevalent across the
range of Rumi’s exegesis on human and divine relations. Rumi discloses this method
through a simple equation of knowing with its opposite (Mathnawi [Nicholson], Bk.
V, lines, 2114–16). To put it succinctly, God has determined the flaws of the flesh, but
then He has provided man with the “ladder” of spiritual development to seek out the
gift of Paradise.
There is another, less prevalent, form of assessment which is derived from subtle
analogical excerpts sprinkled throughout his works. These point to a deeper aspect of
Rumi’s mysticism, which is never overtly disclosed. This is the way of self-knowledge,
as distinct from self-examination, designed to reveal the deepest secrets on the Sufi
path. Where the hadith “who knows himself knows his Lord” is taken to mean
finding God in the contrasting reality of being human, the hadith qudsi “Heaven and
earth contain Me not, but the heart of my faithful servant contains Me” refers to the
deeper mystery that is only alluded to in the writings of the Sufis. Attar infers that
God acts as a mirror reflecting back to us our own reality, cautioning not to confuse
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the reflection with God (Mantiq-ut-Tayr, or Conference of the Birds [Davis], lines
4232–54). But this is not the end of the lesson. The next step in Attar’s metaphysics is
to go beyond the self in order to grasp what escapes the limits of human comprehen-
sion and language (Conference, ll. 4272–90). The passage points to the deeper mys-
teries through the heart (Attar, Diwan-i Ghazaliyat-u Qasayid [Tafazzuli], no. 372;
with Tadhkerat al-Auliya [Salmasizadeh]; Musibatname [Fisal]). Rumi makes it clear
that the heart is a “window” to the unknown (Mathnawi, II, ll. 2240–2). The heart
of the mystic contains the deepest mysteries; the mystic is the sight of God in the
form of Man, visible through heart perception, making void the misconception about
human and divine separation (ll. 2250–5). What appears to be contrary evidence in
the literature, as exemplified by the distinction made between self-examination and
self-knowledge, is better understood as heuristic layers contained within the text for
gradually disclosing to the acolyte the secrets of the divine.
While the poetry of Attar and Rumi contain intuitive wisdom enclosed within the
outward form of religious discourse and terminology, other Sufi authors are noted for
having produced treatises on the mysteries, disclosing their theory of metaphysical
knowledge. The writings of Suhrawardi and Ibn ‘Arabi represent the development of
a distinct framework for Sufi gnoseology within the mystical tradition. Their treatises
for the attainment of a state of “gnosis” were by no means original, since certain
members of the Falasafa (“Philosophical”) movement (especially al-Farabi and Ibn
Sina) had already ascertained the perception of higher [prophetic] knowledge through
philosophical methods (see chs. 3, 31, 32). What remained distinct for the Sufis was
that their methods elaborated the experiential processes of such attainment.
Suhrawardi’s original contribution was the development of a light ontology or a
philosophy of illumination. He aspired toward encompassing prophetic cognition,
charisma, and visions and made the distinction between abstract knowledge which
is “representative cognition” and unitive or intuitive knowledge which is “presential
cognition” (esp. Hikmat al-ishraq [Ziai], Pt. 2.1; with Corbin 1970). The latter was
intended to discern true Gnosis sourced in one absolute essence, the Light of Lights,
which emanated forth as presential illumination (ishraq huzuri). The human soul
which was sourced in this Light would make itself known to the subject by making
Itself present to Itself (Walbridge 1999). Suhrawardi’s gnoseology was comprehensive
in that it consisted of a critical development of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas as found
in the Neo-Platonic tradition, and a new conceptualization of a fourth “imaginal”
world considered the locus of the source of being beyond the material, spiritual, and
intelligible ones (esp. Hikmat, Pt. 2.3–5; with Walbridge and Ziai 1999).
Ibn ‘Arabi considered “knowledge” and “cognition” synonymous. He revealed
through a systematic understanding of the role of relational cognition the capacity of
human intelligence to be able to perceive real knowledge of divine nature. The basis of
Ibn ‘Arabi’s gnoseology can be located in the theophanic utterances (tadjalli) of early
Sufis such as Dhul Nun al-Misri (d. 859) and Bayazid al-Bastami (d. 874) that God is
known through God. Ibn ‘Arabi maintained that no one knows except for God who
has knowledge of what exists through His essence. And only by imitating God through
what He has made known through Revelation and His Messengers does one have the
means by which to attain the innermost secrets. Ibn ‘Arabi elaborates on a technique
of taqlid (imitation) of the Prophet and the Word of God which amounts to total
immersion in the Divine, this technically being a means to an end, namely, the reaching
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of the “true” goal –God. By fastening themselves to what He has made known in its
perfection, human beings would eradicate the margin of error possible through human
faculties (Futuhat [Būlāq edn.], ch. 177). The culmination of this understanding was
itself revealed in the Qur’anic verses 12:108 and 75:14, which state “… man against
himself will be a witness,” and “This is my way; I invite to Allah with insight …” The
key term used in each verse is basirat, which designated an interior perception of real-
ities which outstretches the reach of both the senses and reason.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s framework did not rely upon the creation of a new ontology, but a
re-formulation of the existing one. He uses the form of Islam as a means to reach the
essence of Islam. Thus with regard to reaching “Gnosis” his formulation is categorized
into three stages of knowledge. The first stage consisted of the knowledge of intelligence,
which was made available through methods known to men of science. The second stage
consisted of knowledge of states (ahwal), which was attained through dhawq (taste).
And the third was the knowledge of secret things (asrar), which was considered by Ibn
‘Arabi as superior to both preceding stages. This third stage is described as attaining
the level of knowing about the activity of the Holy Spirit (ruh al-qudus) through the
breath or breathing within the human spirit. It is possible to know about this through
ratiocination and thereby gain a level of intellectual appreciation, and it is also possible
to know it through taste, which is superior to the former. Yet a more superior level is
possible through what Ibn ‘Arabi called the active imagination, which is loftier because
it is simultaneously present and operative through all other stages. Imagination, in Ibn
Arabi’s gnoseology, was a form of higher rational perception that facilitated a constant
link to the divine realm. As the creative source of manifestation and the cause of our
existence, the active imagination was, therefore, the point at which human reason and
the divine realm met. The mystically prepared were able to attain to the level of the
active imagination through which they would engage with the divine (Ibn Arabi, esp.
Futuḥat al-Makkiyya [Būlāq], vols. 1–4; Fusus al-Hikam [Afifi]).
CONCLUS IO N
The Sufi tradition was built around the theophanic experiences of “archetypal” Sufis
of the formative period. These experiences were the product of the rigorous ascetic
lifestyle of Muslim pietists and renouncers yet to be counted among the ranks of the
Sufis in the later biographical genre. The early tasawwuf movement was therefore
based on the foundations of scriptural hermeneutics and the heuristics of religious
engagement. The experiences and insights that arose from the unregulated mysti-
cism of the eighth and ninth centuries laid the foundations for Islamic theophany
(tadjalli) and experiential mysticism (dhawq). This fed into the growing exegesis on
intuitive knowledge (ma‘rifa) and related theories of metaphysical knowledge, as well
as the development of categories of knowledge within the tasawwuf movement. At
its height, the Sufi exegesis on gnosis or gnoseology produced varieties of expression
in theosophical and emanationist depictions that drew on and reformulated the cat-
egorical layering of rational perception. This has produced, to date, in Sufi literature
a range of expression from strict monotheistic adherence to pantheism to monism.
In looking at the correlation between classic Sufism and gnosis, a number of con-
siderations have been brought forward. Firstly, the Sufis did relate to the notion of
“Gnosis” as they understood it within the paradigm of Islamic theology. Secondly,
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the term “Gnosis” was specifically in use from early on as a means of designating
intuitive knowledge (ma‘rifa). Thirdly, understanding the full range of how the Sufis
incorporated their understanding of Gnosis is dependent upon the synaptic link that
was maintained between two other terms carrying independent but related notions to
ma‘rifa: tadjalli (theophany) and dhawq (taste). Lastly, a survey of early Sufi exegesis
is indicative of a gradual refinement of a theory of metaphysical knowledge inherent
to the tasawwuf movement, which is here defined as Sufi gnoseology.
A final point of consideration is that of causality. In poring over the materials,
a deeper layer of thought is noticeable within the works of individual Sufis that is
unequivocally gnoseological. This current of subterranean contemplative language
detected in the text of well-known orthodox Sunni mystics such as Attar or Rumi
is indicative of an engagement with a theory of interiority of religion (and for the
South Asian case, Ali Hujwi [1009–1077], Kashf al-Mahjoub. [Nicholson]). Bolder
expressions of Sufi gnoseology, as purported in the works of Suhrawardi and Ibn ‘Arabi’s
emanationism, present the full-force of the emerging mystical ontology of knowledge
without departing from the framework of Qur’anic theological language. The devel-
opment of an interior focus among Muslim ascetics was not a necessary product of
Islamic scripture, but a contingent outcome after the fact. Nevertheless, this new devel-
opment in Islamic history, and specifically among the mystics of Islam, exhibits experi-
ential affinities with conclusions reached almost four hundred years before as well as
ideas firmly established in the overlapping regions of Eastern Orthodoxy as attested in
the reach of the teachings of the early Church Fathers in newly acquired Muslim ter-
ritories (Andrae 1987). Regardless of the contentious question of origins, there seems
to have been a trigger that set off the asceticism and mysticism of introspective or soli-
tary Muslims, in the first instance, prior to the subsequent cross-pollination of ideas
through the momentum of Hellenism in ninth-century Baghdad.
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Walbridge, John. 1999. The Leaven of the Ancients. New York: SUNY Press.
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Press: xv–xxxvii.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ISMAILISM AND GNOSIS
Farhad Daftary
T he Ismailis represent the second most important Shiʿi Muslim community, after
the Ithnaʿashari or Twelver Shiʿa (often classed with them among the Batiniyya
esoteric theological schools). They have subdivided into a number of major branches
and minor groups in the course of a complex history dating back to the middle of the
eighth century. Today the Ismailis belong to the Nizari and Tayyibi branches and are
scattered as religious minorities in many countries of Asia, the Middle East, Africa,
Europe and North America. Numbering several millions, they also represent a diver-
sity of ethnic groups and speak a variety of languages, including Persian and Arabic,
as well as a number of Indic and European tongues. At the present time, the majority
of the world’s Ismaili population, belonging to the Nizari branch, acknowledge the
Aga Khan as their Imam or spiritual leader.
By the middle of the ninth century, the Ismailis had appeared on the historical
stage as the most revolutionary faction of Shiʿi Islam. They aimed to uproot the Sunni
Abbasids and establish a new Ismaili Shiʿi caliphate ruled by the Ismaili Imam. The
religio-political message of the Ismaili daʿwa or mission was disseminated throughout
the Muslim world by a network of daʿis or missionaries. The rapid success of the
early Ismaili movement soon led to the establishment of the Fatimid caliphate in
North Africa in 909 headed by the Ismaili Imam. The Fatimid period is often taken
as the “golden age” for the Ismailis, when they possessed their own state and Ismaili
thought and literature attained their summit.
Cairo, founded by the Fatimids upon their conquest of Egypt in 969, became the
headquarters of the complex hierarchical Ismaili daʿwa organization, in addition to
serving as the capital of the Fatimid Empire. In Egypt, the Fatimid Caliph-Imams
patronized intellectual activities and founded major institutions of learning and
libraries. Indeed, Fatimid Cairo soon became a flourishing center of Islamic scholar-
ship, sciences, art, and culture, as well as playing a prominent role in Indian Ocean
and Mediterranean trade and commerce (Daftary and Shainool 2018).
It was during the Fatimid period that the Ismaili daʿis, who were at the same
time the scholars and authors of their community, produced what became the clas-
sical texts of Ismaili literature dealing with a multitude of exoteric and esoteric
subjects, and deploying taʾwil or esoteric exegesis, which became the hallmark of
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— Farhad Daftary —
Ismaili thought. From early on, the Ismailis had concerned themselves with intellec-
tual issues, including the mysteries of the Creation and the sacred history of human-
kind within their Shiʿi theological frame, which was essentially revelational rather
than rational, requiring the guidance of authorized individuals, prophets and Imams,
for acquiring salvific knowledge (Greek: gnōsis). As a corollary of this outlook, they
held that Man could not understand the immutable religious truths, or the haqaʾiq,
and attain the knowledge of God, by merely relying on his reason or intellect (ʿaql).
Therefore, the Ismaili system of religious thought was of a gnostic nature from its
origins, and, in time, the Ismailis elaborated a distinctive Gnostic tradition and made
significant contributions to the intellectual history of Islam.
Building on the foundations laid by the early Ismailis and their worldview, the
daʿis of the Fatimid period elaborated their own distinctive intellectual traditions,
which essentially remained Gnostic with soteriological purposes. In particular, certain
daʿis of the Iranian lands, in Persia and Central Asia, notably Abu Yaʿqub al-Sijistani
(d. post. 971) and Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani (d. ca. 1021), amalgamated their Ismaili
Shiʿi theology (kalam) with Neoplatonism and other philosophical traditions into ele-
gant and highly complex metaphysical thought-systems expressed through numerous
treatises in Arabic. Only Nasir-i Khusraw (d. post. 1070), the last major proponent
of this Iranian Ismaili school of philosophical theology, produced all of his works in
Persian. These daʿis wrote for the educated classes of society and aimed to attract
them to their message intellectually. This explains why they expressed their theology,
always revolving around the central Shiʿi doctrine of the Imamate emphasizing the
need at all times for the spiritual guidance of an Imam, in terms of the most intellec-
tually fashionable terminologies and themes of the time. The metaphysical systems of
these daʿis contained a distinct Neoplatonized emanational cosmology together with
an associated G/gnostic soteriology (Walker 1993: 67–142).
In Fatimid Egypt, a variety of lectures were organized on Ismaili esoteric teachings,
known as the majalis al-hikma, or “the sessions of wisdom,” for the Ismaili initiates
(Halm 1996: 91–115; 1997: 17–29). The lectures were approved beforehand by the
Imam, because only he was the source of the hikma, the technical term for esoteric
Ismaili doctrine. Many of these lectures, normally delivered by the chief daʿi (daʿi
al-duʿat), were in due course collected and committed to writing. This Ismaili trad-
ition of learning, also maintained by the daʿis operating outside the Fatimid state,
culminated in the 800 lectures put together by al- Muʾayyad fi’l-Din al-Shirazi,
chief daʿi for twenty years up until just before his death in 1078, in his Majalis al-
Muʾayyadiyya ([Ghalib], 2 vols.).
Elsewhere I have explained the late Fatimid split of the Ismailis in a contest for
the throne (1094), and how the Persian followers accepted the succession of Nizar
and the other (Mustaʿlian) grouping split again into the Hafizi and Tayyibi branches,
the latter alone surviving and finding strongholds in Yemen and then in India (where
Ismailis became known as the Bohras). The Tayyibis maintained many of the Fatimid
traditions of learning, also producing learned daʿis who led their community, as the
Tayyibi Imams themselves remained concealed since 1130 (Daftary 2007: 241–94).
Meanwhile, after the seizure of the Alamut fortress in northern Persia in 1090, the
Nizari Ismailis had laid the foundation of a new state, centered at Alamut, with its
territories and network of mountain fortresses scattered in different regions of Persia
and Syria.
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— Ismailism and gnosis —
Within an extremely hostile environment, the Nizari state did not produce a sub-
stantial body of literature of its own, and whatever they collected in the famous
library at Alamut was lost to the Mongols, who brought to an end the 166-year-long
history of their state (Daftary 2007: 301–401). Still, if other fortresses retained places
of learning, Alamut became more fabled. There, Hasan-i Sabbah (d. 1124), credited
with founding the Alamut library, emerged as a learned theologian who reformulated
the old Shiʿi doctrine of taʿlim, or acceptance of the authoritative teaching by “the
Imam of the time.” The doctrine of taʿlim became the central doctrine of the Nizaris,
who were henceforth also called the Taʿlimiyya, yet limitations for intellectual vitality
came with Hasan-i Sabbah’s choice for the spiritual language to be Persian, not
Arabic. From the Mongol invasions (or from 1256) to the present, the Nizari com-
munities were scattered across Syria, Persia, Central Asia, and South Asia, elaborating
diverse traditions, including that of the well-known Indian (and Indian east African)
Khojas, with a distinctive “Satpanth” melding of Muslim and Hindu outlooks (esp.
Nanji 1978). Along the way, the Ismailis were establishing close relations with Sufism,
a key esoteric tradition in Islam.
Despite their rich intellectual heritage and contributions to Islamic culture, the
Ismailis were often accused of heretical teachings and a multitude of myths and
misrepresentations circulated about them. This state of affairs reflected mainly the fact
that the Shiʿi Ismailis were, until the middle of the twentieth century, perceived and
studied almost exclusively on the basis of the evidence collected or often fabricated by
their detractors, mainly Sunnis (Daftary 2014: 47–54). After all, their revolutionary
religio-political agenda was to uproot the existing Sunni Abbasid regime and restore
the Caliphate to a line of ʿAlid Imams, descendants of ʿAli b. Abi Talib, the Prophet
Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, the first Shiʿi Imam and the fourth of the early
Caliphs.
With the foundation of the Fatimid state in 909, the Ismaili challenge to the
established order became actualized, and thereupon the Abbasid Caliphs and their
Sunni scholars launched an anti-Ismaili propaganda campaign to discredit the entire
Ismaili movement and its basis. Treating Ismailis as malahida, heretics or deviators
from the true religious path, Sunni polemicists fabricated damning evidence on
doctrinal grounds. Such anti-Ismaili polemics provided a major yet misleading
source of information for such Sunni heresiographers as ʿAbd al-Qahir al-Baghdadi
(d. 1037) and other influential commenators, resulting in the “black legend” that
Ismailism, with its arcane teaching and intricate stages of initiation, led ultimately
to unbelief (Ivanow 1946). In reaction to Hasan-i Sabbah’s active opposition to
the post-Abbasid Sunni Saljuq Turks, the most notorious anti-Ismaili treatise came
with the so-called al-Mustazhiri by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111),
a renowned Sunni theologian and jurist of the time, laying charges of atheism
and initiatic falseties. Al-Ghazali maintained that the Ismaili doctrine of taʿlim
had undermined the Abbasid Caliph’s spiritual authority to speak for all Muslims.
European (especially Crusader) commentaries embellished this misinformation,
resulting in the so-called Assassin legends –the “paradise,” “hashish,” and “death-
leap legend” – that culminated in the deprecatory popularizations of Marco Polo
(d. 1324) that perpetuated false impressions for centuries (Daftary 1994: 88–127).
If, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, European orientalists had correctly
identified the Ismailis as Shiʿi Muslims, hostile Sunni fictitious and Crusader sources
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still clouded their perceptions. Consequently, the orientalists, too, tacitly lent their own
seal of approval to the myths of the Ismailis, namely, the anti-Ismaili “black legend”
of the medieval Sunni polemicists, rooted in hostility, and the Assassin legends, rooted
in “imaginative ignorance.”
The breakthrough in the scholarly understanding of Ismailism had to await the
recovery and study of genuine Ismaili texts on a large scale –manuscript sources which
had been preserved secretly in Yemen, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and
India. This process effectively started in the 1930s in India, where significant caches
of Ismaili manuscripts were preserved by the Bohra community. Key to restoring
matters were Russian orientalist Wladimir Ivanow (1886–1970) and a few Bohra
scholars accessing crucial family collections of Ismaili manuscripts. The initiation
of modern scholarship in the field came with Ivanow’s first published catalogue of
Ismaili works, citing some 700 separate titles, attesting to hitherto unknown riches of
Ismaili literary and intellectual life (Ivanow 1933). Many more texts were recovered
over the following decades (Ivanow 1963; Poonawala 1977), and many texts are
now critically edited and published (Daftary 2004: 104–73). Further progress centers
on the Institute of Ismaili Studies, established in London (1977–), holding Ismaili
manuscripts in excess of 3,000 volumes.
With new research revolutionizing our understanding of Ismailism, it is plain that
it made very significant and often neglected contributions to the intellectual history
of Islam in general and Shiʿi Islam in particular. We now also know that Ismaili doc-
trine was Gnostic from early on, representing a “new Gnostic” tradition in Shiʿi Islam,
based on esoteric and initiatory knowledge (deriving from the Greek gnosis, trans-
mitted from Neoplatonism). In its esotericism, Ismaili Gnosis also shares themes with
ʿirfan or Sufi gnosis. This explains why the Nizari Ismailis of the post-Alamut cen-
turies were able to disguise themselves in Persia and Central Asia under the mantle
of Sufism. This coalescence was made possible by doctrinal features shared by
Iranian Ismailism and Sufism, two independent esoteric traditions in Islam (Daftary
2005: 183–203; cf. ch. 30).
Ismaili Gnosis essentially attempts to explain, to the initiated, the hidden spiritual
meaning of the Islamic revelation. In the era of Islam, the esoteric truths (haqaʾiq),
representing the immutable truths of all religions, including especially the religions of
the Abrahamic tradition, which the Prophet Muhammad and other divinely guided
members of the prophetic chain had dispensed, were essentially gnostic. They were
based on revelation and transcended human reason or intellect (ʿaql). Human intel-
lect could not apprehend them by its own independent efforts. Only through the spir-
itual guidance and teachings of the Prophet, and the Imams after him, could properly
initiated individuals partake of these truths, which are also required for humankind’s
salvation. This gnostico-salvific import recurs in different forms throughout the ages
in Ismaili teachings.
By the middle of the ninth century, the basic framework of Ismaili religious thought
was in place. Subsequently, the early doctrines were further elaborated, and occa-
sionally modified. Ismaili esotericism and Gnosis entailed a fundamental distinction
between the exoteric (zahir) and the esoteric (batin) aspects and dimensions of the
sacred Scriptures, as well as religious commandments and prohibitions. Drawing on
the teachings of the earlier Shiʿi groups in southern Iraq, the early Ismailis held that
the revealed scriptures, including especially the Quran and the sacred law of Islam
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(shariʿa), had their apparent or literal meaning, expressed in the zahir, which had
to be distinguished from their inner meaning or true spiritual reality, hidden in the
batin. They further held that the zahir or the religious laws enunciated by different
prophets underwent periodical changes, while the batin, containing the spiritual
truths (haqaʾiq), remained immutable and eternal. For the Ismailis, these immutable
truths, or the haqaʾiq, in effect formed a Gnostic system, representing an esoteric
world of hidden spiritual reality.
Even the early Ismailis held that, in every age, this esoteric world of spiritual reality
could be accessible only to the elite (khawass) of humankind, as distinct from the
uninitiated common people (ʿawamm), who were merely capable of perceiving the
zahir, the outward world and only apparent meaning of revelations. Accordingly,
in the era of Islam initiated by the Prophet, and before the coming of the Qaʾim or
Resurrector at the End of Time, the eternal truths of religion could be explained only
to those who had been properly initiated into the Ismaili community and recognized
the teaching authority of Muhammad, his successor and legatee ʿAli b. Abi Talib, and
the legitimate Imams of that era.
Initiation into Ismailism, known as balagh, took place after the novice had taken
an oath of allegiance (ʿahd) to the Ismaili Imam of the time, also pledging to maintain
secrecy regarding what was divulged to him (Halm 1996: 91–9). The initiates were
thus bound by their oath to keep secret the batin imparted to them by a hierarchy of
teachers authorized by the Ismaili Imam. The batin was both hidden and secret, and
its knowledge had to be kept away from the uninitiated and the masses (ʿawamm),
and the non-Ismailis who were incapable of understanding it. In this context, the
Ismailis effectively reinterpreted the Shiʿi principle of taqiyya, or precautionary dis-
simulation, to imply also their obligation not to reveal the batin to any unauthorized
person, in addition to their duty to dissimulate when facing persecution. The process
of initiation, like any pedagogical process, was gradual, also involving the payment
of certain dues for receiving instructions (Corbin 1970: 41–2). However, there is no
evidence of any system of fixed (seven or more) stages of initiation, as alleged by anti-
Ismaili polemicists.
The Ismailis taught that the eternal truths (haqaʾiq) hidden in the batin actually
represented the true message common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However,
the truths of these monotheistic religions recognized in the Quran had been veiled by
different exoteric laws as required by changing temporal circumstances. While the
religious laws were announced by prophets, it was the function of their successors,
the legatees, or the awsiya (singular, wasi), and the Imams, to interpret and explain
their true meaning to those who were properly initiated and had acknowledged the
current teaching authorities. And in the era of Islam, the unchangeable esoteric truths,
contained in the batin of the Islamic message, were indeed the exclusive prerogative
of the divinely guided Ismaili Imams after Muhammad and his wasi ʿAli, and of the
hierarchy of teachers installed by the Imam-of-the-time.
The truths behind the revealed scriptures and laws, representing the Gnostic know-
ledge of Ismailism throughout the centuries, could be attained or made apparent
through the so-called taʾwil, or the esoteric, symbolical or allegorical interpretation
that was hallmark of Ismailism. Taʾwil, literally meaning to lead back to the origin or
to educe the batin from the zahir, should be distinguished, however, from tafsir, which
means to explain and comment upon the apparent meaning of the sacred texts, and
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from tanzil, which refers to the revelation of the religious scriptures through angelic
intermediaries. The taʾwil practiced by the Ismailis, particularly in the early phases
of their history, was often of a cabalistic form, relying on the mystical properties and
symbolism of letters and numbers. Although similar processes of interpretation and
spiritual exegesis had existed in the earlier Judeo-Christian traditions and among the
Gnostics of early Christian times, the immediate origins of the Ismaili taʾwil (also
designated batini taʾwil) are Islamic and may be traced especially to the Shiʿi circles of
the eighth century in Iraq (Corbin 1970: 63–84).
The chief purpose of taʾwil, utilized extensively by the Ismailis, was to manifest
the hidden, Gnostic truths, so as to unveil the true spiritual reality. It represented a
journey from the zahir or exoteric world of appearances, to the original ideas or the
Gnostic truths hidden in the batin, causing the letters or symbolism to return to what
they symbolized, the Gnostic truths or the esoteric world of spiritual reality. In short,
the passage from zahir to batin, from shariʿa to its inner spiritual dimension (haqiqa),
or from tanzil to taʾwil, entailed a passage from the appearance to the hidden true
reality, from the letters of the revelation to the inner message behind them. And the
guide authorized divinely to lead this passage for the initiated Ismailis was the current
Imam and the daʿi-teachers authorized by him. The initiation into the haqaʾiq, the
Gnostic truths, attained through taʾwil, would indeed represent a spiritual rebirth for
the Ismailis. Taʾwil, translated also as spiritual hermeneutics, presented an elaborate
understanding of reality and faith that developed into a metaphysical system.
The two main components of this system were a cyclical interpretation of the
sacred history of humankind and a Gnostic cosmological doctrine (see ch. 3). By the
early 890s, the Ismailis had already developed a cyclical interpretation of time and
hierohistory, which they applied to the Judeo-Christian revelations as well as certain
other pre-Islamic religions. They conceived of time as a progression of successive
cycles or eras with a Beginning and an End. On the basis of their eclectic temporal
vision, reflecting Greek, Judaeo-Christian, and Gnostic influences a well as the eschato-
logical ideas of the earlier Shiʿis and the Quranic view on the evolution of man, the
Ismailis developed a conception of religious history in terms of the eras (dawrs) of the
different prophets recognized in the Quran, and this view was combined with their
doctrine of the Imamate, necessitating the existence of holy Imams at all times.
Ismailis believed that the religious history of humankind is consummated in seven
eras of various durations, each one inaugurated by a speaker-prophet or enunciator
(natiq) of a revealed message, which in its exoteric (zahir) aspect contains a reli-
gious law (shariʿa). In the first six eras, the natiqs had been Adam, Noah, Abraham,
Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. The early Ismailis further maintained that each of the
first six natiqs was succeeded by a spiritual legatee (wasi), who interpreted the eso-
teric truths (haqaʾiq) contained in the inner (batin) dimension of that era’s revealed
message for the elite. Each wasi was, in turn, followed by seven Imams, who guarded
the true meaning of the scriptures and the laws in both their zahir and batin aspects.
In every prophetic era, the seventh Imam would rise in rank to become the natiq of
the following era, abrogating the shariʿa of the previous natiq and promulgating a
new one. This pattern would change only in the seventh, final era of history.
The seventh Imam of the sixth era, the era of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad,
was Jaʿfar al-Sadiq’s grandson, Muhammad b. Ismaʿil, who, according to the bulk of
the early Ismailis, had gone into concealment. On his return, he would become the
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seventh natiq, as well as the Qaʾim or Mahdi, ruling over the final eschatological era,
initiating the final era in humanity’s history. However, he would not announce a new
religious law. Instead, he would fully reveal the Gnostic, esoteric truths concealed
in the inner dimensions of all the preceding revelations, truths that had so far been
revealed imperfectly and only to the elite of humanity.
In the final era, before the end of the world, the haqaʾiq would thus become fully
known, free from all their symbolism, and an age of pure spiritual knowledge would
be ushered in. In this final messianic age, there would no longer be any distinction
between the zahir and the batin, the letter of the law and its inner spirituality. There
would, therefore, no longer be any need for further Imams after the seventh natiq
who would be also the Mahdi, the Imam of the Resurrection or qiyama, the end of
time and history. For the later Ismailis, who recognized continuity of the Imamate in
the era of Islam, rather than only a single heptad of Imams ending in Muhammad
b. Ismaʿil as the Mahdi, the coming of the seventh, final era was postponed indefin-
itely into the future. Among all other Muslim communities only the Ismailis, in their
cyclical scheme, comprehensively accommodated Judaism and Christianity, as well as
a variety of other ancient religions, such as Zoroastrianism and Mazdakism, then still
enjoying some prominence in the Iranian world.
The second main component of the esoteric truths elaborated by the early Ismailis
was a special cosmology. Various motifs were combined in this Gnostic, mytho-
logical doctrine, which described the Creation of the universe and the analogies
between the celestial and terrestrial worlds. According to this doctrine, in its earliest
statement in pre-Fatimid times, God existed when there was no space and no time.
His will called Creation into being; He first created a Light and addressed it with the
Quranic creative imperative kun (Be). Through duplication of the two letters (kaf
and nun) of this divine fiat, kun acquired its feminine form Kuni, who was Light
now personified. On God’s command, Kuni, the first creature, created from her light
the second creature, called Qadar, representing the male principle. Kuni and Qadar,
the two original principles of Creation, taken as Intellect and Soul, were together
composed of seven consonantal letters, also called the seven higher letters. The letters
were interpreted as the archetypes of the seven natiqs or speaker-prophets and their
scriptures. It was out of the original heptad of letters that all the other letters of
the Arabic alphabet and names emerged, and with the names there simultaneously
appeared the very things they signified. Thus, in this gnosticizing, cabalistic, and
mythological cosmogony, the letters and words provided a ready explanation for the
genesis of the universe.
God’s creative activity by the intermediacy of the primal pair first brought forth
the beings of the spiritual world, the Pleroma, a traditional Gnostic feature, including
the seven karubiyyun corresponding to the seven “Cherubs” (or Archangels) of
Judeo-Christian angelology. Subsequently, the physical world was created, ending in
Man. Significantly, when Kuni was created, the Ismaili equivalent of Sophia in “classic
Gnosticism,” she initially failed to recognize the Creator, and, thereupon, six digni-
taries emanated from her through God’s power, in order to teach her that there is an
omnipotent being above her. As these beings originated without her will through the
power of the Creator, she now recognized God and denied her own divinity. Indeed,
Kuni’s error, her presumption and hubris, caused God to intervene, and this was what
initiated the process of creation (Halm 1978: 18–127).
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The emanationist features in foundational Ismaili cosmology will recall Ophite,

Valentinian, and Barbelo-Gnostic systems, with Cherubs reflecting Jewish/Christian
angelologies. Precise sources elude us, yet key traditional aspects of Gnosticism are
there. Ponder the belief that the Creation of the universe resulted from a Fall –not the
Fall of a terrestrial man, but that of the spiritual first creature, Kuni. Moreover, the first
of God’s created beings who rebels and succumbs to hubris is female. The progressive
development first of the spiritual and then of the material worlds, as well as Man’s dis-
tance from God, both with soteriological purpose, are Gnostic enough motifs. Again,
given the distance the acquisition of Gnosis cannot be attained by the application of
one’s own intellect: the spiritual truths necessary for salvation are communicated to
him from above, through the prophets and Imams of each era of history as elaborated
in Ismaili cyclical theory (Corbin 1983:1–58). In sum, many of the characteristics of
early Ismaili cosmology qualify it as continuing preceding Gnostic trajectories.
In considering possible sources, we must refute anti- Ismaili polemics and
heresiographies that trace Ismailism to Iranian dualism as found in Zoroastrianism,
Zurvanism, and Manichaeism. Kuni and qadar do not reflect a cosmic dualism of
“good and evil,” or “light and darkness,” as in those earlier religious traditions, but
are posited as the first two principles in the spiritual world. In this early Ismaili doc-
trine we have an original model which developed on its own in an Islamic milieu
relying on Quranic terminology and Shiʿi doctrines, while drawing on the overall
pattern of Gnosticism prevalent in Mesopotamia, where Ismailism started. Indeed,
with lack of evidence to the contrary, one might contend that the Ismailis founded an
Islamic Gnostic tradition of their own, with their special linkage of cosmology, sacred
(macro-)history, and soteriology.
The basic frame of religious thought in early Ismailism was essentially retained in
the Fatimid period, in wedding a Gnostic, esoteric haqaʾiq outlook, a cyclical con-
ception of religious history, to a cosmological doctrine, but from that time slight
revisions occurred to accommodate historical outcomes, more than one heptad of
Imams admitted in the era of Islam in history’s sacred cycles, and the arrival of the
Mahdi postponed indefinitely into the future. More seriously, the earlier Gnostically
framed cosmology was now superseded by an emanationist one with processes clearly
of Neoplatonic provenance, if still retaining Gnostic soteriology.
Pseudo-Aristotelian and Neoplatonic texts came to attract various Muslim groups,
especially in the Iranian world. During the tenth century a few Ismaili daʿis tried
harmonizing Ismaili theology with versions of Gnostic Neoplatonic philosophy
circulating among educated circles of Khurasan and Central Asia. Beginning with
Muhammad b. Ahmad al- Nasafi (d. 943), such daʿis elaborated complex meta-
physical systems of thought with a distinct Neoplatonized emanational cosmology,
developing in the process the earliest Gnostic “philosophical theology” in Shiʿi Islam.
The new cosmology was formally adopted by the Ismaili daʿwa of the Fatimids in
the reign of the fourth Fatimid Caliph-Imam al-Muʿizz (953–975). It is mainly on the
basis of several extant works of the daʿi Abu Yaʿqub al-Sijistani, originally a disciple
of al-Nasafi, that modern scholars have studied the early development of philosoph-
ical Ismailism, which was basically Gnostic, yet Neoplatonically so, in its cosmo-
logical and soteriological import (Walker 1994; De Smet 2012).
In the Neoplatonized Ismaili cosmology, God is described as absolutely tran-
scendent, beyond human comprehension, beyond any name or attribute, beyond
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being and non-being, and therefore unknowable. This conception of God, reminiscent
of the ineffable One of the Greek Neoplatonists, was in close agreement with the fun-
damental Islamic principle of tawhid, affirming the absolute unity of God. However,
the Ismailis introduced major modifications to the emanationist scheme: instead of
having the Intellect, the Neoplatonists’ Nous, issue directly and involuntarily from
the Source of Being, the One, in the Ismaili system God brings creation into being
through His command or volition (amr), or word (kalima), in an act of primordial,
extra-temporal origination (ibdaʿ) signifying creation out of nothing –ex nihilo.
Hence, God is the Originator (the mubdiʿ) and the Universal Intellect (ʿaql) is the first
originated being, also called the preceder (sabiq). The intellect is eternal, motionless,
and perfect, both potentially and actually. In keeping with Neoplatonic tradition,
it is called the source of all light. From the intellect proceeds, through emanation
(inbiʿath), the Universal Soul (nafs), also referred to as the Follower (tali). In this
cosmology, intellect and soul, ʿaql and nafs, are the two roots or principles, the ori-
ginal dyad of the Pleroma. The nafs, the second hypostasis, is much more complex
than the ʿaql, being imperfect, relatively removed from the Creator, and belonging to
a different plane of existence. In this cosmology the emanational chain of Creation
continues all the way to the genesis of Man, while it is also recognized that God had
created everything in the spiritual and physical worlds all at once.
The imperfection of the soul, and its desire to attain perfection, expresses itself
in movement and this movement is a symptom of defect, just as tranquility reflects
perfection. And it is the soul’s movement which causes all other movements and
creational activities. The soul’s defect also accounts for its descent into the depths
of the physical world, which owes its existence to this very defect. From the soul,
which is the source of matter (hayula) and form, proceed the seven spheres with
their stars, and, then, the four elements, etc. At the same time, certain conceptions
of the earlier Ismaili cosmology were also retained. For instance, in a general sense,
Kuni and Qadar now became synonymous with ʿaql and nafs of the Neoplatonized
paradigm.
A doctrine of salvation accompanied this Neoplatonizing cosmology. Reflecting
a variety of Gnostic motifs, in al- Sijistani’s philosophical thought, man appears
as a microcosm removed from his origins, with individual human souls as part of
the Universal Soul. Spiritual salvation, in spiritual terms, bears close affinity to the
Neoplatonists’ ideas on the mystical union between Man and the One, a recovered
union that was the supreme goal of all human endeavor (see ch. 18). Al-Sijistani’s
soteriology closely relates to his doctrine of the soul and Ismaili cyclical macrohistory.
His vision conceives descending and ascending scales or paths with their associated
hierarchies. The descending scale traces the Creation from God’s command through
an emanational hierarchy, to the world of material reality and the genesis of Man. As
a counterpart, the ascending scale maps the rise of Man’s soul to the higher, spiritual
world in quest of salvation, in a progression out of a purely mundane, physical exist-
ence towards his ultimate Source and Creator, in quest for the bliss in an eternal after-
life. This ascending quest up a ladder of salvation involves the purification of one’s
soul, which depends on guidance provided by the terrestrial hierarchy of the Ismaili
daʿwa. In the Ismaili cyclical model, only the authorized members of this daʿwa hier-
archy are in a position to reveal the “right path” along which God guides those who
seek the truth and whose souls on the Day of Judgment will be rewarded spiritually.
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In every era of human history, the terrestrial hierarchy consists of the speaker-prophet
(natiq) of that era and his rightful successors.
In the era of Islam, within which the Fatimid Ismailis would continue until the end
of time, the guidance is provided by Muhammad, his immediate successor ʿAli, and
the Ismaili Imams. In this Gnostic system par excellence, man’s salvation depends
on his acquisition of a particular type of knowledge through a unique source or
Wellspring (yanabiʿ) of Wisdom. And this knowledge, as held also by the early as well
as later Ismailis, can be imparted only through the guidance of the rightful religious
authorities, as the sole possessors of the true, inner meaning or taʾwil of the revelation
(ashab al-ta’wil) in any prophetic era. And only through the perfection of individual
souls can the actually defective Universal Soul attain its own perfection, which is
tantamount to restoring perfection to the Pleroma (Walker 1994: 70–3). All of these
ideas contributed to the rich heritage of Ismaili Gnosis.
The Neoplatonized Ismaili cosmology went through a further transformation under
the daʿi Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani (d. ca. 1021), the most learned Ismaili philosopher
of the Fatimid period. He was fully acquainted with Aristotelian and Neoplatonic
philosophies as well as the metaphysical systems of the Muslim philosophers, not-
ably al-Farabi (d. 950) and Ibn Sina (d. 1037) (Avicenna for medieval Europeans).
Al-Kirmani harmonized Ismaili theology with a variety of philosophical traditions
in developing his own elaborate metaphysical system in his major philosophical
treatise entitled Rahat al-ʿaql (Tranquility of the Intellect). Al-Kirmani’s cosmology
was partially based on al- Farabi’s Aristotelian cosmic system. He now replaced
the Neoplatonic dyad of intellect and soul in the spiritual world, adopted by al-
Sijistani and his other Iranian predecessors, with a system of ten separate intellects,
or archangelical hypostases, in partial adaptation of al-Farabi’s school of philosophy.
Al-Kirmani’s metaphysical system, though, still culminated in a Gnostic soteriological
doctrine, centered on the salvation of man’s soul through the attainment of spiritual
knowledge provided by the authoritative guidance of prophets and their legitimate
successors (De Smet 1995). Al-Kirmani’s cosmology was not adopted by the Fatimid
Ismaili daʿwa, but it later provided the doctrinal basis for the cosmological doctrine
elaborated by the Tayyibi Ismailis of Yemen.
After the Fatimids, Ismailism survived in its Tayyibi and Nizari forms. In the doc-
trinal field, the Tayyibis maintained many of the Fatimid traditions of cyclical history
and cosmology, which again provided the main components of their esoteric, Gnostic
haqaʾiq system. In their esoteric doctrine, however, their fairly early adoption of al-
Kirmani’s innovative system and its ten separate intellects accorded Tayyibi Gnosis
a distinctive character. But they also modified al-Kirmani’s system by introducing a
Gnostic, mythical “drama in heaven”. This particular cosmology, first expounded
by the Tayyibi daʿi Ibrahim al-Hamidi (d. 1162), shaped the Tayyibi haqaʾiq system
in its “final” form as a synthesis of many earlier Ismaili and non-Ismaili traditions,
including Gnostic doctrines. By astronomical and astrological speculations, the
Yemeni Tayyibis also introduced certain innovations into the earlier Ismaili concep-
tion of sacred history. They now conceived of virtually countless cycles in humanity’s
religious history from its origins to the Great Resurrection. And for the Tayyibis, their
Imams are held to have remained in concealment since 1130; so in the absence of
Imams, the daʿis have led with the absolute authority the Tayyibi Ismaili community,
now situated mainly in India and Yemen.
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The Nizari Ismailis, on the other hand, living under adverse realities, went in a
different, in a sense more limited, way, with less access to earlier Arabic sources. In
placing an increasing emphasis on the batin and the spiritual essence of Islam, Nizari
teachings revolved very heavily around the doctrine of the Imamate, working on
the assumption of the permanent need of humankind for a divinely guided spiritual
leader from the family of the Prophet, as Hasan-i Sabbah had vigorously maintained.
Indeed, for the Nizaris the Ismaili Imam was the “gate” through whom an esoteric
knowledge transcended exoteric Islam, allowing attainment of this Gnosis in this
world to those who had been properly initiated and partook of his teachings or
taʿlim. The Resurrection or Qiyama was interpreted to mean the manifestation of the
unveiled truth (haqiqa) in the person of the Nizari Imam, and his presence became
more important than the cosmologic and cyclo-historical speculation found among
the Tayyibis.
All in all, the Shiʿi Muslims had from early on elaborated a Gnostic tradition in
Islam, revolving around their esotericism and the unique spiritual role assigned to their
Imams. Only the rightful Imams were authorized to teach the knowledge of the hidden
meaning of the Quran and the previous revelations. In this sense Ismai’li Gnosis evolved
out of Shiʿi gnosis, first elaborated in the Shiʿi circles of southern Iraq during the eighth
century, and built on earlier doctrine of the Imamate and Shiʿi esotericism. And the
Nizari Ismailis, actually as the sole Shiʿi community proudly with a continuous line of
Imams, can be taken today as the foremost custodians of Shiʿi Gnosticism.
REFERENCES
Al-Mu’ayyad fi’l-Din al-Shirazi, Abu Nasr. 1974–84. Al-Majalis al-Mu’ayyadiyya (ed. Mustafa
Ghalib). Beirut: Dar al-Andalus: vols. 1 and 3.
Corbin, Henry. 1970. “L’initiation Ismaélienne ou l’ésotérisme et le Verbe.” Eranos Jahrbuch
39: 41–142.
——— 1983. Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis. London: Kegan Paul.
Daftary, Farhad. 1994. The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismaʿilis. London: I.B. Tauris.
——— 2004. Ismaili Literature: A Bibliography of Sources and Studies. London: I.B. Tauris;
The Institute of Ismaili Studies.
——— 2005. Ismailis in Medieval Muslim Societies. London: I.B. Tauris; The Institute of
Ismaili Studies.
——— 2007. The Ismaʿilis: Their History and Doctrines. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———2014. “The Study of the Ismailis: Phases and Issues.” Farhad Daftary and Gurdofarid
Miskinzoda (eds.). The Study of Shiʿi Islam: History, Theology and Law, London: I.B.
Tauris; The Institute of Ismaili Studies: 47–65.
Daftary, Farhad, and Jiwa Shainool (eds.). 2018. The Fatimid Caliphate: Diversity of Traditions.
De Smet, Daniel. 1995. La Quiétude de l’Intellect: Néoplatonisme et gnose ismaélienne dans
l’oeuvre de Hamid ad-Din al-Kirmani. Louvain: Peeters.
——— 2012. La philosophie ismaélienne: Un ésotérisme chiite entre néoplatonisme et gnose.
Paris: Éditions du Cerf.
Halm, Heinz. 1978. Kosmologie und Heilslehre der frühen Isma’iliya. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner.
——— 1996. “The Ismaʿili Oath of Allegiance (ʿahd) and the ‘Sessions of Wisdom’ (majalis al-
hikma) in Fatimid Times.” Farhad Daftary (ed.). Mediaeval Ismaʿili History and Thought.
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——— 1997. The Fatimids and their Traditions of Learning. London: I.B. Tauris; The Institute
of Ismaili Studies.
Ivanow, Wladimir. 1933. A Guide to Ismaili Literature. London: Royal Asiatic Society.
——— 1946. The Alleged Founder of Ismailism. Bombay: Thacker and Co.
——— 1963. Ismaili Literature: A Bibliographical Survey. Tehran: Ismaili Society.
Nanji, Azim. 1978. The Nizārī Ismā‘īlī Tradition in the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent. Delmar,
NY: Caravan.
Poonawala, Ismail. 1977. Biobibliography of Ismaʿili Literature. Malibu, CA: Undena.
Walker, Paul. 1993. Early Philosophical Shiism: The Ismaili Neoplatonism of Abu Yaʿqub al-
Sijistani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— 1994. The Wellsprings of Wisdom: A Study of Abu Yaʿqub al-Sijistani’s Kitab al-
Yanabiʿ. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
DRUZE GNOSIS AND THE

MYSTERY OF TIME
Adnan Kasamanie
T he people known as Druze (Arab. Dūrūz) form a renowned religious minority in

the Near and Middle East. The Druze see themselves as followers of the path of
divine Unity, and trace their origin to late tenth-century Egypt, accepting that they
branched out from the larger grouping called the Isma’ilis to become an independent
faith. They hold their separateness was by divine guidance and with the blessing of
the sixth Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amri Allah, seated in Cairo, Egypt. This new
faith officially began on the first day (1 Muḥārram) of A.H. 408, which corresponds to
Thursday sunset, 30 May 1017, after 21 years of “Preparation” (nathara). Al-Hakim
bi-Amr Allah (b. 985–1021) announced the beginning of the new era and proclaimed
Hamza ibn Ali Ben Ahmad al-Zouzani (b. 985) as the Imam of the movement, with
“first ploughers of the field” (nudhr, “missionaries”) having been enlisted before him
(996–1016). The political, cultural, spiritual and administrative center of the first
Druze era was Cairo (al-Muizzia), named in honor of the Imam al-Muizz, the founder
Fatimid caliph who made the city the capital for his dynasty (De Smet 2007: 15–26).
In order to understand this new flowering of such mystical forms of religious
and spiritual knowledge, and the “chiliastic atmosphere” in which it arose (Van Ess
1977), it is pertinent to return to the day when the al-Hakim assumed by inherit-
ance the Imamate and Caliphate of the Fatimid Empire. On the 28th of Ramadan
386 (13 September 996), the young boy, named al-Mansūr, was proclaimed as the
sixth Caliph-Imam of the Fatimid dynasty, with the caliphal title of al-Hakim bi-
Amr Allah. Al-Hakim inaugurated a new stage within a great three-staged vision
of unfolding time. In the Druze view, cycles of veiling and unveiling operate neces-
sarily and in a regular way with the purpose of bringing individual consciousness to
higher levels. This sequential necessity starts from the Shari’ā (literalism of the Law)
on into the Tariqa (the way, the time of allegorical interpretation, marked especially
by the Fatimid dynasty or the Imamate of Tāwi’l), and culminating in the Haqiqa
(The Truth, the final time inaugurated by Al-Hakim himself). This last time combines
knowledge of the Truth and acting in accordance with it. In the latter case, the indi-
vidual experiences a quasi- alchemical transformation, which involves the whole
person. In the Druze view, the good and evil actions committed by human beings are
held to be truly their own work. Thus, the merits and demerits should be our own.
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— Adnan Kasamanie —
The purpose of the different cycles (adwār) is for each human being to reach the
ultimate degree of one’s spiritual potential, and to spread justice and goodwill among
people and to safeguard their wealth and lives without any imposition and onerous
provisions (“provision” here linguistically indicating burden and calamity). This truth
lives in multiple forms to lead back to the ultimate Reality of the One. The doctrine’s
inner meaning was entrusted to those who were gradually prepared over the ages to
penetrate more deeply into its core without being harmed by its intensity.
Within our protracted Age (Dawr al-Qiyāmah) that humanity currently experiences,
as one Age among many coming before it (Kasamanie 2007: 3–19; forthcoming;
and see ch. 3), there is a twofold cause for imposing the Shari’ā (here interpreted
as outward Law) from the time of Noah: above all as a cosmic reaction against the
forgetfulness and ignorance of humanity, and as a way to exhaust the widespread
errors and faults of the soul in its former existences. The unveiling of the meaning of
hidden symbols and allegories in the literal text (for a start in the Qur’an) is a way
of imparting Divine grace, which paradoxically then transcends both the literal and
allegorical levels of the truth. The Druze perspective speaks often of the shell of reli-
gion associated with the literal level of understanding the divine Message and the
kernel, which alludes to what they deem as the middle way of Tawhīd. Insights about
the hierarchy of the Five Hudūd, or Guides that can come and go in time bearing
the cosmic principles in bodily form, bore evidence of deep mystical knowledge and
effective use of the tools of Greek-associated philosophy to articulate the metaphys-
ical and cosmological heart of the Druze doctrine. Every sacred symbol is a vision of
the Essence as was amply conveyed by the esoteric meaning derived from the sym-
bolic language of the great spiritual traditions. The rigorous commentaries, mainly by
Hamza and Al-Muqtāna Baha’uddin in the Druze Sacred Epistles, offered a witness to
their mystical powers and the soteriological orientation of the movement’s cosmology
and metaphysics. On the Druze understanding, the doctrine of the three elements of
religion such as islām, imān, and ihsān or the Law, Faith, and the “way of Gnosis” is
independently found, in their view, in every religious sector of humanity.
The work of the Druze Hudūd, however, is there to remove the obscurations of
the literal messages layer by layer to arrive at the “Gnosis” hidden in their essence,
leaving the follower of the Druze branch of Tawhīd with a vision of the sacred Truth.
Within the Semitic monotheistic world of religions, the Druze faith represents the
way of “gnosis” despite the veiling required by necessity as a protection for a nas-
cent revolutionary Call in a milieu very hostile to its impulse. The Druze Hudūd
interpreted the fundamental symbolism found in the religious messages according to
a deep metaphysical and cosmological perspective. This method combines the numer-
ical value of the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet with the direct science of letters,
such as the esoteric application of the fundamental sacred Shahādah. The formula
combines transcendence (There is no God but One), with immanence (Muhammad
is His Messenger). The Shahādah is made of the three Arabic letters Aleph, Lam,
and Hā, which is an expression of the three consecutive religious modes of outer,
inner, and secret, as well as the essential unity of the doctrine lying hidden behind its
three diverse forms. The first part of the Testimony contains a negation (nafy), which
rejects the falsity of associating any entity with the sole Divine Reality, and a positive
part, which affirms (ithbāt) the immanent aspect of Divine Reality (Hamza, Sacred
Epistle 13 [De Smet]). Thus, when one reads the Druze Sacred Epistles, one is reading
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— Druze gnosis and the mystery of time —
a complex expression of the Truth ranging from the numerical value of each letter
with all sorts of combinations, on a variety of levels, including the five colors of the
text indicative of the levels of esoteric comprehension of the literal text. Naturally,
this makes for a difference in relation to the study of these Epistles of Wisdom, as
every letter and its combinations in words and other relevant signs are indicative of
a divine mystery waiting to be revealed. The Druze view is a pure expression of the
perennial wisdom of all ages beyond the social opportuneness of outward religion
and its narrow theological perspective.
In Druze cosmology, the universal manifestation of the divine Word forms a sep-
tenary series that repeats itself over cycles of veiling and unveiling of the divine Truth.
In Druze cosmology, the continuum space-time has sprung forth from the fifth level
in the descending order of origination of the cosmos whose limit is the corporeal
world (Abdul Ghaffar Taqiyyūdin [1497–1557], Kitāb Alnoqat Wal’dawair [Seybold],
p. 28). The manifestation of phenomena is logically a dynamic rupture of original
equilibrium that becomes consecutively an ontological reverberation of the divine
Will. Dynamic expansion at any level leads inevitably to its complementary opposite,
namely transformation and destruction. The Druze view about the various religious
forms is that their movement of separation over time from the divine source leads to
their eventual decline. A religion is an integral whole that is subject to necessary laws
of change like any living organism. The Druze standpoint considers the preceding
forms of religion as a necessary stage in the progressive development of conscious-
ness intended to impose discipline on humanity. Thus, there were positive reasons for
the processual path of religious forms despite their subsequent degeneration that was
inbuilt into their formal structure. Such limitation consists of the ritual and legislative
element of conformity to the revealed Law (Yousef al-Quaylli, Khabāyyah al-Jawahir
(Ms (1810s]), Mounts Lebanon], pp. 390–2). The ritual forms and the simple ideas of
religion suffer from old age and thereby forfeit their saving power due to the changing
state of humanity. The average person cannot comprehend the metaphysical depth
of the notions of transcendence, immanence, the ephemeral nature of the world and
suchlike due to the complexity and subtle nature of the terminological and intuitional
hierarchy of Gnosis. The average believer cannot comprehend the nuances of esoteric
knowledge and can only feel at home in dogmatically simple definitions. On the other
hand, the follower of gnosis understands effectively the nuances of esoteric concepts,
because it leads to the center of all things, via the intellect, even if the person neglects
to perform outward rituals, rites, and obligations.
Pythagorean and Platonic ideas revealed the intricate connection between numbers
and the world of nature; and by the time it reached Plotinus, such conviction was
raised to even higher levels where numbers existed for him before the variety of
sense-objects his two predecessors described. The veneration of the sage Pythagoras
in Druze cosmology, mind you, is most vital and we find primary importance given
to the geomancy of letters and the science of numbers. Number “7” occupies a prom-
inent place within the Druze conceptualization of religious cycles, and as such, it is
analogous to the days of the week, at the end of which a new week begins, and in the
same vein, the rotation of the seven planets around the sun. In both analogies, there
is a Return to the Origin and that conveys the Druze belief that primordial humanity
would return to its divine source after a long period of integration of the human
being with the divine Word. At the end of each cyclic period of terrestrial humanity,
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the human order actualizes some level of spiritual consciousness only to be gradually
brought back to its recognizable starting point, albeit at a higher level. The end of
any one cycle always and necessarily coincides with the beginning of another. It is our
own responsibility to choose freely and refine our innate humanness in our spiritual
journey towards the Divine Reality.
According to Druze cosmological framing, the first luminous point was issued
forth from within the eternal Light of Divine Greatness, which is a Unity that
passes beyond numbers. The Absolute maintains His transcendence in relation to
the first Cause (Al-Muqtāna Baha’uddin, Sacr. Epist. 35 [based esp. on the Qur’an
34:4; 45:15]; cf. Jumblatt 2011: 24–5 for Hermetic sources). The movement of the
originated “point” produces the circumference of existence and all manifested things.
This is why the Druze authority Abdul Ghaffār uses the spatial symbolism of center
and circumference. Druze metaphysics envisages the All-encompassing Intellect (al-
‘Aql) as the principle of manifestation before the projection of the physical universe in
the form of space, time, number, and matter (hayūla), and its differentiated corporeal
contents. The All-encompassing Intellect is the origin of stillness and coldness in the
hierarchy of the four “natures,” just as the All-inclusive Soul is the origin of heat and
motion (Ghaffar, Al-Noqat, pp. 76–83). The Adversary sprang forth from the Light
of the All-encompassing without mediation; henceforth the All-inclusive Soul came
forth from between the Light of the All-encompassing Intellect and the darkness of
the Adversary. Then the Antagonist came forth from the Light of the Intellect and the
darkness of the Adversary through the medium of the All-inclusive Soul. Whereas the
All-inclusive Soul had little of the darkness of the Adversary and much of the Light of
the All-encompassing Intellect, the opposite is true for the Antagonist. According to
the Druze canon, the Adversary and the Antagonist represented the power of oppos-
ition to the spiritual activity of the five luminous Hudūd (Ghaffar, Al-Noqat, p. 76).
In the Druze story of origination of our world, the Adversary and the Antagonist,
essentially negative, descended to the earthly plane, and hence had no part in the ori-
gination of the natural cosmos. Divine Infinity cannot exclude the possibility of an
apparent negation of its Reality. Hence, the powers of “negation” can only exist at
the extreme limit of the gross physical world below the Divine Reality. The cosmic
contrapuntal forces are concomitant with the oscillations in the macro-cyclic pro-
cess in human time (ch. 3), and one can see this contradictory aspect of reality and
unreality, of unity and separation within every human being as the equal tendencies
for good and for evil from the moment of manifestation as the “speaking souls” (Al-
Quaylli, Khabāyyah, pp. 355–64).
What is essential for Druze practice is discernment between the world and God,
or between the illusory and the Real. The intrinsic virtues of the malleability of the
soul are forbearance, humility, discerning, and spiritual fervor, to be combined with
the extrinsic rules of conduct. This practice would allow one to live in trust and
form an essential entry point to Druze initiation. The soul must become a recep-
tacle to the divine Presence that corresponds to the sacred object of its aspirations.
The last cycle of 1017–1043 under al-Hākim unveiled to the Druze seeker suffi-
cient esoteric knowledge to be able to understand the intentions of symbols and
allegories in the Sacred Books of humanity and to live in a state of pure simpli-
city (Al-Quaylli, Khabāyyah, pp. 503–5). “Verily, verily, I say unto you, before
Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).
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35
The cyclical view of the universe permeates all aspects of the Druze Tradition,
indeed to such an extent that any understanding of its metaphysical and theological
principles would be incomplete without addressing the concept of the cyclical tra-
jectory in the economy of “Divine-Possibility.” The striking example is of the 72
sub-cycles eventually coinciding with the 72 cycles and last manifestation of the
Imam, completing the length of the “Great Year” of Plato calculated as 25,920 of
our common years (from Respublica 546B-C). The length of the “Great Year” for
Plato is equivalent to 360 × 72. (Timaeus 22D). This number measures the length
of time in years required for the earth’s axis to make a full return to the exact point
of departure in relation to the zodiac constellation, with the earth’s axis traversing
one degree of the equinoctial circle every 72 years. In this regard, the compass point
and the circle constitute the cyclical model, which denotes four meanings: the center
is divine Support; the point on the circumference represents the All-encompassing
Intellect in his historical personification; and the measures that make up the six cycles
represent the movement of the complementary pair of inward and outward religions.
Finally, the closing seventh cycle constitutes the unveiling of the immanent Truth and
immanent Presence (Al-Qaylli, Khabāyyah, pp. 394–6).
It is not by chance that the Druze commentaries and Epistles devote so much space
to the geometric and natural symbolism in order to show the immanence of the Divine
Presence in the cosmic Order. The Druze axiom that absolute Truth is what saves is
contained in the archetypal model of the points and circles. Here the Divine Essence,
Adh-Dhāt or the Unique One, corresponds to the center of the circle, whereas the con-
centric circles correspond by analogy with the creative unfolding of the Universe that
does not affect divine unicity. The conceived hypostatic gradation represents the Five
Hudūd, whose activity derives from the central Point that deploys them. The inter-
mediary function of the Hudūd avoids anthropotheism inasmuch as it is from them
that the cosmic order manifests or comes forth by projection like radii (“emanations”
in that sense) extending from the Center. A different cyclical rhythm governs each
degree of Existence down to the limits of matter. The logical emphasis in the Druze
cosmological doctrine is on the function of the All-encompassing Intellect as the Cause
of all causes; with all of that the Absolute remains transcendent beyond the reality of
the manifested world (Makarem 1974: 41–2; Trompf and Kasamanie 1981: 190–2).
This archetypal pattern of the world falls under the order of divine Providence.
The field of human experience in nature is the arena of the struggle of the soul in
the earthly plane (space). In resisting the power of earthly seduction, the soul gains
insight and a sense of meaning. The Druze had endured terrible suffering over the
ages, starting from their spiritual Egyptian homeland, but even after the minority in
Egypt went underground, the other communities who accepted the Call in the tribal
regions of the Eastern Mediterranean dispersed into the safety of Levantine fastnesses
(Mounts Lebanon and Syro-Palestine) (Firro 1992: 25–53; cf. Izzeddin 1984: 132–8).
The minority’s early inability to realize their mission freely inevitably brought diffi-
culties for the majority. The Sacred Epistles of Wisdom called upon them to prove
their faith in relation to God through these trials. Such deep trust in the Goodness and
Justice of God follows from the sixth and seventh obligations of the Druze faith. It is
a great victory to resign oneself to the divine Will until one exhausts the trail of evil in
one’s destiny. Hence, contentment and resignation to the divine Will are the ultimate
state of knowledge and learning.
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In the current period, with the mysterious occultation and virtual absence of
the Hudūd, the innermost mentor is the archetypal and guiding image of the All-
encompassing Intellect in one’s process of coming to self-realization. As phenomenal
manifestation, the human being is at once physical and psychic, exhibiting varying
degrees of density: intellect as relatively transparent, speech as semi-transparent, and
corporeal body as opaque. It follows that purification of oneself from the vulgar and
contemptible traits and adopting the five qualities of the All-encompassing Intellect
is the path of Druze Tawhīd. The latter five virtues amount to the conditio sine qua
non for Druze Gnosis. Mastering oneself requires the gradual identification with the
five natures of the All-encompassing Intellect, namely, the suppleness of the soul,
forbearance, humility, heat of devotion, and intensity of the light of the intellect (Al-
Muqtāna, Sacr. Epist. 85).
The axiom that only the Truth saves forms the basis of Druze cosmogonic outlook.
Therefore, one enters into the mold of Gnosis by binding his or her whole being in
divine Wisdom. Al-Al-Muqtāna, the lowest in ranking of the Five Hudūd, bears the
epithet: “Subtle Wisdom” (Ḥikma al-Lātifa). At this lower level, wisdom is no more
than a potential before it can become, at the higher levels, a spiritual alchemy full of
content and substance. Hence the significance of the All-encompassing Intellect and
his five natures as expressing the fundamental and saving truths (Ghaffar, Al-Noqat,
p. 18). He is the exemplary figure that joins the formal expression of each Revelation
in a chain from the dawn of time to its concluding proclamation. According to the
Druze, in these “Latter Days” humanity is too weak to do much to change the social
order, but it will be realized at the Day of Judgment when the time for it is ripe. The
Epistles offer a witness to the interpretative power displayed by the Hudūd who
integrated all the previous revelations to fit the unique Weltanschauung available
today. The Druze practitioner accomplishes his practice through his activity in his
habitual environment within the spirit of the seven admonitions. Truth, as the first
Druze admonition, illuminates the will and becomes veracity and sincerity. The prac-
titioner looks towards the Truth and submits to its light. The second admonition
is safeguarding one’s fellows as a gift of oneself in seeing God in one’s neighbor.
Druze neophytes have to be initiated anew in each lifetime to the ancient mysteries of
Wisdom by the inner religious circle of practitioners in order to test their capacity to
withstand psychic shocks, and to prepare their souls gradually for the new conditions
they are obliged to fulfill. The third admonition is to renounce all previous beliefs
acquired through habitual thinking, which gives a false sense of security and psycho-
logical comfort and turns into an obstacle to inner awakening. The fourth admon-
ition takes the form of dissociation from those who harbor doubt about the Truth
of divine Unicity (Tawhīd), lead a life of perplexity, who have distrust in the intrinsic
goodness of life, and an inability to see God’s work in the world. The coldness of
renunciation and the complementary warmth of devotional fervor bring peace, joy,
and equilibrium to the soul. The moral aura of this alchemy stems from the prac-
tice of the virtues, since metaphysical knowledge has moral concomitance, other-
wise practice would be devoid of spiritual value and blessing. When the seeker starts
with the immanent and liberating Truth, and projects one’s love to one’s neighbor,
as it facilitates and strengthens faith, then removes oneself from and avoids what
is harmful, what remains is to enter the garden of divine Unicity, which is the fifth
Druze admonition. This fifth admonition requires wholesome attention and gives us
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a glimpse of transcendent Reality that is mysterious, beautiful, and wondrous. All of

the veils woven by the ego are suddenly lifted from the mirror of the intellect so that
we can see with clarity. To be content and accept whatever comes from the divine Will
is the sixth admonition; and the seventh is for a serenity that brings conformity with
the divine Will, in perfect self-knowledge beyond the veils of passion.
The ritual commandments in Islam such as that of the profession of faith, prayer
five times a day, fasting, pilgrimage to Mecca, and almsgiving represent the formal
elements of religion that are effective for the average collectivity. From the point of
view of the Druze, when the person passes the stage of the exoteric form of worship,
a higher spiritual awakening effects a transformation of their being and enables them
to grasp the content and inner meaning of the message. Although some theologians
might dispute the esoteric interpretations of the Five Hudūd, as unavoidably happens
when a new faith is born in the climate of exoteric religions, nonetheless the Druze
Sacred Epistles evince a marked tendency to deal with metaphysical principles in the
spirit of Gnosis. The Druze Epistles were the fruit of a third interpretative reading of
the Scriptures called the anagogical after the literal and allegorical. In this way, the
follower of the new faith gains a keener sense of the deeper meaning of the text and
of symbols hidden within the Sacred Books. The point of departure was always the
underlying nature of things, not the opinions of the theologians or the doctrines of
outward religions, but the mystical exegesis of the sacred Scriptures. Esoteric know-
ledge is gained through intuitive insight and the capacity of the intellect to transfigure
the literal text by referring to the roots of all Wisdom beyond literalism and allegor-
ical exegesis. Many traits of the well-known Druze mystical Shaykhs are seen in their
contempt for worldly pleasures, the bearing of every trial for the love of God, love
of self-discipline, and a fervent desire to ascend on the ladder of holiness. When we
read the lives of some of the Druze shaykhs, one will see that they were great above
all through their simplicity, in their perseverance in little things, and in knowing how
to empty their souls for God. The Druze doctrine of the hierarchy of being implies the
“relativity” of the world and in consequence the way of detachment from it.
The ‘Aql always refers to the first originated entity, the All-encompassing Intellect.
Nature contains the earthly kingdoms of mineral, vegetable, animal, and human, in
addition to the whole universe. The All-encompassing Intellect contains everything in
potential like a seed. At this a-temporal stage, there is no before or after: time enters
at the fifth stage or that of the perfection of corporeal beings in the universe. The fifth
level is called al-Jīsmānniyya, which is made of the visible and invisible dimension of
the universe that flows through geometrical shapes, colors, lines, tactile properties,
odors, and physical states. Materiality has depth, width, and length.
The significance of origination of the universe from the Light of the All-encompassing
Intellect, which begins unfolding with the hierarchy of the five Hudūd and passes
through to the lower subtle levels, had to do with the influence of the first seven spir-
itual entities over the traits of the human soul. The Absolute drew forth a created
light from His uncreated Light. The All-encompassing Intellect was perfect in form
and complete in potentiality. The entities that came forth after the All-encompassing
Intellect were the Adversary, the All-inclusive Soul, the Antagonist, the divine Word,
the Precedent, and the Follower, all of which had an effect over the human soul, but
only the five Hudūd bore responsibility for the origination of Nature. The aim of the
series of human reincarnations is to actualize the divine content that God places in
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the mirror of the heart so that each soul can reach its spiritual excellence. The Druze
religious archetype accentuates the aspect of intellect within Monotheism as a possi-
bility adapted to the needs of different sectors of humanity.
The Druze medieval commentator Abdul Ghaffar presents five reasons for reincar-
nation of the spiritual core of every human personality in a new human “garment”
(Al-Noqat, pp. 23–4). First, Divine Justice that permeates the cosmic order; secondly,
rewards and punishments occur to all age groups from a newborn to an old person;
thirdly, differentiation in the intellectual capacities of each individual human being;
fourthly, the wide range of discerning powers of reasoning and judgment; fifthly,
discrepancy of overall human disposition. Therefore, it is reasonable to think that
such an actual differentiated outcome in this life must have been due to what one has
wrought over previous lifetimes. In this way, a child that was born blind or with some
other handicap could only have been the echo of past deeds in a former life. This per-
spective differs markedly from doctrines that portray every human soul with the same
brush of original sin or pure disposition from birth.
The human intimacy with the Divine could not come from the impersonal Essence
of Divine Reality, seeing that it is transcendent. The Divine Presence can be experienced
in the mirror of the believer’s heart as blissful oneness. The people of divine Unity
anticipated this historical stage of the Truth of Tawhīd, and it was realized by the
final particular manifestation of the Fatimid Imam al-Hakim (al-Quaylli, Khabāyyah
pp. 391–5). He was the culmination of the great revelations of the eternal Word in the
course of history with the obvious reservation that it is always of a lesser reality than
the Divine Reality. The Imam has become the supreme archetype of the knowledge of
the Truth. This shows the necessity of retracting the Infinite radiance of God to allow
finite worlds to come into existence because Infinite light is beyond the capacity of a
human being to absorb. If in one respect the Nāsūt (the potentiality for the corporeal
realm) is a prolongation of the Divine Essence, in another it is no more than a limited
and particular manifestation of Omnipotence. When the Scriptures say that a human
being is made in the image of God (e.g., Gen 1:26), the Druze perspective deals with it
as an expression of readiness to render to God the totality of what one is in terms of
purity, nobility, and moral excellence. An intense longing for the Divine Truth is like
a flame of fire, which purifies one’s whole being. The Imam would have yielded his
full message of divine Unity for the people that he could sweep into his embrace. It is
a state of true witnessing for the people who were anticipating such a historical event
and preparing for such an overwhelming feeling of joy and deep gladness, indeed the
kind of spiritual intoxication made renowned by the Sufis (Kasamanie forthcoming).
The Druze Epistles talk about the recurrence of the seven cycles long before our
Age (of al-Bārr) more than 7,000 years ago. The 6 + 1 cycles close with an unveiling
of the buried meanings of symbols and allegories prior to the closing seventh cycle.
The seven cycles make a total of 4,900,000 years and all similar in duration within
the 70 long major cycle periods. The decreasing length of the respective durations,
notably after al-Bārr, reflects the speed of events as the end of the cycle draws near.
Esoteric Muslim talk of pre-Adamic stages of Thimm, Rimm, Hinn, and Jinn (derived
from the Qur. 2:30–3 and strongly developed among the reincarnationist Nusayris)
is paralleled in Druze Age-theory (Pareja et al. 1964: 844–55). The same data had a
different interpretation in the eschatological cosmology of the Druze Epistles where
the Cycles of Time point to the key idea of the gradual descent of humanity into the
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Dark Age after the time of al-Bon. Humanity of the primordial Age was much closer
to the Divine Presence and people were able to penetrate the meaning of symbols and
have more sense of the sacred than in the latter days. Al-Thimm is similar to the out-
ward religion of Abraham, the al-Rimm is similar to that of Moses, al-Hinn is like that
of Issa (Jesus), and al-Jinn is like that of Islam. The divine Call of al-Jinn coincided
with the time of the opening of Al-Barr, when Shatnil and his twelve disciples were
responsible for the propagation of the divine Call to divine Unity in the Yemeni city of
Hājar (Quayli, Khabāyyah p. 396). The cycles of the distant past preceding ours were
beatific and humanity had a freer access to the Mysteries than currently.
The purified soul has passed the myriad trials and barriers of the divine test. The
blindfolds due to the inveterate tendencies of the soul were acquired during the many
lifetimes spent in the necessary search for the precious jewel that is within us. The
answer to the riddle of the meaning of life is itself the process of transforming the
density of the psycho-corporeal plane of existence into the transparent purity of a
crystal in the full Hermetic alchemical sense. The modern Druze draw their know-
ledge from the traditional background, which fosters in them certain attitudes without
much conscious thought; and as well, some aspirants derive their knowledge from a
known Shaykh who personally imbibes and mediates the elements of the doctrine. In
this way, the practitioner opens new pathways of meaning through revealing within
themselves reformulations of symbolism. This way of imparting doctrinal knowledge
to ongoing recipients, without imposition from a central authority, is less a subju-
gation of the person to a given scriptural interpretation, and thus opens the way to
discerning new patterns of meaning. The fully devoted practitioners join each other
in uttering communal recitation of assigned text and prayers in a rhythmical voice
chanted in unison, and loudly.
REFERENCES
De Smet, Daniel (ed. and trans.). 2007. Les Épîtres sacrées des Druzes: Rasā’il al-Hikma.
Louvain: Peeters: vols. 1 and 2.
Firro, Kais. 1992. A History of the Druzes. Leiden: Brill.
Izzeddin, Nejla. 1984. The Druzes: A New Study of their History, Faith, and Society. Leiden:
Brill.
Jumblatt, Kamal. 2011. Fi Masālik al-Urfān, ala Khota Hermes al-Harāmisa. Chouf: Dar al-
Takadoumiyya.
Kasamanie, Adnan. 2007. Druze Wisdom. Beirut: [AK]: vol. 3.
——— [forthcoming]. Druze Gnosis: An Exposition. London: Routledge
Makarem, Sami. 1974. The Druze Faith. New York: Caravan.
Pareja, Felix, et al. 1964. Islamologie. Beirut: Imprimérie Catholique.
Social Implications of Mysticism.” Prudentia (Suppl. Vol.): 188–94.
Van Ess, Josef. 1977. Chiliastische Erwartungen und die Versuchung der Göttlichkeit: Der
Kalif al-Hākim (386–411 H.). Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Walker, Paul. 2012. Caliph of Cairo: Al-Hakim Bi-Amr Allah, 996–1021. Cairo: American
University in Cairo.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
GNOSTIC ELEMENTS IN
YEZIDISM
Victoria Arakelova and Garnik Asatrian
Y ezidism, a unique product of the Near Eastern non-dogmatic milieu, absorbed

elements of numerous religious trends of the region. The process of the formation
of the Yezidis as a separate ethno-religious group took place in the period from the
eleventh to the fourteenth centuries in the region of Sinjar in Northern Iraq. The new
community was initially shaped on the basis of the Sufi Adawīyya order, which loyal
atmosphere inhaled different and often contradictory elements brought by diverse
groups of the followers of the Sufi murshid Sheikh ‘Adi (d. 1162), the founder of the
Adawīyya. But the coalescences of group cooperation and beliefs produced a funda-
mentally new syncretic religion that was principally lacking a common dogma, and
later totally dissociated itself from Islam (Guest 1987: 15–28; Kreyenbroek 1995: 45–
68; Arakelova 2006).
No wonder Gnostic ideas, which had been a prominent part of the variegated
religious scenery of Mesopotamia up to then, would penetrate, on different levels,
into the Yezidi doctrine, alongside different ideas from Islam, Christianity, residual
Zoroastrianism, and the substrate of pagan beliefs. Scholars of Yezidism have more
than once pointed to some Gnostics elements in this syncretic religion, as well as to
obvious parallels either with other non-dogmatic trends that also contain Gnostic
touches (heterodox Shi‘a sects) (Arakelova 2004; 2011a; 2011b), or with some dis-
tinctively Gnostic trends, for that “they worship a single God in different guises,” has
been taken as “a kind of Manichaeism” (Ahmed 1975: 12–13).
We have to say, though, that this influence of the Gnostic ideas on the Yezidi doc-
trine was indirect, mainly, most probably, through esoteric Islam. Sufism, in particular,
and other heterodox trends participated in Yezidism’s shape, from early stages in the
formation of its community.
GN OSTIC ASP ECTS IN THE P E RCE P TIO N O F THE

XWAD Ē – THE O NE G O D
The Yezidis characterize their religion, Sharfadin, as monotheistic despite the fact the
cult is mainly based on the worship of the Yezidi triad (Malak Tawus or the Peacock
Angel, Sheikh ‘Adi, and Sultan Ezid), and a rich folk pantheon of deities, saints and
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— G n o s t i c e l e m e n t s i n Ye z i d i s m —
patron spirits (Asatrian and Arakelova 2004: 9–108). Yet this idea of one god seems
to be quite vague in the tradition. There are not too many references to the singular
Xwadē in Yezidi religious knowledge. Being represented by the triad but standing
above all his manifestations, the Yezidi one god is seldom if ever addressed directly
in the whole qawl-ū-bayt‘ or the Yezidi corpus of sacred texts. This fact, mind you,
probably proves how sacred and virtually tabooed He is for the faithful.
Xwadē interferes neither in the fate of the world nor in humans’ destinies; every-
thing is done by the hand of his manifestations. Xwadē himself for the Yezidis is an
utterly transcendent entity, perceived only through the activity of the triad, particu-
larly of Malak-Tawus, its main representative, who often poses as the creator as well.
At best, Xwadē is an implicitly watching God, moved aside, first of all, by the emer-
gence of the Yezidi triad. Xwadē has come to be seen manifesting through this triad,
as well as through secondary characters of the folk pantheon, whose cults gradually
developed in the new syncretic trend and were superimposed upon the monotheistic
tradition of a mystical version of Islam, the religious basis of the proto-Yezidi for-
mation. Thus, the Yezidi Xwadē presents as a typical deus otiosus, an impartial and
removed god, whose image in sacred history will naturally lose his distinct outlines
against the background of the trivial phenomena of Creation, the aggrandizement
of supernatural creatures, minor divinities, cultural heroes, and ancestors directly
related to human life. The initial stage of Creation and the role of demiurge thus end
up, in a way, falling into oblivion (Asatrian and Arakelova 2014: 6).
The primordial stage, having existed prior to the Yezidis’ sacred history, loses its
relevance; the idea of God the Creator, together with the origins of the Universe,
becomes increasingly obscure. If the Great God is still remembered, they know that he
had created humans and the Universe and that is it. The Supreme God seems to have
played out his role once finishing the course of his Creation (Kuiper 1986: 112–15).
Yezidism goes even further. Xwadē minimizes his own significance by sharing,
even passing on the role of the Creator to his manifestation, Malak-Tawus. Mash’af
ē Řaš (“The Black Scripture”) says that God created Malak-Tawus and set him as
the head of all ([Pt.] 1:2, 9), and in Kitēbā ȷ̌alwa (the Book of Revelation) Malak-
Tawus is called “the one who had existed before all creatures” (Introd.). However, in
the hymnic qawl-ū-bayt‘ tradition, which actually better reflects the Yezidi religious
Weltanschauung than the so-called sacred books, and particularly Qawlē Tāwūsī
Malak (“Song [or Hymn] to Malak-Tawus”), Malak-Tawus is not only approached
as agent of Creation but as Demiurge, and actually called “god”: Yā, řabbī, tu xāliqī,
am maxlūqin (“O my Lord, you are the creator, we the creatures”) and “Yā, řabbī, tu
řāh’īmī, tu xudāyī” (“O Lord, you are god!”) (Asatrian and Arakelova 2014: 17–18).
Abstaining from the temptation to draw any direct genetic line between Xwadē
and the “hidden God” of some ancient Gnostic system, as well as between Xwadē’s
manifestations in the Yezidi triad and emanations from the far removed divine (cf.
Rudolph 1983: 53–112), we should not miss the typological parallel between the per-
ception of god in Yezidism and Gnosticism.
GNOSTIC ROOTS OF M AL AK- TAW U S

Malak-Tawus (Malak tāwūs, Malakē tāwūs, or Tāwūsē/ī malak, Arab. Malak Ṭāwūs,
i.e., the Peacock Angel) is not only the most important character of the Yezidi holy
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— Victoria Arakelova and Garnik Asatrian —
triad, but the central figure, the essence or raison d’être of the Yezidis’ religion and
the main distinguishing feature of Yezidism, indeed the eponym for its followers is
milatē Malak tāwūs, the nation (or tribe) of Malak-Tawus. His name is also partially
tabooed, however, as of the most sacred character; and despite his omnipresent and
all-embracing nature and numerous domains, the Qawl-ū-bayt‘ contains the one song
directly concerned with him (see above), and only a few prayer formulas address
him. Yet, his key position is obvious as clearly as the main manifestation of Xwadē,
with unique functions and characteristics. The tradition even describes Malak-Tawus
as bēširīk-bēhavāl (“having no companion or friend”), or in other words “the Only
One,” a clear attribute of God transferred to his image (Asatrian and Arakelova
2014: 19).
According to Yezidi tradition, at least in The Black Scripture (1:1–8), Malak-Tawus
is accompanied and assisted by seven of his “avatars”: the angels Azrail (featuring as
Malak-Tawus himself), Dardail, Israfil, Mikail, Jabrail, Shamnail, and Turail. “From
his essence and light God created six angels, whose creation was as one lighteth a lamp
from another lamp” (32), like emanations, and in variants of this same scenario, these
angels (malaks), headed by Malak-Tawus, participate together in the act of Creation.
In almost the same succession, a sevenfold cluster of similarly named angels appears
in the cosmogonies of some Extreme Shi‘a (or Ghulat) sects (Minorskij 1911: 62,
64, 81; Nūr ‘Alī Shah Elāhī 1966: 22–6; Mokri 1974: 29–30), though the idea of the
seven creator Angels, associated with the Seven Days of Creation, is probably also
informed by Biblical (Test. Patr. Levi 8:2–12; 1 Enoch 20:1–8), Zoroastrian (Yasht
19:16–18; cf. Boyce 1979: 21–2; Trompf 2005: 706a; see also Schimmel 1993: 145–
50), and also Gnostic traditions (Duchesne-Guillemin 1988: 351).
Of all the characteristic features of Malak-Tawus, the most dramatic one, which
in fact makes his image so ambiguous, is his association with the Fallen Angel. This
is also the reason why the neighboring communities, primarily Muslims, generally
regarded this character as an incarnation of evil, embodiment of the lord of darkness,
Satan himself (cf. the Kurdish curse formula Bi tāwūsē hařa –“Go to hell” (lit. “Go
to Satan [peacock]”).
The image of the fallen angel expelled from Paradise for disobedience to the will
of God, as an incorporated element of the central deity in the Yezidi pantheon, can be
most probably traced to the Sufi views on Satan and the essence of evil in general; the
apologia for Satan is one of the characteristic features of early Sufism. According to
the Qur’anic tradition and the Hadith, the reason why Satan (Azazel) was alienated
from the throng of angelic beings was that, in contrast to all other angels, he disobeyed
God’s command to worship Adam (Man) (Qur. 2:34, 17:61, 18:50). Yet, the Yezidi
Malak-Tawus, being, in many aspects, a unique personage, in this particular step of
disobedience, is very close to the Mandaean Tāwūs Melka. The Mandaean legend
narrating the creation of Man, says inter alia:
The Jews were of the children of Ruha and Adam. Their great men were the
children of Ruha … They travelled and travelled until they came to ‘Ur shalam
(Jerusalem) … They wanted books, and Melka d Anhura (King of Light, the
Supreme Being) said, ‘A book must be written that does not make trouble for the
Mandai,’ and they sent one of the melki –Tāwūs Melka to write the Torat.
(Drower 1962: 257–8)
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Although in Mandaeism, Malkia (Melki) are semi-divinities, the initial incarnations

of the Creator, executing the will of Great Life, and their functions remind one rather
of those of messengers, angels (Heb. malāk, Arab. malak), the Mandaeans used the
word malax (equivalent of the aforementioned Heb. and Arab. forms) also to des-
ignate the evil spirit. In the colloquial Iraqi dialect an evil spirit or a jinn is also
sometimes named by using a related word, melek (Drower 1962: 73–94). And the
malka named Ṭāwūs (the peacock) by the Mandaeans was the one who, according
to the tradition, was distressed about his having rebelled against the Great Life and
allowed his pride to push him into rebellion. Thus, the same figure of the fallen angel,
incorporated into the images of both the ambivalent Yezidi deity and no less ambiva-
lent Mandaean spirit, bearing, in fact, the same name, is another obvious parallel
between the Yezidism and a doctrine of Gnostic origin.
The very fact of the existence of such a striking parallel between the two groups
can seem quite strange, as there could be no contacts between the two systems. If
Yezidism, on the early stage of its formation, was still subject to multiple influences,
the Mandaeans, by that time, had for centuries been a closed group with their esoteric
teaching. The only relevant explanation is the belonging of both to the non-dogmatic
milieu of the region, equidistant from the centers of orthodoxy, in which gnostic ideas
were part of the atmosphere. And the notion of the ambivalent Peacock Angel, along
with some other elements, was among the essential markers, having shaped certain
trends of this milieu (Arakelova 2015: 119–28).
GN OSTIC ELEMENTS IN T HE CHARACTE RS O F

YEZIDI DE ITIE S
Some deities of the colorful Yezidi folk pantheon also represent a certain interest in
terms of Gnostic interpretation of their figures. The one who seems to possess the
most obvious Gnostic features is Šēx-kirās (lit. “the Sheikh of the robe”; Kurdish kirās
< Old Iranian *kṛpa-pāθra-, “protecting a body”), the Spirit of Garment. Rather a
marginal personage (Asatrian and Arakelova 2014: 77–80; Arakelova 2015: 125–7),
Šēx-kirās was, most probably, responsible for the process of death, transmigration
of a soul, maybe even reincarnation –the exchange of bodies like that of clothes.
Although in modern Yezidism the concept of reincarnation exists only implicitly, the
Yezidi Book of Revelation (2:12) contains an allusion to it. Tanāsux (reincarnation,
transmigration) is one of the basic ideas of some esoteric teachings in Islam, including
heterodox Shi‘a sects (see. e.g., Ali Hujwiri, Kashf al-Mahjub [d. 1077] [Nicholson],
pp. 260–6; with Khaksar 2009: 117–34; Friedman 2010: 102–9; cf. Bar-Asher and
Kofski 2002). Generally, this concept can be approached as another essential marker
of the Near Eastern non-dogmatic milieu, which is rooted, first of all, in Gnostic
trends (among ancient Gnostic trends, in particular Basilides, Commentaries, Frag.
G; Apocryphon of John 26–7; Zostrianos 45–7; etc.), once widespread in the region
and having penetrated into doctrines of various heterodox groups in Islam and its
derivatives like Yezidism (Arakelova 2015).
The physical body is seen as a temporary garment in various trends of the mentioned
non-dogmatic milieu: “to take a garment off” is a metaphor for death, and to change it
is a metaphor for reincarnation. The phrase kirās guhērīn –lit. “to change clothes” –is
the denotation of death among the Yezidis. The Ahl-i Haqq followers, speaking about
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incarnation, use the Turkish word dun or Persian ȷ̌āme (“dressing”), the Persian be
lebās āmadan, lit. “to put on clothes” and meaning “to be made flesh” (Minorskij
1911: xii, n.2). This is, in fact, a Gnostic concept (Layton 1987: 18), clearly persisting
in Manichaeism. Apart from the very idea of reincarnation, inherent in Manichaean
tradition, taking off the garment as a metaphor for death is attested in one of the
Parthian Manichaean mourning hymns describing Mani’s frāmōxtiš tanβār padmōžan
aβδēn (Mitteliranische Manichaica [Andreas and Henning 1934, vol. 3], M5: 63–
6): “and he (the Prophet Mani) shed his beautiful bodily garment (= he died).” In
Gnosticism the robe can symbolize the primordial self of a person, his initial idea, his
alter ego in the heavens, preserved in the upper world, while the person himself lives
below, in the material world: “His image (garment) was kept untouched in its place,”
says the Mandaean text (Jonas 2001: 122–3). One of the emanations in the Coptic
Manichean genealogy of gods is the Image of Light or the Angel with the Garments of
Light, who comes to a dying man. The Angel, meeting a dying man, delivers to him his
true clothes, “the Garment of Light,” thus giving him back his real, original essence,
or his heavenly ego (Jonas 2001: 122). “The Hymn of the Pearl” from the apocryphal
Acts of Thomas tells how Judas Thomas has to leave his “splendid robe” in his Father’s
home and to set out in search of the Pearl (the Gnostic metaphor for the lost soul), and
he can regain it only when he returns to the Father’s kingdom. Having come home,
Judas Thomas realizes that his heavenly robe is like his “reflection in the mirror”:
I saw it wholly in me,
And in it I saw myself quite apart from myself,
So that we were two in distinction
And again one in a single form …
(Russell 2001–2002; cf. Jonas 2001: 125–9 giving
comparisons with the Mandaean Ginza Rba)
Thus, Šēx-kirās, as deity in charge of the burial rite, who meets a soul right after
the latter leaves the body (or takes off the physical garment), and whose name,
most probably, points to his functional connection with this process, could have his
direct prototype in the Gnostic tradition, while the very existence of such a character
actually may show that the same Gnostic concept, once, most probably, existed in
Yezidism.
Another reference to the Gnostic tradition can be made in connection with Yezidi
beliefs related to the Moon. Generally, the main figure personifying the Moon in
the Yezidi folk pantheon is Malak Faxr ad-din (Faxradīn, Farxadīn) or A’zīz Malak
Faxradīn, that is, (Saint) Angel Farxadin, identified with Turail (or Nurail), the
seventh avatar of Malak-Tāwūs (Arakelova 2002: 66–9; Asatrian and Arakelova
2014: 69–71).
However, among the Yezidi sheikhs of Armenia there is a rather marginal belief
that the moon is also the domain of Sheikh Sin (Malak Šēx Sīn), that is, Sheikh Hasan,
one of the Adawiyya Sufi order’s esteemed leaders. There is nothing in the biography
of this personality, whether real or legendary, which would relate him to this celes-
tial body or its particular characteristics in the Yezidi beliefs. This fact suggests the
secondary reference of his name to Sin, the Lord of the Moon in decisively Gnostic
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Mandaean tradition (Drower 1962: 252). The described development would seem to

be the result of Mandaean influence, but again the latter, as well as the Yezidis later
on, have been closed esoteric societies. One could assume the existence of a, probably,
marginal local character rooted in old regional beliefs, which could have penetrated
into the “pantheons” of the two non-dogmatic groups shaped in the same regional
heterodox milieu.
In both traditions the Moon is an ambivalent personage, although the dark side of
the Mandaean Sin is more emphasized: his sinister influence manifests itself in men’s
behavior, as he inclines people to commit crimes (Drower 1962: 392). “The face of
Sin, the Moon, is like a cat, animal-like and black … With Sin in the moon-ship is
the King of Darkness also. He … pulls men towards the earthly and gross, towards
the dark and evil. He does this because he must, though he was created by and serves
God, for there must be darkness and light and day and night. He is ordered to this
by the Lord of Greatness …” The Mandaean Sin, responsible also for abortions and
deformities, is a malformed figure (Drower 1962: 78–89).
The Moon’s character in the Yezidi tradition is definitely less dramatic, although it
is also apprehended as something mystical and even inauspicious. The Yezidis believe
that the moon is able to bring misfortunes and calamities to people and livestock, as
well as natural disasters –floods, earthquakes, and so on. At the same time, it is the
moon deity Faxradin whom the Yezidis ask for fertility when letting the livestock
outside on a new moon. Among the negative sides of the moon is also its connection
with the “lunar disease” –kēma hayvī or hīvē lēxistī (literally “the [state of being]
moonstruck”). And, again, it is just Malak Farxadin who is believed to be able to heal
those moonstruck, which also proves the ambivalent nature of the moon deity in the
Yezidi tradition (Arakelova 2001: 326).
OTHER GNOSTIC F IL AM E NTS

The legend of Yezidi origins
Among the probable Gnostic hangovers of Yezidism is the Yezidi legend of their
origin, which says that, unlike all other peoples who originated from Adam and Eve,
the Yezidis had only a primeval father, Adam. Eve played no role in their genesis.
Once, the Yezidi legend tells us, Eve claimed that children were produced by her alone
and that Adam had no part in creating them. In order to test her claim they put their
seeds in separate jars and closed them. When, nine months later, they opened Eve’s jar,
they found serpents, scorpions, and poisonous insects, while in Adam’s jar there was
a beautiful moon-faced child. They called the boy Šahīd bin-ȷ̌ arr (Arab. “Šahīd, the
son of the pot”). He later married a hūrī and became Forefather of the Yezidis (Spät
2002). This account of the origin of the Yezidis is also confirmed in the Yezidi Black
Scripture (14):
Xwadāyī gawra bimalāyikaī gōt, min Ādam wa Hawā xalq dikim wa diyānkim
bi bašar. Li siřī Ādam Šahr ibn-Safar dibē wa liawīš milatī li sar arz p’aydā dibē
lipāštir milatī ‘Azrayīl ya‘nī Malak Tāwus kī yazīdīyāya p’aydā dibē.
(Bittner 1913: 28)
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Which we translate as:
The Great God said to the angels: I create Adam and Eve, and make them human
beings. From Adam’s essence Šahr ibn-Safar will appear, and from him will ori-
ginate on Earth a people, who will later give birth to the people of ‘Azrayīl, i.e.,
Malak Tāwūs, who are the Yezidis.
Another version of the same legend mentions two children in Adam’s jar (Siouffi
1882: 259–60; Lescot 1938: 59; Drower 1941: 91). The legend is of the obvious
Abrahamic origin, but with its non-orthodox interpretation, traceable to a Gnostic
sujet (Spät 2002), could have been an element of a once-existing Gnostic trend, having
been preserved on a marginal level as a fragment of the regional non-dogmatic milieu
and penetrating the Yezidi tradition in the early period of its shaping.
Snake
Gnostic elements, although reinterpreted, can also be found among the Yezidi images
and symbols, some of them being equally attested in the Extreme Shi‘a tradition.
One of such symbols in Yezidism is the serpent (also attested among the Alevi-Zazas
in Central Anatolia: Asatrian and Gevorgian 1988: 508). Its importance is never
explained explicitly in the tradition. We should mention, though, the Yezidi house-
hold spirit Xudāne-mālē appearing in the shape of the snake, and the Yezidi lord of
graves Šēx Mand, or P’īr Mandī-gōrā, as a chthonic deity apparently having power
over snakes (Asatrian and Arakelova 2014: 92–4). The latter is also an eponym of
a sheikhy family, whose members are regarded as snake charmers, known as healers
of snakebites (Kreyenbroek 1995: 103–4) and experts in catching and taming snakes
(Bois 1966: 100).
The snake is yet clearly manifested in a kind of the Yezidi “iconography”. The two-
meter image of the black serpent “guards” the entrance to the shrine of Sheikh ‘Adi
in Lalish. Besides, the Sheikhy clan Dārā Mirāzā (in Armenia) has preserved a figure
of a dragon serpent made of brass as an important relic, although with no detailed
explanations provided by the relic holders (Asatrian and Arakelova 2014: 126).
Unfortunately, we have to admit that any evidence connecting these beings to a spe-
cific Gnostic system –that of those Ophites, for instance, who extolled the paradis-
iacal Genesis serpent as Sophia and the source of Gnosis for humanity (Irenaeus,
Adversus haereses 1.30.15) –is lacking.
In the similar forms –as a reptile, headless and legless, and as great earthly dragon –
the snake is attested in the Mandaean tradition. The serpent as a symbol of life and
as an amulet is carved by the Mandaeans above the door of a new house; woven of
blue cotton, it is suspended from a conjugal bed. A group consisting of a serpent,
a scorpion, and a lion, most probably of zodiacal significance, used to be part of
the Mandaean ornamental tradition (Brashear 1993: 2–6; cf. the Mandaean zodiac,
Nasoraia and Trompf 2010–2011: 404–5). In any case, the image of a serpent is gen-
erally a widespread motif in the art of the region (Drower 1962: 37, 40, 50).
However, this ornamental function of the snake, even bearing an amulet signi-
fying it, seems to be a result of symbol degradation, the secondary interpretation of
a key symbol. As a basic symbol of Gnosis, the snake was supposed to naturally be
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preserved in the traditions affected by Gnosticism, either in a degraded form (as with
the Mandaeans), or in formal representation with no dogmatic context (as among the
Yezidis). The Gnostics approached the serpent from the point of view of pneumatic
contradiction, underscoring its role in cognition: having tasted from the tree, Adam
and Eve acquired the Knowledge, the power beyond the bounds, and turned their
faces away from the Creator (see, e.g., Pagels 1990). The action of the serpent (resp.
Malak-Tawus with the Yezidis) is approached as the inception of Gnosis on earth
(Jonas 2001: 95), which destroyed the principle of concealing Knowledge from Man.
Even Jesus could be regarded by the Gnostics as an embodiment of the supreme ser-
pent. In the Gnostic Apocryphon of John Christ presses the man to taste against the
commandment by the Chief Archon (II,1 [22]), thus assuming some functions of the
serpent. And Manichaeism gives birth to a completely new, but quite organic form of
this tradition-myth: the serpent cedes his place to Jesus (Jonas 2001: 94–6).
The second shape of the snake, that of a serpent- dragon, also occurs in the
Mandaean tradition. The mighty serpent-dragon ‘Ur keeps the physical world with
its seven firmaments over him (Yezidism, by the way, also deals with the fourteen
spheres of the world), while below him are seven underground worlds of darkness
(Drower 1962: 253). In the Gnostic tradition, the serpent with his tail in his mouth
is the Universe; its dark head is earth and the light-colored tail is heaven (Rudolph
1983: 70). This earth-girding dragon of the primeval chaos is the principle of evil
and darkness, in contrast to light: “The outward darkness is a giant dragon, his tail
being in his mouth” (Jonas 2001: 17). The same is true with regard to the serpent “as
the king of the earth’s worms, with its tail in its mouth,” the serpent who misled the
angels and the first Adam (Reitzenstein 1921: 77–8).
Pearl
The pearl, being another striking example of symbol degradation and even profan-
ation in numerous cultural traditions, has preserved a special sacred nature in the
Yezidi religion, as well as in heterodox Shi‘a trends (Ivanow 1953: 42), and allows us
to draw another parallel between them and Gnosticism. The Yezidi tradition reflects
the initial metaphysical significance of the pearl. Prior to its degradation to just
magico-medical attributes, even, finally, merely aesthetic and economical value, the
pearl carried crucial metaphysical significance. Hidden in a shell and containing all the
elements of the Universe within its substantial, quintessential part, the pearl becomes
a cosmological symbol (Eliade 1958: 398–405). The Yezidi cosmogony endows the
(white) pearl with the status of cosmic centrality, as the quintessence of the Universe,
coexisting with the divine in eternity, prior to everything else: “At the beginning God
created the white pearl from His kind substance …,” the Yezidi Black Scripture (I:1)
says. The primeval liquid, the seed that had generated the Yezidi people, had also been
created by God out of a pearl (Asatrian 2007: 324–5). In the Ahl-i Haqq doctrine, the
pearl is sanctified by hierophany directly: in the eternal existence the divine has been
enclosed in “the Pearl.”
In ancient Gnostic systems, the sacredness of the pearl lay in its metaphoric
connection with soul, and the search for pearl, which is in fact a precondition of
coming back to Father, means the search and regaining of one’s own lost soul, one’s
own true Self (Jonas 2001: 116–18; Rudolph 1983: 29, 261; Arakelova 2002: 71–2).
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DEROGATED CHARACTER IS TICS AND S TIG M AS

There is one more phenomenon which brings together numerous later trends of the
Near Eastern non-dogmatic milieu, including the Yezidis (as well as heterodox Shi‘a
groups), with the Gnostic sects, at least, part of them. This consists of the similar,
peculiar incriminations leveled against both the former and the latter, resulting also in
comparably derogative characteristics applied to both. Apart from natural accusations
of heresy and even devil-worshipping, for the Yezidis (as well as heterodox Shi‘a
groups) and some Gnostic sects the main corpus delicti contained accusations of night
orgies and promiscuity (Arakelova 2011a).
As with Yezidism and heterodox Muslim sects, it is definitely the closed, esoteric
character of the community, including the special status of women in the commu-
nities, considering they were admitted into the sectaries’ general assemblies, that
gave rise to the above-mentioned incriminations. Such accusations, however, were
completely groundless, as multiple objective authors and researchers have attested.
A number of particular stigmas generated by the mainstream believers have become
popular clichés in the Near and Middle East in general (Asatrian 1998: 104–6).
Similar accusations –violation of the human and divine prescripts –leveled in the
past against Gnostic sects by the Christian Church, though, were not so groundless.
We should of course take into consideration that the asocial behavioral agendas were
manifest only in select groups of Gnostics, who did indeed deliberately disregard many
taboos. On reflection, though, the charge that certain Gnostic cult activity would lead
to promiscuity, as described in the apocryphal source The Secret Book of Noria,
would not, from the Gnostic point of view, contradict the diametrically opposite
practices of other Gnostic sectarians, including self-denial, abstinence, and even celi-
bacy, as upheld in such apocryphal gospels as The Gospel of Thomas and The Gospel
according to the Egyptians (Trofimova 1997: 53). Despite opposite orientations, both
groups pretend to follow the special path for the chosen ones, who possess exclusive
access to the True Knowledge –the ultimate goal their esoteric practices, no matter
how different they are.
It is quite probable that the earlier suspicious attitudes towards the Gnostic and
Gnosticizing sects was simply later transferred to the esoteric streams in Islam, and
wider to the whole non-dogmatic milieu of the region, which clearly showed conceptual
parallels with Gnosticism. All the more, the ethics of both are primarily conditioned
by mystical experience and both obviously trespass against public standards, as first
made clear by Epiphanes, the son of libertarian Gnostic Carpocrates, in his compos-
ition On Justice (ca. 150s): “The private character of the laws is cutting and gnawing
at the alliance established by the divine law,” for the Creator established the laws “in
accordance with His justice, no distinction being made of the feminine from the mas-
culine” (Trofimova 1997: 53–4).
Thus, there can be no doubt that the Yezidi religion, along with the basic concepts
of Islamic mysticism (later transformed within the already closed community),
incorporated a number of elements from Gnosticism and of “Oriental mysticism”
in the broad sense. Some of them definitely became part of the newly shaped doc-
trine through Yezidism being the successor of a Sufi order. It is quite natural that
Sufism, which itself contained a solid Gnostic layer (e.g., the idea of the apology of
the fallen angel, adherence to the esoteric knowledge, etc.), passed its ideological basis
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to Yezidism. Taking into consideration that Gnostic elements, similar to those among
the Yezidis, have also been discovered in other non-orthodox doctrines developed in
the same multicultural area of Northern Mesopotamia, it could be assumed that, gen-
erally, various Gnostics ideas had been preserved on different levels (as marginal ideas
or even in popular folk beliefs) by the heterodox milieu. The Yezidi community, which
acquired its closed esoteric and later ethno-confessional character not earlier than the
fourteenth century (Arakelova 2006), could have adopted any of the afore-mentioned
Gnostic elements in the early stage of its formation.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
GNOSTICISM AND KABBALAH
Michael Schneider
A short time after the beginning of Humanistic Hebraism and Christian Kabbalah,
the first reflections about the Kabbalah and Gnosticism appear. Cornelius Agrippa,
with little sympathy for either, claims that “Ophites, Gnosticks, and Valentinians”
came from kabbalistic superstitions. As an example of kabbalistic speculation in
Gnosticism, he mentions the “Body of Truth,” in which the Anthropos is composed
of letters, as envisioned by Marcus, Valentinus’s disciple (Agrippa, De incertitudine et
vanitate scientiarum declamatio invectiva [1531], pp. 64v-65f). This example remains
relevant in modern discussions on the topic. Over time, the concept of the connection
between Gnosticism and Kabbalah gained some popularity, especially during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Stroumsa 1993). Hegel describes Kabbalah and
Gnosticism as two connected doctrines stemming from Philo (Hegel 2006: 327–9).
While the “Gnosticism” in this comparison had some historical dimension, provided
by heresiographers (Vallée 1981), the concept of Kabbalah was completely anachron-
istic. Only from the middle of nineteenth century were the first steps toward the
historical analysis of the problem undertaken (Grätz 1846; Gaster 1893). Without a
doubt the most influential figure in this area remains Gershom Scholem, the founding
father of the modern study of Jewish mysticism. Gnosticism was invariably present
in his reflections on the origin and essence of Jewish mysticism since the late 1920s
(Scholem 1928). There were several reasons for this, both intellectual and existential.
First, it was predetermined by his general concept of mysticism. In the begin-
ning of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem claims that the definitions of
mysticism, which are based solely on unitive experiences, are not suitable for the
historical analysis of Jewish mysticism. As an alternative, he suggests a definition
based on the concept of three stages in the development of religion. The first stage
is mythic consciousness, where the gods, man, and the cosmos are fused together in
an indistinguishable unity. The second stage is the religion of revelation that breaks
the mythic unity and opens a huge abyss between man, God, and the cosmos. The
third stage is when mysticism seeks ways of overcoming the gap and restores to some
extent the unity of the mythic stage. Mysticism becomes therefore a resurgence of
myth, challenging the main achievement of the religion of revelation. This “revenge
of myth upon its conqueror” corresponds exactly to one of the main characteristics
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— Michael Schneider —
of Gnosticism (Scholem 1961: 3–7, 35). Scholem admits that in reality Jewish mysti-
cism was not anti-Biblical in any way; he repeatedly stresses the ingeniousness with
which it combined external conservatism with inner radicalism. Only in rare cases, as
in Sabbateanism, did the inner antinomianism become manifest. The dialectic of con-
tinuity and rebellion ascribed to Jewish mysticism is characteristic of Scholem’s own
relation to tradition. Thus Gnosticism becomes existentially relevant to him. In the
existential interpretation of Gnosticism, he is close to Hans Jonas (1934). He espe-
cially feels that the Gnostic and Kabbalistic mythical responses on the problem of evil
are more adequate to the authentic human experience than the attempts to explain it
away in orthodoxy and rationalism (Scholem 1991: 56–87).
Scholem’s historiosophical paradigm, including the basic opposition of myth and
revelation, was widely critiqued (Idel 1988; 1998; Liebes 1993). In addition the con-
cept of Gnosticism he used is considered outdated. Nevertheless many particular
observations by Scholem and his followers, as well as by scholars who break with the
Scholemian paradigm, are significant and deserve attention.
When discussing links with Gnosticism, Kabbalah should not be isolated from
its historical context –the Jewish heritage –and in particular from the continuity
of Jewish mystic traditions. Therefore, first of all, we will outline the main historical
stages of Jewish mysticism, in connection with which this topic should be considered,
and then we will discuss concrete examples in a thematic order.
The unfolding historical perspective of Jewish mysticism, proposed by Scholem,
retains its significance in all of its main features. Recognizing the presence of mys-
tical elements in the apocalyptic outlook, he passes on and begins a detailed review
starting with the traditions of the rabbinic period, including the literature of the
Hekhaloth (Heavenly palaces) and Talmudic Ma‘aseh Bereshit (Account of Creation)
and Ma‘aseh Merkabah (Account of the Chariot). Apocalyptic themes may be related
to the origins of Gnosticism, which we will not deal with here. The literature of
Merkabah and Hekhaloth is difficult to date, but, apparently, its early layers are con-
temporary with the flowering of Gnosticism in the second to third centuries CE. Because
of this, the possibility of early contacts and interactions between these traditions
and Gnosticism requires careful consideration. Some of the motifs in the descrip-
tion of the higher worlds in the Hekhaloth literature, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and
Mandaeism apparently go back to common sources. Special studies were devoted
to such motives as the Merkabah, the Veil, and the dangerous vision of the waters
(Hofius 1972; Séd 1979; Morray-Jones 2002). Described in the Great Treatise on the
Hekhaloth, the mystical journey through the gates of the seven palaces, guarded by
the angels, has correspondences with the Gnostic apocalypses (Burns 2014). Rabbinic
literature of the same period contains numerous polemical references to the themes
of the “two powers in heaven,” which have become the focus of many studies (Segal
1978). Probably some of these references were really directed against the Gnostics.
The first Kabbalists known to us appear in the second half of the twelfth century
in Provence. At about the same time, the Book Bahir begins to circulate, containing
the basic concepts of Kabbalah in its raw form, which presents curious parallels with
Gnostic doctrines (Scholem 1987: 68–97). The assumption of a genetic connection
between these concepts and Gnosticism requires a plausible solution to the temporal-
gaps problem. In the thirteenth century, Kabbalah develops intensively, becoming
the dominant form of Jewish mysticism, and remains so throughout the Middle
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— Gnosticism and Kabbalah —
Ages. According to Scholem’s concept, in Kabbalah there are two opposing tenden-
cies: mythical-gnostic and speculative-Neoplatonic. The first trend is represented
by Bahir, the second by the Provençal Kabbalists and their followers in Catalonia
(Gerona). The dichotomy of the mythical/speculative-Neoplatonic, which looks more
like an a priori commonplace than a generalization of a specific material, still prevails
in the literature on Kabbalah.
Mid-thirteenth century, a Kabbalistic school emerges in Castile, which pays
special attention to the genesis of the forces of evil, the so-called left emanation.
Scholem coined the term “Gnostic Kabbalah” to designate this school (Scholem
1931–1932). In the same region in the 1270s the first texts of what came to be
known as the Zohar began to circulate. In addition to the motifs inherited from the
Castilian Kabbalah, it resembles the writings of the Gnostics with their unrestrained
mythmaking, impregnated by hermeneutic audacity in the treatment of the Biblical
text. Additionally, the sheer abundance and variety of materials included in the book
predetermine broad opportunities for comparison with Gnosticism. Quite a few
remarks on this topic are included in Isaiah Tishby’s extensive anthology of Zoharic
texts (1989). Despite all the innovations in mythology, theology, and exegesis, the
Zohar is apologetically oriented towards the Jewish tradition and practice. In con-
trast, Ra‘aya Meheimana and Tikkune ha-Zohar, the continuations and additions to
the Zohar, written 20–30 years later by another author, express the radical criticism
of the religious establishment and a dualistic theology, which depicts the world under
the dominion of evil powers, from which one cannot be released through the obser-
vance and the study of the law, but only through the knowledge of higher secrets. An
equally pessimistic worldview emerges from the theory of cosmic cycles, according
to which the world and even the Torah given in this world bear an indelible stamp of
the sinister sefirah of Gevurah (Strict Judgment) (cf. ch. 3). This theme, which begins
in the Geronese school of the thirteenth century, becomes central to the Byzantine
Kabbalah over the next two centuries.
After the expulsion of Jews from Spain (1492), the center of the new flowering
of Kabbalistic creativity was the Galilean city of Safed. Of particular importance
to our topic is the teaching of Isaac Luria (1534–1572), set forth and developed
by Chaim Vital (1543–1620). Scholars note its numerous parallels with Gnosticism,
Manichaeism, and Mandaeism (Scholem 1961; Tishby 1955; Drower 1960: 21).
Sabbatianism is the late stage of Jewish mysticism, repeatedly compared to
Gnosticism. Scholem’s thesis that the theology of the Sabbatian movement represents
the realization of the antinomian potencies of the Lurianic Kabbalah remains dom-
inant to this day, although several alternative theories have been put forward.
Antinomianism, proceeding from profound theological premises, invites a com-
parison with Gnosticism.
Comparisons between Jewish mysticism and Gnosticism can be pursued for
different purposes and interpreted in various ways, which can be divided into
two broad categories: (a) genetic connections: various forms of influences and
interactions or common roots; and (b) typological parallels that can be purely
phenomenological, and can assume a particular cause-effect explanation, as with
similarities in social processes or psychological situations. Of course, these cat-
egories may require further splitting, as shown by Philip Alexander in his article
on Merkabah mysticism (Alexander 1984). Let us now consider some of the main
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themes touched upon in the context of the comparison of Jewish mysticism and
Gnosticism.
SALVIF IC KNOW L E D G E
In many forms of Jewish tradition, including its mysticism, the knowledge of God or
his hypostases, such as Wisdom, Torah, or Name, or the totality of Sefiroth (see ch.
3), is the ultimate goal and true destiny of a man. Such knowledge releases from the
power of death, from “this world,” and transforms the human into a supernal being
(Chernus 1982), and knowledge is often described as vision (Gruenwald 1988: 64–
123; Wolfson 1994). At times the revelation of divine gnosis is described as an
encounter or a union with the mirror image of the mystic himself, his heavenly twin
(Schneider 2012a: 134–45).
There is an immanent tension between the mystical interpretation of knowledge
and the idea of a tradition in which knowledge, gained in the ancient revelation, is
transmitted. This duality corresponds to the double meaning of secrecy –as a secret,
which it is forbidden to open to the uninitiated, and as an experience that cannot be
transferred to another person (Scholem 1961: 20–1). This tension can be resolved
by comprehending the initiation into tradition as a return from here and now to the
timeless event of the revelation, the source from which the tradition stems. Similarly,
the interpretation of the sacred text is a re-visualization of the original revelation
(Wolfson 1994). The transfer of Ma‘aseh Merkabah described by the Talmud can
be mentioned here. The disciple expounds the interpretation of Merkabah, based on
the hints of the teacher; if he guessed the hints of the teacher correctly, the interpret-
ation is accompanied by a theophany resembling a Sinai revelation; the teacher says a
laudatory speech. An analogous ritual is described in the Zohar (Idra Rabba, Zohar
3: 127b-145a) and in the late Antique Gnostic text Pistis Sophia. In many cases, the
acquisition of the higher knowledge is mediated by the figure of a teacher who belongs
in one way or another to the transcendental dimension (angels and souls of the right-
eous, Eliyahu, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, zaddik in Hasidism). The terms Gnosticism
and Mandaeism emphasize the central role of “knowledge” as does Maskilim
(Knowers), an earlier term for Kabbalists. Perhaps because of this circumstance Gilles
Quispel claimed that Scholem should have named his book “Major Trends in Jewish
Gnosticism” (Quispel 2008: 44). That, however, would be to deploy “Gnosticism” to
a very wide range of phenomena and render its usefulness questionable.
HYPOSTASES AND P L E RO M A
The concept of hypostasis is present in many forms of Jewish mysticism, although
it is almost never formulated explicitly. In the vast majority of cases, hypostases are
associated with theophany or with God’s activity in the world. The roots of these
concepts lay in theophanic agents, such as the Angel of the Lord, the Divine Glory,
the Name, the Face, the (Divine) Spirit, and Word, in the personification of Wisdom
(Hokhma) in the literature of wisdom, etc. Leaving aside the original meaning of
these concepts in the actual Biblical context, it can be argued that they have become
the basis for the formation of various mystical concepts since the era of the second
Temple. A significant contribution to this development was made by Hellenistic
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Judaism (Wisdom of Solomon, Philo). Equally important is the Rabbinic concept of

the Shekhinah (Divine Presence), which acquires all the features of the hypostasis in
post-Talmudic literature. An impenetrable boundary between hypostases and higher
angels does not exist. In some cases, we can talk about the angelomorphic divine
hypostases of the Name, Face, Spirit, Glory. In addition, along with the conceptual
fluidity, the ontological status of hypostases can be dynamic. They can come out of
the primeval source and return to it. The created essence can rise up to the hypostasis,
receiving the Name, and return to its original state, being deprived of it (Schneider
2012b: 118–200).
Different hypostases in their interaction and inner unity manifest, according to
Scholem’s expression, the hidden life of the Deity (Scholem 1961: 208–15). The
notion of the system of hypostases is associated with reflections on the attributes of
God, his names and powers that created the world and are governing it, the supreme
angels and celestial bodies, the elements of the cosmos. A special role is played by
numerical motifs, both originally Biblical and Pythagorean. In many cases, the influ-
ence of Platonism and other Greek schools is evident.
Notions of male and female hypostases, couples, and sacred marriage go back
to Biblical mythopoetics, which in turn, perhaps, is a reception and a reaction to
polytheistic mythology. This theme was developed in the literature of the Second
Temple, in Rabbinic literature and, somewhat less explicitly, in the Hekhaloth and
Merkabah literature. Sexual symbolism associated with the Merkabah continues
to develop further in the esoteric schools of medieval Europe (Abrams 1997). In
the theosophic Kabbalah, beginning with the Sefer Bahir, sexual symbolism plays
a central role in the doctrine of the Sefiroth. The unfolding of the sefirotic system is
described in terms of conception and birth. Their unity, which embodies the unity
of the Deity, is realized through the sexual union of the male and female Sefiroth;
their influence in the world depends upon this union. Ritual and prayer, according
to the Kabbalistic interpretation, are also aimed at initiating and supporting this
cosmic unification.
The analogy between the system of hypostases in Jewish mysticism and the pleroma
of the Gnostics is an essential moment in Scholem’s argument. In his opinion, already
in this early period of mysticism, the analogy of the pleroma is the throne of God,
Merkabah, and the supreme angels, endowed with the name of God. Scholem and other
researchers gave a number of indirect proofs of the existence of a connection between
the two traditions, for example, the parallel between the “name of the eights” in the lit-
erature of Hekhaloth and the Gnostic Ogdoad (Scholem 1965: 65–72). Nevertheless,
there are more differences between the Gnostic aeons and Merkabah than similarities.
In contrast, a comparison of the pleroma with the theosophical system of Sefer Bahir
and other Kabbalists seems more productive (Scholem 1987: 68–97). There are some
curious conceptual terminological and imaginal parallels, including the term Male
(fullness) corresponding to the pleroma (ha-kol [All]), Hokhma-Sophia being a dual
female hypostasis, with the descent of the lower wisdom into the world, and pertinent
epithets of Sophia.
Of particular interest is a set of related paragraphs in Bahir which deal with the
72 names of God, and the 72 cherubim that surround the Tree of Life. Scholars
demonstrated numerous coincidences, up to details with such Nag Hammadi Gnostic
texts as The Hypostases of the Archons, On the Origin of the World, and The First
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Apocalypse of James (Séd 1979; Idel 1988: 122–8; Fishbane 1992). Since coincidences
of this kind cannot be explained by chance or typology, questions arise regarding the
trajectory of Gnostic traditions into medieval Provence. First of all, it should be noted
that the attempts to explain Gnostic motifs by means of the contacts with the Cathars
of Provence proved fruitless. Apart from the elusive Manichaeism, Cathar sources do
not contain any pronounced Gnostic motifs. The comparison between Bahir and “The
Questions of John” (Shahar 1974) does not reveal convincing parallels and also faces
chronological difficulties (Schneider 2009). Reports of thirteenth-century Kabbalists
saying that Sefer Bahir arrived in Provence from the East (perhaps Palestine?) through
Germany probably contain an historical grain. Researchers believe that the German
and Provençal esotericists made a significant contribution to the formation of the
book. Still, the thesis that the essential parts of Bahir came from the early medieval
East receives a number of affirmations, argued independently of each other (Scholem
1987: 97–102, 192–8; Meroz 2002; 2007).
The system of ten aeons-sefiroth, divided into a triad and hebdomad, has many
parallels in the Neo-Pythagorean and Neoplatonic tradition, some of which are quite
interesting. Between the Gnostic parallels of this kind we find the Arab Monoimus
(flor. 200), who taught about Man as monad and a son of Man as a decade, and the
letter of iota (pseudo-Hippolytus, Refutatio omnium haeresium 8.6). The similarity
of his system with Kabbalah is not limited to the theosophical structure, but extends
to Biblical exegesis (Idel 1988: 114–22). Some Kabbalistic sources speak about the
two decades of Sefiroth, one inferior, non-anthropomorphic, and the other, the higher,
forming the image of a man; this motif recalls the unnamed treatise from the Bruce
Codex (Idel 2009). According to some early Kabbalists the system of Sefiroth consists
of three decades, similar to the Valentinian pleroma consisting of 30 aeons (Idel 1982).
In general, though, the numerous parallels between the theosophy of Jewish mysti-
cism and Gnosticism are either of a typological nature or can be explained by their
common origin and mutual influence. Contrary to Scholem’s opinion, these parallels
do not give grounds for talking about the Gnostic character of Jewish mysticism, even
if studying the similarities can still prove fruitful.
THE DEM IU RG E
The theophanic hypostases and angels, despite the controversy that occasionally
arose around them, were quite common in the Jewish tradition. But the idea of trans-
ferring the creative functions to someone other than the higher Deity faced greater
opposition and is much less common in ancient sources. This tendency is manifested
even in cases when the attributes and epithets of God associated with Creation are
transformed into independent hypostases, such as Wisdom and the Logos. Despite the
fact that the very logic of these concepts requires attributing demiurgic functions to
them, the sources avoid direct statements of this kind or resort to ambiguous wording,
as evinced, for example, by numerous arguments about the meaning of Proverbs 8:23
(on Wisdom’s part in Creation). Nevertheless, some texts express this thought directly
(Sap Sol 7:22; 2 Enoch 30:4). Rabbinic sources insist that God had no accomplices in
the creation of the world; in particular, some midrashic sources state that the angels
were created not earlier than the Second Day, to eliminate attributing to them par-
ticipation in the Creation of the world (Urbach 1979: 184–213). Apparently in many
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cases we are dealing with theological censorship, which suppressed the early demi-
urgic traditions. Midrash pays special attention to the plural in the phrase “make a
man.” According to a common interpretation, before the Creation of Man, God asked
the opinion of the angels. They argued against creation, but God created Adam in
spite of them (Kister 2006). The extensive theme of the hostility of angels towards
Man reflects, in particular, the interaction of the rabbinic tradition with Gnosticism.
According to Philo, the earthly elements were God’s associates in the creation of a
man (cf. ch. 5). Personalized Earth in Aggada becomes an active partner of God in the
creation of the world. In addition, the Earth is depicted as the mother of all things,
and especially of a man (cf. Job 1:21 and 40:1). Representations of the Earth as a
female hypostasis and the syzygos of God/Heaven and as one that gave birth to Adam
are characteristic of Kabbalah and have correspondences in the Book of Baruch of
Justin the Gnostic (“Hippolytus,” Refutatio 5.22; 10.15, with Scholem 1969: 164–5).
The idea of Creation by the God’s name or letters of the Name is deeply rooted
in the Jewish tradition. Accordingly, an angel bearing the name of God must have a
demiurgic status. In the Hekhaloth literature, the epithet “creator of the Beginning”
or “our creator” is attached to the theophanic hypostasis of God in the form of a giant
Anthrōpos on the throne of Glory (Shi‘ur Qomah). This opens the way for connecting
the concepts of the theophanic hypostasis and the demiurgic angel. Indeed, in many
medieval texts the “creator of the Beginning” is identified with the theophanic angel
Metatron (Wolfson 1990; 1995). The Karaite Jacob al-Qirqasani (ca. 937) reports
about the ancient sect of Magharia attributing the Creation of the world to the
supreme angel and about Benjamin al-Nahāwandī, the Karaite teacher of the first half
of the ninth century, holding a similar point of view (Fossum 1987).
Kabbalists read the first phrase of the Torah as a theogony, and not as a cos-
mogony: “By the Beginning (Hokhma) the unnamed concealed one (Keter) created
Elohim (Binah), which in turn spawned Heaven (Sefiroth 4–9) and Earth (Malkhut).”
Thus, “Heaven” and “Earth” mentioned in the verse are the hebdomad of the lower
Sefiroth, generated by Wisdom and Understanding (Matt 2004: 17ff.). It is these
seven Sefiroth responsible for the creation and management of the world –like the
seven archons, the creatures of the fallen Sophia. It is obvious that the parallel can
be explained by common roots in the sapiential theosophy. In general, it can be said
that the concept of the Demiurge is not a distinctive feature of Gnosticism or a sign
of its influence (see O’Brien 2015). More characteristic of Gnosticism is the special
polemical use of demiurgical concepts, in turn producing in Rabbinic literature anti-
Gnostic reactions.
THE ORIGIN O F E VIL

According to a common notion, expressed already by Tertullian and other church
fathers, the question of the origin of evil and its nature is the starting point of Gnostic
thought (Tishby 1942: 14–21; Stroumsa 1984: 18). In contrast to the philosophical
approach that denies the reality of evil, Gnosticism accepts this reality and gives it a
mythological explanation. The same description is quite suitable to many Kabbalistic
systems, causing some scholars to classify them as Gnostic. On this basis Scholem
called the Castilian school “Gnostic Kabbalah” –a term that many apply to it even
today. It seems that Scholem in his later works abandoned this linkage. It is obvious
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that such a widespread cultural phenomenon as an ontological dualism cannot be

the hallmark of Gnosticism. Scholem (1991: 56–7), emphasizing the novelty of the
Kabbalistic doctrine of evil within Judaism, juxtaposed it with the naivety of the
Biblical approach. But it is impossible to talk about a single Biblical doctrine of evil
(Knohl 2003), and even more so in the post-Biblical period. The variety of approaches,
including the Gnostic one, was a cause of the rabbinic warning against speculation on
the primordial chaos as insulting to God the Creator.
The doctrine of the subtle root of evil in God himself or in the early stages of the
theogonic process is significantly typical of most Kabbalistic trends (Farber-Ginat
1996), although Sefer Bahir, often cited as purveying it, contains a much more com-
plex approach (Schneider 2009).
Though the great theories about Gnostic origins from Iranian sources are passé
(chs. 1, 2), there are some new approaches to the Iranian roots of the doctrine of evil
that may also explain the parallels between Kabbalah and Gnosticism in this respect.
With an expanding knowledge of the Persian religious history, more solid ground
was laid for the study of Iranian influences on Judaism. Thus, Moshe Idel suggested
that the concept of evil in Judaism, and Kabbalah in particular, was affected by the
Zurvanite version of Zoroastrianism, which has the evil deity, Ahriman, born out of
Zurvan’s doubts before the birth of his blessed son Ormuzd (Idel, 1980; 2016; and
see ch. 23).
P RIMORDIAL D RAM A
While ontological dualism is a category too broad to serve as the basis for a mean-
ingful comparison of Kabbalah and Gnosticism, the myth that traces the origin of evil
to a primordial catastrophe serves as more favorable ground for making comparisons.
The two main versions of the myth of the origin of evil in the early Jewish tradition are
the Fall of Adam and the Rebellion of Angels seduced by human wives. In both cases,
human beings and the conditions of human existence are involved, with the myths on
the edges of primordial time. Undoubtedly, most Gnostic doctrines are influenced by
both these myths. Likewise, these myths have become the most important sources for
Jewish mysticism –including the Enochian myth, which informed the angelological
tradition of Hekhaloth literature as much as the Adamic myth did the Rabbinical
Aggada and Kabbalah. The Enoch myth seems conceptually close to Gnosticism and
some researchers trace to it the origin of the Gnostic myth of the archons (Stroumsa
1984). On the other hand, the post-Biblical development of Adamic history saw some
convergence with the Enochian myth, the Fall of Adam becoming the result of the
fall of the supreme angel, which united the Biblical accuser Satan and the head of the
fallen angels, Azazel. Developments in the literature on Adam and Eve have taken
some unusual turns. A mysterious passage from Ezekiel (28: 12–19), depicting the
fall of the higher being, who either lived in paradise with the great cherub, or was
identical to him, impacted some versions of Paradise history (Anderson 2000). The
common feature of many Gnostic and Kabbalistic interpretations of Paradise events
is their projection into primordial time. Whereas the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule
sought the common source of primal Anthropos of Christian, Jewish, and Gnostic
authors in Iranian mythology, it makes more sense to seek it in the interpretation of
the first chapters of Genesis as a primordial myth (Idel 1990; Schneider 2018).
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According to many Biblical scholars, the first verses of Genesis contain a distant
echo of the ancient Eastern myth of the struggle of the god-creator with the monsters
of chaos. In a more explicit form, the monstrous personifications of the forces of
chaos appear in the Biblical poetry and in the Biblical and extra-Biblical apoca-
lyptic of the Second Temple era. In some cases, we are dealing with the returning
of repressed Mesopotamian influences, in others a new influx of them. The same is
true for Talmudic monsters, with the addition of Iranian influences. In the classical
Aggadah, there is a steady tendency to describe forces that reluctantly obey the divine
control in the process of Creation or even come out from under it. The Earth is in
turmoil, because God preferred Heaven; the lower waters cry, not wanting to leave
the face of God. The moon does not want to reign with the sun. The earth violates
the command to produce trees that have the same taste as the fruits; this violation
is somehow connected to the future sin of Adam. Moreover, not only created, but
even conceived entities manifest self-will. The Talmud (Shabbat 88b) speaks of 974
generations before the Creation of the world, which broke through into being before
the moment of creation arrived. And elsewhere:
Who pressed forward before their time, whose foundation was poured out as a
stream. It is taught: R. Simeon the Pious said: These are the nine hundred and sev-
enty four generations who pressed themselves forward to be created before the
world was created, the Holy One, blessed be He, arose and planted them in every
generation, and it is they who are the insolent of each generation.
(bHag 13a [MS München] 6)
This self-realization of notional bad entities recalls Zoroastrian, especially Zurvanite

cosmogony (see above and ch. 23). Another, more famous, tradition has it that before
our world, God repeatedly created worlds; none of them satisfied the Creator, and
they were destroyed (Gen. Rab. 3:7, 9:2; cf. ch. 3). The present world also does not
completely correspond to the intentions of the Creator; in some cases, He regrets His
actions at the time of Creation (similar to Genesis 6:6). The sages do not refrain from
describing the suffering of God from the imperfections of the world. These aggadoth
present a certain stream in the rabbinical thought: not the only one, but a quite influ-
ential one, that considered it possible to sacrifice the thesis of unlimited power and
sovereignty of God for the sake of other principles.
As opposed to the popular opinion, though, Kabbalistic teachings on primordial
drama rather soften than radicalize these rabbinic concepts. The doctrine of the left
emanation that brought Isaac ha-Kohen the title of the “Gnostic Kabbalist” mainly
represents the systematization of the demonological tradition within the framework
set by aggadah about the destroyed worlds. Although many details of this concept find
curious correspondences with Gnostic doctrines, there are no grounds for describing
it as a primordial drama or catastrophe. Notwithstanding the extreme hostility and
aggressiveness of demonic entities, their appearance was not a deviation from God’s
predestination.
One of the most important and well-known versions of the primordial drama is the
myth of the kings of old. In Zoharic interpretation the Biblical passage about Edomite
kings (Gen 36:31–9) narrates about the emanation of primordial aeons. Due to the
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fact that the aeons did not form syzygies, their world lacked balance and harmony,
therefore they fell or died, forming the world of chaos mentioned in Gen 1:2 (Matt
2009: 545–50). This explanation of the fall due to the aeons’ lack of syzygy resembles
Valentinian myth. In the Kabbalah rebuilding the world from chaos through the prin-
ciple of syzygy is the essence of further theogonic-cosmogonic process (tikkun). In
another place in the Zohar, ancient kings appear as sparks, carved by the primordial
act of Creation, that are being extinguished by the breath of the great serpent, who
represents the darkness over the abyss in Gen. 1:2 (Matt 2007: 152ff.). This snake is
described as an uroboros, resembling a dragon from Pistis Sophia. In some passages
he appears as the center of demonic forces, in others, as the foundational principle of
cosmos, in others again, as the divine force, representing the anti-cosmic vector, seeking
to return the emanation to its source. In the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, the Sefiroth are
described as vessels containing light, and, accordingly, the death of kings –the breaking
of vessels that could not stand the pressure of light. Some of Luria’s followers taught,
by analogy with aggada about the hubris of the Moon, that ancient kings fell because
each wished to reign alone. In many Kabbalistic systems, interestingly, the fall of the
kings is associated with the primordial Anthropos: the Tikkune Zohar, indeed, has the
ancient Adam as the one who created and destroyed the worlds; in Lurianic Kabbalah,
the fallen kings were emanated from the body of the Primordial Adam.
In general, most Kabbalistic versions of the primordial drama are actually less
personal and psychological than Gnostic myth, say, about the passions of Sophia,
and the motif of hubris leading to a radical distortion of the original divine plan is
minimally present.
OTHER P OSSIB LE CO NNE CTIO NS

Discussing Lurianic Kabbalah prompts the exploration of various other parallels
between Kabbalist preoccupations and “post-classic” Gnostic developments, as in
Mandaeism, Manichaeism, and further on. To conclude with an illustration of the
possibilities and difficulties in tracking relationships, consider one example (from
Schneider 2018: 143–202). In the middle of the twelfth century there was a mystical
Jewish school in northern France, in which the supreme theophanic angel was called
the “Special Cherub” (Dan 1999). This image does not receive sufficient explanation
on the basis of known Biblical texts and Rabbinic exegesis. On the other hand, in
various early Christian texts closely associated with the Gnostic tradition, a great
Cherubi appears (Shoemaker 2003: 217–19; Meyer and Smith 1994: 212–13, 240,
334), sometimes accompanied by the seven cherubim under him. In many cases,
the Great Cherub is associated with events in Paradise, yet with its role extending
much further than what is generally accepted in exegeting Gen. 3:24 (about kerūvīm
guarding Eden to prevent the primal couple’s return). In addition, a special connection
is forged between the Cherub and the main antagonist of Paradise history –Satan.
The Great Cherub plays a major role in overthrowing Satan, but Satan himself also
belongs to the rank of cherubim or even is their head. All this indicates the existence
of a special version of the Paradise story, which incorporated the image of the Cherub
of Ezek 28: 14–16 (Anderson 2000). The intermediate link between these traditions
and the Jewish mystics of Europe could be so-called Islamic Gnosticism. The term
Gnosticism was widely used in the literature on Isma‘ilism and other Shiite sects
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(Nusayriya and so on), and Druzism (chs. 31, 32). Pace recent objections (Asatryan
and Burns 2016), the designation “Gnosticism” here has more grounds than a similar
designation for Kabbalah. First, the temporal and spatial gap between the early
Islamic currents and late Gnosticisms of Manichaeism and Mandaeism is much less
or nonexistent. Secondly, if one takes the concept of a hostile demiurge to be a very
vivid sign of Gnosticism, one can argue that the “Islamic gnosis” is much closer to it
than the early Kabbalah. In earliest Isma‘ilism, as well as in the Ghulat work Umm
al-Kitab, moreover, the primordial hubris is a significant, though not the only, factor
that influenced the Creation.
Cherubs occupy a special place in Shi‘ite angelology, among the Twelvers, Isma‘ilis,
and the “extremists.” In the early Isma‘ili mythology set forth by Abu ‘Isa al-Murshid,
the Seven Cherubim are the first hypostases participating in the primordial version
of Paradise history (Stern 1983: 3–29). The same projection of the history of Adam
into the primordial dimension is characteristic of Gnostic and later of Kabbalistic
interpretations; one of the exegetical grounds for such a reading could be the Targum
tradition, which treats the phrase “in the east” (mi-qedem) in Gen 3:24 as “from the
beginning.” In the opinion of Stern and other researchers, the key terms in the version
of Abu ‘Isa –the cherubs and the “spiritual ones” –are borrowed from the lexicon
of Syrian Christianity. Scholarly literature on early Jewish mysticism in Europe has
accumulated many examples of its connections with early Shi‘ite theosophy. These
considerations allow us to build the following chain through the centuries (here
numbered): the Judeo-Christian Adamic tradition (1 BCE – 3 CE) – Syro-Mesopotamian
Gnosticism (2–8) –Judeo-Muslim sectarian milieu (8–10) –mystics of the northern
France and Germany (10–12) –the Provençal Kabbalah (12–13). Of course, this
chain is not the only possible one, and probably there were other ways of plotting
motifs yet to be discerned.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
BOGOMILS AND CATHARS
Zdenko Zlatar
B ogomils and Cathars were, according to the prevailing theory, “Gnostic dualist
heresies” of the Middle Ages. They were Gnostic, because both the Bogomils
and the Cathars believed that only the initiated were given the secret knowledge of
cosmogony and anthropogony that alone could bring salvation. They were dualist,
because they believed in two fundamental cosmic principles, whether they were abso-
lute and from eternity as two gods, or, in a moderate (often called “Monarchian”)
view, God as a single divine principle, but with a steward, his elder or younger son
Satan, who was responsible for the Creation of the visible world and of Man (though
with God’s help). The Orthodox Church in Byzantium and the Balkans, and the
Catholic Church in Western Christendom, regarded both these positions heretical
principally because they denied the fundamental tenet of orthodox Christianity (as
expressed in the opening statement of the Nicene Creed), that a single God created
both the invisible and visible world and all things in it, including humans.
In what follows the Bogomils –in Bulgaria, Byzantium, and Bosnia in turn –and
then the Cathars are considered.
THE B OGO M IL S
In Bulgaria
The first mention of the Bogomils in Bulgaria comes from a hostile source. In the
introduction to his History of the Paulicians (see ch. 25), dedicated to the Archbishop
of Bulgaria, Peter of Sicily mentions a visit he made to the Paulician fortress of
Tefrice in 869–870, where he heard that “they intended to send some of their
number to the country of Bulgaria to detach some from the Orthodox faith and to
bring them over to their own foul heresy” (Historia Paulicianarum [Hamilton and
Hamilton 1998 (hereafter HH): 25]). We do know from Byzantine sources that a
number of Paulicians were settled in and around Philippopolis (present-day Plovdiv)
in Bulgaria, and thus most scholars derive the origin of the Bogomils from the
Paulicians. Though the Bogomils differed from the Paulicians both doctrinally and
in other ways, this is still an acceptable hypothesis. The Bulgarians were of Turkic
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— Bogomils and Cathars —
origin but they ruled over a much more numerous Slavic population, were absorbed
by the latter, and accepted their language. The Bulgarians were at first pagan, but
accepted Christianity from the missionaries sent by Byzantium (formally from 864
on). From the beginning, however, the Bulgarian rulers insisted on the Slavic lan-
guage for church services. This was provided by the missionaries who were disciples
of the brothers Constantine/Cyril and Methodius, and who invented an alphabet
based on the Byzantine uncial script, and known as Cyrillic in honor of Constantine/
Cyril. The liturgy and other ecclesial books were rendered from Greek into what
is commonly called Old Church Slavonic (OCS), the dialect of the Southern Slavs
living in the vicinity of Salonica (Thessaloniki). This language was understandable
to all the Slavs at that time, and helps explain why a heresy like the Bogomils could
“travel” from one part of the Balkans to another, i.e., from Bulgaria to Bosnia, with
comparative ease.
“Bogomil” was derived from the name of the grouping’s first (alleged) leader,
Bogumil (which means “dear to God,” in Greek Theophilos). The acceptable hypoth-
esis is that the Bogomils/Bogumils found the ground very favorable to their teaching
in Bulgaria because the Bulgarians were only recently Christianized, and there was
a lot of resentment over favoring Byzantine influences at the Bulgarian court. The
Marxist theory is that the Bogomil movement was primarily anti-feudal, with aspects
of anti-religious revolt: “They teach their followers not to obey their masters; they
scorn the rich, they hate the Tsar, they ridicule their superiors, they reproach the
boyars …” (Cosmas, Sermo adversus haereticos [Puech and Vaillant in HH], 28).
Though the earliest Ms for Cosmas comes from the fifteenth century (making some
scholars push for a high-medieval date of composition), it is now accepted that his
sermon belongs to the late tenth century. If Cosmas is critical of the Orthodox Church
in Bulgaria, the second part of his Sermon hardly confirms the Marxist interpretation
of a popular revolt against the aristocrats (boiars), for it is from Cosmas that we
learn of the Bogomil belief that God had two sons, the elder Christ, and the younger,
Satan, with the latter creating the visible world. From him we also know that the
Bogomils rejected the Old Testament and accepted only the New. They regarded the
Eucharist as an allegory: Jesus gave his body in the form of the four Gospels, and his
blood as the Acts of the Apostles at the Last Supper. The Bogomils regarded them-
selves as the only true Christians, and rejected the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church.
They rejected the eating of meat, drinking of wine, and marriage because of sexual
intercourse. They rejected all other prayers except for the Lord’s Prayer, which they
repeated many times. Their rejection of the material world was, according to most
scholars, derived from Manichaeism. If this is indeed so, then this explains why both
in eastern Orthodoxy and particularly in the Catholic West (given St. Augustine’s rele-
vant tracts) they were called Manichaeans.
There were two strands of Bogomilism, however, of moderate and abso-
lute dualism. “Besides the official Bogomil or ‘Bulgarian’ church we find a church
known as ‘Dragovitsan’, from the village of Dragovitsa, on the border of Thrace and
Macedonia. Dragovitsa was not far from the Paulician colonies of Philippopolis,”
and “the doctrines of its church … were more completely dualist than those of the
‘Bulgarians’ ” (Runciman 1947: 69).
The translation of many books from Greek into OCS facilitated the circulation of
some very important apocrypha popular in the Byzantine world. The 1018 reconquest
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— Zdenko Zlatar —
of Bulgaria by expansionist emperor Basil II the Bulgar-slayer (ruling alone 976–

1025), and Byzantium’s rule over Bulgaria until 1185, facilitated the growth and
spread of Bogomilism to other parts of the Byzantine empire, most importantly to its
capital, Constantinople.
In Byzantium
Unlike the situation for Bulgaria we have much more detailed and trustworthy material
about Byzantine Bogomilism. The earliest report of it lies in the letter of Euthymius
of the Peribleptos Monastery, Constantinople (ca. 1045). We learn that the Bogomils
do not “confess God as the maker of heaven and earth,” but call Satan “the lord of
this world” [“A Letter from Euthymius, monk of the monastery of Periblepton, sent
from Constantinople … identifying the heresies of … the Bogomils” [HH, 143, 146];
cf. John 14:30], and so they were dualists: “[T]‌hey say that the devil is the creator of
… heaven and earth and all that they contain …, not God.” Confirming our view that
they were Gnostics, Euthymius adds: “[They] demand securely sworn oaths not to
reveal to the majority what they have learnt from them. [T]hey tell them the rest …
little by little … over time … and they reveal the blasphemy to their disciples” [HH,
150–1].
A capital hostile source is Anna Komnena, The Alexiad. As well established, this
Byzantine princess, daughter of Emperor Alexios 1 Komnenos (1081–1118), altered
the sequence of her epic account of her father’s reign by ending it (at Book 15) with
the spectacular discovery, trial, and burning of Basil the Bogomil, the leader of the
Bogomils in the capital. Significantly, Anna calls Basil and his followers “the Bogomils”
[bogomiloi], though this is a Slavic not a Greek term (in Greek the term is theophiloi).
She thus clearly indicated its Bulgarian provenance (Anna Komnene, Alexiad
[Frankopan], pp. 455–63, 501, 529, 531). Alexios, with his brother sebastokrator
Isaac, tricked Basil into revealing his doctrine to them, and then had this informa-
tion redacted by Euthymius Zigabenus in a systematic form as a part of his Panoplia
dogmatica, a summa of all heresies (Zlatar 2016: 349–86). The Panoplia offers a brief
summary of Basil’s view from his own words [using HH, 181–95].
They believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but they say that the Son
is the Word [Logos] of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the Word of the Son.
They believe that the Heavenly Father begat the Son, and the Son begat the
Holy Spirit. They believe that the demon whom the Savior called Satan himself is
also a son of God the Father, called Satanael; he came before the Son, the Word,
and is stronger, as befits the first-born; that they are brothers one of the other.
Satan is the steward, second to the Father, having the same form and dress as
He does, and he sits at His right hand on the throne, and deserves honour next
after His. He was intoxicated by this, and being carried away by loss of sense, he
plotted a rebellion, and having done so, he seized the opportunity to test some
of the ministering powers. He said [to the angels] that if they wanted to lessen
the load of their service, they should follow him and join him in breaking away
from the Father. [For this they] quote the parable in St. Luke’s gospel of the unjust
steward who reduced the liability of the debtors [Lk 16:1–13]. They say that he is
Satanael, and that this parable is written about him. Then to the aforesaid angels
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who were enticed by the lightening of their burdensome services and other exces-
sive demands, he said: ‘I will place my throne upon the clouds, and I will be like
unto the Most High’ [Isa 14:14]; they were attracted by this, and joined the plot.
When God perceived this He threw them all down headlong together …
They believe that Satanael was cast down from above, and was unable to
sit upon the waters, for the Earth was invisible and unprepared. But since he
had the form and dress of God and possessed the power of the Demiurge to
summon the powers which had fallen along with him and to embolden them, he
said: ‘Since God made the heaven and the earth in the beginning, I too will make
a second heaven being the second God, and the rest in order.’ He said: ‘Let the
firmament be created,’ and it was created; ‘Let such and such be created,’ and
they were all created. He adorned the second heaven, and withdrew the water
from the face of the earth, and arranged it in places as seemed good to him,
as the book of Genesis describes. He adorned it and beautified and created all
that grows from the earth and animals and anything else, and allotted this as a
home for himself and for the powers which had rebelled. Then he molded the
body of Adam from earth mixed with water, and made him stand up … Satanael
gathered together the breath that was in him [but could not make man come
alive] … When he saw this, and realized that he had labored in vain, he sent an
embassy to the Good Father, and asked Him to send His breath, saying that the
man would be shared if he were to be endowed with life, and that the places
in heaven of the angels who had been thrown out should be filled by the man’s
descendants. Because God is good, He agreed, and breathed into what Satanael
had molded the breath of life; immediately man became a living soul, splendid
in his body and bright with many graces.
Eve was made similarly then, and shone forth with the same splendor.
Satanael … deceived Eve, slept with her and made her pregnant, so that his seed
might get a start on and master the seed of Adam, and as far as possible destroy it
and not allow it to increase and grow. Soon she fell into labor and brought forth
Cain from her coition with Satanael, and his sister like him, named Calomena.
Adam became jealous, and also slept with Eve, and begot Abel, whom Cain
immediately killed, and so brought murder into life. As Satanael coupled shame-
lessly with Eve through the medium of the serpent, immediately there were taken
from him his divine appearance and dress, and they say, his creative power and
the appellation of God. Until now he had been called God. When he had been
stripped of all these he became dark and ugly. Until this point the good Father
had stayed His anger and pardoned this lord and cosmocrator, himself a creator,
who had fallen above.
They rejected all the books of Moses and the God who is described in them …;
indeed, all the books which follow, as being written in accordance with the plan
of Satan. They accept only the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John, the Acts of the Apostles together with the Epistles and the Apocalypse of
John the Divine.
At length the Father realized that He had been outwitted by Satanael and
knew that He had been wronged, because although He had provided the most
important part of man and supplied what was most essential for his completion,
He could lay claim only to an infinitely small part of the human race. At the
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same time He felt pity for the soul which He had himself breathed in, which was
suffering so piteously and was oppressed; He determined to defend it, and in the
year 5000 he sent forth from His heart the Word, that is the Son, who is God.
They believe that this word and son is the archangel Michael, ‘For his name shall
be the angel of good counsel’ [Isa. 9.6]. They believe that he is called archangel
because he is more divine than all the angels, Jesus because he cures all weakness,
and Christ because he is anointed with flesh; that he descended from above and
crept through the right ear of the Virgin, and put on a body which seems phys-
ical, like a human body, but in reality is immaterial and divine, that he went out
again as he had entered, while the Virgin perceived neither entrance nor exit, but
simply found him lying swaddled in the cave. He accomplished the incarnate plan
and did and taught what is set in the Gospels, except that he only appeared to
undergo human sufferings. For they say that the Son was incarnate but in imma-
terial flesh, god-like, needing no food. ‘For my food,’ he said, ‘is to do the will of
my Father’ [cf. Matt. 4:4). Thus they teach that the whole plan of the incarnation
of the Saviour took place only in appearance.
They believe that he, that is Jesus who came as archangel Michael, only
appeared to be crucified and to have died and to have risen again, he rang down
the curtain, made the play apparent, took off the mask and imprisoned the rebel.
He bound him with a thick and heavy chain and shut him in Tartarus, taking
from his name the syllable ‘el’, which is angelic. He allowed him who had been
called Satanael to be called Satan, and then, having fulfilled the service he had
undertaken, he returned to the Father and sat at this right hand on the throne of
Satanael, who had been cast down. Thus they believe and teach that the Son and
Word took over the first rank which was Satanael’s and took his position as first
born and his throne. Then he returned whence he came and was dissolved back
into the Father, in whose womb he had been enclosed in the beginning.
They teach that the angels which fell, having heard that Satanael had promised
the Father to fill up their places in heaven from the race of men, look shamelessly
on the daughters of men and took them to wife, so that their descendants might
ascend to heaven to take the place of their fathers, as it is written in Genesis: ‘The
sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and they took them as
wives for themselves’ [Gen 6:2]. From their union came the giants who resisted
Satanael … He was enraged and brought down on them the Flood, and destroyed
along with them all human flesh. Only Noah … was saved …
They believe that of their enemies is the baptism of John, being accomplished
in water, but theirs is the baptism of Christ, achieved through the Spirit [Jn
3:5–6]. So they re-baptize anyone who joins them, first fixing for him a time
for confession, purification, and earnest prayer. Then they place the Gospel of
John on the candidate’s head, and invoke the Holy Spirit, and read the begin-
ning of the gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word’; and then they chant the
Our Father. After a baptism they fix a time for a more searching training, a
more continent way of life and purer prayer. Then they look for evidence to see
if he has observed all this, if he is judged to be enthusiastic. If men and women
give such evidence they bring him to a public initiation. They place him facing
East, for at baptism they turn west to renounce Satan, and at the initiation they
turn East to glorify God. They put the Gospel of John on his head, and men
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and women present put their hands on him and chant a hymn of thanksgiving
because he has kept piety.
They believe … that the only prayer is the one the Lord handed down in the
Gospels, that is, the Our Father. This alone they pray, seven times a day and five
times a night. They say this prayer, some ten times over with genuflections, some
fifteen, some more or less. All other prayers are idle repetitions, appropriate to
the Gentiles.
We can immediately see from this more pronounced dualism between God and
Satan, and the sense of an equal balancing in the struggle between Christ and Satan,
why the Bulgarian scholar Yuri Stoyanov (1994) would suspect a persisting, lurking
Zoroastrian component in Bogomil views, about cosmic struggle (thus Ahura Mazda
versus Agriman), a contest which of course is also present in Manichaeism (chs. 3, 21,
23) and in a different way with Paulicians.
After the burning of Basil the Bogomil in the middle of Alexios’s reign, ca. 1102–
1104, not at the end, as Anna suggests, there is no mention of Bogomilism until 1140.
In the writings of Constantine Chrysomallus, posthumously tried as a Bogomil, is
the first mention of spiritual baptism (see below on Consolamentum, so important
to the Cathars): “He demands from the baptized a spiritual perception … of the
Spirit, and says that otherwise their baptism is useless …” [“The Posthumous Trial of
Constantine Chrysomallus for Heresy, 1140” [HH, 213]).
In Bosnia
Bosnia was a country between East and West, Eastern and Western Christian
cultures, its position making it vulnerable to the Bogomil teachings. The Bosnian
ruler ban Kulin, though, abjured heresy at the meeting in the Bilino Polje (Field) in
1203. The document of abjuration in the Vatican Archives specifies that he and his
followers swore before the papal legate that they would not ever follow heresy and
that they would acknowledge the Roman Church as theirs. They also swore not
to harbor any “Manichaeans,” meaning “dualists” (see Zlatar 2011). That is only
to show that, on Latin Church suspicions, Bosnia was infested with heresy. Due to
internal rivalries within the ruling house of Kotromanić, heresy was able to flourish
through the thirteenth into the fifteenth centuries. The debate among historians is
whether this specifically Bosnian Church (Crkva Bosanska) was a dualist (Rački
and i tutti quanti), or mildly heterodox but Catholic, or heterodox Orthodox
church (see Fine 1987).
Since many sources allege that the majority of those who accepted Islam volun-
tarily during and after the Ottoman conquests of Bosnia in the fifteenth century
were originally members of this Bosnian Church, heated debates have arisen over
the nature and extent of this church. In my opinion there is no question that the
Bosnian Church was a dualist heretical organization, and seen as such not just by
Rome (sending its legates and Franciscans to bring it back to the Church), but by the
best sources on the medieval Balkans from the City Republic of Dubrovnik (which
consistently drew contrasts between the Catholic and Bosnian Churches, labeling the
latter Patarene, a synonym for dualist). An official act from Dubrovnik specifies that
“first among them is said to be djed, second gost, third starac, and fourth strojnik.
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These four ones are the major ones in heresy and infidelity of the same Bosnians”
(Zlatar 2007: 107). Another Dubrovnik document defines djed “as supreme of
the Patarenes” (diedi supremi patarenorum [Zlatar 2007: 107]). The hierarchical
members of the Bosnian Church, such as gost and starac, were asked to give their
assent to a number of official Bosnian charters. The most telling proof of the her-
etical, specifically dualist, nature of the Bosnian Church is found in the so-called
testament of Gost Radin (1466) registered in the Dubrovnik archives. In it Radin
refers to “the male and female Christians who do not love sin,” “the male and female
Christians who are of the true apostolic faith,” to “good men,” and to “those who
eat meat.” The last phrase has occasioned a bitter debate. Some, like Miho Barada,
read the crucial word as mirskie (“of this world”), while others, including Yvonne
Burns in her English translation (see Lambert 1976: [Append. E], 377–80), read it
as mrskie, (“odious”), thereby denying any whole dualist reference in the testament.
But in my thorough review of evidence, including photo reproductions of the docu-
ment and crucial word as found in 1911 by Ćiro Truhelka (1911), it is indisputable
that the original read mrsnie (“those who eat meat”), i.e., the ordinary believers
as opposed to the true Christians who are the Bosnian equivalent of the Cathar
“Perfects” (Zlatar 2007: 100–6).
The structure and hierarchy of the Bosnian Church is identical with those of the
Cathars (see below) in the south of France and northern Italy:
In his testimony dated 1388 Jacob Bech stated that he was on his way to
“Sclavonia” to be perfected in the teachings of his church, to the place called
Boxena which belongs to “Albanus de Boxena” who is subject to “regi Russienae”
(Döllinger 1890: 268; Šanjek 2003: 140–2). As explained in my article (Zlatar
2007: 94), Bech referred to Bosnia ruled by the ban, i.e., viceroy of Bosnia, which
was a part of Tvrtko I’s state (c. 1338–1391). In 1377 Tvrtko crowned himself
King of Serbia whose medieval name was Rascia or Ruscia and whose Latin title
was regus Russienae. This document is crucial in establishing that in the fourteenth
century the so-called Cathars went to Bosnia to perfect their knowledge of the
teachings of their “church.”
That the Bosnian Church was an institution whose members were seen as not
belonging to either the Orthodox or Catholic churches in Bosnia is attested by the
CATHARS THE BOGOMIL CHURCH

CREDENTES “MR’SNI LJUDE”
BONS HOMMES, BONS “KR’ST’JANI I KR’ST’JANICE KOI GREHA NE LJUBE,”
CHRETIENS “KR’ST’JANI I KR’ST’JANICE KOI SU PRAVE VERE
APOSTOLSKE”
BONI HOMINES “DOBRI MUŽJE”
DIACONUS STROJNIK
FILIUS MINOR STARAC
DFILIUS MAIOR GOST
EPISCOPUS DJED
Figure 35.1 Bogomil and Cathar church offices compared
388
389
Ottoman census records of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries which consistently and
poignantly draw a difference between the Kristians (Christians, i.e., the “Perfects”)
and Gebr or Kafir (i.e., the Orthodox and Catholics) (Okiç 1960: 108–33).
CATHARS
In the south of France
The first thing to be pointed out is that the so-called Cathars did not call them-
selves such and were not named that by the Inquisitors either (Zlatar 2011: 546–61).
“Cathar” comes from katharos (“pure” in Greek). They were also often dubbed by
their enemies “Albigensians,” i.e., coming from the city of Albi in southern France, or
“Manichaeans,” i.e., followers of Mani. To reiterate (Zlatar 2011: 561), “Manichaean”
was a medieval equivalent of dualist, and the Church especially followed this usage
from St Augustine (once a Manichaean himself). On the other hand, it is not true
that the term “perfect” (parfait/e in French) was never used. It is found in the earliest
hostile source on “Catharism” (the epithet we use here for convenience), Historia
Albigensis: The History of the Albigensian Crusade by Cistercian Peter of les Vaux-
de-Cernay (1210s) [Sibly]:
It should be understood that some of the heretics were called ‘perfected’ heretics
or ‘good men,’ others ‘believers of the heretics’ [credentes]. The ‘perfected’ heretics
wore a black robe, claimed (falsely) to practice chastity, and renounced meat,
eggs, and cheese. […] The term ‘believers’ was applied to those who lived a secular
existence and did not try to copy the way of life of the ‘perfected,’ but hoped that
by following their faith they would attain salvation … […] They selected from
the ‘perfected’ heretics officials whom they called ‘deacons’ and ‘bishops,’ and the
‘believers’ held that no one of them could attain salvation without the laying-on of
hands by these clergy just before death; indeed, they considered that however sinful
a man might have been, then provided he had undergone this laying-on of hands
on his deathbed, and so long as he was able to recite the Lord’s prayer, he would
gain salvation and (to use their own expression) ‘consolation’ [consolamentum];
to the extent that he would immediately fly up to heaven without making any
amends or reparations for wrongs he had committed.
(Sibly 1998: 12–13)
Despite the hostility this source is precious, for it tells us that as early as 1212–1218
there was something called “Albigensian” heresy: it included both those who were
“perfects” and “believers”; it had a hierarchy; and it considered the consolamentum
as the sole means of salvation. But Peter goes further:
First … the heretics maintained the existence of two creators, one of things
invisible whom they called the ‘benign’ God, and one of things visible whom
they named the ‘malign’ God. They attributed the New Testament to the benign
God and the Old Testament to the malign God, and rejected the whole of the
latter except for certain passages quoted in the New Testament. […] In their
secret meetings they said that the Christ who was born in the earthly and visible
389
390
Bethlehem and crucified at Jerusalem was ‘evil’…; the ‘good’ Christ, they said,
neither ate nor drank nor assumed the true flesh and was never in this world …
[…] There were other heretics who said that there was only one Creator, but that
he had two sons, Christ and the Devil … […] They denied the resurrection of the
body, and invented new myths, claiming that our souls are really those angelic
spirits who were driven from heaven through their rebellious pride … and that
these souls after successively inhabiting any seven earthly bodies will then return
to their original bodies…
(Sibly 1998: 11–12)
Peter also provides evidence of the consolamentum: “Then all present place their
hands on his head and kiss him and clothe him in a black robe; from that time he is
counted as one of them” (15).
From his testimony we can see that in the early thirteenth century there was already
a distinction between the absolute dualists who believed in two gods, and moderate
(the so-called Monarchian) Cathars who attributed everything visible to Satan as one
of God’s sons who revolted against Him. He recounts the master myth of the mod-
erate Cathars, namely, the fall of those angels who followed Satan in his rebellion,
and the importance of metempsychosis (the transmigration of the souls), which could
only be avoided by consolamentum –the spiritual baptism and entrance into ranks
of the “perfects.” Peter’s testimony, if antagonistic, nevertheless enables us to see very
definite parallels between the Bogomils and “Cathars.” Viewing especially the testi-
monies of Peter and Euthymius Zigabenus side-by-side we can plot the similarities:
PRINCIPAL THEMES MOVEMENTS

SATAN AS STEWARD FOR GOD THE BOGOMILS ACC. TO ZIGABENOS,
FATHER MODERATE CATHARS
SEDUCTION OF ANGELS: PARABLE OF BOGOMILS ACC. TO ZIGABENOS,
THE UNJUST STEWARD MODERATE CATHARS
SATAN’S PLEA TO GOD AFTER HIS FALL MODERATE CATHARS
SATAN AS DEMIURGE GNOSTICS, BOGOMILS, CATHARS
DIVISION OF THE ELEMENTS BY SATAN BOGOMILS ACC. TO ZIGABENOS,
MODERATE CATHARS
SATAN’S CREATION OF THE VISIBLE MODERATE CATHARS
WORLD WITH GOD’S PERMISSION
SATAN’S CREATION OF CELESTIAL MODERATE CATHARS
BODIES
SATAN’S CREATION OF THE STARS MODERATE CATHARS
CREATION OF THE ATMOSPHERE CATHARS
CREATION OF THE HUMAN BODY BOGOMILS, CATHARS
PUTTING LIFE INTO HUMAN BODY GNOSTICS, MANDEANS, BOGOMILS,
CATHARS
SATAN’S SEDUCTION OF EVE GNOSTICS, BOGOMILS ACC. TO
ZIGABENOS, MODERATE CATHARS
Figure 35.2 Bogomil and Cathar tenets compared
390
391
PRINCIPAL THEMES MOVEMENTS
PROCREATION OF SOULS MODERATE CATHARS

SATAN’S REIGN BOGOMILS, CATHARS
SATAN’S BOASTING GNOSTICS, THE APOCRYPHA
HATRED OF THE CROSS PAULICIANS, BOGOMILS, CATHARS
REJECTION OF THE LAW OF MOSES GNOSTICS, BOGOMILS, CATHARS
CHRIST’S BIRTH GNOSTICS, PAULICIANS, BOGOMILS,
CATHARS
MARY AS AN ANGEL MODERATE CATHARS
CONDEMNATION OF JOHN THE BOGOMILS, CATHARS
BAPTIST
IDENTIFICATION OF JOHN THE GNOSTICS, MODERATE CATHARS
BAPTIST WITH ELIJAH
REJECTION OF BAPTISM WITH WATER GNOSTICS, MANICHAEANS,
PAULICIANS, BOGOMILS, CATHARS
“OUR FATHER” THE ONLY PRAYER BOGOMILS, CATHARS
ADORATION OF CHASTITY GNOSTICS, MANICHAEANS,
BOGOMILS, CATHARS
PARABLE OF EUNUCHS AS A REJECTION MODERATE CATHARS
OF MARRIAGE
FIERY ABYSS APOCRYPHA, MODERATE CATHARS
CROWNS, THRONES, AND ROBES OF APOCRYPHA, CATHARS
THE JUST
Figure 35.2 Continued
The Cathars in the south of France, according to inquisitorial records (all subse-
quent page numbers are to the heresy Depositions as edited by Biller, Bruschi, and
Sneddon [2011]), believed that their church was “the true church” (179, 191, 875),
often referred to as “the church of God” (ecclesia Dei, 893). The mere believers
greeted the perfects with the ritual melioramentum which the inquisitorial sources
invariably call adoratio: “And he adored them twice, genuflecting according to
their custom, saying, ‘Bless me,’ as the same heretics taught him. And they replied,
‘May God bless you’ ” (199). All inquisitorial sources make a point that a believer
(credens) genuflected three times (241, 185, 373, 511, 679, 915, 939, 955). The
Depositions are particularly revealing about the consolamentum, stressing its car-
dinal importance as well as making it the boundary between those who were mere
followers (called credentes) and the true heretics (dubbed heretici [for “perfects”]).
All accounts agree on the laying-on of hands and the placing of the book on the
recipient’s head:
And then she was hereticated, consoled and received by them according to the
manner and rite of the heretics, placing their hands and a book on Raymonda’s
head, in the presence and sight of the same witness and Esclarmonda genuflected
391
392
to them three times, saying, ‘Bless us,’ according to the manner of the heretics;
and then the same witness received the peace from the heretics’ book’
(289, cf. also 707, 721, 937)
The inquisitorial sources also reveal that “the same witness underwent the abstinence
which the heretics undergo in fasting, and abstaining from the eating of flesh and eggs
and cheeses” (473).
Particularly valuable is the inquisitorial testimony that some heretics believed in
two gods:
Asked if the same witness ever said that there were two gods, one good and the
other evil, he said that the same witness three or four times, or more, said in
various places that Garnier of Cordes, a judge of Rodez, said that there were two
gods, one benign and the other malign.
(547)
… the aforesaid Garnier acknowledged before the late Aimery of Mayreras,

knight of the order of St. John of Jerusalem, that he had indeed said that there
were two gods, one benign and the other malign.
(671)
Repeatedly the witnesses confessed that “all visible things were the works of the
devil” (quod omnia visibia erant opera diaboli, 190–1), or that “the devil had made
all visible things” (diabolus fecerat omnia visibilia, 415), as well as the obverse, that
“God did not make this world but that it had another maker …” (523).
It is from the inquisitorial records that we know that the Cathars in Languedoc
possessed ritual books of specifically Bulgarian provenance:
The same Bernard of Lavaur also said then that he had heard Anglesia, the wife
of the late Peter Ratier, who [Anglesia] was burnt for heresy, saying that the
heretics had a certain book which they looked at when they saw such weather –
and this is in Bulgaria [et hoc in Bulgaria].
(621; cf. Thouzellier 1977)
For Peter Biller (621, fn. 3), “this reference to a text used by heretics in Bulgaria is
unique in the inquisition records of Languedoc. One example is an apocryphon, The
Questions of John, otherwise known as The Secret, which was possessed and used
by the heretics (Cathars) of Concorrezzo in Italy. The preservation of a Doat copy
of one of the three manuscripts of this, once in the archive of the Dominicans at
Carcassonne, suggests that it also circulated among heretics in Languedoc, not just
Italy. The colophon of another copy states that it was brought by Nazarius (bishop
of the heretics of Concorezzo) from Bulgaria (Interrogatio Johannis [Bozóky], p. 86).
Mark Pegg has rejected this reading of the document, suggesting that it should
read “in voulgaria” and that it has nothing to do with Bulgaria. However, as Biller
and others clarify, the document reads “in Bulgaria,” and even “in Vulgaria” would
not change matters anyway, for the name Bulgaria was transliterated into Latin from
392
39
Byzantine Greek, reading “b” as “v” (thus basileus [for king] is rendered as vasileus)
(see also Sennis 2016: 18–19 with fn. 43). The Cathars also used The Vision of Isaiah,
an apocryphal Bogomil text; and “of the Gospels they favored the Gospel of John
above all others—only it contained the truth” (303 [still using Biller et al. 2011]).
Many witnesses testified that they used the opening of it, “In the beginning was the
Word …,” as the most important part of the consolamentum [681]. All witnesses
testified that the Cathars used only one prayer, “Our Father,” that they added the
comma: “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory for ever and ever” at its
end, and that they substituted “our supersubstantial bread” for “everyday bread,” i.e.,
immaterial for material (217, 681). A witness also stated that the Cathars used only
the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse from the New Testament (581).
The inquisitorial records specify that the Cathars had an ecclesiastical structure
(regardless of whether we call it a church, though their sources do): they mention a
“bishop” (179, 783), a “deacon” (179, 203, 805, 975), “an elder son” (filius maior,
783, 815). They refer to “perfects” as “robed heretics” (haereticus vestitus, 897).
The sources also corroborate the belief in the transmigration of the souls: “She also
heard her [Fabrissa] saying that the spirit of the late William Aribaud would just go
from body to body until it came into the hands of the good men,” or until it under-
went a consolamentum (275). They mention also the practice of fasting unto death
[endura]: “The same witness also said that the aforesaid lady lived for fifteen days
or thereabouts after she was hereticated” (i.e., given the consolamentum), “eating
nothing, nor drinking anything except water; and the same witness served her con-
tinually until her death” (539). The sources also testify to the fundamental doctrines –
of the fall of angels: “She said that all the spirits which have fallen from heaven
because of their pride will yet be saved” (309) –and of the creation of Man:
She heard Fabrissa saying that Lucifer had made man, and God said to him
that he should make him. He, however, replied that he could not, and then God
breathed into the mouth of man, and man spoke.
(265; also 307)
It is not possible to give the history of the “Cathar” movement in the south of France,
but the dividing line was the Albigensian Crusade against it by the Papacy, backed
up by the army from northern France. The destruction of the political independence
of Languedoc, coupled with the extirpation of “Catharism,” resulted in the paucity
of sources on the heresy apart from those of the Inquisition. This has given rise to
the so-called “sceptics,” Pegg in particular, supported by Robert Moore. Pegg’s view
is: that there was no dualist heresy before the mid-thirteenth century when, para-
doxically, the persecution of the Inquisition led the Cathars into adopting it; that
there was no organized church as such; that the earlier sources are suspect, with the
important “Charter of papa Nicheta” (a Bogomil bishop) being a seventeenth-century
version of a thirteenth-century forgery; that there were no Cathar “rituals” as such,
for the adoratio of the perfects was just an expression of local courtesy rites. In short,
Catharism before the Inquisition did not exist and was made up by the Inquisitors,
whose sources then led nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholars to impose upon
local bases the superstructure of a heretical, organized, dualist church, none of these
being initially true (at least prior to the Inquisition and the Crusade) (Pegg 2005;
393
394
2008; Moore 2012; cf. Sennis 2016). Critics of the “sceptics,” such as Biller, myself,
and others, have pointed out several key mistakes arising from their erroneous reading
of documents (such as “Voulgaria” above), as well as their rejection of the thoroughly
confirmed veracity of several key documents. The crucial Charter of papa Niquinta,
for one, has been pronounced genuine by key experts, as “a homogeneous document,
written at the same time as the events which it describes, and it is the work of a
single scribe” (Dalarun et al. 2001: 200–1). Similarly, as Julien Roche concludes: “It
is a homogeneous document,” the charter of Niquinta offering “without doubt … the
proofs of necessary authenticity” (in Bozóky 2003: 16, 244). Assuming the informa-
tion in this document is genuine, there is then proof of the existence of an organized
network of “Cathar” churches in the south of France in 1167, almost half a cen-
tury before the Albigensian Crusade and its Inquisition. Steven Runciman reckons
Niquinta a thoroughgoing Dualist. He made it his business to consecrate new bishops
for the heretics, but he found their churches almost all Monarchian and insisted on for-
cing new Dualist bishops on them to rescue them from error (Runciman 1947: 124).
According to this charter, Niquinta, who came from Constantinople, divided the
existing Cathar church of Albi into four bishoprics: Albi, Toulouse, Carcassonne, and
Agen (Duvernoy 1976: 242).
Pegg has also rejected what seems prima facie evidence of absolute dualism from the
testimony of Peire Garcias (dated 1247), who told his kinsman that he believed indeed
in two gods, “one benign God, who created all incorruptible things and things that
will endure, and another God who was all evil, who made all corruptible and tran-
sitory things” (Douais 1900: vol. 2, 90–114). His kinsman, Guilhelm, asked Peire to
explain the meaning of “without Him, nothing was made” [sine ipso factum est nihil]
in the beginning of John’s Gospel. Peire explained that “the word ‘nothing’ was used to
designate visible things, which are nothing” (92; Duvernoy 1970). This interpretation
gave rise to serious scholarly debate, some interpreting the above passage in the Cathar
way, and others denying it bears a dualist character (see Duvernoy 1962: 22–54; Nelli
1966: 133; 1966: 181–95; Thouzellier 1969a: 50–3; 1969b: 128–38; 1971: 321–41;
Gonnet 1984: 5–14; Sánchez 2005: 311–22; cf. Stoyanov 2000). If interpreted to
mean that “without God there was Nothing as creation,” this would give it an abso-
lute dualist tenor. Pegg’s denial of the existence of dualism before the mid-thirteenth
century, however, is flatly contradicted by the 1177 letter of Count Raymond V of
Toulouse, which states that in his regions “two principles are introduced (duo…
principia introducuntur)” (Biller in Sennis 2016: 293). Furthermore, in 1179 Canon
27 of the Third Lateran Council laments that “in Gascony and the regions of Albi
and Toulouse … the loathsome heresy of those whom some call Cathars, others the
Patarenes … has grown so strong …” (Biller in Sennis 2016: 294). Together with the
Charter of Niquinta of 1167 it proves that Pegg’s theory cannot stand. We have with
Cathars a continuation of Bogomilism and of Gnostico-dualist currents within medi-
eval Christendom.
REFERENCES
For the Index of References to Published Sources see my article 2011 below, 561–76.
Biller, Peter, and Anne Hudson (eds.). 1996. Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530. Cambridge:
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Biller, Peter, Bruschi, Caterina, and Shelagh Sneddon (eds. and trans.). 2011. Inquisitors and
Heretics in Thirteenth-Century Languedoc: Toulouse Inquisition Depositions, 1273–1282.
Leiden: Brill.
Bozóky, Edina (ed.). 2003. Bogomiles, Patarins et Cathares. Toulouse: Université de Toulouse.
Dalarun, Jacques, et al. 2001. “La charte de Niquinta: analyse formelle.” Monique Zerner (ed.).
L’histoire du catharisme en discussion. Nice: Université de Nice: 135–201.
Döllinger, Ignaz von. 1890. Beiträge zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters, Vol. II: Dokumente
vornehmlich zur Geschichte der Valdesier und Katharer. Munich: Beck.
Douais, Célestin (ed.). 1900. Documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’inquisition dans le
Languedoc. Paris, 2 vols.
Duvernoy, Jean. 1962. “Une traité cathare du début du XIIIe siècle.” Cahiers d’Études Cathares
13: 22–54.
——— 1970. “L’Exégèse de Jean 1,3–4.” Cahiers d’Études Cathares 47: 12–15.
——— 1976. Le Catharisme: La religion des Cathares. Toulouse: Privat.
Fine, John, Jr. 1987. The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Gonnet, Giovanni. 1984. “A propos du Nichil: une controverse désuète mais courtoise sur la
conception cathare du bien et du mal.” Heresis 2: 5–14.
Hamilton, Janet, Hamilton, Bernard, with Yuri Stoyanov (eds., trans., and comm.). 1998.
Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650–c. 1405. Manchester: Manchester
University Press [in the text abbreviated as HH].
Lambert, Malcolm. 1976. Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Moore, Robert I. 2012. The War on Heresy. London: Profile Books.
Nelli, René. 1966. “Réflexions sur le dualisme, le principle du mal et l’éternité du monde dans
le catharisme médiévale.” Cahiers du Sud 61: 181–95.
Okiç, Tayyib. 1960. “Les Kristians (Bogomiles Parfaits) de Bosnie d’après des documents turcs
inédits.” Südost-Forschungen 19: 108–33.
Pegg, Mark G. 2005. The Corruption of Angels. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
——— 2008. A Most Holy War. New York: Oxford University Press.
Runciman, Steven. 1947. The Medieval Manichee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sánchez, Jiménez. 2005. “A propos de la controverse sur la nature doctrinale du Nichil cathare.”
Martin Aurell (ed.). Les cathares devant l’histoire: Mélanges offerts à Jean Duvernoy.
Cahors: L’Hydre: 311–22.
Šanjek, Franjo. 2003. Bosansko-humski krstjani u povijesnim vrelima. Zagreb: Arbat.
Sennis, Antonio (ed.). 2016. Cathars in Question. York, UK: York Medieval Press.
Stoyanov, Yuri. 1994. The Hidden Tradition in Europe. London: Arkana.
——— 2000. The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Thouzellier, Christine. 1969b. Catharsisme et Valdéisme en Languedoc à la fin XIIe et au début
de XIIIe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
——— 1969b. “Les Cathares languedociens et le Nichil (Jean 1,3).” Annales E.S.C.
1: 128–38.
———1971. “Controverse médiévale en Languedoc relative au sens du mot Nichil.” Annales
de Midi 99: 321–47.
Thouzellier, Christine (ed., trans., and comm.). 1977. Rituel cathare. Paris: Editions du Cerf.
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Hercegovine (Sarajevo) 23: 353–57.
Zdenko Zlatar. 2007. “The Haeresis of the Bosnian Church: une question mal posée?” Heresis
46–47: 81–120.
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——— 2011. “What’s in a Name? A Critical Examination of Published and Website

Sources on the Dualism of the Cathars in Languedoc.” Journal of Religious History 35
(4): 546–76.
——— 2016. Red and Black Byzantium: Komnenian Emperors and Opposition (1081–1180).
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Zerner, Monique (ed.). 2001. L’histoire du catharisme en discussion: le ‘concile’ de Saint-Felix
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CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
ALCHEMY AND GNOSIS

FROM ANTIQUITY TO EARLY
MODERN TIMES: “AS
ABOVE SO BELOW”
Peter Marshall
A lchemy, like Gnosticism, has many roots which are often very obscure. It was the
principal form of science before the Scientific Revolution in seventeenth-century
England. It is often defined merely as the medieval forerunner of chemistry, yet it was
much more than that. It was a central part not only of early science but of medicine
and philosophy. Alchemy always combined mental and physical activity, work in the
study as well as in the laboratory. In the Western tradition, a distinction was often
made between the esoteric (inner work) and the exoteric (outer work) of alchemy, but
the true alchemist was involved in both aspects. Indeed, the medieval practitioners
called the work of the “sacred science” of alchemy the Magnum Opus, the Great
Work. In the Hellenistic and European tradition, it was thought that the creation of
the Philosopher’s Stone would enable the adept to transmute base metal into gold,
cure all ills, prolong life, and even bring about immortality. In the last respect it links
to the Taoist alchemical quest for the elixir of life in the Far East, but length demands
require this piece to concentrate on Hellenistic, Arab, and Western developments
(start with Sivin in Needham 1980 for Chinese materials). In what follows I concen-
trate on the issue of Gnosis, and many subtleties of esoteric method and terminology,
and such matters as correspondence and union (coniunctio) have to be left in the
shadows.
ANTIQUITY
The etymology of the word “alchemy” in English reflects its history and origins.
It comes from the late Middle English, via the Old French alchimie and mediaeval
Latin alkimia, taken in turn from the Arabic al-kimiya. Egypt was originally called
by the Arabs al-Kemia, the Black Land, because of the annual flooding of the Nile
and deposit of black alluvial soil which fertilized the land and turned the parched
desert into green life. As for the terms Gnostic and Gnosticism, despite the latter
abstraction’s later-coming usage, they derive from the ancient Greek phrases gnostikos
(having knowledge) and from gnōsis (knowledge), and in Hellenistic times already
implied initiates in mystery religions and popular philosophical contexts who turned
away from the material world to probe “spiritual worlds.” Gnostic ideas extensively
397
398
— Pe t e r M a r s h a l l —
influenced Late Antique religious life, including alchemy, that taught that “gnosis,” or
a kind of knowledge illuminated by faith in newly revealed truths, could bring about
salvation and enlightenment (Stephens 2016: 218–31, 239–59).
The Gnostics borrowed from Neoplatonism the notion of the Demiurge (Plato’s
dēmiourgos, from Timaeus 28C, 38D, 39D, 47E, 53B), referring to the skilled creator
of the material world. If in Platonic thinking the demiurge was basically the world’s
Maker, for the Gnostics he was a heavenly being inferior to the Supreme Being, and
opposed to the purely spiritual world. In this readjustment, matter or materiality was
so inherently flawed as to be evil, and humans could only become virtuous and spir-
itual by transcending it. With the lower world of matter conceived as this imperfect
as well as passing, the upper world of the spirit was perfect and eternal, and an inter-
mediate, “topographically ambiguous” middle world of archons to be negotiated, the
Demiurge provided for Gnostics an explanation for the existence of evil.
A very early thinker claimed by the Gnostics was Cerinthus (flor. 100 CE), who
denied that the Supreme God made the physical world since it was created by the
Demiurge (Myllikoski 2008). In taking this cue and differentiating between the
unworthy Old Testament Demiurge and the God of New, Basilides (flor. 117–
138) was to establish a “Gnostic school” that apparently survived in Egypt until
the fourth century (Epiphanius, Panarion 1.2.7.4). By comparison, leading another
Gnostic movement very popular in second-century Egypt, Valentinus (ca. 100–ca.
160) promulgated a more modified form of dualism, or perhaps ultimately a monistic
view, with good and evil seen as relative (chs. 12, 13). Whatever the differences, they
did not prevent third-century Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus from his detraction
that, if the Gnostics truly felt that this world was a prison, they could always leave it
at any moment by suicide (Enneads 2.9.5, 9, 18)!
Unlike the early Gnostics, the alchemists did not entirely shun the material world
in search of the spiritual one. Rather, they took matter to be potentially spiritual, and
in seeking to transmute base metal into gold thought matter could be purified. Some
espoused the Neoplatonic view that this world was made by a Demiurge but without
seeing the material world as irredeemable. Nor did they imagine an unbridgeable gap
between this ephemeral world and the divine one, as Zoroastrians and Manichaeans
did. Alchemy did not share with most Gnostic attitudes a radical matter/spirit dualism,
and did not necessarily deny the former in order to reach the latter: the world of time
and of the body may have seen as part of a “lower world” created by a Demiurge, but
the “upper world” of the spirit or soul is not entirely separate. This is the Hermetic
position; and as the Hermetic text The Emerald Tablet, which much influenced later
alchemists, put it: “As above, so below” (Holmyard 1957: 97–8). The microcosm of
the person, as both matter and spirit, was potentially the same as the macrocosm of
the universe.
There is no proof that alchemists read the early Gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi
library, so central to our understanding of Gnosticism and the belief systems reflected
in these texts of the third–fourth centuries CE. But many early alchemists were clearly
influenced by the same streams of thought affecting the Nag Hammadi writings
(NHC), particularly the Neoplatonic elements and the Hermetic texts (partial
translations of Plato’s The Republic and the Corpus Hermeticum being found among
the codices [NHC VI.5, 8]). The relation between the Gnostics and alchemists was
therefore complex and interwoven. They both sought “Gnosis,” knowledge illumined,
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— Alchemy and gnosis —
deep, secret, ancient, indeed eternal. They tended to the esoteric and mystical and
obscure in their utterances.
The alchemists saw it as their task to help nature become perfect, in this accepting
Aristotelian teaching that nature and humanity each have a telos, or ultimate purpose.
Just as humans strive to realize their full potentia (the end of Man) so metals “strive”
to realize their potential and reach their purest state –gold (the “end” of metal). The
alchemists therefore saw it as their work to assist nature with art and science in order
to bring it to perfection, though in the sense of improving nature but simply speeding
up natural dynamics, or realizing what is implicit and positive in the starting-matter
of nature (prima materia), a concept most often derived from Aristotle (Metaphysica
H/2.4; cf. King 1956: 370–5). And if for the “classic Gnostics” the female figure of
Sophia often has negative associations, as the lowest Aeon emanated from the light
of God behind the creation of this flawed material world, for the alchemists Sophia
personified her ancient Greek name of “Wisdom,” and thus philosophia as “love of
Wisdom,” an affirmation recurring throughout subsequent centuries (as, for example,
in the last work attributed to Thomas Aquinas, Aurora Consurgens or The Rising
Dawn [1270s] the “Wisdom of God” is evoked in the figure of the Sophia, “Goddess
of Wisdom”) (Franz 1980:187–9).
In the Western tradition, alchemy originated in the Greco-Egyptian world. The
Greeks had a great admiration for Egyptian wisdom. In a well-known story, Plato
has an old Egyptian priest tell Solon the Greeks, when compared to the Egyptians,
are all children, “all young in mind … with no belief rooted in old tradition and
no knowledge hoary with age” (Timaeus [ca. 448 BCE] 22B). Thus when Greeks
conquered Egypt (under Alexander in 332 BCE) the Greek-speaking ruling dynasty
of the Ptolemies was dazzled by the Egyptians’ achievements and ready enough to
encourage adopting much of their way of life and beliefs. Against this background the
great city of Alexandria became the crucible of both alchemy and Gnosticism.
The Greeks believed that the ancient Egyptians were able to transmute base metal
into gold and acquire immortality. They had used mercury to separate gold and
silver from their ores, and the mummification process already betokened chemical
knowledge.
The central myth of the Egyptians, recounted inter alia in The Egyptian Book of
the Dead (Pl. VII), sees the god Osiris passing through the Underworld after being
killed and dismembered by his brother Seth. He is brought together by his wife Isis
and given new life, in a process of death, separation, and resurrection that mirrored
alchemical stages, as also did the flying scarab beetle, the hiding of its eggs in dung
making it a popular Egyptian symbol, indeed talisman, of rebirth succeeding death.
Now, in a remarkable Hellenistic text usually called Isis the Prophetess to Her
Horus [in Codex Marcianus] (provenance Alexandria, first century CE), the goddess
enunciates a formula in the typically cryptic language of the alchemists: “For Nature
rejoices in Nature, Nature contains Nature,” and finally gives various recipes to trans-
mute matter into gold, beginning with mercury (Lindsay 1970: 194).
Others strands of thought running to Alexandria, though, make the roots of
alchemy more complex and not only Egyptian. Zoroastrianism comes into the pic-
ture, viewing the world as a constant struggle between light and darkness, good
and evil, as well as so-called “Mystery Religions,” with elaborate rituals offered by
secret schools for initiates bent on bringing about resurrection and salvation after
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death (Meyer 1999). Neoplatonism also played a crucial part in alchemy, not only
Gnosticism, Plato holding that the four elements of water, earth, air and fire could
easily pass from one to the other (Black 2000). But indubitably the most important
philosophical influence on alchemy was Hermetism. The way of alchemy was the way
of Hermes, otherwise known in Egyptian lore as Thoth, confusing in his guises as
human inventor of writing and a god arbitrating over the dead. Down the ages he has
not only been hailed the father of alchemy but has given his name to alchemy as the
“Hermetic Art,” as integral to the great Hermetic tradition of wisdom. The Hermetica,
which came to light in second-century Alexandria in Egypt, was attributed to Hermes
Trismegistus, the “Thrice-Blessed.” It shows the successive steps on the path towards
enlightenment, aimed at those seekers who yearn for immortality and union with
God. It makes a distinction between two types of knowledge, episteme (science) and
gnosis (illumination). They are not exclusive for one leads to the other. But to have
a full vision of God –the “one and only” –you must understand not only with your
reason but “with the eyes of your heart” (Corpus Hermeticum 4.11; 7.1; 10.12–15
[Copenhaver]).
According to the Hermetica God creates the world through the Demiurge (that
Neoplatonist notion shared by alchemy and Gnosticism) which combines both male
and female principles. The sun (in Egyptian mythology, the supreme sun god Re)
“brings transmutation and transformation … as in a spiral, when change turns one
thing to another, from kind to kind, from form to form” (16.8). Sympathetic ener-
gies, affinities, and correspondences therefore connect the most disparate aspects of
nature and lie at the heart of the alchemists’ hopes of both material transmutation
and human divinization.
Unlike expectations put on Gnostics in terms of ritual and abstinence, early
alchemists were primarily interested in discovering the “Philosopher’s Stone” (lapis
philosophorum), the sought-for substance to achieve transmutation. The Alexandrian
alchemists first defined the different stages of the alchemical process as a series of
different colors, from nigredo, a blackening, albedo, a whitening, citrinas, a yellowing,
and rubedo, a reddening or purpling. It was seen as a gradual process of refinement.
On the personal level it meant purifying oneself in order to become enlightened but
in the laboratory it involved passing base metal through the different stages and
transforming it into gold. Not surprisingly, the symbol for gold was a dot within a
circle ʘ, which is also a symbol for wholeness and eternity (Marshall 2001: 466).
The first direct discussion of alchemical ideas and practices comes in a Greek trea-
tise called Physika kai mystika attributed to pseudo-Democritus (sometimes Bolos of
Mendes) (flor. 100 BCE), who explores the hidden secrets of Egypt’s sacred science.
According to the Alexandrian Neoplatonist, alchemist, and later bishop Synesius of
Cyrene (flor. 390s), he was initiated into “the mysteries of the great Ostanes in the
temple of Memphis” and composed four books on Bronzing, and Gold and Silver, on
Stones and on Purple (dye). Ostanes allegedly accompanied Alexander the Great on
his journeys, and in a dream Democritus conjures up the master from the Underworld
who points out the well-known formula “Nature rejoices in Nature, Nature contains
Nature, Nature overcomes Nature.” If this principle reverberated down the centuries
among alchemists, so did pseudo-Democritus’s describing of the Philosopher’s Stone
as the “the many named and nameless,” thereby launching a paradoxical description
taken up by countless later alchemists (Lindsay 1970: 103, 141; Haage 2006: 25–6).
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Alchemy was never the exclusive preserve of men. In second-century Alexandria,

one Cleopatra (not the Pharaoh) was credited by the Arabs with writing books on
poisons and cosmetics as well as on weights and measures. Her book Chrysopia
(Gold-making) was widely influential, and also her Dialogue, where she famously
enjoins a philosophical circle to see “the fulfilment of the art in the joining-together
of the bride and bridegroom and their becoming one” (Lindsay 1970: 258). This
sets in train the imagery of the “Chemical Wedding” found among many mediaeval
alchemists and of the Rosicrucians. “Maria the Jewess” or “Prophetess” is not to
be forgotten either, steeped as she was in Jewish philosophy and alchemy. To her is
attributed the “bain-marie” (Baleneum Mariae), a water bath for a gentle steaming
which is still used in kitchens today. Many medieval alchemical illustrations to come
depict Sol and Luna as a king and queen sitting naked together in a bath, symbolizing
purification. Maria’s interest in the distillation of liquids resulted in the tribikos, a
still with three funnels and receivers in which distilled vapors can be condensed, and
the kerotakis, a reflux apparatus for treating metals with vapors, probably in order
to color them.
Maria was a philosopher in her own right and credited by later alchemists with the
famous axiom: “One becomes two, two becomes three and out of the third comes the
one as the fourth” (Patai 1994: 63–4). It reflects the alchemical notion of the union
of male and female principles (cf. Gospel of Thomas [NHC II.2], Log. 114), with the
partial unity of the hermaphrodite in turn creating the real unity of the Philosopher’s
Stone. Maria is best known to us through Zosimus the Panopolite (flor. 300), prob-
ably a Gnostic Christian and acclaimedly “the founder of religious alchemy,” and first
to popularize the term khêmeia and to describe how to use the kerotakis in alchem-
ical experimentation (Grimes 2006). Alchemy reached a new level with his treatises
Apparatus and Furnaces: Commentaries on the Letter Omega and The Divine Art of
Making Gold and Silver. While clearly in touch with ancient practices of the Egyptian
temples and the mystical Hermetic tradition, the true end of alchemy was not the
manufacture of gold but the purification of the soul and the contemplation of God.
This became the major theme for mediaeval alchemists, his work being preserved in
the Arabic source Kitāb Mafatih as-san’a.
More widely practiced by the late third century, alchemy suffered a severe set-
back under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, whose infamous 296 Decree expelled
practitioners of alchemy from Egypt and banned their books for fear of counterfeiting
money. If Byzantine transmissions kept the “sacred art” from languishing under-
ground, the revival by Alexandrian Stephanus “the universal philosopher” (flor. 610–
640) produced an unfortunate legacy –the protective use of obscure and veiled terms
(admittedly already one feature of “the Gnostic mode”). As well known, though,
some documents attributed to Hermes Trismegistus survived Diocletian’s purge (most
significantly the parts of the Hermetica called Asclepius and Poimandres) (Hopkins
1934: 246). More controversial is whether also surviving was the so-called Emerald
Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina) of Hermes, first reported in the sixth-to-eighth-century
Arabic text Kitāb sirr al-Halīqa by one Balinas (or pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana),
and said to open with the key alchemical maxim: “That which is above is like to
that which is below … to accomplish the miracles of the one thing,” which meant
unlocking the secret of prima materia and its transmutation (see Linden 2003: 28;
with Holmyard 1957: 97).
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DEVELOP MENTS F ROM M E D IE VAL INTO

MODERN TIMES: A S U M M ARY
Alchemy, memorably, followed the marches of Islam’s conquering armies. It was
in a work attributed to the Arab Jabir ibn Hayyan or Geber (ca. 721–815) that
another Arabic version of the Emerald Tablet, probably made about the ninth cen-
tury, made its appearance, to be subsequently translated into Latin. Born at Houran
in Mesopotamia, Geber was considered by adepts as the greatest alchemist after
Hermes. Out of hundreds of treatises claimed to be his, only some great alchem-
ical texts survive, with significant later printed versions being in Latin as Summa
Perfectionis Magisterii (The Sum of the Perfect Magistery) (1485), and in English
as The Works Geber, the Most Famous Arabian Prince and Philosopher, of the
Investigation of Perfection of the Philosopher’s Stone (including The Testament,
1686). Although the first to mention red oxide of mercury and nitrate of silver,
mysterious and complicated expressions meant his writings were often written off
as “gibberish.”
Among other Muslim theorists, Muhammad al Razi or Rhazes (854–925), who
proclaimed alchemy “the astrology of the lower world,” became well known for
his alleged transmutation of base metals into gold. Full of practical alchemical and
medicinal recipes, his Persian Ketabe Serr (“The Book of Secrets”) was among other
works probing this transmutation as secretum secretorum (published as a book in
Latin, 1489). An even more important text combining medicine, alchemy, and also
astrology, was the encyclopedic Al-Qanun fi‘t-Tibb (“The Canon of Medicine”),
deriving from Ibn Sīnā (or Avicenna as known to the West, 980–1037). As one of
the greatest Persian philosophers and scientists of his age, his text was to remain
important during the European Renaissance.
If Islam was seen as a threat to Christianity, the Muslims who conquered Egypt
in the seventh century were the greatest heirs of Egyptian alchemy and responsible
for its transmission to the West. Not only did Islamic conquests over Sicily and Spain
allow the filtering of alchemical ideas into western Europe, but the Moors of North
Africa and Spain not only translated many works but made their own important
contributions to theory and practice, giving us the by-now virtually globalized names
of alcohol, alkaline, and elixir. Thus the ninth century Maslama al-Majrītī (the One
from Madrid, 950–1007) gave us what was to be dubbed The Sage’s Step, primarily
a work of practical alchemy. And with Spain-born Muhammad Ibn Umail (ca. 900–
960) came the Kitāb al-ma’al waraqi wal-ard an-majmiyah (The Book of Silvery
Water and Starry Earth), containing an allegorical description of the creation of the
Philosopher’s Stone. He passed on the Emerald Tablet as the Tabula chemica, being
the work by a true “Gnostic Hermetist,” according to the Jungians (e.g., Abt with von
Franz 2006: 50; cf. Jung 1995). The tenth-century Arab heresiographer Al-Nadim,
always on the lookout for special opinions, drew up a catalogue of works of “the
Alchemists and Seekers of the Philosopher’s Stone,” tracing alchemy to Hermes.
The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed many alchemical treatises translated
by Jewish scholars and Christian clerics from Arabic into Latin and then circulated
in western Christendom’s centers of learning. If alchemists increasingly expressed
themselves in terms of Christianity as the dominant religion, this did not pre-
vent influences of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, with its concepts of
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progressive “emanations” and complicated numerology, particularly when the book

Zohar (Splendor) came to light. For high and late medieval Europe alchemy figured as
the main experimental science, with Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and St Thomas
Aquinas famously reputed as alchemists (Thorndike 1923). Able to read Arabic,
Hebrew, and Greek, and acquainted with all the available alchemical texts in the
original, the Catalan Arnald of Villanova (1240–1311) was the most distinguished
of the translators. In practice his focus was medicinal: like Jabir and Rhazes, he did
not treat alchemy and medicine as separate disciplines and explored the possibility
of chemical and metallic remedies for illnesses. Just as ill health is caused by the
upset of the balance of humors, he believed that metals can be helped to obtain their
ideal internal balance by the use of elixirs. His name is connected to that renowned
alchemical work the Rosarium Philosophorum (The Rosary of the Philosophers),
maintaining a mercurial liquid can be used for transmuting base metals, with the
claim “I would transmute the sea, if it were mercury” probably falsely ascribed (cf.
Marshall 2001: 287).
Among high medievals the Catalan Ramon Llull (ca. 1232– 1318) was most
respected by later alchemists. Influenced by both Kabbalah and the Islamic tradition,
he developed his Ars Magna (“The Great Art,” 1305), accompanied by a special epi-
stemic and geometric method, to establish the causes of all phenomena in Creation in
terms of “the Divine Names.” Later alchemists believed that he had provided recipes
for making the Philosopher’s Stone. They often began with gold (Sol) and silver
(Luna) but the most crucial and elusive ingredient remained the “philosopher’s mer-
cury,” a substance extremely difficult to come by.
Coming to the Renaissance, we find in Britain there were many poets and writers
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reflecting the cultural importance of alchemy
at the time. Many were covered by Mason and the antiquary Elias Ashmole (1617–
1692), whose marvellous Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652) contained
Several Poeticall Pieces of our Famous English Philosophers, who have written
the Hermetique Mysteries in their owne Ancient Language, as the sub-title has it.
Alchemy’s early modern English story runs from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (8.2),
with “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” showing knowledge of alchemical processes and
instruments, through both Thomas Norton’s Ordinal of Alchemy (1477) and Sir
George Ripley’s Compound of Alchymy (1490[?]‌) –his “hidden arte” involving the
poetical vision of an “alchemical toad”! –on to Thomas Charnock’s Breviary of
Naturall Philosophy (1557) (Thorndike 1934).
On the continent, the legendary and mysterious fourteenth-century scribe Nicholas
Flamel, said to reach Santiago de Compostela on pilgrimage from Paris, claimed of
his Work “the conversion and change of one being into another being … from cor-
poreality to spirituality.” Experiments involving Mercury and Sulphur achieved “a
Chemical Wedding,” thereby producing the Philosopher’s Stone (Marshall 2001: 309).
Despite Pope John XXII’s bull of 1317 against alchemists misleadingly promising
riches, for charlatans and “puffers” undoubtedly at large, serious alchemists still
tried to transform themselves and create the Philosopher’s Stone. A notable two were
monks John Dastin, who defended his “most secret English rosary (Angli Rosarium)”
against the Pope, and Petrus Bona, who unveiled Pretiosa Margerita Novella (The
New Pearl of Great Price). The Rosarium for alchemists, as with 1550 garnishing
of alchemical tracts about “the most precious gift of God,” was not the rosary but
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“the rose garden of truths,” and thus important symbolism for the Rosy Cross, the
legendary alchemico- Kabbalistic order (1614– 1615), said to be founded by one
Christian Rosenkreu(t)z.
By the mid-sixteenth century, allegedly the greatest alchemist of all time, Paracelsus
(“Like Celsus”), had had his effect. His real name was Theophrastus Bombastus von
Hohenheim (1493–1541) and his convoluted and “bombastically” emphatic style in
a German-Swiss dialect made him seem like the reforming “Luther of Medicine.”
Calling his own brand of alchemy “spagyric,” taken from spao (to divide) and ageiro
(to bind), he sought to put into practice the old alchemical motto solve et coagula
(dissolve and coagulate). Insofar as Paracelsus is a founder figure of pharmacology,
toxicology, and psychosomatic theory, he has been taken as a turning point in alchemy
from mystery (or Gnosis) to experimental science (Bernoulli 1960: 310–16). Still, he
shared with Abbot Johannes Trimethius and Cornelius Agrippa the Hermetic belief
that magic could manipulate the hidden forces of the universe. In his view, the foun-
dation of all phenomena in nature as the tria prima of salt, sulphur, and mercury: only
if they were properly balanced in the body could the natural harmony of health result,
chemistry being an integral part of medicine.
In Paracelsus’s wake one can even talk of a “Hermetic Enlightenment” at this time,
first illustrated through his followers, Heinrich Khunrath and the more legendary
Basilius Valentinus, who took up the Paracelsian apocalyptic prophecy that a third
of the world would be destroyed and great artist and super-scientist “Elias Artista”
would appear, embodying final Transmutation itself (Tilton 2003: 196). We can hardly
forget Giordano Bruno (1548– 1600), fatefully burnt by the Roman Inquisition,
touting Hermetic philosophy as the true religion, with its Egyptian worship of “God
in all things” and an alchemical prospect of divinized Man, that magnum miraculum,
in the words of Asclepius (Yates 1964).
With alchemy thriving at beginning of the seventeenth century, Polish-Moravian
nobleman Michael Sendivogius (1566–1636) made the extraordinary prediction of
the coming of a New Age (in his Novum Lumen Chymicum [“New Chemical Light”],
1610). The newly emergent Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross –the Rosicrucians –fitted
the bill (Yates 1972). One of their members, Robert Fludd, saw them as relying com-
pletely on alchemical principles and theories. A plethora of illustrated alchemical
treaties followed. These included those of Michael Maier, who worked as a personal
physician to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and Khunrath. The court in Prague
of Rudolf II attracted many other practicing magicians, alchemists, and astrologers,
including the Englishmen John Dee and Edward Kelly. Tycho Brahe and Johannes
Kepler came to Rudolf’s court and, while steeped in the Hermetic “sacred science,”
they laid down the foundations of modern astronomy (Marshall 2006). Even the key
architects of “the Scientific Revolution,” founder-chemist Robert Boyle (1627–1691)
and the polymathic Isaac Newton (1643–1727), were alchemists at different stages of
their lives (cf. Read 1957). Indeed, Newton intriguingly spent much time pondering
the Emerald Tablet and experimenting in alchemy (Dobbs 1984). His apparent
breakdown, leading him to move from his University of Cambridge laboratory to the
London Mint, may have been caused by mercury poisoning.
The so-called bright light of the “Age of Reason” sent alchemy as a practical science
underground. Like Gnosticism, it met challenges from theologians and the philosoph-
ical establishment, though even in its lost reputation, even deprecation as occultist,
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Figure 36.1 The Emerald Tablet in Johann Daniel Mylius, Basilica Philosophica (1618)
gives the cosmology of alchemy, particularly symbolizing the macrocosm and the
microcosm, and the Great Work. The alchemist is in the middle at the bottom
it still became influential in esoteric and mystical circles of the West in recent cen-
turies (see Waite 1888; Evola 1995), particularly among Theosophists, Rosicrucians,
Freemasons, and also Jungians.
Behind appearances, alchemy is not only concerned with the transmutation of
matter, but is a process of purification and refinement of the self. Indeed, it was a
Hermetic Gnosis that the realm of matter is not separated from that of the spirit,
making perfect sense of the alchemical quest to discover the universal elixir or
Philosopher’s Stone which would cure all ills, prolong life and eventually bring about
immortality. The true alchemist is not primarily interested in material wealth (or exo-
teric work) but in in self-realization (the esoteric), in gaining knowledge so that she
or he can be at one with the cosmos. As the modern alchemist Gerard Dorn still will-
fully provokes: “Transform yourself from dead stones to living philosophical stones!”
(Marshall 2001: 355). “As above, so below.”
REFERENCES
Abt, Theodor (ed.), with Marie-Louise von Franz (comm.). 2006. Book of the Explanation of
Symbols: Kitāb Ḥall ar-Rumūz. Zurich: Living Human Heritage.
Black, John. 2000. The Four Elements in Plato’s Timaeus. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen.
Bernoulli, Rudolf. 1960. “Spiritual Development as Reflected in Alchemy and Related
Disciplines.” Joseph Campbell (ed.). Spiritual Disciplines. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul: 305–40.
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Dobbs, Betty. 1984. The Foundation of Newton’s Alchemy. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Evola, Julius, 1995. The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art (trans.
Edward Rehmus). Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International.
Franz, Marie- Louise von. 1980. Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the
Psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Grimes. Shannon. 2006. “Zosimus of Panopolis: Alchemy, Nature, and Religion in Late
Antiquity.” Doctoral dissert., Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY.
Haage, Bernard. 2006. “Alchemy II; Antiquity-12th Century.” Wouter Hanegraaff et al. (eds.).
Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill: vol. 1, 16–34.
Holmyard, Eric. 1957. Alchemy. Harmondsworth: Pelican.
Hopkins, Arthur John. 1934. Alchemy: Child of Greek Philosophy. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Jung, Carl. 1995. Jung on Alchemy (ed. Nathan Schwarz-Salant). Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
King, Hugh. 1956. “Aristotle without Prima Materia.” Journal of the History of Ideas 17
(3): 370–89.
Linden, Stanton (ed.). 2003. The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton.
Lindsay, Jack. 1970. The Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt. London: Frederick
Muller.
Marshall, Peter. 2001. The Philosopher’s Stone: A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy.
London: Macmillan (for glossary, symbols, and bibliography, see pp. 496–525).
——— 2006. The Theatre of the World: Alchemy, Astrology and Magic in Renaissance Prague.
London: Harvill Secker (for other editions [2007, 2006] look for The Mercurial Emperor: The
Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague and The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy
and Astrology in Renaissance Prague. London: Pimlico; New York: Walker).
Meyer, Marvin (ed.). 1999. The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook of Sacred Texts. Philadelphia:
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Myllikoski, Matti. 2008. “Cerinthus.” Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen (eds.). A Companion
to Second-Century Christian “Heretics.” Leiden: Brill: 213–46.
Patai, Raphael. 1994. The Jewish Alchemists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Read, John. 1957. Through Alchemy to Chemistry. London: G. Bell.
Sivin, Nathan. 1980. “The Theoretical Background of Laboratory Alchemy.” Joseph Needham
(ed.). Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: vol. 5,
210–305.
Stephens, John. 2016. Ancient Mediterranean Religions: Myth, Ritual and Religious Experience.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Thorndike, Lynn. 1923, 1934. A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. New York:
Macmillan: vols. 2, 3, 4.
—— —1934. “Magic, Witchcraft, Astrology and Alchemy.” John Bury (ed.). Cambridge
Mediaeval History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: vol. 8: 660–87.
Tilton, Hereward. 2003. The Quest for the Phoenix: Spiritual Alchemy and Rosicrucianism in
the Work of Count Michael Maier. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Waite, Arthur. 1888. Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers. London: G. Redway.
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——— 1972. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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MODERN: WEST, EAST, AND

CURRENT ISSUES
EUROPE AND THE WEST

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“GNOSIS” AS TERM AND CONCEPT

IN THE ESOTERIC MOVEMENTS
OF THE MODERN WEST: AN ATTEMPT
AT PERIODIZATION
Antoine Faivre
Translated by Korshi Dosoo
“E sotericism” has at least five meanings (Faivre 2012: 3–7), one of which, common
but too general, is that of secret knowledge reserved for the initiated. We under-
stand it here in the sense of the “esoteric movements of the modern West” (“modern”
to designate the period which stretches from the Renaissance to our times), an object
of study constructed by historians from empirical observations, and not from a philo-
sophical or religious model which had been postulated a priori. Sufficiently specific
for three university chairs to be dedicated to its study, it includes the currents of
thought among which figure, from the end of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries,
Alexandrian Neo-Hermeticism, Christian Kabbalah, so-called “speculative” alchemy
and astrology, Rosicrucianism, Christian theosophy, and thence their continuations
into the eighteenth century, and later the movement known as “Occultism” (Faivre
2012: 7–9). It is these that are intended when, for the sake of brevity, we write
“Western esotericism,” or “esoteric Literature,” or even simply “esotericism.”
The term “Gnosticism” does not appear until the seventeenth century, more pre-
cisely, it seems, in 1669, under the pen of the Cambridge Neo-Platonician Henry
More (1614–1687), and is used during the modern period (Hanegraaff 2007: 791)
to designate a group of authors and schools (called “Gnostic”) which flourished in
the Christianity of Late Antiquity (Hanegraaff 2007: 791). “Gnosis” also refers, more
generally, to a salvific knowledge of an intellectual nature, and it is roughly in this way
that it was understood by certain religious thinkers of the early centuries of our era,
such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen. In the context of monotheism, this know-
ledge often concerned a sort of revelation within the revelation of Scripture. Finally,
in the modern contexts, whether or not they are linked directly to the Religions of the
Book, “gnosis” designates more broadly a mode of knowledge which places an accent
on the “experiential,” the mythic, and the symbolic, rather than dogmatic or discur-
sive forms of knowledge (Mahé and Poirier 2007; cf. Vieillard-Baron 1999).
In fact, what I present here relates to the presence of “gnosis” in the field of eso-
tericism (in the sense, let us recall, of “esoteric movements of the modern West”).
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410
— Antoine Faivre —
This will consist of demonstrating first that, understood positively, the term begins
to appear in the nineteenth century, thus late –and tentatively –in the vocabulary
of esotericism. Thence, I will present the state of its more clearly evident presence
in the twentieth century, above all in its second half. Finally, I will present some
examples of philosophers and historians of the twentieth and twenty-first cen-
turies who, without being themselves “esotericists,” each constructed in their own
fashion “gnosis” which included, to a greater or lesser extent, the aforementioned
movements.
TH E TENTATIVE APPEARANCE O F “ G NO S IS ” IN A
POSI TIVE SENSE IN THE C O NTE X T O F E S OTE RIC
MOVEMENTS OF THE M O D E RN W E S T
Taken in its sense with positive connotations, “gnosis” remained, until the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, almost completely absent from the esoteric vocabu-
lary, except to designate ancient Gnosticism, which was generally considered as
belonging among the heresies. Moreover, what those –Protestant or Catholic –who
represented the movements we call “esoteric” would understand by Gnosticism was
too marked by dualism and “anti-cosmic” (not to mention docetic) tendencies to
be acceptable or useful, while they, by a large majority, made a large place in their
philosophies for Nature, considered as endowed with its own life, and bearing
symbols, “signatures” to decipher, and in no way rejecting “the world,” they were
thus rather “cosmicists” or, to use a convenient English term, world-affirming rather
than world-denying.
On the other hand, it is in part due to their its postive cosmicist orientation that the
Alexandrian Hermetism of the second and third centuries (in particular the Corpus
Hermeticum, attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus) experienced in the
Renaissance the extraordinary renewal of interest that it did, with such authors as
Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), to the extent
of leading to the emergence of a relatively specific esoteric current, the form known
as “Neo-Alexandrian Hermetism.” That said, as Gilly has noted (1992: 104), those
authors, such as Paracelsus, were not aware of the fact that the Corpus Hermeticum
appeared in the gnostic mileu of early Christianity. Besides, Marsilio Ficino and
Ludovico Lazarelli (1447– 1500) as well, in their translations of the Corpus
Hermeticum, do not seem to have made any specific remark about the term “gnosis,”
which they quite simply translated as cognitio (Hanegraaff 2015).
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in movements such as Paracelcism,
and in the so-called “speculative” alchemy and astrology, Rosicrucianism, Christian
Theosophy, whose popularity increased with the thought of Jacob Böhme (1575–
1624), it seems we never encounter the term “gnosis,” except employed in a pejora-
tive sense. Thus, the Lutheran minister Daniel Colberg (1659–1698), in his Das
Platonisch-Hermetisches [sic] Christenthum (“Platonic- Christian Christianity”
[1690–1691]), accused most of the representatives of these currents of being secret
gnostics (Gilly 1992: 401). A most marked exception, also found at the end of the
seventeenth century, is the celebrated and voluminous German work of another
erudite Lutheran (and theosopher), Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), dedicated to
an “impartial history of the Churches and the heresies from the beginning of the
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— “ G n o s i s ” i n We s t e r n e s o t e r i c m o ve m e n t s —
New Testament to the Year of Christ 1688” (Unpartheyische Kirchen-und Ketzer-

Historie [1688]), which appeared between 1699 and 1700. He consecrated one
of its chapters to defending “gnosis” –understood as “Gnosticism” –against the
deplorable calumnies of which it had always been the object, and attempted to
blur the differences between its doctrines and those of the established Churches.
As background, we may nonetheless note an example of an apology for Gnosticism
(in this case, for Valentinism) under the pen of a Christian theosopher, Abraham
von Franckenberg (1593–1652), in his writing Theophrastia Valentiniana, dating
to 1629, a text that remained unprinted until Arnold published it in 1703 (Gilly
1992: 425–32; Hanegraaff 1999: 508; 2007: 794). In many other chapters of his
Ketzer-Historie, Arnold also took up the defence of Paracelcism, Rosicrucianism,
and Theosophy against their detractors. Certainly, nowhere did he speak of a
“Gnosis” understood as an abstract philosophical or religious category; how-
ever, the fact that he treated at the same time Gnosticism and movements such as
Theosophy with apologetic care could only encourage his many contemporary and
future readers to consider them both from a common perspective.
In the Enlightenment, the criticism directed at religious institutions was accom-
panied by the interest of philosophers and historians in the authors of Gnosticism,
which encouraged the use of “gnosis” (and of “gnostics”) less to designate these
movements themselves than as interpretive categories referring to diverse philo-
sophical and religious movements, including esotericism. Nonetheless, this semantic
slippage does not appear to have taken place in a marked fashion before the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century. To the best of our knowledge, the most characteristic
example in this period is found in the works of an author who was also the principal
representative of Christian theosophy: Franz von Baader (1765–1841), the Munich
exegete of Paracelsus, Böhme, as well as of the eighteenth-century theosopher Louis-
Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803). Baader was also the colleague of Friedrich
Schelling (1775–1854) and of Georg W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). In an introduction,
dated to 1 July 1828, to his “Lectures on Speculative Dogmatics,” he wrote:
Moreover, since true gnosis is not a row of concepts (Begriffe), but is made up of
a circle of them, it hardly matters from which concept we begin the exposition, it
rather matters to introduce each of them into the centre, from whence this con-
cept is necessarily brought back in a regressive or anticipatory fashion to all the
other ones –an introduction, indeed, that shows to be the only systematic –prac-
tical and essential –way of going about it.
(Baader, Vorlesungen über spekulative Dogmatik,
in Sämtliche Werke [Hoffmann], vol. 8, p. 11)
What he meant by “the true gnosis” was Christian theosophy, which he opposed both
to the theologians of his time and the philosophy of Hegel. And in 1832, at the end of
his “Course of Social Philosophy,” after having laid out the principal components of
the myth of the Fall (a myth in which he believed) according to Böhme, he ended with
these words which, with a few small changes, repeated his declaration of 1828: “True
Gnosis is a circle which one does not grasp little by little, but only immediately; one
thing always leads to Everything Else” (Vorlesungen über Societätsphilosophie, in
Sämtliche Werke, vol. 14, p. 160).
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412
The first of these two texts is from 1828. This was the same year that the work
of the Protestant historian Jacques Matter (1791– 1864), entitled Histoire critique
du Gnosticisme et de son influence sur les sectes religieuses et philosophiques des six
premiers siècles de l’ère chrétienne (“Critical History of Gnosticism and its influence
on the religious and philosophical groups of the first six centuries of the Christian
Era”), appeared. The position of Matter in regard to Gnosticism was generally posi-
tive. He used the terms “gnosis” and “gnosticism” indifferently: he took this notion as
bringing back a “third system” situated between polytheism in decline and Christianity
originated from Judaism, namely, a form of eclecticism, mainly made of the introduc-
tion, into Christianity, of former speculations (of an oriental, Egyptian, Greek, or Jewish
kind) adopted by the Platonists–in other words, a strongly Hellenized Christianity
(Histoire, vol. 1, p. v). He did not ask what a universal gnosis could or should be, but it
is significant that he was also interested enough in Christian theosophy to write a work
on Saint-Martin, and then another on Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). The term
“esotericism” appeared in his book on Gnosticism; he spoke, indeed, of an “esotericism
of the [ancient] Gnostics.” By this, he simply meant aspects of their “secret teachings”
bearing, among the ancient Gnostics, on a kind of higher knowledge reserved for an
elite (Histoire, vol. 1, pp. 12–13; vol. 2, p. 368; cf. Laurant 1993: 19). It seems that this
later substantive (here, ésotérisme) was used for the first time in French by him (Laurent
1992: 19; 1993: 40–1), and as Monika Neugebauer-Wölk explains (2012), the first
occcurrence of the German term Esoterik appears in 1792 under the pen of Johann
Philipp Gabler, who used it in his edition of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s Urgeschichte
(vol. 2, 1792). The fact that Matter consecrated other writings to Theosophers was to
later encourage the frequent synonymy of “gnosis” and “esotericism.”
In 1835, only three years after the 1832 text of Baader and seven years after the
publication of Matter’s history of Gnosticism, an historical treatise written in German
appeared in Tübingen, written by the historian of theology Ferdinand Christian
Baur (1792–1860) and consecrated to Die Christliche Gnosis, oder die christliche
Religions-Philosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (“Christian Gnosis, or
the Christian Philosophy of the Religion considered in its Historical Development”).
Baur endeavored to demonstrate the existence of a continuity of inspiration from
Late Antiquity (in this case, from Gnosticism) to German philosophy of the nine-
teenth century (notably that of Hegel), by way of Böhme in the seventeenth –des-
pite the differences separating Gnosticism and Christian theosophy (Vieillard-Baron
1999: 355–60). An entire chapter (“Christliche Gnosis,” pp. 557–611) is dedicated
to Böhme. Like Baader, Baur attempted to demarcate and promote the idea of a true
philosophy of religion, understood as a sort of absolute knowledge. But although,
according to him, it found its highest point in Hegelianism, for Baader, on the other
hand, who was rather more anti-Hegelian, this philosophy must necessarily remain
dependent on Paracelcism, alongside the theosophy of Böhme on the one hand and
that of Saint-Martin on the other.
Thus, in the wake of Arnold, Matter, Baur, and Baader, there was an increasing ten-
dency to use “gnosis” in a positive sense, and as a synonym of “esotericism.” “Gnosis,”
however, continued to be relatively rare in the esoteric literature of the nineteenth
century, represented in a large measure from the 1860s by the so-called occultist
current which began to flourish with the principal works of the French author Eliphas
Lévi (1810–1875). One of the first notable cases of this use is found in the writings
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413
of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), who, in her Isis Unveiled (1877), made a
distinction between Gnosticism and that which she called “Gnosis”:
[…] if the Gnostics were destroyed, the Gnosis, based on the secret science of
sciences, still lives […] The ancient Kabala, the Gnosis, or traditional secret
knowledge, was never without its representatives in any age or country.
(vol. 2, p. 38)
The initiates who had passed it on from age to age, she added, were Moses, Plato,
Philo, Pythagoras, Jesus, Elijah, Hermes Trismegistus, and others. In the first issue of
her journal, The Theosophist (dated 1 October 1879), she spoke again of a sort of
universal Gnosis, which she had decided to call “Theosophy” and which had been
widespread since Antiquity, preserved by the initiated in every civilization and culture.
These two citations are interesting for two reasons. First, the works of Blavatsky have
exercised, up to the present day, a considerable influence in esotericism and popular
culture more broadly, an influence reinforced by the existence of the Theosophical
Society, co-founded by her in 1875. On the other hand, these two citations testify
to the de-Christianization of a large part of Western esotericism in favor of Eastern
and neo-pagan influences, although Blavatskian theosophy had only fairly marginal
links with Christian theosophy. It is now current to use “theosophism” (in French,
“théosophisme”) to refer to the Theosophical Society and its teachings, in order to
avoid confusing these latter with the Christian theosophical literature (that of the
“theosophers”) which preceded it.
“ GNOSIS” IN THE TW E NTIE TH AND

TWENTY-F IRST CENTURIE S IN E S OTE RIC AND
NEO-E SOTERIC L ITE RATU RE
The occultist current persisted into the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite
the influence of Blavtasky’s writings, occultists continued to display little inclination
to speak of “Gnosis” in a general sense, while in this period academic research on the
subject of Gnosticism progressed rapidly, encouraging at the same time greater consid-
eration of it from the perspective of its specificity. They used this term, largely, to refer
to the Gnostics of Antiquity, seeing in them the repositories of a treasure of wisdom
and truth stifled by the great churches. But they also had a tendency to annex these
Gnostics to their body of esoteric source material. For example, the occultist Joanny
Bricaud (1884–1934) wrote in 1911, in the journal L’Initiation, the organ of the Ordre
Martiniste (No. 1, p. 5): “Gnosis constitutes the esoteric doctrine of all the ancient
religions.” In principle, the Ordre Martiniste, founded in 1891 by Papus (pen name of
Gérard Encausse, 1865–1916), had claimed to be a part of Christian theosophy; thus, in
1892, by virtue of an agreement signed between, on the one hand, the Gnostic Church
founded by Jules Doinel, and, on the other part, the Ordre Martiniste, which was an
avowal of an “essence gnostique” –a characteristic expression –with all of its members
being declared ipso facto members of this Church. In its rebirth in 1953, the journal
(which had not been published since 1914) hastened to reaffirm this (L’Initiation [3]‌
1954, p. 129) and to publish (from 1953 to 1960) a long series of contributions from
a certain T. Robert, (Gnostic) bishop of Samaria, under the title “La Gnose chrétienne.”
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41
And the interpretation, still notable today, by the Freemasons, of the Masonic
letter G as “Gnosis” dates back to that literature of the twentieth century, an inter-
pretation that esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), founder of the Anthroposophic
Society, had adopted in certain of his rituals (Zander 2007: 997). Equally, on the
subject of rituals, and within an esoteric horizon very different from that of Steiner,
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) formulated in 1913 a Gnostic Mass, marked by sexual
symbolism, and which became one of the principal rites of the Ordo Templi Orientis,
of which this magus was the head from 1923 until his death (Pasi 2005: 904). Note
as well the Fraternitas Saturni, founded in 1926 by Eugen Grosche, which published
a periodical entitled Vita Gnosis, was also strongly marked by elements imported
from Gnosticism, along with sexual magic (and anti-Christianism) (Hakl 2005: 380).
The notion of gnosis still represented a challenge for the established religious
institutions, the more so since besides esoteric literature proper it found itself to be
very positively used. For example, at the beginning of the nineteeth century a philoso-
pher from Budapest, Eugen Heinrich Schmitt (1851–1916), attempted (in Die Gnosis,
1903) to unite a “gnostic elite” around a program dedicated (as the very titles and
sub-titles of one of his works already suggest) to “the Gnosis” –that of the first
Gnostics. He considered this program to be able to create the “basis of a vision of
the world corresponding to a noble culture,” and he defended the idea of a kind of
Christian pantheism likely to create or reestablish an equilibrium between God and
Satan. This program struck a chord among some esotericists, notably Rudolf Steiner
and Theodor Reuss (1779–1923, a founder of the Ordo Templi Orientis). Thus, that
notion of gnosis had progressively become pervasive enough in the imaginary world
of the occultist current proper to trigger the creation, by Jules-Benoît Doinel (1842–
1902), of a Gnostic Church, and the interest of René Guénon (1886–1951).
Guénon, who frequented diverse occultist milieux but distanced himself from
them early on, published many of his first articles in the revue La Gnose, which
flourished from 1909 to 1912, and which presented itself as “L’organe officiel de
l’Église Gnostique universelle.” This Church, created in 1890 by Doinel in Paris,
based its teachings on Catharism and elements of Gnosticism. Now, Guénon did not
set himself up as a spokesperson for Gnosticism, and he did not hesitate to detach
himself completely from the Gnostic Church. In a 1909 article for La Gnose, on “La
Gnose et les écoles spiritualistes” (“Gnosis and the Spiritualist Churches”), he opened
with the declaration, “Gnosis, in its largest and most elevated sense is knowledge; the
true Gnosticism cannot thus be a particular school or system, but it has to be above
all the search for the whole Truth” (Guénon 1976: 176; Laurant 1992: 179). He
always maintained this position, without, however, regularly using the word itself. In
the same period of time, the Englishman George Robert Stowe Mead (1863–1933),
translator and exegete not only of the Corpus Hermeticum (cf. his major work,
Thrice Great Hermes, 1906) but also of many Gnostic texts, and who was a member
of the Theosophical Society, made no secret of his admiration for Guénon in these
texts. To give one example, he wrote in 1909 that certain problems posed by the
ancient Gnostics were “still of the greatest importance for all lovers of the Living
Gnosis, whether concerned with the Christian tradition, or any other form of lived
expérience” (in Goodrick-Clarke 2005: 165).
The terrain was thus increasingly favorable for the use of “esotericism” and “gnosis”
as related terms serving to designate either the modern currents properly termed
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esoteric, or an ensemble of traditions which had existed for at least two millennia,
or indeed, by extension, a general mode of knowledge (first discussed above), which
placed an accent on the “experiential,” the mythic, the symbolic, rather than dog-
matic and discursive forms of expression. The fashion for these two terms from the
middle of the twentieth century would defy any attempt to provide an exhaustive list
of their occurrences. Let us then confine ourselves to presenting a few examples of
the use of “gnosis” from this period until the present day, chosen from among those
which seem the most important in the field of esotericism, taking them, on the one
hand, from esoteric literature stricto sensu, and on the other, from movements which
are marginal with respect to these, but which clearly have links to them, and which
we will call “neo-esoteric” (it being understood that the boundary between these two
categories is at times porous).
Regarding esoteric literature proper, we may think of that of esoteric orders –many
still in existence –such as the Lectorium Rosicrucianim (also called the International
School of the Golden Rosycross, or “École Internationale de la Rose-Croix d’Or”),
founded under this name in 1945 by Jan van Rijckenborgh (a pseudonym of Jan
Leene, 1896– 1968), which attempted to reconcile the traditions of Christianity,
Rosicrucianism, and Theosophy with elements of Gnosticism strongly marked by
dualism (Introvigne 2005: 993–4). But this literature seems to be represented by a few
authors independent of any official order, yet still remarkable for the philosophical
interest and diffusion of their work. Among these, Valentin Tomberg and Raymond
Abellio are worth consideration.
The Baltic writer Valentin Tomberg (1900–1973) is known above all for his work
Meditations on the Tarot, which first appeared in German in 1973 and thereafter in
many other languages. Despite its title, it can barely be described as a book dedicated
to the Tarot, but is rather a sort of treatment of Western esotericism, in which
Tomberg situates himself, all the while claiming that he, himself, belongs to the trad-
ition of the Roman Catholic Church. What we understand here as “esotericism” he
calls “Christian Hermeticism,” which he defined as the synthesis of mysticism, magic,
and gnosis. Around these three notions, to which he repeatedly returns to inter-
rogate their reciprocal relationships, he develops the majority of his “Tombergian
meditations”: mysticism is the experience of union with Nature, or with the transcen-
dental human self, or with a living God. Magic is the application of that which the
mystic contemplates and what the gnostic understands by revelation. Gnosis itself is
“the contribution of mystical experience to understanding and Memory” (Tomberg
1972: 110, 173, 218, 353, 437, 540). If Tomberg is not the only Christian esotericist
of his time to use the term “gnosis,” he is one of the rare examples to have dedicated
a systematic treatment to it. We should note on this point that in his trilogy entitled
Gnôsis, which has never ceased to generate numerous and fervent admirers, Boris
Mouravieff (1890–1969) barely used the term “gnosis” except in the title; essen-
tially, as indicated by the sub-title, his book is consecrated to the teaching of spiritual
realization in the light of “the esoteric tradition of oriental orthodoxy” (Mouravieff
1961–1965).
The texts on which the Frenchman Raymond Abellio (1907– 1986) exercised
his reflections belong, for example, to speculative astrology, Jewish Kabbalah, the I
Ching, and the Tarot. But he kept his distance from the traditions he studied, in order
to elaborate from them a philosophy capable of surpassing them by drawing from
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them all –a philosophy which was itself situated in the tradition of Edmund Husserl,
and not at all that of René Guénon. The very title of his book The End of Esotericism
(Abellio 1973) is meaningful in this regard. In fact, his goal was essentially to con-
struct that which he called “a gnosis,” a project he followed in many of his major
works, such as Approaches to the new Gnosis (1981) and Manifesto of the new
Gnosis (1989). He attempted to discard the “questionable doctrinal contents which
did indeed vary strongly over the course of centuries,” and defined gnosis as “an
openness of being to universal interdependence and the eternal présent” (1989: 25).
Of this state of illumination, “the active presence of absolute Being and of its ‘par-
ticular’ manifestation in every being,” he wrote that it corresponded to “enstasy” in
the sense in which it was used by the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade
(1907–1986), “in opposition to ‘ecstasy,’ ” which designated, also according to Eliade,
mystical illumination (Abellio 1973: 18). And although he resolutely maintained
a distinction between “mystic” experience and Gnosis, he saw in Meister Eckhart
(1260–1327) “the distant precursor to modern western gnosis” (Abellio 1989: 29).
Among the numerous other texts and collective works with some interest in theory
and less interest in terms of philosophical speculation which have appeared recently,
we may cite André Wautier, who has written a Dictionary of the Gnostics and the
Principle Initiates (Dictionnaire des gnostiques et des principaux initiés) (published
online) in which he haphazardly lists representatives of Gnosticism and a number of
esoteric currents, and Yves-Fred Boisset (Director of the journal L’Initiation, Organe
officiel de l’Ordre Martiniste), who on his site “Martinisme” writes that “the avatars
of Christian Gnosis bear the successive names of Hermeticism, (Spiritual) Alchemy,
and, in the guise terms of synthesis, Rosicrucianism.”
Apart from such orders as the Lectorium Rosicrucianum, and authors such as
Tomberg or Abellio, two other cultural phenomena appeared in the second half of
the twentieth century within this panorama, which may be qualified as “neo-esoteric”
in the sense described above. These are, first, Perennialism, a tradition which may
be characterized as metaphysical, and the nebulous cultural phenomenon called the
“New Age.” Guénon, whose idea of Gnosis is presented above, died in 1951, having
continued his work as a thinker and author to the very end. He is the most illustrious
representative of the current known as “Perennialism” (or École traditionnelle), an
adjective which refers to the idea of a philosophia perennis, or “Primordial Tradition,”
supposedly underlying all of the diverse religious traditions of humanity. Resolutely
anti-modern, this current was implanted in several countries, in particular the United
States, France, Italy, and Romania, with this last sometimes referred to as “the most
guénonian country in the world,” having produced authors such as Michel Valsan
(1907–1974) and Vasile Lovinescu (1905–1984).
The most important individual to follow Guénon within this current was the
Swiss-American Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998), who never ceased to write and
to exercise a strong cultural influence. “Gnosis” was one of the key terms of his
vocabulary from 1957, the date of the publication of his work Sentiers de Gnose
(“Paths of Gnosis”), when he presented the term, as he would often in his works that
followed, as purely intellectual suprarational knowledge, whose expressions over
the course of history constitute this previously mentioned philosophia perennis,
a veritable “sacred science,” which alone allowed the spiritual reality underlying
all spiritual traditions –esoteric and otherwise –to emerge. Christianity, whose
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sapiential aspect he thought had been ignored for too long, could be, considered
from the angle of its metaphysical structure, nothing but this very science, know-
ledge itself, according to his scheme. For him, gnosis and esoterism (he avoids
using esotericism) are often synonyms, a theme he demonstrates in his French
work L’Esotérisme comme principe et comme voie (“Esoterism as a Principle and a
Path”) (1978; cf. Nasr 1981: 60). It was also under his influence that a collection of
texts by Perennialist authors (including, of course, Guénon and Schuon) appeared
in 1974, edited as The Sword of Gnosis (Needleman 1974). Among other French
authors belonging to this current, Jean Borella, Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Nancy, is prominent, who kept his distance equally from Guénon
and Schuon and endeavored to define what was, according to him, the Christian
“true Gnosis” (Borella 2007). And among the French who followed this current,
we should finally mention Jean Biès, who, inspired by Tomberg (as well as Quispel
and Koslowski, cf. infra), presented in 1987 his idea of “gnosis” as one of the three
terms of a triad, in his book Arts, gnose et alchimie: Trois sources de régénérescence
(“Art, Gnosis and Alchemy: Three Sources of Regeneration,” 1987).
As for the New Age, its close relationship with esotericism can be explained, to a
large extent, by its largely cosmicist orientation, which goes together with a marked
interest in the person considered individually hic et nunc, and, as a consequence,
in psychology. Thus, it is above all the Analytical Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung
(1875–1961) which, more or less correctly understood, flourished in the New Age
movement (Hanegraaff 1996: 496–513). Jung was himself interested in the Gnostic
writings of Late Antiquity as well as in alchemical treatises. He thought he detected
in this literature a frame of mind which might allow the implementation of a psy-
chological process which would be beneficial for the individual, which he called, in
this context, the process of individuation (Ewers 1988; cf. Singer 1992). His text
Septem sermones ad mortuos (1916 [1996]) met with great success wittin the New
Age, mostly after its English edition in 1967. Therein, Jung speaks of himself under
the pseudonym of Basilides, the Gnostic of the second century of our era (see also
Jung 2009; and cf. chs. 2, 50).
The presence of Jung in these milieux animated by the need of what is commonly
called the “experiential” has played a large role in the success of the word “gnosis,”
and triggered a marked interest in the “gnoses” of Late Antiquity. The Nag Hammadi
Library, notably, is the object of a strong fascination. The Gospel of Thomas and
The Gospel of Truth, in particular, are considered in these milieux as texts eventually
likely to reveal the “esoteric” meaning of canonical texts (the relevance of these latter
being, by the same token, minimized) and likely to bring us an “added soul” (“un
supplément d’âme”). Some scholars, mostly in America, have set out to bring up to
date this kind of romanticizied gnosticism. In this respect, the works of Eliane Pagels,
in The Gnostic Gospels (1979), and other writings that are dedicated to the Gospel
of Thomas, have exerted an influence which should not be underestimated.
To this, many other elements may be added. In the English-speaking world, Roberts
Avens (1923–2006, Professor at Iona College), for example, in his New Gnosis
(1984), constructed his own philosophy as a synthesis of that of Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976), the works of the neo-Jungian psychologist James Hillman (1926–
2011), the opus of Henry Corbin (1903–1978), who studied the Islamic theosophers,
and to a lesser extent Christian theosophy, in particular that of Swedenborg (cf.
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Burns 2007: 276–85). Another example is Peter Wilberg, whose book From New
Age to New Gnosis: The Contemporary Significance of a New Gnostic Spirituality
appeared in 2003 and experienced considerable success. Although he purported to
criticize the spirituality of the New Age, it appears to us that he certainly belongs
within this movement. Thus he strongly advocated the revelations received from
the entity named Seth through channeling (a mediumistic practice, very character-
istic of the New Age; cf. Hanegraaff 1996: 23–41; Hammer 2001: 427–30). He
also actively recommended the reading of the work of Jane Roberts (the medium of
Seth), Seth Speaks, published in 1972 (Roberts and Butts 1972). Wilberg drew from
the revelations above all the concept of the necessity of an expanded psychology,
resting upon the idea that our personality or “ego” is simply the tip of a deeper
spiritual reality, which encompasses countless other human personalities. Among
the esotericists whom he integrated into his synthesis George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
(1866–1949) figures, and is found placed, curiously, next to Karl Marx and (here
again) Martin Heidegger.
Certainly, there are churches and organizations, either more or less structured,
which, on the model of the Gnostic Church of Jules-Benoît Doinel (see supra), have
explicitly reclaimed the Gnosticism of Late Antiquity, and which for this reason do
not enter into our discussion. Let us give a few examples, on the other hand, of those
which, displaying a New Age spirit, belong to a greater or lesser extent to esoteri-
cism: the Ecclesia Gnostica, and the International Gnostic Movement (I.G.M.) (see
Hanegraaff 1992b: 19–20; Smith 1995).
With relatively limited relations with the Theosophical Society and its teachings,
the Ecclesia Gnostica, founded in 1970, claims to integrate elements of Gnosticism
while avoiding the adoption of a dualist, “anti-cosmicist” position. It draws from
Buddhism, Jung, and esoteric traditions such as spiritual alchemy, and Rosicrucianism.
Its principal spokesperson is Stephan Hoeller, author of articles of a neo-Jungian
orientation consecrated to Kabbalah, alchemy, and the Tarot, and a book consecrated
to gnosticism (Hoeller, esp. 2002). He is perhaps “the most prolific commentator on
Thomas and Gnosticism outside the academy” (Burns 2007: 268, 270). In fact, on the
model of numerous other commentators within the New Age movement, he places
great importance on all of the Gnostic writings discovered at Nag Hammadi, and
attempts to interpret the “anti-cosmic” dualism that they often contain (particularly
notable in the Sethian texts), in a sense that seemed to him more compatible with a
holistic vision of the world.
The International Gnostic Movement (also called the Gnostic Association of
Anthropological and Cultural Studies) –created in 1962 by Samaël Aun Weor
(1917–1977), a Columbian living in Mexico –numbers at present up to eight million
members and is dedicated to the practice of “gnostic knowledge” in many fields of
human action, such as science, philosophy, mysticism, psychology, and metaphysics.
“Gnosis” is presented here as the synthesis, the summum of human spiritual
aspirations across the centuries. It is the very heart of the great religions, the highest
philosophy, the science of creation, and the sublime Art which transmits them. The
I.G.M. pushes syncretism very far, encouraging the study of a universal psychological
principle of “self-realization of the Being,” and of a past made up of tutelary personal-
ities, among whom properly called esotericists belonging to other families play a large
rôle (Weor 2002; and see ch. 58).
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419
Finally, some journals and series having “Gnosis” as part of their title can be seen
operating within the spirit of the New Age. They draw on diverse esoteric traditions.
Such include the journal Gnosis. A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, which
appeared from 1985 to 1999 in California. We find therein numerous articles devoted
to esoteric movements proper, as well as to Perennialism, Jungian psychology, Sufism,
etc. (see Hanegraaff 2009). There is also the series which, published by Editions du
Rocher in Paris, bears the name “Gnose” and already includes dozens of titles, among
which are re-editions of the books of Christian theosophers such as Saint-Martin and
Böhme, placed among other titles. Less known, but characteristic also, is the journal
Gnostica: Esoteric Knowledge for the New Age (in the 1970s), which contains such
different domains as Hasidic wisdom, astrology, Zen, Buddhism, Celtic mythology,
and yoga, to mention a few.
T H E PRESENCE AND AB SEN CE O F E S OTE RICIS M IN

ACAD EMIC CONSTRUCTIONS O F A “ G NO S IS ” IN THE
T W ENTIETH AND TWENTY-F IRS T CE NTU RIE S
Here we address the question of philosophers and academic historians who have
constructed “Gnosis” as an object of study, understanding it, more or less, a part of
esotericism (see Sheppard 1957; Bonardel 1998). Some (such as Gilles Quispel and
Peter Koslowski, who belong to this first category) have constructed it in a spirit not
lacking in apologetic intent; others, with a greater care for strict neutrality.
In his “Introduction” to a collective work in Dutch which appeared in 1987,
dedicated to “Gnosis –or the third element of the European cultural tradition,” and
in several other texts, Gilles Quispel (1916–2006), Professor of Early Christianity at
the University of Utrecht (and a noted specialist in ancient Gnosticism), proposed the
existence of three foundations (symbolized by “Jerusalem, Athens, and Alexandria”)
on which rested our Western culture. These were, according to him, “reason” (that is to
say, rational philosophy and science), faith (in the sense of institutional Christianity),
and “gnosis.” By this last term, which he used in a highly positive sense, he meant a
great number of movements, including Gnosticism and almost all of those which we
call here “esoteric” (Quispel 1988; with Ritman 1988).
Again in 1988, and in a comparable spirit, Peter Koslowski (1952– 2012),
Professor of Philosophy at several German universities, proposed another tripartite
division, which had a more limited, though still rather broad, focus. This addressed
a “triad of philosophy, mysticism, and gnosis,” consisting of three modes of thinking
of and experiencing the totality and unity of Being (we have thus, after Tomberg, Biès
and Quispel, a fourth example of a tripartition of which “gnosis” is one element).
Philosophy is the love of truth; mysticism is a feeling of unity; gnosis is the quest
for a “saving knowledge” (Erlösungswissen) capable of giving answers to our sense
of feeling like strangers in this world (Koslowski 1988a: 9). Koslowski elaborates
that this gnosis is that which he understands to be better represented by Christian
theosophy than by Gnosticism, by reason of the polytheistic and pantheistic elem-
ents in the latter (1988b; 2001). In fact, he is particularly interested in Franz von
Baader, to whom he dedicated several Works (see 1988c; 1993). In this vein, more
or less marked by an apologetic spirit, let us cite also Harold Bloom, Professor of
Humanities at Yale University and a very well-known literary critic, who attempted
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420
to demonstrate (notably in Omens of the Millennium, 1996) that the origin of the
fascination for gnosis felt by North Americans can be found in Gnosticism, Christian
hermeticism, Sufi theosophy, and Jewish Kabbalah. A self-identifying Gnostic, the
gnosis he proclaims is understood as a refined form of these traditions, of which he
retains only that which seems to him the most valuable for humanity in general and
for our time in particular.
Finally, Jeffrey Kripal, Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University (Houston,
Texas), proposes in a challenging book (The Serpent’s Gift, 2006) to reconcile and
even to renew the foundations and the methods of Religious Studies by practicing
what he calls an “academic gnosticism” (that is, a scholarly one) inspired by ancient
Gnostic traditons and likely to respond to the present needs of the said sciences.
Other historians or philosophers belonging to an academic milieu have constructed
“gnosis” as an object of study, but in contrast to these preceding examples they
have usually done so for purely methodological purposes, without this indicating
any personal engagement on their part. Thus, in 1992, Wouter Hanegraaff, who has
since become Professor at the University of Amsterdam, proposed a “dynamic typo-
logical approach to post-gnostic gnosticism.” In 1994, he modified this in an abridged
version of that article, dedicated to “the problem of ‘post-gnostic’ gnosticism,” where
he presented a model in which “three elements: experience, imagination and trans-
formation are necessarily part of any gnostic view of life” (1994: 628). Later, thinking
that such an approach had been too philosopical, even based on certain a priori
principles. he gave a very different version of it in 1998, namely in his article “On
the [intellectual] Construction of ‘Esoteric Traditions’ ” (1998: esp. 42–43). In a later
article again, he reinforced his critical position towards the tripartition proposed by
Quispel (see supra), arguing notably that the distinction between reason, faith, and
gnosis is largely misleading if it is used as a description of historical reality, although
it does have a valid use if understood as an analytical tool that may help distinguish
different kinds of knowledge referred to by both esoteric and non-esoteric authors.
This distinction between a historical/ descriptive and analytical understanding he
considered crucial (Hanegraaff 2008a: 138).
In the same article, he proposed a more fine-grained analysis, which conformed
more closely to historical reality of these three ideas than the Quispellian triad, and
developed notably the idea that “reason” is communicable and verifiable, “faith” is
communicable but not verifiable, and “gnosis” is neither communicable nor vérifiable
(2008a: 140 [table]; cf. 2009). More recently still, three of his articles were dedicated
to the issue of distinctions. First, dealing with the how gnosis is attainable in the
Hermetica, he defended the thesis that these texts (and many other ones from Late
Antiquity) more or less implicitely contain the idea that the acquisition of gnosis went
through a modified state of counsciousness (2008b). Then, dealing with with the
“quest of a higher knowledge,” he called “magnetic gnosis” the quest in which sev-
eral representatives of animal magnetism within the context of German Romanticism
were engaged –“magnetic gnosis” being understood as a particular category of higher
“knowledge and wisdom” bearing on “realities” of the Beyond, and attributed to cer-
tain persons in a state of somnambulic clairvoyance (2010). Finally, in an approach
of a third cultural domain, that of the Renaissance, he has presented a work devoted
to the idea of reason and gnosis from Marsilio Ficino to François Foix de Candale
(1512–1594) (2015).
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421
Dan Merkur (1952–2016), Professor of the Study of Religion at the University

of Toronto, has detailed in his work Gnosis (1993) an idea of gnosis based on his
observations of a range of visionary practices detectable in Western alchemy, as well
as in various Jewish and Islamic traditions –practices often linked to altered states of
counsciousness that are, according to him, brought about by psychotropics. We may
also note in this same tradition of academic neutrality an increasing tendency to jointly
present Gnosticism, gnosis, and esotericism as the titles of research programs, collective
volumes, series, and journals. Thus, in 1998 the collection Gnosis and Hermeticism
from Antiquity to Modern Times appeared (Van den Broek and Hanegraaff), and in
2005 a Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Hanegraaff, Faivre et al.). The
monograph series Gnostica (co-founded Hanegraaff and Garry Trompf), carried on
by at least three academic publishers since 1997 (now Routledge), includes yet goes
beyond modern Western esotericism to look at “the Gnostic World” as we have it in
this volume, as also the highly researched German-language journal Gnostika (from
1996) purports to do.
To situate the last part of this discussion “in context” let me present several
examples of constructions of the idea of gnosis which do not themselves include eso-
tericism, except rarely or indirectly. Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), who was Professor
of Philosophy at Stanford University (among other institutions), took a resolutely
polemic approach. From the 1950s, and in particular in his book The New Science
of Politics (1952), he intended to interpret the great contemporary ideologies, such
as Communism and National Socialism, in the light of Gnosticism, in which he
saw a dangerous form of apocalypticism and millenarianism which encouraged a
struggle for a redemption which was strictly temporal and under human control (see
McKnight 1995: 145–6; Hanegraaff 1998: 29–36). In contrast, in a 1996 article in
English dedicated to “Gnosis as Science and Mysticism,” and also in other works,
Stefan Rossbach, Professor of Political Science at the University of Kent (Canterbury),
exegete and critic of the works of Voegelin, claimed to situate himself historically in
the tradition of Ferdinand Christian Baur (see supra). He marked the advent of the
twentieth century in a non-totalitarian “gnostic spirit,” understood as the way of
emancipation and of health, on an individual and collective level –a way, according
to him, situated in the tradition of such forms of esotericism as, in the Renaissance, the
resurgence of the Corpus Hermeticum and the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria (1534–72).
Raymond Ruyer (1902–1987), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nancy,
in his 1974 book La Gnose de Princeton, on “Scholars in Search of Religion,” as
the sub-title goes, “revealed” the existence of a group of learned physicists who met
in a sort of club, careful to preserve their anonymity, and who developed a phil-
osophy inspired as much by advanced scientific research as by gnosticism. Although
this title was, at best, a work of science-fiction, it was no less the recipient of a certain
success. From a completely different perspective, in 1966 Hans Jonas (1903–1993),
a historian of Gnosticism, attempted to establish, without any polemic intentions, a
parallel between gnosticism, on the one hand, and existentialism, along with modern
nihilism, on the other –the common denominator between these three philosophies
being the feeling which he called “gnostic,” of being “cast” into a strange universe,
our own (the idea of Weltentfremdung) (Jonas 1978; cf. Couliano 1990).
Finally, we see in the academic milieux which may be properly be called “philosoph-
ical” a tendency to apply the term “gnosis” without necessarily giving it an otherwise
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42
“gnostic” or “esoteric” connotation. A first example is the American journal Gnosis (not
to be confused with that mentioned previously), founded in 1973 and presenting itself
as “a journal of philosophy published by students under the auspices of the Department
of Philosophy of Concordia University,” which practically returns, it seems, to the idea
of “gnosis” and “philosophy” as synonyms. A second example: a philosophy collo-
quium entitled “Phénoménologie, gnose, métaphysique” was held in October 1997 at
the University of Paris-IV-Sorbonne and its Proceedings were published under the title
Gnosis: A Philosophical Question (1997). The majority of talks were concerned with
the possibility of constructing models of “philosophical gnosis,” although the word
does not appear in many of them (cf. Depraz and Marquet 2000).
From this overview, it is apparent that an empirical look at the polysemy of
“gnosis” presents a double advantage. First, an approach of this type (nominalist,
let us say) allows us to disassociate ourselves more easily from the temptation to
examine what “gnosis in itself” might be, the “true Gnosis” (which would lead to
an essentialist approach). In fact, the meaning of this word is never anything except
that which it is given by a given author at a given moment. And if we are entitled
to expect them to make clear what he/she intends by using it, it is incumbent on the
interlocutor or reader to respect this choice. “Gnosis” does not belong exclusively to
any one person –neither to esotericists, nor to philosophers, nor to textual historians.
Secondly, to choose a common thread to follow in the history of a discipline or spe-
cialty may lead to unexpected encounters, light up areas hitherto poorly explored,
and allow us to situate “in context” discourses whose relationships to each other were
unclear. This common thread may be a theme, a motif, an image –whose choice may
be at times problematic, running the risk of a form of superficial comparativism –
but if the common thread is a word, it may present rewards nonetheless, as well as a
lesser risk.
Note: the above is a translation of a longer version of the article: «Le terme et la notion
de ‘Gnose’ dans les courants ésotériques occidentaux modernes (Essai de périodisation)».
Jean-Pierre Mahé, Paul-Hubert Poirier, and Madeleine Scopello (eds.). Les Textes de Nag
Hammadi: Histoire des Religions et approches contemporaines: Actes du Colloque inter-
national des 11 et 12 décembre 2008 à l’Institut de France. Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres, 2009: 87–112.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
BYZANTINE AND MODERN

ORTHODOX GNOSIS: FROM
THE ELEVENTH TO THE TWENTY-
FIRST CENTURY
Doru Costache
T he following is of necessity a scanty survey of significant moments in the last mil-

lennium of Orthodox Christian experience. Sometimes divergent, the trends and
figures mentioned here converged in the common aspiration for higher gnosis and the
attainment of human perfection.
MONKS, MYSTICS, AND INTE L L E CTUAL S : THE

ELEVENTH CE NTU RY
At the turn of the second Christian millennium, Byzantine monasticism seems to have
forgotten its prophetic maximalism, becoming conservative. Most monks renounced
the quest for gnosis in favor of formulaic certainties, ritualism, and proclamations
of ephemeral triumphs over the heresies. Worst still, they became oppressors of the
nonconformist, monastic mystics and lay intellectuals alike (Golitzin 1997: 13–21,
29–31; Meyendorff 1987: 54–64). Differing in many respects, the oppressed shared,
however, a desire for knowledge obtained through personal search.
After a brief administrative career in Constantinople, Symeon the New Theologian
(d. 1022) became a monk at Stoudion Monastery under the guidance of a charismatic
elder, who initiated him in the mystical life (McGuckin 2005: 99–100). Symeon after-
wards joined Saint Mamas Monastery, whose abbot he became. Misfortune befell
him there. Some of his spiritually lethargic but very orthodox monks, whom he once
called “pious hypocrites” (Practical and Theological Chapters [=Ch.] 13), accused
him of irreligion, novelty, and heterodoxy. Similar accusations were soon repeated
by a metropolitan bishop, an expert at parroting patristic commonplaces. Symeon
retorted. In Catechetical Discourse [=Cat.] 15.1, he used the analogy of light and
darkness to show how “the divinely inspired word of a spiritual and holy man” was
met with hatred by the ignorant. Elsewhere he conceded that the adversaries were
victims of the invisible enemy (Ch. 6–8). Overall, Cat. shows Symeon torn apart
between affirming the possibility of knowing God’s glory and his care for the recalci-
trant monks. He was less tactful about the aforementioned bishop, whose position he
dismissed in poems and discourses as blind and arrogant.
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— Byzantine and modern Orthodox gnosis —
What matters is that, in polemical and expositional contexts alike, Symeon

articulated Christianity as crowned by a “felt” participation in the divine, associated
with “gnosis and vision” (Hymn 50.193; Epistle 4.488–96, 530–3). With prophetic
boldness, he reminded his contemporaries that, unquestionably (Cat. 29.4; Ch. 60),
the Gospel promised an immediate experience with God, not only future glory. The
fulfillment of this promise was made available to all by the grace of baptism (Cat.
2.5). Grace, however, had to be activated through strenuous ascesis and prayer, which
secured one’s access to divine knowledge by way of an ineffable experience. This
experience meant participation in Christ, who became human so that human beings
become gods through adoption and transformation (Hymn 50.190– 206; Russell
2004: 301–3). As testified by countless saintly lives, from the apostles to the martyrs
to his own elder (Cat. 6.7), the content of divine gnosis as a participatory experi-
ence was the supernatural, radiant vision of Christ’s divine glory through “the soul’s
purified eye” (Hymn 50.213; Ch. 68; Epistle 4.496–503). Gnosis was to be with
Christ and be transformed by the abiding of the Spirit (Epistle 4.503–13), to be dei-
fied –albeit this did not amount to a grasp of divine essence (Alfeyev 2000: 120–1,
157–60). The epistemological outcomes of this transformative experience were two.
First, it meant that nobody could address things divine without possessing the Spirit
(Theological Discourse 1.271–6). Second, the experience of deification enhanced
one’s capacity to comprehend the whole continuum of created existence, from begin-
ning to end, an ability which he detailed in the first two Ethical Discourses. In short,
Symeon’s gnostic trajectory entailed an advance from cultural, epistemological, and
social conformism, also from a derelict personal state, to an existential and intellec-
tual reformation of the self on its Godward way, to then return, enlightened by the
Presence, to cast a clarifying light on realities of this world. Symeon has not ascribed
any function to the curricular disciplines towards this achievement. His younger con-
temporary, Michael Psellos, did.
Representing the intellectuals and perhaps against the same monastic conservatism
that aggrieved Symeon, Psellos (d. c. 1082) turned to Classical learning and Platonism,
particularly its mystical form (Lauritzen 2012: 168–9). A Constantinopolitan poly-
math and teacher of philosophy, tutor to future emperors and later their advisor, and
a political opportunist, Psellos even put on monastic garb for a while and had to
defend himself against the zealots’ accusations of paganism. Credited with reviving
Greek philosophy in Byzantium, alongside Gregory the Theologian, his main sources
were Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Proclus. A keen seeker, Psellos showed interest
in all forms of acquiring knowledge and understanding, from the Classical curric-
ulum to astrology, magic, and esotericism. He subordinated the disciplines to phil-
osophy, variously understood as metaphysics, the occult sciences, and theology.
Often uttering philosophical theories under the guise of Christian doctrine, seemingly
he attempted to reconcile Christianity and Greek philosophy by establishing their
respective competence, the former in theological matters and the latter for the natural
world (Meyendorff 1987: 61–3). Nevertheless, his quest for theological gnosis was
supremely guided by Plato and Proclus, whose wisdom he revealed by elaborating on
both Christian and Classical texts. Indeed, most of his philosophical output was mys-
tically oriented and exegetical in nature. He espoused his interests in tens of treatises,
both large and short (Duffy 2002; Kaldellis 2007: 191–224). One scholar has recently
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analyzed his exegesis on Christ’s transfiguration on Mount Tabor, a scriptural passage

mediated by a Byzantine hymn. The author pointed out Psellos’s view that one sees
according to one’s worthiness and that what was beheld on Tabor were the rays of
divinity, not divinity itself (Lauritzen 2012: 170–2, 174–5). Psellos’s view on Tabor
echoes the Christocentric mysticism of Symeon, for whom the highest gnosis consisted
in the luminous vision of Christ’s glorious resplendence. The difference between
their approaches is, however, unmistakable. Symeon strongly advocated divine illu-
mination as deciding on all matters, whereas Psellos alternated divine illumination
and intellectual enquiry. Specifically, Psellos believed that the Tabor event remained
beyond grasp without methodical analysis. He noted, “In order that we may not take
up the idea carelessly, but interpret it wisely, it is necessary to refer to the standards
of philosophy and from there to investigate the solution by questions” (Theologica
1.11.12–13). But ultimately he shared with Symeon the conviction that the mystical
experience was at hand only for whoever was purified. “We do not always partici-
pate in God, even though he is active, because of our lack of receptiveness towards
participation” (De Omnifaria Doctrina 95). Apart from the above similarity, Psellos
does not seem to have quoted Symeon, although he was acquainted with works of
Symeon’s disciple Nicetas Stethatos (d. 1090).
Before moving further, it is noteworthy that, contrary to the common view that
Symeon was an exclusivist and Psellos an inclusivist in matters pertaining to mys-
tical theology and philosophy, the situation was complex. We have seen that Psellos
subscribed to the traditional view about experiencing the light of Tabor. In turn,
Symeon pointed out that whether interested in bodily values or in the spiritual ones,
“all are moving towards a single goal” (Ch. 89). Symeon and Psellos were seeking the
same thing –that which their obtuse antagonists did not, namely, gnosis.
SCHOLARS AND HE S YCHAS TS : THE

F OURTEENTH CE NTU RY
Towards the end of Byzantium, imperial decline was counterbalanced by the unpre-
cedented flourishing of science, philosophy, theology, and spirituality (Nicolaidis
2011; Tatakis 2007). Mystical theology culminated in the articulation of hesychasm,
the experience of charismatic and prayerful serenity (McGuckin 2005: 100– 2;
Meyendorff 1987: 76–8). Of interest are the accomplishments of Theodore Metochites
(d. 1332) and Gregory Palamas (d. 1359).
When they do not ignore Metochites, at times Orthodox scholars relegate his
memory, regretfully, akin to a joke (McGuckin 2011: xxi). That said, he was the
Michael Psellos of his age, mentor to the brightest Byzantine intellectuals of the century,
from Nicephorus Gregoras (d. 1360) to Gregory Palamas. Methochites, an imperial
dignitary, a logician, and a sceptic, was an Aristotelian thinker for whom the great
Platonic tradition seems to have lost appeal (Poem 4.134–61). He advised, “Devote
yourself especially to Aristotle” (Poem 4.137). He was likewise a proficient astron-
omer and mathematician, profoundly committed to the faith (Nicolaidis 2011: 85–
9). By his Christian devotion, he was the opposite of Psellos, who represented what
the Byzantines construed as secular scholarship (Meyendorff 2001: 136–8; Tatakis
2007: 232, 269). What matters is that for Metochites, polymath training and faith
were not mutually contradictory –a conviction which he impressed upon his pupils
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429
too (Poem 4.103–34). Faith led him to an appreciation of apophatic theology, a

nuance missed by recent scholarship which places him exclusively in the Sceptic trad-
ition (Bydén 2002: 184, 186–7, 207).
Briefly, the apophatic method entailed a prudent attitude concerning human com-
petence in divine matters and, overall, the mysteries of existence. Apophatic prudence
conditioned the early Christian and Medieval thinkers to adopt paradoxical formulae
which articulated the mysteries as mysteries. It is his apophatic commitment which
undoubtedly determined Metochites’s logical scepticism –his view that opinions on
the nature of things were undecidable and his doubts concerning the competence of
syllogisms, particularly in matters theological (Semeioseis gnomikai 13–42; Costache
2011: 47). The same commitment prompted him, the Aristotelian sage, to deny the
validity, formally never questioned before, of the logical principles of noncontradiction
and the excluded middle (Bydén 2002: 186–8) in any reference to the ultimate aspects
of reality. Correlatively, he did not shy away from encouraging his students to improve
on Aristotle (Poem 4.137–39). That said, his refusal to reflect on the mysteries of
existence in terms of either/or was irreducible to anything like Psellos’s syncretistic
approach. Metochites believed that the quest of theology for divine knowledge did
not require logical and philosophical prolegomena, as long as the source of gnosis was
divine revelation (Semeioseis gnomikai 73–86; Bydén 2002: 189–90). But he militated
likewise for the independence of astronomy and applied mathematics from any other
consideration (Tatakis 2007: 294). Metochites opened “a can of worms” by pointing
out the difficulty of deciding on contrary opinions, whilst he affirmed the revelatory
nature of the highest truth which transcended all confusion and doubt. That said, these
convictions did not deter him from praising a friend’s quest for wisdom in Christian
as well as Classical sources, as long as these were associated with the path of virtue
and a doxological approach to God (Poem 3.60–68). This was his way of saying that
divine gnosis was attainable both intellectually and existentially, the former by way of
enquiry and study, the latter by moral transformation and a prayerful search for God.
To a large extent, Palamas adopted Metochites’s stance on the competence of logic
and human opinion concerning divine realities (One Hundred and Fifty Topics [=Topics]
1, 2, 354; Costache 2008). It is true that initially, given the testimony of Scripture and
the teachings of the Church fathers, Palamas was of the view that logic, specifically
demonstrative syllogisms, can be applied to the divine attributes. However, following
the apophatic tradition and Metochites’s teaching, he rejected the use of syllogisms for
God’s inner life (Ierodiakonou 2002: 225, 228–9). The same intellectual framework
prompted him to disregard formal logic when needed, drawing criticisms from one
scholar who chose to ignore his theological convictions (Ierodiakonou 2002: 233–5).
One should not forget that, except for Psellos and his disciples, mainstream Byzantine
intellectuals, particularly the disciples of Metochites, have never construed themselves
as Hellenistic philosophers. On the contrary, following the great theologians of past
centuries, they reserved for themselves the role of discerning what, for Christianity, was
useful and what was not useful from the Classical tradition. In emulation of Metochites,
who, given his apophatic convictions, embraced Scepticism, Palamas approached
Aristotelianism selectively due to his commitment to that same tradition. He has not
contested the title for the most faithful Aristotelian of his generation. In fact, after his
early clash with Barlaam (d. 1348) documented in his celebrated Triads (McGuckin
2010), perhaps realizing the shortcomings of his own approach, Palamas desisted from
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battling for logic. Instead, he turned to articulating his main concern, namely, that unen-
lightened from above, human reasoning was incompetent in matters of divine know-
ledge. Long after the defeat of Barlaam (Bradshaw 2004: 229–34), Palamas wrote, “To
know God truly, as much as possible, is incomparably better than the philosophy of
the Greeks, and simply to know what place the human being has in relation to God
surpasses all their wisdom” (Topics 26). The statement encapsulates what he advocated
all along, namely, that regardless the epistemological prowess of logic and philosophy,
divine gnosis amounted to more: a participatory grasp of the divine.
Through this message, Palamas reiterated the position of Dionysius, Maximus,
and Symeon, corroborated by other Church fathers and contemporary hesychasts
(see Declaration of the Holy Mountain). Himself a hesychast, he stated that divine
gnosis demanded personal catharsis on the part of the knower and direct illumin-
ation from Christ, “the giver of wisdom” and “the Lord of knowledge” (On the
Divine and Deifying Participation ([=Part.] 4, 30). Illumination corresponded to the
uncreated, supernatural participation in God’s uncreated energies (Part. 20). Both
conditions, catharsis and illumination, related to the practice of Jesus-Prayer, a form
of Christocentric devotion which consisted in focusing on, and repeatedly calling,
the name of Christ. The seeker strove for purification so that prayer brought about
gracious enlightenment. On a personal level this amounted to the rebirth of the pray-
erful knower in the Holy Spirit (Part. 2, 9), which culminated in the gift to “live
divinely” (Part. 11; Triad 1.3.5). To live divinely was associated with extraordinary
perceptive abilities, such as seeing the invisible, far exceeding the cognitive aptitude
of low achievers. Palamas referred to three ways of accessing the divine –sensorially,
rationally, and noetically (Part. 14; Topics 63). Purified, deified, and equipped with
transfigured or noetic senses (Russell 2004: 306, 308), the hesychasts attained the
truest knowledge, as vision of divine light (Triad 1.3.5; 3.1.6). As Palamas had it,
“Although the divine is [present] in all and participated by all, it abides in the saints
only and is truly participated only by them” (Part. 10). Even so, participation could
not exhaust the fascinating mystery of God. This was an experience of the divine
uncreated energies, not of the divine essence, which remained forever unapproach-
able (Bradshaw 2004: 234–42; Russell 2004: 306). Interestingly, awareness of the
supreme gnosis has not determined Palamas to stop appreciating other objects and
forms of knowledge. As earlier in his career, when he produced a model of the human
being that combined within a scriptural framework Aristotle’s naturalism, Plato’s
tridimensional anthropology, and the hesychast notion of divine participation (Part.
13; Costache 2015: 352–9), he remained vividly interested until the end of his life in
cosmography, geography, and physics (Costache 2008: 30–4; Nicolaidis 2011: 98–
104). I have shown elsewhere that he must have structured these ways of acquiring
knowledge after the tripartite sequence of information or science, formation or the-
ology, and transformation or the mystical experience (Costache 2011: 50–1). This
hierarchy illustrated his view that supreme gnosis amounted to divine participation
(Triad 2.3.8), but without discarding other forms of acquiring knowledge.
THE P HI LO KALI A: THE REB IRTH O F O RTHO D OX Y

During the difficult post-Byzantine centuries, the Orthodox experienced sporadic
moments of awakening long before the eighteenth century, particularly in the hesychast
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centers. And although the theologically articulated hesychasm of Palamas does not
seem to have impacted them immediately, the teaching of Palamas’s older confrère,
Gregory of Sinai (d. 1346), spread throughout Bulgaria, Romania, and Russia, where
it was brought by disciples such as Theodosius of Trnovo (d. 1363) and his own
disciples (Russell 2004: 309–10; Stăniloae 1992: 6–9). The first known hesychasts in
Russia and Romania were Sergius of Radonezh (d. 1392) and Nicodemus of Tismana
(d. 1406), who marked monastic spirituality for the centuries to come. However, due
to historical vicissitude the hesychast life declined even in centers where it flourished
at first, surviving through small groups of ascetics around masters such as Daniil the
Hesychast (d. 1496) in Romania and Nil Sorsky (d. 1508) in Russia. After them, the
tradition was continued by male and female ascetics whose names were not always
preserved. A remarkable Romanian exception was Theodora of Sihla, a holy woman
who lived in the second half of the seventeenth century, whose ascetic exploits and
ecstatic experiences have become legend among the locals (Stăniloae 1992: 11).
That the tradition has not disappeared is proven, closer to the timeframe of
interest, by the documented development of hesychasm in Romania during the first
half of the eighteenth century, being illustrated by, among others, a Ukrainian elder,
Basil of Poiana Mărului (d. 1767). Basil possessed a collection of Byzantine spir-
itual tracts translated into Slavonic, based on Romanian versions dating from the
previous two centuries, currently preserved by the Romanian Academy. Basil’s own
disciple, Paisij Velichkovsky (d. 1794), another Ukrainian monk, traveled to Athos to
gather more hesychast resources, spending almost twenty years there. Upon his return
to Romania, Paisij preached the hesychast ideal of enlightenment, gathering around
him dozens of erudite monks whom he tasked with translating into Romanian and
Slavonic the Byzantine manuscripts collected in Athos. It is under his guidance that The
Philokalia, a collection of hesychast writings from the fourth to the fourteenth cen-
tury, was born: first in the Romanian manuscript of 1769 known as The Philokalia of
Dragomirna, written by Monk Raphael, then copied in several Slavonic manuscripts
and printed only in 1793 (Stăniloae 1992: 20–4; Zaharia 1996: 47–55). Meanwhile,
little after Paisij’s return to Romania, two Greek hesychasts, Nicodemus of the Holy
Mountain and Makarios of Corinth, gathered another philokalic collection, which
they published before Paisij, in 1782, in the original Byzantine Greek (Ware 2012).
The first modern version, Raphael’s Romanian manuscript, was soon appended by
translations from the Byzantine Greek version of 1782, the latter being rendered
into Romanian within twenty years from its publication as The Philokalia of Neamț
(Zaharia 1996: 57–62). This Romanian edition remained for a while in manuscript,
being copied for monastic use. The later publication of The Philokalia in Russian by
Theophan the Recluse (d. 1894) in 1877 and 1889 had a more significant impact.
Through the sequential translation of the collection into Romanian, Slavonic, and
Russian, the Byzantine mystical ideals, the quest for divine gnosis via ascesis, prayer,
and deification, spread like a wildfire, fostering a new generation of hesychasts and
the popularization of Jesus-Prayer.
This revival was illustrated by Seraphim of Sarov (d. 1833) and Theophan the
Recluse in Russia, and the Romanians Gheorghe (d. 1806) and Calinic (d. 1868) of
Cernica Monastery, who wrote their own testimonies on acquiring perfection and
divine knowledge. Through the anonymous, mid-nineteenth-century Russian novel
The Way of the Pilgrim, this revival, particularly the practice of Jesus-Prayer, reached
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large audiences, its message being reiterated closer to our time by J. D. Salinger’s Franny
and Zooey (1961). During the twentieth century, The Philokalia was translated into
various modern languages, the first one being another Romanian version by Dumitru
Stăniloae. These translations have stirred a renewed interest in mystical gnosis or
“how the mind is purified, enlightened, and perfected by way of praxis and contem-
plation,” as the title of the Greek version of 1782 reads. The rebirth of Orthodoxy,
including mystical theology, in modern times is the direct outcome of The Philokalia
(Louth 2012; McGuckin 2005: 102–3).
TH E MODERN ORTHODOX QU E S T F O R G NO S IS
In the footsteps of the influential philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (d. 1900), early
on in the twentieth century a pleiad of Russian Orthodox intellectuals, of whom
many lived in western exile, undertook to redraft the Orthodox tradition in modern
idiom. Among these were Pavel Florensky (d. 1937), Sergius Bulgakov (d. 1944),
and Nicholas Berdyaev (d. 1948), trailblazers of modern Orthodox thinking who
shared a certain freedom from the boundaries of mainstream theology. Of these, the
thinking of Bulgakov is the most researched (Nichols 1999: 57–73; Plekon 2008).
Following Solovyov, Bulgakov and Florensky developed the doctrine of Sophiology,
by which, in the main, they attempted to give epistemological articulation to the
rapport between God, humankind, and the cosmos. In short, for them, divine Sophia
or Wisdom, which, alongside a mix of elements from Classical philosophy and
early Christian speculation, rehearsed the Jewish mysticism of Shekinah, bridged
God and the creation as an ongoing process, facilitating the human access to divine
participation and knowledge. Sophia, inherent to God, but also the outer revela-
tion of divine love, was an interface for God and the creation, the participatory side
of the uncreated (Louth 2015: 13–59; McGuckin 2011: 77–8, 257–59, 576–9). As
for Berdyaev, he balanced Sophiological reflection with traditional Christology and
Pneumatology, interpreting the divine-human Byzantine Christ as the source of a
dynamic anthropology of progress, enlightenment, and perfection, where the themes
of human freedom and creativity in the Spirit were at the forefront (Louth 2015: 60–
76; McGuckin 2011: 69–70). Less cosmologically inclined, in fact displaying a tragic
sense of the world perceived through the realities of the century, Berdyaev studied
gnostic texts, ancient and modern, contributing his own ideas. He construed himself
as a “God-seeking philosopher” unable to find answers in the ideological certain-
ties of mainstream theology (Linde 2010). Notwithstanding the criticisms of Georges
Florovsky (d. 1979) and John Meyendorff (d. 1992), which have recently come under
scrutiny (Tanev 2017: 11–81), Sophiology offered a traditional European alternative
to the mythical cosmologism of Hitler’s Germany. Furthermore, mainly through the
input of Berdyaev, modern Russian philosophy promoted an inspiring depiction of
humankind, noble, dynamic, improvable, called to awareness, creativity, and immor-
tality –in stark contrast to the distressing figure of our race throughout most of the
twentieth century.
The quest for divine gnosis continued with the Orthodox theologians of the
Neopatristic movement. What gave rise to this movement was a sense of alien-
ation from tradition remarked about late Medieval and modern Orthodox the-
ology. Florovsky discussed this matter in Ways of Russian Theology (1937),
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where he identified the influence of scholasticism, pietism, and idealism, the latter
including Bulgakov’s contributions. Nevertheless, the Neopatristic movement was
not only about exposing foreign additions to the Orthodox patrimony. Florovsky
and Meyendorff, followed by a great many scholars, focused on the rediscovery of
patristic tradition, particularly in its Byzantine expression. But the spearheads of
the movement rehashed various traditional stances with reference to current real-
ities. Theirs were not far from the goals of the Russian philosophers, except for their
faithfulness to traditional criteria, often bent in Sophiological discourse. The most
dynamic representatives of the Neopatristic movement have been Vladimir Lossky
(d. 1958), Paul Evdokimov (d. 1970), Panagiotis Nellas (d. 1986), Dumitru Stăniloae
(d. 1993), and Olivier Clément (d. 2009), who, profoundly drawing from tradition,
nevertheless emulated within contemporary circumstances the creativity of past ages.
Alongside various other topics, most Neopatristic thinkers have explored, and still
do, through the remarkable work of Christos Yannaras (n. 1935), epistemological
matters. Interested in the mystery of God, humankind, and the cosmos, they have
pioneered a phenomenological articulation of these three, showing that none can be
appraised in isolation from the other two. This relational representation of existence
refers to the mutual participation of the created and the uncreated, of the subject
and the object. Albeit intellectually articulated, knowledge consisted in experience,
togetherness, and sharing, the best expression of which was the ecclesial gathering.
A common thread for these authors was the view that grasping reality entailed a
progressive purification of mindset and lifestyle; only a purified person can truly
know God, other people, and the world. Purification unblocked the cognitive poten-
tial of the human person, generally hindered by wrong presuppositions and habits,
rendering it more perceptive, more attuned to the divine, human, and cosmic milieu.
In terms of knowing God, without discarding other means, such as traditional testi-
monies, metaphysical speculation, and rational proofs, the Neopatristic thinkers have
highlighted participation in the uncreated energies theorized by hesychasm (Louth
2015: 77–110, 127–42, 159–93, 247–63; Louth 2008; McGuckin 2011: 259–60;
Nichols 1999: 21–56, 129–45, 170–204).
Space does not allow for a discussion concerning fascinating developments in the
second half of twentieth-century Romania, such as the Burning Bush group of Antim
Monastery, which combined the hesychast experience and cultural creativity (Scrima
2010), and Constantin Noica’s School of Păltiniș Monastery, which found in Platonism
a source of strength during testing times (Liiceanu 2013). Nor does it allow me to
properly introduce the tremendous input of Annick de Souzenelle (n. 1922), whose
Orthodox search for divine gnosis entails prayer, meditation, analytical psychology,
symbolic thinking, rabbinic wisdom, and the reading of Scripture through an existen-
tial lens. Nor can I do justice to Basarab Nicolescu’s (n. 1942) transdisciplinary search
for knowledge. But it would be remiss of me not to point out that, alongside the input
of educated thinkers, the modern Orthodox quest for divine gnosis came to be extra-
ordinarily embodied in the hesychast experiences of several charismatic elders. The
best example is that of Silouan the Athonite (d. 1938), who, according to his own
diary and the testimonies of those who knew him, attained divine illumination, a par-
ticipatory experience which he interpreted within a thorough scriptural and patristic
framework (Archimandrite Sophrony 1991; Costache 2015: 359–66). Reading his
simple diary, deprived of the sophistication of a Gregory Palamas, one gets the distinct
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impression that the tradition of Symeon the New Theologian, Gheorghe of Cernica,
and Seraphim of Sarov was still there, a proof of God and human achievement beyond
the wildest intellectual dream. In contrast with the Neopatristic thinkers, whose hall-
mark was a preference for the veiled apophatic approach, Silouan’s discourse, like
that of Symeon, was direct, explicit, and affirmative –a moving expression of the
most profound desire to communicate an otherwise unbelievable experience. And so,
perhaps disappointing for the exigent reader, it seems that the more the educated dis-
course promotes the apophatic approach to divine gnosis, the less genuine it is. After
devouring the fine thoughts of the theologians, to get a sense of Orthodox gnosis one
should turn to the testimonies of Silouan and his hesychast peers.
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Zaharia, Ciprian. 1996. “Biserica ortodoxă română şi traducerile filocalice şi patristice în limbile
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CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
PANSOPHIA, CHRISTIAN KABBALISM,

AND THE QUEST FOR UNIVERSAL
KNOWLEDGE IN THE EARLY
MODERN WEST
Garry W. Trompf
O ne could argue that between two dramatic tragedies, Christopher Marlowe’s

Doctor Faustus (1592) and Freemason Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust (1808), an
extraordinary turn occurred in European thought: the possibility of new knowledge
unlocking the secret key to the universe. Both these Fausts make a pact with the
Devil (alias Mephistophilis/eles) as the original late-medieval magician, alchemist,
necromancer, and kabbalist by that name was alleged to do. Marlowe’s Faust is still
“ravished” by “magic, magic” as the panacea of knowing to replace the inadequacy
of philosophy, law, medicine, or theology, and has to face hell for practicing “more
than heavenly power permits” (Doctor Faustus I.i: 100–4; V.iii, finis). Goethe’s Faust
is equally dissatisfied with the same disciplines, wanting to uncover “Nature’s secret
seal … like a god” and “bestride the whole Creation’s prospect” or Makrokosmos
with ease and pleasure, not by time-wasting pains of study (Faust I. Vorspiel; Nacht).
Like Job, however, experiencing all the “witchcraft of life” –“scouring the whole
world … even what is barred from human ken” –and resisting it enough, this later
Faust attains a blissful sense that All will be Well (Vorgefühl) that “no flight of aeons
(Äonen) can impair,” and so by Grace he can “shake off the earthly flakes” for “ether’s
raiment” to rejoin Gretchen, the lover he has wronged, in heaven (II.5). The Gnostic
touches play with revelations of extraordinary new knowledge that Goethe saw
unfolding in a Spirale (as with a shell) in the complex course of thought (Materialen
zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre (1808) [Bentler: 247]).
This “Promethean” issue at hand seemed plonked in the arena of early modern
European thought with the exciting career of the Dominican Giordano Bruno
and his notorious execution for heresy (1600). Evoking Democritus, Heraclitus,
Pythagoras, and Empedocles with Epicurus as authorities for his “atomistic” doc-
trine, Bruno taught that “we ourselves” constantly “come and go, pass and repass” in
an unprecedently wide universe, and our earth falls subject to “constant mutation”
and “vicissitude” in processes with no apparent Beginning or End. Bruno’s cosmos,
what is more, richly animated as he envisaged it by a vast host of “intelligible beings”
rather than mere impersonal matter, was postulated as a rediscovery of lost sacred
wisdom. He saw himself reviving a prisca theologia from Egypt as old as Moses, in
divinely inspired teachings found in the mysterious and magical Corpus Hermeticum
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— Pa n s o p h i a a n d C h r i s t i a n K a b b a l i s m —
so captivating to various Renaissance humanists. In Bruno’s view, an occult intellec-

tual genealogy through the ages –from a Golden Age in Egypt and Chaldea, to the
Persian Zoroaster, the Indian gymnosophists, the Thracian Orpheus, the Greek pre-
Socratics, Plotinus, and the Latin Lucretius –made its “perennial” appearance, even
“ten thousand years ago” among the newly discovered sun-oriented Aztecs. It even-
tually worked itself out to a decisive renovatio of Egyptianism in the new heliocen-
tric cosmology, especially Bruno’s own version of it, which was at once hierarchized
under a Plotinian World-Soul, held together by a patterned “struggle of opposites”
and of ideas imbedded in matter (and thus susceptible to magic), yet also involving
many worlds other than ours –“the Totality neither diminishing nor increasing” (e.g.,
Ceno de le ceneri V; Infinito, universo e mondi IIG; Causa, principio e uno II; along
with Yates 1964: 20–189, 220, 244–7, 270–3; de Bernart 1986: 124–50). Conceding
the old Gnostic (Hermetic and Plotinian) sources, the whole vision might be dubbed
“neo-Gnostic,” a deep knowing about the secrets of a much more complex universe
than ordinarily thought, disclosed by a master-revealer.
The magical and alchemical interests in Bruno’s “gnoseology” place him within
a continuing tradition of late Medieval and Renaissance thought (“from Faust to
John Dee,” as it were) (Classen 2017: 57–70), but his opus bespeaks an intellec-
tual “mutation,” by which “heroic frenzies” can be unleashed for the imagination –
poetry not to be tied to set rules (Eroici furiosi [1585], I), for example –and “diverse
philosophical systems” and terminologies celebrated rather than their forced unifi-
cation under neo-scholastic Aristotelianism, for such plurality is truer to nature, to
mutazioni natural in human reason and societies, even in the worlds of animals and
spirits, as his neo-Egyptianism unveiled (Sabbatino 1993: 10–11, 157, 161, 214–15).
While Bruno did not eschew the Renaissance ideal of a philosophy of the world and
Man bound together by divine Love (à la Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino, as
in De amore [1484], II.2), including deep affective amor, as conveyed by Orphism
(Fredén 1958: 28–62), his vision of the world is decidedly dynamic (“prototypical”
of the Baroque!), as if probed by the experimental but tragically dangerous daring
of his mythic hero Actaeon, and with Wisdom (or his gnosis) becoming an unlocking
of complex realms of knowledge and of less stable cosmic structures waiting to be
uncovered. This is the point (and it is the subject of this piece) when deep sapiential
insight (gnosis) amounts to or arises from a command of many strands of disciplinary
knowledge. Lecture-touring European universities in an unprecedented way, Bruno’s
career bespeaks a “Promethean turn” towards the post-theological, independent intel-
lectual adventure as “the new Gnostic heresy.”
Now, the idea of a deeper divine Knowing accompanying a unified vision of all
branches of learning was affected by theological masters of gnoseology within
the Islamic world (see ch. 3), where what can be called “knowledge triumphant”
(Rosenthal 2007) followed better access to ancient sources in circulated books. In
a famous response the Majorcan Ramon Llull posited an Ars generalis (in 1305),
which was systematized by his disciple Thomas le Myésier, was modified in Cornelius
Agrippa’s Occulta philosophia (1533), and re-deployed by Bruno. It was alleged to
“answer all questions at once,” as well as provide the basic principles on which all
religious (including inter-religious) issues could be resolved by argument in a panacea
philosophica (Traninger 2011: 114–23). A key figure transmitting this dream from
the late medieval world of scholasticism was the German cardinal Nicholas Cusanus,
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who, with access to Proclus’s Platonic Theology (in Latin; and see Koch 1973: 3–68),
interwove Pythagorean, Hermetic, and pseudo-Dionysian insights about the structure,
potentiality, spontaneity, dialectical struggle, even contradictoriness of the human mind
as an extension and similitude of the Divine. He assimilated all humanity’s powers
of mental exploration and diverse spiritual life back to God’s unicity, seeing them
manifesting through the Trinitarian continuum of divine plenitude and creativity, and
so ultimately not in vain (esp. De Conjecturis 1.1–2; 2.14, with Sfez 2012: 63–140).
The general promise of this vision was hardly lost on Bruno, the Platonic
“gnoseology” of divine emanation through the dynamics, plurality, and alterity in
the cosmos (Secchi 2006: 42–83), passes into the early modern context in the con-
sciousness of unfolding New Knowledge. Thus it is that, especially in the seventeenth
century, there spring up exultations of access to the “Fount of all Knowledge” (fons
sapientiae) as a new gnōsis, of which Bruno is but a telling symptom and which
heralds the “gnosticizing glorification” of academic pursuit and modern science from
then on. By its very nature, the new impetuses are programmatic: they seek to encom-
pass systematically what has become a rich yet unwieldy patchwork of new human
endeavors, including the “new ocean of Knowledge” from overseas discoveries
(Talbot 2010: 179–278), into a unified field of relatable disciplines. But they do so
with a “general Protesting flavor” (of Reformation times) resisting the old solutions
(especially traditional theological ploys) that were being brought up again to fit the
overly complex case –in the Catholic neo-Thomist revival, for instance, however scin-
tillating (Skinner 1978: 151–77) or in straitening Lutheran neo-scholastic methods
(Elert 1962). The emergent quests for the unity of knowledge expressed dissatisfac-
tion in the relative secular agenda of laying out branches of learning (affected largely
by Aristotle’s classificatory demarcations) as an academic corpus (Trompf 2011: 116).
The search (philosophically more reflective of Platonic sensitivities, and theologically
of Protestant allowances for subjectivity) took on various mystical dimensions, as if
all human labors had to be saturated by the divine energies.
Early signals of this came with continuing Late Renaissance interest in the
philosophia perennis, or a lineage of ancient fundamental wisdom going far back
to Zoroaster, Hermes (Thoth), and Orpheus, sitting alongside Biblical truth from
Moses to Christ, as famously popularized by Ficino, custodian of the newly avail-
able Platonic corpus in Greek (in the Laurentian Library) that included the Hermetic
treatises, and the Chaldaean Oracles attributed to Zoroaster (see Agostino Steuco,
De perennis philosophia [1540] I.1, 4; II.1; V, with Walker 1972; Schmidt-Biggemann
2004: 421–48). Jewish Kabbalah, now said to hold secrets for Christians, if not all
humanity, was an accompanying thread fed into the pursuit of deeper knowledge by
humanist scholars Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin; and in turn western
European Jewish Kabbalists played with pagano-Platonic insights such as reincarna-
tion (Ogren 2009). In this atmosphere, alchemical and astrological principles modi-
fied from their Islamic inheritance and neo-Hermetic theurgic interests combined to
engender the kind of prehensile medicine and magic we find with occultists Paracelsus
and John Dee (Katz 2017: 11–55). Tools for a new spiritually grounded, totalistic
system of knowledge and practice were thus already touted before the seventeenth
century, but they were now to receive a recognizably more “theosophic” treatment, a
stronger sense that all scientia could be comprehended under divine principles that,
lifted from obscurity, would transform the world.
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German mystic Jakob Böhme (1575– 1624) was a key impetus with his
innovative processional Christian cosmology. Out of the impenetrable Ungrund
(Groundlessness, cf. the Kabbalah’s En-Sof), the Creation arises from wrath (the
Father), is met by light and love (the Son), and expands (with the nurturing Holy
Spirit as Matrix) through seven Quellgeister, or emanated spirits (like seven “lower”
Sefiroth in the Kabbalah’s “Tree of Life”) (chs. 3, 34). The paradigm envisions all
things unfolding in God in a constant wheeling between action and counteraction,
not only to affirm the ultimate unity of opposites (as did Cusanus and Bruno), but
to address how evil is necessarily incurred in our world (Deinert 1964) and warn
that the pressures of choice between heaven and hell are closer than our noses. The
old Gnostic dilemma over cosmic evil is met by accepting the demonic potential of
God’s Work from the Beginning (cf. Hanegraaff 1993). The “theological,” or better,
“theosophical factor,” is integral to the universe, which can no longer be interpreted
adequately by Aristotelian causal generatio. Alchemical and Kabbalistic signatures
(of temperatur, koncordanz, harmonia, etc.) (Hanratty 1997: 66) allowed Creation
to be read at one and the same axiologically and as a divine Entfaltung, in which
everything –minerals, vegetable and animal (not just human) life –could find a
place. The implications for evolutionary theory were immense (if by Goethe’s time
evisceration of the theological framing set in), but for Böhme the key was the cor-
respondence between the inner and macro-worlds that can only find fulfillment by
return to God. The true End, the mystical Apocalypse both esoteric and exoteric
becomes theosophic Gnosis (as Wissen of “Heaven, Earth and everything” (e.g.,
Aurora [unfinished 1612] [Schiebler] 2.16), a consummation of all that the Wisdom
of God expressed in time (cf. ch. 38).
This “pan-Sophic” vision, controversial yet very influential in German Pietism,
actually chimed in with new hopes for “spiritual panaceas” of Knowledge across
Europe at the time. Ponder the famous Rosicrucian manifestos (1607–1616) for
a covertly founded Christian order that would ease conflict-ridden times (Joann
Andreae, Confessio Fraternitatis [1615], chs. 4, 6), “to teach the world, and to reform
all schools, churches, and law courts, and to bring everything to the state in which
Adam found it,” especially through the promising Protestant union of Friedrich V,
both Elector Palatinate of the Rhine and King of Bohemia, and Princess Elizabeth
Stuart of Britain in 1613 (Yates 1972: 57, 59–102). Friedrich’s short-lived inheritance
included the Bohemian court of Prague, where the patron of sciences and arts alike,
Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, had attracted scientists of contrasting reli-
gious positions into his royal circle –such cutting-edge astronomers as Lutheran Tycho
Brahe, Calvinist-leaning Johannes Kepler, and a scintillating array of astrologers and
alchemists, including Lutheran court physician Michael Maier (Evans 1973, and
ch. 37). Projects for a spiritually imbued transformation of Knowledge spawned
in this atmosphere. Maier, for example, in a musical composed for the Friedrich/
Elizabeth marriage, linked Rosicrucian and Bohemian dreams to England, notably
to Anglican and Christian Kabbalist Robert Fludd. Francis Bacon prepared his uto-
pian New Atlantis (1627) in this context, “the lanthorn of this kingdom” being the
Order of “Salomon’s House,” dedicated “for the finding out of the true nature of all
things” (Ellis and Spedding edn.: 721). And the seedbed of modern Masonry’s appeal
to Natural Philosophers, including founding figures of The Royal Society, lay in this
enduring ethos (ch. 41).
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That Creation could be read like a book covering all disciplines was not without
ancient precedence (starting from Philo, De Opificio mundi 25, 77–8), and medievals
could contemplate God as the sum of all knowledge mediated by Sophia and Prudentia
(e.g., Alain of Lille, Anticlaudianus (ca. 1182) 2.70–4, 331–72), but the pansophic
tendency we consider here has as much to do with the reform of learning as with
recasting Knowledge (scientia) in new visionary ways. The figure most associated
with the agenda of pansophia, Jan Komensky (Latinized as Comenius) (1592–1670),
significantly a Czech, and the Moravian Brethens’ last bishop, grew up in the heady
atmosphere of educational reform and became the greatest protagonist for universal
education across the early modern Protestant world. All his programs were motivated
by commitment to the absolute unity of all knowledge: that nature had none of the
divisions imposed by human classification. The world was one and so was knowledge.
The three key sources of knowledge, “the Books of God” we call Nature, the Bible,
and “the notions inscribed on the human soul,” were epitomized in his pansophic
project: “the Book of Pansophia” (Praecognita pansophica (DJAK) 3.4). Combining
the rationalism of Petrus Ramus to cut back redundancy (even preferring to distill the
four Gospels into one) and the Boehmian reading of corresponding “representations
of all visible things (to which also invisible things are reduced after their fashion)”
(Orbis sensualium pictus [1672] Bowen: A3v), he maintained that “to achieve know-
ledge was to reach God; in attaining a completely unified view of all existence,” we
would fulfill our “natural end” in God (Hotson 2011: 244–5; Bowen 1967: 15). And
actually finding a universal language behind classical texts and the vernacular would
facilitate the transformation, for everyone.
We detect here that quests for access to a kind of all-knowledge, meaning command
over all means of understanding and construing the world, are a neo-Gnosis that
demands recognition in this volume. It arises in many strands. One notes, inter alia,
the Comenian projects for “universal Reformation” by German émigré to England
Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662), including his advice for the “advancement” of many
and diverse fields of study in his Bacon-inspired Macaria (1641) (Greengrass et al.
2002). Matters might of course issue in Fantastische Theologie, as the student of
sects Daniel Colberg described Behmenism, Kabbalah, and Platonisch-hermetisches
Christenthum (1690); for Böhme’s enthusiastic advocate Quirinus Kuhlmann, a doc-
trine of knowledge “hitherto unheard of, in which the great center of the world is
hidden” would emerge (Neubegeisterter Böhme [1674]). Still, this was the kind of
millennium-cum-Golden Age that inspired later hopes of a new “Universal science”
(as with Friedrich Oetinger) (Barnes 1988: 182– 227; Vondung 1992: 120– 1).
Interestingly, though the Cambridge Platonists seem a sturdy academic lot, they freely
applied Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Christian Kabbalistic insights in quest for a true
Christianity of eternal truth and morality only accessible by mystical illumination
(Rogers et al. 1997). Breaking this intriguing balance, on the one hand, came sub-
jectivism, with Behemists, Quakers, and also Quietists, allowing that uninstructed
spiritual individuals could embody the divine Light (cf. Trompf and Kasamanie
1981: 193–5, 201–2), while grand philosophic solutions for such “rationalists” as
Baruch Spinoza and John Toland, on the other hand, produced pantheism or the
religion of nature.
The matter of unlocking the secrets of time on earth came into the equation. Famed
among Late Renaissance Dutch scholars, Daniel Heinsius saw the possibility of what
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we can call a Buddha-like, “macrohistorical flash,” a salvation in the potential to

“gather into one focus,” or “view in a moment,” the past myriad affairs of the human
“fretful animal” (Orationes [1650]: 230) This was not just to hold history’s “spec-
tacle” or design “before one’s eyes,” as bishop Bossuet later mused in his Discours sur
l’histoire universelle (1681, av.-prop.). Young Isaac Newton came to believe he could
actually pinpoint the historical beginnings of Truth in the original “True Religion” of
Noah, which explained its persisting reflection in all religions, and that Jesus’s crucial
two commandments to love God and thy neighbor epitomized the divinely revealed
Noachian precepts, and that science as God’s work began with the ark, with moments
of fuller transmission in Thoth’s Emerald Tablet, Solomon’s Temple, and Pythagoras
(Trompf 1991; chs. 37, 41). A little down the track Johann Sebastian Bach was cov-
ertly imagining he could fathom how to compose “in God’s time” (Rumsey 1997).
What was largely a Protestant wave of excitement caught on fire among Catholic
savants. German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) was the giant among them,
in his founding roles in such disciplines as geology, microbiology, and museology
(establishing the extraordinary Museum of the Jesuit College in Rome, a virtual
“Baroque Encyclopedia” full of new finds, innovative artifices, indeed the kind of
curiosities which ran knowledge, “wonder,” and Biblical truth together at the time
(cf. Evans and Marr 2006; Killeen and Forshaw 2007). He engaged in the emer-
gent quest for universal knowledge (or Centrosophia) with gusto, with a splurge into
new “magically loaded” epithets for disciplines approaching final arcane truth: turris,
arca, sphinx, magnes, tariffa, etc. (Leinkauf 2007), and into a massive correspond-
ence enthusing scholars from across religious divides (Fletcher 2008: 391– 459).
“The universe was alive with possibilities, dynamic (even ‘evolving’) in its forms,”
and the inventive instruments of humans “to test nature’s secrets,” musical har-
monies reflecting “hidden principles of concord,” and the increasing Babel of newly
discovered languages, all pointed to “the divine Word” (Trompf 2008: xxiii; Godwin
2015). The Egyptian hieroglyphs, which he never actually deciphered, were central for
uncovering the fons sapientiae of his “Great Art of Knowing.” With the Aegyptiaca
of Manetho (flor. 250s BCE) now available, Kircher combined Biblical, Greek, and
Arabic authorities to allege (in his Oedipus Aegyptica [1652]) that there were two
Hermes, one being antediluvian (= the Enoch of Genesis 5 and author of a Book of
Enoch Kircher knew only in fragments). This earlier Enoch/Hermes, before Noah,
designed the original pyramids, while the second was the post-diluvian Trismegistus,
whose attempts at preserving Adam’s wisdom were badly corrupted by Egyptian
priests and better mediated to the Gentiles (esoterically) by Orpheus, Pythagoras, and
Plato (Stolzenberg 2001: 127–32).
Intriguingly, the Kabbalah, often Christianized (Faivre and Tristan 1979), played
its apart, usually alongside Hermetic tendencies, in most of the projects we have
discussed. In trying to prove Catholicity and Trinitarian faith could be consolidated
rather than weakened by embracing all spheres of knowledge, for example, Kircher
schematized a Kabbalistic “mirror” in his Oedipus, making 72 identifiable languages
correspond to the 72 Names of God in the Hebrew tradition, and his diagrammatic
“Theotechnia Hermetica” showed twelve pagan divinity-types deriving from aspects
of the Sun, from the pre-diluvian monotheistic source of all religions, in the most
ancient Kabbalah, best known from the hieroglyphs (Turris Babel [1679]: 144).
More ominously, if Kircher, attuned to Kabbalistic lore, paralleled probing the earth’s
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underground depths to mining the soul and its demons (Mundus subterraneus [168]
bk. 8), Newton’s mentor the Christian Kabbalist, apocalyptist, and Cambridge
Platonist Henry More imagined the world surrounded by good versus bad spirits in
the ether, and if “[false] knowledge would increase” in the Last Days (Daniel 12:4),
Truth would prevail on earth in the Millennium (Copenhaver 1980).
The ancient Hermes, taken as philosophy not myth (Segal 1986), was firmly
domesticated into Christianity, and it was only beginning to dawn on religious
thinkers that the Hermetica, given Isaac Casaubon’s philological researches (1614),
belonged alongside Gnostic heretics. Kabbalism, though, might be taken too far;
and this, in Newton’s view, happened with his greatest competitor, Gottfried Leibniz
(1646–1716), whom he dubbed Simon Magus Redivivus (ch. 2). During the seven-
teenth century, two of the most celebrated Jewish Kabbalists, Frans van Helmont
and Knorr von Rosenruth, had taught the identification of Adam Kadmon of the
Kabbalah with Christ, and also evoked the principle of monads, infinite extensions of
the ultimate Monad (God) down to minima (tiniest bodies, atoms) such that matter
and spirit flow into each other (ideas already broached by Reuchlin and Bruno).
Leibniz’s famous Monadology was a combined solution for both cosmology and the-
ology, the universe being made up of a hierarchy of indivisible monads continually
generated by God to produce in their interactions “the best of all possible worlds.”
The grand formulation (during the 1690s) also formed part of his project to achieve
inter-religious harmony (Coudert 1995).
By 1700 we find the quest for universal knowledge, or what we have dared call a
neo-Gnostic modality, a contested area. There will be some honoring of the Gnostic
inheritance in theology (as with Gottfried Arnold, ch. 38), but Pietist suspicions on
the one hand and more rationalist approaches on the other (as with Johann Brucker,
reflective of emergent encyclopedism) will want anything smacking of magic, personal
illuminism, as well as astrology and alchemy pushed aside (Lehmann-Brauns 2004;
Hanegraaff 2012: 137–47). But we have had to introduce the aforegoing materials if
only to contemplate links between them and later-coming projections of education,
academia, and universities as panaceas, and of late the dream of universal knowledge
provided by the internet.
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CHAPTER FORTY
FREEMASONRY: GNOSTIC IMAGES
Garry W. Trompf
S peculations about the origins of Freemasonry will doubtless go on unabated.

They have often connected Masonic teaching and practice to Gnostic filaments in
Mediaeval and Renaissance sources –back to Sufi orders via the Crusader Templers
on to operative masons’ “guild-assemblies” (e.g., Shah 1964: xix, 50, 178–88, 226),
for instance, or to the later Rosicrucian manifestos (1607–1616), in which masonry
and temple architecture are invoked to create a new covertly founded Christian order
(Joann Andreae, Confessio Fraternitatis [1615], chs. 4, 6), and to the “initiatory
ordeal” described in the (anonymous) Chymische Hochzeit (or “Chemical Wedding”)
of 1616, which is set in 1459, the year the Constitutions of the Strasburg Masons
were signed [1459] (Edighoffer 2001: 377–80; cf. Yates 1972: 209–19). The point of
this article, however, is to recognize that a “Gnostic-associated” movement, namely
Freemasonry, with its many branches but common enough features, became a world-
wide movement in modern times. We are not to forget the ancient program of Mani
to make his Gnosticizing religion “surpass” other churches that only worked in “par-
ticular places and cities,” and to spread the “message” (including that of the res-
cuing divine, Great Architect) “to reach every land” (Keph. 151.9–10) –even though
Manichaeism faded into apparent extinction by the fourteenth century (Tardieu
2008: 91–102). But Freemasonry has usually been presented by its (traditionally all-
male) members as a Craft or Art, and a philosophical, moral, and philanthropic fra-
ternity that does not substitute for religion, albeit a society veiled by symbol and
allegory, holding secrets so occult as to die for.
To clarify from the start, modern (Free)Masonry cannot be said to have only one
beginning, and if, at least since 1599, its meetings have been held in Lodges (often
rented premises) in western Europe (first in Scotland), covert gatherings soliciting
initiates have been myriad. Constitutions and practices accepted by Grand Lodges
founded in different nations (first in England, 1717) (Stevenson 1990) led to different
branches (rites, orders, and degrees), at least 25 major ones today. The spawning of
lodge meetings (usually by Grand Masters) inevitably led to special splits, variances,
and innovations in “obedience” (though sometimes also reunifications). There were
125 Lodges listed as affiliated with London’s Grand Lodge by 1735 (as displayed
on Sir Richard Steele’s engraving). Since Speculative Masonry had fast replaced
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Operative in these developments, and no meeting records or new regulations were

yet written, symbolism and meaning-making had some fluidity from place to place,
and with no talk of set “dogma” until the nineteenth century (as with Albert Pike in
1871). Disappointment over the apparent vacuousness of meaning in attaining higher
status (of “mysteries veiling nothing”) engendered symbolic craft degrees that then
became increasingly numerous (starting from France ca. 1740). By the end of the
eighteenth century there were separate meeting places financed by governing or Grand
Lodges, sometimes Chapters (Halls, then Temples, and from the 1920s Centers, when
Conferences of Grand Lodges started forming). The virtually ubiquitous observance
is that of the first three (“Blue”) degrees (Apprentice/Fellow/Master), and the most
widely followed branch the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of 33 degrees (used
most in the Americas) (Jones 1950).
PROTESTANT AND IMP E RIAL CO NNE CTIO NS

Freemasonry’s popularity in Protestant countries followed its association with sci-
entific progress and liberal thought (and thus The Enlightenment) and its presumed
opposition to western Catholicism. Along with other “Secret Societies,” Freemasonry
stood accused in Catholic circles of inspiring French revolutionary (and Napoleonic)
sentiments (Roberts 1972: 146–200); and already within the Anglophone world
Masonry seemed to lurk in Protestant anti-tyrannical, anti-absolutist constitution-
alist positions –in Britain’s 1688 Revolution and the United States revolutionary
republic of 1787 (Trompf 1991: 234–6; Tabbert 2006: 33–47) –as if prefacing what
happened on the Continent. Very popular Freemasonry bolstering the cause and man-
power for Texan independence from both Mexico and the United States in 1835,
flaunted membership by Mazzini and Garibaldi in the 1848 Italian Risorgimento,
Freemasonic Mexican President Plutarco Calles’s anticlerical assaults in 1926–1927.
These were key grounds for Catholic opposition to Masonry as politically subversive,
with excommunication for joining (1738–1983) and condemnatory encyclicals (e.g.,
Leo XIII’s Humanum Genus [1884]), although many Catholics did join Lodges (and
also neo-Druidical ones) rather than alternative fraternities sponsored by the Papacy
(Benimeli 2014).
Masonry grew strongly in Protestant- dominated, anti- Catholic contexts in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in such a country as France where
Catholicism was weakened by Protestant and deistic tendencies. For the Dutch,
British, and French empires, it was immensely important in binding ruling groups
with indigenous elites to control motleys of subjugated and colonized peoples (e.g.,
Harland-Jacobs 2007: 204–88; Daughton 2006: 85–96 [and cf. ch. 57]). The higher
popularity of European rites in colonial contexts (among liberalizing Maronites
and Sunnis in Lebanon or Parsees and Sikhs in India, for example) reveals them
as pathways to business success and political power, and eventually the chance of
independence (famous anti-imperialists Nehru and Rizal were Masons), with African
Lodges long being associated with “self-government” (since 1776) (Deschamps 2017;
Gregorius 2014: 53). Less cynically, status and religious difference were to stop at
the Lodge door (thus Rudyard Kipling’s poem from the Punjab “Mother Lodge”
[1896]). The Anglo-Irish Establishment after the 1798 Rebellion was partly pulled
off with Masonic “Friendship” that raised both “cheerful mirth” and “lofty columns
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— Freemasonry: gnostic images —
… to adorn this happy land” (Grand Lodge of Ireland, Constitution, 1807 edition,
Song 38). Within United States expansionism, Masonic ideals “to civilize men, soften
their savage … manners” by teaching “true principles of morals,” and if necessary to
“conquer men to civilization” (Pike 1871: 377–81), chimed in with talk of Manifest
Destiny, while in newer settler colonies (such as Australia) Masonic membership was
a stamp of loyalty to homelands. For Fascist governments (Franco, Mussolini, Hitler)
Masonic fraternalism smacked of Communism and thus required extirpation.
Given its complex associations with anti- Catholicism, political liberalization,
quests for power and influence, and secret influences, what are we to make of (Free)
masonry as a Gnostic affair? Already it has been classified as “esoteric” (Mazet 1992)
and “occult” (Snoek and Bogdan 2014), but what of claims about it as the inheritor
of “Gnosis or secret Wisdom of the Ancients” (chs. 3, 39)?
DEGREES, RITES, AND THE IR HIS TO RIE S :

GNOSTIC TOU CHE S
Considering the very size, diversity, increasingly non-sectarian openness, and spread
of Masonic membership, we can only talk of general structural similarities to
Gnostic movements through history, and indeed of secularizing deep commitment
to a guided progress through mysterious, intricate gateways in a “great journey …
of self-discovery” that will “end up with revelatory knowledge of your inner nature”
(Harwood 2006: 9). For those persisting Adepts, different from the great majority
who just enjoy the fraternal benefits of acquiring Blue Craft Degrees (fixed ca. 1725),
probing level upon level of meaning opened deeper Knowing of the self’s place in the
universe. Generally, we can admit, Freemasonry has the structure of Gnosis from the
start for being initiatic, and for being laden with hieroglyphic signals in lodge para-
phernalia that entice “spiritual curiosity” (Bogdan 2007: 27–52, 76–93; Snoek 1998).
First the initiatory process faces the Apprentice with the frightening ordeal of being
blindfolded and threatened with a poignard before taking his oath of secrecy, and
at the “Third [Blue] Degree” the candidate for Master Mason faces the frightening
similitude of death and the ominous wands of his initiators, and hears the legend of
“our Master Hiram Abiff,” “principal Architect” of King Solomon’s Temple, “slain
just before the completion” of it, as a model of his own sacred responsibility. This
figure, connected to the name of Phoenician King Hiram of Tyre, who sent building
materials to help Solomon’s project (1 Kgs 5; 7; 9–10), proves in the end to be purely
figurative, indeed a veneer for God, eventually giving way to the deeper, more dis-
tinctly Gnostic (or Pythagorean-cum-Christian Kabbalistic) insight that Man (the
Mason) participates in Divinity; but Hiram’s refusal to betray secrets clearly inspires
fervent “emulation” (Hass 1982: 370). As we shall see, the initiatory ordeal is a primal
structure, as rite de passage, accompanying disclosure of group knowledge previously
forbidden to a novice (ch. 57). In Christian confirmation (as against original male
baptisms) only the shadow of any such ordeal remains (as with a bishop’s measured
slap on the face).
The earliest distinctive mysteries of modern Freemasonry connected architectural
knowledge and the Bible. Thus the Sloane Manuscript ([1646] British Museum Ms
3848) has the earliest truths of “Sciences” and “Craft” written in antediluvian times
on two pillars (of “Marble” and “Letera”) by descendants of Lameth [sic] (Genesis
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4:17–22), later put in Greek by Hermenes, son to Cus[h]‌, grandson to Noah through
Shem (yet cf. 10:6–21), “the same Hermenes [being] afterwards Hermes: the father
of wise men” who found the pillars “where ye Sciences were written.” This creative
sleight subtly incorporates Egypt and Hermes/Thoth into the Biblical tradition that
honors the designs of Noah’s Ark and the Solomonic temple, which receives input
from a non-Israelite Phoenician king, who significantly cast two pillars of bronze,
Jachin and Boaz (1 Kings 7:15–22), corresponding to the pre-diluvian duo and
the two placed in Masonic lodges, and measured (as also the Ark, the Pyramids,
and the whole Temple) by sacred cubits (cf. Duncan [1866]: 73 on Second Craft
Degree) and the “celestial Cube” as the “Foundation of all Knowledge” (Harcourt
Charge [1715]). Belief expectations of members were Christian, but allowing simple
faith and a tolerance across Protestant differences, with the emphasis being on dis-
closure through emblem and ritual. Basic Masonic concepts were detectable: in the
Harcourt formulation Love of God and neighbor were the “primitive” and “uni-
versal Religion,” and being the “Law of Nature” also constituted “the Law of God,”
taught by Adam and Seth, Noah and Shem, to counter “all ambitious Thirsters after
empire” threatening original human freedom. Extra-Israelite input from Egypt and
Phoenicia-Canaan was incorporated because Moses borrowed Egyptian “mystic
Shadows” to God’s glory, and Christ’s role was to restore corrupt humanity to its
“primaeval state of Integrity” within “the Divine Intelligence” (as “the Platonicks”
also hoped) (Knoop, Jones, and Hamer 1978: 41, 50, 53, 57, 63).
A shift, though, if already in the making, occurs with James Anderson’s 1723 and
1738 Constitutions of the Free-Masons, inspired by Protestant-Jewish cultural and
cross-Atlantic business interchange (see Popkin and Weiner 1994: 35–158) and ahead
of the 1738 inclusion of Jewish members. Anderson, a Scottish Presbyterian Talmudist,
was affected by current ideas (especially in extolled Isaac Newton’s tolerationist
thought) that Noah was divinely revealed the foundations of all Knowledge, and
given Seven Precepts whereby people become civilized (and acceptable into Jewry
with its Ten Commandments) (Babylonian Talmud, Sanedhrin 56a-b). For Newton,
Jesus had distilled the Noachide precepts and Mosaic commands into the essential
two rules (Love God and love your neighbor), and while Anderson only implied these
in 1723 when declaring Masons were “charged to adhere to that religion in which all
men agree” (excluding atheism), he acknowledged “Noachidae” as “the first Name of
Masons,” and explicitly invoked a necessary subscription to “the moral law” found
in “the three great articles of Noah” in 1738. By the three (referring back to his 1723
formulation) he meant those precepts referring to God (no idols /no blasphemy), to
others (no murder /theft /fornication /just governance to uphold the precepts), and
to “the law of Nature” (in that God’s postdiluvian settlement of the world [Gen 9:11–
16], and the special one of the seven precepts calling Noah “to care for the animals,”
required concern for the natural order) (Trompf 2015: 631–9; Jones 1950: 315–16;
1969: 32; Mazet 1992: 258; cf. Graham Iowa/Essex Mss also connecting Noah to
Hiram and Solomon). This moral foundation makes a man “of good report” and
(placed in a blindfolded “state of darkness”) now “worthy” and “properly prepared
… to be admitted to the mysteries” (1st degree).
This Judaic strain honored the “extra-Biblical” presence of Noachide truth in other
religions (for Newton as far as the Brahmins and Confucius), and certainly the role of
Phoenicia, it being commonly taken that letters and learning reached the Greeks (and
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Pythagoras) and thus Europe through Cadmus the Phoenician. Phoenicia-Canaan also
produced its Melchizedek, the King of [Jeru]Salem mystically prototypical of both
Solomon’s and Christ’s kingship (Gen 14:18–20; Heb 7:1–3). But a Judaizing conser-
vatism could apply about Egypt –Newton significantly holding that the Jerusalem
Temple (or at least its plan under David, 1 Chron 22; cf. 14:1–2) inspired and
preceded the building of the pyramids under pharaoh Sesostris (Manuel 1963: 115,
187, 196, 206–7, 214–15, 219)! Given Freemasonry’s early Hermetic connection,
however, and rampant enthusiasm for things Egyptian (Bernal 1991: 162–4, 169–71),
the Noachian stress did not fit the times for long, with seven cardinal (mainly clas-
sical) virtues even replacing the Precepts (i.e., Fortitude, Temperance, Prudence, and
Justice, sometimes combined with Secrecy, Fidelity, and Obedience, and in other cases
with the Christian Faith, Hope, and Charity, the last supreme), such matters settling
by the 1790s, as William Preston’s Lectures show.
Symptomatic of the cultural shift from earlier religious to later latitudinarian
“Enlightenment,” a Biblically oriented reaction produced a schism (above all in the
Anglophone world from the 1750s) –between (Scottish) “Antients” and (English,
Andersonian-associated) “Moderns” –which was resolved though the development
of the fourth degree, of the (basically York-originated) Royal Arch, in an 1817 Union
of a Grand Masonic Chapter (Jones 1969: 32, 52–125; Wells 1986), in which specu-
lative focus on the Jerusalem Temple retook center-stage. North Americans became
accepting of the Royal Arch from 1797, though understandably revolutionary souls
stood away from royal associations. It was commensurate with his republicanism
that Benjamin Franklin, who penned America’s first Masonic Constitutions (1734),
pared down Christianity to love of God and one’s fellows, and recast the Lord’s
Prayer deistically with “may thy [Masonically conceived] laws be obeyed on earth”
rather than “thy will be done” (Haverstick 1968: 128). Subversive against Russia’s
“oriental despotism” in the east, for another challenger to royalty, Sicilian (self-
inscribed Count) Alessandro Cagliostro dared to connect Hermetic, Egypto-centric
Freemasonry with doctrines of the Illuminati, and also to abet Muslim membership
(begun in Saxony from 1754), finding himself in the Pope’s gaol for heresy by 1789.
For Cagliostro the original Temple was designed in antediluvian times and quite out-
side our present human order and its political system, buried underground by Enoch
for future generations (om. Gen 5:23–24) (McCalman 2003: 70–92, 207–32; cf.
Koselleck 1988: 86–97).
But various complications were afoot that allowed this distilling tendency to be
filled out in Gnostic vein. Of course it was not as if the “basic moral truth” that was
Freemasonry could not be confirmed by “revelations” from old wisdom –what was
traditionally called “esotery” –and thus from details of ancient religions and lore. But
what we may call “sacred history” materials, as in “old charges” (known from the
Sloane Ms, for instance), or “ancient wisdom narratives” (Granholm 2014: 33) –with
ideas of a prisca sapientia or theologia from Noah or Hermes or Pythagoras being
perennially accessible –gave way both to greater detail and a recognizably Gnostic
macrohistorical framework of cosmic descent and (re-)ascent (see ch. 3), one that
linked to pre-existing Gnostic macrohistories (such as those of modern Theosophy).
We conclude this article by noting three quite different thinkers in this connection,
to confirm the Masonic- Gnostic interface in terms of special (macro- )historical
speculations.
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TH REE GNOSTICIZING M AS O NIC THINKE RS

The first figure is the mysterious Martinez de Pasqually (1727[?]‌–1774), founder of
a special but reputed Masonic temple order of “Elect Priests” (Elus Coëns), whose
fetish for initiations, Christian Kabbalism, and theurgic interests propelled both the
emergence of the Rectified Scottish rite in France (from Lyon, 1782 on) elaborated by
Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, and the para-Masonic strand called Martinism (surrounding
esoterist Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin). De Pasqually focused on the redemptive
Christ as “Repairer” of the Fall. The Creation involved the necessary emanation of
many “free” divine beings out of Divinity’s breast, the most powerful inner circle
being denary or Domination who turned against their Maker. The prototype of this
world was created to control their power, Man (as “pure spirit”) being set in it and
protected by it so as to cushion God from these “first spirits.” But these latter were
too persuasively influential over the human, and of his own free will he used their
magical techniques rather than God’s. Adam thus lost the potential for reproducing
the “glorious form” of the Divine in his posterity, and received a “material form”
appropriate to his prévarication, falling out of heaven to “the abyss of earth … like
the rest of the animals.” Adam, however, was also first among humans to seek rec-
onciliation, which came with Christ Le Régénérateur, who redeems those “sealed”
by their righteousness and now calls out an elect to prepare for his new Advent,
by which all beings may be reintegrated into the Divine (Traité de la réintégration
des êtres [1771–1775]). The shadows of Gnostic emanationism and the Manichaean
cosmogony hovers, yet with a justification of matter; and De Pasqually significantly
interprets the major symbol of Freemasonry, with the pointed compass over the
mason’s square sitting on its angle as the Descent of all beings from the One with
the open possibility of (re-)Ascent (in the Platonico-Gnostic U-curve (see ch. 3). The
whole cosmic system is also epitomized (using Kabbalistic and Pythagorean insights)
in the completing of Solomon’s Temple (Urban 1997: 15–17; cf. Faivre 1972). The
Masonic rediscovery that the Divine is in the human foreshadows the return to heav-
enly Eden, and our “apotheosis,” as reflected at the time in the finale of Freemason
Mozart’s Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte [1791]).
Our second figure, imposing American romantic adventurer, trooper, and lawyer
Albert Pike (1809–1891), served 32 years as Sovereign Grand Commander of the
Scottish Rite in the southern States reforming and shaping its ritual life (while
documenting old rites). Probably the most influential Freemasonic expositor, Pike’s
Morals and Dogma (1871) accounts for the meaning of 32 degrees in what reads
sometimes like a curtain-raiser to Theosophist Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled
(1877) (see ch. 44). Although St John the Evangelist (the Masons’ virtual Masonic
patron saint) corrected them, the Gnostics are treated with some respect for seeing
the world “emanating out of the vital development of God” as beyond description,
and recognizing an immortal “soul within our body, a God that lives in the [material]
universe” (Charleston 1871 edition: 557–73). For their quests the Gnostics were
rated among the (ancient) “Cabalists” and among those successive groups of
“Initiates into the Mysteries,” from the Buddha, the first known “Masonic legis-
lator,” through Egypt’s Hermes or Thoth, “initiated into the secret knowledge of
India, of Persia and of [Sabaean] Ethiopia,” and Pythagoras, student of Zoroaster
and Egyptian initiate, on to Plato, “who drew his doctrines from the East and the
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451
Mysteries” and whose Academy has been revived in Masonry (221, 277, 364–5,
379–90, 398, 424). Of all the Mysteries, Pike’s favorite was that of Osiris’s resur-
rection, connecting sun, planets, immortality, transmigration, goodness, and the
pyramids as “universal symbol” for them all –such Egyptophile propensities even-
tually affecting Royal Arch Masons, with their Egyptian Rooms. Pike also linked
Egypt to the Hiramic Phoenician connection, and it was the concessions he made
to Baal/Bel as the archetypal Mesopotamian deity that sounded the most alarm
bells among Freemasonry’s Christian constituency (234, 590–1, 633; cf. Hannah
1984: 35–36). The “royal secret” though, is found (as with De Pasqually) in the
pointers to Descent and (re-)Ascent in the Craft’s major symbol, and is thus philo-
sophic. It concerns “that Equilibrium … Masonry incessantly labours to accom-
plish in its Initiates … between the Spiritual and Divine and the Material and
Human in man,” who partakes the “ray of the Divine Intelligence” in “the Temple
builded by Wisdom” (Pike 1871: 860–1).
The third figure, Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934), was a leader of the
Theosophical Society (TS). After its second President Annie Besant embraced and
fostered TS membership of Co-Masonry (from 1902), a French “Symbolic Scottish
Grand Lodge” that had initiated women into the mysteries (from 1882) (see ch. 44),
Leadbeater quickly rose to be the order’s Administrator General in Sydney, Australia
(where TS interests had gravitated). A clairvoyant, claiming to see thousands of per-
sons’ previous lives, Leadbeater presented himself as “the Inner Head” of “All True
Freemasons” (from 1915), a highly irregular move (Tillett 1982: 168). By clairvoy-
ance revisiting a former life, he claimed he could accurately describe the architecture,
paraphernalia, and ritual of the earliest known Masonry in our human order, in Egypt,
its origins there now “somewhat obscured by Jewish influence” in modern versions.
That is the main subject of his Hidden Life in Freemasonry (Adyar, 1926 edition). The
significance of Ra (the Sun) as symbolic of the one God in the Trinity Father/Mother/
Son (Osiris, Isis, Horus) and the dot in the center of the circle revealing heliocentrism
and awareness of “the all-seeing eye” were portions “of the secret knowledge reserved
for the Mysteries” that went back still further, at least to Atlantis. The same gnosis,
he maintained, was found in The Book of Dzyan, expounded by Blavatsky in her
The Secret Doctrine. The chief, indeed incessant hidden purpose of Masonry was to
“make the character of a perfect man, a kind of heavenly man,” who, “doing unto
others” in this symbolic “system of morality,” is ready to return to the divine origin-
ating Light (Leadbeater: 17, 21–2, 26–9, 42, 46–7, etc.), and its career through time
chimed perfectly with the Gnostic macrohistory of the TS, and “under the guidance
of the Masters” (Leadbeater: 69).
If Freemasonry has often been introduced to outsiders simply as “a way of making
men better,” the evidence remains that some of its renowned exponents, whether legit-
imately or not, have approached and unveiled it for its loyalists as “a way of Gnosis.”
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CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
BRITISH ROMANTICISM: GNOSTIC
LONGINGS
William Christie
N one of the British Romantic writers was gnostic, not even William Blake, who
happily embraced the charge when it was leveled at him on one occasion
by Henry Crabb Robinson (Symons 1907: 298). Indeed, if Romanticism is to be
associated with any ancient religion, it is with one that is in vital ways diametrically
opposed to Gnosticism, which is pantheism. Wordsworth’s celebrated “sense sublime”
Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things
(“Lines Written a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey,” ll. 96–103)
could not be further removed from the supra-cosmic Gnostic deity whose slender legacy
is the consubstantial pneuma or “spark” said to be imprisoned within us, just as we,
in turn, are imprisoned within the material cosmos. Where Gnosticism is dualistic,
rigidly separating the immaterial from the material (God and world, man and world),
Romanticism tends throughout to unity and reconciliation. Far from focusing on the
divine pneuma in its splendid isolation, “the poet,” says Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “brings
the whole soul of man into activity”: “He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends,
and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which
we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination” (Halmi, Magnuson, and
Modiano 2004: 495). Gnosticism is preoccupied with fission, Romanticism with fusion.
Manifestations of Gnostic belief or Gnostic mythology in Romantic writing,
then, are only ever occasional, speculative, and/or metaphorical. Their exact source,
moreover, must remain doubtful. Platonism and Neoplatonism, for example, share
a number of motifs and assumptions with Gnosticism. Plotinus may have attacked
the Gnostic repudiation of the material cosmos, but he was not being completely
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— British Romanticism: gnostic longings —
ingenuous and there remained large areas of overlap. So it was with Romanticism.
Insofar as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism can be said to derive from Platonism –and
I am aware that the jury is still out as to Gnosticism’s many and various intellectual
genetics –Romanticism’s recovery of the spirit and revival of idealism, vexed and
uncertain though they were and often more aspiration than inspiration, means that it
shares a heritage with both Neoplatonism and Gnosticism:
each treats the mundane world as degraded in relation to a transcendent reality,

and each represents the soul as having descended or fallen into the degraded
world which is not its true home and from which it seeks to reascend.
(Quinney 2001: 413–14)
If we think of Gnosticism as a theogony and cosmogony (or anti-cosmogony) with

defining ramifications for the status and destiny of human being –a cosmogony in
which “the world is the product of a divine tragedy, a disharmony in the realm of
God, a baleful destiny in which man is entangled and from which he must be set free”
(Rudolph 1983: 66) –we can identify a number of ideas and values (or valorizations)
that Romanticism had in common with Gnosticism. Three of these were central and
will form the focus of this entry: isolation, insight, and insubordination.
ISOLATIO N
This concerns our sense of belonging –or of not belonging –to the world in which
we find ourselves, what we might call the sense of cosmic unease experienced and
dramatized (allegorized) by so many Romantic writers. Hans Jonas identifies this as
the psychological aspect of Gnosticism (Jonas 1963: 331–4), part of a long history
of “existential alienation” that stretches back to Orphism and Pythagoreanism and
forward to Heidegger and the Existentialists of twentieth-century philosophy. The
same Wordsworth who celebrated Nature as “the nurse, | The guide, the guardian
of my heart, and soul | Of all my moral being” (ll. 110–12) in “Lines Written a Few
Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798) gave classic expression in his “Ode. Intimations
of Immortality” to what we can call a kind of Gnostic nostalgia or “ache for home” in
which the same “nurse,” Nature, struggles to divert our attention from the “imperial
palace” or pleroma we have forsaken:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
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— William Christie —
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother’s mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
(ll. 58–84)
Growing up in this material world –call it Nature or the cosmos –spells incarceration

and alienation “from God, who is our home.” “Who has not felt the same aspirations
as regards the world of his own mind?” Wordsworth asked rhetorically in the note he
dictated to Isabella Fenwick in 1843. Wordsworth might only have been ransacking
the “popular creeds of many nations” in search of a metaphor for his sense of spir-
itual displacement, but he shared that sense with the Gnostics. (See the editorial note
to “Ode. Intimations of Immortality” in Halmi 2014: 432–4.)
And he shared it with his younger contemporary, Percy Bysshe Shelley. “We are
born into this world,” Shelley writes in his essay “On Love,” “and there is something
within us which from the instant that we live and move thirsts after its likeness”
(Reiman and Fraistat 2002: 504). Shelley would make this “thirst” the topic of one
of his first large-scale excursions into idealism and its discontents, “Alastor; or, The
Spirit of Solitude” (1815), in which the cosmic unease of Shelley’s hero plays out as a
form of tragic isolation from his own kind: “He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude”
(l. 60). The unnamed hero has a vision of “a veilèd maid” in a dream:
He dreamed a veilèd maid
Sate near him, talking in melodious tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held
His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine liberty …
(ll. 151–62)
Already a homeless wanderer “through Arabie | And Persia, and the wild Carmanian
waste,” the Poet-hero is driven by his dream of consummation on an extraordinary
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allegorical journey that rewinds the history of human civilization in its symbolic
geography, just as it takes him back to the source of his own life in ritual degener-
ation and death.
Far from offering intimations of Gnostic transcendence in its return to origins,
however, “Alastor,” like all Romantic poetry, betrays a deep scepticism about the
status of its own “knowledge” or gnosis. It may be, as Laura Quinney suggests, that
“a visionary construction is worthwhile because it satisfies the soul’s deepest desire: to
return to what shares its nature” (Quinney 2001: 414), but in this case the vision of
the “veilèd maid” is clearly a projection of the idealist hero’s own desire. Starved of
effective intercourse with his kind, the isolated voyager is self-driven into fantasies
at once erotic and narcissistic: “Her voice was like the voice of his own soul.” Like
Narcissus, he falls in love with his own image before the avenging “Spirit of Solitude”
of the title pursues him to an early death.
To say that the realm of the ideal is often equivocal or precarious in Romantic
writing is not to settle the issue against idealism on behalf of a “real” or material
world, however. The poem may question the voyager’s obsessively self-destructive
quest, but his yearning (Sehnsucht) and single-minded pursuit of “Knowledge and
truth and virtue” remain irresistibly heroic. His brief life and premature death –like
the Gnostic construction of humanity, Shelley’s voyager is unfit for the material world
he inhabits –is still to be preferred to the lives of “those whose hearts are dry as
summer dust,” insists Shelley (quoting Wordsworth), those who “Burn to the socket”
(Reiman and Fraistat 2002: 73).
Surely the most haunting Romantic expression of the “existential alienation” that
Jonas identifies with Gnosticism, however, is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner” (1798), in which the isolation so harrowingly recounted by its
transgressive narrator is understood as at once immediate and personal, and at the
same time profoundly representative: a symbolic-allegorical account of human spir-
itual and existential solitude:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
(ll. 232–35)
As Hans Blumenberg reminds us, in Christian iconography “the sea is the place
where evil appears, sometimes with the Gnostic touch that stands for all-devouring
matter that takes everything back into itself” (Blumenberg 1996: 8). The poem’s
consolations –the Mariner’s subsequent blessing of the slimy water- snakes and
apparent reconciliation with the material cosmos –
O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
(ll. 282–85)
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–are deliberately frustrated; the Mariner’s suffering, it turns out, does not end
there: “The man hath penance done, | And penance more will do” (ll. 408–9). It is
the same when the Mariner returns to his “own countree” (l. 467) –when it seems
that he is finally at home –only to discover an eternal restlessness and compulsion
to repeat:
Since then, at an uncertain hour,

That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land …
(ll. 582–6)
We are never allowed to imagine the Mariner absolved of his sin, if it is a sin (the jury
is out on that one). Whatever we call it, no amount of confession or expiation will
ever relieve the Mariner, other than momentarily, of the burden of what he knows –
his “sense of the material world,” to quote Thomas Pfau, “as an all-encompassing,
cosmic miscarriage” (Pfau 2007: 951).
“Here is a voice that expresses unrelieved, naked, desperate suffering. It is the voice
of a man with no place to go, no one to turn to, least of all providential aid,” writes
Raimonda Modiano (2001: 275).
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been

Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ‘twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
(ll. 597–600)
As a characterization of a degraded, or evil, material world in line with the Gnostic

vision, nothing could be starker. Either the place of the Mariner’s abjection was so
lonely that God did not seem to be there –suggestive of a condition of the soul
abandoned by all support –or there is what Seamus Perry calls “a more appal-
ling sense”: “I was so isolated and bereft, that God scarce seemed to exist at all”
(Perry 2001: 250). The overriding or informing anxiety of “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner” is an anxiety, not just about moral disproportion or the incomprehensibility
of human motive, but about an ultimate onto-theological meaninglessness: the vast
inanity and inconsequentiality of human being.
INSIGHT
By “insight” I mean a fusion of gnosis and imagination, as in Gnosticism itself: knowing
as vision. This, too, Romanticism shares with Gnosticism. “Poetry defeats the curse
that binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions,” writes
Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry” (1821), liberating us from the prison of the material
world and creating for us “a being within our being”: “It compels us to feel that which
we perceive, and to imagine that which we know” (Reiman and Fraistat 2002: 533).
This is the primary and paradoxical legacy of Romanticism, its original idealism.
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Coleridge’s famous passage on the imagination in chapter 13 of the Biographia

Literaria (1817) –revealing that not only does the mind take an active role in per-
ception itself (mistaken by the empiricists for a passive activity), but we are capable
of further exercising our secondary imagination to create “that which we know” –
presents as both an injunction and a benediction. The secondary imagination, “co-
existing with the conscious will,” “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate;
or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events struggles to idealize
and to unify.” The aspiration to autonomy and creativity is no less characteristic of
Romanticism than the hesitation and the doubt that Coleridge’s formulation betrays
(“where this process is rendered impossible”). Indeed, as we saw in Shelley’s “Alastor,”
the imagination can be, both epistemologically and ethically, an ambiguous attribute.
Still its power comes athwart us, as Wordsworth discovered in a moment of insight
celebrated in the famous passage in Book 6 of The Prelude (1805) when, to his
confusion, he discovers he has crossed the Swiss Alps without realizing it and been
defrauded of a sublime moment:
Imagination! lifting up itself up

Before the eye and progress of my song
Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud,
Halted without a struggle to break through
And now recovering to my Soul I say
I recognize thy glory; in such strength
Of usurpation, in such visitings
Of awful promise, when the light of sense
Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us
The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode,
There harbours whether we be young or old.
Our destiny, our nature, and our home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
(Book 6, ll. 525–42)
Here the mind anatomizes, even as it glories in, its own insight, declaring its affinity or
continuity with “the invisible world” it accesses and at the same time, as Wordsworth’s
most Kantian moment, implicitly linking Romantic idealism with its Neoplatonic and
Gnostic antecedents.
INSUB ORDINATIO N
It is no coincidence that, until the twentieth century at least, our knowledge of Gnosticism
should have come to us largely, if not exclusively, through the agency and mediation
of the Fathers of the Christian Church, specifically through the Adversus Haereses of
Irenaeus. It is worth reminding ourselves that Gnosticism was a heresy before embarking
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on my final affinity between Romanticism and Gnosticism, which concerns Romantic

creation myths and their Gnostic tendency to challenge or invert Christian orthodoxy –
most often, it should be said, the authorized version as it came down to them from
John Milton in Paradise Lost. Blake was not the only Romantic for whom Milton
“was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” (see his “The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell,” with Erdman 1982: 35). Shelley, too, admired Milton’s Satan’s
“firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force” (Reiman and Fraistat 2002: 207).
When Robert Southey condemned Shelley and Byron as the “Satanic School,” he may
have been reacting hysterically to their politics and morals, but he was otherwise strictly
accurate in his attribution of literary influence. What it amounted to on the part of the
younger generation of Romantics was an uneasiness with Biblical mythology and the
way it inscribed and perpetuated social and political inequities.
Romanticism, for example, shared the Gnostics’ misgivings about the Creator-God
of Genesis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as sharing its tendency to read
against the grain: the serpent in Gnostic mythology becomes the hero of the Garden
of Eden story, the fall itself the beginning of salvation. (Indeed, writes Paul Cantor,
“in Gnostic myth, the creation and the fall are in effect conflated into a single event”
[Cantor 1985: x].) And in Gnostic writings the God of the Old Testament becomes a
“polemical caricature” (Edwards 1967: 338). Quite apart from the problem of evil,
there were clearly anthropomorphic and reprehensible aspects to Yahweh/Jehovah
for the Romantics –his arrogance and jealousy, for example, and his partiality: the
absoluteness of his power, exerting control over Adam and Eve by denying them vital
knowledge. As Byron put it in Cain: A Mystery, the most Gnostic of his works:
LUCIFER Goodness would not make

Evil; and what else has he made? But let him
Sit on his vast and solitary throne,
Creating worlds, to make eternity
Less burthensome to his immense existence
And unparticipated solitude!
Let him crowd orb on orb: he is alone
Indefinite, indissoluble tyrant!
…
I tempt none
Save with the truth: was not the tree, the tree
Of knowledge? and was not the tree of life
Still fruitful: Did I bid her [= Eve] pluck them not?
Did I plant things prohibited within
The reach of beings innocent, and curious
By their own innocence? I would have made ye
Gods …
(1:1:146–53, 197–203, with
McGann 1986: 888–9)
The orthodox politics of withholding knowledge was antipathetic to a Romantic

generation preoccupied with the question of authority: of who should rule over, or
overrule, whom; of what entitled or empowered someone –or, more ethically, what
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qualified someone –to rule at all. Clearly this had also worried the Gnostics, inspiring
the invention of a theogony that pre-dated the Biblical story of creation, with a prim-
ordial, transcendent deity above and beyond corruption and comprehension –indeed,
above and beyond creation itself, and all the investments and interests that creation
implied. That was to be managed by an altogether lower figure in the Gnostic hier-
archy (the Demiurge in Valentinian Gnosticism, Ialdabaoth in the Apocrophon of
John), a flawed and sometimes cruel and vicious Creator bent on denying humans
access to the transformative Gnôsis: the creative recognition of whom they are and
where they really belong, outside the material cosmos.
By rewriting the mythical Greek hero, Prometheus, Romanticism created a less
ambivalent figure than Milton’s Satan, a figure at once heroic (noble) and repre-
sentative, to steal fire/knowledge for humankind: “To the romantics it is clear that
Prometheus symbolized a will power that included a capacity for infinite endurance,
a defiance of deity and therefore of ‘priestcraft,’ a mystical self-justification that might
mount to sublime egotism, a hatred of tyranny, and a belief in the brotherhood of
man” (Mumford Jones 1974: 251; cf. ch. 39). Accordingly, in Shelley’s Prometheus
Unbound, Jupiter is a cruel tyrant in the demiurgic mould, like Blake’s Urizen and
Nobodaddy crippling the human mind through his “thought-executing ministers”
(1:1:387):
ASIA He refused
The birthright of their being, knowledge, power,
The skill which wields the elements, the thought
Which pierces this dim Universe like light,
Self-empire and the majesty of love,
For thirst of which they fainted.
(2:4:38–43)
Prometheus himself has to learn forgiveness (like Christ), to embrace his anima, in
“Asia,” and turn tragic antagonism into lyric transcendence.
It is in the revisionary insubordination of Romantic writing that Harold Bloom
identifies its Gnostic inheritance, classifying as Gnostic “questers for God” everyone
“not persuaded by orthodox or normative accounts or versions of religion” in search
of a “timeless knowing” (Bloom 1982: 4). “But the Gnostic dualism of soul or psyche
against self or pneuma or ‘spark’ is crucial for seeing just what Gnostic knowing, or
Gnosis, takes as its quest” (Bloom 1982: 7). Just how interested the Romantics were
in the Gnostic pneuma or “spark” is a moot point, however. Byron’s Lucifer and Cain
are not simply heterodox inversions of figures traditionally demonized in Christian
mythology, they are complex characters, vulnerable to self-deception and disturbingly
prone to echo their tyrannical antagonists in speech and action, to be doubted most
when they are most plausible. If they are Gnostic, then Gnosticism is not the answer
to the problems of power, evil, and human responsibility thrown up by the poems. Or
to put it another way, they are hardly likely to satisfy the Gnostic revisionists.
Nor do we find among the disruptive and interrogative fictions of the Romantics
any impulse to create an alternative orthodoxy –quite the opposite. As a matter
of principle, each poet felt impelled, like Blake, to create his own System, “or be
enslav’d by another Man’s” (Erdman 1982: 153). Each system, moreover, each
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mythology –Gnosticism included –and the very metaphors used by poets to express

their individual visions, needed constant revision and reinvention to prevent its
hardening into a new orthodoxy.
“Valentinian narrative grammar,” writes Cyril O’Regan, referring to Valentinian
Gnosticism, “is always at the same time a transformational narrative grammar,” to
be read in relation to the Biblical discourse it opposes (O’Regan 2001: 59). The same
is true of the revisionary myth-making of the Romantics, but their locus is rarely, if
ever, supernatural or theological. The typical Romantic psycho-drama is just that: a
drama of the psyche or mind; an elaborate psychomachia in which characters figure
forth conflicting ideas and impulses. Shelley’s Jupiter, authoritarian and evil, is no
less a creation of the tortured Prometheus than Prometheus is a victim of Jupiter.
Byron’s Lucifer is the projection of a disaffected, even bloody-minded Cain, driven
by “rage and fury against the inadequacy of his state to his Conceptions” (Marchand
1979: 54). Welcome to the human, not the divine or pneumatic race. The elaborate
machinery of Romantic mythology, as Wordsworth declared in his Prospectus to The
Recluse, is just a way back into the “Mind of Man”:
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink

Deep, and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the Heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength, all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form—
Jehovah, with his thunder, and the quire
Of shouting angels, and the empyreal thrones—
I pass them unalarmed. Not Chaos, not
The darkest Pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy scooped out
By help of dreams can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man,
My haunt and the main region of my Song.
(Home at Grasmere, MS D, ll. 781–94)
We can say of Romantic Gnosticism, wherever we find it, what Wordsworth said
when defending his allusion to a Platonic notion of pre-existence in “Ode. Intimations
of Immortality”: “It is far too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith as more
than an element in our instincts for immortality” (Halmi 2014: 433).
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Erdman, David V. (ed.). 1982. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The Complete Poetry and
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Symons, Arthur. 1907. “Extracts on William Blake from the Diary, Letters, and Reminiscences
of Henry Crabb Robinson.” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/William_Blake_(Symons)/
Extracts_ f rom_ t he_ D iary,_ L etters,_ a nd_ R eminiscences_ o f_ H enry_ C rabb_R obinson,
accessed 24 February 2018.
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CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
WILLIAM BLAKE, THE ANCIENT

GNOSTICS, AND THE BIRTH
OF MODERN GNOSTICISM
Peter Otto
O n 10 December 1825, after dining at the house of the painter and socialite Eliza
Aders and her husband Charles, in the company of the painter John Linnell,
Henry Crabb Robinson was at a loss. As he wrote in his diary: “I will put down as they
occur to me without method all I can recollect of the conversation of this remarkable
man”; but “Shall I call him Artist or Genius–or Mystic–or Madman? Probably he is
all” (Bentley 2004: 420). The remarkable man was William Blake, the fifth member
of the dinner party –a poet, prophet, painter, visionary, engraver, and non-academic
philosopher, who has exerted a powerful influence on twentieth-and twenty-first-
century thought and culture. But in 1825, two years before the end of his life, he had
almost sunk from sight. As the essayist Charles Lamb reported, on 15 May 1824, to
his friend James Montgomery: “the man is flown, whither I know not, to Hades or a
Mad House” (quoted in Bentley 2001: 365). Although Robinson had not previously
met Blake, he had viewed Blake’s exhibition of paintings (1809), read the Descriptive
Catalogue that accompanied it, and then two years later published in Vaterländisches
Museum (vol. 2, pp. 107–31) an essay entitled “William Blake: Künstler, Dichter,
und Religiöser Schwärmer” (“William Blake: Artist, Poet, and Religious Enthusiast”).
Now, in the comfort of the Aders’s house at No. 11 Euston Square, he set out to draw
from Blake “an avowal of his peculiar sentiments” (Bentley 2004: 420).
Blake was then 68 years old and at the height of his powers. Five years earlier,
he had completed Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–ca. 1820),
the most ambitious of his illuminated poems; and now, encouraged by Linnell’s
patronage, he had begun to engrave his illustrations to the Book of Job (composed
1823–1826), while working on his illustrations to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,
Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the Ethiopic Book of Enoch (all composed 1824–1827).
In the following year, he would begin work on ‫[ הי‬Jehovah]& his two Sons Satan &
Adam [The Laocoön] (ca. 1826–1827), a summary of his artistic, poetic, and theo-
logical views, and on his illustrations to the book of Genesis (1826–1827), which like
earlier poems such as The Book of Urizen (1794) attempts to explain how this world
came into being. It is not surprising therefore that, after leaving the Aders, Robinson
was eager to extend the experience, by “walking homeward” with Blake (Bentley
2004: 421), and then to repeat it. Seven days later, he visited Blake in his rooms “in
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— William Blake and modern Gnosticism —
Fountain Court in the Strand” (Bentley 2004: 426), and he was there again on 24
December, 6 January, and 18 February. After each visit, he recorded in his diary what
seemed the most important of Blake’s remarks.
Robinson didn’t think that Blake’s “fragmentary Sentims” (Bentley 2004: 422) could
be reconciled with each other. His views are, he wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth on 19
February, “a strange compound” of irreconcilable systems –“Christianity Spinosism
& Platonism” (Bentley 2004: 437). Indeed, as one reads the diary, this sense of baffle-
ment seems to bring conversation between the diarist and the poet again and again
to a halt, often at points where it is at its most interesting; but it also leads Robinson
to report rather than explain Blake’s views, alongside his own responses to them. The
result is an assemblage of snippets and summaries of conversation that sketch the
outline of a Gnostic theology, albeit one that is inflected by what we can call modern
Gnosticism (O’Regan 2002: 13). It is therefore worth tracing Robinson’s account of
Blake’s views, before turning briefly to the latter’s poems and designs.
Thinking back on his first meeting with Blake, Robinson is most baffled when
he tries to reconcile remarks Blake made during dinner with those he made while
walking home. “We are all coexistent with God –Members of the Divine body –We
are all partakers of the divine nature,” Blake had asserted during dinner. This was
a view, Robinson surmised, which he had drawn from “ancient Greek” philosophy
and, more particularly, from Plato. But when Robinson asked, as the pair walked
“homeward,” “in what light [Blake] viewed the Divinity of Jesus Christ,” his new
friend agreed that “He is the only God,” but then added “And so am I and so are
you.” This claim was all the more surprising because, as Robinson writes next, earlier
that evening Blake had said Christ “was wrong in suffering himself to be crucified[.]‌
He should not have attacked the govt.[;] he had no business with such matters”
(Bentley 2004: 421). In the course of a single paragraph, readers of Robinson’s diary
are therefore taken from Platonism to a radical Christian-humanism and then to
remarks recalling Baruch Spinoza’s belief that Jesus was a Jewish prophet, who like
lesser prophets was a man “subject to human limitations” (Tractatus Theologico-
politicus 1677] [Shirley 1925], p. 80).
Although Robinson offers these remarks as a sample of the “strange compound”
minted by Blake’s thought, the order in which he reports them rehearses (even as it
revises) one of the organizing myths of Gnosticism, namely the fall of a divine spark
into the abyss of the material world, where it vanishes almost entirely from sight. In
other words, what Robinson takes to be a summary of the Platonic and Neoplatonic
belief in the eternal One (the origin and end of all things), from which the soul falls
into the abyss of materialism, is reworked twice. First, through a radical version of
the Incarnation, which brings God into time in order to make the human consubstan-
tial with the divine. And, second, by the suggestion that, although we become like
God, God becomes like us –human and fallible. At the conclusion of this sequence,
Robinson aligns Blake with a philosopher commonly thought an atheist, who defended
such progressive causes as tolerance, freedom of speech and conscience, democracy, a
universal religion, and the separation of church and state” (Beiser 1987: 50).
If the record of their conversation ended here, one could perhaps think Blake
was drawing primarily on Platonic and Neoplatonic accounts of the soul’s fall into
the material world; but, in the next paragraphs, Blake can be heard distinguishing
between a true God and an evil Creator, and between “The natural world,” which
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— Pe t e r O t t o —
“must be consumed,” and “the spiritual world,” before then introducing some of the
conclusions commonly drawn by Gnostics from these premises.
Blake proposes, first, that “There is no use in education[.]‌I hold it wrong—It is
the great Sin … It is eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil –That was
the fault of Plato –he knew of nothing but of the Virtues & Vices and good & evil”
(Bentley 2004: 422). The rapid shift of topic here (from education to the Garden of
Eden and then Plato) suggests that Blake is opposed to education, as defined by Plato,
because it assumes “the general homogeneity of all cosmic existence, which [in turn]
permits comparison between all parts by a uniform standard of evaluation” (Jonas
1963: 262). If seen in this light, education is possible only in a hierarchical world,
where the lower is governed by the higher, the student by the teacher, the people by
the king. As Plotinus argues in The Enneads, “If men are superior to the other living
creatures, how much more superior are they (the spheres), which are in the All not for
tyrannical rule but to confer on it order and harmony.” But this truth, he continues,
is lost on the Gnostics, who tell stories of “the frightful things which allegedly take
place in the cosmic spheres,” and in so doing “frighten those who are inexperienced
in reason and have never heard of the well-ordered knowledge [gnosis] acquired by
education” (quoted in Jonas 1963: 262).
Second, Blake turns to the antinomian conclusion drawn by some Gnostics from
the same premises (as shown by Lardner in his Historie of the Heretics [1780],
pp. 169–70), namely that “[‘]Every thing is good in [the true] God’s eyes[’]” and,
therefore, the distinction between “Virtues & Vices and good & evil” is a delusion
(Bentley 2004: 422). Summarizing the argument that led second-century Gnostics to
this conclusion, Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons from ca. 178 to ca. 202, writes: “just as
the earthly element cannot partake of salvation … so, on the other hand, the spiritual,
which [the Gnostics] maintain they constitute, cannot take on corruption, regardless
of what practices they may have engaged in” (Adversus Haereses 6.2).
And third, drawing a conclusion not imagined by ancient Gnosticism, Blake turns
from the eternal to the temporal world, from law to creation, and from theology to
art. In Robinson’s words:
His eye glistend while he spoke of the joy of devoting himself solely to divine
art –[“]Art is inspiration[.]‌When Michael Angelo or Raphael or Mr Flaxman
does any of his fine things he does them in the spirit[”] –Bl said [“]I shd be sorry if
I had any earthly fame for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted
from his spiritual glory[.] I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art.[”]
(Bentley 2004: 422)
The binary universe of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism is still evident in the oppos-
itions that structure this passage: joy and sadness, devotion and apathy, “divine
art” and routine labor, “inspiration” and memory, spirit and body, living for art and
dying for profit, and “spiritual glory” and “earthly fame”/“natural glory.” But both
dimensions are dependent on human creators, with one bound to what is and the
other open to what could be.
These shifts in topic (from education to antinomianism and then art), echoing
the sequence mapped earlier by Robinson, take us once more from Platonism to a
radical Christian-humanism which celebrates the holiness of desire (antinomianism),
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and then to a view reminiscent of Spinoza. With regard to this last point one must
add, however, that the differences are as significant as the similarities. For Spinoza,
God is the immanent cause of Nature, whereas, for Blake, God is immanent in artistic
creation, which in his late work is understood broadly as the ability not just to create
a work of art but in so doing both to reveal the structure of this world and to open
it to what could be.
The (ancient and modern) Gnostic themes I am drawing from Robinson’s first
meeting with Blake become still more explicit in the second, when the former steers
the conversation back to the problem of good and evil, and the latter, upping the
ante, remarks that “What are called the vices in the natural world, are the highest
sublimities in the spiritual world” (Bentley 2004: 427). This prompts a discussion
about the Devil, which Robinson tries to guide by mentioning the doctrine of the
Manichaeans, which divides the world into two warring principles, one good and the
other evil. “[W]‌hen a child,” Robinson cautiously admits, ‘I thought the Manichaean
doctrine … a rational one.” Blake agreed with the younger Robinson on this point
“and in confirmation asserted that he did not believe in the omnipotence of God.”
The older Robinson seems to have assumed this would commit Blake to the opposite
view, namely that life is governed by Nature. He is therefore surprised to hear Blake
say, a few minutes later, “that the natural world is [not] any thing. It is all nothing and
Satan’s empire is the empire of nothing” (Bentley 2004: 427). In Blake’s view, it seems,
action in this world is set free from the causal chains that bind us to forms imposed
by a pre-existing Nature, whether fabricated by earthly or divine powers.
These sentences are followed by yet another of Gnosticism’s guiding thoughts,
namely the primal androgyny of Man (and God), which Wo/Man lost in the course
of the Fall/Creation but will regain in the Kingdom of Heaven. In Robinson’s highly
compressed, perhaps self-censored, account of this theme, after affirming that “the fall
produced only generation & death” Blake “went off upon a rambling state of a Union
of Sexes in Man as in God –an androgynous state in which I could not follow him”
(Bentley 2004: 427–8). But if we put Robinson’s confusion to one side for a moment,
the logic of Blake’s thought is not hard to discern. As we have seen, the Gnostic critique
of the lower world and its Creator becomes, in Blake’s hands, a critique of lower and
upper worlds, and of the human acts that maintain a universe where Heaven imposes
its will on Hell, reason on energy, the king on his people, and so on. In this context,
Gnostic notions of a primal androgyny, echoed in particular by Kabbalist, alchemical,
Swedenborgian, and Moravian thought, and by elements of conventional Christian
theologies, are used by Blake to suggest that amongst the divisions that organize the
fallen world we should include those that structure the hierarchical relations between
men and women. As Los (Blake’s personation of the fallen imagination) announces
in Jerusalem, “Sexes must vanish & cease | To be, when Albion [humanity] rises from
his dread repose” (92:14–15 [Erdman 1988: 252]).
One week later, in Robinson’s third conversation with Blake, Gnosticism becomes
an explicit topic of conversation when he attempts to gauge Blake’s response to the
poetry of William Wordsworth. On the one hand, Blake praised passages disliked by
Robinson, such as the beginning of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807), with its evocation of a pre-existent
state redolent of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. Indeed, Robinson tells us that they
“threw him almost into an hysterical rapture.” But, on the other hand, when they
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turned to Wordsworth’s “eloquent descriptions of Nature,” which were prized by

Robinson, Blake claimed they were “conclusive proof of [the poet’s] Atheism, for
whoever believes in Nature said B: disbelieves in God –For Nature is the work of the
Devil” (Bentley 2004: 701). Unwilling to let this pass without debate, Robinson posed
a counter argument:
On my obtaining from him the declaration that the Bible was the work of God,
I referred to the commencemt of Genesis –In the beginning God created the
Heaven & the Earth[.]‌ –But I gained nothing by this for I was triumphantly told
that this God was not Jehovah, but the Elohim, and the doctrine of the Gnostics
repeated with sufficient consistency to silence one so unlearned as myself[.]
(Bentley 2004: 701)
Although it is Robinson who categorizes Blake’s views on this occasion as Gnostic,

this passage has provided a starting point for a long line of critics who have explored
Blake’s relation to Gnosticism. This line stretches from Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of
William Blake, Pictor Ignotus (1863) to Milton O. Percival’s William Blake’s Circle
of Destiny (1938), Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company (1961), and Kathleen
Raine’s Blake and Tradition (1968); and then to publications by Stuart Curran
(1972), William Dennis Horn (1987), Peter Sorensen (1995), and A. D. Nuttall (2007).
Amongst this last group, Sorenson makes the most ambitious claims, namely that a
“gnostic reading of Blake’s work will demonstrate its essential unity” (1995: 1). The
topic has, nevertheless, remained on the margins of Blake criticism, for three reasons.
Although the first and second can quickly be dispatched, the third demands more
careful attention because, by drawing Blake apart from ancient Gnosticism, it makes
it possible to see his place within modern Gnosticism.
Robinson is himself the first reason for doubt, in part because of his self-description
as “unlearned,” the frequency with which he was baffled by Blake’s thought, and
his image as “cautious” and “orthodox,” particularly amongst Blake critics (Bentley
2004: 430). In fact, Robinson had been “a youthful enthusiast for the French
Revolution” and in 1800, at the age of 24, he had traveled to Germany, where he
stayed for the next five years. During this period, he studied at the University of
Jena, met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Madame de Staël,
and was converted to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Building on this experience
he developed, as James Vigus notes, “a philosophical erudition unique among British
writers in the early nineteenth century” (2010: vii).
As this first doubt fades, a second emerges, as one begins to wonder how Blake
could have known of a second-and third-century heresy that until 1945, when the
library of Gnostic texts near Nag Hammadi in Egypt was discovered, had been
known mainly through the writings of the Church Fathers who had opposed it, such
as Irenaeus (ca. 130–ca. 202), Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 240), Origen (ca. 185–ca. 254),
and Epiphanius (ca. 315–403). Like the first, this difficulty is more apparent than
real. As is often remarked, Blake could have read lengthy accounts of Gnosticism,
drawn from heresiologists such as Irenaeus and Epiphanius, in Nathaniel Lardner’s
The Credibility of the Gospel History (1727) and The Historie of the Heretics of the
two first Centuries after Christ (1780); Johann Lorenz Mosheim’s An Ecclesiastical
History, Antient and Modern (trans. 1765: vol. 1, pp. 25–51); Joseph Priestley’s An
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History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) and An History of Early Opinions

Concerning Jesus Christ (1786: vol. 1, pp. 139–237, 303–20); and Edward Gibbon’s
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789: vol. 1,
pp. 219–313).
Gnostic elements can, of course, also be found in the New Testament, most obvi-
ously in Paul’s epistles (Pagels 1975), which divide spirit from flesh (Rom 8:1–15);
pit “the spirit of the world” against “the spirit which is of God” (1 Cor 2:10–16);
dismiss the hierarchies of gender, class, and race that confines us in this world (1 Cor
12:13–14; Rom 12:5; Col 3:10–11); identify the individual with Christ (Gal 3:28);
and describe those who walk “after the Spirit” as free from the Law (Rom 8:1–5).
And many of these same Gnostic elements can also be found, mixed or overlapping
with Platonic and Neoplatonic thought, in Hermetic, Kabbalist, Christian-Kabbalist,
Christian-theosophical, and mystical-Freemason mythologies, which were part of the
radical religious counter-culture of which Blake was part.
In addition to these possible sources, when James Bruce (1730–1794) returned
in 1774 from his travels in Africa, he brought with him from Ethiopia “the Bruce
Codex” of Christian Gnostic writings (Churton 2015: 73). Most of these texts weren’t
translated until the twentieth century, with the exception of a substantial part of The
Book of Watchers, which appeared in the popular Monthly Magazine for 1 February
1801, and The Book of Enoch (of which The Book of Watchers is part), which was
published in 1821. Both rehearse in vivid detail the destructive effects of heaven on
the earth (Otto 2012).
Still more importantly, Gnostic ideas appear in the work of the Lutheran mystic
Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) and Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–
1772), two of the most important non-literary influences on Blake’s thought (Aubrey
1986; Fischer 2004). Indeed, the former has been called “the first modern Gnostic”
(Van Meurs 1998: 273) and his “discourse” claimed as “the site of introduction of
Gnosis into the field of modern discourse” (O’Regan 2002: ix). As Giovanni Filoramo
writes, “Boehme stands … at the origin of the modernization of Gnostic esoteric
traditions, destined … to leave an often profound influence on thinkers such as Goethe
or, specifically, Hegel” (1990: xvi) and, we can add, William Blake, who encountered
Boehme’s work in The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher, published
1764–1781.
Although this dispatches our second doubt, it opens the space for a third, which
appears when one stops the hunt for Gnostic motifs and asks instead: what is left of
Gnosticism when, now mediated by Boehme (and Swedenborg), it enters a “modern
discourse,” such as the one developed by Blake? For some, the question is uninteresting.
As William Dennis Horn remarks, “Most major Blake critics mention Gnosticism
only to drop the subject” (1987: 74). For others, the answer is “nothing.” Thomas
Altizer writes, for example, that “[n]‌o one with any historical knowledge of ancient
Gnosticism could imagine for a moment that Blake’s vision is Gnostic” (1967: 79).
For a third group, Gnosticism is also left behind, but now after a slight pause, as its
motifs are incorporated into Blake’s own system. Laura Quinney provides a recent
example: “Blake departs from Gnosticism almost immediately, or it might be better to
say that he ‘subsumes’ it, for he performs a psychological analysis of the mythology, in
the process overturning some of what are revealed to be more literal Gnostic beliefs”
(2009: 55).
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My sympathies lie with the third of these options, although in my view it leads to
conclusions substantially different from those drawn by Quinney, namely that Blake’s
illuminated books are as much about politics as they are about psychology, and that
the ways in which they reformulate Gnostic beliefs ensure that those beliefs are never
quite left behind. To explain why this is so, we must sketch in broad outline the tra-
jectory of Gnostic thought in Blake’s oeuvre.
Blake’s revisioning and repurposing of the Gnostic world, as mediated by
Swedenborg and Boehme, can be seen even in early poems such as The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell. According to Swedenborg, arguably the most important influence on
this work, Earth is caught between the opposing forces of Angels and Devils, Heaven
and Hell, and the Creator and the Demiurge (God and Satan). In The Marriage, Blake
humanizes this schema, by re-reading the opposition between Angels and Devils as
a struggle between Contraries –the forces of “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason
and Energy, Love and Hate” –both of which “are necessary to Human existence”
(Erdman 1988: 34, plate 3). The struggle between Angels and Devils is therefore
located in this world; and so too is the struggle between evil and good creators, with
the first, dominated by dogmatic reason, diminishing the struggle between contraries,
and the second, allied with revolutionary energy, fostering their exchanges.
This remarkable revision of Gnostic cosmologies is accompanied by a reversal of
values, which is strongly influenced by Boehme. As Robert Brown argues, in contrast to
“[t]‌he classical symbolism of light,” which “expressed the view that the highest reality
(God) is incorporeal spirit,” Boehme “shifts to fire as the comprehensive symbol for
metaphysics, based on his belief that the life of all spirit is organic and therefore requires
a corporeal embodiment” (1976: 50). The consequences drawn by Blake from this
about-turn can, in The Marriage, be heard most overtly in the Devil’s claims that “Man
has no Body distinct from his soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by
the five Senses”; that “Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the
bound or outward circumference of Energy” (Erdman 1988: 34 [4: 2]); and that Jesus
broke all of the commandments imposed by the God of this world, because he was “all
virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules” (Erdman 1988: 43 [23: 4]).
Gnostic themes can also be found in Songs of Innocence and of Experience
(1794), most obviously in “The Tyger” (a Song of Experience), which asks whether
the Tyger and the Lamb were made by the same figure (Raine 1968: vol. 2, 3–31).
The poem tempts us to answer in the negative and, in so doing, to align Innocence
with the Creator and Experience with the demiurge: and, if this is done, to detect
in the composite work a bivalent cosmos (light/dark; spiritual/material; potential/
actual) similar to that evoked by Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,”
which as we have seen threw Blake “almost into an hysterical rapture.” One would
nevertheless need to add that, as in The Marriage, allusion is here coincident with
reworking: first, Innocence (the divine spark buried in this world) flows from
bodily energy rather than ethereal light; second, Innocence and Experience are
introduced as “the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul” (Erdman 1988: 7,
plate 1) and, as such, are both “necessary to Human existence”; third, Hell is
a static world, created by the demiurge, where the bodily energies of Innocence
are repressed or colonized by Experience; and, fourth, the “Heaven” promised
or projected by the human divine is an earthly world in which Innocence and
Experience are contraries.
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Just as importantly, in both of the works we are discussing, Blake alludes to Gnostic
myths of a primal androgyny lost in the course of events he presents as contempor-
aneous with each other: the division of the sexes, the creation of this world, and the
Fall. In the frontispiece to Songs, for example, a naked Adam and Eve, with vine
leaves covering their genitals, are being driven from Paradise into the fallen world,
by flames that rise up from the right-hand corner of the design, which is also from
where the Sexes are dividing from each other. In the frontispiece to The Marriage,
these processes seem to have reached their end. The solid ground, lifeless vegeta-
tion, and clearly defined gender roles of Heaven, depicted in the upper-third of the
design, are divided from the energetic, sexually indeterminate bodies and swirling
atmospheres of Hell, which fill the abyss beneath Heaven. But this end is also a begin-
ning, that promises to bring life back to its androgynous beginning, as life’s energies
rise towards the closed spaces of this world in order to transform it.
Gnostic ideas take more systematic form in Visions of the Daughters of Albion
(1793), where the demiurge is introduced as “Urizen! Creator of men! mistaken
Demon of Heaven,” a name he will carry throughout Blake’s oeuvre. The (bodily)
soul imprisoned in Urizen’s world appears as Oothoon, who is associated with both
Jesus in the tomb, the chained Prometheus, and revolutionary energy. And so too does
the Gnostic belief that Fall, Creation, and division of a primal whole are contempor-
aneous events. As Oothoon complains:
They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up.

And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle.
And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning
Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.
(Erdman 1988: 47 [2: 30–34])
But here again, as in Songs and The Marriage, Blake reworks as he repeats Gnostic
themes. The heavenly upper-world, like the hellish lower-world, is created when
Oothoon’s “infinite brain” is “inclos’d … into a narrow circle” and so divided from
her heart (energy), which in turn becomes a fiery globe falling into the Abyss (the
body) that now opens beneath heaven. As the last line in Oothoon’s autobiography
implies, this division is the original form of “the great Sin” –viz. to be born into this
world is to eat “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and so to be divided
from “the tree of life” (Gen 3: 22–4). And the god that presides over this creation/
catastrophe is Urizen –“your reason,” but also your priest, king, and god.
As this suggests, in this poem the cosmic architecture of ancient Gnosticism is
treated as a myth of origins rather than an allegory of a pre-existent state, which is
used to explore the social and psychological structures of this world. In this schema,
the soul struggles against the heaven (the prison) built by gods, priests, and kings, and
it does so in the hope of finding a path back to life in this world rather than the next.
As Oothoon cries to her irresolute lover: “Arise my Theotormon I am pure. | Because
the night is gone that clos’d me in its deadly black” (see Erdman 1988: 47 [2: 28–29]).
The primary catalyst for this rereading and repurposing of ancient Gnosticism is the
French Revolution (1789) and the Terror (1793). The former was viewed by radicals
as a time of regeneration or restoration, and as the second birth promised by the
Gospels, which would usher in the New Age. As Mona Ozouf writes, “Revolutionary
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consciousness … delighted in the notion that a tabula rasa was being made of the
past,” which would enable them to retie “a broken thread, either with a primitive
history … or with Nature herself, in her primal purity” (1991: 34). The latter, prob-
lematizing the confidence of the first, suggested that the past was more resilient and
Nature more distant than had been thought; but also that a bodily soul, which had in
part been shaped by rather than merely buried in this world, was likely to bring the
past along with it into the future.
The extent of this shift is suggested by the contrast between, on the one hand, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where the narrator announces in a matter-of-fact tone
that “Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease” (Erdman 1988: 45
[27: 45]) and, on the other hand, Visions, where Oothoon asks why, when freedom
beckons, our lives remain tethered to a world that destroys it. “Infancy, fearless, lustful,
happy! nestling for delight, … Who taught thee modesty,” she asks (Erdman 1988: 49
[6: 4, 7]). And then, more particularly: “Father of jealousy [Urizen] … Why hast thou
taught my Theotormon this accursed thing?” (Erdman 1988: 50 [7: 12–13]). Still
more plangently, even Oothoon has in part been shaped by the world that she wants
to cast off (Hilton 1986). As this suggests, by the time Visions was published, dreams
of regeneration had for many radicals been displaced by a painful oscillation between
not-yet-realized hope and obdurate reality.
In this context, Gnosticism provided a mythological frame (rather than a set of doc-
trinal statements) that was able to encompass both of these moods, while neverthe-
less leaving open the question of how the relation between bodily soul and stubborn
reality should be articulated. In Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” for
example, memory bridges the gap between, on the one hand, the “Heaven [that] lies
about us in our infancy,” which he evokes using imagery drawn from Neoplatonic
and French Revolutionary sources and, on the other hand, the actual world, in which
“custom” covers the Soul, “with a weight, | Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!”
(Poems [Hurst et al. 1807]. p 154).
In contrast, rather than attempting to recover what has been lost, Blake sets out
to explain why it is that the nightmare of history repeats itself again and again. In
America a Prophecy (1793), Europe a Prophecy (1794), and The Song of Los (1795),
he sketches the social/psychological complex that structures the fallen world, while
in The First Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania (1795), The Book of Los
(1795), and Vala or The Four Zoas (1797–ca. 1807), he develops a prehistory of the
present, which offers to explain how this world came into being.
Blake’s prehistory of the present and the pantheon of characters he develops to
tell this story (Eternals, fallen Eternals, and Emanations; and Zoas, Emanations,
and Spectres) recall, respectively, Gnostic attempts to explain how the demiurge’s
world came into being and the cast of mythological characters they use for this pur-
pose (God, Aeons, and Emanations; Demiurge, Archons, and Angels). As we have
seen, however, for Blake these characters are personifications of human faculties and
social forces, whose life depends on this world. Moreover, as Blake’s critiques and
prehistories of the present develop in explanatory power, he discovers that the ener-
gies of Orc (the bodily soul), the shaping power of Los (the imagination), and even
the innocent power of Tharmas (the senses) are not just shaped by the fallen world
but have been led actively to support it.
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This remarkable about-turn culminates in the apocalypse described in the last

Night of The Four Zoas, where the liberation of the soul from the flesh that has
imprisoned it, arguably the goal of Gnosticism, is achieved only in an orgy of violence,
which takes us back to the beginning of the poem, where the nightmare of history
begins once again (Otto 2000: 285–346). Paradoxically, this dead-end is the cata-
lyst that inspires the innovations of Blake’s late works. Most obviously, it frames the
“comic” narrative of Milton a Poem (ca. 1804–1811), in which the poet John Milton
(1608–1674), still unhappy even after a hundred years in Heaven, returns to Earth so
that he can be reunited with what the resurrection of his spirit had left behind: Los
(the imagination), the living present (represented by Blake), and Ololon (his fem-
inine counterpart). And it inspires the non-violent politics, notions of radical forgive-
ness, and the claims made for the redemptive power of art, which are developed in
Jerusalem and ‫[ הי‬Jehovah] & his two Sons Satan & Adam.
These developments draw the anti-transcendental conclusions implicit in Boehme’s
notion of a bodily soul, particularly in the form it is understood by Blake, namely
that the trajectories of reason (the demiurge), imagination, energy, and the senses are
deeply entwined with each other and that they are all aspects of the human divine,
no matter how far they have traveled from that source. One might say, therefore, that
Blake’s modern Gnosticism repeats the structure of ancient Gnosticism while turning
it inside out: viz. the journey to the source of life takes us back to this world rather
than up to Heaven. Arguably this twin register, which repeats ancient Gnosticism in
order radically to transform it, explains why Robinson, despite his sense of confusion,
could hear on Blake’s lips “the doctrine of the Gnostics repeated with sufficient con-
sistency to silence one so unlearned as myself.”
REFERENCES
Altizer, Thomas. 1967. The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake.
East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Aubrey, Bryan. 1986. Watchmen of Eternity: Blake’s Debt to Jacob Boehme. Lanham, MD:
University Press of America.
Beiser, Frederick C. 1987. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte.
Bentley, G. E., Jr. 2004. Blake Records. 2nd edn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
——— 2001. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Bloom, Harold. 1971 (1961). The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Brown, Robert. 1976. The Later Philosophy of Schelling: The Influence of Boehme on the
Works of 1809–1815. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
Churton, Tobias. 2015. Jerusalem! The Real Life of William Blake. London: Watkins.
Curran, Stuart. 1972. “Blake and the Gnostic Hyle: A Double Negative.” Blake Studies
4: 117–33.
Erdman, David. (ed.). 1988 (1965). The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York:
Anchor-Doubleday.
Filoramo, Giovanni. 1990. A History of Gnosticism (trans. Anthony Alcock). Oxford:
Blackwell.
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Fischer, Kevin. 2004. William Blake, Jacob Boehme and the Creative Spirit. Madison,
WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Gilchrist, Alexander. 1863. Life of William Blake, Pictor Ignotus. London: Macmillan and
Co.: 2 vols.
Hilton, Nelson. 1986. “An Original Story.” Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (eds.).
Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality. Berkeley: University of California Press: 69–104.
Horn, William. 1987. “Blake’s Revisionism: Gnostic Interpretation and Critical Methodology.”
Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault (eds.). Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument
of Method. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Christianity. Boston, MA: Beacon.
Nuttall, Anthony. 2007. The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and
Blake. Oxford: Clarendon.
O’Regan, Cyril. 2002. Gnosic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative. Albany,
NY: SUNY Press.
Otto, Peter. 2000. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in “The
Four Zoas.” Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———2012. “Sex, Violence and the History of this world: Blake’s illustrations to the Book
of Enoch.” Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly (eds.). Blake, Gender and Culture.
London: Pickering and Chatto: 37–56.
Ozouf, Mona. 1991. Festivals and the French Revolution (trans. Alan Sheridan). Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Pagels, Elaine. 1975. The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters. Philadelphia,
PA: Fortress.
Percival, Milton. 1938. William Blake’s Circle of Destiny. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Quinney, Laura. 2009. William Blake on Self and Soul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Raine, Kathleen. 1968. Blake and Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2 vols.
Sorensen, Peter. 1995. William Blake’s Recreation of Gnostic Myth: Resolving the Apparent
Incongruities. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Van Meurs, Josh. 1998. “William Blake and his Gnostic Myths.” Roelof van den Broek and
Wouter Hanegraaff (eds.). Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times.
New York: SUNY Press: 269–309.
Vigus, James (ed.). 2010. Henry Crabb Robinson, Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German
Aesthetics. London: MHRA.
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CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
GNOSIS AND THE “FRENCH OCCULT

REVIVAL” AND ITS OFFSHOOTS
Tobias Churton
“M aterialism has had its day” runs the masthead to L’Initiation (1888–1908),
a Parisian monthly journal produced by “Papus” (Gérard Encausse, 1865–
1916), and behind it an “occult revival,” or better, Hermetic movement crystallized in
Paris in the late 1880s as outstanding personalities responded to historical forces and
ideas set adrift from mainstream religion in the French Revolution’s long aftermath.
The movement cannot be separated from the equally entwined artistic movements
of Decadence and Symbolism, whose perception of cultural decay promoted inner
questing for an underlying sense of eternity to the universe: what has been, is, and
always will be. Following the “godfather” of decadence Charles Baudelaire (1821–
1867), decadents opposed materialist realism with “occult” ideas reflecting the imma-
terial, imaginary, and symbolic. In 1887 theosophist Édouard Schuré (1849–1929),
influential author of The Great Initiates, commented in Anatole Baju’s journal Le
Décadent:
Never has the aspiration to the spiritual life or to the invisible world –an aspir-
ation opposed by the materialistic theories of the scientists and by fashionable
opinion –been more serious and more genuine. That aspiration can be found
in the regrets and doubts, the black despair and even the blasphemies of our
Naturalist novelists and our Decadent poets. Never has the human spirit had a
more profound awareness of the inadequacy, the poverty, the unreality of this life.
Never has it aspired more ardently to an invisible Beyond without managing to
believe in it.
(Jullian 1971: 258)
Jean Moréas’s “Literary [Symbolist] Manifesto” (Le Figaro, 1886) marked eso-
teric concerns as a distinction of the Symbolist in contrast to the accepted idea of
the Decadent. Art was at the core of the new Hermetic movement, harnessed to an
aesthetic flight from mediocrity, artistic and political. Movement lynchpin Victor-
Émile Michelet (1868–1938) asserted Art’s relation to Alchemy in his account of the
movement, Les Compagnons de la Hiérophanie (1937):
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— To b i a s C h u r t o n —
The Abstract [figure] which invokes the Rosicrucian tradition was named by
Adepts, Elias Artista. The initiate who takes to the Great Work [of transmuta-
tion], according to which mode is appropriate, is an artist, a creator, a poet. He
can be compared to the yogi of India, philosopher of the fire and the red Stone,
the embodying of the magician’s will, metaphysician of real knowledge, poet of
beauty; he is an artist.
(trans. by Churton 2016: 162)
Movement leader Joséphin Péladan linked aesthetics directly to the spiritual. Thus
in the name of the “Salon of the Rosy+Cross’: “There is no reality other than God.
There is no Truth other than God. There is no Beauty other than God” (L’Art idéaliste
et mystique [1894 edn.], p. 33).
Principal among influential esoteric writers and philosophers were Louis-Claude
de St. Martin (1743–1803), Fabre d’Olivet (1767–1825), and Éliphas Lévi (1810–
1875). The essential idea that united these figures was that humanity stands in a state
of deformation from an original being that once enjoyed divine faculties. The “image
of God” in Man has been shattered. Reintegration of faculties is necessary to restore
Man to spiritual fullness. Cultural decay mirrored an existential plight. The idea’s
underlying myth is plainly gnostic. A sense of loss of an ancient pristine knowledge is
vital to the aesthetic, manifesting in the acceptance of Fabre d’Olivet’s understanding
of “Tradition”: fragments of an ancient, harmonious civilization, where Man once
united “Will” and “Providence,” whose opposition in the world constituted the
deformation through “Destiny” of any possible spiritual progress in time. Tradition’s
counterpart idea in Nature is the alchemists’ perception of matter being the differenti-
ation of a once undifferentiated, primal substance surviving occultly, whose recovery
could transmute all things.
Ordinary, unaided reason is subject to the limitations of the deformed state. St.
Martin’s key doctrine was that Imagination is the spiritual part of humanity, and
that through Imagination, we grasp the spiritual unity of the universe. In the works
of Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (an “elder” to Michelet’s generation), d’Olivet’s
“Tradition” becomes a kind of historical force whose social opponent is anarchy,
where anarchy is understood as life without Tradition. The palliative to anarchy was
d’Alveydre’s “synarchy,” a political evolution towards Tradition, aided, he believed,
by his elaboration on Tibetan, Buddhist, and Hindu legends of a “Shambhala,” a
pure, peaceful land from which the Golden Age would spring. d’Alveydre’s version
was “Agarttha,” revealed to him as located underground in the Himalayas. (Scholar
Joscelyn Godwin [2011: 44–5] has shown the name Agarttha came through d’Alveydre’s
teacher of Sanskrit, “Hardjji Scharipf” [b. 1838], as revealed in d’Alveydre’s Sanskrit
lessons, Nouveau fonds de manuscrits, now in the collection of the Bibliothèque de
la Sorbonne.) From Agarttha the modern, anarchic industrialized anthill could yet be
redeemed should it accept “Trinitarian Synarchy” as its means of renewal.
Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918) and Stanislas de Guaita (1861–1897) –two of the
three crucial activists of France’s “Occult Revival” –found inspiration in Éliphas
Lévi, whose Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Dogma and Ritual of High Magic)
appeared in Paris between 1854 and 1856. Born Alphonse Louis Constant, trained
for the priesthood, Lévi identified the highest Reason with God, distinguishing it, like
Fabre d’Olivet, from mere rationality and ability to calculate.
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— Gnosis and the “French Occult Revival” —
Lévi transmitted traditions of Man as a microcosm, a little universe, corresponding

in his nature to the formation principles of the universe, the stars being differentiated
in space but not in substance. In Dogma and Ritual, Lévi adumbrated a principle res-
onant with alchemical ideas of a primal substance diffused in matter that has deformed
from it. Lévi’s “Astral Light” or “Universal Agent” owed something to Franz Mesmer
(1734– 1815), plus Rosicrucianist physics concerning stellar rays that penetrated
organic fiber (such as dew), mutating its occulted nature. Corresponding to the “prim-
ordial light” of divine formation, its terrestrial counterpart is, according to Lévi, the
“terrestrial fluid, which we call the Great Magnetic Agent … saturated with all kinds
of images and reflections” (Dogme [1861 edn.], V). This means the Astral Light is a
plastic medium on which thoughts and images can be magically imprinted. The willful
soul can affect it, dissolve it, coagulate it, project it, or withdraw it: verbs taken from
the grammar of alchemy. The idea of magic as a technique of the imagination carried
artistic implications, and would inform the magic of the British offshoot of “Occult
Paris,” the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, established in London, significantly,
in 1888. Lévi, a laconic polemicist, provided initial, practical texts for the movement.
THREE PARISIA N CE NTE RS

Such ideas coalesced at three places in the Paris of the late 1880s and 1890s. In
1888 Edmond Bailly (1850–1916), a man, according to Michelet, “with no com-
mercial aptitude but gifted with rare intellectual and aesthetic acuity,” established
a bookshop “of Independent Art” at 11 Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin in Paris’s 9th
arrondissement. There the cream of the movement mingled with new stars of “inde-
pendent art,” such as 23-year-old Toulouse-Lautrec, who, like musician Erik Satie,
descended from Montmartre to gather in crepuscular afternoons in the shop where
Satie’s friend Debussy, “permeated powerfully with Hermetism,” and Symbolist sen-
sitivity (now mistaken as “Impressionism”), would play his experimental music on
the shop’s piano. Esoteric poet and Martinist Michelet wrote in the Foreword to
Les Compagnons de la Hiérophanie (1937) of “the late 19th-century movement of
Hermetists” (translating the book’s subtitle):
In the last years of the last century, a number of young men met, ardent and
vibrant, impassioned by the joy of learning of the most arduous studies. All
recognized a spiritual fraternity oriented to the quest for the highest knowledge,
of the integral gnosis woven under the fabric of time. They undertook to pene-
trate the secrets of that antique science prudently and necessarily hidden.
(trans. from Churton 2016: 53)
Michelet names three patriarchal lights who “deserve the glory” but never received
the publicity: Christian esotericist Abbé Paul François Gaspard Lacuria (1806–1890),
Symbolist poet, playwright, and novelist Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889),
and esoteric theorist and social reformer Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. Edmond Bailly’s
bookshop “united the minds of symbolism with the those of esotericism” (Michelet
1937, trans. Churton 2016: 55).
For Michelet, it was Edmond Bailly’s “interesting mind” that explained why men of
such great artistic gifts as Odilon Redon, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Stéphane Mallarmé
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(1842–1898), and Claude Debussy filed into the shop, delighting in Bailly’s conversa-
tion. Michelet also recalled “masters of hermetic knowledge” such as Matgioï: a pen
name taken from the Chinese Matgioi (“eye of the day”) by de Guaita’s school-friend,
Georges-Albert Puyou de Pouvourville (1861–1939). Villiers met novelist Joris-Karl
(real name Charles-Marie-Georges) Huysmans (1848–1907), author of the arche-
typal Decadent novel À Rebours (Against the Grain, 1884), at the shop. Michelet
knew another friend of Edmond Bailly’s: Belgian artist of the bizarre Félicien Rops
(1833–1898). Rops would design several frontispieces for Péladan’s series of esoteric,
popular novels.
About the time Bailly established his bookshop, occultist Gérard Encausse
(called “Papus” after the “génie” of medicine in the Hermetic Nuctemeron) advised
“Martinist” magic enthusiast Lucien Mauchel (“Chamuel”) to launch the Librairie
du Merveilleux at 29 Rue de Trévise, a kilometer east of the Rue de la Chaussée
d’Antin. Papus’s shop had occult atmosphere, and offered formal education in
esotericism, but more artists attended Bailly’s shop. Magic was part of the armory
against materialism, but the magician’s circle was now the theater, studio, salon,
cabaret, gallery, and concert hall, wherever two or three were gathered together in
the name of Art.
Paris’s third occult radix was “Holyrood,” 124 Avenue de Wagram, home to the
remarkable Maria de Mariategui, Duchess of Medina Pomar, Lady Caithness (1830–
1895), who took Mary, Queen of Scots for her guardian angel. To Holyrood in April
1884 came Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society (New York,
1875). Blavatsky approved her Grace’s establishment of the Theosophical Society of
East and West: the French branch of the international society. Unlike Blavatsky, but
like Anna Kingsford (1846–1888), Lady Caithness had less time for Eastern traditions
than she did for esoteric Christianity, denying original sin and conventional Catholic
doctrines of Jesus’s divinity. Maria’s book Old Truths in a New Light, influenced by
Christian spiritist Allan Kardec, tried to reconcile Theosophy, Spiritualism, and the
Catholic faith. It enraged Catholic clergy. Sharing her vision with English seeress
Kingsford, the flower bloomed into a dream of a universal religion to reconcile and
reintegrate masculine and female aspects of the human being: androgyny again, with
full spiritual equality for women.
Every Wednesday from spring to autumn, Holyrood hosted a spiritual salon where
Lady Caithness gathered companions of the Hierophany, such as poet and scholar
Stanislas de Guaita, magnetic healer Oswald Wirth, Papus –who joined the TS in
October 1887 –and Albert Jounet, Vice President of the Spiritualist Alliance. Other
regulars included Theosophist Annie Besant, Gnostic Church founder Jules Doinel
(whose “Sophia” concept would chime in with the Caithness-Kingsford vision), het-
erodox priest Father Paul Roca (1830–1893), Huysmans’s friend, novelist Jules Bois
and his mistress, diva Emma Calvé, psychical researcher Charles Richet (1850–1930),
and Abbé Alta, founder-member of de Guaita and Péladan’s Kabbalistic Order Rose-
Croix (1888). Astronomer, TS member, psychical researcher, and author of popular
science books and science fiction Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) also attended.
Accounts of the so-called “Occult Revival” have focused on the “wars of the
roses,” an apparent rivalry between de Guaita and Péladan that occurred when the
latter quit the Ordre Kabbalistique Rose+Croix in 1890 to form his own order (cf.
McIntosh 1972: 96–153).
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Stanislas de Guaita
A marquis from an estate on the étang (“pond”) d’Alteville, between Dieuze and
Mittersheim in Moselle Lorraine, Stanislas de Guaita had been force-fed the virtue of
pain by Jesuits first at Dijon, then at the lycée of La Malgrange (“The Evil Barn”!),
a barrack-like former château, 60 km from home comforts and three kilometers
south of Nancy. Stanislas shared consolation in literature among schoolfriends and
writers-to-be Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), Paul Adam (1862–1920), and Albert de
Pouvourville.
At nineteen, de Guaita was a law student in Paris, falling in with other aspiring
poets in the Latin Quarter. Les Oiseaux de Passage (Birds of Passage –Fantastic
Rhymes) he published in Paris in 1881. One theme, mind is creative of reality, is
Hermetic, while in “Persecutions” de Guaita finds himself with the persecuted, the
heretics, the true Christians. After Baudelaire and Flaubert, Lévi grabbed him.
When first confronted with Péladan’s Lévi-inspired novel Le Vice Suprême (1884) –
whose hero Mérodack typifies Lévi’s Magus –de Guaita wrote to its author: “It is
your Vice Suprême that revealed to me (to me, sceptic, although respectful of all
holy things) that the Kabbala and High Magic could be something other than a
trick” (Bertholet 1952: 51). De Guaita was perhaps too humble, and while friendship
blossomed, Péladan grew as uncomfortable with aspects of the relationship as de
Guaita grew critical of Péladan’s colorful love life. Having shared an apartment at
24 Rue Pigalle in the 9th arrondissement, Péladan moved out and in January 1887
de Guaita entered 20 Avenue Trudaine 300 meters away, where he assembled a mag-
nificent library, drank copiously, and reclused himself, inviting guests on Thursday
evenings to gather around the tea table like “alchemists about the athanor.” These
“faithful to the Gnosis” (Michelet 1937, trans. Churton 2016) included Lady
Caithness, Papus, Abbé Roca, Péladan, Maurice Barrès, St Yves d’Alveydre, and
Victor-Émile Michelet.
Joséphin Péladan
Joséphin Péladan, or Sâr Mérodack, as he called himself after the hero in Le Vice
Suprême, was born on 28 March 1858. His elder brother Adrien Péladan fils was then
fourteen and excelling. Homeopath Adrien Péladan fils would enter the Christian
esoteric path via Lacuria’s extraordinary book The Harmonies of Being (1844), and
Joséphin would follow. Joséphin’s “Assyriophilia” also came through his brother, his
master, and encouraged him to name fictional characters “Mérodack” (the Babylonian
Jupiter) and “Nébo” (Mercury) –a nickname subsequently adopted by de Guaita.
A Platonizing Catholic, Péladan was attracted spiritually to androgyny, for in
androgyny, occultly understood, lay the secret key to Man’s reintegration and the
vitalization of spiritual culture. Extrovert in fashion, inspired by Decadent dandy
novelist and advocate of Baudelaire Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808– 1889), who
scandalized the establishment in 1874 with his Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils),
Péladan admired and imitated both d’Aurevilly’s personal style and literary flirtation
with Satanism, mixed with eroticism and mysticism in aristocratic settings.
Péladan regarded ideal art, taste, culture, and spirituality as the peculiar gift
of the Latin races, and the decline of those ideals as the product of rot within
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the country and Germanic barbarism without. Péladan’s first critical piece on art
concluded: “masterpieces of art are all religious, even among non- believers.”
“For nineteen centuries masterpieces of art have all been Catholic, even for the
Protestants” (Pincus-Witten 1976: 32; cf. Péladan “Le Matérialisme dans l’art,” Le
Foyer: Journal de Famille 300 [1881]). Turning his guns on the official Salon (or pro-
clivities of Paris’s biennial art exhibition) in May 1883 through the journal L’Artiste,
Péladan declared: “I believe in the Ideal, in Tradition, in Hierarchy.” As Pincus-Witten
observed, Péladan’s Platonist aesthetic gave him a vantage point from which he could
aim his artillery at the official Salon (Pincus-Witten 1976: 22).
In 1888 de Guaita and Péladan formed (or “renovated”) the Ordre Rose+Croix
Kabbalistique. Michelet took it that Grand Master de Guaita’s methodical, system-
atizing mind was the mainspring. Péladan joined Gérard Encausse (Papus) on the
Order’s Supreme Council. Papus organized his own society for “esoteric studies”
at Chamuel’s Librairie du Merveilleux in the Rue Trévise, while de Guaita’s Order
offered baccalauréat, licentiate, and doctorate of the Kabbalah qualifications. Jean-
Pierre Laurant has described the functioning of the Order as “chaotic” (2007: 441).
Other Supreme Council members included Marc “Haven” –the name of the
Nuctemeron’s demon of dignity taken by (medical) Dr Emmanuel Marc Henri
Lalande (1868–1926); the Abbé Alta –real name Dr Calixte Mélinge, whose moniker
came from a rare, good character in Le Vice Suprême; “Barlet” –pen name of Albert
Faucheux (1838–1921); writer and schoolfriend of de Guaita, Paul Adam (1862–
1920); and young Breton Yvon Leloup (1871–1926), whose name Papus changed to
Paul Sédir, “Sédir” being an anagram of Désir, a significant word to Saint-Martin,
who wrote of the “L’homme de désir,” the Man of Desire, ardent in retrieving the
divine image, dedicated to reintegration. Lists of council members vary. Regarding an
order statute of 1891, Michelet included Martinist Julien Lejay, and magnetic healer
Oswald Wirth. Joanny Bricaud’s account of the Boullan scandal includes socialist
and spiritist Albert Jounet, who wrote as “Alber Jhouney” (Bricaud 1913). Maurice
Barrès’s name has also been included. Some accounts include Paul Sédir but not Paul
Adam, and vice versa.
Looking ahead, readers should note with interest that Barlet also wrote as Ch.
Barlet, Ch., F.C., or François Charles Barlet. In 1890 he became a bishop in Jules
Doinel’s Gnostic Church, and after de Guaita’s death in December 1897, Barlet
became Grand Master of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix. He would hand
the documents and grades of the Order to René Guénon, who also obtained de
Guaita’s library. Barlet was a member of the first Supreme Council of the Martinist
Order (Papus’s creation) from March 1891.
The council officially consisted of six known and six unknown members. Michelet
clarifies the role of the unknown members:
These last [unknown members] had the mission of re-establishing the Order
if hostile powers should destroy it. In reality, the six unknown members never
existed. Of some six known members, of whom one was a prematurely dead
writer’s wife, I will only name the dead. They were, with the Grand Master de
Guaita, Paul Adam, Papus, A. Gabrol, H. Thorion, Péladan. This one, having
demitted, was replaced by a woman. Another was replaced by Marc Haven. Two
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men came late who were in plain maturity of age, Barlet, and another member,
Alta, who was a priest; all the rest were young. There was lots of juvenility.
(Michelet 1937, translated in Churton 2016: 434)
Péladan would not stay long. His departure (viewed as a betrayal) was in part due to
ideas he nursed for his own ideal order, with an attestable Rosicrucian lineage, and
partly due to intolerance for Papus’s allowances for spiritism, Freemasonry, and prac-
tically every form of religion. Péladan saw himself as a true Catholic “Templar” and
was unmoved by de Guaita’s decision to try (in absentia) defrocked heretical priest
Abbé Joseph-Antoine Boullan (1824–1893) as a Satanist in May 1888, a decision
leading to a destructive press scandal in 1893, when Boullan accused de Guaita and
his friends of trying to kill him by black magic (Boullan died that year).
Péladan announced his departure from the Ordre Rose+Croix Kabbalistique
(R+C+K) in L’Initiation (June 1890), partly in reaction to the previous February’s
“Declaration” revealing Papus’s desire to see occultism and “all cults” as “a sole reli-
gion.” While de Guaita was content with Papus’s enterprises, Péladan was not, writing
in L’Initiation:
My adherence, fruitful until now, would henceforth become sterile. My abso-

lutist nature isolates me from your eclectic work. I could not take occultism in its
entirety with me to Mass, and I refuse to rub shoulders with spiritism, masonry,
or Buddhism.
Papus and Chamuel’s monthly review L’Initiation first appeared in 1888. In May
1891 it joined the Papal Index of prohibited works for promoting Gnostic heresy.
The journal also promoted Papus’s Groupe Indépendant d’Études ésoteriques in an
attempt to unite all minds in the occult world.
An occult evangelist, Papus loved the company of poets, writers, artists, doctors,
and diverse sages, among whom were alchemist- chemist Albert Poisson, Barlet,
Georges Polti, Émile Gary, parapsychologist and military engineer Colonel Albert
de Rochas (1837–1914), Paul Adam, publisher Lemerle, Paul Sédir, Marc Haven,
Abel Haatan, Henri Selva (pen name of Jewish astrologer Arthur Herrmann), and
Augustin Chaboseau (1868–1946). In Michelet’s opinion, Papus went too far too fast,
cheapening the value of the mysteries in an effort to persuade.
Péladan, meanwhile, was committed to absolute idealism in Art. “You [de Guaita’s
order] come from free thinking toward Faith, I leave the Vatican toward the occult”
(Pierrot 1977). Péladan’s palliative for a sick art world was a conception announced
as “la Rose Croix Catholique l’Aristie.” L’Aristie is a transliteration into French com-
bining the Greek aristos (“best”) and eidos (“kind” or “type”), so the Order is the
Catholic Rose-Croix of the best or ideal kind. Aristocracy means “government by
the best.”
In August 1890, Péladan founded the Triple intellectual order of the Catholic
Rose-Croix R+C+C+, condemned as a “schismatic sect” by de Guaita’s Supreme
Council of the Rose+Croix in August 1891. Backed by Léonce Comte de Larmandie
(1851–1921) and young artist and artists’ patron Antoine de La Rochefoucauld
(1862–1959), Péladan’s Order of the Catholic Rose-Croix, the Temple and the
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Graal was intended to renovate the arts and culture in general with an ambitious
program of salons, encyclicals, and activism to encourage respect for ideal beauty
throughout France, indeed, to renovate the individual into a beautiful being: that,
he declared, was what being a “Magus” now meant. Another of the Order’s
“Magnifiques” was second-in-command Émile Gary de Lacroze, “Archwarden of
the Province of Paris for the reception and preliminary selection of candidates” (see
Péladan, La Décadence Esthétique [1890], p. xix). Michelet called Gary de Lacroze
“a metaphysical and aesthetic head of rare profundity.” Another commander
appeared briefly: author Saint-Pol Roux (Paul-Pierre Roux, 1861–1940). Michelet
describes him as a “gentle provençal dreamer.” “Proclaimed leader of the School of
the Magnifiques, he was brave against the scoffers [of Symbolism], and the scoffers
were wrong, for it is a fine thing to inculcate a taste for grandeur” (Michelet 1937,
trans. from Churton 2016). Saint-Pol Roux was a personal hero of Surrealist leader
André Breton.
Péladan’s Order was essentially conceptual, a kind of ideal Church of Aesthetics, a
House of the Holy Spirit of Art, stubbornly set within an uncomprehending Catholic
communion. In announcing the first Salon de la Rose+Croix in 1892, Péladan spoke
of “Art-God:”
Artist, thou art priest: Art is the great mystery; and if your attempt turns out to
be a masterwork, a divine ray descends as on an altar. Oh real presence of the
divinity resplendent under these supreme names: Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo,
Beethoven, and Wagner. Artist, thou art king; art is the real kingdom.
(Péladan, Geste esthétique [1892], p. 7)
It would be abstract pioneer Wassily Kandinsky (1866– 1944) who recognized

Péladan’s critical genius. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), Kandinsky
wrote: “The artist is not only a king, as Péladan says, because he has great power, but
also because he has great duties” (Kandinsky 1977).
Funded by de La Rochefoucauld, the first Salon opened at the Durand- Ruel
Gallery on 10 March 1892. Larmandie counted 274 carriages; more than 22,600
visiting cards were left. Police had to stop traffic between the Rue Montmartre and
the Opéra until past five in the afternoon. According to Larmandie’s record: “The
real, the only food, was an immense enthusiasm, an unshakeable faith in the certi-
tude of an apotheosis, the deep-rooted belief that a new life opened for art and that
we were the predestined workers of a regeneration without precedent” (Larmandie
1903). Proceedings were marred only by a dispute between La Rochefoucauld and
Péladan, which affected Erik Satie, the Order’s official master of music, whose works
were announced in the catalogue: “Among the idealist composers that the Rose-Croix
will shed light on, it is proper to mention Erik Satie again, of whose work one will
hear the harmonic suites for Le Fils des Étoiles and the preludes to the Prince de
Byzance.” Satie composed other works for the Order but, with la Rochefoucauld as
his intended patron, Satie felt a clash of loyalties (Churton 2016: 629).
Further Salons Rose+Croix took place annually until 1897 and, despite finan-
cial constraints, proved immensely popular and controversial, with dozens of new
artists introduced to the public, along with a powerful aesthetic. In 1894 Péladan’s
Comment on devient artiste (Ésthétique) (How One Becomes an Artist) appeared. It
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contained a “Commemoration” of Firmin Boissin (Simon Brugal), who in 1858 had

initiated Péladan’s brother Adrien into Rosicrucian mysteries, as Boissin understood
them. Péladan had a link through his brother with an arguably authentic strand of
Rosicrucian initiation dating back to the late eighteenth century, and possibly fur-
ther, through Adrien Péladan fils’s connection with a fellow spagyric doctor, Catholic
legitimist Vicomte Louis Charles Édouard de Lapasse (1792–1867). This intriguing
initiatory line was first brought to scholarly attention by Gérard Galtier, in his studies
of “Egyptian” Masonry and French neo-Rosicrucianism (1989: 219–25); cf. also
Le comte Fernand de Rességuier, Éloge de M. Le vicomte de Lapasse, Jeux Floraux
[1869], pp. 261–88) (Churton 2016: 373, 414).
The 1894 Salon received familiar criticism for alleged superficial impact on art,
or as pro-Catholic propaganda, but La Plume, normally hostile, praised Péladan for
creating a substantial body of valid art criticism and a no less valuable and instructive
Salon, concluding that in the end “the contemporaries of the Sâr will be severely
judged for their indifference” (as Albert Fleury has it of “Le Sâr Peladan” in the
November issue). Some 15,000 attended the last Salon in 1897.
A PARISIAN GNOS TIC CHU RCH

During the summer of 1888, Orléans librarian Jules Benoît Stanislas Doinel du Val-
Michel (1842–1902) discovered documentation from 1022 concerning the trial and
burning at the stake of Canon Étienne d’Orléans, identified by Doinel as a precursor
of the independent “Cathar” Church. Finding personal significance in the account of
a persecuted true believer, Doinel informed theosophist and spiritist friends in Paris
that the “Aeon Jesus” had chosen him to reestablish Gnostic religion in France on the
lines of the extinct Cathar Church –a momentous occurrence.
What we know of the genesis of the Gnostic Church we owe to Doinel’s account,
kept by Déodat Roché (1877–1978), according to which a tumultuous séance in
autumn 1889 took place at Holyrood. The spirit of Guilhabert de Castres declared
via pendulum and letters-plate:
The Assembly will be composed of Parfaits and Parfaites. The Holy Spirit will
send you those males and females that he must send you. We bring you joy and
peace, the joy of the Spirit and the peace of the heart. Now, kneel, O you who are
the first fruits of the Gnosis. We are going to bless you.
(Bonnerot [1890] 1969: 7)
Doinel’s name first appeared in July 1890’s L’Initiation, under the “First Homily on the
Holy Gnosis –to the Church of the Paraclete [the Holy Spirit of the New Age]” signed
by “T[au] Jules,” that is, Jules Doinel, gnostic bishop. The Catholic Church in Rome
was alarmed. On 14 May 1891, when Cardinal Mazzella ensured the Congregation of
the Index prohibit L’Initiation to Catholics, “Gnosis” was entered as the provocation.
L’Initiation responded with “The Gnosis and the Inquisition”: “That which menaces
the hierarchy is the reconstitution of the gnostic episcopacy and the Albigensian or
Cathar assembly, with a definite episcopal seat, Montségur.” The article was signed
with a gnostic episcopal tau: “T JULES, bishop of Montségur” ((= Jules Doinel; see
Churton 2016: 362).
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Doinel’s Gnostic progress stalled when duped by a protracted hoax (the “Palladium
Conspiracy”) perpetrated by Gabriel Jogand-Pagès aka “Léo Taxil” (1854–1907),
who convinced Doinel –and many influential persons –that Freemasonry and the
Gnosis were part of an elaborate conspiracy led by Satan himself. In 1900, Doinel
applied to the Gnostic Patriarch Synesius (Fabre des Essarts) –consecrated Patriarch
in Doinel’s place at Lady Caithness’s Oratory –to rejoin the Gnostic Church, now
fully integrated with Papus’s Ordre Martiniste.
A Gnostic Church Synod had issued a decree on 12 September 1893 that Papus’s
revived Martinist Order was of its essence, gnostic, an identification enabling Papus
to absorb Doinel’s church, hardly difficult since Doinel had formed his first Sacred
Synod of the Gnostic Ecclesia in 1892 at 29 Rue de Trévise from the senior staff of
L’Initiation, and was himself in the O.M. Thus “Gnostic Patriarch” and “Primate of
the Albigeois,” Doinel consecrated Papus as “Tau Vincent” gnostic bishop of Toulouse,
Paul Sédir (Yvon Leloup) as “Tau Paul” gnostic bishop of Concorezzo, and Lucien
Mauchel (“Chamuel”) as “Tau Bardesanes” bishop of La Rochelle and Saintes. The
Duchess of Pomar was elected bishop of Warsaw but declined the distinction.
In 1892, Louis-Sophrone Fugairon (b. 1846), professor of physics and chemistry
at the Collège de Foix, became Tau Sophronius, bishop of Béziers. Alber Jhouney
became Tau Théodotus, bishop of Avignon, and Marie Chauvel de Chauvignie (1842–
1927) became Esclarmonde –after famous Cathar parfaite Esclarmonde de Foix the
Sophia of Warsaw, and the first consecrated “Sophia.” François-Charles Barlet and
Jules Lejay were also consecrated, and, according to Massimo Introvigne, one of
Mme. Blavatsky’s close colleagues, the Countess d’Adhemer, was designated as Tau
Valentin’s “Helen” (Introvigne 1993).
Papus’s Ordre Martiniste was intended to synthesize the theurgy of Martinèz de
Pasqually, the Masonic Templarism of Jean- Baptiste Willermoz, and the Christian
Theosophy of Louis-Claude de St. Martin in lodges as a primarily Christian Freemasonry,
heir to Pasqually and Willermoz’s high grade of “Réau-Croix,” with an ultimate degree
of “Unknown Superior” (Supérieur Inconnu, or S∴I∴) (cf. chs. 37, 40).
Opening the fourth volume of L’Initiation of 1889 we find already an “Initiatic
Discourse for a Martinist Reception” by a “holder of the Third Degree,” signed by
Stanislas de Guaita “S ∴ I ∴” In the article, de Guaita states that once the three hier-
archical grades of “our order” have been passed, culminating in that of “S∴I∴”
(occasionally written simply as “S.I.”), the initiate becomes in his turn initiator,
commissioned to establish a group with himself as its “moral Tutor.” According to the
Martinist, esotericism is the foundation of “all really true and profound religions,” its
testimony one in essence: “Love, Solidarity, Altruism, Fraternity, Charity.” There is no
dogmatic imposition in the Order; essential universal Truth is advocated by persua-
sion only: “a God defined is a finite god,” de Guaita insisted.
The influence of the French Occult Revival (so-called) is immense. It is impossible
to point to any outgrowth of neo-Gnostic activity in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries which has not either originated within the movement directly or indirectly,
or passed through its arterial system. The influence of Anna Kingsford on the chief
founders of the British Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (G.D.) is recognized, and
through the G.D. (and the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) whose origins mingle with
the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim favored by Papus) we have
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the basis for the proliferation of Aleister Crowley’s magick which thrives in many
forms today (see Churton 2011: 275–96).
British co-
founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Samuel
“MacGregor” Mathers made an exploratory visit to Paris in July 1891, shortly after
Papus and Augustin Chaboseau’s (1868–1946) establishment of the Martinist Order’s
Supreme Council. Mathers informed Rosicrucian colleague William Wynn Westcott,
in London, that his visit introduced him to the “Secret Chiefs” of his and Westcott’s
relatively new Order. On 23 March 1895, Papus was admitted as a neophyte at
Mathers’s temple in Auteuil in a ceremony specially conducted in French. Papus did
not proceed with further initiations in the Outer Order.
Jules Bois (1868– 1943), who dueled inconclusively with de Guaita over the
Boullan affair when Bois accused de Guaita of magic against Boullan in 1893, was,
like intimate friend Emma Calvé, an S.I. and, in that capacity, according to Gérard
Galtier, may have been the source in New York of a supposed initiation of Harvey
Spencer Lewis (1883–1939), founder of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis
(AMORC), though Lewis would claim his initiation occurred in Toulouse in 1909 –
picking up, presumably, on Péladan’s Toulouse-centered claim to Rose+Croix legit-
imacy (Galtier 1989: 354–7).
Occultist Jean or “Joanny” Bricaud (1881–1934) was twenty when Fabre des
Essarts of the Église Gnostique consecrated him bishop of Lyon-Grenoble in 1901. In
1907–1908 the Church split when Bricaud took Papus and Fugairon (Tau Sophronius)
with him to what would in February 1908 be called the Église Gnostique Universelle.
Papus’s Supreme Council of the Martinist Order signed a treaty of alliance with
Bricaud’s Church in 1911. This alliance did not, technically speaking, make Bricaud’s
church the official church of the Martinist Order, but it functioned as such in effect.
Doinel had died in March 1902, spared the sight of his church’s bifurcation over
issues of doctrine and affiliation. While follower Déodat Roché would lose faith in
the Church, Roché nevertheless maintained the flame he received after joining Papus’s
Independent Group of Esoteric Studies in 1896, and entering the Gnostic Church in
1899, where he encountered Fugairon and Fabre des Essarts. Ordained deacon
in 1901, Roché was consecrated Tau Theodotus, bishop of Carcassonne, in 1903
(Bonnerot [1890] 1969: 27). Roché remained devoted to the memory of the Cathars,
perceived as much through spiritual revelation as by historical methodology. In 1950
Roché founded the “Society for the remembrance and study of the Cathars,” which
erected the memorial to Cathar martyrs still standing by the “pog” of Montségur in
the lower Pyrenees. Since much of the twentieth century’s enthusiasm for the Cathars
may be laid at the door of one-time gnostic bishop Déodat Roché, and his later more
circumspect admirer, René Nelli (1906–1982), Doinel’s Catharist vision remains a
living force.
“Occult Paris” died as a Hermetic movement with the First World War. Papus
or Gérard Encausse volunteered for the French army medical corps to serve on the
western front. Exhausted after two years of carnage, he contracted tuberculosis at a
military hospital, and died, aged 51, on 25 October 1916. By the end of World War I,
Papus was dead, Péladan was dead (1918), Debussy was dead (1918). De Guaita had
died prematurely in 1897. The Martinist Order split into competing factions, all of
whose lineages may be traced to bodies active today.
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REFERENCES
Bertholet, Edouard (ed.). 1952. Lettres inédites: de Stanislas de Guaita au Sâr Joséphin Péladan,
une page inconnue de l’histoire de l’occultisme à la fin du XIXe siècle. Paris: Editions
Rosicruciennes.
Bonnerot, Jean-Pierre (comp.). [1890] 1969. Déodat Roché et l’Eglise Gnostique [Spec. issue
of] Cahiers d’Etudes Cathares 4–5: 5–72. Édition électronique Morgane’s World.
Bricaud, Joanny. 1913. J.-K. Huysmans et le Satanisme. Paris: Bibliothèque Chacornac.
Churton, Tobias. 2011. Aleister Crowley: The Biography. London: Watkins.
——— 2016. Occult Paris: The Lost Magic of the Belle Époque. Rochester, VT: Inner
Traditions.
Galtier, Gérard. 1989. Maçonnerie égyptienne, Rose- Croix, et néo-chevalerie: Les fils de
Cagliostro. Paris: Rocher.
Godwin, Joscelyn. 2011. Atlantis and the Cycles of Time: Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult
Revelations. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.
Introvigne, Massimo. 1993. Il Retorno dello Gnosticismo. Carnago: SugarCo.
Jullian, Philippe. 1971. Dreamers of Decadence. London: Pall Mall Press.
Kandinsky, Wassily. 1977. Concerning the Spiritual in Art (trans. Michael Sadler). New York:
Dover.
Larmandie, Léonce, Comte de. 1903. L’Entr’acte Idéal. Paris: Bibliothèque Chacornac.
Laurant, Jean-Pierre. 2007. “Stanislas de Guaïta.” Wouter Hanegraaff et al. (eds.). Dictionary
of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill: vol. 1, 441–2.
McIntosh, Christopher. 1972. Éliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival. London: Rider.
Michelet, Victor-Émile. 1937. Les Compagnons de la Hiérophanie: Souvenirs du mouvement
hermétiste à la fin du XIX siècle. Paris: Dorbon.
Pierrot, Jean. 1977. L’Imaginaire Décadent 1880–1900. Rouen: l’Université de Rouen.
Pincus-Witten, Robert. 1976. Occult Symbolism in France: Joséphin Péladan and the Salons de
la Rose-Croix. New York: Garland.
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CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
THE “LOST WORD” KEY AND

ESOTERIC ESCHATOLOGY:
BLAVATSKY’S GNOSIS THE CORE
OF KRISHNAMURTI’S TEACHING
Al Boag
H elena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831– 1891), a self- claimed “initiated wretch”

(Jinarajadasa 1922: 611), co-founded with Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907)
and others the Theosophical Society (hereafter TS) in 1875 and created a mystique
around herself as a possessor of primeval wisdom and secret knowledge (Grk: gnōsis;
Skrt: Gupta Vidya, in Blavatsky’s Theosophical Glossary [1892] (1978), p. 129). That
primeval Gnosis, purportedly derived from divine beings responsible for the origin
and development of the first human “root races,” told of the mystery of the divine
spark the Ego individuality within the human personality whose point of emanation
had been the Absolute All. According to Blavatsky, an embodied conscious return
and union of the divine spark with the Absolute could be achieved as the divine Ego
awakened to itself through the rigors of initiation. That initiatory discipline would
end the cycle of incarnations and karma accrued through the various personalities
informed by the Ego on its evolutionary cycle: the “Circle of Necessity” (Blavatsky,
The Secret Doctrine [hereafter SD] [1888], vol. 2, p. 303). At that time, only cer-
tain keen Theosophical students received from Blavatsky secret Instructions relevant
to the Path of Initiation and an enlightened consciousness, the centrality of which
Blavatsky publicly and mysteriously denoted as the “Lost Word” key. Included in
Blavatsky’s secret Instructions was her prediction of the historical arrival of a new
Bodhisattva Teacher who would lead a new human race of enlightened initiates.
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), a Hindu Brahman, was thoroughly indoctrinated
from the age of fourteen in the rigorous demands of the Path of Initiation, and in a
modified version of Blavatsky’s historical prediction of a new Teacher, by his two
Theosophical mentors Annie Besant (1847–1933), President of the TS, and Charles
Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) (see chs. 40, 43). Krishnamurti himself explicitly
denied any knowledge of Blavatsky’s teaching (Krishnamurti 1934: vol. 2, 26) but
in fact this was not the case (Boag 2017). Krishnamurti did not use the term gnosis
either before or after his departure from the TS. As a Theosophist, however, he
exploited Blavatsky’s secret knowledge of a “Lost Word” key in his claim to have
finished the Path of Initiation, and in declaring himself the Teacher at the predicted
time as reworked by Besant and Leadbeater. After he left the Society, Krishnamurti
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— Al Boag —
affirmed the necessity of cognitive function yet denied the primacy of place given to
knowledge per se, much less secret knowledge:
What lies beyond thought, beyond the known, may not be imagined or made a
myth of or made a secret for the few. It is there for you to see.
(Krishnamurti 1998: 96)
THE “ LOST WO RD ” KE Y
The cosmo-metahistorical worldview presented in her 1888 masterwork The Secret
Doctrine was crafted by Blavatsky from Hindu theory of cyclic Ages, the descent
and ascent of souls in a gnostic “cosmic U-curve,” and Hebraic-Christian eschat-
ology: a fusion of belief systems which had cosmic, universal, historical, and personal
relevance. Blavatsky impressively fashioned these disparate belief systems within the
four “idea frames” of progress, regress, recurrence, and apocalyptic and, crucially, in
an “occult or esoteric” manner. Her “esoteric macrohistory” spoke not only to the
succession of the seven human root races, but also to “the significance of our time in
particular” (Trompf 2013: 375–6, 387). According to Blavatsky “Spirit and Matter”
had become “equilibrized in Man” at the “mid-point of evolution,” the middle of
the fourth root race on the fourth globe (earth) in the fourth round of the “great
Manvantaric cycle of Seven Rounds” (SD, vol. 2, p. 180). Therefore, the personal
relevance of Blavatsky’s “esoteric macrohistory” lay in the possibility of awakening
the divine consciousness by means of the Path of Initiation and the “Lost Word” key
and the mysteries of sound. While some scholars have examined Blavatsky’s teaching
of the transformative power of the mysteries of sound (Rudbøg 2010), to my know-
ledge there has been no public discussion on Blavatsky’s “Lost Word” and its relation
to an esoteric eschatology, nor of that relationship being the unacknowledged core of
Krishnamurti’s teaching.
From her earlier major work Isis Unveiled (1877) to SD and contemporaneous
articles Blavatsky associated a “Lost Word” with the mysteries of initiation, nature,
and the dawn of a new spiritual cycle in 1897. In Isis the purified Brahman in ritual
“ceases to breathe” and pronounces a sacred word in order to communicate with
the spirit world. In a similar ritual the Brahman initiate priest communicates with
and even ascends to the spirit realm, by mentally pronouncing “the mystic word …
the Lost Word” (Isis, vol. 1, pp. xlii–iv). The antediluvian Enoch, who had the “true
pronunciation” of the “Lost Word” revealed to him (vol. 1, 30), avoided death and
stood before God because in himself he had balanced spirit and matter (vol. 1, 150;
vol. 2, pp. 453–4, 463–4; vol. 1, p. 150). This attainment of immortality was known
by ancient initiates as the “descent of the Angel Gabriel,” a “mysterious and rare
occurrence” which fits the initiate to “live forever in eternal life” (vol. 2, pp. 153–9;
cf. Jn 3:15).
Blavatsky, in all her trekking through the whole world of comparative religion,
is not fully recognized for her attention to Biblical materials, especially apocalyptic
motifs. For her, Enoch, Daniel, and John the Revelator were initiates, and the texts
attributed to them contained hidden knowledge of the mysteries and initiation (Isis,
vol. 2, pp. 38, 147, 351). Daniel has the “rare” spirit of “the gods” (Dan 2:11; 5:11,
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— T h e “ L o s t Wo r d ” k e y —
14) and falls breathless (10:17) at the feet of Gabriel. For Blavatsky, the new name
written on the white stone of Revelation 2:17 and known only by the initiate was
a “Lost Word”: “the ‘word’ was lost” (vol. 2, pp. 351, 348). However, beyond the
country of Kashmir the “Lost Word … [of a] … secret doctrine” still exists among
initiates (vol. 1, pp. 579–80). Blavatsky’s early claims of a secret gnosis of a “Lost
Word” suggest it is both an actual word and a body of secret knowledge concerned
with immortality and access to the presence of God.
A decade later there is development in Blavatsky’s thought with regard to the
“Lost Word.” In the Introductory to SD Blavatsky links the recurring four Age series
of Hindu chronological reckoning (Krita, Treta, Dvapara, Kali) with the “prophetic
record” of “another book.” The end of the first 5,000-year cycle of the present Kali
Yuga or Black Age coincides with “the last prophecy” of that book in “about nine
years” with “the Dawn of the New Cycle” (SD, vol. 1, pp. xliii–v). That “prophetic
record” is the book of (1) Enoch (vol. 2, p. 535). In the translation of (1) Enoch
used by Blavatsky, Enoch’s last prophecy announces “a new thing [cf. Isa 43:19; Acts
17:21] … a righteous race shall arise … in the latter days [cf. Dan 9:24; 10:14].” At
that time evildoers will be destroyed, sin will cease, and the pure who regard them-
selves “as a breath passing away” will be blessed by God (Laurence 1883: 176–9).
Since SD was published in 1888 then the Dawn of the New Cycle would begin in
1897. Further, with the New Cycle of 1897 the Path of Initiation would bring “no
more death [cf. Rev 21:4] because one feels oneself [cf. Acts 17:27] rebecoming a
god!” (“The New Cycle” [1889], Collected Works [hereafter CW], vol. 11, pp. 135,
133). Elsewhere Blavatsky invokes an urgency to find “the Lost Word” because “the
great cycle, the first one within the Kali-yuga, is at an end; the day of resurrection for
all that is dead” is close (“Beacon of the Unknown” [1889], CW, vol. 11, p. 281; cf.
Phil 3:11). Now, by association with the first cycle of the Kali Yuga (and Enoch’s last
prophecy), “the Lost Word” will ensure the initiate’s place in the historical arising of
a “new … righteous race.”
In an article contemporaneous with SD the “Lost Word” remains well-guarded in
Tibet, and (surprisingly) is a more potent occult key than “the sacred word, AUM”;
it is “a Word far surpassing the mysterious monosyllable.” This “key … can be passed
only at death, for it is the ‘Lost Word’ ” which brings an equality with Brahman
(“Mystery of the Buddha” [1889?], CW, vol. 14, p. 430; cf. Enoch’s “as a breath
passing away”). Blavatsky tempers this limited transmission of the secret gnosis
with comments made shortly before her own death. The “unity” of consciousness
throughout the cosmos at the completion of its evolution is also attained “by analogy
… in initiation” and “not necessarily at death only, but during Samadhi, or mystic
trance.” The name, the “Fire-Self,” by which this consciousness is realized is actually
“no name, no action” but an “ever-living” spiritual power (“Pistis Sophia” [1890],
CW, vol. 13, pp. 41–2, 64). Blavatsky’s various references to initiation and the “Lost
Word” indicate the initiate’s unity of consciousness with all things is experienced as
the somatic feeling of being a living god. In another context and allied to an act of will,
the “long-lost Word” the “(lost) ancient Word” frees the “Inner Self” from the phys-
ical senses (and actual breath?), at which it “lives and breathes” (cf. Acts 17:25) with
nature whose secrets are then an “open book” (Isis, vol. 2, p. 470; “Mystery of the
Buddha,” pp. 443–4; cf. Rev. 10:2, 8–10). But what actually is the “Lost Word” key?
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THE SECRET INS TRU CTIO NS

In 1887 Blavatsky claimed that a potent messianic cycle of 2,155 years which was
“historic and not very long, but very occult” was due to recur in 1900 (“The Esoteric
Character of the Gospels” [1887], CW, vol. 8, p. 174). In 1888 she formed the exclu-
sive and secretive Esoteric Section (ES) of the TS, with the purpose “to strike the key-
note” of esoteric truths within it. Blavatsky urged ES members to begin “the cycle of
adeptship” before 1900 and predicted the arrival of a new Teacher in 1975 (“Esoteric
Instructions” [hereafter EI] [1889], CW, vol. 12, pp. 491–2, 601). In the following
year Blavatsky published The Voice of the Silence (1889), which detailed the Path of
Initiation and was “written for and dedicated to” ES members on order of the Masters,
since it contained answers to their questions arising from the secret Instructions (EI,
p. 505). For Blavatsky the Masters were perfected human beings who guide the spir-
itual evolution of humanity. In 1890 Blavatsky chose six women and six men from
the ES as an even more secretive Inner Group (IG) of pupils, whom she gave face-
to-face teaching weekly until her death. The final details and “the ultimate key” to
Blavatsky’s esoteric gnosis would be given only to the “Elect” if found “worthy” of it
by the Masters (EI III, p. 601).
Blavatsky’s Path of Initiation was an intricate and rigorous divinization process.
She intended her students to understand that their spiritual and physical “essence”
was “identical” with the “Absolute Principle” and “God in Nature.” By gaining a
“perfect knowledge” of the sevenfold correspondences of color, sound, and number
(vibrations), forces in nature, states of consciousness, and the seven human principles
through chanting the sacred formula “Om Mani Padme Hum,” the “learner” could
realize the creative forces of nature which lay within (EI I, p. 519). To traverse the
seven-gated Path, however, seven virtues of “perfection” were to be developed by
means of a seven-stage meditation practice, during which seven mystic sounds had to
be heard internally. The mystic sounds would raise kundalini energy from the heart
to between the eyes as “the breath” of the inner god or Higher Self, the Christos. All
seven mystic sounds would collapse into one, which would be heard by the initiate
only at the end of the Path as the “VOICE OF THE SILENCE” (1889 [Cleather and
Crump, hereafter VS], pp. xi, 9–10, 15, 22). The single Path had a dual aspect. If the
seven virtues were attained by the fourth gate then the initiate had the right to enter
Nirvana. The initiate who renounced that right and passed all seven gates would be
the new “rare” Bodhisattva (pp. 13, 39, 71). The pivotal factor in gaining the seven
virtues of perfection and awakening the divine consciousness was the practice of an
occult meditation of sensory deprivation in which imagination was a strategy to tran-
scend the brain and worldly thought and access higher planes.
With the eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth closed off and “holding the breath for
a short time” Blavatsky “went home” (Spierenburg 1995: 17, 72). In that occult
breathless meditation, which she related to the Raja yoga practice of a “mental or
‘will’ breath,” but in her teaching built around the silent mental intoning of the key-
note “Fa of human nature,” the “middle key” of the seven human principles, the
vibrations of the pituitary and pineal glands would intensify and awaken kunda-
lini energy, as well as the human principles of the physical Kama and the spiritual
Manas (EI III, pp. 615–18). As the Lower Manas (Kama-Manas), the higher principle
of mind (Manas) could control the animal desires, thoughts, and emotions of the
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lower physical principle (Kama). For Blavatsky (true) intense desire and will power
attracted cosmic forces which aided the imagination to “create” with the “mental
eye” the “shape and colour” of the thing desired, which was “in truth as good as
real.” The Lower Manas, “the only and direct mediator” between itself the personal
Ego and the divine Ego, would become such by the “projection” of an “imaginary
path” of communication towards the divine Ego, which, in turn, would empower the
Lower Manas to implement its “reason and intelligence” to overcome the impurities
of the selfish personal Ego and so to “blend” with the higher (EI, I, pp. 527–8; III,
pp. 626, 631–3). This imaginative purification was possible because in Blavatsky’s
secret gnosis colors were psychic and sounds were spiritual (Spierenburg 1995: 17),
and audible sound uttered on the earth plane produced its corresponding color in the
invisible realms, while inaudible sound in the invisible realms produced a perceptible
color. Thus the keynote Fa in triggering “the breath” of the Higher Self the inner god
also produced the corresponding color green. The color of the Lower Manas was also
green, and green was “threefold stronger in its vibrations” than red the color of the
physical Kama (EI I, pp. 534; III, pp. 620, 564).
While it would take years of such practice to purify the will and desire, harmonize
the seven human principles, and end one’s karma and cycle of incarnations, Blavatsky
assured the IG pupils that there “comes a moment when, in the highest meditation,”
the Lower Manas would be drawn into union with the higher principles of Atma-
Buddhi-Manas. At that, the “full adept is One spiritually, but has also a body; the
fourfold path is finished (cf. Jn 17:4, 22–23; 19:30) and he is One” (Spierenburg
1995: 15, 61). That convoluted process had entailed the suffering of the Higher Self
which was “the true Crucifixion of the Christos (cf. Jn 19:30), the most abstruse but
yet the most important mystery (cf. Rev. 10:7) of Occultism; all the cycle of our lives
hangs on it” (Spierenburg 1995: 69). Compare Blavatsky’s unreferenced allusions to
Rev. 10:7; 8:1, where the silent “divine intuitions” of the heart reveal the truth of “the
great SEVENTH MYSTERY” (SD, vol. 2, pp. 516; 558–9).
Complementary to Blavatsky’s secret gnosis of an occult meditation of breathless
sensory deprivation was her secret Instruction on acute sensory perception. The key-
note Fa was also the “single definite tone” of the vibrations of nature’s sounds; it was
“the middle note,” the “voice,” “The Master-Key” of nature heard as the roar of the
sea and the wind in the trees (EI II, pp. 550, 562, 564). Since the essence of human
nature was “identical” with the “Absolute Principle” and “God in Nature,” it follows
that the sounds and colors of nature’s keynote Fa would evoke the psychic color green
and a breathless meditative state within the occultist. For those who understood the
gnosis, the senses and somatic feeling affirmed the unity of all life and one’s divinity.
Because every atom possesses Alaya (Universal Soul, Atman) human sight can dis-
cern the “truth” of the moon’s reflection on waves as “the right perception of existing
things, the Knowledge [gnosis] of the non-existent.” Further, “to feel” oneself in “all
things” was “to live and breathe in all” and “to live in the eternal”; even a felt compas-
sion corresponded to nature’s vibrations of the keynote Fa (VS, pp. 24, 49–50, n. 10).
The new Bodhisattva Teacher, the Master of the “whole Manvantara,” would be
praised by the “wordless voice” of nature’s sights, sounds and smells (pp. 72, 65, 93,
n. 24). The keynote Fa, the middle key of both Man and nature, whether silently and
breathlessly intoned by will power in meditation or heard as a whisper of the wind
in the trees, was Blavatsky’s “Lost Word” key and the turning point in enlightenment.
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Shortly before her death Blavatsky sought to recruit disciples for her Path of Initiation
who would be the vanguard of a new (sub-)race by 1897 (SD, vol. 2, p. 444) to be led
by the new Bodhisattva in 1975.
T R ANSMISSION; REDACT IO N; IM AG INATIO N;

CONSUMM ATIO N
Just as for Blavatsky the eschatologies of (1) Enoch, Daniel, and Revelation contained
veiled gnosis of the mysteries of initiation, so too did the words uttered by Jesus. Jesus
had been a young disciple in 105 BCE (CW, [1883], vol. 4, pp. 361–1; [1887], vol.
8, [pp]. 189, 380), and preached the sermon on the mount at “thirty years” of age
([n.d.], vol. 14, p. 388; cf. Lk 3:23), with “Every act … every word … every event …
[of] … the three years” of his mission based on a “Cycle of Initiation” ([1888], vol.
9, p. 225). As an initiate Jesus held “the ‘Fire’ Wisdom of the true Gnosis or the real
spiritual enlightenment” (SD, vol. 2, p. 566). His “secret doctrine, … the ‘mysteries
of the kingdom of heaven’ ” were occult teachings hidden in his parables and alle-
gories which were “to be revealed later to the world” (CW [1887], vol. 8, p. 271).
Jesus also possessed secret Essene knowledge of time cycles (Isis, vol. 2, p. 144). His
declaration of “the consummation of the age” had not meant “the end of the world”
(cf. Matt 24:3), but rather the end of a time cycle “now fast approaching,” that is, the
2,155-year messianic cycle due to recur in 1900 (“Esoteric Character of the Gospels”
[1887], CW, vol. 8, p. 174).
Annie Besant became Blavatsky’s friend, confidante, and star pupil, and was
anointed by Blavatsky as “Chief Secretary of the Inner Group of the Esoteric Section
and Recorder of the Teachings” (Spierenburg 1995: xv). Blavatsky had told the IG
that “the real purpose” of the TS was to prepare humanity to receive the new Teacher,
and Besant claimed verification from her own Master in 1895 that “the inner pur-
pose” of the TS was to prepare the world for the new race and its new Teacher
(Lutyens 1975: 12; Besant 1910: 228–9). Charles Leadbeater, the Secretary of the TS
London Lodge, had never been a member of the London Blavatsky Lodge, or its ES or
IG, nor had his clairvoyant connection with the Masters brought him any gnosis of a
coming Messiah. He began his collaboration with Besant in 1895 and they appointed
themselves the Adept status of the Fourth Initiation (Lutyens 1957: 191; 1975: 213).
Taking her cue from Blavatsky and an unreferenced Luke 3:23 Besant presented
Jesus as “thirty years of age” at his baptism, at which he received his occult illumin-
ation as the divine messenger “For three years only.” Besant, however, went further
than her mentor. For Blavatsky, Jesus was a young disciple in 105 BCE; for Besant,
Jesus was born in 105 BCE. Leadbeater quoted Besant’s position on Jesus’s nativity
and later asserted Krishnamurti, like Jesus, would be occupied by the consciousness
of the World Teacher at “about thirty years of age” (Besant 1966: 170; 2002: 96–100;
Leadbeater 1917: 13; Leadbeater 1919: 10–11). In Blavatsky’s esoteric interpretation,
Jesus’s words in Matthew 24:3 had meant the recurrence of the 2,155-year messianic
cycle in 1900. In Matthew 24:21, 22 Jesus’s words (resonant with occult corres-
pondence) point to a “great tribulation” that “for the elect’s sake those days shall be
shortened.” Besant and Leadbeater used Blavatsky’s own esoteric hermeneutics to
shorten the 2,155-year messianic cycle to 2,000 years (Lutyens 1975: 12; Leadbeater
1925: 258).
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In the Besant-Leadbeater collaborative view, calculating 2,000 years from 105 BCE

pin-pointed 1895 as the birth year of the new vehicle, who would be indwelt by
the World Teacher in 1925. Blavatsky herself had nominated 1897 for the Dawn
of the New Cycle, and on that prediction the birth of the new vehicle, in fulfill-
ment of Luke 3:23, the Teacher would announce himself in 1927. When Besant
and Leadbeater settled on the young Krishnamurti as the new vehicle of the World
Teacher, they believed his birth year to have been 1896 or 1897. By Krishnamurti’s
Second Initiation, however, Besant and Leadbeater knew he had been born in 1895
(Lutyens 1975: 2, 58, 309), and Besant brazenly asserted her predictive capacity over
that of her mentor:
[Blavatsky had] regarded it as the mission of the T.S. to prepare the world for the
coming of the next great Teacher, though she put that event perhaps half a cen-
tury later than I do.
(Lutyens 1975: 46)
By shortening Blavatsky’s messianic cycle Besant and Leadbeater eliminated 1900

as the terminus to begin the Path of Initiation, and brought the coming of the World
Teacher into their own lifetime. Besant’s indefinite “perhaps half a century” replaced
Blavatsky’s prediction of 1975 with the variant possibilities of 1925 and 1927 for
Krishnamurti’s coming as the new Teacher.
Krishnamurti’s two authorized biographers both assert that his 1922 “process”
of intense suffering at Ojai, California –to where he had been escorted by Albert
Warrington, the General Secretary of the TS in America –had made him an exalted
human being (Lutyens 1975: 152–64; Jayakar 1986: 46–57). As shown elsewhere
(Boag 2017: 98–158), Krishnamurti’s claim to have finished the Path of Initiation,
without his mentors’ sanction, was a psychological and physical artefact of his imagin-
ation –a strategy to attain perfection and realize the god within as trained into him
by Besant and Leadbeater (Besant 1966: 189; 2002: 181; Leadbeater 1947: 73, 138).
Further, Krishnamurti’s private and public literary descriptions of his Ojai drama were
deliberately crafted in the sacramentally potent in-house vocabulary of Blavatsky’s
secret gnosis, which Besant and Leadbeater could not refute. For instance, in past
incarnations he had worshipped the Path and practiced meditation in “breathless …
adoration,” yet it was in his present incarnation that Krishnamurti now claimed –in
literary proximity to Blavatsky’s words “The voice of … silence and … stillness,” with
the air “still, breathless,” –“Divinity is taking shape within me” and finally, “I AM
GOD” (Krishnamurti 1923: Oct., 395–6; Dec., 481–3).
With allusions to New Testament texts, Besant in 1912 had predicted “He shall
again appear [cf. Matt 24:30] to build up a new sub-race, to shape a universal reli-
gion. He literally shall not come to destroy but to fulfill [cf. Matt. 5:17]” (Besant
1912: 100). At the Adyar Star Congress on 28 December 1925, Krishnamurti (then
30 years old) reworked and historically fulfilled Besant’s prediction with a change in
speech from the third to the first person:
I come for those … longing to find happiness in all things. I come to reform and
not to tear down, I come not to destroy but to build.
(Krishnamurti 1926: Feb., 41)
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Besant, however, only partially endorsed his claim: the event had marked only the
“consecration” and “final acceptance” of Krishnamurti’s body as the vehicle for the
World Teacher, the coming had only “begun” (Lutyens 1975: 224).
One year later Besant and 200 supporters gathered around Krishnamurti at Ojai
on 11 January 1927, the date of his first initiation in 1910. Krishnamurti recited a
poem in which, as he had been meditating, he had a vision of the Buddha and realized
that he himself was “… the Truth … and the Beloved.” The first two lines of the poem
are pertinent:
I sat a-dreaming in a room of great silence,

The early morning was still and breathless.
(Krishnamurti 1927: April, 21)
As in his 1922 claim to divinity, Krishnamurti’s words “silence,” “still,” and “breathless”
indicated to Besant and his supporters his knowledge of Blavatsky’s occult breathless
meditation and his divine awakening. Before leaving Ojai, Besant issued a press release
presenting “the Christ in Palestine” as a paradigm for Krishnamurti. Just as “the Divine
Spirit” had remained with Jesus during “His three years of teaching … The coming is
now similar.” Krishnamurti’s message that the “Kingdom of Heaven is the Kingdom of
Happiness” within (cf. Lk 17:21) which had to be externalized would “guide the nations
for centuries” (cf. Isa 66:18; Matt 28:19–20). Krishnamurti was “literally perfect:”
In him the manhood had been taken up into Divinity, and we beheld his glory,
full of grace and truth [cf. Jn 1:14]. The Spirit had descended and abides on him.
The World Teacher is here.
(Besant 1927: March, 93–4)
Krishnamurti deliberately fulfilled Besant’s prediction for the coming World Teacher
in 1925 and 1927. He had official sanction for his messianic status from the President
of the TS, and Besant had publicly pressured him to remain for three years with the
TS and his own support organization the Order of the Star in the East (OSE).
Capitalizing on Besant’s ratification of his status, Krishnamurti spoke of his evo-
lutionary significance in eschatological terms. In his presence as the Beloved “time as
such ceases” (cf. Rev 10:6); it could be seen he was the goal, “the end” for everyone
(cf. Dan 12:13; Rom 10:4). His purpose “from the very ancient of days” (cf. Dan
7:13) to unite with the Beloved had “been fulfilled” (cf. Mk 1:15). He knew “the short
… path” (cf. Matt 24:22; Rev 1:1) and all religion, worship, affection, and desires
were “consummated” in him (cf. Dan 9:27) with “the separate self … purified” (cf.
Dan 12:10). While struggle, suffering, and control were necessary “to lose the sep-
arate self” which had evolved “from the very beginning, from the very foundation of
the earth” (Krishnamurti 1928a: 60–1, 81, 71; cf. Matt 13:35), by 1928 Krishnamurti
frequently spoke of an alternative: imagination coupled with affection could appro-
priate another’s experience:
Everyone must go through all experiences but they need not go through them in
reality –they can do it vicariously by imagination’
(Krishnamurti 1929a: June, 12)
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Prior to the Ojai Star Camp in May 1928 Krishnamurti published a poem in which
he described the inner sanctuary of the Madura temple as being “breathless with
the love of many” in its “still silence” (Krishnamurti 1931: 34). On the first day
of the Camp he read from his latest book of poems The Immortal Friend (1928b),
in which poems I, VI, XI all contain the word breathless. Poem I is a reprint of
his 1927 declaration at Ojai. Poem VI assures the reader “thou wilt meet with my
Beloved” in the “still blue skies” and “breathless air” of “the great silence before
the dawn” (Krishnamurti 1928b: 37). In poem XI Krishnamurti had “climbed”
to his Beloved on a “quiet evening” with smoke “mounting in a still column”
when “the world is breathless” (Krishnamurti 1928b: 57). Having published the
breathless clue to union with the Beloved, and without reference to the keynote Fa,
Krishnamurti later claimed his infallibility: “I say exactly what I mean. Every word
I have carefully thought out … I am the whole –entirely unconditioned.” And in
an obvious attack on ES members he stated “there is no special meditation, yoga,”
and his audience should “rejoice” that he had “the glad news” (Krishnamurti
1929b: July, 6–21; cf. Lk 2:10).
In the talks following his well-known dissolution of the OSE on 3 August 1929,
Biblical eschatology and New Testament texts were important to Krishnamurti in
an as yet unresolved dualism. Desires were to be “transformed” (cf. Rom 12:2) into
desire for the “consummation” (cf. Dan 9:27) in which the “self-assertion of the ‘I’ …
[which] … is timeless” (cf. Rev 10:6) brought no sorrow (cf. Rev 21:4). In the “now”
where past, present, and future met “there is no mystery” (cf. Rev 10:7); issues of
the progressive self could be understood, and the issue “is over, it is finished with [cf.
Jn 19:30; Rev 10:7] and belongs to the past.” The present moment “transcended all
laws, limitations, karma and reincarnation” and one was then “living in the eternal”
(Krishnamurti 1929c: Sept., 18–20). Krishnamurti resigned from the TS in the new
year of 1930 (Lutyens 1975: 277), three years after the breathless assumption of his
role on 11 January 1927.
POST-S OCIETY: B REATHL E S S ATTE NTIO N

Krishnamurti’s post-Society use of the cognate forms of the verb to breathe are
numerous, with many examples presented in covert word- play accompanied by
unreferenced Biblical vocabulary. For example, Krishnamurti’s notion of the sacred
was “The otherness” which was “the mind without time [cf. Rev 10:6]; it was the
breath of innocence and immensity” (cf. Dan. 6:22; Acts 17:25). And again, “Every
act of meditation is never the same, there is a new breath [cf. Acts 17:21, 25], a new
shattering” (Krishnamurti 2003: 212, 283). Blavatsky’s “Lost Word” breathless key-
note Fa was the middle key of both Man and nature, and Krishnamurti frequently
cast both animate and inanimate nature as being breathless. In a sudden “silence” (cf.
Hab 2:20; Rev 8:1) birds and monkeys were “absolutely still and everything seemed
to be holding its breath.” Elsewhere “there was a breathless silence and its tender
beauty was on the land. Meditation is the movement of that silence.” And in the quiet
silence of a dawn “It was as though the whole earth were holding its breath, probably
in great adoration” (Krishnamurti 1998: 14, 69, 111).
Krishnamurti did provide clear examples of the common human event of invol-
untary breathless attention with, according to him, its all-encompassing significance
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for one’s life. For example, the book of Revelation closes with a dire warning against
anyone who would “add” or “take away” any words from its eschatological prophecy
since “the time is at hand” (Rev 22:18, 19, 10). Making various other Biblical
allusions in a 1961 diary entry, Krishnamurti reworks that eschatological warning
into a timeless, breathless, thoughtless moment of the unalterable love of the strength
of life as manifest in the natural order:
that inviolable strength comes with such abundance and with such clarity that
it took literally your breath away [cf. Dan 10:17]. All life was that strength … it
was there as those dark distant hills and those trees beside the road. It was too
immense for thought to bring it about or speculate upon. It was the strength
that had no cause and so nothing could be added to or taken away from it [cf.
Rev 22: 18, 19]. It cannot be known [cf. Acts 17:23]; … is always new [cf. Acts
17:21], … cannot be measured in time [cf. Rev 10:6]. … the word love [cf. 1
Jn 4:8] … had a totally different meaning, … It came with that impenetrable
strength; the two were inseparable, … The brain, the heart and the mind were
totally consumed by it … But it is there like a whisper among the leaves.
(Krishnamurti 2003: 275–6)
In a 1973 journal entry Krishnamurti insists meditation “must happen” rather than it
being a conscious endeavor, with light Biblical touches:
Coming over the stile into the grove one felt immediately [cf. Acts 17:27] a great
sense of peace and stillness … It seemed sacrilegious to walk through it, … it was
profane to talk, even to breathe. The great redwood trees were absolutely still
… [and] … silent … You stood still [cf. Ps 46:10] hardly daring to breathe; …
speechless with the wonder of it … that beauty, [cf. Isa 33:17] that stillness, that
strange stillness. Come when you will and it will be there, full, rich [cf. 1 Cor 4:8]
and unnameable.
In the same journal Krishnamurti’s words again resonate with the book of Revelation
and other Biblical texts:
All things, … were waiting breathless for the sun, in adoration … Every living
thing was still in the mystery [cf. Rev 10:7] of that moment of meditation. Your
own mind was timeless, [cf. Rev 10:6] … You were the world, the cosmos, the
deathless beauty [cf. Rev 21:4; Isa 33:17] and the joy of compassion. Only you
weren’t there; …
Blavatsky described the divine consciousness attained through a breathless meditation

practice in Hindu and eschatological and Christological terms. That realization was
“the true Crucifixion”; “the most important mystery” of the occult Path was “finished”
and a felt compassion corresponded to “God in Nature.” In 1929 Krishnamurti
asserted there was “no mystery” in the “now,” yet post-Society, the moment of spon-
taneous breathless meditation was a profound “mystery” which evoked compassion.
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Blavatsky had been adamant that the Path of Initiation, with its practice of an occult
breathless meditation of sensory deprivation, would bring “no more death” (cf. Rev
21:4). But for Krishnamurti, it is in a moment of acute sensory perception and spon-
taneous breathless meditation that he is himself “the deathless beauty” of life –his
gnosis, an evisceration of Blavatsky perhaps, but his distinct insight.
Shortly before his death, Krishnamurti pointed to such breathless moments as
indicators of a “religious mind” which has personal and social ramifications:
I don’t know if it has ever happened to you. It may happen occasionally when you
are walking in a beautiful lane, in a wood of trees and birds and flowers, and the
beauty of a sunset, or a morning dawn, then for a second or two you are quiet,
breathless, watching the beauty of the world. But that is external.
But when the brain is quiet, though it has its own activity, quiet in the sense
thought is not functioning, so time and thought come to an end where there is
deep attention. And then in that silence there is that which is nameless, which
is beyond all time. Such a mind is a religious mind. And it is only such minds
can bring about a new culture, a new society. And because that is eternal it has
immense significance in life.
(Krishnamurti 1983: 10 April)
Krishnamurti came to reject the secretive and imagined perfectionist divinization of

his Blavatskian Theosophical roots. Blavatsky’s gnosis of an occult breathless (“Lost
Word”) meditation practice ended karma and reincarnation and allowed one “to
live in the eternal”. Krishnamurti pointed to a moment of timeless, thoughtless,
breathless attention as spontaneous meditation which has “eternal … significance in
life.” His published works are saturated in the reworked vocabulary of the esoteric
interpretation of eschatological and Christological texts derived from Blavatsky and
without any reference to her “Lost Word,” the keynote Fa. In this light Krishnamurti’s
teaching has been de-mystified, yet he left his own gnosis, hidden behind his verbal
convolutions, almost always elusive to his own new followers who maintain the
Krishnamurti Foundations and Schools.
REFERENCES
Besant, Annie. (1897) 1966. Seven Great Religions. Madras: The Theosophical Publishing House.
——— (1901) 2002. Esoteric Christianity or The Lesser Mysteries. Chennai: The Theosophical
Publishing House.
——— 1910. The Changing World. London: The Theosophical Publishing Society.
——— 1912. Initiation: The Perfecting of Man. London: The Theosophical Publishing Society.
———1927. “A Statement by Dr. Annie Besant.” The Herald of the Star 16 (3), March: 93–94.
Blavatsky, Helena. See in-text references to Collected Writings (Los Angeles: Blavatsky Writing
Publications, etc.), 16 vols.; etc.
Boag, Al. 2017. “Concealed and Revealed: Madame Blavatsky’s ‘Lost-Word’ Key and Esoteric
Eschatology in the Teachings of J. Krishnamurti.” Doctoral dissert., University of Sydney,
Sydney.
Jayakar, Pupul. 1986. Krishnamurti: A Biography. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Jinarajadasa, Curuppumullage. 1922. “The Early History of the T.S.” The Theosophist,
March: 533–54.
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Krishnamurti, Jiddu. 1923. “The Path.” The Herald of the Star 12 (10– 12) October;
December: 394–99, 436–39, 479–83.
——— 1926. “Address.” The Herald of the Star 15 (2): 39–41.
——— 1927. “I sat a-dreaming.” The Theosophist, April: 69.
——— 1928a. The Pool of Wisdom; Who Brings the Truth; By What Authority; Three Poems.
Ommen: The Star Publishing Trust.
——— 1928b. The Immortal Friend. Ommen: The Star Publishing Trust.
———1929a. “An Interview with Krishnaji On Current Problems.” International Star Bulletin,
June: 6–15.
———1929b. “Glimpses of the Ojai Camp: 27 May –2 June, 1929.” International Star
Bulletin, July: 35–40.
—— —1929c. “Ommen Star Camp: Talk by Krishnamurti.” International Star Bulletin,
September: 4–21.
——— 1931. The Song of Life. Ommen: The Star Publishing Trust.
——— (1934) 1991. The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti. 18 vols incl. index. Iowa: Kendall/
Hunt.
——— (1976) 2003. Krishnamurti’s Notebook. California: Krishnamurti Publications of
America.
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——— (1983) 1991. The Krishnamurti Text Collection & Index: The Complete Published
Works 1933–1986. CD ROM. England: The Krishnamurti Foundation Trust.
——— 1998 (1987). Krishnamurti To Himself: His last journal. Madras: Krishnamurti
Foundation, India.
Laurence, Richard. 1995 (1883). The Book of Enoch: The Prophet. San Diego, CA: Wizards
Bookshelf.
Leadbeater, Charles. 1917 (1899). The Christian Creed: Its Origin and Signification.
London: The Theosophical Publishing House.
———1919. “The King the Perfect Man.” Theosophy in Australasia 25 April: 9–13.
——— 1925. The Masters & The Path. Madras: The Theosophical Publishing House.
——— 1947 (1920). The Monad. Madras: The Theosophical Publishing House.
Lutyens, Emily. 1957. Candles in the Sun. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.
Lutyens, Mary. 1975. Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Rudbøg, Tim. 2010. “The Mysteries of Sound in H.P. Blavatsky’s ‘Esoteric Instructions’.”
Laurence Wuidar (ed.). Music and Esotericism. Leiden; Brill: 243–64.
Spierenburg, Henk J. 1995. The Inner Group Teachings of H.P. Blavatsky to her personal
pupils (1890–91). San Diego, CA: Point Loma Publications.
Trompf, Garry W. 2013. “Theosophical Macrohistory.” Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein
(eds.). Handbook of the Theosophical Current. Leiden: Brill: 375–403.
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CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THE PHILOSOPHY OF GUIDO VON

LIST (1848–1 919): CONNECTING
GNOSTICISM TO NAZISM
Jeffrey D. Lavoie
T he following chapter will assess the possible connections between Nazism and
the belief in a hidden knowledge (i.e., Gnosticism), especially as they pertain to
the subject of Ariosophy and its founder Guido von List. Before any connection can
be identified, these key terms must first be defined. For the sake of conciseness, the
most generic definition of “Gnosticism” will be employed in this study, accepting that
the term derives from the Greek γνῶσις, literally translated as “knowledge.” While a
wider definition remains the subject of much debate, we will simply defer to Webster’s
Dictionary for a suitable working definition: “the conviction that matter is evil and
that emancipation comes through gnosis” (cf. King 2003: 1). In other words, a higher
knowledge leads to a spiritual salvation that transcends the physical, natural world.
Further gnostic “traits” have been identified by Tom Hall, who defined the nature
of many historical “gnostics” as being “focused on the individual rather than the
group,” as being “liberals rather that holy tories … they were hippies, not corporate
executives; spiritual people rather than attendees at divine services; they saw salva-
tion in enlightenment, they were seekers after blessedness … they were idealists, not
church-builders” (King 2003: 8). Few descriptions could apply more fittingly to the
life and mystical teachings of Guido von List.
Von List is indisputably the father of a Western esoteric philosophy known as
Ariosophy. Ariosophy is a current of thought propagated by Austrian- Germanic
esotericists who combined racial and völkisch ideologies together along with a belief
in an ancient knowledge (often called ur-knowledge/gnosis) and occultism (Mosse
1999: 4–5; Kurlander 2002: 23–6). While List labeled his teachings Wotanism and
Armanism, the epithet Ariosophy was later suggested by his pupil Lanz von Liebenfels
(1874–1954), and the last term has been widely accepted in modern scholarship to
describe this nationalist esoteric background (Goodrick-Clarke 1995: 227). It should
be clarified that a chief trait of Ariosophy included some belief in a form of an ancient
gnosis which is typically assimilated into views on the origin and supremacy of the
Aryan race. As such, in this article the words “Ariosophy,” “gnosis,” and “gnosti-
cism” will be used interchangeably (as well as several variations that List employed,
including “ur-knowledge/gnosis” and “Ario-gnosis”). While any study on a subject
as daunting as Nazism (and Ariosophy) could easily turn into an unmanageable
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— Jeffrey D. Lavoie —
and massive project, for the sake of accessibility we will remain focused on List as
Ariosophy’s founder-figure. This study seeks to answer the following three questions.
First: why did List need to develop or “rediscover” this allegedly “ancient” gnosis,
and what was it? Second: how was this gnosis practiced? And third: how did List’s
teachings go on to influence the rise of the Nazi Party (if at all)?
D EV ELOP ING THE ANCIENT- G NO S IS O F ARIO S O P HY

Despite his enormous influence on modern German esotericism, Guido Karl Anton
von List (1848–1919) has been the subject of only one full-length biography, which
was written in 1917 by one of his closest followers, Johannes Balzli. While many
of the details of List’s early life remain accessible only through this biography, it is
this intimate relationship that makes the writing prone to self-aggrandizements and
conclusions that are suspicious at best. What remains curious is the connection Balzli
makes between List and the existence of this ancient wisdom (i.e., gnosis), as evinced
by the title The Rediscoverer of Ancient Aryan Wisdom. Thus, the idea that List had
“rediscovered” the primal “Aryan gnosis wisdom” was assumed by his early followers
and provides an indisputable link between List and gnosticism.
From the very beginning, List associated himself with the primal, universal know-
ledge or what he called the Ur-religion/gnosis (which was eventually systematized
into his unique esoteric belief system). He was proud of his family heritage and used a
magical rune square to trace back his lineage. This occult practice indicates the type of
pseudo-scientific methods List engaged in when performing his various “researches,”
for which he became famous (or infamous). One of his most basic and fundamental
conclusions was a belief that the current Austrian and German descendants were the
inheritors of the one true, primal Ario-gnostic religion. This idea became the basis for
his unique mystical ideology and its racial grounding, on which future Ariosophists
would build (including Liebenfels, the Germanenorden, Thule Society, etc.). This
unusual form of gnosticism became such a defining aspect of List’s teachings that
it was assimilated into his own personal lineage and origin (whether real or myth-
ical). He even incorporated this belief into his family’s heraldic shield, as a historical
symbol of Austrian noble families. Not surprisingly, this symbol bestowed the highest
honor to the List family line:
fuartfosor: deepest knowledge of the Ur-air for the sake of revelation … The
jewel declares … expanding (growing) deepest knowledge of the Ur-air for the
sake of revelation. (I) expediently partake, guided by the wisdom of Ariarita, in
the creation of rightfulness.
(Balzli 1917: 13–14)
It seemed even before he was born that List was “destined” to learn and reveal the
Ur-gnosis to a wider Austrian-German audience.
As the first-born son of a successful businessman, List was marked to carry on the
family business, but destiny had other plans for this would-be German mystic. At the
young age of fourteen, he discovered the ruins of an ancient Wotan temple (Wotan
was an old Saxon version of the Norse God Odin, traditionally as widely respected a
divine being as Thor/Donar). It was recorded that: “He [List] felt (still unconsciously)
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— The philosophy of Guido von List —
the presence of Hari Wotan and, in front of a torn-down altar, he took, in a pathetic
dedication that takes over the sources and seeds of the Cosmos, a solemn vow: ‘When
I grow up, I will build a Temple to Wotan!’ ” (Balzli 1917: 15). The foundation for this
temple was likely torn down long ago due to the strong Christian influence that had
dominated the Austrian-German religious landscape through Christian reformers,
possibly as late as Martin Luther’s time. Wotan not only became a symbol of List’s
nationalism, but he was also a ‘cut-out’ for List’s exoteric religious practice that he
proudly called Wotanism. Yet, there was an even deeper level to List’s teaching activ-
ities: an elitist esoteric group that met in secret and was reserved for the more spir-
itually minded and devoted followers of List’s racial gnosis. This esoteric branch was
known as Armanism, named after the ancient order of priests (the Armanens) yet
borrowing some of its structure from Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism (Goodrick-
Clarke 1995: 57). List was careful to distinguish between these two groups in his
writing:
While Armanism is purely monotheistic, Wotanism … is polytheistic. Since the

masses were not and still are not able to grasp the immortality of the Ego (indi-
viduality) and the transience of the personality (animal nature, pseudo-ego),
and also to understand the laws of reincarnation (re-embodiment) and Garma
(Karma), the exoteric teachings of heaven and hell (Walhall, Thrudheim, Helheim)
were created.
(Balzli 1917: 46)
Given the key ideas showing in this quotation, there is no denying that List’s Ur-gnosis
owed a tremendous debt to the modern Theosophical movement led by the irascible
Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891). List was introduced to her work through various
associates and referenced the publications of Franz Hartmann (1838–1912), who had
translated many of Blavatsky’s writings into the German language. This prompted List
to reconstruct his ancient gnosis by assimilating Blavatsky’s ideological frames into
his racial beliefs (Goodrick-Clarke 1995: 51). If many of his occult ideas derived from
Blavatsky’s Theosophy and her macro-historical visioning, though, List altered them
to make Austria and Germany the cradle of civilization (and hence of the Ur-gnosis)
instead of India as Blavatsky maintained in The Secret Doctrine (1888: vol. 1, 311).
He also replaced the Vishnu Purana as the main source of cosmology, switching it for
the Edda (a book of Ancient Saxon mythology) (Lavoie 2012: 218–19). In fact, many
teachings found throughout his writings, including various diagrams, were snatched
from the pages of The Secret Doctrine (List 2005: 34, 36–8, 43; List 1914: supple-
mental chart). His characteristic adjustments included making German the secret holy
language (as opposed to Blavatsky’s “Senzar,” the language of the Akashic text on
which she based her Doctrine), a fixation on the number seven, and an admiration of
the Incomprehensible One. When List engaged Blavatsky’s cyclical, cosmic chronology
of rounds and root races (see chs. 3, 44), he argued that humanity evolved from the
third “Root-race,” which was androgynous, into the fourth in which the sexes split,
and finally into its present and fifth Root-race. He basically utilized her teachings to
justify his own cosmology, yet instead of using Sanskrit terms deployed German ones.
This included taking the concept of karma, which List termed “Garma,” assimilating it
from a cyclical-mythological context into a German linear-historical context. He also
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utilized Norse deities (Norn and Urdam) as the progenitors of the various races as dis-
tinct from Blavatsky’s references to Manas, Logos, Pitris, etc. (List 2005: 48).
Blavatsky and her writings were extremely influential on List and especially in
his cosmological ordering and the origin of the universe. However, nothing could
supplant his own race and the sacred Ario-gnosis. For the Austrians and Germans
were possessors of the wisdom, the esoteric gnosis that undergirded “not only all of
the cultural history of Aryan Germans, but also that of all Aryan nations that had
evolved from antiquity to the present times” (Balzli 1917: 29). This gnosis had been
suppressed by Christianity at large and it desperately needed to be disseminated back
into Germanic culture. List believed that by rediscovering and propagating the secret
gnostic teachings, the result would the “rejuvenation and the re-birth of Aryans, enab-
ling them to attain the heights and reach perfection that had been dormant in them
before” (Balzli 1917: 29). The idea of obtaining racial perfection is pivotal in List’s
writings, portending the evolution of this special gnostic Aryanism into a unique form
of nationalism.
List went on to publish numerous articles and books between the years 1890 and
1903, and tirelessly worked on improving his literary capabilities and developing his
writing style. It was shortly after this time that his compositions took on a notice-
ably esoteric aspect. This new focus followed an intense cataract surgery in 1902 that
left List blind for nearly a year (incidentally in the same year the final installment of
Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine was published in German translation).
While this surgery impaired his vision it also allowed him to develop gifts of clair-
voyance and “extraordinary vivid activity of his memory and intuition, and immense
things revealed themselves to him” (Balzli 1917: 35). This included the profound
belief “that the rune song of Wotan in the Norse Edda contained an explanation
of the original healing sign runes and magical runes; he came up with the never-
before anticipated laws of creation and development of the Aryan race, its feelings,
thoughts, speech, and writing, by relating these revelations to previous insights”
(Balzli 1917: 36).
Renewed in ambition he produced over twelve new nationalist esoteric
publications, including (we translate) The Hieroglyphs of the Germanics (1906) and
The Proto-language of the Aryans (1914) on the runes and their healing signs. By
these works he steadily gained his authority on Aryan Germanic history, mythology,
and tradition. In 1903, in an article to the occult publication The Gnosis, he outlined
a Theosophical cosmological picture of the universe through symbols such as the tri-
skelion and the swastika as well as from runes.
In 1908, List published The Secret of Runes (Das Geheimnis der Runen), tra-
cing the German language to the one true ancient gnosis-language undergirding all
of history. He discovered that the root language of German was the key toward
understanding an ancient Roman script that connected the rune alphabet to “the
Song of Wotan.” Since the names of the runes were root words of the original
Aryan proto- language, the German tongue was crucial in linking the ancient
gnostic teachings from Germany’s ancient past to its present! This in turn inspired
his first volume of The Armanism of the Aryan Germans (1908), which expounded
a revolutionary ideology.
In this book, List introduced the idea that the Armans were of ancient noble origin,
and that the manifestation of their spirit could be found in the Edda, as well as in the
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various Germanic myths and fairy-tales (especially those collected by the Brothers
Grimm). Furthermore, List identified the Arman mystery traditions with old Austro-
German customs still being practiced during his time (Balzli 1917: 39). In 1908 again,
in yet another book, on The Rites of Aryan Germans, he derived an ancient sun ritual
to the original Ur-gnosis religion of the Saxons, in his view based on a belief in racial
control:
… how far we have wandered from the will of the ancient sun rite by using the
Roman written law and free trade … The sun rite was based on the old concept
of racial care and, due to this, was really durable, so that even now, after its elim-
ination –it is preserved only in folk traditions –it keeps people healthy, fresh, and
strong. Those who go wandering through Aryan Germania (Middle Europe) with
open eyes can find benchmarks –documents, sagas, holy trees, and thing-steads –
everywhere, and they can discover the rites themselves.
(Balzli 1917: 40)
List claimed that the true ancient Aryo-gnosis had been scattered across the history,
literature and archaeology of Austria-Germany and had never been fully assimilated
until now. By 1909, List pushed his theories on language and its connection to
Ariosophy, publishing The Names of Germanic Tribes and Their Interpretation to
identify how the German language should be interpreted, and by 1910 was alleging,
in a work on Ario-Germanic Hieroglyphics, that a conspiracy lay behind the gradual
repression of this Aryo-gnosis, blaming the Jesuits and Christians generally as dark
forces working to wipe away all traces of the true ancient gnostic practices and the
traditions of his people. This “secret science” in “many literary works” had to be
“re-discovered,” against those who would end “the freedom of the Armans and bring
the Chandala (the raceless, animalistic human mutts and materialists) to power …”
(Balzli 1917: 44). In this sense, List viewed his position as a prophet and a redeemer
of his people through the revelation of this unique racial gnosis.
This position was fueled by a deep disdain for materialists and his focus on the
spiritual essence of race. With the second volume of The Armanism of the Aryan
Germanic People (1911) he was laying out a plan to impart this Aryan revelation to
the world:
The slogan “up to Aryanism” is the guiding principle of this work. Since the
Aryan Germans have remained healthy and strong despite ecclesiasticism, despite
intrigues between the Aryans and the Chandala, it is possible to save them from
the troops of the rootless and to build new people in the spirit of the reawakened
Arman spirit. Consolidation with God, formation of the state, law and order, and
the acceptance of gender in the spirit of Armanism are the cures for the troubles
of our time.
(Balzli 1917: 49)
Ariosophy (or Aryan-gnosis) now became clearly combined with German nationalism
and entailed a more potent conspiracy theory to pinpoint those who were working
against the Germans. With a more aggressive agenda, List pushed for a combination
of a fraternity, racial superiority, a return to law and order, and national pride, all
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of which solidified the Guido von List Society (founded 1908) into a new religio-
political movement (Goodrick-Clarke 1995: 43).
Eventually, on 17 May 1919, List caught pneumonia and passed away. His body
was cremated, and his ashes were buried in Vienna’s central cemetery. An obituary
published in Prana noted that: “Pneumonia had exhausted the meager life force,
which was still weakened by the deprivations and the psychological distress of the
war years. His departure was easy and unconscious … [and he] desired to return
home to the spiritual world” (Balzli 1919: 289). To his end we have been tracing the
development of List’s gnostic “Wotanism” and the gist of its curious secrets. The next
question is: how was this Ariosophy practically applied?
A PP LYING THE UR-G NO SIS AND ARIO S O P HY

List was an experienced hiker and mountain climber and he came to believe that the
root to accessing this primal gnosticism was through nature. Nature was the key to
all knowledge and:
a par excellence guide to the divine, and the conscious human search for the
source of truth should always follow the trail of the nature’s sleeping will … The
moment when you focus on the ever-lasting edifice of nature, you get closer to the
“oldest, primeval, most profound truths” of the spiritual life.
(Balzli 1917: 18)
Nature served as an entry point towards experiencing the various forms of List’s eso-
teric belief structure.
By 1891 the divine gnosis/nature connection inspired List to pen his great work
titled German Mythological Landscapes in which nature, nationalism, folklore, and
Ariosophy were forged together:
for the first time the monuments of the Aryan German antiquity (such as wobbling
stones, sacrificial stones, phallic and vulva stones, local mountains, hill forts,
cattle-sheds, tumuli), as well as folklore (the black dog, the white woman, St.
Christopher, the dragon, the lint worm) are thoroughly described and interpreted
… not only are trees or roses alive, or that a brook sings to us in a silver voice,
but also that we could read the meadows to see everything that an archaeologist
can only discover with a spade and a shovel. Indeed, as Schopenhauer says: ‘Men
of learning are those who have read books. Thinkers, people of genius and those
who enlighten the world and further the human race are those who have made
direct use of the books of the world.’
(Balzli 1917: 26)
List attempted to enlighten the human race through the revelation of the Aryo-gnosis,
creating a textbook for the reader to interpret German landscapes and runes. “The
book articulates the momentous findings which, from the depths of millennia, revive
the Ur-wisdom of the Aryans (Aryan Germans). German Mythological Landscapes is
the foundation on which List built the edifice of his world-view in giant hewn stones”
(Balzli 1917: 37).
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From 1894 to 1895, List wrote an ongoing series in the East German Review
called “German Mythology in the Course of a Calendar Year” that further connected
the ancient Austrian- German mythologies to changes in nature, exhibiting the
intertwined land, Ur-gnosis, and German Volk and disclosing deeper meaning behind
his system. For List, myths were created because the Aryan race possessed a spiritual
sensitivity and they became “wonderful pictures [that] formed the life of nature and
created gods, which then reflected as a wonderful mirror of the people’s spirit their
feelings and thoughts, hopes and worries, strengths and weaknesses” (List 1894: 9).
The Germans were the “luckiest” of nations, for their myths contained “a higher
moral pureness” and an “ethical worth” that were far superior to those told by the
Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, or any other race (even if there were a number of simi-
larities among them) (List 1894: 9–10). These myths symbolized the great spirit of
his people and served as proof of their cultural superiority, with its Ur-gnosticism so
integral to the life of a largely agrarian people (Lauridsen 2007: 81).
In later years, List also discovered that language was the key to understanding
the Germanic past and future, and the interpretation of the Ur-gnosis, and he was
not the only one to conclude this. In 1902, the noted Theosophist Franz Hartmann
confirmed List’s militant ideologies in his Mysteries, Symbols, and Magical Powers.
“Since among all of the constituted nations only the Germans have a constituted
proto-language, the Germans could become masters of the world, if they would only
recognize the power that lies in their language” (Balzli 1917: 50). In his final book,
on The Proto-Language of the Aryan Germans and Their Mystery Language (1914),
the Aryo-Germanic original tongue became “a key for all languages and language
mysteries,” using his unique
threefold interpretability, which is based on the natural Ur-law of the sacrosanct

three –Creation (Becoming), Being (Prevail) and Decay towards a new uprising
(Destruction-Recreation) –and that they had a reflection in the threefold
division of people into Ingfoons (nutritional profession, Ingävonen), Armans
(scholar profession, Irmionen) and Istfoons (military profession, Istavönen),
and many other characteristics and establishments, in which this trinity was
expressed.
(Balzli 1917: 50)
There are three groups of people identified by List here. The middle one, the Armans/
Imionens, were the elite class of professional academics and priests whose task it
was to guard the hidden Aryan-gnosis and keep it secret/esoteric. Following the
rise of Christian dominance, the Armanens broke up into various secret societies
who worshipped Wotan and became the “hidden protagonists of western esoteri-
cism” (Nesi 2002: 409). They kept Ariosophy alive by hiding it in the German lan-
guage using the runes as a type of kabbalistic code. This was the true lineage of the
Ario-gnosis.
List’s discovery was that all primitive languages –Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and every
other one –came from the proto-language of the Aryans from a one-syllable German
root word called a rune. He wrote that “if one wants to trace the root-words of proto-
Germanic back to their sources, and follow them back to the germinal, primordial
[gnosis] words in the Aryan protolanguage, one must always write them in runes
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…” (List 1914: 105). Holding this startling discovery “proved” the superiority of the
German language, he sent the manuscript to the Imperial Science Academy in Vienna
to be considered for publication. It was returned, however, without award or even
comment, a sign of apparent rejection. But he did not give up on his combined “scien-
tific and völkisch meaning” that “solved the puzzles of the Kala and to find the key to
Antiquity” (Balzli 1917: 52–3). Apropos “Kala,” List composed one other work never
formally published, but which was circulated among his closest followers under the
working (here translated) title “Armanism and Kabala.” If the Kabbalah is typically
credited to the Jews, List voiced anti-Semitic sentiments by insisting that “The Kabala
is not a Jewish creation!” (Balzli 1917: 55–56).
List undeniably spouted anti-Semitic opinions. Though impressed at the strong
nationalism of the Jews, with their attempts to maintain racial purity through marital
laws, he also feared that, if given the opportunity, they would dominate and purge the
earth of every non-Jew, similarly to what had been done in ancient Egypt and Canaan
(according to his unique view) (List 1903: 2). He called them Germany’s “dedicated
enemies,” seeing their exclusivity as a direct affront against Austria-Germany, because
to a Jew every non-Jew was viewed as an unholy pagan jeopardizing their wellbeing
and standard of living. It is ironic that the very fear List expressed about the Jews was
eventually reversed and carried out by his own people through the unspeakable atro-
cities of the “Final Solution” and the mass extermination of Jewish people.
According to the Listian view, moreover, the famed Hebrew “Exodus” misconstrued
the historical details of the event. It was all the result of a war the Israelites had
instigated with the Egyptians as they robbed and plundered their property “as they
have done many times, as is historically proven, and still do today” (List 1903: 1),
and so the Exodus really “represents a successful anti-Semitic state action [by the
Egyptians] that sadly was never repeated in the history of mankind” (List 1903: 1). In
the long run “the inability of the Jews to form and maintain a state was demonstrated,
because they lived everywhere as parasites,” until bearing weight by hosts meant
they were repeatedly “carried off” (List 1896: 1–2). Despite countless anti-Semitic
jibes, though, how these particular prejudices connected to his religious ideology is
made unclear by the fact he could be just as intolerant of other races and religions
including Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, etc., seeing them all posing threats to
the Austrian-German way of life (List 1898: 9).
Such ominous connections between religion and race have naturally led some
researchers to deduce a sinister goal in List’s writings. Consider Gianluca Nesi’s con-
clusion in an article titled “The Secret Gnosis of the ‘Spiritual Masters’ of Nazism”:
Guido List … concealed a secret message that historians have never fully
caught: God created the world through His own sacrifice and entrusted the task
to carry on His work of creation to the Aryan-Germanic race. However, this
mission was obstacled by Jewish people by creating a fictitious world that does
not allow to get in touch with the true lineage, Creation, and the God concealed
within it. The Aryan-Germanic must therefore engage a mortal struggle against
Jews; by doing so, Aryan-Germanic would reach the Sieg-heil (the victory that
ensures salvation) and would reunite to God.
(Nesi 2002: 403) [and we should note that the greeting Sieg-heil
used by Nazis was List’s coinage; cf. Hunger 1984: 100]
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While Nesi’s conclusion might seem plausible at first glance, it requires too many
intellectual jumps and a creative reading of List’s work to justify its premise and we
must be careful, as we should be in our concluding section, to gauge whether we
possess sufficient “historiographic proof” (Nesi 2002: 405, 414) to confirm List’s
effects on Nazism.
GNOSTICISM AND NAZI S P E CU L ATIO NS

Nesi seems convinced Hitler had read List, yet the sources he cites do not confirm
this direct connection because often List talks of Germany’s inner enemies without
specifying who they were. Still, it cannot be denied that there is an obvious esoteric
influence in Nazism specifically in the ritual of the Schutzstaffel (SS) order, and the
question remains, what influence did List have on these teachings and the rise of
Nazism? Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985), traced
List’s teachings and members of the List Society as they spread across various Austrian-
German intellectual groups. Surely one of the most influential of these groups was
the Thule Society. The Thule Society boasted some major Nazi personalities including
Gottfried Feder, the financial instructor of the army and one of the main writers of the
Nazi Party, Dietrich Eckart, who became Hitler’s personal mentor, Alfred Rosenberg,
who was placed in charge of the foreign affairs for the future Nazi regime and became
the official philosopher of the party, Rudolf Hess, who became Hitler’s lieutenant as
well as the party’s secretary, and Hans Frank, who became the governor of the Polish
lands where the death camps were eventually built. If all of these high-ranking indi-
viduals were Thule Society members they would have been fully aware of the Aryo-
Germanic idea and List’s Ur-gnosis version of Ariosophy.
Still, for all these intellectual links, no evidence links List directly to Hitler. A trail
of indirect linkages, however, can show beyond reasonable doubt that Hitler was
aware of List’s teachings in some form. Goodrick-Clarke notes that Hitler’s know-
ledge of List rested “upon the testimony of a third party and some literary references”
(Goodrick-Clarke 1995: 198). Inter alia Wilfried Daim (1923–2016) commented (in
a 1959 lecture) that “Hitler frequently mentioned his reading List and quoted the old
master’s books with enthusiasm. Hitler also told him that some members of the List
Society at Vienna had given him a letter of introduction to the President of the Society
at Munich” (Goodrick-Clarke 1995: 198–9). And in 1921, intriguingly, Dr. Babette
Steininger (a member of the Nazi Party) presented to Hitler Rabindranath Tagore’s
essay on nationalism as a birthday present, with the copy bearing a personal dedica-
tion which read: “To Adolf Hitler my dear Armanen-brother,” suggesting a connection
between Hitler and List’s esoteric “Armanenschaft” (Goodrick-Clarke 1995: 199).
While other minor clusters of evidence can be discussed here –Elsa Schmidt-
Falk’s claim that “Hitler was particularly inspired by List’s German Mythological
Landscapes,” possessing “the first edition”; Hitler’s mention of his letter of recom-
mendation to a well-known patron of the List Society; George Mosse’s deduction
that Hitler directly assimilated List’s ideas through such associates as Alfred Schuler
(Goodrick-Clarke 1995: 199–201; Kershaw 2008: 19, Mosse 1999: 75–7) –recent
research has revealed deeper social connections between List and the Führer. Brigitte
Hamann in her work Hitler’s Vienna (2010) concludes that “there can be no doubt
that young Hitler was familiar with List’s theories while he was in Vienna,” claiming
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that certain of Hitler’s ideologies could only have been derived from List’s writings.
Defending her position, Hamann quotes a 1920 Munich speech where Hitler credited
the Aryans from the north as the originators of all human culture –in a statement
virtually identical to what List wrote in The Names of Germania’s Tribes (Hamann
2010: 211–12). The memoirs of Hitler’s friend August Kubizek also have it that the
young Hitler not only studied List’s works, but owned at least one of his books per-
sonally (Hamann 2010: 299).
Another indirect connection has recently been uncovered by the present author
following a closer perusal of part of Hitler’s library housed at Brown University, which
holds in its Rare Books and Manuscripts Department a copy of Aus den Traditionen
der Laf-tar-ar-Sippe der “Lauterer”: eine Weihegabe an alle Treubefundenen written
by Tarnhari (Ernst Lauterer) and published by the Guido von List Society. This book
builds upon List’s theories, citing the master himself. In fact, List’s writings were
prerequisites for understanding the teachings put forth in this small booklet as it
could “only be understood, if one has a thorough knowledge of the main works
of List” (Lauterer 1910: 3). Lauterer even went so far as to call List’s work “super-
natural!,” an interesting claim in a well-worn copy in Hitler’s possession (Lauterer
1910: 3–7, 60–3, 81–2, 94),
Of course sorting out these filaments should not detract from a wider study of all
that is going on in the minds of millions of Germany’s Christians, indeed over sixty
million of them, in the huge story of nationalism, world war, depression, and counter-
depression and renewed war; but the role of List’s “current in the religionization’ of
Nazism (especially through the SS practices and symbols) requires recognition and
further attention” (Strube 2015: 34; Goodrick-Clarke 1995: 217; Longerich 2012: 28,
266; cf. Hockenos 2004: 4). On Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s pertinent assessment,
“List’s blueprint for a new pan-German empire was detailed and unambiguous. It
called for the ruthless subjection of non-Aryans to Aryan masters in a highly structured
hierarchal state,” even though for him “Ariosophy is a symptom rather than an influ-
ence in the way it anticipated Nazism” (Goodrick-Clarke 1995: 63, 202). In my own
view, to conclude, I concur with Goodrick-Clarke: List’s Ariosophy did not create
Nazism, rather it was a not-insignificant factor that influenced a culture that led to
the establishment of the Nazi movement.
REFERENCES
Balzli, Johannes. 1917. Guido v. List: Der Wiederentdecker Uralter Arischer Weisheit -Sein
Leben und sein Schaffen. Leipzig and Vienna: Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft.
——— 1919. “Guido v. List.” Prana: Vierteljahresschrift Organ für angewandte
Geisteswissenschaft 9 (4): 289–90.
Blavatsky, Helena. 1888. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and
Philosophy. London: Theosophical Publishing Company.
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. 1995. Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their
Influence on Nazi Ideology. New York: New York University Press.
Hamann, Brigitte. 2010. Hitler’s Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man. New York:
Tauris Parke.
Hockenos, Matthew. 2004. A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Hunger, Ulrich. 1984. Die Runenkunde im Dritten Reich. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
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Kershaw, Ian. 2008. Hitler: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton.

Kurlander, Eric. 2002. “The Rise of Völkisch- Nationalism and the Decline of German
Liberalism: A Comparison of Liberal Political Cultures in Schleswig-Holstein and Silesia
1912–1924.” European Review of History 9 (1): 23–36.
Lauridsen, John. 2007. Nazism and the Radical Right in Austria, 1918–1934. Copenhagen:
Museum Tusculanum Press.
Lauterer, Ernst [Tarnhari]. 1910. Aus den Traditionen der Laf-tar-ar-Sippe der “Lauterer” eine
Weihegabe an alle Treubefundenen. Wien: Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft.
Lavoie, Jeffrey D. 2012. The Theosophical Society: The History of a Spiritualist Movement.
Boca Raton, FL: BrownWalker Press.
List, Guido. 1894. “German Mythology in the Course of a Calendar Year.” Ostdeutsche
Rundschau 5 (12): 9–10.
———1903. “Jerusalem, the Mortgage Bank of Caesarian Rome.” Deutsches Volksblatt 15
(2089).
———1896. “The Jew as State and Nation.” Ostdeutsche Rundschau: 1–2.
——— 2005. The Religion of the Aryo-Germanic Folk (trans. Stephen Flowers). Smithville,
TX: Runa Raven Press.
——— 1898. Der Unbesiegbare: Ein Grundzug germanischer Weltanschaaung. Vienna:
Cornelius Vetter.
——— 1914. Die Ursprache der Ario- Germanen und ihre Mysteriensprache. Leipzig and
Vienna: Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft.
Longerich, Peter. 2012. Heinrich Himmler: A Life (trans. Jeremy Noakes). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Mosse, George. 1999. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich.
New York: Howard Fertig.
Nesi, Gianluca. 2002. “La gnosi segreta dei ‘maestri spirituali’ del nazismo.” Rivista di filosofia
43 (3): 403–8.
Strube, Julian. 2015. “Nazism and the Occult.” Nicholas Partridge (ed.). The Occult World.
New York: Routledge: 336–47.
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CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
RUDOLF STEINER: MULTIPLE
BODIES
Wayne Hudson
R udolf Steiner (1861– 1925) was a modernist esotericist and the founder of
Anthroposophy, arguably the most important esoteric movement of the twen-
tieth century. Much of what has been written about him has been written by his
followers or by critics and their assessments differ (Lindenberg 2012; Zander 2011).
There is no satisfactory study of his total corpus, which includes 42 books and 6,000
lectures in some 350 volumes, as well as a range of works of artistic creation, ran-
ging from architecture to sculpture to painting to dramaturgy. Moreover, it is only
recently that critical editions of his major books have been published (Steiner 2017).
Here I nuance attempts to associate him with Gnosticism and highlight his projective
account of the bodies of the human being in order to suggest how the theosophical
fantastic can have real-world effects.
Granted that Steiner included Gnostic elements in his cosmological reinterpret-
ation of Christianity, many of them from the Pistis Sophia, Steiner was not a Gnostic
in the sense of someone who held that the world was ruled by a demiurge, that matter
was evil, or that it was possible to escape from this fallen universe by acquiring
secret spiritual knowledge. To characterize the structure of his thought as derived
from Syrio-Egyptian gnosis (Ahern 2010) may be too strong and plays down the
fact that he was critical of early Gnostic Christianity as having no adequate idea of
Jesus as a man of flesh and blood. Steiner accepted that Rosicrucianism had become
charlatanism in many quarters and that Rosicrucian wisdom needed to take a new
form in an age of science and to be related to the activity of the “I.” Anthroposophy
was this form (Steiner 2000). In contrast to the modernist misunderstandings of
Buddhist and Hindu materials promoted by the Theosophical Society, Steiner
developed his own system, one that mixed Rosicrucian elements with features of
Renaissance Hermeticism, including astrology and alchemy, and elements of Indian
and Buddhist esotericism as they were understood by the Theosophical Society
(reincarnation, chakras, subtle bodies, cosmic gods etc.). What made his approach
distinctive was his attempt to marry Rosicrucianism with the phenomenological
immanent idealism implicit, in his view, in Goethe’s scientific studies, and the spir-
itual philosophy of thinking advanced by the German Idealists Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel.
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— Rudolf Steiner: multiple bodies —
Steiner was a cultural modernist (Treitel 2004) who sought to reinvent esotericism
as spiritual science, in the context of a civilization shaped by the natural sciences in
which human beings had fallen into abstract intellectualism and no longer possessed
immediate clairvoyant knowledge of spiritual worlds. Steiner attempted to teach his
contemporaries how to attain such perception in a completely modern way that was
consistent with the freedom of the individual and did not rely on accepting teachings
based on authority. He left detailed exercises for those seeking esoteric development
and outlined a vast theosophical cosmology including information about cosmic
evolution, the hierarchies who ruled the cosmos, and the laws of reincarnation and
karma. He also promoted concrete initiatives to reform Western civilization in over
twenty areas, including architecture, education, nutrition, medicine, social science,
economics, law, and religion, and inspired new work in at least seven arts.
Steiner continued, and to a degree reinvented, Rosicrucian and Blavatskian the-
osophy for the twentieth century as Anthroposophy or a wisdom of the human being.
Allowing for the fact that it is difficult to distinguish between Steiner’s teaching on a
specific topic and the rest of his enormous system, one way to understand this is to
understand Steiner’s projective account of the bodies of the human being. According
to Steiner ordinary consciousness cannot see the real cosmic form of the human being.
In reality the human being has multiple bodies which penetrate one another. Allowing
for differences in nomenclature across texts, these are:
• the physical body
• the etheric body, held in common with the plant world
• the astral body, held in common with the animal world
to which he sometimes added the “I” or thought body, i.e., the ego (Steiner
2006: Meditation 6).
The physical body, as the coarsest structure, lies within others, which mutually
interpenetrate both it and each other. According to Steiner, the visible physical body
of the human being is only a small part of the whole, and the true nature of the
human being is hidden from the ordinary senses. The human being is not confined
within the skin, and its bodies extend over vast spaces of the universe. The human
being is a cosmic being connected with the whole universe as a microcosm of the
macrocosm. The etheric body fills the physical body as a life-form. It works in the
water in the human body and is associated with the plant world. The etheric body
is between the astral and the physical bodies. It is a fine, delicate, time body of for-
mative forces in continuous movement and mediates life forces to the physical body.
It doubles the physical body, and there are etheric arms, legs, kidneys, and so on, as
well as physical ones. The etheric body is a time body, and works from the periphery
of the cosmos. It works through the fluid organism of the human being. The etheric
body has approximately the size and form of the physical body, so that it occupies vir-
tually the same space. It is an extremely delicately organized structure. Its basic color
is different from the seven colors contained in the rainbow. Anyone able to observe it
will detect a color that is actually non-existent for sense-perception and can best be
compared to the color of young peach-blossom (Steiner 1954: 29–59; 1961: 27–36,
78–82; 1966: 13–19; 1997: 38–58).
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— Wa y n e H u d s o n —
The astral body can be seen as a luminous cloud with the physical body in
its midst. It is larger than the physical and etheric bodies, and permeates both.
A body of wishes and desires, it is in continuous movement, and works through
the breathing organism of the human being. The astral body resounds with the
music of the cosmos. It works on the sensory and nervous system, and is the vehicle
of consciousness and the passions. Parts of it are dark and inert, but this can be
changed by human activity. The astral body contains pictures which it can perceive
when it looks into the etheric body.
The ego lives in the warmth of the physical body. It can act on the other bodies,
and can transform the whole human organization by beginning to work on purifying
the etheric body. Like the astral body, it is not earthly, but is related to forces beyond
the earth. According to Steiner the ego and the astral body are out of the physical
body during sleep and present in a non-spatial spiritual world. After death the phys-
ical body dissolves, but after three days in which the human being experiences its life
in reverse, the etheric body passes into an etheric world. The astral body and the ego
then begin a long cosmic journey to the Sun’s sphere, after which a process of descent
to the earth takes place. During this time, the human being is not a separate entity, but
is attached to and worked on by hierarchies of the cosmos.
For Steiner the bodies of the human being are not discontinuous from past times:
Our former life on earth works into the warmth of our organism, and kindles
this or that impulse. Thus we see in the earthly, solid man the physical body, in
the fluid man the etheric body, in the airy man the astral body, and in the warmth
element the ego proper … It is the ego of the former life on earth, working
in subconscious depths, that is the ego proper. And when you perceive a man
clairvoyantly you are led to say: He is standing here and I see him, to begin with,
with my external senses. But I also see what is etheric and what is astral; then,
behind him, the man he was in his previous incarnation.
In fact, the more this consciousness is developed, the more clearly do we see,
in a kind of perspective, the head of his last incarnation a little above the head
of his present incarnation, and, somewhat higher still, the head of his second last
incarnation. In civilizations in which there was still a kind of instinctive con-
sciousness of these things, you will find pictures which show, behind the clearly
drawn countenance of the present incarnation, a second countenance less clearly
painted; behind this a third that is still less clear.
(Steiner 1961: 80–1)
According to Steiner the human being cannot be understood as a product of

its apparent immediate environment on earth. Cosmic forces work in the human
organism, and the bodies of the human beings are not separated from the spiritual
beings of the cosmos who work in its sheaths.
Perhaps what Steiner is doing here is to offer his readers imaginative creations which
will enliven their thinking and their senses, and provide them with new bodily know-
ledge. Steiner offers his readers projective anthropology and projective cosmosophy,
which, allied to appropriate practices, have the capacity to elicit and support sig-
nificant changes to their physical and psychological organization. It follows, as he
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explains, that his spiritual teaching cannot be taken as literal information as if it

referred to the physical world, even though many of his followers do take it in this
way. Steiner insisted in many places that his esoteric teachings are spatial descriptions
of spiritual realities. He also emphasized that his readers needed to suspend their
natural tendency to regard such statements as ludicrous and fantastic because by
doing so their thinking could become more “living” and “inwardly mobile.” Spiritual
science, Steiner emphasized:
… speaks to the will. Hence it is not understood by anyone who tries to grasp
it by faith or as a theory. I have said to you that for anyone who reads my
Occult Science as he would read a novel, passively giving himself to it, it is
really only a thicket of words –and so are my other books. Only one who
knows that in every moment of reading he must, out of the depths of his own
soul, and through his most intimate willing, create something for which the
books should be only a stimulus –only such a one can regard these books as
musical scores out of which he can gain the experience in his own soul of the
true piece of music.
(Steiner 1949: 14)
In short, Steiner’s Anthroposophy is a body of material to be worked with, and not an

independent mythology or a speculative metaphysics (Kühlewind 1992). The fact that
the bodies Steiner describes are objects to be transformed by means of practices alerts
the reader to the practical character of his teaching. Steiner claims that it is possible
to learn how to control and redirect one’s bodies in the course of esoteric develop-
ment. Practices enable the pupil to determine for himself the position of his etheric
body and to turn it in any direction. This faculty is produced by currents which move
approximately along both hands and are centered in the two-petaled lotus-flower
in the region of the eyes. All this is made possible by the radiations from the larynx
assuming rounded forms, a number of which flow to the two-petaled lotus-flower
and thence move as undulating currents along the hands. As a further development,
these currents branch out and ramify in the most delicate way, becoming a kind of
web which then transforms itself into a membrane around the boundary of the eth-
eric body (Steiner 1969: 145). Again, these multiple bodies relate to earlier phases of
cosmic evolution, including earlier embodiments of the universe (“Saturn,” “Sun,”
“Moon”):
The complicated physical body as we encounter it today is the product of a long

evolution. Its first germinal potentiality came into being on old Saturn, and it
evolved further on the old Sun, the old Moon and the Earth. The etheric body
was added to it on the Sun, the astral body on the Moon. Now, these members of
the human being have changed in the course of evolution, and what we encounter
today as the complicated physical human being, with heart, kidneys, eyes, ears
and so forth, is the product of a long development. It has all grown out of a
simple germinal form that originated on Saturn. Through millions and millions
of years it has continually changed and been transformed …
(Steiner 1909: n.p.)
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— Wa y n e H u d s o n —
Thus the evolution of the cosmos, and not the present earth, is the key to the
human being, and older cosmic conditions still echo in the current human organiza-
tion. Moreover, in the future the human being would develop three more spiritual
organizations: spirit-man or the transmuted physical body, life-spirit or the transmuted
etheric body, and spirit-Self or the transmuted astral body (Steiner 1954: ch 2). All
this is not easy to interpret because Steiner uses physical terms and then withdraws
their physical sense. Thus he explains that the term “body” must not be confused with
a bodily form perceptible to the physical senses: the term “body” refers only to the
data which he describes when discussing them (Steiner 1954: 39).
All this matters because human beings can adopt projective counter- factual
bodies as objects of their life practices. In the existing literature the link between
what human beings can experience and particular mystical bodies is little explored,
even though esoteric practices allow different mediations of sense, feeling, and will to
those achieved by modern practices exercised in homogeneous space. Steiner’s claims
challenge notions such as:
• That the human being is separate from the universe. Steiner claims that the human
being is a cosmic being and belongs to the whole universe.
• That the human being lives “in the world.” Steiner claims that human beings par-
ticipate in three worlds.
• That human bodies are the products of physical conditions prevailing on the
earth. In Steiner’s account, human bodies are the product of earlier incarnations
and earlier embodiments of the universe. They are affected now by earlier cosmic
embodiments, and causal influences come from realities which are either earlier
in time or at the periphery of the cosmos.
• That human beings are separate, isolated entities. In Steiner’s account, the hier-
archies of the cosmos are at work in the human physical system.
• That human beings possess a single physical body with a unitary character. In
Steiner’s account, the human organism is threefold, and it is necessary to distin-
guish between the head and nerves organization, the heart and lungs organization
and the metabolic-limb organization, all of which differ from each other.
The radical challenge of Steiner’s teaching lies in the suggestion that human beings
can come to have qualitatively richer embodied experiences than they currently have
if they work on multiple bodies. Contemporary readers are understandably uncertain
about how to react to such claims. Steiner’s texts, however, embody will experiences,
despite the apparently incredible nature of what is literally said. The embodied know-
ledge in Steiner’s texts is not the knowledge of modern consciousness, but it may be
a form of body knowledge which can play a part in a future civilization if it is care-
fully interrogated and related to specific practical trainings. Assuming that changes
of experience can be related to work on projective bodies, however these are to be
explained, Steiner’s work suggests that there is a plastic dimension to how human
beings can experience themselves as embodied agents relative to practices and socio-
historical conditions. To postulate such a possibility is not to underwrite any form of
supernaturalism, or to envisage strong plasticity beyond the limits of biological prob-
ability. It is to mark out a space for human freedom and social practice, a space con-
sistent with ancient traditions for the formation of mystical elites in many cultures.
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REFERENCES
Ahern, Geoffrey. 2010. Sun at Midnight: The Rudolf Steiner Movement and Gnosis in the
West. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co.
Kühlewind, Georg. 1992. Working with Anthroposophy (trans. and ed. Michael Lipson and
Christopher Bamford). New York: Anthroposophic Press.
Lindenberg, Christoph. 2012. Rudolf Steiner: A Biography (trans. Jon McAlice). Great
Barrington, MA: Steiner Books.
Steiner, Rudolf. 1909. “The Position of Anthroposophy in Relation to Theosophy and
Anthropology.” The Human Senses, Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit, Part I,
The Wisdom of Man, Lecture 1 (trans. Samuel and Loni Lockwood). http://wn.rsarchive.
org/Lectures/GA115.
——— 1949. Oswald Spengler: Prophet of World Chaos (trans. Norman Macbeth and Frances
Dawson). New York: Anthroposophic Press.
——— 1954. Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World
and the Destination of Man (trans. and revis. Mabel Cotterell). London: Theosophical
Publishing Company.
——— 1961. Anthroposophy: An Introduction (trans. Compton Burnett). London:
Anthroposophical Publishing Company.
——— 1966. Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (trans. Mabel Cotterell and Dorothy S. Osmond).
London: Rudolf Steiner Press.
——— 1969. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved? (trans. George Metaxa, D.
S. Osmond and Charles Davy). London: Rudolf Steiner Press.
——— 1997. An Outline of Esoteric Science (trans. Catherine E. Creeger). New York:
Anthroposophic Press.
——— 2000. The Secret Stream: Christian Rosenkreutz and Rosicrucianism (ed. Christopher
Bamford). Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press.
——— 2006. A Way of Self-Knowledge and the Threshold of the Spiritual World (trans. and
introd. Christopher Bamford). Great Barrington, MA: Steiner Books.
——— 2017 (2013). Schriften. Kritische Ausgabe, 4 vols (ed. Christian Clement). Stuttgart:
Frommann-Holzboog Verlag.
Treitel, Corinna. 2004. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German
Modern. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press.
Zander, Helmut. 2011. Rudolf Steiner: Die Biografie. Munich: Piper.
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CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
GNOSTIC SENSIBILITY
IN GURDJIEFF’S “WORK”
Constance A. Jones
INTRODUCTIO N
This paper examines the legacy of George Ivanonich Gurdjieff (1866[?]‌–1949), spe-
cifically the esoteric school he founded called the “Work,” as an embodiment of a
gnostic sensibility. The term “legacy” refers to both Gurdjieff and his teaching, an
integrated system of ideas that includes cosmology, metaphysics, science, psychology,
and a corpus of sacred music and dance. First, his biography and teaching demon-
strate how the Work addresses an inner search for development of consciousness.
After a comparison of Gurdjieff’s teaching and the gnostic paradigm, the activities
and organizations that comprise the Work today are delineated as elements in an eso-
teric school organized around the aim of self-inquiry and eventual transformation. All
of these elements evoke the gnostic sensibility for understanding: for awakening to
the truth of human existence. A final section addresses the gnostic motive underlying
Gurdjieff’s legacy as a whole, and the Work in particular.
B IOGRA P HY
Gurdjieff was born in the town of Alexandropol, in what is now Armenia, the eldest
son of a Greek father and an Armenian mother, probably between 1866 and 1877. He
spent his childhood in the Caucasus, an area of great diversity in cultures, languages,
and religions, where he witnessed the meeting of East and West in both traditional
and modern ways of life. His father, a practitioner in the tradition of narrative recita-
tion, significantly influenced Gurdjieff by sharing his oral craft, which Gurdjieff felt
embodied an ancient wisdom lost to the contemporary world.
Gurdjieff relates how, even as a boy, he wished to understand the meaning of
human life and humanity’s position in the universe. These questions led him to
investigate many sources of wisdom, but in each he found contradictions, even
among accomplished practitioners and scholars. In search of a non-contradictory
understanding, he read widely in science and religion, and studied formally both
medicine and Orthodox Christian theology, integrating humanistic and scientific
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— G n o s t i c s e n s i b i l i t y i n G u r d j i e f f ’s “ Wo r k ” —
concerns (Gurdjieff 1985). He became convinced that neither conventional religion

nor scientific knowledge alone adequately addressed his questions, but that he could
find understanding of his concerns among surviving traces of ancient traditions in
the Middle East and Asia. In Meetings with Remarkable Men (Gurdjieff 1985), an
interweaving of spiritual quest and allegorical teaching, he recounts his travels in the
Middle East, Egypt, Ethiopia, Tibet, Central Asia, and the Hindu Kush.
Details of his sojourns are described only in his writings; little historical evi-
dence exists to verify his accounts. Investigators of this period posit that he may
have assumed, in addition to role of researcher, other disparate roles, including occult
adviser to the Tsar, and the Russian agent in Tibet, adviser to the Dalai Lama, and
Buddhist monk (Webb 1980: 48–73; Moore 1991: 24–38). Some scholars of reli-
gion consider him a sort of shaman who withdrew from society to gain knowledge
and power and then returned to lead others, i.e., a “modern Western magus” who
displayed qualities of a trickster (Ellwood and Partin 1988: 134–40).
Gurdjieff relates that his search revealed principles of esoteric wisdom, virtually
unknown in the contemporary west (Gurdjieff 1985: 30–1; Ouspensky 1949: 202–
4). After formulating a teaching from his discoveries, he began to teach a group of
pupils in Moscow and St Petersburg in 1913. Among these was Peter Demianovich
Ouspensky (1878– 1947), philosopher, mathematician, and journalist, who had
received recognition in intellectual and occult circles through publication of a treatise
on the nature of the universe, first published in Russia in 1911 (Ouspensky 1981).
Ouspensky’s later monograph on Gurdjieff’s teaching (1949) remains a major expos-
ition of the teaching.
Although a core of pupils, drawn mainly from the Russian intelligentsia, began
to collect around him, Gurdjieff rarely received public notice during the early years
(1912–1923). Only after 1923, following the creation of his Institute outside Paris
and after he had made acquaintance with European and American luminaries, did
he meet acclaim and controversy (Moore 1991: 225–41). He set out his teaching
in a series of books, written between 1924 and 1935. Throughout these years he
continued to teach pupils directly until his death in Paris in 1949.
Published accounts of Gurdjieff emphasize that his teaching could not be separated
from the man (Moore 1991); to many, he was an exemplar of traditional esoteric
wisdom and “a contemporary gnostic” (Lacarriere 1996: 156–62). Gurdjieff relates
that he set two coherent and enduring aims. As a youth, he identified the first aim,
an “ ‘irrepressible striving’ to understand clearly the precise significance … of the life
process on earth of all outward forms of breathing creatures and, in particular, of the
aim of human life” (Gurdjieff 1933: 13). During his travels, he added a second aim,
“that I must discover, at all costs, some manner or means for destroying in people
the predilection which causes them to fall so easily under the influence of ‘mass hyp-
nosis’ ” (Gurdjieff 1981: 27).
Pursuit of these intentions and other stringent voluntary restrictions (Gurdjieff
1981: 13, 25, 45) must have effected certain qualities –will, powerful attention,
unity of purpose, personal control, compassion for others, and an extraordinary
understanding of himself –all of which are repeatedly attributed to him. These qual-
ities also constitute the aims of his teaching and the Work, the esoteric school he
founded.
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— C o n s t a n c e A . Jo n e s —
OVERVIEW OF THE GURDJI E F F WO RK AND G NO S IS

Gurdjieff’s teaching contains an esoteric system of ideas for inner awakening accom-
panied by a praxis for development of conscious intelligence. Consistent with the
gnostic impulse, Gurdjieff teaches that we ourselves and the outer “world” are not as
we take them to be. Humanity needs a new kind of knowledge, a gnosis, in his terms
an understanding that integrates all parts of oneself –intellect, feeling, and body –in
a harmonious whole.
Not a religious teacher in any conventional sense, Gurdjieff did not inculcate
beliefs, nor demand faith from his pupils; rather, he taught a practice that uses the
circumstances of everyday life to reveal laws of spiritual influence he detected at the
source of great religious traditions as well as esoteric teachings (Ouspensky 1949: 362–
4). He cites the ideals and teachings of many spiritual adepts –specifically Moses, Jesus
Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and the unknown Saint Lama and Ashiata Shiemash. He
identifies each as a “saint” or “a genuine messenger from our Endlessness” (Gurdjieff
1993: 235–6, 347–9, 705–6). Further, Gurdjieff identifies Pythagoras as an “initiate of
the first degree” and extolls his esoteric study of the monochord (Gurdjieff 1993: 455,
888–90), which is consonant with Gurdjieff’s cosmological teaching and theory of
vibrations (Gurdjieff 1993: 859–67). Behind these adepts, he taught, lies an esoteric
center of humanity that alone disseminates the conscious influences and objective
knowledge required for transformation (Gurdjieff 1973: 78–9; Ouspensky 1949: 199–
202). To realize gnosis, one must develop the capacity to discriminate these esoteric
influences from the ordinary ones of life and open oneself to penetration by these
influences. This inner search described by Gurdjieff is the essence of the gnostic quest.
Gurdjieff’s “Work” (also “work on oneself” and “work toward consciousness”) is
a practice that uses inquiry and disciplined effort to awaken to the goal of inner trans-
formation. Consistent with the Western esoteric, alchemical, and Hermetic traditions,
the practice follows the principle that the human birthright includes vast possibilities
for development of consciousness, beyond conceptions of ordinary consciousness.
In these characteristics, the Gurdjieff Work is properly considered an esoteric school
with gnostic sensibilities (Ouspensky 1949: 222–31).
Although scholarship on ancient gnostic and esoteric schools is limited, remarkable
parallels exist between reports of the esoteric school of Pythagoras and Gurdjieff’s Work.
Both systems posit that humanity is a complete image of the entire cosmos, a microcosm,
situated in a unique position to integrate universal principles with the world of mani-
festation. Both agree that the task of humanity is not to become divine, but to awaken
to the divine, already within each individual. Integral to this task is study of the law
of vibrations, which Pythagoras demonstrated on the monochord and which Gurdjieff
called the most important branch of scientific knowledge that “gives the possibility …
of recognizing reality” (Gurdjieff 1993: 859). And finally, the esoteric schools of both
Pythagoras and Gurdjieff emphasize integration of theory and practice in requiring that
humans work within the world, not escape it, in order to find harmonious fulfillment of
the human soul and the unity that lies behind multiplicity (Fideler 1987: 30–48).
Gurdjieff’s esoteric school embodies gnostic sensibilities in many ways, only three
of which are addressed here: the plight of humanity as illusion; humanity’s place in
the cosmos; and work for consciousness.
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T HE PLIGHT OF HUMANITY – IG NO RANCE

AND ILLU S IO N
Consistent with the gnostic impulse and Hermetism (Hermetica [Excerpts 1977],
pp. 80–3), Gurdjieff teaches that the world as we see and feel it is not as it truly exists,
but, rather, is taken in as a fantastic representation, as an illusory world (Ouspensky
1949: 20–1). In our perceptions, the real world is turned upside down and we do not
understand the truth of who we are or how we live. Moreover, we live in the wrong
part of ourselves. To Gurdjieff, our normal waking consciousness is mistaken for
real consciousness, when, in fact, the subconscious is the “real” human consciousness
(Gurdjieff 1993: 24–7).
For Gnostics, Hermeticists, and Gurdjieff, ignorance of our plight is ensured
through a host of almost pervasive psychological and social processes. Essentially,
we are in prison and need to escape, but first, we must realize that we are imprisoned
and understand what freedom is. We need to awaken –to understand –that we
are asleep to our real nature and then, to escape the prison of illusion and ignor-
ance (Meyer 2003: 3; Gurdjieff 1993: 353). Gurdjieff’s Work is dedicated to striving
toward understanding and liberation to serve the process of evolution on both indi-
vidual and cosmic scales (Conge 1999: 5–15).
Although Gurdjieff’s teaching aligns with Gnostic and Hermetic preconceptions
of human life in this world as “alienated” from our true nature, Gurdjieff and
Hermetic beliefs do not see this world as a place without value, to be escaped, as the
Gnostics held (Lachman 2011: 90–1). Rather, Gurdjieff and the Hermeticists agree
that humanity’s task is one of responsibility and obligation (Lachman 2011: 90;
Ouspensky 1949: 20–1) to a mission specific to its unique niche in the grand scheme
of things (Ouspensky 1949: 102, 305; Lachman 2013: 15–16). Essentially, we live
unconsciously, below our legitimate level, but we can have consciousness and con-
sciousness belongs to us by right (Ouspensky 1968: 27).
HUMANITY’S P LACE IN THE CO S M O S

The cosmologies of the gnostics (Lachman 2015: 106– 18), the Hermeticists
(Hermetica [1977], pp. 13–14), and Gurdjieff agree that humanity is separated from
the most intelligent consciousness by many levels of creation (in Gurdjieff’s terms,
many “orders of mechanical laws”) (Ouspensky 1949: 82–8), which severely con-
strain the freedom of humanity. At a great distance from this perfect and unitary
intelligence, our world is also a prison realm of falsity and oppression. The possibility
exists for humans to free themselves from these laws through long and persistent
efforts, which will convince them of the limitations of ordinary consciousness and the
truth of their imprisonment (Ouspensky 1949: 84).
The most intelligent consciousness is similarly identified by the Gnostics as the
“unknown God, beyond all that is visible or sensible” (Rudolph 1977: 58; Meyer
2003: 4), by the Hermeticists as the “source of all that is” ([1977], p. 13), and by
Gurdjieff as “His Endlessness” and “Actualizer of Everything Existing in the Whole
of the Universe” (Gurdjieff 1993: 24, 1120). These three systems also agree that a
spark of this highest One is contained within humans. To discover this hidden truth,
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humans must conduct a parallel study of the microcosm of self and the macrocosm of
all of creation, because the microcosm contains the macrocosm.
Although similar to the Gnostic emphasis on the remote and impersonal nature
of the Ultimate, Gurdjieff’s teaching differs from Gnosticism’s ontological dualism,
world- rejecting themes, and devaluation of the physical body. Instead, Gurdjieff
proffers a non-dual cosmology, accepts this world as the venue for transformation,
and considers the body an ally in spiritual development. These differences aside,
Gurdjieff’s teaching embodies a gnostic sensibility in its diagnosis of the human need
to awaken to its true nature and to pursue transformation.
WORK F OR CON S CIO U S NE S S

Both Gnostic schools and Gurdjieff define the human condition as one of “sleep,” in
which we are unaware of the real nature of humanity –that we contain a spark of
the divine fire, which must be sought and found within self. Our responsibility is to
awaken from this sleep, to expand consciousness, and to participate in a knowledge
of our situation that is integrated into our “being,” which Gurdjieff identifies as the
“only indestructible reality” (Gurdjieff 1973: 79).
They fail to see the galling emptiness hidden behind the highly painted façade
created by their self-delusion … There do exist enquiring minds, which long for
the truth of the heart, seek it, strive to solve the problems set by life, try to pene-
trate to the essence of things and phenomena and to penetrate into themselves.
If a man reasons and thinks soundly … he must inevitably arrive back at himself
and begin with the solution of the problem of what he is himself and what his
place is in the world … Socrates’ words ‘know thyself’ remain for all who seek
true knowledge and being.
(Gurdjieff 1973: 43)
Also consistent with some but not all Gnostic teaching (Lacarriere 1977: 49), Gurdjieff
taught that the soul is not immortal by nature, but must be developed. “Man is born
without a soul, but it is possible to make one” (Gurdjieff 1973: 191).
THE TEACHING
Gurdjieff’s teaching connects several sets of oppositions –not only East and West,
but also traditional and modern, mythic and scientific, esoteric and exoteric –and
demonstrates the instruction he gave to his pupils: to “take the understanding of the
East and the knowledge of the West—and then seek” (Gurdjieff 1973: 274). Gurdjieff
claims that his ideas and practices stem from Antiquity, before duality brought degen-
eration and fragmentation into human life and thought. He returns repeatedly to the
many ways in which fragmentation and the lack of unity are basic to the problems of
human existence, stating his wish, “to speak about the overall unity of all that exists –
about unity in multiplicity” (Gurdjieff 1973: 15).
Gurdjieff’s emphasis on personal effort can be compared to the occult systems
of Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and Rosicrucianism (Webb 1980: 540–1; Lacarriere
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1996: 156–62), but expressed via modern scientific language (Nicolescu 1996: 37–

69; Moore 1991: 345–8).
These diverse strands of teaching and practice cohere in an integrated praxis, the
Work, that calls pupils to discover truth for themselves, as, according to Gurdjieff,
this is the only truth of any value. In this way, Gurdjieff intended the Work to embody
the parallel development of knowledge and being into an integrated wholeness (Finch
1996: 27).
THE HUMAN C O ND ITIO N

According to Gurdjieff, each person consists of two parts. One part, particularly
valued in the West, personality, derives from influences external to a person, such
as education, culture, and circumstance. The other, essence, derives from birth, not
external influences, and is the real nature of each person. The truth of the human
condition, especially under conditions of civilization and distance from nature, is that
personality grows, while essence remains undeveloped. Until essence is rediscovered
and nourished alongside personality, humans are not complete and life is not “real”
(Ouspensky 1949: 161–5).
Gurdjieff distinguishes four states or levels of consciousness, although ordinarily
people live in only two of these states. The first state, he says, is sleep, the common
state of passivity in which we spend about one-third of our life. The second state,
usually called waking state or ordinary consciousness, is the condition under which
the remainder of life occurs. But ordinary consciousness demonstrates neither clarity
of thought nor objective reason, but, rather, is a personal and subjective world of
“I like” and “I do not like,” in which people walk, talk, write books, and kill one
another (Ouspensky 1949: 141–2). In this state of waking sleep, desires and imagin-
ation obscure any objective view of the real world.
In the third state of consciousness, self-remembering or self-consciousness, one is
able to be conscious of one’s actual state of being. Although possible for an ordinary
person, the third state is rarely achieved because of the dysfunctional conditions of
everyday life and because most people think that they already possess such a state of
consciousness. Obviously, individuals will not be inclined to make strenuous efforts
to achieve something they believe they already possess. Only in the fourth state,
objective consciousness, can a person see things as they are. Religions and systems of
spiritual understanding refer to this highest state of consciousness as “being awake”
or “enlightenment.” According to Gurdjieff, the fourth state is possible only as a result
of inner growth and work on oneself (Ouspensky 1949: 141–2).
“A modern man,” says Gurdjieff, “lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he
dies … what knowledge can a sleeping man have?” (Ouspensky 1949: 66). Gurdjieff’s
answer to his own question is that a person can appreciate the state of waking sleep
by having, however fleetingly, an experience of an altogether different state in which
moving, feeling, and thinking functions are harmonious. This state offers the first
glimmer of real knowledge and a “view from the real world” (Gurdjieff 1973: v). But
when challenged to explain this experience, a person does not know how to repeat the
experience, make it last, or deepen it. Here, says Gurdjieff, a person encounters another
fact about the human condition –that one does not know oneself. Yet overcoming
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ignorance is not simply gaining self-knowledge. In Gurdjieff’s words, “to do you must
know; but to know you must find out how to know” (Ouspensky 1949: 105).
To refine the relationship between knowledge and being, Gurdjieff introduces a
third term, understanding (Ouspensky 1949: 68). The mind may know something,
but understanding occurs only when feeling and sensing are connected to what is
known. Understanding increases only when knowledge and being grow together.
A prerequisite of this development is discovery of a capacity that brings order
among being, knowledge and understanding. Such a faculty is innate and already
exists, undiscovered, within the sub-consciousness of each person. This is conscience
(Gurdjieff 1993: 372).
CONSCIENCE AND E VO L U TIO N

For Gurdjieff, genuine conscience is a faculty buried so deep inside each person that
it exerts virtually no force in everyday life. In its place, and to the detriment of each
person, personality acquires a mechanism called “morality,” which is relative and
varies by conditions of life, and whose purpose is largely to ensure obedience to cul-
tural norms (Gurdjieff 1993: 343). Genuine conscience, on the other hand, is not
part of personality, but is part of one’s innate makeup, deriving from a reality beyond
personal and cultural influences and serving an evolutionary and developmental pur-
pose. Because he considers conscience the most valuable thing in a person (Gurdjieff
1985: 115), he made its development central to the aim of his school:
The ideas upon which my Institute would be based: namely I wished to create

around myself conditions in which a man would be continually reminded of the
sense and aim of his existence by an unavoidable friction between his conscience
and the automatic manifestations of his nature.
(Gurdjieff 1985: 270)
Gurdjieff’s cosmology relates the larger processes operating in the universe to the
processes occurring within each person. Work toward evolution, thus, requires
observation of inner processes as well as study of external influences. Further,
maintenance of the universe needs something from humanity, particularly human
bodies that can accumulate and develop energies. This energy, “food” for planetary
growth, accumulates only through growth of consciousness among humans
(Gurdjieff 1993: 130). The inescapable purpose of human life, consequently, is
to develop consciousness to serve the process of evolution on an interplanetary
scale. Humanity’s role, then, involves responsibility, which increases as a function
of understanding the intricate correspondence between efforts for self-awareness
and evolution on a universal scale. This responsibility resides within a hierarchy of
sacredness (Gurdjieff 1993: 759–60), so that work for consciousness is also service
to the Divine.
COSMOL O G Y
Gurdjieff’s cosmology explains the universe from the largest scale of manifestation,
megalocosmos, through intermediate scales, to the smallest scale, microcosmos
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(Gurdjieff 1993: 759–60). In Gurdjieff’s cosmology, the interrelated parts of the

universe, are all in movement, sustained by an ongoing undulation and transform-
ation of energies. The fundamental dynamic of this movement consists of two forces
working in complementary directions. A creative, involutionary force descends from
subtle levels of energy, and an evolutionary force ascends from dense levels of energy
(Gurdjieff 1993: 137–8). All matter and energy in the universe undergoes transform-
ation at all times, either descending from finer to coarser (involution) or ascending
from coarser to finer (evolution) (Gurdjieff 1973: 209). In this living, transforming
universe, humanity plays a significant role as a bridge between the subtle world of
spiritual forces and the everyday world of experience. On the scale of human life, con-
scious efforts serve cosmic evolution by contributing a quality of energy that allows
the involutionary and evolutionary forces to proceed across the place where humanity
is located. Thus, humanity’s role is necessary for cosmic evolution, as it participates
in an organic relationship with cosmic forces according to two fundamental laws
that Gurdjieff calls the “law of seven” (Gurdjieff 1993: 813–70) and the “the law of
three” (Gurdjieff 1993: 138–9). Subsidiary laws, such as gravity, mutual attraction of
similars, and even psychological processes, derive from these fundamental laws.
In these ways, Gurdjieff’s teaching embodies esoteric principles and a gnostic sens-
ibility. Organized around systematic analysis of the human condition and recogni-
tion of humanity’s responsibility for awakening to its real nature, the Work provides
conditions for self-study and the development of finer energies needed for conscious
evolution.
ASP ECTS OF T HE WO RK
Movements and dances
Gurdjieff included in his teaching rhythmic exercises, called Movements; these
address the aims of self-knowledge and development of a new quality of attention
that includes the whole person: body, mind, and feeling. Movements are said to
express precise metaphysical laws and to allow a direct and personal experience
of different qualities of energy, and thus another dimension of reality (Gurdjieff
1973: 31; with Nott 1969: 240–1; De Salzmann 2010: 122). The challenge of
Movements is that they require instantaneous coordination of body and mind (De
Dampierre 1996: 290–5).
Music and the study of ideas

Gurdjieff maintains that music can transmit understanding of universal laws through
direct perception of the effect of vibrations on the organism. His theories invoke
the esoteric teaching of correspondences: study of the microcosm of music as an
inquiry into universal laws and processes that also operate at the macrocosmic level
(Rosenthal 1996: 301–10).
According to Gurdjieff, a fine energy from sources more intelligent than humanity
constitutes influences that can enter our lives, and expand our consciousness, both
directly from other realms and as living ideas in the teachings of messengers from
Above (Ouspensky 1949: 199–200; Gurdjieff 1993: 293–6). Study of ideas, alone and
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in groups, calls for an integration of the ideas of the teaching with personal experi-
ence. Gurdjieff stressed the need to study the ideas of his teaching at all levels, from
intra-psychic to universal, and to spend time considering seriously the relationships
among these levels (Gurdjieff 1993: 386).
Practical work and work in life

Throughout his work with pupils, Gurdjieff assigned physical tasks to awaken
in each person an understanding of self and to demonstrate how laws operate in
everyday life. Working with craft materials or tools with a directed attention can pro-
vide impressions of how awareness, emotional attachment, and physical activity are
interrelated (Tchekhovitch 2006). Work groups regularly assemble for a period (day,
weekend, or week) to engage in team activities while also setting a common intention
to experiment with aspects of self-observation during practical activities.
Essential to Gurdjieff’s teaching is the principle that the Work, begun as quiet,
inner observation of oneself, must eventually emerge into everyday life (Ouspensky
1949: 44–52; Needleman 2006: 452).
CONCLUSION: THE GNO S TIC M OTIVE

The Gurdjieff Work and the gnostic quest embody similar paradigms, with parallel
ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, and methodologies. Their ontologies attempt to
define the cosmos, the human situation, and relation between the two in similar terms.
Both call upon epistemologies of self-inquiry through communal efforts to address the
illusion and “sleep” that envelop humanity. Methodologically both require self-study
and inner search toward the goals of awakening, transformation, and evolution.
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CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
WESTERN SUFISM AND GNOSIS
Mark Sedgwick
G nosis in the sense of maʿrifa, the soul’s experience of the divine that is related to
what some call the “mystical experience,” has always been important in Sufism
(see ch. 30). Gnosis in this sense has also been important to Western Sufis, as we will
see, though it is now often presented in deliberately ambiguous fashion, as the classic
concept is not immediately compatible with contemporary Western understandings
of spirituality. Gnosis has also been important to Western Sufis in a second sense,
which has no precedent in “classic” Sufism. Gnosis has been understood by some
Western Sufis to mean not the soul’s experience of the divine but a hidden system of
knowledge and practice of which Sufism is one instance. Gnosis in this sense is com-
parable to two other Western concepts, the “perennial philosophy” and “esotericism.”
In addition to these two ways in which Western Sufism understands “gnosis,” there
is also the use of “Gnostic” to denote particular historical groups that existed in the
Hellenistic world in the early centuries of Christianity, but this use has nothing Sufi
about it, even when used in connection with discussions of Sufism, and will not be
considered further.
There are many kinds of Western Sufis. If “Western” is understood in its widest sense
to include the Balkans, there have been Western Sufis for many centuries, as there have
been Muslims in the Balkans for many centuries, and Sufism has existed among them
just as it has among Muslims elsewhere. If “Western” is understood in a narrower
sense, however, in terms of the Americas and of Western Europe, Western Sufism is a
more recent phenomenon, dating from general interest in “Oriental” religions in the
late nineteenth century. This is the sense in which this chapter understands “Western.”
It discusses the first Sufi groups to include Westerners of non-Muslim origin, which
were established in 1910–1911, and so-called “universal” Sufism, distanced from
Islam, which was a phenomenon especially of the 1970s. There are still Sufi groups
today that are purely universal, but Western Sufism is now generally more Islamic
than universal, and some Western Sufi groups that arrived with migration from the
Muslim world differ little from the Sufism of their countries of origin. Such groups
are present in the West, but are not especially Western in other senses, and so fall
beyond the scope of this chapter.
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— Mark Sedgwick —
GNOSIS AS MAʿRIFA
The term “gnosis” is widely used among both Western Sufis and Western scholars as
the translation of the Arabic term maʿrifa, which has the general meaning of “know-
ledge” and which in a Sufi context denotes direct knowledge of God, either through
mystical union or immediately preparatory to this. The use of “gnosis” to translate
maʿrifa was established by the earliest major modern scholar of Sufism, the Cambridge
Orientalist Reynold Nicholson (1865–1945) (Nicholson 1898: 327; 1914: 71), and
was followed by the leading scholar of the middle of the twentieth century, Arthur
Arberry (1905–69), also at Cambridge (Arberry 1935: 46; 1950: 52, 78). It is still the
standard translation today, and is used, for example, by the author of what is cur-
rently the best-selling general introduction to Sufism, the American scholar Carl Ernst
(1950–), of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Ernst 1997: 28).
Although Nicholson identified his use of “gnosis” with Hellenistic philosophy
(Nicholson 1914: 71), Arberry and Ernst simply used the term as an available trans-
lation, without considering possible parallels or links with Late Antiquity. Neither
they nor Arberry use the term “gnosticism.” Instead, they all describe Sufism as “mys-
ticism” (Nicholson 1914; Arberry 1950; Ernst 1997), a label that has been used by
Western scholars since the seventeenth century (Sedgwick 2016: 83–4). Quite what
they mean by “mysticism” may be discussed, but what they mean by “gnosis” is clear,
to the extent that the Sufis whose work they are using meant only one thing by
maʿrifa. In practice, of course, understandings of maʿrifa differed among Sufis, with
some seeing it as identical with union with God and/or the Godhead (ittisal or fana),
and some seeing it as a penultimate stage of contemplation of the divine attributes,
prior to undifferentiated union. These differences of understanding, however, derive
from Classic Sufism, not from Western Sufism.
GNOSIS AS S YS TE M
An understanding of “Gnosis” that is distinctly Western is the understanding of it as
the true, ancient, and hidden religion of humanity (see chs. 3, 49). This understanding
did not originate among Western Sufis, but has been very important for the develop-
ment of Western Sufism. Sufis were first identified as Gnostics in this sense in 1864,
in The Gnostics and Their Remains, Ancient and Mediaeval by Charles William King
(1818–1888), a Cambridge scholar who worked mainly on antique engraved gems
(Wroth 2004). The year is significant, as King published his book during a decade of
heightened Victorian public interest in Gnostics. He argued for an understanding of
“Gnosticism” as an ancient and generally secret school that resulted from a blending
of Greek and Persian wisdom, incorporated the idea of emanation, and was trans-
mitted through Zoroastrianism and its chief derivative, the Kabbalah, and through
Brahmanism and its chief derivate, Buddhism (King 1864: 6–7). King then traced the
transmission of this understanding of Gnosticism through the Druze and the Sufis
to the Templars and thus to the Rosicrucians and Freemasons (King 1864: 191; and
see ch. 2).
King barely treats the Druze, knowing little about them (King 1864: 183), but went
into some detail on Sufism, explaining that the Sufis probably originated in Persia
and combined Persian learning (i.e., Zoroastrianism) with the surviving if persecuted
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— We s t e r n S u f i s m a n d g n o s i s —
learning of Greece, calling themselves “Sufi” after the Greek sophoi (sages). They
had learned “secret doctrines,” and believed in “one universal creed which could be
secretly held under any profession of an outward faith” (King 1864: 184–5). They
were thus found in Islam, but were not actually Muslim.
In a much enlarged second edition of his book published shortly before his death,
King identified Gnosticism as “an esoteric theology of which the popular creed … was
but the exoteric form.” (King 1887: 5). The Sufis’ “secret doctrines” thus became “eso-
teric doctrines” (King 1887: 415). This change reflected the influence of a more gen-
eral understanding of the times that identified King’s ancient school not as “gnostic”
or “secret” but as “esoteric,” a concept that was placed in opposition to the exoteric.
King’s tracing of a route through the Sufis to the Templars seems to have been
his own hypothesis, but his understanding otherwise drew on earlier models. The
idea that an ancient or “perennial” philosophy or religion could be found in remote
antiquity had been popular since the Renaissance, and possibly even before it
(Sedgwick 2016: 86–8). It is an idea that has been of great importance to many
varieties of Western alternative religious thought. It also contributed to establishing
the contemporary scholarly discipline of the History of Religions, though contem-
porary scholars of course use much more complicated, non-unilinear models than
perennialists do.
The idea that Gnostics were not just a group of long-extinct early Christian sects
but also, more generally, those who believed that the soul was of one substance
with God (as implied by many theories of emanation) was sufficiently current by
1721 to be incorporated in a dictionary definition (Bailey 1726: sv. Gnosticks). The
connection between secret transmissions, Crusading knights, and the Freemasons
had been made by Andrew Ramsay (1686–1743), a Jacobite intellectual in exile in
France, in 1737, and the Templars were identified as the relevant Crusading knights
by German Freemasons around 1760 (Partner 1982: 103–5, 100–11). The Templars
were then connected with Gnosticism and the Nizari Ismailis by the Austrian scholar
Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) in 1818, and the Druze were inserted as
intermediaries between the Templars and the Gnostics by the French novelist Gérard
de Nerval (1808–1855) in 1850 (Partner 1982: 139, 151). Nerval drew on a range of
scholarly sources (Hisashi 2001), and which one suggested the Druze as a source for
the Templars has not yet been established.
The derivation of “Sufi” from sophoi, almost certainly a false etymology, was
first proposed by Jacobus Golius (1596–1667), a Dutch scholar, in 1653 and was
then widely repeated (Sedgwick 2016: 84). The understanding of Sufism as a secret
universal religion feigning adherence to various forms was developed by the British
Indologist James Graham’s “A Treatise on Sufiism, or Mahomedan Mysticism”
(1819), a work which drew on the theories of the British scholar Sir William Jones
(1746–1794) and also, indirectly, on earlier sources, from the Pantheist intellectual
John Toland (1670–1722), who established the esoteric/exoteric pair, to the philoso-
pher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) (Sedgwick 2016: 102–12).
These theories had generally fallen out of favor among most scholars by the 1860s,
and King was thought by some to be not always entirely serious as a scholar (Wroth
2004), really being an expert in a different field. Because his book was closer to
established conceptions than to more recent scholarship, though, it was nonetheless
widely read and influential, and in the view of Philip Jenkins remained a standard
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work until 1900, when it was replaced by Fragments of a Faith Forgotten by the
Theosophist George Mead (1863–1933) (Jenkins 2002: 39). Helena Blavatsky (1831–
1891), the leader of the Theosophical Society, herself drew extensively on King’s book
in her Isis Unveiled (1877) (Chajes 2016: 54–5; Jenkins 2002: 43–4), and cites it
for her understanding of Sufism (Sedgwick 2016: 145). Graham’s understanding of
Sufism was also influential, republished in a Theosophical journal in 1882 (Sedgwick
2016: 145, 293). Theosophy was always much more interested in Hinduism and
Buddhism than Sufism or Islam (Sedgwick 2016: 144), but to the extent that it was
interested in Sufism, it followed King’s understanding of it as a transmission of per-
ennial Gnosis. This matters, because at the turn of the century Theosophy dominated
the Western alternative religious milieu in a way that no other organization ever has.
Its influence on the subsequent religious history of the West has been tremendous.
EARLY WESTERN SUFIS M AND G NO S IS

Western Sufism took concrete form in 1910–1911, almost simultaneously in San
Francisco and in Paris, with two distinct groups that were unrelated to each other,
both of which were related to Theosophy. In San Francisco in 1911, a young Indian
Sufi and musician on a world tour, Inayat Khan (1882–1927), “initiated” Ada Martin
(1871–1947), a Jewish member of an American Martinist Order (an offshoot of
Theosophy), into Sufism (Sedgwick 2016: 159). Inayat Khan subsequently moved to
Europe, where he established a Sufi Movement in London and then a Sufi Order (so-
called) in Paris. The Sufi Order is the classic expression of “universal” Sufism. There
was no expectation that its members should become Muslim, and rather than prac-
ticing Islam they took part in “Universal Worship” that referred to all major religions.
The Sufi Order prospered in the interwar period, and groups descended from it then
prospered again during the 1960s and 1970s. Such groups, taken together, may today
be the single largest stream in Western Sufism. Some are purely universal, and others
are more Islamic.
At about the same time, in Paris in 1911 or 1910, a Swedish Theosophist, Sufi
and painter, Ivan (Abd al-Hadi) Aguéli (1869–1917), “initiated” René Guénon, a
former member of the French Martinist Order, into Sufism (Sedgwick 2016: 155; and
chs. 37, 43). Guénon subsequently inspired the establishment in Switzerland of the
Maryamiyya, a Sufi order that prospered especially in the 1960s and 1970s (Sedgwick
2004) and is today one of the most influential streams in Western Sufism. It is uni-
versal in its theology, but mostly Islamic in its practice.
Inayat Khan’s portrayal of Sufism was very close to King’s portrayal of Sufi
Gnosticism, partly because of his close ties to Theosophists (Inayat-Khan 2006: 110–
11; Sedgwick 2016: 184). He did not, however, use the terms “gnosis” or “Gnosticism.”
His conception of Sufism as system, then, was compatible with King’s and Graham’s,
though he did not follow King’s terminology. Inayat Khan’s Sufism also included
gnosis in the classical sense of maʿrifa, and he often referred to the “Knower,” mostly
capitalized (Inayat Khan 2005a), by which he evidently meant ʿarif, one who has
maʿrifa. The term maʿrifa was either left untranslated (as “marifat”) but sometimes
translated, either as “self- realisation,” “wisdom,” or “esotericism” (Inayat Khan
1914: 27, 47; 2005b). Inayat Khan thus began the ambiguous presentation of maʿrifa,
since while “wisdom” is a relatively neutral, literal translation, “self-realization” is a
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distinctly Western concept. It is, however, compatible with the concept of maʿrifa,
since what is known, following Sufi theology, is the God-head, generally termed
Haqiqa, the True or the Real. For the soul to approach the Real, then, surely involves
“self-Real-ization.” Likewise, the Western concept of “esotericism” is compatible with
the concept of maʿrifa, though perhaps less comfortably, as one thing that the ʿarif
(knower) has knowledge of is the ghayb (unseen), and the ghayb may be understood
as the esoteric.
Aguéli’s portrayal of Sufism was also close to Gnosis qua system, to Theosophy,
and to King’s portrayal of Sufi Gnosticism, as he saw Sufism as “the secret doctrine
of Islam,” comparable to Kabbalah, yoga, and the mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688–1772) (Sedgwick 2016: 154). He referred only rarely to “gnosis,” despite the
fact that the Parisian journal in which he most often published was entitled La Gnose
(Gnosis) and was subtitled “The Official Organ of the Universal Gnostic Church.” The
Universal Gnostic Church was a small organization, composed primarily of former
Martinists, including Guénon. Aguéli used “gnosis” to render maʿrifa in translations
from the Arabic (Aguéli 1988a: 113), but otherwise hardly used the term at all, and
then only very vaguely, as when he noted that “the importance of pure art, from the
perspective of Gnosis, is to join the concrete to the abstract” (Aguéli 1988b: 41). In
contexts such as these, the word could mean almost anything.
Aguéli’s associate Guénon understood Sufism as a system in similar ways, though
like Aguéli he did not use King’s terminology. For Guénon, Sufism was esotericism
or “tradition,” as we will see. He rarely used the word gnose, at least after an early
article in 1909 in La Gnose in which he identified “Gnosis” with knowledge, indeed
true knowledge with “the orthodox tradition contained in the sacred books of all
peoples, a tradition which is in fact everywhere the same, despite the various forms
it takes to adapt to every race and every age” (Guénon 1976: 176, 178). Guénon’s
“tradition,” then, is King’s “gnosis,” and the concept of tradition was so central to
his thought that the movement he founded came to be known as “Traditionalism.”
In a later article that took its starting point in a quotation from the American
Freemason Albert Pike (1809–1891), who according to Guénon wrote that “Gnosis
is the essence and marrow of Freemasonry,” Guénon explained that what Pike meant
by “gnosis” was “traditional knowledge” (Guénon 1971: 257). Pike elsewhere
defined “gnosis” in terms compatible with King as “mysteries,” including eman-
ation, derived from Greek, Zoroastrian and Kabbalistic sources (Pike 1871: 248;
and ch. 40).
POSTWAR WESTERN SU F IS M AND G NO S IS

Although Guénon made little use of the term “gnosis,” his most important fol-
lower, Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998), the founding shaykh of the Maryamiyya,
made more use of it. First, Schuon used “gnosis” as a translation of the terms
maʿrifa and of jnâna (Schuon 2006: 61; Schuon 2011: 114), though maʿrifa was
also sometimes glossed as “knowledge” (Schuon 2006: 186). Secondly, and most
importantly, he reverted to King’s terminology, equating gnosis and the perennial
philosophy (Schuon 2006: 15–16; Schuon 2011: xvii). He thus refers to Sufism as
“Muslim gnosis” (Schuon 2006: 65). Why Schuon thus reverted to earlier usage
is not known. Conceivably it was part of the attempt to distance himself from
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Guénon and establish himself as an independent authority that characterized the

later part of his career.
Schuon’s usage was followed by his own most important follower, Seyyed Hossein
Nasr (1933–). Nasr, who was a scholar as well as a Sufi, with a doctorate from
Harvard and many years on the faculty of George Washington University, follows
both Schuon and standard scholarly practice in translating ma‘rifa as “gnosis” (Nasr
1993: 25). He also translates the Persian term ‘irfan as “gnosis,” which is an obvious
choice given that ‘irfan derives from the same Arabic root as maʿrifa and is used to
translate maʿrifa into Persian. ʿIrfan is also used, however, to denote one of three
related but distinct traditions in Persian Islam: ʿirfan, ishraq, and hikma, which Nasr
translates as Gnosis, Illumination, and Theosophy (Nasr 1981: 67, 75). In this, and
also in glossing Sufism as “gnosis” (Nasr 1981: 98), he is both following the example
of Schuon and establishing an equivalence between Shi’i ʿirfan and Sunni Sufism that
might be disputed.
As a scholar, Nasr was necessarily more careful than Schuon or Guénon in iden-
tifying Sufism, ʿirfan or Gnosis with the perennial philosophy, which is a concept
that mainstream Western scholarship has long rejected. Although on one occasion
he does identify Sufism with scientia sacra (a term sometimes used by Schuon as an
alternative to “perennial philosophy”) (Nasr 2010: 304), he more often uses such
formulations as “the perennial nature of the truths contained in the Islamic tradition”
(Nasr 1981: 34) or “a truth that is at once perennial and universal” (Nasr 1991: 33).
Such expressions are effective, being read one way by Traditionalists and another
way by scholars who are unaware of Traditionalism. Even so, however, Schuon is
sometimes more explicit, as when he identified Mulla Sadra as “an expositor of that
perennial philosophy which remains fresh and new in every age and which, being
derived from the unique source of all wisdom, is universal … no matter in what form
and dress it manifests itself” (Nasr 1981: 165).
One scholar who knew Nasr well and who took a related but distinct approach
to gnosis was Henri Corbin (1903–1978). Corbin was only a Western Sufi in certain
ways. His primary identity was as a distinguished French scholar, the holder of the
chair in Islam at the École Pratique des Hautes Études of the Sorbonne (Van den Bos
2005: 114). He was also notable as one of those who, together with others such as the
Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), comparative religionist Mircea
Eliade (1907–1986), and Zen scholar Daisetsu Suzuki (1870–1966), attempted to
restore the Western relationship with myth and symbol at the Eranos meetings (ch. 2)
and then through a research center, the Université Saint-Jean de Jérusalem (Hanegraaff
2012: 278, 341). In this he was more of a neo-Templar and a Christian theosophist
than a Sufi (Hanegraaff 2012: 341). His work and writing, however, was on the
Iranian Ishraqi tradition that Nasr called Illumination, on Sufism, and on the Ismailis,
an Islamic denomination of Shi’i origin whose theology has very similar emphases.
Corbin’s work also had an impact similar to Nasr’s: the sociologist Francesco Piraino
recently found that it was referred to by French converts to Sufism in the same way
that the work of declared Western Sufis was (Piraino 2015: 31).
Corbin’s opus is complex and extensive, and research into it is still only beginning.
Like others, he used gnose to translate maʿrifa (Corbin 1969: 221). In essence, how-
ever, Corbin’s understanding of Gnosis was similar to that of King. He understood
Gnosis as a “World Religion,” a phrase that he used. “There was a Gnosis in Islam
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as there was a Gnosis in Christianity, and these Gnoses certainly have more affinities
with one another than do the official religious forms into which they secretly made
their spirit penetrate” (Corbin 1960: 14). Islamic Gnosis is thus one with Christian,
Jewish, Manichaean, and Zoroastrian Gnosis (Corbin 2014: 20–1). Corbin accepts
that the transmission of Gnosis cannot be demonstrated, but does not accept that this
means that it did not happen (Corbin 2010: 152–3). The “schools of Gnosis” differ
amongst themselves, but all have certain features in common (Corbin 2010: 161).
Corbin’s concern is the comparative study of three forms of Islamic Gnosticism –
Isma‘ili, Illuminationist, and Sufi –not of all forms of Gnosticism, but even so he
occasionally indicates what it is that he thinks they have in common. Most important
is an “unknowable, impredicable, ineffable Divinity … which is the origin of all the
becoming of the worlds” distinct from a “revealed God” or nous (Corbin 2010: 161;
1969: 112). The concept for which Corbin is best known, the “imaginal world,”
derives from this. For Corbin, the Imagination is that which is “at once in the sensible
and the intelligible, in the senses and in the intellect,” making it a “pillar” of Gnosis
and maʿrifa (Corbin 1969: 218–19).
An understanding very similar to this is found with Idries Shah (1924–1996), a
Western Sufi whose books were very popular during the “new age.” In his classic
work The Sufis, Shah explained that “there were Sufis at all times and in all coun-
tries … Sufism existed as such and under this name before Islam.” Sufism also existed
under other names, including ʿilm al-maʿrifa, glossed as “the science of Knowing,”
and ʿirfan, glossed as “gnosis” (Shah 1977: 54–5). Shah also refers to the transmission
of “the Sufi tradition” through the Templars (211).
LATER WESTERN SUF IS M AND G NO S IS

Rather as Inayat Khan glossed maʿrifa in neutral terms as “self- realization” or
“wisdom,” so his son Vilayat Inayat Khan (1916–2004) also wrote during the 1970s
and 1980s not of “gnosis” but of “knowledge,” which he divided between “acquired
knowledge” and “revealed knowledge,” (Vilayat Inayat Khan 1999: 5). This is a classic
Sufi distinction, with “acquired knowledge” known as ʿilm and “revealed knowledge”
known as maʿrifa. He also used the term “awakening” to gloss maʿrifa (Vilayat Inayat
Khan 1999: 3–5). “Awakening” was sometimes interpreted very loosely, for example
as “a term used by Vedânta and Sufism which stands for a sudden switch from one’s
commonplace perspective of things … to identifying oneself with the totality … of the
thinking and feeling of which the universe is a projection or manifestation” (Vilayat
Inayat Khan 2011: 95). Even this, however, is compatible not only with the “spir-
ituality” that was popular during and after the “new age” but also with the classic
conception of maʿrifa. As the universe is a projection or manifestation of the Haqiqa,
“the totality” is also the Haqiqa, and identification with the Haqiqa is maʿrifa.
A similar approach is followed by Kabir Helminski (1947–), the founder and
shaykh of the Threshold Society, an important American Mevlevi group that care-
fully positions itself between classical Islamic Sufism and general non-Islamic spir-
ituality, attempting with some success to link these two systems (one reason why
the group is known as the “threshold” society). There are several levels of par-
ticipation in the Threshold Society, the third of which is to make “the Mevlevi
tradition” one’s “primary spiritual commitment.” This “entails a willingness to
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acquaint oneself with and understand the sources and framework of the Sufi trad-
ition, including the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet. It is not, however,
required that a Mevlevi dervish embrace the religion of Islam in its outer, socio-
logical form” (Helminski 2011).
Helminski follows general practice in using “gnostic” to translate ʿarif, but gener-
ally speaks not of “gnosis” but of “completion.” He uses the term cautiously, speaking
more often of the desirability of “completion” as the goal of the Sufi path (Helminski
1999: 23) than of what “completion” actually is. When he does define “comple-
tion,” he does so carefully and ambiguously in ways that satisfy both classic Islamic
understandings and the frames of contemporary Western spirituality, in accordance
with the general approach of the Threshold Society. “Completion” is thus defined
in the glossary to his main books as “Being one with the Whole, realizing Truth”
(Helminski 1999: 271). This works in classic Sufi terms, if the Whole is understood
as the One, and if Truth is understood as Haqiqa. The definition also works in non-
Islamic terms, however: as Helminski himself obverses, it is generally accepted among
those interested in spirituality “that each part of the universe in some way reflects
the whole” (Helminski 1999: 20), and who does not want to realize Truth? Similarly,
the term “completed human being” is in one place identified with the technical Sufi
term al-insan al-kamil (Helminski 1999: 20), a term usually translated by scholars
as “the perfect man” (Arnaldez 2012). Different classical authors use the term some-
what differently, but the meaning as always close to ʿarif, and Helminski’s transla-
tion is certainly defensible in classical Sufi terms. Elsewhere, however, it is defined
as “someone who has become transparent to God and thus can reflect the Divine
Attributes appropriately” (Helminski 1999: 271). Again, who would not want to be
transparent to God?
CONCLUS IO N
Gnosis in the sense of maʿrifa, then, has been important to Western Sufis, as it has
to “classic” Sufis. Western Sufis generally follow Western scholars from Reynold
Nicholson to Carl Ernst in using “gnosis” to translate the term maʿrifa into
English. They also present the concept in ambiguous fashion, however. For Inayat
Khan, maʿrifa was “self-realisation,” while for his son Vilayat Inayat Khan it was
“awakening” and “identifying oneself with the totality.” For Kabir Helminski, it is
“completion,” to “become transparent to God.” All these formulations are compat-
ible with the classic Sufi understanding, and are also compatible with contemporary
Western understandings of spirituality. The ambiguous presentation of maʿrifa, then,
serves a useful purpose.
Gnosis has also been important to Western Sufis in a second sense, as a hidden
system of knowledge and practice of which Sufism is one instance. This idea has no
precedent in “classic” Sufism and derives directly from Charles King in the 1860s, and
indirectly from a variety of Western sources from James Graham back to Spinoza. It
matches the understanding of Blavatsky and the Theosophists.
The understanding of gnosis as a system, though not the term, is characteristic of
Western Sufism, starting with Inayat Khan and Ivan Aguéli. The term is at first not
used after King, and Guénon introduced the alternative of “tradition,” but it was then
reintroduced by Schuon, and used in this sense both by Schuon’s follower Nasr, both
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Western Sufi and scholar, and by Nasr’s colleague Corbin, more scholar than Sufi, but
today read much as Western Sufis are.
Both the conceptions of gnosis that are found in Western Sufism are important, but
neither is logically connected with the other. It seems, then, that Gnosis has a signifi-
cance in Western culture that transcends particular conceptions.
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Inayat-Khan, Zia. 2006. “A Hybrid Sufi Order at the Crossroads of Modernity: The Sufi Order
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Durham, NC.
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CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
GNOSIS: A PERENNIALIST
PERSPECTIVE
Harry Oldmeadow
PERENNIA L IS M
Perennialism, as here understood, is a school of thought which emerged from the
writings of René Guénon (1886– 1951), the remarkable French intellectual and
metaphysician, sometimes misleadingly described as an “occultist” or “orientalist.”
Since the time of Guénon’s first writings, in the early twentieth century, a signifi-
cant perennialist movement (sometimes called “traditionalism”) has developed.
Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) and Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998)
are recognized as its most authoritative exponents. Other leading figures include Titus
Burckhardt, Marco Pallis, Martin Lings, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr (see Oldmeadow,
K. 2000; Oldmeadow, H. 2010). These writers are committed to the explication of the
sophia perennis which lies at the heart of the diverse religions and behind the mani-
fold forms of the world’s different traditions. At the same time, unlike many others
who espouse some sort of “perennial philosophy” –Aldous Huxley, for instance –
they are dedicated to the illumination and preservation of the traditional forms which
give each religious heritage its distinctive character and guarantee its formal integrity
and, by the same token, ensure its spiritual efficacy. In other words they have insisted
on the incalculable value of tradition and of religious orthodoxy.
St Augustine speaks of: “Wisdom uncreate, the same now as it ever was and
ever will be” (Radhakrishnan 1952: 80), known throughout the world by many
names: Philosophia Perennis, Lex Aeterna, Hagia Sophia, Din al-Haqq, Akālika
Dhamma, and Sanātana Dharma are among the better known. In itself and as such
this truth is formless and beyond all conceptualizations. Any attempt to define it is
to chase the wind with a net. This immemorial wisdom, the patrimony of all human-
kind, can also be designated as the Primordial Tradition. Guénon refers, in one of
his earliest articles, to “the Tradition contained in the Sacred Books of all peoples,
a Tradition which in reality is everywhere the same, in spite of all the diverse forms
it assumes to adapt itself to each race and period …” (Perry 1980: 20). In this sense
tradition is synonymous with the perennial philosophy itself which is universal and
immutable (see Coomaraswamy 1977: 7). “Tradition” in its purest metaphysical
sense –the sense in which Guénon often uses it –signifies the unity of First Principles,
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— Harry Oldmeadow —
an eternal wisdom which, in Schuon’s words, signifies “the totality of the primordial
and universal truths” (Schuon 1991: 21). It is one and the same unchanging wisdom
which can be found, sometimes heavily veiled, in all the sacred Scriptures, and which
nourishes all integral religious and sapiential traditions. This is axiomatic, the sine
qua non of traditionalist thought. It has met with a good deal of scepticism, even
derision, in modern times. It must be said that the credibility of the principle, if one
might so put it, has also been compromised by a rag-tag of so-called “gurus” and
pseudo-spiritual movements claiming adherence to some vague universalist “essence”
without really understanding its nature. More often than not such “universalists” are
iconoclasts who repudiate the very forms in which the perennial wisdom is neces-
sarily clothed; they are also, thereby, anti-traditional.
GNOSIS: DIVINE W IS D O M
Our governing concern here is the perennialist understanding of “gnosis.” Frithjof
Schuon is the pre-eminent writer on this subject and it is primarily on his works that
the following account draws. Schuon rather tersely entitled one of his essays on this
subject, “Gnosis is not just anything,” opening his discussion this way:
It is a fact that too many authors –we would almost say: general opinion –
attribute to gnosis what is proper to Gnosticism and to other counterfeits of the
sophia perennis, and moreover make no distinction between the latter and the
most fanciful movements, such as spiritualism, theosophism, and the pseudo-
esoterisms that saw the light of day in the twentieth century.
(Schuon 2015: 53)
In other words, gnosis as such must not be confused with the historical phenom-
enon of Gnosticism, the Greco-Oriental syncretism of Antiquity, nor with latter-day
occultism. Gnosis, properly understood, is “intellective knowledge of the Absolute”
(Schuon 2015: 54), a “supra-rational, and thus purely intellective, knowledge of
metacosmic realities” (Schuon 1998: 138). Its Sanskrit equivalent is jñāna, knowledge
in its fullest sense, what Eckhart calls “divine knowledge.”
In order to understand the perennialist perspective on gnosis we must clarify sev-
eral terms. For the moment capsule definitions will suffice:
Revelation: a providential Message from the Divine which enters the world of time
and space and thereby takes on a particular form, and from which flows a reli-
gious tradition.
Tradition: (a) “the totality of the primordial and universal truths”; (b) a formal
embodiment of truth under a particular mythological or religious guise, issuing
from a Revelation and transmitted through time.
Metaphysics: “is the science of the Real, of the origin and end of things, of the
Absolute and in its light, the relative” (Nasr 1968: 81).
Mystical: “concerning [metacosmic] realities considered subjectively, that is, in rela-
tion to the contemplative soul, insofar as they enter into contact with it” (Schuon
1984: 176n).
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— Gnosis: a perennialist perspective —
Exotericism: the outlook and spiritual practice determined by religious forms

wherein universal truths are particularized.
Esotericism: the mystical and metaphysical understanding which penetrates (but
does not invalidate or repudiate) religious forms and thus universalizes them.
Intellect: an impersonal faculty which receives intuitions and apprehends realities
of a supra-phenomenal order.
These definitions raise myriad questions, three of the most pressing being: what
comprises gnosis, divine wisdom? What are the sources of gnosis? What is the rela-
tion of this mode of knowing to other forms of knowledge?
The metaphysic elucidated by the perennialists might be articulated in any number
of ways, from a variety of viewpoints. Two metaphysical vocabularies which they fre-
quently deploy are those of Sufism and Advaita Vedanta, each presenting essentially
the same account of the Real, albeit in the differing “languages” of the traditions in
question. Schuon states that Advaita Vedanta is “one of the most adequate expressions
possible of the philosophia perennis” (Schuon 1981: 21) and “the most direct pos-
sible expression of gnosis” (Schuon 2006a: 61). Under different guises much the same
account can be found in any integral tradition, especially in those which foreground
metaphysics –Platonism, Pythagoreanism, Taoism, to cite three obvious instances. In
other traditions, where the accent, in the first place, is on a spiritual therapy rather
than a metaphysic, the metaphysical teachings will often be implicit.
To provide even a rudimentary outline of esoteric metaphysical teachings as they
are understood within a single tradition is no easy matter, still less when one is dealing
with a metaphysical synthesis such as we find in the work of the perennialists. One
might start with these words, from Schuon:
The content of the universal and primordial Doctrine is the following, expressed
in Vedantic terms: ‘Brahma is Reality; the world is appearance; the soul is not
other than Brahma.’ These are the three great theses of integral metaphysics: one
positive, one negative, one unitive.
(Schuon 1997: 135–6)
Another possible starting point is Schuon’s cardinal essay, “The Five Divine
Presences,” expounding the Sufi doctrine which furnishes a coherent “explanation” of
the Real, and of the various levels of the cosmic and meta-cosmic hierarchy. The Five
Divine Presences, translated into terms more accessible to those of a Judeo-Christian
background, starting from the “top” and allowing for some expedient simplifications,
can be variously rendered thus:
1. Beyond Being, the Godhead, the Divine Essence, the Divine Principle (the Divine
Principle Itself);
2. Being, the Personal God, the Creator, the Uncreated Logos (the prefiguration of
Manifestation in the Principle);
3. Spirit, the Angelic, Celestial or Avataric Realm, the Spirit, the Intellect, the
Created Logos [Latin: Spiritus; Greek: Pneuma; Arabic: Rûh] (the projection of
the Principle in Manifestation);
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4. Soul, the Psychic Realm [anima: psyche: nafs];

5. Body, the Corporeal Realm, Matter; the realm of “matter-energy, form, number,
space and time.”
(4. & 5. Manifestation in itself) (Schuon 1982: 65)
Starting with a “manifestation that surrounds us, and in which we are as it were
woven as threads in a piece of cloth,” these Presences (or Degrees, or Hypostases)
comprise a structured hierarchy of Reality in which we can establish certain “bound-
aries or syntheses”:
… the totality of the corporeal and animic states forms the ‘natural’ domain, that
of ‘nature’; the totality of those two states and of supra-formal manifestation
constitutes the cosmic realm; the totality of the cosmic realm and of Being is …
the realm of Relativity, of Maya; and all of the realms considered together with
the Supreme Self constitute the Universe in the highest sense.
(Schuon 2002a: 54)
In some traditional expositions the five degrees are consolidated in a three-tiered

totality, as in this passage from Schuon:
The three great degrees of reality are: formal manifestation (comprising the gross,
corporeal, sensible plane and the subtle, psychic plane), non-formal manifestation
(constituted by the universal Spirit, the supreme Angels) and non-manifestation
(God, in His Essence as well as in His Word).
(Schuon 1993: 84)
The Doctrine of the Five Presences, adumbrated here, discloses the “relationships” of
the Absolute and the Relative, the Principle and Manifestation, God and the World.
Gnosis derives primarily from two sources:
The source of our knowledge of God is at one and the same time the Intellect
and Revelation. In principle the Intellect knows everything, because all possible
knowledge is inscribed in its very substance, and it promises absolute certainty
because its knowledge is a ‘being,’ or a participation in being, and not merely a
‘seeing.’
(Schuon 1984: 71)
Whenever the traditionalists use “Intellect,” and its derivatives, it is to be under-

stood as a precise technical term taken from the Latin intellectus and from medi-
eval scholasticism: that faculty which receives intuitions and apprehends realities
of a supra-phenomenal order. In Meister Eckhart’s words it is “something in
the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable” (Lings 1971: 27). “The intellect is
a receptive faculty and not a productive power: it does not ‘create,’ it receives
and transmits” (Schuon 1999: 9). It is a mirror “which participates in the divine
Subject” (Schuon 1961: 88), an impersonal, unconditioned, receptive faculty,
whence the objectivity of intellection. It is that in man which is “most conformable
to God” (Schuon 1992: 23), the “transpersonal essence of the subject” (Schuon
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1992: 46). Intellection is “naturally supernatural” grace which is inseparable from

our “consubstantiality with all that can be known, and so with all that is” (Schuon
1981: 240).
In almost every culture the Intellect (under whatever name) is symbolically
associated with the heart; hence the recurrence of such images as “the eye of the
heart,” “the cave of the heart” (Sanskrit: guha) and suchlike, and formulations like
“Heart-Knowledge” or, in popular usage, “I knew in my heart”. Schuon writes:
It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the
human spirit that are as if buried in the ‘depths of the heart,’ which means that
they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are
the principal and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all
others. They are accessible, intuitively and infallibly, to the ‘gnostic,’ the ‘pneu-
matic,’ the ‘theosopher’ –in the original meaning of the word …
(Schuon 2000: 3)
And elsewhere:
… the Absolute is not an artificial postulate, explainable by psychology, but a

‘pre-mental’ evidence as actual as the air we breathe or the beating of our hearts;
… intelligence when not atrophied –the pure, intuitive, contemplative intel-
lect –allows no doubt on this subject, the ‘proofs’ being in its very substance; …
man, when he trusts to his reason alone, only ends by unleashing the dark and
dissolving forces of the irrational.
(Schuon 1961: x)
Moreover,
Fallen man, and thus the average man, is as it were poisoned by the passional
element, either grossly or subtly; from this results an obscuring of the Intellect
and the necessity of a Revelation from the outside.
(Schuon 1981: 20)
Revelation –a divine dispensation addressed to a human collectivity, such as

we find in the Mosaic Law, the Incarnation of Christ, the Descent of the Koran,
and the intuitions of the Vedic sages –“is there to compensate for the lack of
innate and so to speak congenital Knowledge and, in doing so, to awaken it, at
least in principle” (Schuon 1977: 201). “Revelation is to the macrocosm what
intellection is to the microcosm” (Schuon 2000: 4). Revelation is the means by
which the Absolute is made known to all mankind. The Uncreated Logos is the
“prefiguration of the relative in the absolute” (Stoddart 2008: 58), “the prototype
of the cosmos in the Principle, or of the world in God” (Schuon 2008: 160); the
Created Logos, the “reflection of the Absolute in the relative” (Stoddart 2008: 59),
enters the manifested world by way of a divine Messenger, the avatar, revealing
Truth to a particular human collectivity in time and space; thus, “Revelation is
in one sense the infallible intellection of the total collectivity” (Nasr and O’Brien
1994: 14). After the fall, Man’s sense of the Absolute is reawakened, on the one
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hand, through Revelation, a downward descent of the Divine Principle, and on the
other through Intellection, a vertical ascent back to the Divine. As James Cutsinger
glosses Schuon,
… nothing can resist God’s entry. Being Infinite, He cannot but enter space, and
the force or impact of this entry results in a kind of radiation or reverberation
through time. The former can be pictured as a vertical descent, like dropping
a stone into a pool of water, while the latter corresponds to centrifugal ripples
moving horizontally toward the shore. These ripples are an image of tradition.
(Cutsinger 1997: 3)
“Revelation speaks an absolute language, because God is absolute …” (Schuon

2006a: 18), but
When the divine Light descends onto the human plane –embodying itself, as
it were –it undergoes an initial limitation, resulting from human language and
from the requirements of a given collective mentality, or cycle of humanity.
(Schuon 2008: 170)
So it is that gnosis derives from both Revelation and Intellection, from a Divine
Message and from the “depths of the heart.”
It is imperative to understand that the modern worldview is almost entirely ignorant
of the suprasensorial dimensions of Reality; indeed, this ignorance is the very corner-
stone of this outlook. As Schuon so clearly states, as Guénon did before him, the
whole edifice of modern (i.e., post-Medieval) thought, particularly that branch of
it that prides itself on the name “science,” is essentially no more than a negation, a
denial of a knowledge which infinitely surpasses it. Schuon writes:
… all of the philosophic and scientific errors of the modern world proceed essen-
tially from the negation of the doctrine under discussion: in other words, what
falsifies modern interpretations of the world and of man at their very base, thus
depriving them of whatever validity they may have, is their monotonous and
obsessive ignorance of the supra-sensible degrees of Reality, or of the ‘Five Divine
Presences.’
(Schuon 2002a: 62)
METAPHYSICS: THE SCIE NCE O F THE RE AL

“Metaphysics” is one of those words, like “dogma” or “mystical,” which has been so
sullied by careless and ignorant usage that the word itself has accumulated pejora-
tive associations. Thus, for instance, we have Bradley’s dictum that “Metaphysics
is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct” (Radhakrishnan
1952: 791). As we have seen, in the perennialist lexicon the word means, precisely,
“the science of the Real.” It is often used more or less synonymously with “gnosis.”
Essentially, metaphysics is the attempt to articulate gnosis, to bring within our pur-
view a state of knowing which may hitherto be unspoken, unheard, invisible as it
were; metaphysics brings gnosis into the realm of human discourse.
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As Guénon observed more than once, metaphysics cannot properly be defined,

for to define is to limit, while the domain of metaphysics is the Real and thus limit-
less. Consequently, metaphysics “is truly and absolutely unlimited and cannot be
confined to any formula or any system” (Guénon 1974: 43–4). Its subject, in the
words of John Tauler, is “that pure knowledge that knows no form or creaturely
way” (Kelley 2009: 4). This should always be kept in mind in any attempt at a “def-
inition,” which must needs be provisional and incomplete. Seyyed Hossein Nasr on
metaphysics:
It is a science as strict and as exact as mathematics and with the same clarity and
certitude, but one which can only be attained through intellectual intuition and
not simply through ratiocination. It thus differs from philosophy as it is usually
understood. Rather, it is a theoria of reality whose realization means sanctity
and spiritual perfection, and therefore can only be achieved within the cadre of a
revealed tradition. Metaphysical intuition can occur everywhere –for the ‘spirit
bloweth where it listeth’ –but the effective realization of metaphysical truth and
its application to human life can only be achieved within a revealed tradition
which gives efficacy to certain symbols and rites upon which metaphysics must
rely for its realization.
This supreme science of the Real … is the only science that can distinguish
between the Absolute and the relative, appearance and reality … Moreover, this
science exists, as the esoteric dimension within every orthodox and integral tradition
and is united with a spiritual method derived totally from the tradition in question.
(Nasr 1968: 81–2)
This accords not with the modern but with the traditional conception of phil-
osophy: philo-sophia, the love of wisdom as a practical concern, a spiritual way. In
India, for example, philosophy was always an all-embracing science of first principles
and of the true nature of Reality, and one wedded to the spiritual disciplines provided
by religion. The ultimate reality of metaphysics is the Supreme Identity in which
all oppositions and dualities are resolved, those of subject and object, knower and
known, being and non-being; thus a Scriptural formulation such as “The things of
God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God” (1 Cor II.11). As Coomaraswamy
remarks, the philosophy, or metaphysics, provided the vision, and religion the way to
its effective verification and actualization in direct experience (Lipsey 1977: 275). The
cleavages between metaphysics and philosophy, and between philosophy and religion,
only appear in modern times.
The nature of metaphysics is more easily grasped through a contrast with phil-
osophy and theology. But first, a few preliminary points. Because the metaphysical
realm lies “beyond” the phenomenal plane the validity of a metaphysical principle can
be neither proved nor disproved by any kind of empirical demonstration, by reference
to material or historical realities (see Guénon 1974: 53). The aim of metaphysics is
not to prove anything whatsoever but to make doctrines intelligible and to demon-
strate their consistency.
Secondly, metaphysics is concerned with a direct apprehension of Reality that
entails a recognition of the Absolute, of God and our relationship to Him. It thus
takes on an imperative character for those capable of metaphysical discernment:
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The requirement for us to recognize the Absolute is itself an absolute one; … It is

a fundamental aspect of human dignity, and especially of that intelligence which
denoted ‘the state of man hard to obtain,’ that we accept Truth because it is true
and for no other reason.
(Schuon 1968: 33)
Furthermore, because metaphysics is attuned to the divine it demands something of

those who would unlock its mysteries:
If metaphysic is a sacred thing, that means it could not be … limited to the frame-
work of the play of the mind. It is illogical and dangerous to talk of metaphysics
without being preoccupied with the moral concomitances it requires, the criteria
of which are, for man, his behavior in relation to God and to his neighbor.
(Schuon 1969: 173)
Thirdly, metaphysics assumes man’s capacity for absolute and certain knowledge:
The capacity for objectivity and for absoluteness is an anticipated and existential
refutation of all the ideologies of doubt: if man is able to doubt this is because certi-
tude exists; likewise the very notion of illusion proves that man has access to reality
… If doubt conformed to the real, human intelligence would be deprived of its suffi-
cient reason and man would be less than an animal, since the intelligence of animals
does not experience doubt concerning the reality to which it is proportioned.
(Schuon 1984: 13)
Metaphysic, therefore, is immutable and inexorable, and the “infallible standard by

which not only religions, but still more ‘philosophies’ and ‘sciences’ must be ‘corrected’
… and interpreted” (Coomaraswamy 1988: 37). Metaphysic can be ignored or for-
gotten but not refuted “precisely because it is immutable and not related to change
qua change” (Nasr 1972a: 86). Metaphysical principles are true and valid once
and for all and not for this particular age or mentality, and could not, in any sense,
“evolve.” They can be validated directly in the plenary and unitive experience of the
mystic. Thus Martin Lings can write of Sufism –and one could say the same of any
intrinsically orthodox traditional esotericism –that it
… has the right to be inexorable because it is based on certainties and not on

opinions. It has the obligation to be inexorable because mysticism is the sole
repository of Truth, in the fullest sense, being above all concerned with the
Absolute, the Infinite and the Eternal; and ‘If the salt have lost its savor, where-
with shall it be salted?’ Without mysticism, Reality would have no voice in the
world. There would be no record of the true hierarchy, and no witness that it is
continually being violated.
(Lings 1975: 93)
One might easily substitute the word “metaphysics” for “mysticism” in this passage,
the former being the formal and objective aspect of the “subjective” experience.
However, this is not to lose sight of the fact that every gnostic doctrine will take
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it as axiomatic that any formulation is “but error in the face of the Divine Reality
itself; a provisional, indispensable, salutary ‘error’ which, however, contains and
communicates the virtuality of the Truth” (Schuon 1969: 162–3).
CONCLUSIO NS
Space does not allow further exploration as to what the perennialist outlook implies
philosophically and theologically. It certainly presents refreshing challenges to most
analytical, rationalist, and materialist philosophies of the West, taking them to be
typically “closed systems,” usually formalistic, reductionist, putting ratiocination
before intellect and not meeting the intellect’s potential, and certainly avoiding
metaphysics as the “consistent doctrine” and special “method of dialectics” by
which the Philosophia perennis can be both accessed and practiced (for guidance,
esp. Coomaraswamy 1977: 6–8; Schuon 1961: 29; 1969: 10; 1981: 28; 1984: 34–7;
1995: 4; 1998: 15, 133, 181; 2002b: 86; Burckhardt 1972: 36; Guénon 1975: 52–3;
Nasr 1968: 35; 1972b: 55, 58; cf. Schumacher 1977: 49; Perry 1971: 731; Singam
1974: 172; with even lines of Nietzsche’s thought [e.g., 1977: 39] bending this
way). Again, with regard to theology, while perennialism holds Divine Revelation
to be the cradle of every orthodox religion, and insists that religion and tradition
are inseparable, it presents a radical challenge to ossified exoteric forms, totali-
tarian theology and exclusivist dogmatisms, as well as to sentimental religiosity or
mere psychologistic subjectivism (Schuon 1961: 57; 1969: 55; 1974: 356; 1976: 39;
1981: 10; 1984: 14, 86; 1998: 57, 157; cf. Perry 1971: 10). The relationship of the-
ology to metaphysics is that of exotericism to esotericism. Exotericism is “unable of
itself to take cognizance of the relationships whereby, at one and the same time, it is
justified in its claims and limited in its scope” (Schuon 1968: 46). What distinguishes
a gnostic esotericism, on the other hand, is its discernment of the universal in the
particular, of the essence in the form. This distinction can be hinged on the terms
“belief” and “gnosis,” or similarly, “faith” and “certitude” (Schuon 1998: 179).
However, the hierarchic superiority of gnosis to all other forms of knowledge and
of metaphysical doctrine to all other kinds of formulations should not be allowed
to obscure the interdependent relationship of the esoteric and the exoteric, ritual
life in general (Schuon 1969: 15).
The distinction between doctrinal understanding and even intellection itself, on
the one hand, and realization on the other, is a crucial one. Contemplative intelli-
gence and metaphysical insight in themselves do not save, “do not prevent titans
from falling” (Schuon 1969: 138). There must be a participation of the will in the
intelligence or, as one scholar glossed Meister Eckhart, “The intellective center is
not truly known without involving the volitive circumference” (Kelley 2009: 243).
Here the will can be defined as “a prolongation or a complement of the intelligence”
(Schuon 2006b: 119) while intelligence itself refers to a contemplative receptivity
rather than any mental cleverness, an intelligence which, in Nasr’s words, “differs
as much from mental virtuosity as the soaring flight of an eagle differs from the
play of a monkey” (Nasr 1966: 21). Morality and the virtues, love, faith –these
must be integrated with metaphysical insight if full realization is to occur, which
is to say there must be a harmonizing of intellectual and volitive elements (Schuon
1995: 25).
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The spiritual life, which can only be lived in conformity with a way provided by
tradition, forms both a precondition and a complement to intellection. As Aquinas
put it, “By their very nature the virtues do not necessarily form part of contempla-
tion, but they are an indispensable condition for it” (Schuon 1998: 161n). Moreover,
sanctity itself may or may not be accompanied by metaphysical discernment: one may
be a saint but no metaphysician, as history repeatedly demonstrates. To expect, as a
necessity, metaphysical wisdom of the saint is to confuse different modes of spiritual
perfection. As Schuon reminds us,
To say ‘man’ is to say bhakta, and to say spirit is to say jñānin; human nature is
so to speak woven of these two neighboring but incommensurable dimensions.
There is certainly a bhakti without jñāna, but there is no jñāna without bhakti.
(Schuon 1981: 22)
If metaphysical discernment is to transform one’s being then intellection alone is

insufficient for “Human nature contains dark elements which no intellectual certainty
could, ipso facto, eliminate” (Schuon 1969: 139). Here the role of faith is of critical
importance:
A man may possess metaphysical certainty without possessing ‘faith’ … But, if

metaphysical certainty suffices on the doctrinal ground, it is far from being suf-
ficient on the spiritual level where it must be completed and enlivened by faith.
Faith is nothing other than our whole being clinging to Truth, whether we have
of truth a direct intuition or an indirect idea. It is an abuse of language to reduce
‘faith’ to the level of ‘belief.’
(Schuon 1969: 127)
In another context Schuon emphasizes this point in even more unequivocal terms.
The following passage is one of the most arresting in the Schuonian corpus, one made
all the more so by the uncharacteristic personal reference:
One can meditate or speculate indefinitely on transcendent truths and their

applications … One can spend a whole lifetime speculating on the suprasensorial
and the transcendent, but all that matters is ‘the leap into the void’ which is the
fixation of spirit and soul in an unthinkable dimension of the Real … this “leap
into the void” we can call … ‘faith’ …
(Schuon 1984: 202)
But the perennialist metaphysician is concerned neither with rational argument nor
with faith/belief but with an Intellectual Evidence which brings an absolute certitude,
while theology focuses on beliefs and moralities, and metaphysics is the outward
expression of gnosis. Or, again, one might say that the philosopher seeks to construct
a mental system, the theologian to discover and live by the “will of heaven,” and the
metaphysician to uncover a transformative gnosis which conforms being to Reality
unqualified.
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547
REFERENCES
Burckhardt, Titus. 1972. Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul. Baltimore,
MD: Penguin.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda. 1977. Selected Papers, vol. 2: Metaphysics. Roger Lipsey (ed.).
——— 1988. Selected Letters of Ananda Coomaraswamy (eds. Rama Coomaraswamy and
Alvin Moore Jr.). New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts.
Cutsinger, James. 1997. Advice to the Serious Seeker. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Guénon, René. 1974. “Oriental Metaphysics.” Jacob Needleman (ed.). The Sword of Gnosis.
Baltimore: Penguin: 40–56.
——— 1975. The Crisis of the Modern World. London: Luzac.
Kelley, Charles. 2009. Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge. Cobb, CA: DharmaCafé.
Lings, Martin. 1971. A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
——— 1975. What is Sufism? London: Allen & Unwin.
Lipsey, Roger. 1977. Coomaraswamy: Life and Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1966. Ideals and Realities of Islam. London: Allen & Unwin.
——— 1968. Man and Nature. London: Allen & Unwin.
——— 1972a. Sufi Essays. London: Allen & Unwin.
———1972b. “Conditions for a Meaningful Comparative Philosophy.” Philosophy East and
West 22 (1): 53–61.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, and Katherine O’Brien (eds.). 1994. In Quest of the Sacred. Oakton,
VA: Foundation of Traditional Studies.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1977. A Nietzsche Reader (trans. and ed. Reginald J. Hollingdale).
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Oldmeadow, Harry. 2010. Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy. Bloomington,
IN: World Wisdom.
Oldmeadow, Kenneth. 2000. Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy.
Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies.
Perry, Whitall (ed.). 1980. A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom. London: Allen & Unwin.
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli. 1952. The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Paul A. Schilpp
(ed.). New York: Tudor.
Schumacher, Friedrich. 1977. A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Jonathan Cape.
Schuon, Frithjof. 1961. Stations of Wisdom. London: John Murray.
——— 1968. In the Tracks of Buddhism. London: Allen & Unwin.
——— 1969. Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
———1974. “Keys to the Bible.” Jacob Needleman (ed.). The Sword of Gnosis. Baltimore,
MD: Penguin, 354–58.
——— 1976. Islam and the Perennial Philosophy. London: World of Islam Festival.
———1977. “Consequences Flowing from the Mystery of Subjectivity.” Studies in Comparative
Religion 11 (4) Autumn: 197–204.
——— 1981. Esoterism as Principle and as Way. London: Perennial Books.
——— 1982. From the Divine to the Human. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
——— 1984. Logic and Transcendence. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
———1991. “The Perennial Philosophy.” Ranjit Fernando (ed.). The Unanimous Tradition,
Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies: 21–4.
——— 1992. Echoes of Perennial Wisdom. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
——— 1993. Treasures of Buddhism. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
——— 1995. The Transfiguration of Man. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
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——— 1997. The Eye of the Heart. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.

——— 1998. Understanding Islam. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
——— 1999. Language of the Self. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
——— 2000. Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
——— 2002a. Form and Substance in the Religions. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
——— 2002b. Roots of the Human Condition. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
——— 2006a. Gnosis: Divine Wisdom. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
——— 2006b. Light on the Ancient Worlds. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
——— 2008. Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism. Bloomington, IN: World
Wisdom.
——— 2015. To Have a Center. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
Singam, Dural (ed.). 1974. Ananda Coomaraswamy: Remembering and Remembering Again
and Again. Kuala Lumpur: privately published.
Stoddart, William. 2008. Remembering in a World of Forgetting. Bloomington, IN: World
Wisdom.
548
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CHAPTER FIFTY
CARL JUNG ON GNOSTICISM
Robert A. Segal
L ike everything else that he analyzes, Gnosticism for the Swiss psychiatrist Carl
Gustav Jung (1875–1961) is a psychological enterprise expressed in physical or
metaphysical form. It is not that Jung somehow misses the metaphysical tenets of
Gnosticism –or of mainstream Christianity or of Buddhism –but that he relent-
lessly transforms those tenets into outward expressions, or projections, of the uncon-
scious. Jung’s later forging of the concept of synchronicity, which ventures beyond the
human mind to the world, is not incompatible with his relentless psychologizing of
religion and of myth. To understand Gnosticism, one must still distinguish between
the mind and the world, onto which the mind projects itself. One must recognize the
projections and thereby re-route them back to the mind.
Jung had a special stake in Gnosticism. For he found in it and, even more, in
alchemy the forerunners of his psychology, the supposedly objective evidence of the
reality of the collective unconscious. As he writes in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world
was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon
the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility
of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to
Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology.
(Jung 1963: 205)
Of course, the support that Gnosticism and alchemy give to Jung’s psychology
depends on their being read psychologically, and read as attempts at the Jungian goal
of individuation.
Jung interprets alchemy and Gnosticism identically. He even sees medieval alchemy
as not merely the link back to ancient Gnosticism but also the forward continuation
of it: “In spite of the suppression of the Gnostic heresy, it [the heresy] continued
to flourish throughout the Middle Ages under the guise of alchemy” (Jung 1938/
1940: 97). For Jung, the alchemical process of extracting gold from base metals
is a continuation of the Gnostic process of liberating fallen souls, or sparks, from
matter. Both processes are seemingly outward physical or metaphysical ones that in
549
50
— Robert A. Segal —
fact are inner, psychological ones. Both symbolize the psychological progression from
the state of sheer ego consciousness to that of the ego’s rediscovery of the uncon-
scious and reintegration with it to form the self. The progression is the task of the
second half of life, so that the goal of both Gnosticism and alchemy is the same as the
psychological one.
In alchemy the progression is from base metals to the distillation of vapor out of
them and the return of that vapor to the metals to form gold. In Gnosticism the pro-
gression is from the Gnostic’s sheer bodily existence to the release of the immaterial
spark within the Gnostic’s body and the reunion of that spark with the godhead. In
both cases the external state is simply the projection onto the world of an inner state –
the reunion of the ego with the unconscious.
For Jung, Gnostics are the ancient counterparts to what I call “contemporaries,”
which include many of his patients. (On Jung’s history of the psyche, see Segal
1986: 104–11, and 1992: 11–18.) Reciprocally, contemporaries are the twentieth-
century counterparts to ancient Gnostics:
The spiritual currents of our time have, in fact, a deep affinity with Gnosticism …
The most impressive movement numerically is undoubtedly Theosophy, together
with its continental sister, Anthroposophy; these are pure Gnosticism in Hindu
dress … What is striking about these Gnostic systems is that they are based exclu-
sively on the manifestations of the unconscious … The passionate interest in
these movements undoubtedly arises from psychic energy which can no longer be
invested in obsolete religious forms.
(Jung 1928/1931: 83–4)
Like Gnostics, contemporaries feel alienated from their roots and are seeking to
overcome that alienation. They are seeking new venues for their unconscious. Where
Gnostics feel cut off from the outer world, contemporaries feel cut off from the inner
one. Contemporaries do not, like Gnostics, project their alienation on to the cosmos.
They seek to discover their true selves within, not outside, themselves.
Gnosticism for Jung is an ancient, not a contemporary, phenomenon. Jung thus
places his psychology not as the contemporary version of Gnosticism but as the
contemporary counterpart to it. At the same time Gnosticism for him is the ancient
version of something that itself is recurrent: alienation from the unconscious, which
in Gnosticism is expressed in alienation from the Gnostic’s immaterial core.
Gnosticism preaches identification with one’s newly discovered divinity, which
is thereby identical with the Gnostic god, or godhead. Because that identification
symbolizes the Gnostic’s identification with the unconscious, Jungian psychology
would regard it as no less lopsided and dangerous than the non-Gnostic’s identifica-
tion with the ego –better, with ego consciousness, or consciousness of the external
world. Jungian psychology would regard both attitudes as unbalanced. It would
maintain that non-Gnostics, the counterparts to whom I call “moderns,” suffer from
an exaggerated persona: their ego identifies itself wholly with the conscious, public
personality. But Jungian psychology would equally maintain that Gnostics, whether
or not contemporaries, suffer from an exaggerated, or inflated, ego, which, conversely,
identifies itself wholly with the rediscovered unconscious. Minimally, the consequence
of inflation is excessive pride in the presumed uniqueness of one’s unconscious.
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51
— Carl Jung on Gnosticism —
Maximally, the consequence is psychosis, or the dissolution of any consciousness of

the external world. The Jungian goal is no more to reject ego consciousness for the
unconscious than, like the modern aim, to reject the unconscious for ego conscious-
ness. Rather, the goal is to balance the two.
In Jungian psychology the cultivation of the unconscious does involve a break
with ego consciousness and a return to the unconscious. But that break is only tem-
porary. The goal is not reversion to the original state of sheer unconsciousness. On
the contrary, the goal is the elevation of the unconscious –better, the symbols of it –
to consciousness. The goal is “consciousness raising.” Humans should seek a unified
state, as they possessed at birth, but the unified state they should now seek is the
integration of the unconscious with ego consciousness, not the restoration of pristine
unconsciousness.
Yet the Gnostic aim is the reverse: reversion to exactly the incipient state of
humanity and of the cosmos. The aim is not the development of the psyche but rever-
sion to the original state of it. Projected onto the cosmos, the aim is the dissolution
of the physical world, including humanity itself, and a return to the original state
of a unified godhead. In Jungian terms, that aim is sheer unconsciousness. The state
sought parallels not that of contemporaries, with whom Jung compares Gnostics, but
that of earliest humanity –the state of “primitives.” In fact, the state sought parallels
more precisely the yet earlier, “uroboric” state before birth. In shedding the body, the
Gnostic is shedding ego consciousness altogether. So Jung misconstrues Gnosticism.
What in Jungian psychology is only a means to an end –return to the uncon-
scious –is for Gnosticism equivalent to the end itself. What in Jungian psychology is
the end –the integration of the unconscious with ego consciousness –is for Gnosticism
equivalent to the present predicament itself: the association of divinity with matter.
Conversely, what for Gnosticism is the end –the severance of any link between div-
inity and matter –is in Jungian terms the predicament: the dissociation of the uncon-
scious from ego consciousness.
Perhaps Jung interprets Gnosticism as he does because he interprets it through
alchemical eyes. Again, he parallels the Gnostic process of liberating the immaterial
sparks from matter to the alchemical process of extracting gold from base metals.
Where, however, gold is produced out of the metals, the sparks are scarcely produced
out of matter. Where gold lies latent in the metals, the sparks lie imprisoned in matter.
Far from originating in matter, they have fallen into it and await not realization but
release. Noting, then, that gold, like the sparks, is produced by extraction is most
misleading. Gold is produced not by shedding but by transforming the metals.
In short, Jung misreads Gnosticism. Of course, Gnosticism can still be read in
Jungian terms, but psychologically it espouses the opposite of the Jungian ideal.
REFERENCES
Jung, Carl. 1951. “Gnostic Symbols of the Self.” 1968 (1959) Collected Works 9.2. 2nd edn.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 287–321.
——— 1963. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (recorder and ed. Aniela Jaffé; trans. Richard and
Clara Winston). New York: Meridian Books.
——— 1969 (1938/1940). “Psychology and Religion.” Collected Works 11: Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press: 3–105.
551
52
— Robert A. Segal —
———1970 (1928/1931). “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man.” Collected Works 10.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 74–94.
Segal, Robert. 1986. The Poimandres as Myth. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.
——— (ed.) 1992. The Gnostic Jung. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London:
Routledge.
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CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
ELEVATING THE FAMILY IN THE

NATION OF ISLAM: DISCERNING
THE “GNOSTIC FACTOR”
Dennis Walker
S o-called “Black Islam” can be examined as three integrally related Islamic or

quasi-Islamic sects in America: the Nation of Islam led by theological inspirer Wali
Fard Muhammad and prophet-leader Elijah Muhammad (1930–1975), the successor
quasi-Sunni sect launched by Elijah’s son Wallace/Warith Deen Mohammed (1975–),
and the new Nation of Islam conducted by Minister Louis Farrakhan Muhammad
(1933–) since 1978. Over and above my major work on the “American Black Muslim”
phenomenon (2005), I have been recently assessing the extent the three connected
movements were able to build “coherent community” by synthesizing concepts of
the African race, Islam, and Arabic heritage while surreptitiously threading aspects of
white-originated social welfare and social work into their innovative Black nationalist
construction of a new Nation. As builders of religio-national community, the Muslim
movements have checked social disintegration in urban Black America, objectively
(if paradoxically) aiding the human services offered from the United States “system”
to forestall persisting poverty, violence, and social breakdown. Indeed, today a new
era is opening in which Muslims increasingly penetrate US human services whether
as clients or recruited social workers, generating possibilities of synthesis between
the two nationalist traditions. Interestingly, Gnostic elements that belong to the
foundations of the Nation of Islam still have some place in these processes. Here
I discern something of “the Gnostic” factor in developing Black Islamic policies to
elevate the status of women.
T H E SOCIAL COMMISSION O F WAL L ACE FARD AND

ELIJAH MUH AM M AD
The Nation of Islam (NOI) from 1945 to 1975 emancipated the minds of minor
and youthful blacks from the psychic grip of white Anglo racism. On the other hand
it had (pending Allah’s Last Judgement) a lot of cautious respect towards white
power, from which its institutions provided sanctuary, and only by an outside pos-
sibility or by severe provocation would NOI have exploded into Jihad. A covert
reverence for orderly aspects and rational achievements of white America remains
553
54
— D e n n i s Wa l k e r —
detectable, operating as unarticulated model, and along with aspects of Arab Islam
that characterized this dual-(or tri-)cultured sect up to 1975.
Elijah and his “Ministers” repeatedly voiced hatred of the popular black stratum
from which they came and which they were trying to transform. At the 1960 Harlem
Freedom Rally, NOI protagonist Malcolm X held out that God was about to estab-
lish His righteous government on earth. “Mr. Muhammad is trying to clean up our
morals and qualify us to enter into this new righteous nation of God.” The American
so-called Negroes had to recognize each other as brothers and sisters, “stop carrying
guns and knives to harm each other, stop drinking whiskey, taking dope, reefers, and
even cigarettes.”
No more gambling! Save your money. Stop fornication, adultery and prostitution
… Elevate the black woman; respect her and protect her. Let us rid ourselves of
immoral habits and God will be with us to protect and guide us. Then, we must
form a platform that will be good for all of our own people, as well as for others.
As black people we must unite. We must recognize and give intelligent active
support to our political leaders who fight for us unselfishly, sincerely, and fear-
lessly (including clergyman friend-rival Adam Clayton Powell).
(X 1960, in Lomax 1964: 131–2)
The NOI under Fard and Elijah offered a school- system for both children and
teenagers, and also instruction in various subjects for adult women and men in
evening classes. Most schooling systems may hope to give a general shape to the per-
sonalities of the minors whom they teach: the government schools taught secular US
nationalism, successfully Americanizing, we can note for comparative purposes, the
children of Jewish immigrants. Education by the Nation of Islam, though, had less of
an atmosphere of imparting atomized neutral or practical subjects. Instead, religious
Islamic feelings bathed all subjects. All subjects were fused together with an ideology
crafted to break the cycle of social disintegration in ghettoes. Because of their trau-
matizing ghetto environment, those “universities of Islam” had some functions of
reclaiming that went well beyond those of the often-diffident welfare services of
“white” ethnic groups to “blacks.”
Recently converted females, significantly, were ideologically remolded by the
“Muslim Girls’ Training and General Civilization Classes,” lectures mostly attended
on five or six evenings per week. Pre-1975 instruction in the NOI gave a new struc-
ture to the psyches of African-Americans, but through transmitting data from highly
diverse sources. In August 1962, a female choir recited passages from the Savior
Elijah Muhammad, the farewell sermon of the Prophet Muhammad of Arabia, a
speech by Frederick Douglas, and quotations from Macbeth and African American
poet Langston Hughes (Curtis 2006: 157).
This kind of heterogeneity of elements, proposed to generate a future black cultural
nationhood in America, was to have effects over decades. Those young people who had
passed through the sect’s schools and/or evening classes might find themselves with
“spiritual guy-wires” to four futures. The first was the special Gnosticism or Batini
esotericism ensconced in the margins of actual Islam (especially from Isma‘ilism and
Druzism, even Ghulat Shi‘ism; see chs. 31, 32) which the Afghan immigrant Wali Fard
Muhammad had imbibed and passed on to Elijah (Walker 2005: 258–63). With shades
554
5
— The family in the Nation of Islam —
of covert transmission of teachings about the great oscillations between good and
evil in Isma‘ili and Druze macrohistories, enclosed by a cosmogony aeons way back
and a now-approaching End, and with reincarnations through great periods, Elijah
Muhammad taught that over many Ages relations between (largely black, potentially
divine) humanity and an anthropomorphically conceived God who was Self-realizing
himself through successive (Isma‘ili-like) emanations had been aided by divinely sent
black mediators (like the Druze Hudûd) (Walker 2005: 259–63, 273–5). Six thou-
sand eight hundred years ago, however, the “white devils” were genetically engineered
as a Frankenstein-like creation by the devious, self-serving “Jacub” in Arabia, and
they subsequently brought genocidal oppression to the blacks. Necessary retribution
against the whites, indeed extermination, would now soon bring the blacks’ terrible
times to an end, through Allah’s intervention in a Mother Plane (a UFO-like, Ezekiel-
inspired divine vehicle), and restore the right order on earth (Walker 1990: 344–5;
Finley 2009: 91–110, 333–88; and see ch. 3).
The second inspiration, much less idiosyncratic, was clearly the prophetic and
founding-Islamic teachings given by the great Muhammad in the Hijaz. Mainstream or
Sunni Islam and the pan-Arab nationalism of Fard’s and Muhammad Elijah’s time were
hinged together, and in time the significant identification with Islam within America
would bring on the sect’s less strident stance under Warith, as Elijah Muhammad’s
successor, with the forging of wider, “transcontinental” Muslim (largely Sunni)
connections for greater legitimacy (Walker 1990: 355–6, 362–6). Yet, to consider a
third inspiration, from the start NOI’s teaching kept open the legacy of the tradition of
Negro emancipation in America (of civil rights activism through the American system
yet with a partial national consciousness capable of real anger, like that of abolitionist
Frederick Douglas [1818–1895]). With all its fire, though, in teaching Shakespeare in
the 1960s NOI was providing an opening to the aesthetic texture of “white” Anglo-
Saxon culture in the world overall. Poet Langston Hughes would also connect the new
NOI generation to that wider language world, while catching particular experiences of
blacks and some of their special forms of English in the USA.
BLAC K ISLAM’S ATTITUDES TO S O CIAL WO RK AND

FAMILY RECON S TRU CTIO N
In regard to the worsening conditions in the ghettos in the 1970s, young converts who
stayed, but in particular the minors who had passed through the sect’s schools, were
less likely to become involved in criminal acts or violence than others of the same
age and class. The diverse elements for identity that the NOI offered in the 1960s
nourished the right outlook to build positive futures in America. The denunciations
of whites as devils stopped black youth from setting unrealistic expectations on white
institutions (“welfare is farewell”), so that youth had to succeed on their own efforts,
in the face of hostility. Yet, despite its real hatred of some specifics of black subcul-
ture, the NOI might not become so over-Arabized (although a process was under
way) as to cut youth off from the people that begat them, neither in politics (Fredrick
Douglas) nor in culture (Langston Hughes). Yet teaching Shakespeare was a wire
to the culture of England and its offspring the USA so prone to slavery and racism.
Could a coming generation carry through any final cultural rupture, a reaction to the
white devils even to the point of political secession?
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The Muslims’ drive to restore patriarchal families of a middle- Anglo texture

brought benefits of continuity of life, stable intimate community, and improved wel-
fare to hundreds of thousands of African-Americans. Such families fitted them much
more into the ideology of the Anglo-American middle classes, whose trades and
professions all Black Muslim sects tried to duplicate throughout the twentieth cen-
tury behind smokescreen denunciations of “white devils.” Yet these NOI endeavors
to enhance black males have sometimes been narrow-minded and dysfunctional, and
they may not succeed. The constricting new roles that Elijah offered the women who
joined –sewing-machines and home-keeping –were a caricature of nineteenth-century
middle-Anglo conservatism. Under Warith and Farrakhan, the roles for women in and
around the sect have certainly widened, but their priority at the turn into this century
is still with the livelihoods and roles of young males. The reputation of Warith’s sect
among African-American women is that it is the place to go to get married quickly
to a male who has the industriousness to support a wife as he moves upwards in
the bourgeois classes. Farrakhan and his sect, for their part, being closer to Elijah
Muhammad’s mentality, remained rather uneasy about the extent of the careers that
African-American women carved out for themselves after World War II. But, as we
shall see, in retaining the sting of Fard’s and Elijah’s anti-white devils rhetoric (Walker
1993), Farrakhan spoke more of their divine potentiality while affirming their crucial
role in the family as the foil to social disintegration in the ghettos.
Fard and Elijah Muhammad drew converts into the “moral cleansing” demanded
in their formal nationalist discourse in the large cities. The aim was to mint activist
nationalists who would have Anglo-like continuous families, with borders, individu-
alism, and structure. On the other hand, members subjected the individuals they
converted to continuous personal surveillance in mosques: through what was like
crude but incessant social work, they were to progress from conversion to fully fused
membership. It was a technology of the soul that reached far beyond the scope of
mainstream social work’s aims. Western social workers have long deemed the soci-
eties that employ them as on balance valid and that individuals or disparate small
groups, being the side at fault, should adjust to the system for their own wellbeing.
Depression, disturbed families, feelings of hatred or violence towards outside groups,
and addictions tend to be seen as proceeding from the malfunctioning psyches of
the individuals being counseled. In contrast, in NOI communications those running
the current system were branded as white Anglo-Saxon “devils,” and responsible
for the addictions, crime, violence and disorder and prostitution afflicting African-
American populations among whom NOI proselytizers moved and recruited.
UNDER FARRAKHAN: THE TWO S E X E S ,

PATRI ARCHALISM, AND TH E W E L FARE O F M INO RS
Following the death of Elijah, Farrakhan and Warith and their followers often made
themselves sound as though they wanted political confrontations with Anglos,
Jews, and the American system. Yet the opposition to US or Israeli Jews was often
secondary or smokescreens. The true target of these Muslims has been to wipe
out most of the plebeian ghetto lifestyle in order to assemble a new Islamic Black
Nation that will be productive in a law-abiding way. The old drive in the 1950s and
1960s to remold blacks into pious, respectable family men and women like unto
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“middle-brow” Anglos recurred after 1978 in Farrakhan’s new post-Elijah Nation of

Islam. Farrakhan sought to recharge Elijah Muhammad’s radicalism (Walker 1993),
but his social attitudes followed the founder’s old-fashioned tendencies. Farrakhan’s
renowned 1995 Million Man March on Washington could have pushed those huge
numbers marching towards radical political protest against the US system (cf. Baker-
Fletcher 1998), and possibly also a forging of far-reaching new ties with the African,
Arab, and Muslim states and peoples. While Farrakhan did use the global publicity to
attempt the latter, the great meeting had already been structured in advance around
reconstructing families and personal morality, and with somewhat “conventional-
looking” assumptions.
Historically, long-term marriages were not a strong model in black ghettoes in US
big cities. In the early 1930s when Wali Fard Muhammad founded NOI, many of the
lumpen black Americans from the South whom he strove to convert had irregular
sexual lives and fluid families very unlike those of middle-class Anglo-Saxons: and
many of them were functional illiterates. NOI (indeed most black Islamic sects) have
striven to build in Black America humane male-led partnerships of males and females,
in which wives and husbands and their minors stay together and prosper united.
Satan has gone into every nation on earth, into every woman of every people and
once he has destroyed the man’s ability to protect the woman, she has become the
“booty” or prize for the [Satanic = Caucasian] enemy, argues Minister Farrakhan. To
cheers and a standing ovation, he has preached:
For 6,000 years the Woman has been suppressed in most civilizations, but right
now all over the earth women are rising. Rising against the mistreatment of
women by men who do not understand the nature and value of a woman.
This rhetoric might point toward a race-neutral feminism that sees most males every-
where as a single enemy, for he went on:
in India women and girls are the targets of brutal gang-rapes, in the U.S. and
abroad, women are forced into sex-trafficking and in the Middle East and Africa,
women are abused and mistreated by the men.
(Farrakhan [interv. Breakfast Club], 24 May 2016)
But in reality such radicalism is definitely muted by normative American approaches

to the family.
At the start of his ministry in Detroit in 1930, Fard had set up the Muslim Girls’
Training and General Civilization Class (MGT and GCC) for women converts and
women minors, probably affected by Fard’s time with the Theosophical Society, and
there was a parallel Fruit of Islam (FOI) training for males that Elijah continued to
develop up to 1975. These two organizations were meant to gradually build com-
plete surveillance and direction over all male and female members of the sect over the
whole country, a feature doubtless deriving from Fard’s experiences with the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, with control coming to radiate down from the leader Elijah Muhammad
himself in Chicago (cf. Finley 2013: 262–8). To ensure his surveillance and con-
trol over all women in the sect, Elijah appointed his daughter Lonny Muhammad
Supreme Captain of the MGT. Many wives of strong males in the Fruit of Islam were
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58
appointed as supervisors or leaders in the MGT classes with powers parallel to their
husbands’ in the FOI (White 2001; Walker 2005: 405, 563).
The pre-1975 NOI was no Sunday religion to which one could turn up sometimes.
The movement strove for an Islamic Black Nation enclosed in its own enclave economy
and its own discourse and education in order to further keep the members close
together under around-the-clock surveillance as they were being transformed. NOI
women were economically productive. They worked in the MGT bakery managed by
Ethel Sharrief, the wife of the redoubtable Raymond Sharrief, the Supreme Captain
of the Fruit of Islam. The bakery became a nation-wide business with outlets across
the North of the USA.
Thus the classical NOI sought totalitarian control over its women and men. It had
to obliterate the promiscuity, sub-literacy, irregular structure, dishonesty, violence,
and addictions of the urban groups from which it recruited. Females were taught
sewing, cooking, housekeeping, child-rearing, hygiene, reading, writing, weight-care,
and the full covering of their bodies with Islamic modest clothing manufactured by
the women of the sect. They were being made into Anglo-like middle-class competent
women holding off the siege of America’s “white devil system,” and what they saw
as the feckless corruption of the black lumpen-proletarians whom the NOI frankly
excoriated and despised.
For the teenage Wali Fard Muhammad, perhaps born a Sunni Afghan in the village
of Shinkay, esoteric Shi’ite doctrines that he somehow acquired were blended with
pro-Ottoman and pan-Islamic feelings received as a child, the combination becoming
authoritative for his chosen one, Elijah Muhammad. With regard to family policy, it
has reappeared in NOI under Farrakhan, who has been trying to fit African-American
women into home-centered marriages on the basis of Elijah Muhammad’s tenets. In
2006 lectures on “The Value of the Female” and “Woman” (cf. NOI magazine The
Final Call [28 March 2006]), Farrakhan deployed the special Isma‘ili conceptions of
the Creation of the universe with the drive to reconstruct males into heads of nation-
alist families. The husbands’ role is to support their families with outside livelihoods,
while a wife would tend him and the offspring in the home –a blend of Muslim families
in the Middle East and that of fundamentalist WASP Christians in America. For Euro-
American Protestant fundamentalists, Jesus pervades and directs the married families,
while for those Black Muslims in a line from Fard to Farrakhan “Allah” pervades the
household and guides it. The women and male together fulfill a developing “Godhead
motif” reinvented from Isma‘ili concepts that recur in NOI descendent sects.
Traditional NOI thought gave an almost cosmic value to maintaining long-term
families with children. For Elijah and Farrakhan, the Black family was a Divine plan
for the Nation’s procreation. Reconstituting the patriarchal families of Islam is a key
step to end the atomization of individuals in ghetto life and thus welfare dependency.
It is clear that the “successive reincarnations” of NOI have removed the most serious
problems that the US system’s social work and law-keeping bodies are tasked to con-
tain. Possibilities open that Black Muslim bodies and mainstream American social
work could cooperate or exchange personnel or services to make US large cities a bit
better.
All the sects in Black Islam have tried to relate African-American Muslim females
to the prescriptions for family-formation and child welfare in the Qur’an and the
Bible (the Qur’an significantly giving the highest value to the life and welfare of minor
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females because of the old practice of infanticide). In this they have been simultan-
eously influenced by the structures for families that middle-brow Anglo-Saxons and
Anglomorph Euro-Americans sought through the 1940s–1960s. The two models, the
traditional American and the Black Muslims’, have enough congruence to fit together
into a very tough compound.
Now, speaking to a packed women audience on 18 April 2015, Farrakhan claimed
to be carrying forward the Muslim Girls’ Training and General Civilization Class
(MGT and GCC) and the parallel Fruit of Islam (FOI) training for males that Fard
and Elijah developed up to 1975. Farrakhan’s new NOI in post-modernity was
carrying forward the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in rebuilding,
educating, and elevating the Black woman in particular: “Save Our Girls: A Nation
Can Rise No Higher Than Its Woman.”
With elements from the old grandiose religious mythology erected to motivate the
believers, Farrakhan’s classes for males and his MGT weekly classes for women are
social work-like instruments to transform the interactions and relationship of the
two sexes. Although potentially divine, the converted Black Man had been made piti-
fully malfunctional by Satan/the whites, who calculatingly destroyed family among
blacks to atomize and rule them. Women in the sect marry a Black man broken under
White supremacy. NOI women’s MGT lessons will have inculcated in her a detailed
understanding of males and developed in her intricate skills to change them: “your
role is to help that man to come back to his [original] position so you can honor him
and love him and respect him again.” His own first FOI classes taught Farrakhan
specifically how to make himself a better person –with side- guidance from his
young wife, whom the MGT classes had taught “not to respond to me in my fool-
ishness.” Promiscuous, dragon-like male and women converts are comprehensively
restructured in the MGT and FOI into monogamists bent on nuclear families like
middle-class whites who had read “the Good Book” on Sundays in the early post-
War decades. Mainstream social workers try to restructure clients and their families
to some extent, or at least apply pro-forma band-aids, but they also may leave some
margins of plural choices. The NOI’s training, lectures and surveillance of individuals
combine hyper-optimism about changing them with an aura of menace if they try to
slip out of the process or leave the NOI. Government social workers may give more
one-on-one attention to clients and greater looseness or variety of options, but the
programs of Black Muslim groups, nationalist and godly at the same time, act as an
incessant inculcation for life.
Presenting himself as the defender of all women “in the face of injustices and abuses
they face globally,” Farrakhan orated on 18 April 2018 in the context of the scope
feminism was building for itself in US life. Some who attended were emerging young
women who could have won chances in the mainstream. Nicole Ross, 28, admitted
she had a bit of a “feminist streak.” But when she heard the Minister talk about how
the home is the base and the root of a woman’s power that does not end there, it was
powerful, she told The Final Call (May). “There’s a lot of the battling of the sexes
going on and so to be taught to build someone who is broken [i.e., black males], that
was something.” For Isis Graham, 15, a US national Ms. Illinois Jr. Teen, the Minister
raised a lot of key points to help a woman realize her self-worth. “One thing that
stood out to me the most would have to be respecting yourself and respecting others
around you: like Minister Farrakhan said, a woman is just as powerful as a man.”
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In ramming females into some of Elijah’s patriarchal quasi-Islamic molds, though,

Farrakhan has slightly expanded past elements from true Islam. The Holy Qu’ran
explains that woman is “one degree” under the man (2:228), but in 2005 Farrakhan
dismissed “some men who have been stupid to say that ‘we are your superior’ ” on
this scriptural basis. He gave the Qur’anic verse a twist that might clear the way for
wider roles for women. “One degree is a step down in rank explained the Minister,
so if God is a 5-star general, the woman is a 4-star general. The Black woman has
no birth record, she is as old as God Himself, and everything in creation, the woman
had a hand in it.” “The world’s view of the woman is not what God’s view is.” “The
woman’s home is her base, but not necessarily her place,” run reflections of Minister
Farrakhan (Final Call, 21 April 2015). Could this open up more careers for Muslim
black women in public space? At least theoretically, although Farrakhan still wants
his sect to withdraw from the society and economy of the White-dominated world.
In this 2015 speech, Farrakhan still blended references and phrases from the Qur’an
and the Bible, as Elijah had often done to his death in 1975. There are tinges of the
old anthropomorphism: the Holy Qu’ran explains that men and women were created
by and from God of the same essence and being. Once more a possibility is raised that
women might be granted some wider post-modern roles: the creation of woman from
the “rib” of man as explained in the Bible “has been used to justify relegating women
to second-class citizenship … [God] created you from a single being, not from no rib
and many have misused that to show a woman as being crooked and bent.” Instead,
he asserts, the Woman also is created from the same “essence of God,” and, able to
give birth, the Woman is a co-creator with God (Final Call, 22 March 2016).
To be clear, NOI and certain groups more influenced by Sunni Islam established
shelters for women suffering domestic abuse. Some of these have received government
funding and could take in many needy women and their children, communicating
Islam to the non-Muslim females. To guide males to sustain long-term marriages eco-
nomically and not abuse their wives, Farrakhan’s NOI produced tapes and internal
courses for members, and also sequential public seminars for Blacks of all religions.
What the Reverend Llano noted with alarm (2005: 41–2) as “Violence Rallies for
Black Men” attracted up to 20,000 people, and most non-Muslim, he also likened to
the huge Christian Promise Keepers meetings.
For, apart from his hope for Muslim black women one day seeking benefits beyond
the redeeming home and the mosque, Farrakhan also significantly observed (again by
2015) that he had “started” with African-Americans “because we have been destroyed
by our enemies; but this teaching is for all women, not just for Black women.” The
Final Call newspaper (21 April 2015) noted that the women attending his gatherings
“were of different faiths, from different places, and even some were of different
races.” Exactly what the paper meant by “races” here, and which ethnic groupings
had representation, is hard to decide, but we have to appreciate that Farrakhan’s
newer face of NOI is in constant ideological flux. For decades he has even slipped
in some whites into the social life and political projection of the NOI, not to be
taken as “devils,” but members of “my Caucasian family.” If the US system made
itself more congenial to African-Americans, Farrakhan or his successor might allow
women members to issue out more into general US society from their NOI refuge into
a “World” less Satanic, less of a graveyard, than before (Starla Muhammad 2015).
NOI women might then utilize mainstream medical services and social work more,
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and some of them might build individualistic careers out there alongside white and
black females –and males. But this is some way away.
So things are changing. Up to 1975, Elijah Muhammad sought to rehabilitate the
women who joined offered “spiritual and moral development, intellectual pursuits,
proper home and family life, self-love and skills such as sewing, cooking, entrepre-
neurship, and self-defense.” This remains the wording of Farrakhan and his “second”
NOI decades later in a new century: he quotes Elijah on this. The programs for
women members and converts that Farrakhan’s Mosque Maryam offers comprise
women teaching about spiritual values and moral virtues. In the Mosque Maryam in
Chicago women can still “hear an empowering message,” radiating down a “gentle
protectiveness and loving firmness of a father, big brother and protector” (Final Call,
21 April 2015). But NOI programs can now sit “alongside a fashion show, with
clothing designed by and created by Muslim women, a military drill exhibition and a
martial arts exhibition.” These can entice women into a small-scale mini-industry of
textile-manufacture inside the Nation and inculcate female “entrepreneurship” or a
small business family team with a husband and off-spring, bringing continuity in the
function of MGT from Elijah to Farrakhan.
The NOI’s neo-Gnostic batini-connected ideology is quicksilver in the shifting or
alternating meanings it gives to the same words: it has dualities towards its women
(as to its male) members. The NOI had always equipped their women to physic-
ally beat off Caucasians or non-Muslim Blacks who have bad intentions. The April
2015 women’s program had a martial arts demonstration: Farrakhan stressed “they
weren’t playing.” He meant that some of his male recruits, not superhumans as yet,
could lapse back into the crimes of graveyard secular USA. “Men who destroy the
virtue of a woman are worthy of death and any woman who fails in her duty to pro-
tect her children from men they know are abusing them are cowardly” (Twitter 24
May 2015). He had encouraged before the martial skills to deal with adulterers and
incest pedophiles directly, and so the old threatening-sounding stridency has been
kept up, still resisting all temptations of the white devils. As time goes on, a cer-
tain strength is retained from the old millenarian and us-versus-them mentality that
actually turns out to be more effective than government welfare and social work
programs, because the definite challenge to become better can be adapted to chan-
ging, even “post-modern” conditions. Paradoxically, NOI’s radical Gnostic impetus
has brought and continues to bring positive social betterment to the oppressed.
NOI has difficulty surviving against mainstream social work policy and the
competitive reactions of black Christian churches, even in heartlands like Detroit.
Government social work agents, whose orientation presumes a privatizing approach,
can hardly accept the collective NOI challenge that the whole white “system” is evil
(Phillips 1985) and the Manichaean-like religious division of people into two tight
Nations, with God’s and His righteous converts in some sense “fighting” the White
Devils (though this stridency does recurrently recede). Only a rare study, based on
interview work supported by the University of Pennsylvania (Sands, Bourjolly, and
Roer-Strier 2007), addresses this problem with sensitivity, and with some important
interviews. An impressive case of the young woman A’ishah gaining protection from
NOI after she was constantly under threat from youths in a black Christian neighbor-
hood shows that Black Muslim methods can still carry potency. On the other hand,
the “us-against-them” stance in the Farrakhan camp shows signs of softening. And
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meanwhile, Warith in his mollifying policies, and recently using an interesting alliance
with Okolo Rashed (Director of the International Museum of Muslim Cultures,
Georgia), keeps trying to achieve rapprochement between NOI and mainstream
Eastern Muslims, and openly displays greater acceptance of “the American way.”
REFERENCES
Baker-Fletcher, Garth. 1998. Black Religion after the Million Man March: Voices on the Future.
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
Curtis, Edward. 2006. Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam 1960–1975. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Finley, Stephen. 2009. “Re-imagining Race and Representation: The Black Body in the Nation
of Islam.” Doctoral dissert., Rice University, Houston, TX.
—— —2013. “Hidden Away: Esotericism and Gnosticism in Elijah Muhammad’s
Nation of Islam.” April DeConick and Grant Adamson (eds.). Histories of the Hidden
God: Concealment and Revelation in Western Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical Traditions.
Durham, UK: Acumen: 259–80.
Llano, Josh. 2005. Reaching African-American Muslims for Christ. New York: Xulon.
Lomax, Louis. 1964. ‘When the Word is Given…’ A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm
X, and the Black Muslim World. New York: Signet.
Muhammad, Starla. 2015. “A New Woman, a New World.” Final Call, 21 April.
Phillips, Norma. 1985. “Ideology and Opportunity in Social Work during the New Deal.”
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 12 (2): 251–73.
Sands, Roberta, Bourjolly, Joretha, and Dorit Roer-Strier. 2007. “Crossing Cultural Barriers in
Research Interviewing.” Qualitative Social Work (3): 353–72.
Walker, Dennis. 1990. “The Black Muslims in American Society: From Millenarian Protest
to Trans-Continental Relationships.” Garry Trompf (ed.). Cargo Cults and Millenarian
Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements. Berlin: De Gruyter,
343–90.
—— —1993. “Louis Farrakhan’s Black Muslim Nationalism.” Garry Trompf (ed.).
Islands and Enclaves: Nationalisms and Separatisms in Island and Littoral Contexts.
Delhi: Sterling: 71–100.
——— 2005. Islam and the Search for African-American Nationhood: Elijah Muhammad,
Louis Farrakhan, and the Nation of Islam. Atlanta, GA: Clarity.
White, Vibert. 2001. Inside the Nation of Islam. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
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THE EAST (AND BEYOND)

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CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
INNER TRADITION: RECOVERING
THE CHRISTIANITY OF THE EAST
Lynn C. Bauman
T he spiritual roots of the Christian Tradition reach deeply into the life of a first-
century Galilean named Jesus (or Yeshua in his language). Volumes have been
written adjudicating the historical, cultural, religious, and spiritual influences of that
life on the subsequent emergence of the Christian tradition from the first century
onward. Today, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Palestine and the Nag
Hammadi Library in Egypt in the last century (Robinson and Meyer 1988), these
topics have received renewed focus and attention. New and sometimes startling
conclusions have been reached which have far-reaching consequences on the way we
read and understand the historic Christian tradition and how it quickly bifurcated
into two very different and separate streams –the Occidental and the Oriental –with
their own unique and often dissimilar characteristics.
THE B IFURCATION O F CHRIS TIANITY

We can begin to understand this bifurcation process by realizing that from its incep-
tion early Christianity was never a monolithic tradition as we often assumed or have
been led to believe. Its origins are far more diverse and interesting than perhaps we
may have imagined. Now that we possess newly discovered early documents from that
era and have been able to make fresh historical discoveries, we see that Christianity’s
early manifestation was expressed in at least four different interpretive streams, two
of which were predominant in the West and two in the East. Perhaps even this is an
oversimplification, but at least it begins to give us a perspective on that early diversity
which was part of the historical reality of that period.
Remnants of these streams have been preserved in their sacred texts and in the
historic communities that represented and treasured them. They are typically identi-
fied as the Pauline and the Johannine streams of Western interpretation, and less well
known, the Eastern streams of the Jewish (or Jacobean for James, Jacob, or Ya’akov)
and the Thomasine which lingered in Palestinian culture for almost a century, but
which also moved quickly into Oriental and African cultures to the south and east
of Palestine. Today we now know that the various faces of exoteric and esoteric
Christianity are the continuation and maturation of these early interpretations which
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— Ly n n C . B a u m a n —
were rooted in first-century Judaism but which then spread out into the cultures of
the ancient Middle East both east and west.
THE WISDOM AND P RAX IS O F YE S HUA

At the core of these powerful spiritual movements arising out of Palestine was, of
course, the early work (the ministry and teachings) of Jesus (or Yeshua). We now
realize that Yeshua himself emerged out of various pre-first-century communities and
movements in his own unique part of the world. More importantly we can now
see that the early Jewish mystical expressions from before the Common Era deeply
influenced him. He was both a sage and mystic, and this latter designation describes
his personal experience of God. His was not an indirect knowledge nor was trad-
ition simply passed on to him as a part of some earlier transmission imposed by
religious authority. It is clear from his own statements recorded in the various sacred
and scriptural texts of that era that he experienced a form of direct knowing and a
deep personal experience of the divine. By his own affirmations he was, therefore, an
“intimate with God” (a God Lover) and he invoked the divine Presence using the term
Abba (an intimate form for the word father or parent).
To put this understanding in context, we know that Yeshua had contact with the
early mystics of both the region of Galilee and also that of southern Palestine through
his nephew John. We can feel and hear the deep strains of these mystical teachings
coming through his own declarations and embodied in his prayer practice and in his
actions among his own people. He was compassionate and loving toward the citizens
of his world, he taught wisdom to those closest to him, and he brought what he called
“good news” to the poor and the marginalized as well as to the masses based not only
on the wisdom he had received from his own world, but more importantly on his own
visionary seeing and mystical experience (Barnhart 1993; Davidson 1995).
Importantly, Yeshua was also a sage. That was his lineage and vocation. It was the
heritage from which he taught. He transmitted his teachings through proverb and
parable in a form of interiorized Judaism from out of the wisdom tradition he knew.
In his world that genre of knowledge and teaching was called ma’shal – sapiential
sayings and wisdom stories (also called logoi sophon in the Greek-speaking world
of Galilee). Locally, therefore, he was called a mosh’el, that is, a master-teacher of
sacred wisdom through ma’shal. He was, therefore, a wisdom practitioner and a con-
templative. His path and his practice were an expression of the inner traditions of
Judaism expressed often through apocalyptic vision –the praxis of unveiling called
apocalypsis (Barker 1988; DeConick 1996; 2004; 2006; Elior 2004; Zinner 2011a).
In this practice, he taught his students to go alone into their own interior space,
shut the door and communion there in secret with the one he called Abba (Matth
6:6, Gospel of Philip, Analogue 45). It was in this interior space that he listened,
learned, saw, and grew wise. It was from that inner space (which he would later call
the “bridal chamber”) that he spoke the vision of truth he contemplated and from
which he lived the life that he knew deeply, personally, and intimately. This interior
practice was done at a kardial level of awareness. The circles of men and women that
were attracted to him were changed by the power of this teaching and practice. They
too came to know and experience God in a similar manner, beyond the dogmatic and
legal boundaries of conventional religion, which he often described as a barrier. For
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— Recovering the Christianity of the East —
them he was a doorway into that interior space and into the experience of intimacy
within the inner chamber to which he invited them. This core teaching was perhaps
a hidden one because it seems it was only later that many of them fully knew or
realized it.
TH E FORMS OF ALP HA AN D B E TA CHRIS TIANITY

It is impossible, of course, in a few words to fully encapsulate the wisdom of Yeshua’s
central and core teachings. The evidence suggests, however, that his sapiential power
was strong enough to leave a deep and lasting impression not only upon his imme-
diate followers, but also on first-century Palestine and subsequent generations which
followed. When he left the world in his own unique fashion, he left behind students
who had to some degree been initiated and who were both stunned by him, but also
in grief at his loss. Gradually they became interpreters of his sapiential teachings
and began to spread the news of their own experience and of his unique teachings
concerning interiorized Judaism. Over time, however, because these teachings were
separated from their maternal Jewish foundations, things changed. The movement
that he catalyzed did indeed begin to deeply affect the Gentile worlds both East and
West. In the West Christianity became known as Christian Orthodoxy. For histor-
ical reasons we might designate this as “beta Christianity,” because it was actually a
secondary form that followed its primary alpha expression rooted in the Jewish and
Semitic traditions. This first alpha form would eventually flow toward the east and
become known as Oriental Orthodoxy (Daniélou 1964).
Yeshua’s students and interpreters were legion. Starting from Jerusalem they
fanned out across the Middle East in the four cardinal directions. Some stayed Torah-
observant Jews in Palestine under the leadership of Yeshua’s brother Ya’akov (James).
They remained centered in Jerusalem until the destruction of the Temple around 72
CE. Others carried the message of his life and teaching into both Hellenic and Semitic
worlds, establishing communities of followers and students. These two different lin-
guistic and cultural streams became vehicles for his message. The Hellenic (or Greco-
Roman) flowed west into the Occidental, Gentile, and Greek-speaking worlds. The
other streamed east into the Aramaic-speaking worlds of the Orient (Aramaic was, of
course, the mother tongue of Yeshua). These two linguistic and cultural domains put
a deep and lasting stamp on the Jesus-tradition and later Christianity. As they evolved
each turned out to be very different in form and substance from the other.
To the west, almost entirely under the impact of its foremost interpreter, Paul, the
Western tradition became predominately a religion about Jesus, dominated by dog-
matic, theological, and orthodox belief systems. The sacred texts that dominated the
Western World were eventually collected into the Christian canon known as the “New
Testament” (or covenant, as opposed to the Jewish Scriptures which were described
as the “Old Testament”). Paul and John left their individual stamp on that particular
canon. This grew into a formidable instructional and institutional frame known as
the Catholic Church under the aegis of the Roman Empire.
In the East, the oriental streams of Christianity formed much differently. They
continued to carry many of the elements of the Jewish Torah-observant world of
early Christianity, even to non-Jewish Aramaic speakers. This tradition did not focus
exclusively on dogma, as was prevalent in the West, but more on the inner wisdom
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tradition and early vision of Yeshua. There was never an official canon of sacred texts
as there came to be in the West, but there were strands and strains of interpretation
that eventually found their way into loved collections of writings such as the Gospel
of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary [Magdalene], the Gospel of Philip, the “Hymn of
the Pearl,” the Odes of Solomon, and many more (Bauman, Bauman, and Bourgeault
2008; Bauman 2014; cf. Cameron 1982). These were not doctrinal treatises in the
way we come to read the Pauline corpus. Typical of most wisdom traditions, these
texts were largely teachings expressed in metaphoric, parabolic, and poetic form very
unlike the doctrinal treatises of Paul in the occidental canon of Scripture. They sought
to express the teachings of Yeshua concerning his own experience of God, and also
the consequent wisdom of how to live that experience.
So in the West we have the predominantly exoteric tradition about Jesus codified
in the theological formulations of the seven Ecumenical Councils and the Nicene
Creed, most of these admittedly formulated in what was by then the New Rome,
Constantinople, in the eastern part of the empire (a place, of course, that would yield
its own deep spiritualities [Louth 1981; 1983]). Predominant in the decisive East,
however, is a far more esoteric emphasis on the religion and wisdom of Yeshua. This
is a distinction that has often been overlooked, but now with the recent discovery of
these Oriental texts, largely from the Nag Hammadi library, not only can this inner
tradition be shown to exist with considerable certainty, but also the characteristic
features of that very different form of Oriental Christianity can be seen. Many con-
temporary scholars are making a good case for this new and insightful understanding
concerning these early Eastern and Western divisions of Christianity and the con-
sequent effects on the exoteric and esoteric modes of these two primary traditions
(Barker 2004; 2011; Bütz 2005; 2010; Chilton, 2000; Chilton and Neusner 2001;
Davies 1983; DeConick 1996; 2004; Pagels 2003; Zinner 2011a).
ESOTERISM AND THE INNE R TRAD ITIO N

It is true, of course, that many of the features of the inner tradition (or of the “mys-
teries” or musterion as they were taught by Yeshua) made their way into the West (Matt
13:11, Mk 4:11, Lk 8:10, with Clement 1993; Tabor 2006). However, these teachings
were often suppressed in favor of an exoteric orthodoxy which sometimes considered
them heretical to formulations of Western dogmas about Jesus. Consequently they
often went underground, remaining hidden for centuries in variant forms. In the
Oriental world, however, since there was no “official dogma” promulgated by a state-
supported church under the Roman Empire, there was always a diversity of expres-
sion that represented independent bodies of Christian thought. These were indigenous
to their own respective communities in the lands that we know today as Syria, Iraq,
Persia, Afghanistan, Armenia, Arabia, Yemen, Ethiopia, India, Tibet, and China.
Strands of this independent wisdom teaching made their way throughout the Orient
and into Africa, interacting positively along the way with other sacred traditions such
as Zoroastrian, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Ethiopian Judaism. Christianity
was in dialogue with these respective worlds until it reached western China, South
India, central Arabia, and Ethiopian Africa. Christianity was not necessarily in direct
competition with these other faith traditions, but often in respectful dialogue which
gave rise to many other texts unknown to us in the West such as the Jesus Sutras
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of western China and independent canon of Ethiopian Orthodoxy (Baumer 2006;

Palmer 2001; Riegert and Moore 2003; Tabor 2006; Zibawi 1995).
Living today as we do at the edges of these two vast oceans of culture and tradition,
we are able to receive and benefit from their ancient treasuries that are now reaching
us in the modern era. Most of our readers here would be heirs to the Occidental
traditions of Christianity in the West. But now we are also learning to listen deeply to
Yeshua as a wisdom teacher coming to us from interiorized Judaism out of his home-
land in the Orient. We also have access to those Oriental and African communities
that preserved what for us in the West are new and heretofore unknown elements
of his teachings. We are able to listen afresh to his original wisdom spoken to and
through these ancient Oriental worlds. Many of these have been found for us at Nag
Hammadi or other parts of Egypt, such as the Gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Philip
(cf. Leloup 2005; 2006); but some like the Hymn of the Pearl, the Odes of Solomon,
and the Books of Enoch have arrived from other ancient libraries in the Far and
Middle East and from Africa.
Up until this past century, the other half of Christianity in its alpha and Semitic
form has been largely hidden from or unknown to us. Except for contemplative
and mystical upwellings within the Western World which bear similar marks and
characteristics harkening back to the mysteries and original wisdom of Yeshua,
Oriental Christian thought had remained remote or non-existent. Upon closer exam-
ination of these two very different and diverse streams which are now available to
us, we can see characteristic features that continued to shape Christianity through
the subsequent generations in each of these regions of the world. Syrian and Assyrian
Orthodoxy in the eastern Mediterranean and Persia, Ethiopian Orthodoxy in Africa,
and the Mar Thomas traditions of South India remain vibrant, living communities to
this day preserving many elements that in the West we did not know (e.g., Alfeyev
2000; Colless 2008; Bütz 2005; 2010; Baumer 2006; cf. also Fideler 1993).
A SUMMARY REVIEW OF CUR RE NT U ND E RS TAND ING

A summary of the characteristic features of these two very different Christian worlds,
occidental and oriental, in a succinct way can be seen in Figure 52.1. For obvious
reasons we are mostly familiar with the contours and outlines of the Western forms
of Christianity: Greek and later Russian Orthodoxy (and their satellite communities),
Latin or Catholic Christianity, and the historical emergence of Protestant values and
ideals coming out of Latin Christianity. In all these various forms certain norms and
conditions predominate, largely influenced by the power and supremacy of the Roman
Empire, which helped to shape their histories. We can see that a certain Greco-Roman
mind-set prevailed in Christianity’s early formation in the West and, almost unseen,
moved Christian focus in a particular and unique direction. Knowing now that this
was a secondary Gentile form and created within the walls of the Roman Empire, this
can help us understand today how we in the West came to be who we are and what
might be missing from our perspective.
Briefly we can say that under the aegis of the Roman Empire, Western Christianity
was dominated by a need for uniformity of doctrine (right belief about Jesus), and
conformity in rites and polity to the institutional establishment. Right beliefs about
Jesus and compliance to the Church’s ecclesiastical norms, laws, and strictures has
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Beta
Early Christianity Alpha
30−130 CE
Occidental Christianity Oriental Christianity
Greco-Roman (Gentile) Syrian-Asian (Semitic)
Pauline Christianity Syrian Christianity

(Greek) (Syriac)
Theological Non-Torah Observant

Propositional language Focus on the wisdom
Concrete and Certain Historical teaching of Yeshua
events Inner Observance and
Focus on the final Events of Ascetical Ideal
Jesus’ Life and the doctrinal Poetic and Imagistic
meaning of his death. Use of symbol and
Rational Oriented to dogma Symbolic
metaphor
Thought Teaching about Jesus. Thought
Visionary Events
Linear Empirical Impulse Non-linear
Oriented toward wisdom
Logical
Thomas Visionary Impulse Trans-logical
Rational Paul Non-rational
Propositional Metaphoric-
Literal- MM symbolic
historical Sapiential Seeing Image
realism Luke and Intimate Mythic
Monological Knowing Narrative
Philip
Prefers prose Dialogical
language to Prefers poetic
poetic speech
speech Psalms and
Pauline Proverbs,
letters as James Aphoristic
example. Mark and
Interiorized Judaism Visionary .
John Peter
Matthew
Johannine Christianity Jewish Christianity

(Greek Coptic) (Aramaic)
The project of western
Sees Jesus as the Savior of all Christianity is salvation. Torah-Observance
humanity The salvation of the soul Loyalty to the Teacher
Experiences Jesus as the Cosmic based upon belief. Emphasis on the Messiah
Christ. The focus of the East is upon Ascetical Ideal
Apocalyptic Seeing enlightenment. Practical Ethics
Spiritual and inner orientation The journey toward Real World Experience.
Enlightenment based on
Belief in Name of Jesus Law and Order Impulse
inner revelation.
Gnostic Impulse
In the West: assistance
comes from without—
through the Savior.
Beta Forms of Christianity In the East: assistance from Alpha Forms of Christianity
The Christ-Movement within—the Teacher. The Jesus-Movement
Praxis: through the
Church—West,
Through personal
discovery—East.
Figure 52.1 Early Christianity 30–130 CE
always been a predominating feature of Western Christianity. In the East there was
much less emphasis on conformity to a common doctrine or rite. Again, we can now
see that more emphasis was placed upon a Christian form of sapiential transmission
and the visionary experiences which accompanied it. This teaching and experience
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were, of course, interpreted in multiple ways in dialogue with the peoples, cultures,
and traditions they encountered. To many in the East the Christian mission was
thought of as the “Religion of Light” since its focus was upon inner revelation, real-
ization, and enlightenment (Palmer 2001).
Arriving in our lifetimes, this fresh understanding challenges us to rethink our
own approach to the practice of Christianity and its inner tradition. Christian spir-
ituality cannot be seen primarily as conformity to the institutional and dogmatic
norms of occidental Christianity, which became its singular authority developing
under the Roman aegis (though admittedly not without inner differences). Instead
we are being challenged now to become contemplative seekers and wisdom
practitioners listening to these new voices that have opened up to us from the East
in our own day. Inner Christianity in all of its occult or hidden conditions in both
East and West is now openly available to us and we can have access to our own
direct (gnostic) knowledge and experience of its ancient, sophianic guidance. We
can again not only become followers and practitioners of the original wisdom of
Yeshua, but also wisdom practitioners of a unique unitive form of Christian per-
ennial wisdom (Sophia perennis) preserved for us in the East ([Anonymous Monk
of the West] 2004; Boyarin 2013; Bruteau 1995; Cheetham 2003; 2005; 2012;
DeConick, 1996; 2004; Zinner 2011b).
This particular Oriental thrust was always at the gnostic heart of Christianity no
matter how it might have been expressed philosophically or theologically in later
generations. Also the Oriental world with its emphasis upon gnosis (or direct experi-
ence or knowledge in the tradition of Yeshua) found a home in the world of Islam,
and the connection between interiorized Judaism and inner-wisdom Christianity was
somehow foundational to later expressions of the inner tradition of Islam within
the various Sufi lineages. Many of the same elements that existed in the wisdom
of Yeshua took root there and have been faithfully transmitted into our own con-
temporary culture through their teachings and practice (Ernst 1977; Corbin 1978;
2005; Cheetham 2003; 2005; 2007; 2012; Helminski 1992; Nasr 1981; 2007; Zinner
2011a). So now by means not only of the availability of Sufism in our day (Khalidi
2001; cf. Aslan 2013), but also with the new and early texts recovered from the
Orient, we are able to more fully assess the impact of the ancient wisdom traditions
which are at the foundations of inner Christianity. We are also able to understand
their essential insights to strengthen esoteric Christianity in our own day and restore
it to its proper place as the foundation of all possible exoteric manifestation.
THE VISIONARY TOP O G RAP HY O F THE

ORIENTAL TRAD ITIO N
For a better understanding of what we have received from these Oriental texts and
the inner traditions of Oriental Christianity, we perhaps need a fuller explanation of
its visionary topography. As an interpretive strategy in our own day, this will not only
give us clearer access to the original wisdom of Yeshua contained in these ancient
documents, it will help us understand and embrace the early forms of unitive vision
which shaped the three Abrahamic faiths. In Yeshua’s day this would have been avail-
able to him through the manifestations of early Jewish mysticism which began after
what some scholars have called the Axial Age occurring centuries earlier. (In 1949
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Karl Jaspers made this term popular.) The Axial Age is perceived to be a worldwide
phenomenon which appeared across the globe and moved humanity away from its
exclusive dependence upon “conventional religion” (based upon traditional religious
rules and conventions that governed society according to established authority), and
toward “enlightenment religion” that began to perceive Ultimate Reality in terms
of a vertical axis. The spectrum of this new axis bridged between two poles, divine
transcendence and contemplative immanence. Religious thought expanded out of its
horizontal, social, and historical conventions, and opened out onto a new axis and
path of enlightened realization.
Such a broader religious and spiritual understanding appears to have taken root
some five centuries before the Common Era and was given symbolic expression
in many ancient cultures of the Far and Middle East, including the prophetic and
wisdom traditions of the Hebrew peoples prior to the era of Yeshua. It was from
this sapiential and mystical lineage that Yeshua learned and spoke, but based also
upon his own direct experience of both transcendence and immanence. Not only did
he make use of this wider body of enlightenment tradition, he also appears to have
added new and important insights to it (extending and developing his own metaphors
in a unique first-century Jewish style using compelling aphorisms and parables, many
of which appear to be unique to him). Troubled by the fact that he did not simply
repeat the wisdom with which they were already familiar, but added compelling new
material (much of which seems to have been collected in the Gospel of Thomas), his
contemporaries often objected to his teachings (Matt 13:54–8, Mk 6:1–4).
It is clear from the recently discovered Nag Hammadi texts that Yeshua’s teachings
represented a form of living wisdom that could not simply be understood intellec-
tually, but had to be grasped and lived inwardly if it was to be experienced as trans-
formative (cf. Grant and Freedman 1960; Davies 1983; Patterson 1993; Patterson
et al. 1998; Meyer 1992; 2003; 2006; 2007; DeConick 2007). This distinction is
often forgotten in conventional forms of occidental Christianity where salvation is
based upon right beliefs and correct doctrine (orthodoxy). Typically in the West we
are content to know the facts of our faith, its correct theological formulations, or
now perhaps to be familiar with the latest textual, historical or literary criticism that
scholars debate. We often resist experimenting with the teachings of our sacred texts
in such a way that we know its wisdom at the level of lived experience. Congruent
with Jewish practice, Yeshua focused his attention upon how to practice and live
wisdom at the level of the heart. This was at the praxiological center of Yeshua’s ori-
ginal wisdom.
THE IMAGINA L RE AL M
This Oriental Christian worldview with its emphasis on interiorized Judaism and
inner-wisdom tradition occupies a very different geographical and spiritual space from
those common perspectives held in the West. For Westerners, this can be very strange
territory (perhaps even described as an alien topography) both literally and spiritu-
ally. What is important to realize, however, is that Oriental vision is not simply about
geographical or even intellectual topography, but more importantly it is situated in a
“topos of vision” –a visionary topography that many have described as the “imaginal
realm” (Cheetham 2003; Corbin 1976; Shayegan 1995). To understand that realm
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accessed through visionary seeing (and its spiritual significance in interpreting these
texts), we must situate ourselves spiritually in that same terrain. To have hermeneut-
ical access to the sacred literature of the Christian Orient, we must begin to see and
learn from its same visionary perspective.
Clues to that visionary topography (and its metaphysical coordinates) are found in
a careful examination of the various forms of traditional wisdom that come from the
ancient Middle East. The ascent codes of early Jewish Merkavah mysticism and the
angelology of the Persians, for example, help to make that topography more explicit.
The terrain that is being described by these traditions is the territory between time
and eternity (or the finite and the Infinite), commonly described as the relationship
between heaven and earth. The juxtaposition between these realms situates a third
realm, namely Yeshua’s Kingdom of God, from which we are said to have sprung
prior to our physical arising. This Kingdom exists as a sacred geography transcendent
to but including space-time, which is also the “kingdom within” intimately connected
to the heart of our own inner core (cf. Besserman 1977; Keizer 2009).
It is a territory which can be known to us now on earth through direct personal
experience and individual participation as we make our way back to our Source on
the journey of eternal return (Campbell 2008; Eliade 1965, with “Hymn of the Pearl”
from the apocryphal Acts of Thomas). This Kingdom is a realm (a sacred time and
space) that stretches between the Alpha and Omega known also as time and eternity.
In this in-between land, the Kingdom of God unfolds at precisely the place where time
and eternity meet. It is also constituted by multiple dimensions and angelic domains,
the levels of which comprise a totality that is called in Greek “the All” (ta panta), but
in Aramaic “the Kingdom” (malkuth, malkutah). Yeshua is clear, this Realm is not
only “out there” and transcendent to space and time, it is “in here” immanent and
available to us within the heart. It is a territory to which we belong and can at least
partially inhabit while we live during our sojourn on earth. This imaginal topography,
therefore, is not only transcendent to us, it is also immanent and personal within us.
Yeshua, the Master of wisdom, directs us toward that Kingdom and away from the
duality at the periphery of our normal world. He calls us to oneness with its Center,
which is also located at our own center.
The Oriental streams of Christianity are perfectly aligned to this topography, not
as an abstraction or set of dogmatic beliefs, but as a specific region or realm (a topos)
composed of non-local and non-temporal coordinates stretching between Ultimate
Reality and temporality. Working within the river of time, Yeshua calls us to stand
up out of the human world (the socially constructed kosmos of the horizontal axis)
on our “own two feet” and become a unified being aligned along the vertical axis
(Gospel of Thomas [log.] 16, 28, 49). His is the voice of the Presence that awakens
us and sets our world ablaze with fire and light in order that we might discover the
true treasure buried within, and secure the Pearl that is our own becoming. His is
the wisdom that will help us realize our theandric or theanthropomorphic destiny. In
the west this was called theosis –the perfect union of the human and the divine, also
known as deification or divinization (Clement 1993).
Speaking to us from this timeless and universal place of seeing, in the early trad-
ition of Oriental Christianity, Yeshua calls his students to awaken to their own inner
reality. This truth about ourselves and our origins was, he said, the original gift given
to each of us at the beginning when we were called forth from the Father’s presence
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before we donned the shirt of the physical body and fell into the density of space and
time (GosThom 18, 19, 49, 77, 84, 103). Yet it is precisely there that human beings
come to know their meaning, the value of their origins, and the true Self which lies
at the core of any known self. The Gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Philip say that
Yeshua, as the Awakener, Life-Giver, and Bringer of Light, will not rest until we are
Culturally Interpretive
Streams of Christianity
Occidental Christianity Oriental Christianity
Greco-Roman (Gentile) Syrian-Asian (Semitic)
Greco-Roman Syriac-Persian
Christianity Christianity
Thomas
Paul
MM
Luke
Philip
James
Egyptian-Coptic Mark
Jewish-Aramaic
Christianity Christianity
John Peter
Matthew
Beta Forms of Christianity Alpha Forms of Christianity

The Christ-Movement The Jesus-Movement
Figure 52.2 Culturally interpreted streams of Christianity
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once again unified, enlightened, and realized. Such an awakening into realization will
not have been a waste of “time.” It will be the wisdom we each find in and through
our temporal journey.
This early inner tradition sees that it is often through the pain of longing for our
original homeland that we are aroused from the sleep of ignorance that has stolen
from us the truth about our true nature and origin. We believe we are one thing, but
the truth is we are another while we search endlessly in the wrong topography to find
satisfaction for the hunger and thirst that we feel. According to the inner Oriental
tradition of early Christianity, the antidote for this longing does not lie outside our-
selves, but is buried and concealed within as both treasure and Pearl. Accordingly,
Yeshua will not only awaken us from ignorance and sleep but will lead us to the dis-
covery of the truth about our true Self along a path that leads to Life. Once we find
the truth about ourselves (our true nature), we can begin to slip free from the bonds
that have held us in ignorance and darkness. We will then stand naked before the One
whose Presence floods us and the world around us with original Light. As we begin to
discern the Face of the One whose love, longing, and compassion have always com-
pelled us, and invoke that Name, we will transcend ourselves and find a path across
the fierce landscapes of our exile on a journey of eternal return to our homeland.
In summary, this visionary sense of human origins and destiny, and the journey
between them, is at the heart of the powerful and positive view of humanity’s purpose
and reason for existence. Much more can be said about each of the three stations of
that progression (pre-eternal origin, journey in time, and return to the Source). Our
reorientation (metanoia) towards that Light is the precondition for possibility of the
return journey home again. The Good News of this high hope, positive valuation, and
visionary seeing shared with the cultures and peoples of the Orient in the lands east
of Palestine describes a fresh understanding of the teachings of Yeshua, who was for
them then, and for us now, the Master of unitive wisdom.
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CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
GNOSIS IN BĀBISM AND GNOSTIC

SIGNS IN BĀBĪ TALISMANS
Denis M. MacEoin
B abism was the precursor of Baha’ísm, but unlike its now very widespread
successor it began as a highly chiliastic and militant affair during Iran’s Qajar
dynastic period, even bent on waging holy war to secure the abrogation of the Islamic
order and bring in a new messianic (Mahdist) dispensation. Centered on Sayyid ‘Alī
Muhammad Shīrāzī, the Bāb (1819–1850) or the “Gate” foreshadowing the coming
of “He whom God shall make manifest” (The Twelfth Imam), the original core group
of converts in his new dispensation from Spring, 1844, were all middle-or low-
ranking ‘ulamā (clerics) recruited exclusively from the ranks of the semi-heterodox
Shaykhi school of Shi’ism, to which the Bāb himself was affiliated. As the movement
spread, converts were made outside the circle of Shaykhism, and the provincial Bābī
leaders of the late 1840s included important local ‘ulamā, such as Sayyid Yahyā
Dārābī in Nayrīz, and Mullā Muhammad ‘Alī Zanjånl in Zanjān. At the same time,
Shīrāzī himself and some of his early converts, including members of his own family,
were not ‘ulamā, but rather laymen with an intense interest in religious matters and
a smattering of theological and philosophical knowledge (Amanat 1981). Although
the leadership of the sect remained firmly in the hands of ‘ulamā, lay members played
a greater role within it than they could have done in the wider context of official
Shi‘ism, and as time passed an increasing number of merchants, urban workers, and
peasants affiliated themselves in some degree to the movement (Momen 1983).
It is clear from some early Bābī writings that a major preoccupation of many
who accepted Shīrāzī’s claims was the possibility of dispensing with rational proofs
or knowledge in religious matters. In an important but hitherto neglected Bābī trea-
tise (Anonymous [but by the Bābī heroine Fatima Baraghani Qurrat al –‘Ayn?], in
Sūrat-i nivishtijāt va āthār-i ashāb-i awwaliyya-yi amr-i a‘lā [Baha’i Iranian National
Archives, Ms 80], dating from the early period (about 1846), the author condemns
those who depend on proofs such as the Qur’an and sunna for their knowledge
(ma‘r(fa) of “the new word” (p. 217). By way of contrast, the same writer praises the
earliest followers of the Bāb for having believed without proofs (p. 224), and urges
the “brethren” to “abandon those imaginations which you have conceived and which
you have named ‘knowledge’ ” (p. 244). The same treatise stresses the value of the
organs of the heart (fu’ād) in reaching true understanding, and emphasizes spiritual
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— Denis M. MacEoin —
love as the prerequisite for Gnosis (pp. 246, 293). This concern for pure knowledge
was exhibited by both laymen and mullahs, and owed much to the Shaykhī origins
of the movement, in which traditional Islamic preoccupations with ‘ilm (external
knowledge) and ma‘rifa (mystical knowledge) were given an unusual emphasis (cf.
Rosenthal 1970: 142–54).
From its inception, Shaykhism had been particularly concerned with the problem
of securing uncorrupted and comprehensive knowledge. Shaykh Ahmad ibn Zayn al-
Dīn al-Ahsā’ī (1753–1826) (MacEoin 1979: 67–95), upon whose teachings the school
was based after his death, was one of the most brilliant Shī‘ī theologians of his day.
Although his major works were concerned primarily with aspects of theosophical
Shi‘ism, he also wrote at length on most areas of orthodox Shi‘ite doctrine, law and
practice. His chief disciple and successor, Sayyid Kāzim Rashtī (d. 1844), emphasized
the universality of al-Ahsā’ī’s knowledge, enumerating some 30 sciences in which he
was adept (Dalil al-mutahayyirin [1859 edn., vol. 1], pp. 13–16). These include the
main occult sciences of astrology, alchemy, numerology, gematria, divination, and
related disciplines. The breadth of al-Ahsā’ī’s knowledge, however, was less significant
for his followers than the source from which it was supposed to come. He himself
was regarded as the chief representative in his time of a central strand in the recently
dominant Usūlī tradition, in which non-rational modes of understanding in religious
matters were emphasized (Amanat 1981: 23– 9). The possibility that knowledge
could be acquired, not through learning or imitation of the clerical elite, but through
intuitive revelation (kashf) involving direct contact with supernatural agencies in the
interworld between heaven and earth was for many Usūlī scholars a necessary cor-
ollary to the use of reason in the pursuit of the traditional sciences. Al-Ahsā’ī went
much further than any of his contemporaries in claiming more or less perpetual access
to supernatural sources of knowledge, thus:
The “ulamā” derive their knowledge one from the other, but I have never followed
in their way. I have derived what I know from the [Twelve] Imāms of guidance,
and error cannot find its way into my words, since all that I confirm in my books
is from them and they are preserved from sin and ignorance and error. Whoso
derives (his knowledge) from them shall not err, inasmuch as he is following them.
(Sharh al-fawā’id [1818] [Tabriz(?) 1856], vol. 2, p. 4)
This knowledge was, moreover, transferable. In speaking of his successor, Sayyid

Kāzim Rashtī, al-Ahsā’ī emphasized his own role as a medium for transmitting div-
inely inspired knowledge, that Rashtī “has learnt what he knows orally from me,
and I have learnt orally from the Imams, and they have learnt from God without the
mediation of anyone” (quoted in Kirmani 1960–1961: 71). Later Shaykhi leaders,
notably Karim Khan Kirmani (1809–1870), first shaykh of the Kerman branch of
the school, tried bypassing al-Ahsā’ī in claiming direct knowledge from God for
themselves. Karim Khan announced that he dictated from God’s eternal Book of
Knowledge: “The visible book I am writing with my hand is the copy of that Book
written by God Himself” (quoted in Bayat 1982: 77), or, in other words, he obtained
all his knowledge from the Family of Muhammad (i.e., the Imāms) with whom all
sciences relative to this world and the next, to past and future, were to be found in
their correct form (Ibrahimi [1977]: 58, 360–87). This helps explain Karim Khan’s
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own confidence to write on an extraordinary range of topics, from medicine to optics

to the occult sciences.
The Bāb, Sayyed ‘Alī Muhammad Shīrāzī, began his career with claims very similar
to these (MacEoin 1983: 16–19; 2009: 173–202). In his early writings, he describes
himself as the “gate” (bāb) of the hidden Twelfth Imām, sent by him as his “Proof and
Remembrance to men,” in order to prepare them for his imminent return. His writings
are “revealed” to him by the Imam, who has received them from God, or in other
terms the Imam inspires the Bāb with what God has inspired him (Shīrāzī, Qayyūm al-
asmā’ [Browne Coll., Ms F11], fols. 4b-5b, 29b, 60b, 196b). One of the Bāb’s leading
followers, Qurrat al-‘Ayn, a female scholar who was effectively head of the Bābīs in
Iraq (see above), writes in letters of how, in every age, God reveals “the bearer of the
Knowledge of the Unseen” (hāmil-i ‘ilm-i ghayba), and why her recipients should now
recognize that the Bāb is “the bearer of divine Knowledge” (hāmil-i ‘ilm-i rabbāniyya)
and that there is no knowledge outside the “Remembrance” of his teaching or what
“he beheld within himself” (untitled treatise [possess. N. Nazari], pp. 12, 16; Sūrat-i
nivishtijāt, pp. 288–9). These assertions chime with the Bāb’s claims to come, as in
his most famous work, the Bayān-i Fārsī (Persian Explanation) (1847–1848) (pub.
Tehran, n.d. [Nicolas, 4 vols.])
In 1848, the Bāb, possibly encouraged by Qurrat al-‘Ayn’s increasing emphasis on
the advent of an age of inner truth succeeding that of outward observance, proclaimed
himself to be the hidden Imām in person. Using this as a starting-point, he went on
to develop his claims in a radical manner, describing himself as a manifestation of the
Universal or Primal Will empowered to abrogate the religious dispensation of Islam
and to usher in a new revelation. As such, he was not so much in contact with divine
knowledge as its source, but in himself the cause of the entire Creation, and the one
who had sent all the previous prophets and their books. Thus he could reveal not only
material knowledge, but also Gnosis located in the interworld (barzakh) or the celes-
tial realm of Hūrqalyā (Bayān-i Farsi 2.1, 8–9; Kitāb-i panj sha’n [1850?] [Walbridge]).
What was the content of this supernatural knowledge he claimed to make known
in his writings? In the broadest sense, it differs little from most other systems of eso-
teric knowledge in Sufism or extreme Shi‘ism, in that it purports to reveal the inner
meaning (bātin) and structure of exoteric reality and, in particular, the true signifi-
cance of expressions of that reality in conventional Scriptural terminology. The Bāb
is especially concerned to uncover the meaning behind eschatological concepts, such
key ones as resurrection, the grave, the questioning of the dead, death itself (and life),
the hour, the bridge, the book, and so forth (cf. Corbin 1960), which he reinterprets
in an original allegorical manner within the framework of an elaborate metaphys-
ical system. The Bāb’s view of the world is rooted in a subtle vision of existence as
structured according to a series of correspondences between names and the realities
underlying them, in patterns made familiar from Sufi, Hurūfī, Bektāshī, and related
speculations.
This system of correspondences is linked in a unique way to the Bāb’s theory of
knowledge in general, much as the idea of kashf (“revelation of the heart”) is central
to Ibn al-‘Arabi’s ontology (Izutsu 1966: 73–4). A knowledge of the realities lying
behind words and letters is not merely part of a more comprehensive knowledge, but
serves as the key to such a knowledge, and forms the most distinctive feature of the
Bāb’s revelation of hidden truth. In one of the last sections of the very late major work
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Kitāb-i panj sha’n, God is credited with the following statement: “I have created the
letters and made them the keys of every science (mafātīh kulli ‘ilm) ([Tehran(?) edn.],
p. 405). He then goes on to address all things, saying,
Consider everything from the most exalted heights to the lowliest atom: you shall
behold it all in the twenty-eight letters, just as you have beheld all the letters in it;
and you shall behold all the spirits of the letters in their spirits.
Some lines later, He continues:
I created an essence of hidden and concealed knowledge, and I stored it up behind

the veils of the unseen from the beginning that has no beginning until now …
We did not see any servants on whom to send down that knowledge, and so We
kept it hidden in Our presence until now … But We taught (it to) the Thrones of
the Reality and then to the first believers in every revelation, and We commanded
them to conceal (it). But now, since We have observed in this Resurrection that
the names of all (things) have become Our tokens, We have desired to show
bounty towards them through this knowledge, as an act of grace on Our part.
(p. 405, cf. p. 422)
This knowledge or science is, of course, the science of gematria and, in particular,
the science of letters as expressed in the construction of talismanic devices. In a later
section of the Panj sha’n, the Bāb, now writing in his own person, explains the import-
ance of this knowledge and provides a brief summary of what it entails.
Among the bounties bestowed by God on the Point of the Bayān (i.e., the Bāb as
Point of the Universal Will from which all things originate) is the knowledge of all
things in a single soul, so that he may behold the Creation in the world of letters,
with the eye of certitude. This is a perfect proof unto all men, like the verses. It was
one of those things hidden in the divine knowledge that was not sent down until
now, and it is more glorious than any other knowledge. All the (holy) books were
sent down and shall be sent down on the basis of this knowledge … In brief, all
things are confined to the twenty-eight letters (of the alphabet). Likewise, the cre-
ation of all things is confined to the meanings contained in these letters. God has
collected together these letters in eleven degrees within His knowledge (i.e., eleven
degrees corresponding to the sum of the letters hā’ and wāw, representing exist-
ence or huwiyya), and has established them as the talisman (haykal) of the Primal
Will (mashiyyat-i awwaliyya), which is the Primal Man (insān-i awwal). The out-
ward form of the talisman is the hā’ (=5), while its inward nature is the wāw (=6).
[This makes the two-letter word huwa, meaning He –God –in Arabic.] He then
created eighteen talismans in the shadow of this talisman, within the ocean of
names (i.e., in the world of the divine names). Nor can they become twenty, for
the utmost limit of the number of the names is the name mustaghāth (= 2001).
(pp. 446–7)
The meaning of this rather obscure passage is made somewhat clearer a few
lines later, when the Bāb states that this knowledge has only been revealed so that
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— G n o s i s i n Bāb i s m —
the “guides of the Bayan” may be enabled to prove to others how the whole of
the Qur’an is contained in a single point (p. 447, cf. p. 434). In Shī‘ī tradition, the
point is identified with the first of the twelve Imans, Alī. A related and highly rele-
vant tradition had it that “knowledge is a single point which the ignorant have
multiplied.”
According to the system elaborated by the Bāb in the Persian Bayān, the Primal
Point from which all things originate is the Universal Will, which first manifests itself
in the form of nineteen letters, the numerical equivalent of the divine name al-wāhid
(the One). In the religious sphere, this is expressed by the appearance of the Point in
the person of the manifestation of the Universal Will, followed by his first eighteen
disciples, the first things to be created in each great cycle of time. When nineteen of
these wāhids have been brought into being, “all things” (kullu shay’ = 361) are sym-
bolically created. This process is again reflected in the structure of the Bayān as a text
(nineteen sections of nineteen chapters), or the Bābī year of nineteen months, each of
nineteen days.
In the Kitāb-i panj sha’n, however, the Bāb describes this process in a rather more
complex way, using as the basis of his system the concept of the Primal Will as a tal-
isman or temple (haykal), a notion that can be found in the Persian Bayān, where God
says, “there is nothing whatsoever whose decree does not return to this human tal-
isman (haykal-i insānī), which has been created at My command. And that talisman
returns by degrees until it reaches My Prophet” (Bayān-i Fārsī 2.1). This procession
of talismans is illustrated in the Panj sha’n (p. 412) by the case of Muhammad, who is
the “first talisman,” followed by the second, ‘Alī. Although the talisman of ‘Alī and his
inner being were created by Muhammad, ‘Alī nevertheless possessed what was sent
down by God in the Qur’an, and this was true of each of the succeeding talismans
through to the nineteenth.
This concept is not restricted to Muhammad and his successors, however, as the
following passage shows:
You, O all things, had your origin in a single individual and you shall return to
a single individual. You shall recognize that individual, for it is the throne of the
manifestation of God and the talisman of talismans (haykal al-hayākil) in the tal-
isman of God … Compare this by way of analogy to the sun, then consider the
fruits of such an analogy. It shall be your salvation in every revelation and your
guidance during every period of inner truth. Whenever the sun of reality rises up,
it is but a single sun, and whenever it sets, it is (still) but a single sun.
(Panj sha’n, p. 423)
All of this can be expressed in a more direct fashion through the construction of actual
talismans in which the pattern of the reality underlying all creation can be discerned.
The Bāb seems to have regarded knowledge of the science of talismans as important
for two connected reasons; first, to serve as a means whereby his followers would
be aided to recognize the One whom God shall manifest, the messianic figure of the
Bāb’s, when he appeared (Panj sha’n, p. 428). More significantly, perhaps, the science
of talismans was seen as a rational proof of the truth of the Bāb and his unprece-
dented wisdom (p. 423), “a perfect proof to men, like the verses (of the Qur’an),” and
a “firm evidence” to show how the entire Qur’an is contained in a single point and is
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Figure 53.1 Bābī talisman combining pentagram and circle, with central

jadim of Quranic verses
Source: MacEoin collection
58
Figure 53.2 Complex but predominantly circular Bābī talisman with Quranic verses

Source: MacEoin collection
586
manifested from it (p. 447, cf. p. 434). This emphasis on the need for rational proofs,
which stands in contrast to the earlier stress on the need to abandon such evidences in
favor of intuitive recognition of the Truth, seems to have become extremely important
for the Bāb, who was highly sensitive to attacks on him by the ‘ulamā, who criticized
his ignorance of the religious sciences and of Arabic grammar. Legitimacy was cru-
cial. If one of the chief features of early Bābism was an attempt to combine within
the same movement elements from both popular and official religion, toward the
end of the Bāb’s writing career, in Panj sha’n, he writes that “it has been prohibited
in the Bayān to believe in a religion except through demonstration (dalīl) and evi-
dence (burhān), proof (hujja) and certitude (iqān)” (p. 437). But the science of letters
in these talismans was not meant to be purely speculative or evidentiary. For even at
the beginning of his career, the Bāb had “fashioned amulets, charms, and talismans”
(Māzandarāni 1924[?]‌: 31–2), and in the early work Khasā’il-i sab‘a he instructed
his followers to wear a talisman or some other mysterious devices around the neck,
containing various names of God (Faydi 1976: 53–4). It would take more time than
is available here (MacEoin 1985: 87–98; 1992: 99–101, 275–7), but we have in these
talismans examples of Gnostic art, as has been shown for the Mandaeans (ch. 16),
who are also known for artistically inscribed talismans.
This article is a shorter version of MacEoin, “Nineteenth-Century Babi Talismans”
published in Studia Iranica 14 (1), 1985: 77–98, presented after special consultation
with Stephen Lambden.
REFERENCES
Amanat, Abbas. 1981. “The Early Years of the Babi Movement: Background and Development.”
Doctoral dissert., University of Oxford, Oxford.
Bayat, Mangol. 1982. Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Thought in Qajar Iran. Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press.
Faydi, Muhammad. 1976. Hadrat-i Nuqta-yi Ūlā. Tehran: Baha’i Publishing House: vol. 1.
Corbin, Henri. 1960. Terre céleste et corps de resurrection. Paris: Buchet-Chastel.
Ibrahimi, Zayn al-Ābidin. [1977]. Firhist-i kutubi-i Shaykh Ahmid Ahsā’ī. Kerman: n. pub.
Izutsu, Toshihiko. 1966. A Comparative Study of the Key Philosophical Concepts in Sufism and
Taoism. Tokyo: Keio Institute.
Kirmani, Karim. 1960–1961. Hidâyat al-tâlibin. Kerman: n. pub.
MacEoin, Denis. 1979. “From Shaykhism to Babism.” Doctoral dissert., University of
Cambridge, Cambridge.
——— 1983. “Early Shaykhī Reactions to the Bāb and his Claims.” Moojan Momen (ed.).
Studies in Bābī and Bahā’ī History. Los Angeles: Kalimat: vol. 1: 1–47.
——— 1985. “Nineteenth-Century Babi Talismans.” Studia Iranica 14 (1): 77–98.
——— 1992. The Sources of Early Bābī Doctrine and History. Leiden: Brill.
——— 2009. The Messiah of Shiraz: Studies in Early and Middle Babism. Leiden: Brill.
Mazarandini, Fadil. 1924[?]‌. Kitāb-i zuhūr al-haqq. Cairo: Bahai Central Spiritual Assembly:
vol. 3.
Momen, Moojan. 1983. “The Social Basis of Babi Upheavals in Iran (1848–53): A Preliminary
Analysis.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 15: 157–83.
Rosenthal, Franz. 1970. Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval
Islam. Leiden: Brill.
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CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI’S
GNOSEOLOGY AND ITS IMPACT
ON HIS POLITICAL WORLDVIEW
Emad Bazzi
A yatollah Khomeini (1902–1989) was a Shiite jurist and revolutionary leader who
justified his claim to power on the grounds of being the deputy of the hidden
Imam, who is believed by Shiite Muslims to be in occultation and is due to re-appear
towards the End of Time to establish a just order in the world. While there was gen-
eral agreement among Shiite jurists that the expert on divine law enjoyed a measure of
authority in the age of the occultation, which ranged from guardianship over orphans
and widows to distribution of the religious tax (Sachedina 1998). it was Khomeini
alone who declared that this authority should extend to all affairs with which the
hidden Imam himself was charged, including the setting up of a divine order on Earth.
It was this outlook which informed his political worldview. It provided the back-
ground for his struggle against the Shah’s regime and was responsible for the forma-
tion of his most important political theory, Welayat al-Faqih (Guardianship of the
Jurist), which later became the blueprint for the establishment of the Islamic Republic
of Iran.
Notwithstanding, it seems that there was a subtler, even ontological, background
which influenced Khomeini’s worldview in general and the role of the mystical way-
farer in it. For apart from being a jurist and political activist Khomeini was deeply
attached to the Islamic mystical tradition, more commonly known as Sufism.
THE SHI‘A AND MYS TICAL IS L AM

The relationship between Sufism and Shiism is complex and multi-faceted. Although
they differ from each other exoterically, in that the majority of the Sufi orders adhere
to the Sunni legal schools, both traditions have a lot in common esoterically. Both
are representatives of Islamic esotericism and have influenced each other in profound
and varying ways. In the words of the well-known expositor of Islamic esotericism,
Sayyid Hossein Nasr,
the esoteric dimension of Islam, which in the Sunni climate is almost totally
connected with Sufism, in one way or another colours the whole structure of
Shiism. One can say Islamic esotericism or gnosis crystallized into the form of
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— Emad Bazzi —
Sufism in the Sunni world while it poured into the whole structure of Shiism espe-
cially during its early period.
(Nasr 1972: 105)
There was a general consensus among early Muslims about the special spiritual status
of the household of the Prophet Muhammad, even among those who did not support
their claim to the political leadership of the Muslim community after the Prophet.
These were to be known later as the Sunni, the “majoritarian” branch of Islam. Most
of the cultivators of the mystical path in early Islam were either devotees of the Shiite
Imams or among their close associates (see ch. 30). There was recognition among
these devotees that the Imams were channels of divine grace, were possessors of the
esoteric or hidden meaning of the Qur’an, that they were privy, through Gnostic
unveiling, to the mysteries of the world, and that they had the prerogative to inter-
cede on behalf of the errant believers on the Day of Judgement. The famed French
orientalist Henri Corbin would later devise the term “Imamology” (1964: 71–92)
to refer to the above qualities Shiite Imams were thought to possess. Imamology is
synonymous with welaya (initiatory sainthood), a term central to the cosmogony of
Khomeini, as we shall see.
This close association between the early mystics and the Shiite Imams was to con-
tinue until the time of the eighth Imam, Ali al-Ridha or Reza (766–818), when the
mystical tradition among adherents of the Sunni legal schools began to systemize into
Sufism, with its peculiar Sufi orders having special attire and places of worship and
becoming a distinct social group.
Theoretical Sufism was to find its most elaborate formulation at the hands of
the Andalusian theosophist Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1270), central to whose metaphysical
system is the notion of the Unity of Being (wahdat al-wujud), according to which
the names and attributes of God mediate between the essence of God, which is an
unknown and unknowable mystery, and the cosmos (Chittick 1989). The process of
self-manifestation is carried out through emanation. According to Ibn ‘Arabi every-
thing in the cosmos represents a Name of God, signifying knowledge, mercy, power,
majesty or wrath. Whereas everything in the cosmos symbolizes an aspect of the
divine names, Man alone, endowed with consciousness, has the capacity to represent
the names of God in their totality. Every human being has the potential to reach
this position but only a select few, among them the prophets and saints, actualize
this potential. In Gnostic parlance they belong to the category of the Perfect Man, a
notion central to Islamic esoterism as a whole.
Starting in the early fourteenth century, there was a process whereby Shiite gnostics
began incorporating the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabi within a Shiite theosophical system. The most
important figure in this arena was Sayyid Haidar Amuli (1319–1385), who claimed that
every true Sufi is a Shia. The term to gain currency from then to refer to Shiite Gnosis
was irfan. Such seminal Sufi ideas like the Qutb (spiritual Pole of the universe) began
to be associated with the Shiite Imams, as was the notion of welaya, which represented
the continuation of divine grace and guidance through the Imams after divine revela-
tion has ceased with the passing of the Prophet. According to Nasr this was proof of
the strong relationship between Sufism and Shiism, whereas for Corbin this process was
simply the Shiites getting back their own Sufism, for him of Shiite origin and import
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— Ay a t o l l a h K h o m e i n i ’s g n o s e o l o g y —
(Corbin 1971: 219). The process instigated by Amuli was to find its culmination in the
works of Mulla Sadra (1571–1640), who introduced a theosophical system he named
Transcendent Theosophy, where he brought harmony between the Quranic teachings,
the heritage of Greek philosophy, and Sufi Gnosis, all within the parameters of Shiite
theology. According to Mulla Sadra the mystical wayfarer undertakes a journey which
consists of four mystical travels that culminate in the mystic achieving annihilation,
then subsistence by God, and then return to world to be a guide.
K HOMEINI AS EMERGENT G NO S E O L O G IS T
Khomeini was drawn into the intellectual atmosphere briefly delineated above.
This was soon after he came to the religious seminary in Qum (between Tehran
and Isfahan) as a young scholar in 1922. Apart from doing the traditional curric-
ulum, which revolved around jurisprudence and its principles, Khomeini showed a
strong interest in Ethics, Philosophy, and Irfan (Gnoseology). The year 1928, with
the arrival in Qum of Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Shahabadi, who became his most
important teacher in Irfan, began a seven-year period in which Khomeini embarked
on an intense cultivation of both the theoretical and practical aspects of the discipline.
He was introduced to Manazil al-Saereen (Stations of the Wayfarers), by Abdullah-
al-Ansari (1006–1088), by Shahabadi, his “esteemed master, to whom my spiritual
life is indebted” (Khomeini Sahifeh-ye Nur [Anthological Compendium] [Asnad and
Eslami, 1990], vol. 18, p. 78).
The product of his mentorship with Shahabadi included the two most important
books Khomeini authored on irfan, which were to shape his Gnostic worldview and
the role of “the mystic wayfarer,” both spiritual and social, in it. These were respect-
ively Misbah al-Hedaya ila al-Khilafah wa al-Wilayah (The Lantern of Guidance
to Deputyship and Sainthood (1983), and Taaliqat ala Sharh Fusus al-Hikam wa
Misbah al-Uns (Glosses on the Explication of the Bezels of Wisdom and the Lamp
of Proximity [hereafter Glosses]). Both of these books betray Khomeini’s indebt-
edness to the cosmogony of Ibn ‘Arabi. Central to that worldview is the theory of
Emanation, according to which God, the Absolute, makes Himself known through a
process of self-manifestation culminating in the appearance of the cosmic world and
all creatures in it. Each stage of manifestation, according to Khomeini (in his Misbah
al-Hedaya ila al-Khilafah wa al-Wilayah [al-Wafaa, 1983 edn.]: 20), represents a
khalifah (deputy or vicegerent, more commonly associated with the word caliph)
of the previous stage. For instance, the second major stage of manifestation, that of
al-Asmaa al-Husna (the Beautiful Names of Allah, which include the Merciful, the
Knower, the Proud, the Punisher, etc.), is, according to Khomeini, the deputy of the ini-
tial stage of Ahadiyyah (Unity of God) in which God is an unknown and unknowable
mystery. At that primordial stage God is referred to in Gnostic parlance and poetry
as the Vanishing Phoenix, the Mystery of Mysteries, and the Hidden Treasure. The
deputy of the Beautiful Names of Allah forms the third stage of manifestation, that of
“the Immutable Entities.” For learned Japanese interpreters Akiro Matsumoto (who
has advised me personally on these matters) and Toshihiko Izutsu (whom I quote
here), these Entities are “ontological models which are eternally established and upon
which the phenomenal things are produced in the empirical dimension of time and
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— Emad Bazzi —
space” (Izutsu 1971: 52). The last stage represents the emergence of the cosmic world.
This process of the self-manifestation of God is called the Arc of Descent.
It is a common point of Islamic Gnoseology that the ontological reality of Prophet
Muhammad was present in this process from the second stage onwards. Once in this
world, the Prophet then embarks upon his spiritual journey back towards God, which
culminates in his nocturnal journey to the heavens where he achieves closest prox-
imity to God. The process in the opposite direction, from this world to God, is called
the Arc of Ascent, and it is also accessible, to a certain level, to ordinary wayfarers,
men and women who are not Prophets or Imams. The important point Khomeini
makes in his Lantern of Guidance is that the welaya, which according to him means
closeness and proximity to God and which is achieved through mystical wayfaring,
forms the esoteric content of khilafah which denotes deputyship and vicegerency.
The closer in proximity to God a mystical wayfarer gets, the more he is invested with
deputyship. In the Glosses Khomeini makes the point that the welaya is accessible to
ordinary wayfarers:
know well that the servant wayfarer who traverses the path towards Allah with
the foot of servitude, if he departs from the abode of nature, migrating to Allah,
and becomes subject to the divine attractions, the Truth may manifest Himself to
him … and then he will be adorned with the gift of welaya.
(Taaliqat ala Sharh Fusus al-Hikam wa Misbah al-Uns
[Pasadr-e Islam edn., 1986], pp. 39–40)
Hence the nexus between Gnosis and political philosophy. In one of his later books
he sets out the issue in no unclear terms, “the true spiritual traveller, after completing
his journey towards God and for the sake of God, tries to perfect the servants of God
and embarks on reform and development of society” (quoted in Damad 2000: 34).
In discussing the metaphysical system related to the mystical journey towards God,
Khomeini came to adopt a methodology which incorporates Mulla Sadra’s teachings
about the four (mystical) travels within the cosmogony of Ibn ‘Arabi which places the
perfect man at the pinnacle of the stations related to proximity to God. For Khomeini
the Perfect Man is the person who has accomplished the fourth travel in his mystical
journey and after having achieved annihilation in God and then sobriety through
God, “comes back,” as it were, in order to guide humanity. The foremost authority
on Ibn ‘Arabi, William Chittick, describes the status and function of the Perfect Man
in the following way:
On the level of the outward, corporeal world, perfect man may not appear different
from other human beings, certainly not in the eyes of deniers and misbelievers.
The Koran reports the words of some of Prophet Muhammad’s contemporaries
as ‘what ails this Messenger that he eats food and goes into the markets?’ (25:7).
But the corporeal is but the distant sun reflected in dust. The real fullness of the
perfect man’s existence must be sought in the inward domains, the innumer-
able intermediate worlds that lie between his sensory shell and his divine kernel.
He is in fact the interworld who encompasses all interworlds, the intermediary
who fills the gap between Absolute Being and absolute nothingness. His cosmic
function is everything because in effect he is identical with the cosmos. In perfect
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man the microcosm and the macrocosm have become one through an inner unity.
In other terms, the macrocosm is the body, perfect man the heart.
(Chittick 1989: 30)
Among gnoseologists, Khomeini included, there is general agreement that the fourth
travel, which denotes social responsibility congruent with the spiritual proximity to
God, is the preserve of the prophet Muhammad. It is most probable that it was
this point that led some scholars, based on a partial investigation of Khomeini’s
legacy, to conclude that he does not go as far as thinking that there is a nexus
between mystical wayfaring and political philosophy as far as the ordinary seeker
is concerned. Thus according to them a case cannot be argued for a mystical back-
ground to Khomeini’s revolutionary movement and later theorization for Islamic
Government, even his later assumption of the leadership of the Islamic republic (see
Ridgeon 2014: 200–3).
KH OMEINI, GNOSEOLOGY, AND G VE RNM E NT

In reality only a thorough study of Khomeini’s mystical output and political views,
and how these shaped his revolutionary movement, and what he saw as the role
of the mystical wayfarer in it, would lead to a clearer view about the Gnosis/pol-
itics connection. What emerges clearly from Khomeini’s central gnoseological ideas,
dispersed throughout his books on the relevant topics, is that welaya, which according
to him is associated with nearness to God gained through mystical wayfaring, forms
the esoteric dimension of khilafah which implies deputyship and social responsibility.
In addition to that, Khomeini saw that the station of the Perfect Man is a hierarchical
position with the Prophet and Imams situated at the top, followed by other gnostics
and wayfarers, and indeed pious people in general, each according to his level. In
the eighteen-volume compendium Sahife-ye Imam, which includes all his speeches,
directives, edicts, and interviews, Khomeini uses the phrase perfect man to refer to
people who are not Prophets or Imams nineteen times. For instance, in an address to
university students on the first anniversary of the victory of the Islamic revolution,
Khomeini had this advice to his audience:
Strive hard to serve your nation, to serve Islam. Strive hard to carry out the
greater jihad (al-jihad al-Akbar) to its conclusion in order to become a perfect
man, an Islamic man, a committed man, so that you may be beneficial to yourself,
your country, and your nation.
(Sahife-ye Imam, vol. 18, p. 30)
On another occasion, Khomeini offers this advice to the Iranian people on whom to
elect for high office: “After you have studied closely his file and found that he is a per-
fect man, a person who wants to serve this country and serve Islam, then you should
elect him” (vol. 15, p. 450).
Having completed seven years of intense study of Irfan with his mentor Shahabadi,
Khomeini started giving lessons of his own on the topic and related subjects like
Ethics and Philosophy to a select group of students after his teacher left the Qum sem-
inary for Tehran. Many of these students, like Hossein Ali Muntazari and Murtada
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— Emad Bazzi —
Mutahhari, would later become key figures in the Iranian revolution and would
occupy leading posts in the Islamic Republic.
It is instructive that the first-ever political statement Khomeini made, which in
1944 was directed against the Iranian King Reza Shah, the father of the last Shah of
Iran, was replete with Gnostic undercurrents and imagery. Bearing all the hallmarks
of Khomeini’s political speeches and directives that would fuse gnoseological motifs
with the political, it is worth quoting the statement at length. He starts by quoting the
Quranic verse: “Say: I enjoin upon you, that you rise up for Allah in pairs and singly,
and then reflect” (34:46), indeed the very verse by which Ansari begins his crucial
chapter on “the Gate of Awakening” in Manazil al-Sa’ireen, the work on spiritual
wayfaring he studied in depth under Shahabadi (Algar 2015: 17). Then Khomeini
continues:
Allah has demonstrated in this holy speech the mission of humanity from the
first station of the dark nature to its consummation. And it is the best counsel
that Allah has chosen from all counsels. He proposed to humanity this single
statement in which is contained the way to reform the two abodes, and that
is rising up for Allah which made Abraham, Friend of the Merciful (khaleel
al-Rahman), reach the station of eternity and released him from the different
manifestations of the world of nature. Abraham has plunged into the Knowledge
of Certainty (Ilm al-Yaqeen) until he said ‘I do not like the disappearing ones.’
Rising up for Allah is what made Musa al-Kaleem (Moses the one to whom
God spoke) victorious over the people of the Pharaoh and enabled him to des-
troy their thrones and crowns, and made him reach the Appointment with the
Beloved (Miqat al-Mahbub) …
(Sahife-ye Nur [Markaz/Maderek], vol. 1, pp. 24–5)
Khomeini continues to enumerate the sad social and political conditions that were the
result of neglecting “the rising up for Allah.” He goes on:
Rising up for the self (qiyam baray-e nafs) is the cause of the lifting of the veil of
chastity from the heads of the chaste Muslim women [a reference to Reza Shah’s
Uniform Dress Law]. Rising up for personal interests made the newspapers,
which act as a means for spreading moral corruption, implement the plans which
are the product of the retarded mind of the illiterate Reza Khan.
(p. 25)
Significantly, Khomeini’s main activity in the period from the mid 1940s until his
open confrontation with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, consisted
in teaching Jurisprudence and its principles to a group of his students. It should be
stressed, however, that for Khomeini teaching these topics was never solely an aca-
demic concern. In fact, he used the teaching sessions to train a generation of scholars
who would become his revolutionary henchmen and would later occupy leading
positions in the Islamic Republic. One such student, Muhammad Javad Bahonar
(1933– 1981), who attended those classes, and who went on to become Prime
Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran shortly before he was assassinated, described
the lectures’ impact on him:
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The Imam (Khomeini) would instil in us a sense of spiritual nobility, of responsibility

and commitment, of spirituality and intellectual richness; his words would resound
in our ears for many days after we left Qum to go preaching during Ramadan.
(quoted by Algar 1988: 288)
Moreover, the subject of jurisprudence was never divorced from other aspects of
Islam, especially the mystical one, as far as Khomeini was concerned. According to
one long-time student, Sayyid Ahmad Fehri, who was also the editor and translator
of many of Khomeini’s books on Gnoseology, Khomeini’s method in those classes was
to “demonstrate the conformity of the sharia to the logic of Irfan as well as the con-
formity of Irfan to the logic of the sharia” (Fehri 1982: 11).
In the early 1960s Khomeini embarked on a process of open confrontation with
the Shah’s regime that would lead to his imprisonment and then exile, first to Turkey
and then to Najaf in Iraq in 1965. It was there that he introduced his most important
political theory, Guardianship of the Jurist, which provided the justification for the
setting up of an Islamic government. It was in Najaf also that he gave a crucial series
of lectures later collected in a volume entitled the Greater Jihad.
Khomeini was to return triumphant to Iran in February of 1979 to assume the
leadership of Iran after the success of the Islamic revolution. He saw the nascent
Islamic republic through a bloody insurrection waged by leftist organizations that
had previously participated in the struggle against the Shah but then parted ways
with the clerical leadership. He also saw a crippling war with Iraq. Towards the end
of his life Khomeini issued a corrective to a statement by Ali Khameni, the present
leader, in which the latter declared that the Islamic government can operate only
within the framework of the sharia, implying that this was the opinion of Khomeini
himself. Replying that such an understanding “contradicts my views completely,” he
added: “Our government is a branch of the absolute welaya of the Messenger of
Allah, and is one of the primary precepts of Islam. It takes precedence over all sec-
ondary precepts like prayers, fasting and pilgrimage” (Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 20, p. 170).
The absolute welaya of the Prophet is nothing but his mystical position, part of which
devolves on the mystical wayfarer.
REFERENCES
Algar, Hamid. 1988. “Imam Khomeini, 1902–1962: The Pre-revolutionary Years.” Edmund
Burke III and Ira Lapidus (eds.). Islam, Politics and Social Movements. Berkeley: University
of California Press: 263–88.
——— 2015. Imam Khomeini: A Short Biography. N.p.: Create Space Independent
Publishing.
Chittick, William. 1989. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Corbin, Henri. 1964. Histoire de philosophie islamique. Paris: Gallimard: vol. 1.
——— 1971. En Islam Iranien, vol. 1: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques. Paris: Gallimard.
Damad, Mustapha. 2000. “The Spiritual Sovereignty of the Perfect Man.” Message of
Thaqalayn 5 (3): 34–8.
Fehri, Ahmad (introd.). 1982. Ayatollah Khomeini, Sharh Dua’a al-Sahar. Beirut: Muassat
al-Wafaa.
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Izutsu, Toshihiko. 1971. The Concept and Reality of Being. Tokyo: The Keio Institute of
Cultural and Linguistic Studies.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1972. “Shi‘ism and Sufism: Their Relationship in Essence and in History.”
Hosein Nasr. Sufi Essays. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Ridgeon, Lloyd. 2014. “Hidden Khomeini: Mysticism and Poetry.” Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
(ed.). A Critical Introduction to Khomeini. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press: 193–203.
Sachedina, Abdulaziz. 1998. The Just Ruler in Shi‘ite Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
SYNCRETISTIC SUFI GNOSTICISM

IN SOUTH AND SOUTH EAST ASIA
Clinton Bennett
T his chapter explores the phenomenon of Sufi Islam in South and South East Asia
as a type of Gnostic religion chiefly characterized by eclecticism and fusion with
endogenous mystical religions. Historically this expression of Islam, taking root in
indigenous cultures, peacefully spread Islamic belief and practice along the spice trade
routes from the Arab world and the East African coast across the Indian Ocean and
beyond into South and South East Asia. This followed in the wake of earlier Indian
cultural and religious dissemination, especially by Buddhists. South East Asia was in
fact formerly more commonly called Indochina, which describes the region as one
where Indic and Chinese influences converge. Indic influence stretched as far as the
Philippines, where it was especially strong in the coastal area of Mindanao and Luzon
(McAmis 2002: 8). Today, the Sufi version of Islam across the region tends to inform
religious openness and tolerance. Two South Asian states, Bangladesh and Pakistan,
are majority Muslim, while India has the world’s third largest Muslim population. In
South East Asia, Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia are Muslim-majority states while
several Filipino provinces form the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. There
are also Muslim communities in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, and
Vietnam. In total, over 60% of the world’s Muslim population live in Asia. In many of
these states, tension currently exists between popular, localized Islam and what some
see as more Arab-influenced revivalist tendencies, which, claiming to be normative,
condemn Sufism as heretical and deviant. However, rejection of much of the tolerance
that Sufism traditionally represents is also rooted in rival views of ethnic and national
identities. Demands for Islam’s revival focus on privileging Islam in the legal sphere.
This is also referred to as the Islamist agenda. After identifying and describing some
important studies relevant to the development of Sufi “Gnosticism” in the region, this
chapter traces Sufism’s spread across South and South East Asia, drawing out Gnostic
aspects in Sufism’s ability to fuse with pre-existing mystical traditions. It then analyses
contemporary tensions and dynamics in the social-political arena across the region.
Yet despite the rival epistemologies, with gnosticizing ideas about the universality of
truth in different traditions as against the claim of one religion being exclusively true
or one ethnicity ultra-special, some Sufis support the Islamist agenda. Sufi opposition
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to this is not automatic, although strong evidence can be cited to indicate that most
Sufi-inclined Muslims do not (see Kahn, 2014, p. 189).
Sufism is taken to be the devotional, spiritual or mystical school within Islam,
often regarded as a form of Gnosticism. With an origin in the early eighth century,
Sufi belief and practices revolve around the teacher-student relationship, the search
for inner enlightenment, divine-human intimacy or unification, and the soul’s return
to its place of origin, Paradise, once freed from the “dunghill” of this material world,
as fifteenth-century Persian Sufi teacher Abd ar- Rahman Jami put it (Schimmel
2013: 109). Illumination, or the lifting of the veil of ignorance, the self-realization of
knowledge of life’s true meaning, nature, and purpose, is the Sufi goal. Non-Muslim
commentators have long argued that Sufism’s origin had roots in Christian and Indic
gnostic traditions. Initially an elite tradition in which teachers only taught a select few
in private, Sufism later became more popular and public especially following the birth
of its great initiatory orders (ṭarīqahs), mainly in the eleventh and twelve centuries.
An early Sufi visitor to India, Mansūr-al-Ḥallāj (d. 922), was one of the first to break
earlier tradition by preaching to anyone who wanted to listen rather than to a select
few. Early Sufism had a strong ascetic bias over-and-against the perceived materialism
of the Caliphal and royal courts and it was this that probably provided its original
foundations, rather than external influences that Sufis later embraced.
SOURCES OF IN F O RM ATIO N
The Preaching of Islam ([1896] 1913) by Sir Thomas Arnold (1864–1930) remains
an important classic for exploring the origin of South and South East Asian Islam.
He does not use the word Sufi (he refers to faqirs and dervishes) but almost all those
whose work he describes were Sufis. This study first proposed a primarily non-violent
mode for Islam’s global spread even within territories that had fallen to Muslim rule,
thus challenging a dominant stereotype that attributed Islam’s spread to the sword. In
the region here surveyed, only India (including present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh)
was ever subject to foreign Muslim rule. After describing Islam’s spread in the Middle
East, Arnold continued with chapters on India, China, and the Malay peninsula,
including “Java, the Moluccas and Borneo” among others. He credited traders and
preachers with Islam’s propagation, arguing that forced conversion was rare.
How little was effected toward the spread of Islam by violence on the part of
the Muhammadan rulers may be judged from the fact that even in the centres
of Muhammadan power, such as Delhi and Agra, the Muhammadans in modern
times in the former district hardly exceeded one-tenth, and in the latter they did
not form one-fourth of the population.
(1913: 262)
Arnold also pointed out that we do not know much about the identities of many of
these missionaries, who included women (410), although he did proffer some details.
In analyzing what attracted converts to Islam, he identified social incentives and the
simplicity of Islam’s creed. Recent research, though, downplays the role that any
message of social equality may have played, as well as persecution by high-caste
Hindus of Buddhists, original peoples, and those of low caste, that Arnold thought
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— Syncretistic Sufi Gnosticism —
propelled people into Islam (279). Indeed, there is little evidence that Muslim
preachers stressed social equality or that caste Hinduism was strongly established
when large-scale conversion took place. Arnold also cited Bishop George Lefroy
(1854–1919), who argued that Islam’s uncompromising monotheism and fixed view
of truth proved more attractive than “the haziness of pantheistic thought and the sub-
jectivity of its belief” he saw in Hindu or animist teaching (Lefroy 1907: 286; Arnold
1913: 259). Arnold also rejected the claim that most Indian Muslims have non-Indian
ancestry: although many “assumed the appellations of distinctly foreign nations, such
as Shaykh, Beg, Khān or even Sayyid … the greater portion of them are local converts
or descendants of converts” (255).
Recent contributions by Roy (1983) and Eaton (1993) on Islam’s spread in Bengal,
and by Laffan (2011), McAmis (2002), and others on Indonesia and beyond, suggest
that rather than rejecting Indic mystical theology, the preachers found ways of cre-
ating links between Sufism and aspects of this spiritual background, including rever-
ence of nature and the land, and especially Yogic notions. This enabled the gradual
transition of their followers into membership of the worldwide Muslim community
but did not necessarily involve or demand a complete break with the past. Indeed,
Eaton (1993: 129) proposes that the notion of religions as “closed, self-contained
and mutually exclusive” was alien to India. Instead, Indians and Asians generally
have tended to look to available spiritual resources regardless of provenance, if they
offer help in dealing with life’s challenges. Arguably, this open-ended approach to reli-
gion, one that produces “multiple-religious identity” in many Asian contexts, is char-
acteristic of Asian religion generally. Research in Bengal, Malaysia, Indonesia, and
elsewhere shows a great deal of similarity in how this process of cultural mediation
resulted in a form of Gnostic Sufi Islam that meshed in with earlier cultural-religious-
social traditions. Ernst’s many contributions span three decades exploring the “rich
and complex interaction” between Sufism and Indian religion that cannot be reduced
to the “articulation of difference” (Ernst 2016: vii).
I SLAM’S SP READ IN BANGL AD E S H, M AL AYS IA,

INDONESIA, AND T HE P HIL IP P INE S
East Bengal
Muslim traders reached East Bengal before Muhammad Bakhtiyar’s conquering
troops arrived in 1203 (Eaton 1993: 130). However, the presence of larger numbers
of Muslims dates from much later. Only a small number of Muslims were present in
Bengal until after the Moghul conquest (1576). Until then, comparatively few elite
Muslims lived in the capital and other administrative centers governing a mainly
Hindu/animist population. There are many accounts of Sufi preachers, some sword-
wielding, temple-destroying conquerors in Bengal from soon after the beginning
of Muslim rule. However, these hagiographies, which date from several centuries
after their subjects’ deaths, reflect later ideas “about how the past ought to have
happened” featuring “a decisive break between Bengal’s Hindu past and its Muslim
future” (Eaton 1993: 73, 133). Arnold (1913: 261) already suspected the apocryphal
nature of such stories. Rather, the adoption of Islam by the masses in Bengal, indeed
in East Bengal, took place over a long period but especially during the sixteenth
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and seventeenth centuries. Conversion was due to the preaching of self-appointed

cultural mediators who set out to present Islam in ways that attracted adherents of
endogenous religious traditions to the exogenous religion. These cultural mediators,
almost all of who were Sufis, adopted and adapted Hindu language and mythology
to accommodate and spread Islam’s message. Allah might be identified with Niranjan
(the Absolute as beyond objectification or form, a popular name for God in Bengal),
Muhammad as an avatar, his daughter Fatimah as Jagat-jananī, the mother-of-the
world (Eaton 1993: 276, 288).
Muslim interest in Yoga dates from the Persian polymath Al-Bīrūnī (d. 1052), who
translated Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras into Arabic (Ernst 2013: 61). In Bengal, The Pool of
Nectar, a yogic text, was translated into Farsi and then into Arabic, ca. 1210 (Ernst
1996: 9). Existing similarities between Sufi and Yoga techniques for body, mind, soul
alignment, aiming at the latter’s detachment from the former and unification with the
Absolute, led not only to Sufis adapting these but to a developing symbiosis between
Sufism and Yoga. For example, teachers of Yoga and Sufism were both pīrs (Ernst
2005: 23). Sufis were especially interested in Yoga because Yogis train to “apprehend
reality unmediated by priests or other worldly institutions” (Eaton 1993: 78). Sufi
and Islamic motifs and concepts found their way into various translations. The idea,
too, that the human body reflects the totality of the macrocosm, especially prominent
among Nath Yoga, popular in Bengal, fitted well with the Sufi idea that the journey
toward God is interior. The body as a microcosm in its relation to the macrocosm is
a recurring Yogic and Sufi theme.
Ways were also found to indigenize Islam in more visible ways, associating it with
the much-loved soil, fauna, flora, and waters of the desh (land). A Sufi teacher might
sit under a tree already revered as holy, or identify himself with sacred fish, crocodiles,
tigers or snakes. This blurred the distinction between a strictly orthodox Muslim
view of discontinuity between the Creator and Creation and local ideas about the
divine existing within all Creation, which is transitory but never evil for Sufis. This
fused with monist ideas about the nature of existence that dominate Indic thought.
This does not resemble classical Mediterranean Gnosticism, which credited an evil
Demiurge with creating matter, but Sufism’s goal of escaping from the world and
the need for knowledge of the real status of our soul have Gnostic parallels. Over
time, these sacred items were “pirified,” a process that Roy explored in his ground-
breaking 1983 text. Many pīrs became renowned for their healing abilities. Shah Jalal
(d. 1346) arrived from Yemen with a lump of soil which he found exactly matched
with that of the place in Sylhet where he settled, as his teacher had instructed him
(Eaton, pp 212–13). Hindu heroes and deities were among the 124,000 prophets sent
by God (according to ḥadīṯh), and Hindu scriptures were earlier divine revelations.
On the one hand, this can all be represented as syncretistic and eclectic. On the other
hand, these Sufi writers (whose choice of Bangla as their literary medium did not
escape censure) even while respecting many aspects of endogenous religion also saw
Islam as correcting and perfecting it: avatars were prophets not divine incarnations;
Muhammad was the culmination of prophetic dispensation; the Qur’an superseded
Hindu scriptures as it did the Bible while also confirming what truths they contain.
While the distinction between a Sufi saint and a Hindu guru was blurred in terms of
their followers, who might be “Hindu” or “Muslim” or perhaps both, the former was
careful to claim intimacy with God, not divinity. However, this approach “connected
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Islam with Bengal’s socio-religious past” rather than repudiating this inheritance
(Eaton 1993: 69), which meant that those who became disciples of these new teachers
remained within existing communities, retaining many practices.
Today, some Muslims still sing Vishnu’s praises and Hindus sing in honor of Sufi
saints. Muslims read the great Hindu epics, while the first Bangla version of the Qur’an
was translated by a Hindu. This expression of Sufism is characteristically Gnostic;
truth is universal and not restricted to any single source. Perhaps the most significant
factor in this indigenization process was how Sufi teachers helped extend agricultural
space eastward across the delta, clearing forests and settling new territory. Many pīrs
were later incorporated into the revenue-collecting system of the Mughal administra-
tion. This also explains why the larger concentrations of Muslims in Bengal are found
in the East not the West even though the seat of Muslim power was located there, as
Arnold noted earlier (1913: 261). Although some of these pioneers were women, the
link with the physical labor of forest clearance and land cultivation meant that most
were men.
Malaysia, Indonesia, and Philippines

Terengganu became the first Malay Muslim state in the very early fourteenth century
when the ruler proclaimed conversion on a granite stele. Brunei’s ruler converted in
1368. Sufi merchants, however, had reached parts of Malaya in the eighth century.
Malacca’s conversion began around 1414 and was possibly led by preachers from
Java. Cultural mediators peopled the popular Hindu epics with Muslim characters
and “Sufi coloring” (Yousof 2014: 101–2), with Muslims still performing shadow-
play versions. Islam appears to have reached Sumatra by the thirteenth century, pos-
sibly from Gujerat and Bengal (McAmis 2002: 8). If the latter, this would have aided
the acculturation process as Bengalis applied an already tested strategy. Islam’s origin
in Java is traditionally linked with the nine saints (Wali Sanga) credited with pros-
elytizing there in the early-fifteenth to early-sixteenth centuries, during which Borneo
also became largely Muslim. Whether historical figures or mythical, in Indonesia each
“saint now has a mortuary complex which is often the source of their present-day
renown” (Laffan 2011: 9). Some biographers trace their descent from the Prophet.
They are said to have “created art forms to explain Islam in the local idiom,” such as
inventing a type of poetical instruction and shadow-puppetry (Laffan 2011: 8). These
have been cited as “examples of Indonesian malleability,” that is, an innate tendency
to blend and synthesize cultural and religious ideas and practices. The nine were
not, it seems, formally connected with traditional Sufi orders. A number of female
saints’ shrines are popular pilgrim sites (Quinn 2016). During the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, traditional initiatory orders became established in Indonesia
although most Muslim spiritual teachers remained unaffiliated with ṭarīqahs (tarekats
in Indonesian). At some point, contact with East African Muslims became more influ-
ential than that with Indian Muslims, especially in coastal areas, given the dominance
of the Shaffi rather than Hanafi legal school across Malaysia and Indonesia.
Many of these teachers “had compiled their own eclectic mixture of spiritual
techniques and metaphysical speculations from a variety of sources,” Islamic and
non-Islamic (Laffan 2011: 95). Eclectic orders developed, too, combining pre-Islamic
animistic with Islamic concepts, presenting themselves as “alternatives to excessively
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sharī’a oriented, exoteric versions of Islam,” with some Theosophical influence

(Laffan 2011: 97). Since these orders’ founders cannot trace their spiritual lineage to
Muhammad, they have been called local ṭarīqahs (they are also known as Majlis Dhikr
groups). As in Bengal, many Sufi teachers became renowned healers, although using
the word “sufi” is anachronistic since this does not appear in Indonesian literature
until the 1970s (Howell 2001: 707). Thus, what became popular in Indonesia was a
localized expression of Islam often referred to as abangan, rather than a version that
closely resembled the type of Islam encountered in the Arab world –although many
Sufi teachers did maintain close ties with Arabia. Abangan holds Islamic and non-
Islamic elements in balance; the more Arab-influenced strand of Islam in Indonesia,
known as santri, gives weight to Islamic elements while prijaji favors Indic elem-
ents. Santri tends to be coastal, abangan rural. Abangan, routinely dubbed syncre-
tistic, includes rituals and beliefs associated with “the agricultural cycle, and local
or ancestral spirits” (Bruinessen, 2007: 93). These three terms were popularized by
anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), who researched in Java (1952–1954)
as part of a team from Harvard. He later researched in Bali (1957–1958) and made
many other shorter visits to Indonesia during his career (Geertz 1960). Some of these
“syncretisms” do not self-define as Muslim. This process continued in a northeasterly
direction across the Sulu Archipelago toward the Philippines, where Islam’s presence
is attributed to “a teacher called Makdum” around 1380 CE (McAmis 2002: 19). It
took root on the already Indianized island of Mindanao. The “simplest rudiments of
the faith were introduced in a way that did not contradict the eclectic, monistic char-
acter of the indigenous beliefs of the tropical island world” of the region (McAmis
2002: 24). Islam in Brunei contrasts somewhat with the rest of the region. Here, it
has developed, over time, as a top-down social-religious system wholly controlled
and defined by the King, the Islam beraja, or Islam with a royal system (Matsuo
2001: 11).
CURRENT TENSIONS A ND CO M P L E X ITIE S

Geertz also used the term “scripturalist” to describe a reformist trend in Java that
saw itself as normative vis-à-vis abangan as deviant. Stressing the exoteric aspects
of Islam, including divine-human distinction, this scripturalism is now most com-
monly called Islamist. Islamism tends to represent itself as closer to an Arab-flavored
version of Islam and sees popular expressions of South and South East Asia Sufi Islam
described above as deeply problematic.
The failure of the post-colonial state, too, to deliver development and economic
opportunity for all contributes to increasing hostility towards whatever is under-
stood to be un-Islamic, whether in the economic, educational, legal, political or
religious spheres. Calls to Islamicize society, heard throughout the region, gener-
ally aim to make it less democratic, less Sufi, less pluralist, less tolerant of diver-
sity within Islam. Islamist parties, including Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) in
Indonesia and Jamaat-e-Islam in Bangladesh (banned 2013), operate across this
region with some, although limited, electoral success. Malaysia’s United Malays
National Organization, which has dominated politics since independence, shares
some Islamist ideas. Conflating being Malay with being Muslim, in theory UMNO
defends religious freedom but in practice implements policies that privilege Muslims
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and discriminate against religious minorities (mainly Chinese). A 2008 fatwa in

Malaysia condemned the practice of Yoga, which it says aims to make people one
with the God of a different religion (Lee 1995: 137). Women’s rights would also be
at risk. Perhaps linked with sensitivity in classical Sufism toward ideas of the divine
as masculine and feminine, the history of Sufi women teachers and ancient local
traditions of reverence for the feminine divine in the region contribute to women
having exercised power at high levels in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan
(Bennett 2010). A commonality across most South and South East Asian majority
Muslim states is the presence of significant non-Muslim populations and of gener-
ally good relations between different religious communities, which is also part of
the Sufi legacy. The Islamist agenda does present a threat to this tradition. Brunei
is 23% non-Muslim (Buddhist and Christian), Indonesia is 13% (Hindu, Buddhist,
Confucian, and Christian), Bangladesh is 11% (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian), and
Malaysia is close to 40%. Pakistan has the smallest non-Muslim community (about
2%). Embracing social pluralism and democracy may have roots in Sufi respect for
diversity and freedom to pursue personal spiritual goals. So far, despite Islamist
rhetoric and activism, democracy remains relatively healthy in these Muslim states.
Indonesia was 49th (the highest rank for any Muslim-majority state) on the 2016
Economist Democracy Index. Malaysia ranked 68th, Bangladesh 86th, and Pakistan
112th, which, although second lowest (above Iraq at 115th), was still within the
democratic category (with Brunei unranked). Elsewhere, the conflation of ethnicity
with national identity has victimized Muslims. For example, in Myanmar, loyalty
to the state is equated with being Buddhist (rather as being Malay and Muslim is
in Malaysia) and the Rohingya Muslim minority is fleeing from state-sponsored
persecution, called by some a genocide (see Ibrahim 2016). In contrast, Muslims
in Thailand (close to 10%) are increasingly integrated into the political structures,
holding a cabinet-level post and several parliamentary seats (Matsuo 2001: 10).
Muslims in Mindanao have their own autonomous zone (since 1989) but some
pursue militancy against the Filipino state to achieve full independence.
There is little evidence that Islamists will win at the ballot box although they can
cause social disruption and even achieve some goals through intimidation. Recent
research in parts of the region suggest popular Sufi expressions of Islam remain
attractive to many and that new, experimental forms of what Kahn calls “modern
Gnosticism” (including Sufi cafes) are emerging “more concerned with inner, experi-
ential, sacred dimensions of Muslim belief and practice, and therefore in one way
or another with forging a closer relationship with the Divine, than with imposing
their views on others” (Kahn 2014: 189). Howell found Sufi devotionalism, still
often eclectic, flourishing in Indonesia not only in rural settings among old men but
also among well-educated urbanites and “members of the national elite” (Howell
2001: 702; cf. also 2000).
REFERENCES
Arnold, Thomas. (1896) 1913. The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the
Muslim Faith. London: Constable & Co.
Bennett, Clinton. 2010. Muslim Women of Power: Gender, Politics, and Culture in Islam.
London: Continuum.
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Bruinessen, Martin van. 2007. “Saints, politicians and Sufi Bureaucrats: Mysticism and Politics
in Indonesia’s New Order.” Martin van Bruinessen and Julia Howell (eds.). Sufism and ‘The
Modern’ in Islam. London: I.B. Tauris: 92–112.
Eaton, Richard. 1993. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Ernst, Carl. 1996. “Sufism and Yoga According to Muhammad Ghawth.” Sufi 29
(Spring): 9–29.
——— 2005. “Situating Sufism and Yoga.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 15 (1): 15–43.
——— 2013. “Muslim Interpreters of Yoga.” Debra Diamond (ed.). Yoga: The Art of
Transformation. Washington DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution:
61–69.
——— 2016. Refractions of Islam in India. New Delhi: Sage.
Geertz, Clifford. 1960. The Religion of Java. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Howell, Julia. 2000. “Indonesia’s Urban Sufis: Challenging Stereotypes of Islamic Revival.”
ISIM [International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World] Newsletter 6: 17.
———2001. “Sufism and the Indonesian Islamic Revival.” The Journal of Asian Studies 6
(3): 701–29.
Ibrahim, Azeem. 2016. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. London:
Hurst & Co.
Kahn, Joel. 2014. “Modern Gnostics: The Pursuit of the Sacred in Indonesian Islam.”
Heritage of NUSANTARA. International Journal of Religious Literature and Heritage
3 (2): 171–94.
Laffan, Michael. 2011. The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a
Sufi Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lee, Hoong. 1995. Constitutional conflicts in contemporary Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford
University Press.
Lefroy, George. 1907. “Mohammedan Races: Their Contributions to the Body of Christ.”
Henry Montgomery (ed.). Mankind and the Church. London: Longmans, Green: 281–300.
Matsuo, Nakamura. 2001. “Introduction.” Nakamura Matsuo, Sharon Siddique, and Omar
Faroul Bajunid (eds.). Islam and Civil Society in Southeast Asia. Singapore: ISEAS: 1–32.
McAmis, Robert Day. 2002. Malay Muslims: The History and Challenge of Resurgent Islam in
Southeast Asia. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.
Quinn, George. 2016. “The Veneration of Female Saints in Indonesia. Islam: Saints and Sacred
Geographies: Indonesia.” Suad Joseph (ed.). Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures
online edition. Brill Online: http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-
women-and-islamic-cultures/islam-saints-and-sacred-geographies-indonesia-EWICCOM_
001427, accessed 22 January 2017 [on-line version only].
Roy, Asim. 1983. The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Schimmel, Annemarie. 2013. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Jakarta Selatan: Mizan.
Yousof, Ghulam. 2014. Issues in Traditional Malaysian Culture. Singapore: Partridge.
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CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
AUROBINDO AND SUPERMIND
Peter Heehs
T he philosophical theory and spiritual methodology of Sri Aurobindo (1872–

1950, born Aurobindo Ghose) are based on Vedānta, Yoga, and other Indian
systems but incorporate some elements from Western sources. Aurobindo had no
detailed knowledge of historical Gnosticism (that is, historically and textually attested
currents of Gnostic belief and practice of Late Antiquity) but he sometimes used
terms employed by historical Gnostic thinkers, and some aspects of his thought are
similar to aspects of historical Gnostic thought. Nevertheless his philosophy cannot be
considered “gnostic” in the sense of being influenced by Late Antique “Gnosticism.”
However, if the word Gnostic is understood in the broader sense of having to do with
gnōsis or knowledge superior to that of the discursive mind, the term could apply to
Aurobindo’s system together with other ancient and modern Indian systems.
AU ROBI NDO’S LIFE AND THOU G HT W ITH RE F E RE NCE

TO “GNOSIS” AND “ G NO S TICIS M ”
A brief summary of Aurobindo’s intellectual life between 1884 and 1914 will provide
indications about possible sources of Gnostic terminology or ideas in his thought. He
was educated entirely in England between 1884 and 1892. At St. Paul’s School his
main subjects were Greek and Latin. He also studied French, History, and Divinity (or
Church History). He was not a Christian, and developed a dislike of Christianity after
being exposed to a rather narrow brand of Evangelicalism by his guardians. He went
to King’s College, Cambridge, on a classical scholarship, having obtained “record
marks” in Greek in the entrance examination, and continued his study of Greek and
Latin literature (Heehs 2008: 20). Plato was his favorite philosophical author. He
returned to India in 1893, where he mastered Sanskrit, Bengali, and other Indian
languages. He began to read the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit
around 1900 and from that point on considered them the foundation stones of his
thought. In 1910 he began to study the Rig Veda and eventually worked out a spir-
itual interpretation of this most ancient of Indian scriptures. In 1914 he met Mirra
Alfassa, a Frenchwoman of Sephardic Jewish origin who after 1920 became his spir-
itual collaborator. From Alfassa he picked up certain neo-Kabbalistic ideas that she
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— Pe t e r H e e h s —
had imbibed from occultists Max Théon and his wife Mary Ware between 1903 and
1908 (Heehs 2011).
Aurobindo’s first references to historical Gnosticism were dismissive. He criticized
Theosophy, which he considered a modern European corruption of ancient Eastern
teachings, for falling into the “snare of Gnostic mysticism, Masonic secrecy &
Rosicrucian jargon” (Aurobindo 1997a: 66). Gnosticism owed what truth it had to
Vedānta, elements of which came to the West via Buddhism, influencing Christianity
and European thought. Later Aurobindo modified this chauvinistic presentation
while keeping the basic idea of a primarily East-West movement:
The ideas of the Upanishads can be rediscovered in much of the thought of

Pythagoras and Plato and form the profoundest part of Neoplatonism and
Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking
of the West.
(Aurobindo 1997b: 330)
In letters of the 1930s he leaned toward a perennialist view: historical Gnosticism,

along with Vedānta, Buddhism, Neoplatonism, Sufism, etc., managed to get hold of
some universal spiritual truths (Aurobindo 2012: 353).
Aurobindo published his main prose works, comprising a dozen titles, in a monthly
journal between 1914 and 1920 and republished most of them as separate books
between 1920 and 1950. His subsequent writings include seven large volumes of
letters and an epic poem. I do not have the space here to provide even a cursory
summary of his teachings but will touch briefly on some ideas that may fruitfully be
compared with Gnostic teachings. In his philosophical works Aurobindo presented a
life-affirming, evolutionary form of Vedānta. Aurobindo agreed with Shankaracharya,
the chief philosopher of the dominant advaita or non-dual school of Vedānta, that
Reality is the one brahman or Absolute. He rejected, however, the advaita idea that
the universe is the false creation of māyā, the power of illusion. Instead he saw the
universe as a manifestation of the inherent potencies of brahman through a process
of involution and evolution. The supreme reality (parabrahman), which is Existence-
Consciousness-Bliss (sat-cit-ānanda), involves itself in “the Inconscient.” From there,
the involved consciousness begins an evolutionary ascent through the planes of matter,
life, and mind. These three planes constitute the “lower hemisphere.” The “higher
hemisphere” consists not only of sat, cit, and ānanda but also an intermediate plane
that belongs to the higher hemisphere but communicates with the lower. The purpose
of the process of involution and evolution is to permit the Absolute to assume multi-
tudinous forms in the lower hemisphere. The final result will be the divinization of the
triple world of matter, life, and mind.
SUPERMIND, VI J Ñ Ā N A, G N ŌS IS
The intermediate plane between the lower hemisphere and sat-cit-ānanda is the char-
acteristic feature of Aurobindo’s philosophy. He gave it different names at different
times and in works intended for different audiences. In works published during his life-
time he used the English term “supermind,” the Sanskrit term vijñāna, and the Greek
term gnōsis. In their unqualified forms these terms may be considered synonyms, but
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— Aurobindo and supermind —
Aurobindo often qualified them because he discovered as he pursued his practice

of yoga that there were many sub-planes between ordinary mind and supermind.
This necessitated the creation of compound terms, some of which he modified or
discarded as he continued his inner exploration. As a result, the full semantic range of
supermind/vijñāna/gnōsis is large and complex. Before going into a some of the fine
points, I will examine the three main terms.
I begin with vijñāna, a term Aurobindo found in the Upanishads and adapted
to his own purposes. Vijñāna is an intensive form of jñāna, which means “know-
ledge.” Jñāna (pronounced something like gyana) is a cognate of the Greek gnōsis,
the Latin cognoscere, and the English “know.” (All four words descend from the
Indo-European root gnō-, “to know.”) Jñāna and vijñāna have many different senses
in secular and sacred Indian literature of all periods (ch. 26). In religious or spiritual
contexts, jñāna often means knowledge of God or brahman, as in the term jñāna-
yoga, the spiritual path that leads to the knowledge of brahman. The prefix vi-gives
vijñāna the sense of a special power of jñāna. Aurobindo made use of this distinction
by treating the former as a higher or more encompassing power than the latter, which
itself, however, was superior to ordinary intellectual knowledge. Thus in personal
notes of 1913, he used vijñāna to cover all forms of higher knowledge, one of which
was jñāna, which he defined as the “power of direct and divine knowledge which
works independently of the intellect & senses or uses them as subordinate assistants”
(Aurobindo 2001: 16).
In arriving at his understanding of vijñāna as the plane or power of consciousness
between ordinary mind and sat-cit-ānanda, Aurobindo was influenced by a passage
in the Taittiriya Upanishad (3.1–6) in which the sage Varuna leads his son Bhrigu
from the level of anna (“food”) or matter, to the levels of prāṇa (“breath”) or vitality,
manas or sense-based mentality, and vijñāna or higher knowledge, before reaching
the plane of ānanda or divine bliss. When Aurobindo began his own ascent through
the levels of consciousness, he conceived of vijñāna as a yet unattained level above
ordinary mind and used the term “intuitive mind” to signify a level or power between
ordinary mind and vijñāna.
In writings meant for the general public, Aurobindo often used the English neolo-
gism “supermind” as a synonym for vijñāna. He first employed it in something
like its final sense in a notebook jotting of 1914: “Transfer the centre of the active
consciousness from the mind to the supermind. The supermind is the seat of the
superman” (Aurobindo 2001: 520). He took the term “superman” from Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844–1900), whom he regarded as the most interesting European phil-
osopher of modern times. But his idea of “superman” differed considerably from
Nietzsche’s: “The deity within,” he wrote in a 1915 essay, “may confront us either with
the clear, joyous and radiant countenance of the God or the stern convulsed visage of
the Titan. Nietzsche hymned the Olympian but presented him with the aspect of the
Asura [a Sanskrit term corresponding to Titan]” (Aurobindo 1998: 152). In writings
from this period onward, Aurobindo developed his idea of the divine superman or
supramental being, also called the “Gnostic Being.”
In The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and other works of the 1914–1920
period, Aurobindo sometimes referred to vijñāna/supermind as gnosis. Here is a defin-
ition of gnosis from 1914: “Gnosis or true supermind is a power above mind working
in its own law, out of the direct identity of the supreme self, his absolute self-conscious
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Truth knowing herself by her own power of absolute Light without any need of
seeking, even the most luminous seeking” (Aurobindo 2003: 71). An individual being
who ascended to gnosis became a gnostic (or vijñānamaya or supramental) being,
which, as Aurobindo wrote in The Synthesis of Yoga, has the character of “a truth-
consciousness, a centre and circumference of the truth-vision of things, a massed
movement or subtle body of gnosis” (Aurobindo 1999: 489).
Between 1912 and 1920 and again in 1927, Aurobindo kept a diary in which he
recorded the results of his inner research. When referring to the planes or power
between mind and sat-cit-ānanda he generally avoided the English term supermind.
Most often he used the Sanskrit term vijnāna, less commonly the Greek-derived
term “ideality,” and during two relatively short periods in 1920 and 1927 the Greek
term gnōsis. He sometimes employed these terms alone, sometimes qualified them in
various ways. The qualifications show the complexity of his mapping project. One set
of qualifiers for gnosis was intuitive, inspired, and revelatory; another was logistic,
hermetic, and seer. The 24 occurrences of “hermetic” are the only times Aurobindo
used this term, well known in Western esotericism, in his works. When he first spoke
of “hermetic gnosis” he described it as “a higher than the logistic ideality” and as
being “attended by a diviner splendor of light and blaze of fiery effulgence [than in
logistic ideality].” Its essence was śruti or “divine inspiration” while the essence of
logistic gnosis was smṛti or “diviner mnenosyne” (Aurobindo 2001: 1136). (In India
sacred teachings are placed in two broad categories: smṛti, “remembered knowledge”
or tradition, and śruti, “heard knowledge” or revealed scripture.) In diary entries of
1927, Aurobindo seems to distinguish gnosis from “supreme supermind” (Aurobindo
2001: 1248–56). This subverts the identity between gnosis and supermind he had
observed up to that point. Such terminological inconsistencies suggest that his cartog-
raphy of the cosmos was a work in progress throughout his lifetime.
In 1926 Aurobindo had an experience that he later described as the descent of
“overmind,” which is the highest of the sub- planes between ordinary mind and
supermind. He later explained that early Indian sages knew about the mental and
supramental levels, but missed out on overmind:
The Indian systems did not distinguish between two quite different powers and
levels of consciousness, one which we can call Overmind and the other the true
Supermind or Divine Gnosis. That is the reason why they got confused about Maya
(Overmind-Force or Vidya-Avidya) and took it for the supreme creative power.
(Aurobindo 2012: 83)
Overmind is the creator of the world in its current imperfect state. (If Supermind had
done the creating on its own, everything would have been perfect from the begin-
ning.) Viewed from below, Overmind appears to be the most powerful power of
consciousness imaginable; viewed from above it marks a line between the gnostic
knowledge-by-identity of Supermind and the separative knowledge of mind. Between
1927 and his death in 1950 Aurobindo continued his explorations of the territory
between mind and Supermind, taking special interest in Overmind. The character of
Overmind, he wrote in the autumn of 1950, was that of “a subordinate power of the
Supermind: it is still an agent of the Truth-consciousness, a gnostic power that has not
descended into the mental ignorance; it is capable of a mental gnosis that preserves
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its connection with the superior light and acts by its power” (Aurobindo 1998: 590).
This was Aurobindo’s last status report on his gnostic explorations before his death
in December 1950.
PARALLELS B ETWEEN HISTO RICAL G NO S TICIS M AND

AUROB INDO’S TE ACHING S
Anyone familiar with the terminology and ideas of Western Esotericism will have
no trouble finding parallels between the ideas sketched above and those of Gnostics,
Kabbalists, and Hermetists. Let it be clear from the start, however, that Aurobindo
never read any Gnostic, Kabbalistic or Hermetic texts. The textual sources of his
teachings were almost entirely Indian. He was of the opinion, furthermore, that it was
not always possible to trace “exact correlations” between “one system of spiritual and
occult knowledge and another” (Aurobindo 2012: 82). He wrote this cautionary note
to a disciple who wondered whether there was any relationship between Aurobindo’s
levels of consciousness and the ten Sephiroth of the Kabbalah, but it could be applied
in other contexts. There are, as I have shown elsewhere (Heehs 2011: 242), at least
four different explanations for resemblances between systems. They can (1) be put
down to direct or indirect influence; (2) reckoned as examples of independent des-
cent from a prior system; (3) taken as independent representations of a single truth;
or (4) viewed as similar outcomes following logically from similar presuppositions.
Examples of such explanations might be: (1) a Kabbalist drawing directly or indir-
ectly from Neoplatonist literature; (2) modern writers, such as Madame Blavatsky or
Max Théon, each claiming to have recovered a preexisting Tradition; (3) a Vedantin
and a Gnostic seeing at least part of a cosmic truth and expressing it in their own
words; (4) a Platonist and a Vedantin, each postulating cosmic planes of perfection
and imperfection but wishing to avoid dualism, arriving independently at an inter-
mediate power such as the Demiurge or Overmind.
Avoiding partisanship over questions of historical precedence or correctness of
truth-claims, I conclude here by highlighting seven terms of Aurobindonian and
Gnostic theory bearing resemblances and inviting discussion.
• The One. Virtually all esoteric systems recognize a supreme Absolute that is one
even if visualized in multiple aspects. In traditional and Aurobindonian Vedānta
this One is called brahman, parabrahman, sat-cit-ānanda, etc. In Platonism it
is called to Hen (the One). Among Gnostics, Cerinthus called it the Pleroma
(Fullness), Monoimus the Monad (Unit), Valentinus the Bythos (Profundity).
• The hierarchy of worlds. Aurobindo took his idea of the planes of existence pri-
marily from the Upanishads and Rig Veda, which express the hierarchy in symbolic
terms. He drew on mythology, esotericism, and science to arrive at his system of
“planes” of matter, life, and mind forming a lower hemisphere beneath the higher
hemisphere of supermind, being, consciousness, and bliss. It is likely that he first
encountered the idea of a cosmic hierarchy in Plato, who spoke of a lower mutable
level and higher ideal level in the Timaeus and other dialogues. Plato’s idea of the
cosmic hierarchy had enormous influence on Gnostics, Neoplatonists, and others.
• Emanation and manifestation. Theories of emanation, as opposed to creation,
are common in spiritual and esoteric systems, for instance Vedānta and Sāṃkhya
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in India and Gnosticism and Neoplatonism in the Hellenistic world. Aurobindo

rarely used the word “emanation”; indeed, in an early Upanishadic commentary
he called it “a silly word.” He preferred “manifestation,” which he took from
the Vedānta-Sāṃkhya concept of sṛs. ṭi, translated by him as “projection of a part
from the whole” (Aurobindo 2003: 132, 226). In Aurobindo’s cosmology the
universe is the self-manifestation of the absolute parabrahman. In Gnosticism,
Neoplatonism, and other esoteric systems the universe is an emanation of the One.
• Divine planes or emanations. In Aurobindo’s system, Supermind (or vijñāna or
gnōsis) belongs to the higher hemisphere. It is, briefly, “the One Truth deploying
and determining the manifestation of its Powers” in a manifold harmony
(Aurobindo 2012: 147). In many Gnostic systems the Aeons are first emanations
of the One that preserve the divine character of their source.
• The source of imperfection. In Aurobindo’s system, Overmind is a level
or power just below Supermind that marks the beginning of imperfection.
Overmind takes the manifested “Powers” (see previous paragraph) “and sets
each working as a force in itself with its necessary consequences” of par-
tial rather than integral harmonies (Aurobindo 2012: 147). Plato and many
Gnostic thinkers spoke of a Demiurge or Craftsman who is the effective cre-
ator of the physical universe. In dualistic forms of Gnosticism that consider the
physical universe to be radically imperfect, the Demiurge is regarded as an evil
or flawed opponent of the divine will. Aurobindo occasionally contrasted his
idea of divine self-manifestation with the theory, which he did not endorse, of
creation by an imperfect Demiurge.
• Hostile powers. Aurobindo took from Mirra Alfassa the idea, prominent in the
thought of Max Théon, of hostile or adverse beings and forces. He considered
them among the most dangerous opponents human aspirants had to overcome.
In some Gnostic systems, the Archons or servants of the evil Demiurge are hostile
to humanity’s spiritual aspirations.
• Liberation or salvation by jñāna/gnōsis. In Aurobindo’s teaching and in Indian
philosophy generally, divine knowledge (jñāna) is one of several means by which
liberation (moks. ha or mukti) can be attained. Other means are devotion (bhakti),
work (karma), and technical practices (tantra). A common theme among Gnostic
thinkers was the exclusive salvific power of secret knowledge or Gnosis. Salvation
through faith was largely excluded. If this was one of the main reasons that the
Church Fathers considered Gnosticism heretical, it also turns out to be one of the
characteristics that sets historical Gnosticism apart from Aurobindo’s “gnostic”
thought and practice.
REFERENCES
Aurobindo, Sri [Aurobindo Ghose] 1997a. Essays Divine and Human. Pondicherry: Sri
Aurobindo Ashram Trust.
—— 1997b. The Renaissance in India. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.
—— 1998. Essays in Philosophy and Yoga. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.
—— 1999. The Synthesis of Yoga. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.
—— 2001. Record of Yoga. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.
—— 2003. Isha Upanishad. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.
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—— 2012. Letters on Yoga -I. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.

Heehs, Peter. 2008. The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. New York: Columbia University Press.
——2011. “The Kabbalah, the Philosophie Cosmique, and the Integral Yoga. A Study in
Cross-Cultural Influence.” Aries 11 (2): 219–47.
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CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
OF GNOSIS IN TRIBAL AND

“PRIMAL” CULTURES
Garry W. Trompf
T he proposition that tribal or smaller-scale traditional societies yield Gnostic ideas

may seem absurd, especially considering the kind of elaborate speculations post-
War scholars have discussed since the Nag Hammadi finds. Such societies, for long
deemed “primitive,” more recently “primal,” are supposed to be pre-reflective in the
“archaeology of mental dictionaries” and thus not possess a plethora of abstract
ideas –about aeons and emanations, or philosophic truth and deep knowledge –in
their conceptual repertories. However, if we set aside the long-prevailing (though
not heuristically useless) assumption that the thousands of smaller culturo-linguistic
traditions documented through history do not necessarily constitute the residual
“childhood of the human race,” possibilities for a matchup can look promising. The
“Gnostic World,” as we have been filling it out cross-culturally in this volume, for
example, often includes the transmission of secret disclosures and insights, and this
commonly occurs with small-scale traditional societies’ initiation rites. Sometimes
this can include revelation about the nature of spirit beings, while at other times (usu-
ally many more others) what is passed down is about managing in a difficult world.
With over 7,000 traditional societies somehow surviving today, we can only pro-
vide samples of relevant evidence, most of it from the Australo-Pacific region, where
traditions of almost a third of the small-fry among world religions persist. En route
points will be raised about the implications of our findings for the study of Gnostic
traditions in the history of religions.
First off, the issue of the hidden high God as apparently far removed from lesser,
sometimes troublesome deities yet not uninterested in human fate has fascinatingly
presented itself in the Maori case (Aotearoa/New Zealand), among whom secret
chants for the highest divine Being Io (or Io Matua Kore), Father of the stars and Lord
over “the twelve heavens,” have been preserved by tohunga priests in the Wairarapa
region (southmost peninsula, North Is.) (Pōhūhū Ms [Thornton VI], paras. 7–9).
Now, Maori departmental deities –Ranganui (Sky-Father), Papatuanuku (Earth-
Mother), etc. –in a hierarchy of their own, are not always tractable, certainly not
the inimical Underworld deities of Death (Whiro, Rohe), and in a post-mortem state
(apart from kings, priests, and nobles, who could have access to stars and heavens
after burial) (Oppenheim 1973: 93–100), a special death journey has to be negotiated
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— Of Gnosis in tribal and “primal” cultures —
from some sacred spot, such as a pōtutukawa tree-root running to the sea at Cape
Reinga (northern tip, North Is.), to reach the afterlife Homeland Hawaiiki and one’s
lost family (therefrom to return with ease). As in most Polynesian, Micronesian, and
other Austronesian socio-religious systems, the hierarchical social arrangements on
earth reflect those in heavens, and on a commoner’s decease, if they are provided
for at all, they must get around obstacles in a spirit-journey to secure an ancestral
resting-place, as against ghostly wandering (Handy 1927). So controversy surrounds
the fairly recent scholarly accessibility to chants surrounding Io, because it looks as if
a benign, comforting Supreme Being has been added to the known Maori theogonic
cluster to outmatch Christian talk of the true God, and after the Maori disclosure
Io cults have cropped up elsewhere (first in the Cook Islands, associated to New
Zealand) (Swain and Trompf 1995: 126– 7). Scholars’ unease increased because
anthropologist Elsdon Best, who was a Theosophist, was too eager to publicize the
Io chants (Simpson 1997), especially considering widespread Maori myths told that
access to the “Baskets of Knowledge of the Uppermost Heaven” (Tikitiki o rangi)
only “incurred jealousy among humans,” when demigod Tane (or Tawhaki) brought
them down (Te Hurinui 1955: 3.2.8).
The Maori case points to the central problématique of this paper: one can find
relevant structures of thought, in this case of the Hidden God, that do not clinch
that we are dealing with a Gnosis (qua deep knowing) or a system we would call
Gnostic, here because, especially on the constrasting light of “classic Gnosticism” and
its influences (chs. 10–13), there is no clash between a high deity and a demiurgical
blunderer, or consequent sending of a savior. This problem applies widely. Ponder the
traditional picturing we have of the Aztec cosmos, with thirteen heavens of the gods
above (up to the ultimate Creator, Ometecuhtli, deity of duality). They stand opposite
to the descending levels of the Underworld, with Mictian at level nine below, the place
of the deads’ eternal rest which requires many tests against inimical forces to reach
(Codex Vaticanus A). If we consider the struggle between the distinctly more mal-
evolent creator god Tezcatlipoca and the more benevolent Quetzalcoatl, in the basic
myth informing Aztec and indeed the preceding Toltec ideologies, we have to face the
data that the latter also played a role in Creation and indeed that the former had a
“white aspect.” If Quetzalcoatl, “the Feathered Serpent,” is looked to as protector of
the kingship, and as a very human-looking deity for being brought down to earth by
a sorcerer, only to regain heaven by ruling with wisdom as king-priest of the mythic
Tollan, he is more exemplar of interactions between heavens and earth, not redeemer.
Only later, in post-conquest contexts, does he become assimilated into Christ, res-
cuing the souls of the deceased (esp. Codex Fiorentina [Sahagún], 1–10; Markman
and Markman 1992: 156–7; 283–7; 352–65; cf. Lanczkowski 1967).
Comparable limitations apply to cases of belief in deities who make mistakes in
Creation. Take the great goddess Latmikaik, honored across the Palau island group
(Micronesia). From the days “when there were only Angaur and Peleliu” (coral atolls
to the south), goes the central myth, Latmikaik gave birth to a giant female child
(Chuab) who, sat up, had to be fed by the islanders but was forever hungry and
grew so large that their ladders could not even reach her mouth. When the exhausted
villagers complained about her imperfect creation, the disgraced goddess let the
villagers burn Chuab, and the bits of her body that fell formed the more major and
higher (volcanic) islands (Trompf 2018: 3). But here the mistake-making Goddess is
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not a lesser Sophia-figure, but the chief divinity who is still venerated today (along
with the Christian God) for rectifying her earlier action and bringing fertile results to
the people (Aoyagi 2002).
Problems for comparison also arise with shamanism, or with phenomena in a huge
range of cultures, especially across “traditional” northern Eurasia to the Americas
where specialists enter induced altered states to follow straying souls of the sick and
report on spirits in the upper and lower worlds, often guided by “animal familiars”
(esp. Eliade 1972). The connection with Gnosticism has been made because of
initiated specialists’ negotiations through “other worlds,” and because initiations
can be paralleled to access to ancient Mysteries (Von Stuckrad 2003: 30, 115) and
questions of handling both lower and upper worlds are part of the ongoing history
of the Gnostic trajectory (e.g., ch. 33). Then again, shamanic “journeying,” though
seemingly like the Gnostics’ heavenly flights, is not to escape from the world, but to
achieve integration of soul, body, and the world, the last preconceived and accepted
as combining both tangible and invisible forces. The magical manipulation of these
interacting forces might also bespeak Gnostic propensities, but traditionally the stress
is on effective techniques of healing and managing local problems, not on occult
Gnosis (cf. Flaherty 1992).
There is indeed a new stress that ancient “classic Gnosticism” (possibly including
Hermetism) involved quests for “altered states of consciousness” (Merkur 1993),
with shamanic experiences falling into the general category of “mystical visions and
unions.” Psychotropic drugs come into this, not least because some shamans are
renowned for ingesting drugs to induce their travels (as with the use of the natema
or banisteriosis potion by the eastern Ecuadorian Jivaro). Free access to this drink,
though, has made at least a quarter of Jivaro males shamans, i.e., allowing deploy-
ment of spirit (often animal-) helpers into others’ bodies as cures and control over
dangerous forces (Harner 2004: 277). One can gauge more clearly what knowledge is
involved when collectivities have access by such ingestions to the spirit world. Among
the now very vulnerable Yanomami (Venezuelan Amazonia), whose initiations involve
“seeing spirits” through drugs, the first thing for the novice to handle is overcoming
the rush of spirits (like bats!) before anything like confident mastery can occur, which
is more like “knowing what to do” prior to a “mastery of technique” (Jokic 2015). By
comparison, in the use of Ayahuasca (as a brew of Banisteriopsis caapi or the psyche-
delic “vine of the soul”) among the Peruvian Amazonian Shipibo-Conibo, two sides
show up: the traditional use by shamans to deploy dangerous animal spirits against
enemies, and in contrast its therapeutic benefit as spiritual medicine within tribal
ceremonies (Eakin et al. 1986), where its broader capacity to bring insight, feelings
of wellbeing, and personal transformation (Shanon 2014) have now become highly
exportable to suit cross-cultural New Age quests for inner Gnosis (chs. 60, 62).
Such ingestions are exceptional, and much more widely cast studies of cognition
are required to probe the potential importance of experiences among the thousands
of traditional small-scale, so-called “primal” societies for the study of the Gnostic
world. Obviously the initiatic aspect of acceptance into tribal life and sometimes its
various grades of membership should attract our attention. The secrecy, especially of
higher-grade male initiations, makes for relevant comparisons (e.g., Allen 1967), and
what is perhaps more interesting are cases of sudden disclosures to initiates of objects
(including parts of dead animals or men) and sacred names and/or sounds going with
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them. As Fredrik Barth describes the outcome for one who has attained the seventh
degree and rich experience of “ritual idioms” among the Baktaman (New Guinea
Highlands):
His secret knowledge gives him a vision of the true nature of this [environal]
reality … he sees the ground as something like a cuscus body or the head of a
man [suddenly and quickly revealed in the sixth degree], he sees the life force that
grows out as hair, fur, vegetation … he senses the power of fertility like a heat in
the ground; and the revelation of the 7th degree showed him the whole garden
like a colonnaded temple [a cult-house], with the shade-trees as mighty fire-posts
carrying sacra …
(Barth 1975: 234)
These revelations, not unexpectedly, are above all about fertility, and will remind one
of the deduction that the final revelation of the ancient Eleusinian mysteries (near
Athens) was the simple, abrupt holding up of a wheat sheaf before the initiate’s eyes,
by Demeter’s officiant, after imbibing a special beverage (Nilsson 1961: 42–5). Yet a
comparable atmosphere was likely to be cultivated in the disclosing of arcane aeonic
names and diagrams in Gnostic worship.
One can make the mistake of concluding that such unveilings are “gnostic,” when
we might as well call them “eidetic” (after that terribly irregular Greek verb oida).
The difference will not be unfamiliar to philosophers, since Edmund Husserl’s phe-
nomenological position hinges on distinguishing immediate experiences (“as such,”
in “eidetic vision”) the “reality strength” of which can soon be lost by our thinking
about them (especially imposing on them an ideological frame) (Husserl 1960: 18–
31). One has to appreciate that the discourse of gnosis or of a deeper knowing
usually implies higher reflection on truth, as with the Platonic distinction between
ignorance/opinion (doxa)/knowledge (gnōsis), and thus arising from a distinctly
philosophical mode. But in ethnological fieldwork among traditional peoples such
epistemological distinctions are generally absent. What we have before us is a sea
of traditional “knowledge,” graced with that term not only to get beyond centuries
of depreciations as superstitions, but because they are received repertories of the
“things known,” transmitted and received, by any discrete smaller-scale culture
(cf. Morphy 1991). They are not believed as if they might be doubted: they are
instilled for survival. Since this knowledge is often dramatically, we should say
eidetically, first revealed to each cohort of youth in initiations, perhaps with the
appearance of masked figures playing the role of spirits (as in the famed Tolai
dukduk ceremonies, New Britain, New Guinea Islands [Errington 1974]), it would
seem to be quite analogous with what we might expect of the unveiled mysteries of
Hellenistic “cults.” Indeed the custodians of traditional lore who do the initiating
want to create an atmosphere of fear and the opportunity for some test or ordeal
to get across the vital importance of what they impart, and revelatory moments are
meant to clinch this urgency.
It is tempting to make the mistake that the cognitive processes of traditional
peoples are so different from human groups existing in a world of literary artifices,
that the truth of things is only conveyed through indelibly registered disclosures of
special secrets, which again suggests comparisons with preconceived ideas about
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occult gnosis in the distant past. Indeed, if material on very local ancient Greek rites
(as documented by Pausanius, for example) is anything to go by, with masked figures
frighteningly appearing out of the dark in Arcadia (see Casson 1939: 51–2, 72–4),
a continuity of ancient disclosure activity, of revealing secrets to given groups as
recognizable religious phenomena, would be highly relevant for understanding the
development of ancient Gnostic groups. They could be seen as partly grounded in
common expectations that priests or custodians of sacred places and rites should
be able to make a display of some previously unappreciated mystae. That ancient
Gnostic teachers could demonstrate their truths with diagrams (as Origen indicates in
Contra Celsum 6.24–5), and in this light would be carrying on more archaic manners
and mentalities that held spirit messages to reside in special stones, markings, or
written (proto-literate, rune-like) signs.
The false step that can be made about “primitive disclosure rituals,” though, is to
extract from them utterly different species of cognition among traditional peoples,
like the greater disposition of “tribals” to have access to the spirit realm by trance or
into the unconscious (according to Jungian comparative psychoanalysis [Jung and
von Franz 1964: 80–90; Trompf 2005: 130–44]). Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse
has developed a whole theory of comparative cognition by accentuating the diffe-
rence between icono-symbolic and discursive cognitive modes (1995; 2000; 2004),
based on fieldwork on a “cargo cult” among the Mengen (on north-eastern New
Britain). He made the mistake, however, of not realizing how much oral teaching,
mythic narrative, and plain regulatory instruction novices were given in initiation,
sometimes for weeks in seclusion, over and above revelatory moments (cf. Lattas
2009). His laboring of the dichotomy, significantly, derived especially from what he
saw as the massive difference between showing in Mengen ritual life and the expect-
ation to absorb the discursive materials put on the islanders by Christian mission-
aries. The cargo cult adjustment movement he was seeking to understand mediated
between two apparently diametrically opposed modes. But his was a very “Protestant-
to-agnostic” reading that did not account for the musterion of the Mass in a region
affected by Catholic impacts and, as just remarked, on the remarkable amount of
discursive “transmission” in traditional religion, normally relayed most in the early
morning and at firesides into the darkness of night (when most ethnographers are
asleep). This kind of transmission went on beyond tradition and into new movements
of adaptation.
Mention of famed “cargo cults” as indigenous adjustment movements before
massive social and technological change raises the matter of “acculturation,” which we
should discuss by way of bringing what could turn out to be an infinitely long expos-
ition to a close. In my 1989 article, in which I dared to compare such adjustments in
modern Melanesia with ancient (mainly “classic”) Gnostic religious activity, I stress
the importance of assessing what happens when human groups who lack the cultural
repertory of history (as against myth, including narratives showing why the cosmos is
what it is) encounter the history-bearing messages of missionaries who try to convey
the “whole Biblical story” from Adam to Christ, on to the Eschaton (Trompf 1989).
Certainly the interchange between mythic and historically oriented modes of thought
produces in world religious life the kind of experimental cosmologies and myth-
historical innovations that the most distinctive ancient Gnostic systems belie (on my
assessment, see ch. 3). In Melanesia, as the most complex and variegated ethnological
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theater on earth, even traditional religions can take different courses when an adept
has dreams, dream-visions, or reported meetings with spirit guides, and takes the ini-
tiative to declare how the new revelations should be interpreted for group ritual and
collective meaning (esp. Stephen 1979). What the so-called “cargo cult” phenomenon
instructs here is that the percolation of an exciting new message, including the indel-
ibly powerful narratives of Adam and Jesus, has generated experimental world pic-
turing and curious narrative material that reflect attempts to accommodate willingly
accepted new truth into traditional frameworks of thought.
The most obvious parallel between cargo cult and Gnostic “styles of cosmic inter-
pretation” lies in new teachers’ disclosures of “what is really going on,” after the clash
of ideas and in the midst of excited discussions about attractive new ideas, with these
uncoverings posed as the telling of “the secret” about the cosmos. In cargo cults the
revelation has to include explaining the appearance of uncanny goods, the Cargo (as
internationally marketed products and huge inventions such as steel-bellied ships, air-
craft, etc.), as local peoples still using lithic (“stone-age”) technology meet intruding
representatives of modern humanity at the very pinnacle of material achievement.
The amazing Cargo looks to bring an “End to the (long-perpetuated) World” (Trompf
2004: 202–10). Expectedly, new religious leadership is acquired by those who tell of
their visionary experiences, of untold riches in a cave (as Biak Islander mythic “culture
hero” Manamakeri once did, for a West Papuan case) or under the sea (as the heroic
Papuan coastal dweller Edai Siabo relayed near the time of contact with colonial
newcomers) (esp. Lacey 1990: 185–8). Innovative mythic materials and re-castings
of Biblical stories about very Beginnings and about Jesus have famously resulted,
providing the basis for new religious movements, often in reaction to established
missions to shore up traditional truth in “nativisms,” and above all forge independent
identities to cope with fast-moving ideological shifts. The new prophet-leaders are
always the masters of time: they tell how it all started, what it is really all about inde-
pendent of “normative” Christian accounts, and where things are heading, sometimes
in apocalyptic events in which Jesus will come back with the Cargo, those startling
new items that Europeans unreciprocally conspire to deprive locals of possessing in
sufficient quantities (Trompf 1994: 239–48).
In Melanesia, even within local congregational contexts, there will always be talk
about the secret, usually that connecting Christianity and Cargo, and out of the blue
the missionary or the newly trained black pastor will be asked when and whether he
will divulge it (Gesch 1985: 69–72). To his surprise, an emergent indigenous theo-
logian from near the Ok Tedi region (close to the West Papua [Indonesian]-Papua
New Guinea border) discovered what he missed out on for not being initiated: beliefs
in the creator Yekawono Dadaman, crucial primal ancestors both male and female,
“cosmic conflict,” and a “world-wide Flood.” That explained to him why his father
hoped that by his training among the whites he could unlock “the secret” (Yandit
2017: esp. 127–36), and whatever we make of the narrative materials he had trans-
mitted to him, and whether they are “fully traditional,” or anticipate or reflect reli-
gious change, they evoke basically the same the kind of atmosphere in which the more
easily recognizably species of “ancient Gnosticism” emerged. The difference, of course,
is that Gnostic movements arose in the context of much popular philosophizing,
whereas cargo cultists might be lucky if a whiteman showed him a Freemasonic text
or insignia (Worsley 1970: 35; cf. ch. 40), seeming to provide clues to link tradition
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Figure 57.1 A Catholic catechist teaching Fugughe youth (Papuan Highlands) and

introducing a totally new cosmos and its layers (1930s)
and Bible, or a catechist might produce a diagram of the layered cosmos, perhaps of
heavens and hells, to generate totally new village imaginings of what the world is
supposed to look like (see Figure 57.1). But potent points of comparison are definitely
there, waiting for further investigation.
REFERENCES
Allen, Michael. 1967. Male Cults and Secret Initiations. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Aoyagi, Masaki. 2002. Modekngei: A New Religion in Palau. Tokyo: Shinsensha.
Barth, Fredrik. 1975. Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea.
Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Casson, Stanley. 1939. Ancient Greece. Oxford: Clarendon.
Eakin, Lucille, Lauriault, Erwin, and Harry Boonstra. 1986. People of the Ucayali, the Shipibo
and Conibo of Peru. Dallas, TX: International Museum of Cultures.
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Eliade, Mircea. 1972. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (trans. Willard Trask).
Errington, Frederick. 1974. Karavar: Masks and Power in a Melanesian Ritual. Ithaca, NY:
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Flaherty, Gloria. 1992. Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
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Gesch, Patrick. 1985. Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo-Type Movement in the Sepik against its
Background in Traditional Village Religion. Sankt Augustin: Anthropos Institute.
Handy, Craighill. 1927. Polynesian Religion. Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum.
Harner, Michael. 2004. “The Sound of Rushing Water.” Patricia Lyon (ed.). Native South
Americans: Ethnology of the Least Known Continent. Eugene, OR: Resource: 276–82.
Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations (trans. Dorion Cairns). Dordrecht: Springer.
Jokic, Zeljko. 2015. The Living Ancestors: Shamanism, Cosmos and Culture Change among
the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco. Oxford: Berghahn.
Jung, Carl, and Marie-Louise von Franz (eds.). 1964. Man and His Symbols. New York:
Doubleday.
Lacey, Roderic. 1990. “Journeys of Transformation in Melanesia.” Garry Trompf (ed.).
Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious
Movements. Berlin: De Gruyter: 181–212.
Lanczkowski, Günter. 1967. “Elemente gnostischer Religiosität in altamerikanischen
Religionen.” Ugo Bianchi (ed.). Le Origini dell gnosticismo: Colloquio di Messina, 13–18
aprile 1966. Leiden: Brill: 675–87.
Lattas, Andrew. 2009. “Cargo Cults and Cognitive Science: The Dynamics of Creativity and
Repetition in the Pomio Kivung.” Carole Cusack and Christopher Hartney (eds.). Religion
and Retributive Logic: Essays in Honour of Garry W. Trompf. Leiden: Brill: 101–29.
Markman, Roberta, and Peter Markman. 1992. The Flayed God: The Mythology of
Mesoamerica. San Francisco: Harper.
Merkur, Dan. 1993. Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions. Albany,
NY: SUNY.
Morphy, Howard. 1991. Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Nilsson, Martin, 1961. Greek Folk Religion. New York: Harper.
Oppenheim, Roger. 1973. Maori Death Customs. Wellington: Reed.
Shanon, Benny. 2014. “Moments of Insight, Healing, and Transformation: A Cognitive
Phenomenological Analysis.” Beatriz Labate and Clancy Cavnar (eds.). The Therapeutic
Use of Ayahuasca. Berlin: Springer: 59–76.
Simpson, Jane. 1997. “Io as Supreme Being: Intellectual Colonization of the Maori?” Journal
of Religious History 37 (1): 50–85.
Stephen, Michele. 1979. “Dreams of Change: The Innovative Role of Altered States of
Consciousness in Traditional Melanesian Religion.” Oceania 50: 3–22.
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Te Hurinui, Pei. 1955. King Pōtatau: An Account of the Life of Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, the
First Maori King. Wellington: The Polynesian Society.
Trompf, Garry. 1989. “Macrohistory and Acculturation: Between Myth and History in
Modern Melanesian Adjustments and Ancient Gnosticism.” Comparative Studies in Society
and History 31 (4): 621–48.
——— 1994. Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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——— 2005. In Search of Origins: The Beginnings of Religions in Western Theory and
Archaeological Practice. Eligin, IL: New Dawn.
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———2018. “Islands, the Humanities and Environmental Conservation.” Environmental

Conservation 45 (1): 1–10.
Von Stuckrad, Kocku. 2003. Schamanismus und Esoterik: Kultur-und wissenschaftliche
Betrachtungen. Louvain: Peeters.
Whitehouse, Harvey. 1995. Inside the Cult. Oxford: Clarendon.
——— 2000. Arguments and Icons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— 2004. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognition Theory of Religious Transmission.
New York: Altamira.
Worsley, Peter. 1970. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia. London:
Paladin.
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CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
THE NEO-G NOSTIC SYNTHESIS

OF SAMAEL AUN WEOR
Bernard Doherty
INTRODUCTIO N
A mong the spiritual groups to have emerged in the twentieth century are a number
who draw in various ways on the broad constellation of earlier Gnostic ideas as
a touchstone for their own teachings. While studies of earlier streams of the Gnostic
tradition are of paramount importance, how various Gnostic ideas have been used by
Neo-Gnostic groups, that is, practical attempts amongst (predominantly) esotericists
since at least the nineteenth century, to rediscover, revive, re-establish, re-imagine,
and/or re-institute various Gnostic teachings within a series of more-or-less organized
religious or spiritual movements, is also worthy of study. This chapter offers an intro-
duction to the thought of one such self-identified Neo-Gnostic, the Columbian eso-
teric teacher Victor Manuel Gómez Rodriguez (1917–1977), with particular emphasis
on the centrality of sexuality in his teachings.
MASTER SAM AE L
Better known by his initiatory name of Samael Aun Weor or, as his followers desig-
nate him, Master Samael, Rodriguez’s voluminous teachings are an intriguing case
study of how spiritual teachers have combined various ideas from East and West to
establish –in etic terms − a Neo-Gnostic synthesis. Indeed, Weor designated him-
self as the “Master of the Synthesis” (Wulfhorst 1995: 188) in acknowledgement
of the plurality of traditions which he sought to bring into harmony. Describing his
“Doctrine of the Synthesis,” Weor claimed that his teaching “could never be contrary
to the diverse religious forms,” as all religions are “precious pearls linked on the
golden thread of divinity” and “Gnosis is the flame from which all religions of the
universe come” (Weor 2012 [1950]: 8; 111).
Such claims of a primordial perennial tradition are not uncommon in the wider
esoteric milieu, but what sets Weor apart from other contemporary teachers is the
centrality and nature of the sexual practices which form the core of his wider religious
system. For Weor “Christ and Sexual Magic constitute the supreme practical syn-
thesis of all religions” (2012 [1950]: 90). As Weor wrote in his most important work
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— Bernard Doherty —
The Perfect Matrimony (2012 [1950]), “Sexual Magic and the Cosmic Christ are the
synthesis of all religions, schools, and sects … If the reader makes a serious study of
all the religions of the world, he will discover the phallus and uterus as the synthesis
of all mysteries” (2012 [1950]: 8). While the centrality of sexuality is nothing new
within either a historical Gnostic or esoteric milieu, how Weor draws together various
aspects of this arguably is (see e.g., Godwin 1994; Versluis 2008; Urban 2006).
Unlike other modern proponents of what is broadly referred to as “sex magic” –
for example Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) –who have been the subject of increasing
scholarly interest in recent years (see e.g., Bogdan 2006; Urban 2006), Weor’s
teachings have received limited attention in scholarship, despite the wide geograph-
ical diffusion of groups who draw their inspiration from his complex theological
system. As an author of wide influence, some of whose followers claim published over
60 books and whose teaching has formed the basis of numerous independent groups,
Weor’s teachings warrant closer scrutiny.
While the exoteric practices taught by groups following these Neo- Gnostic
teachings center predominantly on various meditation practices, Weor’s own writings
make it clear from the outset that such practices are preparatory for higher esoteric
initiatory stages which revolve around spiritual exercises centered on the practice
of coitus reservatus or “karezza.” Compared with other practitioners of sex magic,
however, many of Weor’s teachings appear almost prudish. The phenomenon Hugh
Urban identifies as the “recurring tendency for the ideal of sexual liberation to
become mingled with less admirable sorts of things, such as misogyny, drug abuse, or
simple commercialization” (2006: 257), often exhibited by those engaged in sexual
mysticism, is far less apparent in the writings of Weor. Unlike Crowley, for instance,
who often revelled in deliberately antinomian and transgressive ritual sexual acts,
Weor’s approach to what he calls “il sexo yoga” (consistently translated in English
as “sex magic”) is markedly restrained and socially conservative. While it is worth
noting that Weor was briefly jailed in 1952 for, among other things, offending public
morals with the candid discussion of sexuality in his influential first book The Perfect
Matrimony, his focus on the centrality of sex in the initiate’s quest to obtain gnosis
places little emphasis on sexual gratification compared with other practitioners of
sex magic and upholds a decidedly stringent heteronormative and in some aspects
socially conservative view of sexuality limited to the marital sphere.
Within his writings, Weor appears as neither a libertine nor a renunciant,
but instead seeks to steer a middle way between what he saw as an ontologically
disordered and dangerous asceticism associated with mainline religions and other
esoteric groups, and an equally damaging hyper-sexuality practiced by the denizens
of the “Black Lodge,” among whom Weor clearly numbered most other practitioners
of sex magic whose practices involved the “spilling of the cup of Hermes” (i.e., ejacu-
lation of semen). These two poles comprise what Samael calls “infrasexuality,” which
he described in revealing terms as:
The psychology of this sphere has various aspects: monks and nuns who hate
sex, homosexuality in convents, homosexuality outside of monastic life, induced
abortions, people who love masturbation, criminals of the brothel, people who
enjoy torturing others … In this sphere we find the most horrible crimes reported
in police records: horrible cases of bloody crimes of homosexual origin, terrifying
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— N e o - G n o s t i c s y n t h e s i s o f S a m a e l A u n We o r —
acts of sadism, homosexuality in jails, lesbianism, terrifying psychotic criminals,

those who enjoy making their loved one suffer, horrible infanticides, patricides,
matricides.
(2012 [1950]: 37)
The remainder of this chapter will be divided into two sections. First, it will provide
a brief sketch of what is known about Weor’s life and esoteric influences. Second, it
will discuss some of the major features of Weor’s belief system, in particular what he
calls the “Three Factors of the Revolution of Consciousness”: death, (re)birth, and
sacrifice.
B IOGRAP HY
According to his spiritual autobiography, The Three Mountains (2015 [1973]),
Weor was born in Bogota, Columbia, on 3 March 1917. Born Victor Manuel Gómez
Rodriguez, he briefly attended a Jesuit school before apparently abandoning his
formal studies at age twelve together with mainline religion. As a teenager Rodriguez
became a voracious reader and developed a keen interest in esotericism and “with
the constancy of a clergyman in a cell” (2015 [1973]: 17) traversed his way through
various writings then popular amongst South American esotericists.
During this period, Rodriguez charted a familiar course through Kardecist
Spiritism, Theosophy, and Rosicrucianism. He claimed to have dictated lectures to
the Theosophical Society at age seventeen in 1933 and, he writes, “I received the
Theosophical diploma from the hands of Jinarajadasa, the illustrious president of that
august Society, whom I have the good fortune of knowing personally” (Rodriguez
2015 [1973]: 26). At the age of eighteen in 1935, Rodriguez claims to have become a
member of Arnoldo Krumm-Heller’s (1876–1949) Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua
(FRA), which had been founded in Mexico in 1927. Krumm-Heller, a homeopathic
doctor by profession, had previously been an associate of Aleister Crowley during the
latter’s brief but eventful intermittent sojourns in Berlin during the early 1930s and
was a practitioner of sex magic (Churton 2014; König 1994).
An intriguer both in politics and as part of the perennial infighting between
esotericists, Krumm- Heller published a series of works on sexual magic which
combined themes from Freemasonry, Theosophy, and other esoteric systems, with
available ideas about Buddhist and Hindu Tantra as these became increasingly access-
ible in the West. From a historical perspective it seems likely that it was from Krumm-
Heller that Weor first encountered the ideas of karezza. Krumm-Heller taught a
distinctly heteronormative, monogamous form of sexual magic whereby the male and
female initiates were united on the astral plane by sexual excitation through kissing,
caressing, and penetration without seminal emission. Unlike Weor, however, Krumm-
Heller seems to have approved of ejaculation in some instances (König 1994; 1995).
Much of the extensive Rosicrucian and alchemical imagery found in Krumm-Heller’s
writings appears to have been taken over wholesale in the work of Weor, though fur-
ther research is warranted.
How long Weor was involved in the FRA is unclear, but he eventually broke with
the organization over the teaching of Crowleyan ideas about sex magic by a Cuban
FRA member named Omar Cherenzi (Leandro de Campos and Cloclet de Silva
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2016: 42). During 1961 Weor began to prophesy that certain astronomical portents
set to occur on 4 February 1962 would usher in a new Age of Aquarius, of which
he was to be the Avatar. It was under these auspices that he founded the Gnostic
Movement in Mexico, noting in a Christmas Message to followers that:
In the new Aquarian age, the human being will adopt the synthesis of all religions.
This synthesis is Sexual Magic, and the Christ in substance. In the Aquarian age,
man will know how to transmute the seminal liquor.
(1961: n.p.)
Over the next decade and a half Weor further developed these ideas, frequently
redacting his earlier works (notably The Perfect Matrimony) and penning numerous
others. Upon Weor’s death on 24 December 1977, his movement splintered into
several factions, each adopting or emphasizing certain aspects of his teachings as
authoritative.
CORE TEAC HING S

Isolating the core teachings of Samael’s system presents challenges. First, as is so often
the case with esoteric teachers more generally, Samael’s system can be characterized
as a complex bricolage of ideas drawn from across this wider spiritual milieu, and
identifying the precise lines of transmission or sources is often thwarted from the
outset. While scholars are in general agreed that in historical terms Krumm-Heller’s
teachings lie at the root of Weor’s teachings on sex magic, the origin of other ideas is
more problematic, and regarding the influence of Tantric texts further study is needed
on what literature was available to Weor. Second, different branches of his movement
emphasize different aspects of his teaching; as such, the highly fragmented nature of
these groups and internal debates over which of his works can be considered authori-
tative mean that identifying which teachings are necessary elements and which are
contingent remains disputed. Third, it is clear from any reading of more recent editions
of his books that Weor’s teaching and writings did not remain stagnant over time, but
developed over the period from when he first published The Perfect Matrimony in
1950 through to his death. Finally, there is the question of source material. While
followers have widely translated and distributed these works, notes on editions and
redactions are not often included in recent versions, meaning that only those with
access to primary-source Spanish-language documents are able to clearly trace certain
trajectories.
To provide one example of the kinds of problem this can create, Zoccatelli has
clearly demonstrated the extent to which Weor drew on the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff
(c. 1866–1949) (see e.g., 2000; 2005; 2013). However, as the Brazilian scholars
Marcelo Leandro de Campos and Ana Rosa Cloclet da Silva have demonstrated,
Weor was likely unaware of the writings of Gurdjieff and his disciple P.D. Ouspensky
(1878–1947), which form a major part of Samael’s more developed “revolutionary
psychology” from the 1960s onward, until his move to Mexico in the mid-1950s
(2016: 43f.), after The Perfect Matrimony was first written. Indeed, the indisputable
influence of Gurdjieff’s writings on Weor’s teachings became a sore point, as he told
followers in one transcribed lecture:
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Obviously, my dear brethren, we have to comprehend the Doctrine of the Many.

Some people have stated that I took the Doctrine of the Pluralized “I” from
Gurdjieff … they are mistaken … Gurdjieff took this doctrine from Tibet …
I took this doctrine from the Egypt of the Pharaohs. I knew it in Egypt. I also
knew this doctrine in many other ancient schools. However, the first ones who
taught this doctrine were the Avatars of Lemuria. So, Gurdjieff took it from Tibet
and I took it from Egypt.
(Weor n.d.)
Despite such difficulties, ethnographic studies have tended to accept the demarca-
tion of his teachings followed by most of his followers which separates the exoteric
or publicly available teachings from higher esoteric knowledge –though in reality
almost all of Weor’s writings and public addresses are now readily available on the
internet.
EXOTERIC TE ACHING S
The exoteric meditation practices advocated by Weor and his followers have been
outlined by Gabrielle Wood (2011). The aim of these is to introduce prospective
initiates to the basics of Gnostic thought through various introductory courses. Among
Australian groups this initial course stretches over a 33-week program, and interested
parties are introduced to topics like “The Four Ways,” and “The Human Machine
and the Pluralized ‘I’ ” before progressing to topics like the “Lunar Influence” and
“Astral Travel” (Australian Gnostic Association n.d.). During this course attendees
are introduced piecemeal to the various aspects of Weor’s intricate system and its
component parts by trained instructors. The complexities of each of these degrees
prevent any detailed treatment here, instead it seems more fruitful to focus on some
of the Second Chamber teachings surrounding the “Three Factors of Revolutionary
Consciousness”: death, (re)birth, and sacrifice.
D EATH AND THE DOCT RINE O F THE M ANY

Borrowing from ideas popularized by Gurdjieff, Weor considered that humanity was
a complex machine made up of multiple brains and component parts of which they
were only vaguely aware. For Weor, “people are mere marionettes controlled by invis-
ible strings, mechanical dolls with fickle ideas and without continuity of purpose”
(2013 [1974]: 196). Instead, people are dominated by a series of conflicting egos
or psychic aggregates, referred to as the pluralized “I’s,” which each seek to dom-
inate human consciousness and cumulatively imprison the divine spark or essence
within and prevent the development of true spiritual potential. Weor called this the
“Doctrine of the Many” (2013 [1974]: 64).
Developing Theosophical themes, this condition has been brought about by a pro-
cess of devolution following a protological tragedy in Lemuria where human beings
were taught “spilling the semen” during the sexual act by Black Magicians (Weor
2012 [1950]: 43). Following a common Gnostic trope, for Weor, the divine Essence is
asleep or held imprisoned in a hypnotic condition by each of these psychic aggregates,
“bottled up, trapped, asleep within each one of those entities” (2013 [1974]: 17).
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Until humanity awakens to this condition and begins undertaking work to correct it,
it is impossible to individually or collectively transcend the mundane world or to pro-
ceed further on a path to the liberation of the true and eternal inner being (sometimes
couched in Hindu terms as Ātman, at others identified with the sphere of Chesed
in the Kabbalist Sephiroth): in Weor’s terminology (where considerable conceptual
overlap and homology occurs), to incarnate their true soul on the astral plane and
thus begin the process of “Christification.”
While not strictly anti-cosmic, in Weor’s system the material world is at best a
distraction, with the vast majority of humanity seen as disordered and careening
toward their own destruction through ignorance. Most of humanity is doomed to
continue this way interminably except for an elite who can overcome this condition
through gnostic praxis and “become a conscious citizen of the superior worlds and
study at the foot of the master” (2012 [1950]: 91). Given a recognition that this
path is reserved for the spiritually elite few, spiritual practice precedes action on the
material plain. Without completely eschewing charitable work, the greater part of the
Gnostic’s individual spiritual exercises are geared toward the eradication of the egos,
which is the sine qua non for “incarnating” the inner Christ and becoming “reborn”
on the supermundane astral plane.
For Weor, 97 percent of the human consciousness/Essence (as opposed to the false
consciousness projected by the various “I’s” which imprison it) is trapped within
these conflicting egos (2013 [1974]: 17). In order to overcome this, then, the gnostic
must practice spiritual exercises in self-observation, self-remembering, and medita-
tion to identify and subsequently dissolve the various conflicting “I’s” to liberate the
Essence trapped within them. Weor writes:
A determined percentage of consciousness is liberated when any ‘I’ is disintegrated.

Hence, the emancipation or liberation of the Essence or consciousness without the
disintegration of each ‘I’ is impossible. The greater the quantity of disintegrated
‘I’s,’ the greater the degree of Self- cognizance. The lesser the quantity of
disintegrated ‘I’s’ the lesser the percentage of awakened consciousness.
(2013 [1974]: 147)
Without this, humanity is doomed to continue repeating the same mistakes from life-
time to lifetime. Speaking of this “law of recurrence” Weor writes:
Each one of us takes his movie with him and brings it back to project it once
again on the screen of a new existence. The repetition of dramas, comedies, and
tragedies is a fundamental axiom of the law of recurrence … The actors of such
scenes, which are always repeated, are those people who live in our interior,
our ‘I’s.’
(2013 [1974]: 142)
The path of gnosis, then, is the realization and experience of this disordered existen-
tial condition –aided by various spiritual e xercises –and the eventual “decapitation”
or “dissolution” of the egos which dominate a person’s day-to-day life and serve to
keep them imprisoned in a largely illusory world (here sometimes referred to using
the Buddhist term Māyā).
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This description is a simplified account of the various strands of esoteric lore

which Weor intricately weaves together, and a full description would involve
detailing Weor’s syncretistic amalgam of Kabbala, various strands of Buddhist
and Hindu Tantrism, alchemical teaching and Theosophy, and particularly the
teachings of Gurdjieff.
SACRIFICE FOR HU M ANITY

Within Weor’s system sacrifice is defined as “showing the way to others … this is
charity very well understood; this is love” (2012 [1950]: 20). In a practical sense
this charity takes at least two forms. The first, more common among Gnostic groups
found in Latin America, is the physical alleviation of poverty and distress and, as
noted by Dawson, derived from the importance of such activities in Spiritist com-
munities (2007b: 37); the second is the provision made for the teaching of Weor’s
exoteric doctrines provided by various organizations, either free or for a nominal
donation. For Gnostics, these charitable activities are beneficial both for the recipient,
who receives either material succor or access to Weor’s teaching, but also for the
Gnostic aspirant, who by engaging in this “earns its practitioner varying amounts of
‘cosmic merit’ relative to the degree of self-sacrifice involved” (Dawson 2007b: 37f.).
This assists during the practice of sex magic. As Weor writes:
The warmth of charity opens up the doors of the heart … Charity is conscious
love. The fire of charity develops the chakra of the heart. The fire of charity
permits the sexual serpent to rise rapidly through the medullar canal. Whosoever
wants to advance rapidly on the path of the razor’s edge must practice Sexual
Magic intensely, and give himself totally to the Universal Charity. Thus, but sac-
rificing himself absolutely for his fellowman and giving his blood and his life for
them, he will be rapidly Christified.
(2012 [1950]: 171)
While charitable activity is important, it cannot proceed or be overemphasised at

the expense of the other two factors. An aspiring Gnostic must first learn the basic
teachings and begin the path of sex magic before they can properly benefit from “sac-
rificing themselves for humanity” (2012 [1950]: 20).
REB IRTH – SEXUAL M AG IC

The third and most important of the three factors is that of Rebirth –which relates
directly to the practice of sexual magic and its role in allowing the birth of what Weor
calls the “Intimate Christ.” Also referred to as the Arcanum A.Z.F., this draws strongly
on ideas borrowed from Hindu and Buddhist Tantric sexual practices (maithuna), but
Westernized and indigenized through an intricate series of correspondences Weor draws
between key concepts in Tantric occult physiology (e.g., chakras, tattvas, nāḍīs), Western
alchemy and esoteric lore, Mesoamerican mythology, and Christian religious texts.
As in some Tantric systems (see e.g., Eliade 1969; Mallinson and Singleton
2017; Samuel 2008), Weor’s system of sex magic focuses on the awakening of the
serpent kuṇḍalinī through various non-ejaculatory sexual acts and Yogic positions
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(mudrās –in particular vajrolīmudrā) which, according to the form of Tantric physi-

ology adopted by Weor, facilitate the build-up of heat/fire and semen (bindu) and
work to channel kuṇḍalinī through the bodily channels (nāḍīs) and the various
chakras until the gnostic achieves a form of ecstasy or “cosmic consciousness” (2012
[1950]: 174). Without providing a detailed physiological description, in short:
The yogi couple remains in this state for hours without spilling the semen. It is the
obligation of the yogi not to think during the practice of Sexual magic. In those
moments both man and woman are found in a state of ecstasy. Thus, in this way,
the couple become deeply in love. The creative energies rise victoriously through
their respective canals to the chalice of the brain. Animal desire is rejected. Then,
the couple withdraws from the act without having spilled the semen.
(2012 [1950]: 202)
This physiological method corresponds to certain forms of maithuna, especially those

described surrounding vajrolīmudrā utilized by Tantric practitioners –whereby “ ‘sen-
sual pleasure’ plays the part of a ‘vehicle’, for it produces the maximum tension that
abolishes normal consciousness and inaugurates the nirvanic state, samarasa, the
paradoxical experience of Unity … samarasa is obtained by the ‘immobilization’ of
breath, thought, and semen” (Eliade 1969: 268). As in certain forms of Tantrism, the
transmutation of the sexual energies, homologized with the semen (bindu – in Weor’s
language alternately referred to as sexual fire, astral liquid or Solar energy) through
the nāḍīs, is utilized to achieve a state of utter transcendence and liberation (mokṣa)
from the constraints of a cyclical existence (saṃsāra) and largely illusory phenomenal
world (māyā). However, in Weor’s system, these practices have a dual creative and
destructive soteriological purpose.
First, the sexual energy is utilized as an ideal way to destroy various “I’s.” The
energy built up through the non-ejaculatory sexual acts, properly directed through
the nāḍīs to the crown chakra, acts to destroy aspects of the egos, liberating the
trapped Essence and both purifying and revivifying the practitioner. However, this
practice is not without its spiritual risks, for along with the great benefits promised
to the practitioner who does not spill the seed there is the attendant risk that the
unprepared or unworthy practitioner will misdirect this sexual energy downward
(i.e., ejaculate), whereby “the human being becomes a demon … [and] falls into the
Abyss.” As in some Tantric systems where sexual release is capable of leading to
degeneration − either physical or in some instances moral − for Weor:
The correct interpretation of the mysteries of sex exists. The white magicians
never ejaculate the semen. The black magicians always ejaculate the semen. The
white magicians make the igneous serpent of our magical powers ascend through
the medullar canal. The black magicians make the snake descend toward the
atomic infernos of the human being.
(2012 [1950]: 20)
As in some Tantric yoga texts (e.g., the Śivasaṃhitā 4.78–104), such is the power of
sexual energy that any “negative mental attitudes can lead directly or indirectly … to
violent and destructive catastrophes of sexual energy” (2012 [1950]: 37).
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Second, sex magic functions in a creative sense of allowing the practitioner

to be liberated from the constraints of the fallen phenomenal world and to be
reborn on the astral plane through the creation of subtle bodies, or as Weor puts it
“Christification.” In order to achieve this, the Gnostic must incarnate the Intimate
Christ. Like some other esoteric teachers, in Weor’s Christology “Christ is not a
human nor a divine individual. Christ is a title given to all fully Self-realized masters”
(2012 [1950]: 106). In order to incarnate this inner or Intimate Christ, who is hom-
ologous with the true soul, Self, or Essence entrapped by the false “I’s,” the Gnostic
must be fully devoted to the dissolution of the egos through meditation and, through
the sexual energy accumulated through seminal retention, in this way facilitate the
Intimate Christ to (re)emerge from the bondage of the multiple “I’s.” In other words,
through the dissolution of the egos the Essence is liberated from the false conscious-
ness caused by the “Doctrine of the Many.” As Weor writes in The Great Rebellion
(2009 [1976]):
The Intimate Christ emerges internally in the work related to the dissolution
of the psychological self. Obviously, the Innermost Christ only comes at the
height of our deliberate efforts and voluntary sufferings. The Advent of the
Christic Fire is the most important event of our own life. The Intimate Christ
then takes charge of all our mental, emotional, motor, instinctual, and sexual
processes.
(2009 [1976]: 117)
CONCLUS IO N
Weor’s system represents one example, among many, of how esotericists have sought
to appropriate the historical gnostic ideas as a resource for contemporary spiritual
practice. Drawing on a rich amalgam of sources, his system represents a largely unex-
plored byway in the burgeoning field of Western Esotericism, particularly within a
Latin American context, where it has witnessed an unparalleled resurgence in recent
decades (see e.g., Carpenter 1999). Weor’s writings also represent a largely neglected
area in the study of contemporary sexual mysticism and the often central role played
by sex magic in many contemporary esoteric and occult groups.
Note: with the exception of a few ethnographic accounts of various groups in Latin America
and Europe by Andrew Dawson (2005; 2007a; 2007b), Carolina María Tamayo Jaramillo
and Johann F. W. Hasler (2012), and PierLuigi Zoccatelli (2000; 2005; 2013), a few recent
historical studies by Marcelo Leandro da Campos and Ana Rosa Cloclet da Silva (2016;
2017), and a useful introductory overview of Weor’s teaching by Richard Smith (1995),
Weor’s teachings have generally received only passing mention in most survey works
dealing with Western Esotericism or what is sometimes considered to be a contemporary
Gnostic revival. To provide three illustrative examples: in Richard Smoley’s popular over-
view Forbidden Faith (2006) Weor warrants only a single paragraph (168f.), whilst in
Massimo Introvigne’s survey work Il ritorno dello gnosticismo (1993) he receives only a
few pages (198–202); finally, in Wouter Hanegraaff’s ground-breaking Dictionary of Gnosis
and Western Esotericism (2006), Weor receives only a few sentences in an article on the
Rosicrucians (1020).
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REFERENCES
Australian Gnostic Association. n.d. “Gnostic Courses.” [Online]. Available at: http://www.
gnosisaustralia.com.au/courses-we-offer.html, accessed 5 August 2017.
Bogdan, Henrik. 2006. “Challenging the Morals of Western Society: The Use of Ritualized Sex
in Contemporary Occultism.” The Pomegranate 8 (2): 211–46.
Carpenter, Robert. 1999. “Esoteric Literature as a Microcosmic Mirror of Brazil’s Religious
Marketplace.” Christian Smith and Joshua Prokopy (eds.). Latin American Religion in
Motion. New York: Routledge: 226–60.
Churton, Tobias. 2014. The Beast in Berlin: Art, Sex and Magick in the Weimer Republic.
Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.
Cloclet da Silva, Ana Rosa, and Marcelo Leandro de Campos. 2017. “Entre contextos e
discursos: a biografia de Samael Aun Weor e o gnosticismo colombiano.” Revista Brasileira
de História das Religiões 9 (27): 85–114.
Dawson, Andrew. 2007a. “A Phenomenological Study of the Gnostic Church of Brazil.”
Fieldwork in Religion 2 (1): 27–48.
——— 2007b. New Era, New Religions: Religious Transformation in Contemporary Brazil.
London: Routledge.
———2005. “The Gnostic Church of Brazil: Contemporary Neo-Esotericism in Late-Modern
Perspective.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 1 (8): 1–28.
Eliade, Mircea. 1969. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Godwin, Joscelyn. 1994. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany, New York: SUNY Press.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (ed.). 2006. Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill.
Introvigne, M. 1993. Il Ritorno dell Gnosticismo. Turin: SugarCo.
Jaramillo, Carolona María Tamayo, and Johann F. W. Hasler. 2012. “El Movimiento Gnóstico
Cristiano Universal de Colombia: um movimiento esotérico internacional nacido em
Colombia.” Cuestiones Teológicas 39.92: 373–93.
König, Peter-Robert. 1994. Das OTO- Phänomen: 100 Jahre Magische Geheimbünde
und ihre Protagonisten von 1895– 1994: Ein historisches Aufklärungswerk. Munich:
Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Religions-und Weltanschauungsfragen.
——— 1995. Ein Leben für die Rose: Arnoldo Krumm-Heller. Munich: Arbeitsgemeinschaft
für Religions-und Weltanschauungsfragen.
Leandro de Campos, Marcelo. 2016. “Gnosticismo Samaelianos na academia: o estado da
arte.” Melancholia 1: 7–29.
Leandro de Campos, Marcelo, and Ana Rosa Cloclet da Silva. 2016. “Esoterismo occidental
em terras latinoamericanas: notas sobre o Movimento Gnóstico de Samael Aun Weor.”
Revista de Estudios Históricos de la Masonería Latinoamericana y Caribeña 8 (1): 24–49.
Mallinson, James, and Mark Singleton. 2017. Roots of Yoga. Sydney: Penguin Books.
Samuel, Geoffrey. 2008. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth
Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Richard. 1995. “The Revival of Ancient Gnosis.” Robert Segal (ed.), The Allure of
Gnosticism: The Gnostic Exprerience in Jungian Experience and Contemporary Culture.
Chicago: Open Court: 204–23.
Smoley, Richard. 2006. Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy from the Gospels to The Da Vinci
Code. New York: HarperCollins.
Urban, Hugh. 2006. Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in the Modern Western
Esotericism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Versluis, Arthur. 2008. The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism. Rochester,
VT: Destiny Books.
Weor, Samael Aun. n.d. “Seriousness in the Esoteric Work.” [Online]. Available at: http://
gnosticteachings.org/lectures-by-samael-aun-weor/120-seriousness-in-the-esoteric-work.
html, accessed 20 April 2017.
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———1961. “The New Aquarian Age.” [Online]. Available at: http://gnosticteachings.

org/books-by-samael-aun-weor/supreme-christmas-message-of-1961–62/3135-the-new-
aquarian-age.html, accessed 4 April 2017.
——— 2009 [1976]. The Great Rebellion: The Path of Liberation from Suffering.
n.p.: Glorian.
——— 2012 [1950]. The Perfect Matrimony: The Door to Enter into Initiation: Why Sex and
Religion are Inseparable. n.p.: Glorian.
——— 2013 [1974]. Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology: The Gnostic Method of Real
Spiritual Awakening. n.p.: Glorian.
——— 2015 [1973]. The Three Mountains. n.p.: Glorian.
Wood, Gabrielle. 2011. “The Role of Spirituality in Gnosticism.” Journal of Dharma 36
(1): 73–86.
Wulfhorst, Ingo. 1995. “Movimento Gnóstico Cristão Universal do Brasil na Nova Ordem: Um
Grupo da Nova Era.” Estudos Teológicos 35 (2): 186–210.
Zoccatelli, PierLuigi. 2000. “Il paradigm esoterico e un modello di applicazione: Note sul
movimento gnostico di Samuel Aun Weor. La Critica Sociologica 135: 33–49.
———2005. “Note a margine dell’influsso di G.I. Gurdjieff su Samael Aun Weor.” Aries 5
(2): 255–75.
———2013. “Sexual magic and Gnosis in Colombia: tracing the influence of G.I. Gurdjieff
on Samael Aun Weor.” Henrik Bogdan and Gordan Djurdjevic (eds.). Occultism in a Global
Perspective. Durham: Acumen: 135–50.
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CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
SCIENTOLOGY AND GNOSTICISM:

L. RON HUBBARD’S “THE
FACTORS” (1953)
Donald A. Westbrook and James R. Lewis
W hen the first churches of Scientology were established in 1953 and 1954, L. Ron
Hubbard (1911–1986) had already set forward dozens of writings and lectures
that now form the core of the canon of scripture for the new religion. In addition to
drawing on his background as a writer, most famously of science fiction, Hubbard
borrowed from other sources in the construction of Scientology and its mental health
forerunner Dianetics; these include popular psychology and space opera theology as
well as elements from the Western esoteric tradition (showcased, for instance, in his
familiarity with the work of Aleister Crowley) (Urban 2012; Bogdan 2016; Melton
2000), as Scientology fashioned itself as paradoxically scientific and religious in orien-
tation (Lewis 2015; Westbrook 2017). Academic researchers have begun to more ser-
iously debate Scientology’s intellectual history, looking for instance to possible influences
from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Theosophy, in addition to Western Esotericism and
Gnosticism broadly construed (Terrin 2017; Dericquebourg 2017; Flinn 2009;
Grünschloß 2009; Hammer 2004; Kent 1999; Trolin 1977; Whitehead 1987: 170–8).
In fact, Hubbard explicitly situated Scientology as a form of gnosticism, writing
in 1955:
This science is formed in the tradition of ten thousand years of religious phil-
osophy and considers itself a culmination of the searches which began with
the Veda, the Tao, Buddhism, Christianity, and other religions. Scientology is a
gnostic faith in that it knows it knows. This is its distinguishing characteristic
from most of its predecessors.
(Hubbard 1991 [1955])
The clearest and most succinct statement linking Scientology and Gnosticism came
in the form of a short piece from 1953 entitled “The Factors,” which set forward the
basics of Scientological cosmology months before the establishment of Scientology
churches and over a decade before the systematization of later developments such
as the step-by-step path to “Clear” and the esoteric “Operating Thetan” (OT) levels
(Hubbard 2007a: 433). As such, it provides early and introductory insight into
Scientology’s place in the broader gnostic tradition.
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— Scientology and Gnosticism —
“T H E FACTORS” (1 9 5 3 ): “B E F O RE THE B E G INNING

WAS A CAU S E ”
According to Hubbard, the individual’s history as an “immortal spiritual being”
(thetan) extends back millions, billions, trillions, and even quadrillions of years to a
primordial period when thetans existed as pure spirits –before bodies, before earth,
before the creation of the universe, and indeed even before the existence of the
physical universe composed of matter, energy, space, and time (termed “MEST”).
Scientology’s founder made no definite statement about the existence of God (which
he termed the “Eighth Dynamic”) and left open the door for theological interpret-
ations of the Supreme Being, Unmoved Mover, or First Cause. However, in at least
one source he suggests a panentheistic view in which a supreme being or force may
exist, with each thetan a reflection of its creative and spiritual power and potential-
ities: “when the Seventh Dynamic (spiritual dynamic) is reached in its entirety, one
will only then discover the true Eighth Dynamic” (Hubbard 2007b: 40). Hubbard’s
writings also make clear that the existence of the universe itself is based on the
mutual agreement of omnipotent thetans who have created it in the first place –
the result of “postulation” and “mocking up” that continues to this day, whether
or not individuals are conscious of the decision in the primordial past (Hubbard
2007c: 71).
This version of philosophical idealism can be found as early as Hubbard’s book
Science of Survival (1951): “What we conceive to be reality is actually agreed-upon
perception of the physical universe” (2007d: 71). He then connects this premise to
one of the most foundational concepts in Scientology: the “ARC Triangle,” whose
component parts –affinity, reality, and most prominently communication –result in
understanding. “Our affinity with that reality, our admission that we are a part of
that reality and our acceptance of our participation in it is necessary to our commu-
nication with it” (Hubbard 2007d: 72). These metaphysical and gnostic intuitions are
more explicitly put forward in a number of other works from the early 1950s, such
as Hubbard’s books Advanced Procedure and Axioms (1951), Scientology 8–8008
(1952), and The Creation of Human Ability (1954), as well as the Philadelphia
Doctorate Course (1952–1953) and The Factors (1953) lecture series.
In April 1953 Hubbard published “The Factors,” a set of 30 points that introduces
some of Scientology’s gnostic sensibilities in language reminiscent of the Book of
Genesis. As such, it is perhaps the best single source on Scientology’s “creation
story,” since it traces out the creation and cycles of beingness, space, communication,
energy, life, time, universes, death, and ongoing creation in the jargon of Dianetics
and Scientology. Though clearly modeled after biblical rhetoric, the points present
a view of space and time that is more cyclical than linear, in line with Scientology’s
affirmation of past and future lives (though Scientologists avoid the word “reincar-
nation” because of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain connotations about future lives in
non-human form). In a lecture given one day after writing “The Factors,” Hubbard
addressed the similarities to Genesis and explained to his audience that this was
simply a literary means to communicate points about creation and the universe.
The Factors should be, by and large, self-explanatory. It is not an effort to copy
the Book of Genesis. It really isn’t an effort to copy that. It happens to be in very
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— D o n a l d A . We s t b r o o k a n d Ja m e s R . L e w i s —
simple language … as a writer, that happens to be as simple as I can say some-

thing. And if I were saying it scientifically, it would not communicate as well.
(Hubbard 2007e: 481)
A selection from “The Factors” provides an introduction to this cosmology of matter,

energy, space, and time:
1. Before the beginning was a Cause and the entire purpose of the Cause was the
creation of effect.
2. In the beginning and forever is the decision and the decision is TO BE.
3. The first action of beingness is to assume a viewpoint.
4. The second action of beingness is to extend from the viewpoint, points to
view, which are dimension points.
5. Thus there is space created, for the definition of space is: viewpoint of dimen-
sion. And the purpose of a dimension point is space and a point of view …
8. And thus there is LIGHT.
9. And thus there is energy.
10. And thus there is life …
14. Many dimension points combine into larger gases, fluids or solids: thus there
is matter …
18. It is the opinions of the viewpoints that some of these forms should endure.
Thus there is survival.
19. And the viewpoint can never perish; but the form can perish …
21. From this comes a consistency of viewpoint of the interaction of dimension
points and this, regulated, is TIME.
22. And there are universes.
23. The universes, then, are three in number: the universe created by one viewpoint,
the universe created by every other viewpoint, the universe created by the mutual
action of viewpoints which is agreed to be upheld –the physical universe.
24. And the viewpoints are never seen … And the viewpoints … forget that they
can create more points and space and forms. Thus comes about scarcity. And
the dimension points can perish and so the viewpoints assume they, too, can
perish.
25. Thus comes about death …
27. There is beingness, but Man believes there is only becomingness.
28. The resolution of any problem posed hereby is the establishment of viewpoints
and dimension points … by the rehabilitation of the ability of the viewpoint
to assume points of view and create and uncreate, neglect, start, change
and stop dimension points of any kind at the determinism of the viewpoint.
Certainty in all three universes must be regained, for certainty, not data, is
knowledge …
30. And above these things there might be speculation only. And below these
things there is the playing of the game. But these things which are written
here Man can experience and know … to employ them to make individuals
and organizations more able and so could give to Earth a culture of which
Earth could be proud.
(Hubbard 2007f)
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The thetan –described as “beingness” in the form of a “viewpoint” –is an active co-

participant in the creation of universes but became subject to the self-imposed limitations
and encumbrances of the physical universe (MEST). These, as it were, fallen “viewpoints”
were responsible for the existence of the material but soon confuse themselves with the
object of their creation, and thus lose native creative power; they “forget that they can
create more points and space and forms … And the dimension points can perish and so
the viewpoints assume they, too, can perish.” The result is death and spiritual amnesia.
“There is beingness, but Man believes there is only becomingness” since humanity has
forgotten its true spiritual nature and succumbs to cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. The
remedy, “the rehabilitation of the ability of the viewpoint,” will result in certainty and
in turn knowledge: “for certainty, not data, is knowledge.” And the final point reiterates
that “these things which are written here Man can experience and know.”
“The Factors” also display one of Hubbard’s early attempts to express and system-
atize the philosophy and theology of Scientology as it transitioned away from its more
secular roots in popular psychology. By late 1952 and early 1953, the movement from
present lifetime to past lifetime auditing (mental/spiritual counseling) marked a tran-
sition to more overtly and empowering theological themes (Urban 2011; Lewis 2015;
Westbrook 2018). As he put it in a December 1952 lecture, “Now, I tell you, as you
look at this galaxy and you look at the Milky Way, the number of engrams which you
can run off the Milky Way aren’t anywhere as near as important as getting the fellow
in command of the Milky Way” (Hubbard 2007g: 426). And, as prolific as he was in
establishing the foundational scriptures of the nascent Church of Scientology in the
1950s, he would spend the next three decades further refining his “applied religious
philosophy” as Scientology expanded beyond its origins in post-war and Cold War
America to become a new religion with global reach (Urban 2011; 2017; Church of
Scientology International 2017b).
SCIENTOLOGY AS SE L F -KNOW L E D G E
It is notable that Scientologists today eschew language such as “belief” or “faith”
in describing the role of Scientology’s teachings and practices in their lives.
Scientologists insist that they do not merely believe in Scientology or have faith in
it. Rather, members claim to “know” it to be true and “have reality” on the effi-
cacy of the technology or the tech, which is how they usually refer to Hubbard’s
creations of Dianetics and Scientology and their pure and unadulterated application
according to his thousands of policy letters (Westbrook 2017: 27). The linguistic
emphasis on knowledge over faith is also put forth by the Church of Scientology
International: “Nothing in Scientology, however, need be taken on faith. Its truths
are self-evident, its principles easily demonstrable and its technology can be seen at
work in any Church of Scientology. One need only open the door and step through”
(Church of Scientology International 2017a). These articulations in turn make sense
in light of Hubbard’s definition of Scientology as “knowing how to know,” from the
Latin scio, “knowing in the fullest meaning of the word” and the Greek logos, “study
of.” Hubbard also writes that Scientology is “the study and handling of the spirit in
relationship to itself, universes and other life” (Hubbard 2007b: 5).
And while it is certainly true that Hubbard founded the Scientology religion and
played a central role in the assembly and systematization of its theology and practices,
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— D o n a l d A . We s t b r o o k a n d Ja m e s R . L e w i s —
he made clear that Dianetics and Scientology are designed to provide personal spir-
itual progress gauged by a radically subjective epistemology: “Nothing in Scientology
is true for you unless you have observed it and it is true according to your observa-
tion” (Hubbard 2007h: 19). “Workability rather than Truth has been consulted,” we
read in the most recent edition of Dianetics: The Original Thesis (Hubbard 2007i: 7).
Along these lines, Scientology has also been characterized as an “applied religious
philosophy” and “spiritual technology” (Westbrook 2014). These points suggest that
Scientology is indeed a form of gnosticism but expressed within a synthesizing and
technological worldview that is both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, sub-
jective and “scientific,” in orientation.
REFERENCES
Bogdan, Henrik. 2016. “The Babalon Working 1946: L. Ron Hubbard, John Whiteside Parsons,
and the Practice of Enochian Magic.” Numen 63 (1): 12–32.
Church of Scientology International. 2017a. “Scientology Principles: Introduction.” http://
www.scientology.org/what-is-scientology/basic-principles-of-scientology/a-description-of-
scientology.html#slide5, accessed August 2017.
— ——2017b. “Church of Scientology Landmark Victories for Religious Freedom.”
ScientologyReligion.org http://www.scientologyreligion.org/landmark-decisions/, accessed
August 2017.
Dericquebourg, Régis. 2017. “Affinities Between Scientology and Theosophy.” Proceedings of
the International Conference on Scientology in Scholarly Perspective. January 24–25, 2014.
Acta Comparanda, Subsidia IV, Antwerpen: FVG. 81–103.
Flinn, Frank K. 2009. “Scientology as Technological Buddhism.” James R. Lewis (ed.).
Scientology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Grünschloß, Andreas. 2009. “Scientology, a ‘New Age’ Religion?” James R. Lewis (ed.).
Scientology. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 225–44.
Hammer, Olav. 2004. “Esotericism in New Religious Movements.” James R. Lewis (ed.). The
Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hubbard, L. Ron. 1991 [1955]. The Scientologist: A Manual on The Dissemination of
Material, Organization Executive Course: Executive Division. Vol. 7. Los Angeles: Bridge
Publications.
———2007a. “From Clear to Eternity.” Scientology 0–8: The Book of Basics. Los Angeles:
Bridge Publications.
——— 2007b. Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought. Los Angeles: Bridge Publications.
——— 2007c. A History of Man. Los Angeles: Bridge Publications.
——— 2007d. Science of Survival. Los Angeles: Bridge Publications.
— ——2007e. “The Factors.” Lecture. April 24, 1953. The Factors: Admiration & the
Renaissance of Beingness. Los Angeles: Golden Era Productions.
——— 2007f. “The Factors.” Scientology 0– 8: The Book of Basics. Los Angeles: Bridge
Publications.
———2007g. “Flows, Dispersals and Ridges.” Lecture. December 10, 1952. Philadelphia
Doctorate Course. Los Angeles: Golden Era Productions.
——— 2007h. “Personal Integrity.” Scientology: A New Slant on Life. Los Angeles: Bridge
Publications [originally published in Ability magazine, Issue 125, 1961].
——— 2007i. Dianetics: The Original Thesis. Los Angeles: Bridge Publications.
Kent, Stephen. 1999. “The Creation of ‘Religious’ Scientology.” Religious Studies and Theology
18 (2): 97–126.
Lewis, James R. 2015. “Scientology: Sect, Science, or Scam?” Numen 62 (2–3): 226–42.
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Melton, J. Gordon. 2000. The Church of Scientology. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books.
Terrin, Aldo Natale. 2017. “Scientology and Its Contiguity with Gnostic Religion and
Eastern Religions.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientology
in Scholarly Perspective. January 24– 25, 2014. Acta Comparanda, Subsidia IV,
Antwerpen: FVG: 185–203.
Trolin, Cliff. 1977. “Knowledge in Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Scientology.” Center
for the Study of New Religious Movements Collections, 1977–1983. Box 17, Folder 13.
Berkeley, CA: Graduate Theological Union Special Collections.
Urban, Hugh B. 2011. The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion. Princeton,
———2012. “The Occult Roots of Scientology? L. Ron Hubbard, Aleister Crowley, and the
Origins of a Controversial New Religion.” Nova Religio 15 (3): 91–116.
———2017. “‘The Third Wall of Fire’: Scientology and the Study of Religious Secrecy.” Nova
Religio 20 (4): 13–36.
Westbrook, Donald A. 2014. “Scientology as ‘Spiritual Technology.’ ” Cosmologics: A Magazine
of Science, Religion, and Culture. December 7. http://cosmologicsmagazine.com/donald-
westbrook-scientology-as-spiritual-technology/, accessed July 2017.
—— —2017. “Researching Scientology and Scientologists in the United States: Methods
and Conclusions.” James R. Lewis and Kjersti Hellesøy (eds.). Handbook of Scientology.
Leiden: Brill.
——— 2018. Among the Scientologists. New York: Oxford University Press.
Whitehead, Harriet. 1987. Renunciation and Reformulation: A Study of Conversion in an
American Sect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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CHAPTER SIXTY
GNOSTIC AND ESOTERIC FILAMENTS

IN POPULAR CULTURE
Adam Possamai
INTRODUCTIO N
I n numerous studies, the concepts of Gnosticism and esotericism are understood

in different ways. Riffard (1990) provides an interesting analysis of the word eso-
teric in its various interpretations by different groups. For example, in Antiquity,
Gnostic groups called esotericism, gnosis; for Pythagoreanism esotericism was syn-
onymous with philosophy (Riffard 1990: 97); esotericism was magic for the Iranian
Mazdeism (1990: 113). In 1883 the word was consecrated for the public in a book
by A. P. Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism, but the term was then used to express the doc-
trine of the Theosophical Society (Riffard 1990: 78–9). For Foster Bailey (1974: 10)
from the Arcane school, esotericism is the secret knowledge found in the work of
the founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. With regard to
Gnosticism, the word originally made reference to an early Christian sect that viewed
gnosis as a knowledge needed to be attained. This group had similarities with ancient
mystery cults. As the sect no longer exists, the use of this word has led to different
understandings as well.
For the sake of this chapter, I am using the words esoteric and gnostic as syn-
onymous and I am following Tiryakian’s (1974: 265) claim that:
a crucial aspect of esoteric knowledge is that it is a secret knowledge of the reality

of things, of hidden truths, handed down, frequently orally and not at all at once,
to a relatively small number of persons who are typically ritually initiated by
those already holding this knowledge.
Even if the term esotericism is a multi-dimensional term and is difficult to grasp

(Faivre and Hanegraaff 1998), for the sake of my argument I will follow the secrecy
dimension of esotericism even if, according to Faivre (1994), there is a danger of
reductionism when following this path. However, the notion of secrecy can have
different interpretations, as found in Simmel (1991): secrecy as a form of protection,
secrecy as giving a sense of power for the one maintaining it, and secrecy as a finality
in itself, i.e., a doctrine will be kept secret for people who want to find it, mainly to
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— Gnostic filaments in popular culture —
force them to gain the experience of attaining this knowledge (e.g., in ancient mystery
cults and initiatory groups, or in alchemy books). This focus will guide the analysis
of popular culture below.
For this chapter, I will mainly concentrate on the Western context of popular cul-
ture and esotericism. There is no need to explore the complexity, the origin, and his-
tory of esotericism. Suffice to say that esoteric knowledge, overall, tended to remain
secret during Christianity in Europe until modernity for fear of heresy or persecution,
even if there were exceptions in various places and times (e.g., Prague at the time of
Emperor Rudolf II). What is significant for this chapter is the moment when esoteri-
cism became caught up in the modernization process –say from the 1800s onwards.
At the same time as urbanization, industrialization, and science were developing
and disenchanting the Western world, the idea and practices of secrecy as presented
above progressively decayed. Esotericists –from groups such as spiritualism, the
Theosophical Society, modern occultism and traditional esotericism (or Guénonism) –
by the nineteenth century wanted to deliver their “knowledge” in a clear language to
the general public and promoted democratic access to it. They wanted transparency
(as opposed to secrecy) and became less of a secret society. As science developed, new
methods of systematic analysis were also used to understand the supernatural and
chart its territories.
This period has been called “Esotericism Unveiled” by Riffard (1990) and coincides
with the time of the dime novels in the United States, and the “penny dreadfuls” in the
United Kingdom. The boom of the printing press and newspapers enabled stories from
popular culture to become available for a low price and they tended to be serialized,
and some of these dealt with supernatural themes. Some magical books also became
popular and were circulated widely (e.g., Le Petit Albert and Le Grand Grimoire).
These two books were circulated at the start of modernity by the Bibliothèque Bleu,
a French pulp publisher, and they have also been used widely as props in works of
fiction. According to Davies (2009) magical books only became part of the “pulp”
industry in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Through the years, and more specifically during late modernity –from the 1970s
onwards –we can posit that the process changed from this idea of democratizing
access to these esoteric doctrines (as found in the four groups above) into that of
(over) simplifying them. As an example, I compare the book by the nineteenth-
century Occultist Papus (1994 [1896]), The Tarot of the Bohemians, which even if it
supposedly answers the secret of tarot cards, underscores complex knowledge (e.g.,
cabbala) and is difficult to understand for the non-initiated; whereas a kind of do-
your-tarot-card-reading-yourself-in-five-minutes book is faster to grasp by focussing
on easy and quick information about the cards, and without entering into any theor-
etical underpinnings. Riffard (1990) describes this period as “Esotericism Simplified.”
If the tendency in the “esotericism unveiled” phase was to reveal the secrets and to
present purported grand knowledge, the tendency in this new period is to simplify
what was already revealed a century ago and encourage the practitioner to develop
his or her knowledge. It is necessary to point out that even if this is the predom-
inant tendency, there are spiritual practitioners who engage in very profound spiritual
research (a search for universal principles). However, what is emphasized is that the
simplification of esotericism has given the opportunity for everyone to have access
to this –sometimes commercially prepared –knowledge (see Possamai 2005). This
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— A d a m Po s s a m a i —
“simplified” version is now a source of inspiration for many creators of popular cul-
ture, whereas the “unveiled” version was less accessible and thus more restricted. At
the same time that gnostic knowledge was being “simplified,” the same knowledge
became increasingly present in popular culture. It is also in this period that popular
culture developed in new media such as television and the internet, and new heroes
have been created to confront the supernatural. The logocentric view of reason was
critiqued at the start of this period (e.g., post-modern and post-structuralist philoso-
phies) and left room for other types of understanding. While the world has become
re-enchanted, story plots about the supernatural have not lost their interest for the
public. On top of this, as occult knowledge is easily available in bookshops and the
internet, an author no longer needs to be initiated into a specific group to be able to
include gnostic knowledge in their work of popular culture.
Esoteric knowledge seems to be no longer secret. Even if there still exist initiatory
societies with diverse rites of initiation, those rites are also found in the literature and
on the internet. For Trevelyan (1984) there is no more need to access what he calls
the “secret wisdom” in groups, because the access for individuals is now facilitated.
Schlegel (1995: 110) writes about the French esotericist, Raymond Abellio (1907–
1986), who declared that our time would be synonymous with the end of esotericism.
Every spiritual technique (e.g., astrology and numerology) is now easy to find and
to learn and there is no need to belong to any secret group. Secrecy being the key
element of “traditional” esotericism (according to the definition adopted above), it
can be argued that since modernity, the veil of secrecy has been thrown open, and
the secrets are now (in late modernity) on the shelves of New Age bookshops, on the
internet, and in many works of popular culture.
As Bauman (1998: 180) notes, transcendence was once the privilege of an aristoc-
racy of culture such as saints, hermits, mystics, ascetic monks or dervishes. Now, this
transcendence is within every individual’s reach and is widely available as a form of
entertainment in popular culture.
The creation of popular culture does not happen in a vacuum and follows wider
cultural trends, as presented above. While readers and viewers of popular culture will
consume their works of choice (or as influenced by their peers, media, and new social
media), the creators will themselves consume various aspects of culture to create their
work. Gnostic and esoteric ideas have of course filtered through works of art and
popular culture for centuries, but rather than go through a list of them, this chapter
provides an overview of major trends.
T H E SECRET KNOWLEDGE IN P O P U L AR CU LTU RE

Some Christian groups have raised serious concerns about J. K. Rowling’s Harry
Potter books, more so than about Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series (Possamai
2005). Both series are popular stories set in a fantasy context, but the reason why
the stories of the orphan Harry Potter who possesses great magical powers and skills
are under attack is because the narratives make undercover reference to the real his-
torical world of the occult, by, for example, mentioning the work of the alchemist
Nicolas Flamel. The world of Tolkien, on the other hand, is a work of pure invention
(although there have been some claims that this is not the case; Davidson 2012). The
intention of J. K. Rowling seems to have been to tap into this world as a source of
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inspiration rather than promoting a secret knowledge or an occult/gnostic view of

the world.
More and more, we find works of popular culture that draw inspiration from
this world for their narrative, the same way a crime writer would be inspired by real
crimes, or a writer of political fiction by real politics. In a society in which the occult
is no longer occult, a reservoir of cultural knowledge is available in popular books
and the internet, the same way that Greek and Roman mythology, Shakespearean
plays, and even the Bible serve as a cultural reservoir to authors; sometimes even these
sources of inspiration are mixed to serve a plot. This is the case for example with the
characters developed by some authors of graphic novels, such as Sandman by Neil
Gaiman, Hell Boy by Mike Mignolia, Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt, and Dr Strange
by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Magic and mystery are not in these stories subject to
scientific analysis. For example, the Marvel character of the surgeon turned expert in
the mystic arts first appeared in the 1960s during the counterculture period in which
some youth were seeking ideals that were not materialist and had an interest in mys-
ticism. The solo series of this character did not survive the decade and it is only in
the 1980s that Marvel came back under its own title as the New Age Movement was
gathering momentum (Daniels 1991). This was a superhero for a new target market.
The occult, as well as science, was a prop heavily used in the nineteenth century
and early twentieth century, especially in Victorian and Edwardian fiction (Parlati
2011). Literature about occult detectives facing the supernatural, and references to,
for example, spiritualism and mesmerism, could be found. The main character in
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories was a detective who always shed a rational
light on a mystery. A film adaptation was recently put on screen by Guy Ritchie and
again reason provides an explanation, revealing that what was presented as occult
were in fact tricks and manufactured plots. However, the movie abounds with images
and symbolism in line with esoteric culture. Doyle also wrote Gothic fiction that
did not always provide a scientific reasoning for the supernatural. It is worth noting
that this author was also involved in Spiritism (Guillaud and Marlin 2016). Another
example is the character Harry Dickson, developed by the Belgian Jean Ray, who is
an American Sherlock Holmes who deals more with the supernatural than his English
counterpart. Around the same time, the pulp fiction of the French writer Gustave Le
Rouge dealt with occultism, which was portrayed as a tool, equivalent to science
for the attainment of knowledge (Jaussaud 2011). Later, at the end of the twentieth
century, McGuire and Buchbinder (2010) claim that a new type of forensic fiction
appeared (e.g., the TV series Medium and Supernatural) in which the detective needs
to be gifted in accessing the supernatural to solve clues.
While not strictly seeking secret knowledge or solving mysterious clues, the science
fiction genre sometimes deals with a quest for the direct experience of reality and
seeks what lies beyond the world as it appears to us. In this sense, both Mackey
(1984) and DiTommaso (2001) find some Christian gnostic elements in the work of
Philip K. Dick, in which some stories involve change from the physical to the meta-
physical, and involve the development of mental powers. As Mackey (1984: 118)
states, there “is a tendency in science fiction to turn supermen into messiahs.”
Can we then state that these plots are simply a narrative device used as a cultural
reservoir without the author believing in the esoteric? Some might have an affinity
rather than a strong belief in esoteric knowledge. Some are known to be insiders in
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this occult knowledge and perform magic themselves. Contemporary international

stars are for example Alan Moore, Grant Morisson, and Alexandro Jodorowsky.
These authors do tap into this reservoir of narratives for their stories and often draw
the readers into a path of initiation through a form of literary Eleusinian mystery
(e.g., Jodorowsky’s movies El Topo and The Holy Mountain, or his graphic novel
The Incal). For example, the main characters go through some adventures, some-
times including the discovery of secret knowledge (be it knowledge of the universe
or of themselves), to discover their true self and thus develop their spiritual side. The
young character in Moore’s Promethea follows another initiatory path, even being
the recipient of superpowers. One story makes reference to the symbolism of tarot
cards quite closely, and demonstrates a strong and explicit link with the esoteric.
There are of course more ancient authors who prior to modern times have been
initiated in an occultist and/or Masonic group and who have created works of fiction.
Some have in turn provided inspirational sources for modern pop culture. Gustav
Meyrink and his Angel of the West Window, written in 1927, deals with a historic
figure, John Dee, the astrologer of Queen Elizabeth I, who used to talk to angels
through a black “shew-stone” (now in the British Museum). This real life occultist is
suspected to have served as a source of inspiration for Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Meyrink is also known for another earlier masterpiece, The Golem, which taps into
Jewish mysticism. William Butler Yeats, who was part of the Golden Dawn, also
wrote a gnostic plot in The Winding Stair. Bram Stoker was also involved in the same
group and created Dracula. It is, however, his character of Van Helsing that is more
central to this chapter, as this detective of the occult treats the supernatural as real.
Better-known classic authors who are not known to have been connected to esoteric
groups have also touched on the genre. Balzac’s Séraphîta is a novel that reflects the
inspiration he gained from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Baudelaire’s poem
“Correspondences” is another example. Other writers partly inspired by Swedenborg
include William Blake and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, both of whom could be
described as deeply esoteric and developed philosophies of their own which have in
turn inspired others in many fields of expression over time. Drawing on a source even
further back in time, Milo Manara’s recent graphic novel The Golden Ass (2016)
refers to Apuleius’s Golden Ass, also known as The Metamorphoses, an ancient
Roman novel making reference to mystery cults of the ancient world.
When dealing with secret knowledge, a strong theme for a plot is of course secret
societies. Narratives about groups with restricted membership who act as gatekeepers
to secret knowledge abound in popular culture. These often deal with esoteric groups
and use intertextual props to link such topics as alchemy, astrology, the Rosicrucians,
Spiritism, and Freemasonry, in a type of fictional bricolage (Guillaud and Marlin
2016). Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891) is an early popular version of the genre that dealt
with satanic secret societies, and in recent times Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code
(2003) was a significant success as a book and movie. In the latter narrative, we see a
mix of conspiracy, secret societies, and lost manuscripts. In between these two works
of fiction, we can find Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), which tends to
critique esoteric knowledge rather than give support to viewing it positively. Another
key work to be noted is James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy (1993), which deals
with the finding of a secret manuscript amid a conspiracy theory plot. More than
revealing secret knowledge, the book is a type of parable for the author’s views on
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spirituality. There is also a recent internet movement that provides texts, videos, and
radio shows dealing with secret groups, conspiracy theories, and alternative spiritu-
ality. This has been called Conspirituality by Ward and Voas (2011).
But what is the difference between a Gothic ghost story and an esoteric story
that deals with the spirit of the dead? Although the line can be blurred at times, a
gnostic piece of fiction would tend to provide secret knowledge and will not equate
the supernatural to superstition. The more a piece of work makes reference to occult
knowledge the more esoteric it will be (though it still can be a non-gnostic piece of
work, e.g., Harry Potter). If the plot involves an initiatory process (e.g., Jodorowsky’s
Holy Mountain), the stronger the connection. Works of popular culture touching on
the esoteric rather than being explicitly esoteric are of course more numerous on the
market.
We have therefore authors who write about the supernatural, the occult, and secret
societies drawing inspiration from real esoteric texts and people, as well as authors
who create new characters, groups, and conspiracies –the line between history and
literary fiction is often indistinct. As an author does not need to be a scientist to
write science fiction, or a police officer or criminal to write crime fiction, a creator
today does not need to be an occultist or magician to include esoteric plots. In this
phase of “esotericism unveiled” the knowledge of this gnosis is easy to access and is
incorporated into popular culture.
WHEN REALITY B ECOM E S B L U RRE D : THE

HYP ER-R EAL PH E NO M E NO N
In the previous section, we have analyzed some works that used esotericism as a
source of knowledge for the narrative. This section explores another process, that of
consuming works of popular culture for an occult practice.
In 1966, in San Francisco, Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan as a medium
for the study of the Black Arts. His assumption of the inherent selfishness and vio-
lence of human beings is at the base of its non-Christian teaching. Satan, mistakenly
viewed as the long-time opponent of God, is, according to LaVey, a hidden force
in nature that can be tapped into. In The Satanic Rituals, which is used by some
occult practitioners as a basis for metaphysical growth, LaVey (1972) refers to the
metaphysics of H. P. Lovecraft, the author of weird fiction who wrote most of his
tales during the 1920s and 1930s. H. P. Lovecraft developed a pantheon of gods
called the Ancient Ones, for example Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Nyarlathotep, who
are waiting in secrecy before coming back to earth to conquer the human race.
In The Nameless City (1921), Lovecraft introduced the mad Abdul Alhazred, who
had penned the ancient tome The Necronomicon. This book claimed to reveal all
secrets of the world, especially those of the Ancient Ones. It became a standard prop
in all later stories, and many readers believed it actually existed. Lovecraft always
claimed that his stories were fictional and that he was a total agnostic. He created his
own supernatural mythology that included esoteric knowledge and occult practices.
However, LaVey, believing that “fantasy plays an important part in any religious
curriculum,” (1972), developed some rituals for his Church of Satan based on this
fictional mythology. Hanegraaff (2007) lists groups who are more or less directly
inspired by Lovecraft’s stories for their magical works, such as the Illuminates of
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Thanateros and the Autonomatrix. This is part of what I have called in other works
(Possamai 2005; 2012) hyper-real religion. The hyper-real religion is a simulacrum
of a religion created out of, or in symbiosis with, commodified popular culture which
provides inspiration at a metaphorical level and/or a source of beliefs for everyday
life. Another example of this phenomenon is people believing that Tolkien’s Lord of
the Rings was tapping into another level of reality, even if the author was not aware
of this (Davidsen 2012).
The most famous case of a hyper-real religion is Jeddism, a spirituality inspired
from the narrative of Star Wars. Although these movies do not deal with occult know-
ledge, one episode, however, is explicit about the initiation into an old religion (the
Jedi religion). In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker goes through an initiation
with Yoda that could be linked to a similar process in a mystery cult (i.e., going into
a cavern under a symbolic tree and facing one’s own fear).
Another aspect of this hyper-real phenomenon is conspiracy theories (Roeland,
Aupers, and Houtman 2012). These are not all gnostic as the focus can be on the
government hiding secrets from its citizens. Another branch, closer to this chapter,
is the one that deals with secret societies ruling the world, often with an esoteric
bent such as in stories about the so-called Illuminati. The original Illuminati group
was originally an initiatory group from Bavaria in the eighteenth century with
strong influence from the Freemasons. Today, popular culture makes reference to the
Illuminati as a secret group seeking a new world order. Reference to this abounds in
the literature, comics, computer games, and cartoons. In our world of intertextuality,
it is common to be able to make quick reference to this conspiracy theory. However,
in hyper-reality, where reality often becomes blurred by the media and commodified
popular culture, some consumers, passive or active, wonder if this is true or can
even be convinced of the existence of a conspiratorial Illuminati. One only needs to
observe the memes of the Illuminati on YouTube and read the comments that people
have posted.
In a pendulum swing, popular culture has also filaments in Gnosticism. As an
example, tarot cards inspired by works of popular culture such as The Lord of the
Rings, Harry Potter, Corto Maltese, and even the erotic art of Milo Manara can be
used for divination and have become collectibles.
CONCLU S IO NS
In their analysis of art today, Lipovetsky and Serroy (2013: 301) claim that as there
are no dominant artistic schools of thought, our period is dominated by the prolif-
eration of styles and techniques, and this involves a deregulation of taste in art and
a mix of styles. Popular culture is not left out, and is part of this mix. We now find
gnostic elements that have lost any taint of heresy or of the demonic. Today in the
phase of “esotericism unveiled,” works of popular culture make reference to eso-
teric knowledge in an intertextual fashion and this has become almost as mainstream
as science fiction. Not only has this knowledge been democratized, but access to
creations of popular culture has also been facilitated by new technologies. If we take
into account internet memes as works of popular culture, we can even see people’s
creative activities on YouTube and other sites. These filaments are becoming stronger,
and are increasing.
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REFERENCES
Bauman, Zygmut. 1998. “Postmodern Religion?” Paul Heelas with David Martin and Paul
Morris (eds.). Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Bailey, Foster. 1974. Changing Esoteric Values. New York: Lucis Publishing Company.
Daniels, Les. 1991. Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics.
New York: Abradale Press.
Davidsen, Markus. 2012. “The Spiritual Milieu Based on J.R. Tolkien’s Literary Mythology.”
Adam Possamai (ed.). Handbook of Hyper-Real Religions. Leiden: Brill: 185–206.
Davies, Owen. 2009. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DiTommaso, Lorenzo. 2001. “Gnosticism and Dualism in the Early Fiction of Philip K. Dick.”
Science Fiction Studies 28 (1): 49–65.
Faivre, Antoine. 1994. Access to Western Esotericism. New York: SUNY Press.
Faivre, Antoine, and Wouter Hanegraaff (eds.). 1998. Western Esotericism and the Science of
Religion. Leuven: Peeters.
Guillaud, Lauric, and Phillippe Marlin. 2016. Le Polar Esotérique : Sources, thèmes,
interprétations. Paris: Editions de l’Œil du Sphinx.
Hanegraaff, Wouter. 2007. “Fiction in the Desert of the Real: Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.”
Aries 7: 85–109.
Jaussaud, Philippe. 2011. “Science et récit policier: les aventures de Harry Dickson.”
AnthropoWeb: 1–33. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00845947.
LaVey, Anton. 1972. The Satanic Rituals. New York: Avon.
Lipovetsky, Gilles, and Jean Serroy. 2013. L’esthétisation de monde: Vivre à l’âge du capitalisme
artiste. Paris: Gallimard.
Mackey, Douglas. 1984. “Science Fiction and Gnosticism.” The Missouri Review 7 (2): 112–20.
McGuire, Ann, and David Buchbinder. 2010. “The Forensic Gothic: Knowledge, the
Supernatural, and the Psychic Detective.” Canadian Review of American Studies 40
(3): 289–307.
Parlati, Marilena. 2011. “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues.” European Journal of English Studies
15 (3): 211–20.
Papus. 1994 [1896]. The Tarot of the Bohemians. London: Studio Editions Ltd.
Possamai, Adam. 2005. Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-Real Testament? Bruxelles: P.I.E.
Peter Lang.
——— (ed.). 2012. Handbook of Hyper-Real Religion. Leiden: Brill.
Riffard, Pierre. 1990. L’ésotérisme. Paris: Editions Robert Laffont.
Roeland, Johan, Aupers, Stef, and Dick Houtman. 2012. “Fantasy, Conspiracy and the
Romantic Legacy: Max Weber and the Spirit of Contemporary Popular Culture.” Adam
Possamai (ed.). Handbook of Hyper-Real Religions. Leiden: Brill: 401–22.
Schlegel, Jean-Louis. 1995. Religions à la carte. Paris: Hachette.
Simmel, George. 1991. Secret et sociétés secrètes. Strasbourg: Editions Circé.
Tiryakian, Edward. 1974. “Toward the Sociology of Esoteric Culture.” Edward A. Tiryakian
(ed.). On the Margin of the Visible. New York: Wiley & Sons: 257–81.
Trevelyan, George. 1984. A Vision of the Aquarian Age: The Emerging Spiritual World View.
Walpole, NH: Stillpoint Publishing.
Ward, Charlotte, and David Voas. 2011. “The Emergence of Conspirituality.” Journal of
Contemporary Religion 26 (1): 103–21.
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CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
FEMINIST GNOSIS AND MODERN

GENDER ISSUES
Jay Johnston
The Weirdest Intergalactic Galloping of Nag-Gnostic Voyagers.

(Daly 1973: xxvi)
I n the realms of feminist philosophy (including philosophy of religion) and gender

theory the terms “gnosis” and “gnostic” have been deployed in a myriad of ways,
including as synonyms for esoteric, secret, deviant, alternate epistemologies, and even
sex/sexuality. Certain of these types of usage are exemplified herein. In this article,
however, I will not be deploying, or analyzing, “gnosis” as a synonym for “esoteric.”
I have written specifically on gender and esotericism, especially contemporary esoteri-
cism, previously (2013; 2015). The focus of this contribution is to consider the ways
the terms gnosis/gnostic have been used to designate contemporary ideas and cri-
tique dominant discourses: usage often general and allusive rather than specific. This
deployment can be characterized in three main ways: (i) to make arguments about
how gender can be conceptualized, (ii) as a critique of patriarchy and associated
dominant Judaeo-Christian discourses, and (iii) as a critique of dimorphic concepts
of gender, especially via analysis of concepts of androgyny and queer subjectivities.
In the analysis produced to date, heterosexual masculinity is often the assumed
“neutral” position against which the “gnostic” –generally as a mode of being, or
life orientation rather than an individual subjectivity –is positioned. There is cer-
tainly room in current debate for more nuanced analysis of masculinities within both
ancient Gnostic texts and modern re-figurations of such. This chapter, in dialogue
with the work of Franzmann (ch. 8), first turns to the interrelation between gnosis/
gnosticism and contemporary feminist philosophy after which it considers how the
terms and ancient texts have been utilized in the development of contemporary gender
scholarship.
GN OSI S AND CONTEMPORARY F E M INIS T THE O RY
T he quotation presented at this chapter’s opening is drawn from feminist phil-

osopher Mary Daly’s (1928–2010) volume Beyond God the Father: Toward a
Philosophy of Women’s Liberation ([1973] 1985). Although extended discussion of
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— Feminist gnosis and modern gender issues —
gnosis/gnosticism does not feature in the volume per se –its target is a critique of
patriarchal concepts of God and attendant institutions –Daly does describe herself
in biographical contexts as a Nag-Gnostic philosopher. This can be considered part
of a broader feminist approach from that time period in which gnostic beliefs were
perceived as evidence upon which critiques of dominant Christian cultures could be
built. As Paul McKechnie notes –with reference to Carol Christ’s argument from
“Heretics and Outsiders” (1978) –in his survey of feminist Biblical scholarship
produced in 1980s–1990s, some women scholars were drawn to the examination and
advocacy for movements deemed heretical because: “they challenge the symbolism
and patriarchal structure of the Orthodox Church” (1996: 410).
While McKechnie makes the salient point that in terms of the ancient sources
“Gnostic writers had hardly discovered the holy grail of gender equality” (1996: 415)
he acknowledges that the main concern for feminist theologians and philosophers
during this period was that: “the Deity, or rather, the divine nature, is described in
terms that allot crucial roles in the formation of the universe and the destiny of the
believer to female deities” (1996: 415). Although McKechnie does not designate it in
such terms, his argument posits that the appeal rests on issues of power and agency.
That is, although gnostic sources contained negative or derogatory representations of
femaleness –alignment with concepts of evil matter for example –they also enabled
conceptualizations of deity, divine knowledge, and access to the divine that did not
exclude women, or feminine subjectivities. McKechnie is ultimately critical and
dismissive of these approaches because he considers them as lacking in historical
accuracy both in terms of the analysis of gnostic sources and in the construction of
Orthodoxy:
A sentimental view of Gnosticism/heresy, as sharing some of the values of fem-

inism and the present generation, has been built up: not by merely excluding from
consideration relevant evidence about Gnosticism/heresy, but by actually misap-
plying that evidence to make unfavourable reflections to which it gives rise attach
themselves to Orthodoxy.
(1996: 430–1)
The questionable validity of this special pleading on behalf of Orthodoxy is not a

topic for this chapter. Of note in this context is that I do not share McKechnie’s
concern with the feminists’ “rose-coloured spectacles” (1996: 431) in regard to the
historical accuracy of their scholarship. The gnostic source history and “everyday”
context remains elusive (contentiously so) and further, issues of accuracy are not
really the point. My concern is not the degree to which these conceptualizations are
historically accurate (as much as that can be known) but rather their affective appeal.
That is, the why of the enthrallment and advocacy.
Further, I note that McKechnie critiques the scholars’ approach because it is –to
his reading –based in emotion, it is “sentimental.” This critique is built upon emotion
as devalued stereotype of the feminine. It is not to be doubted that the excitement
generated by gnostic sources, and their varied contexts, opened out all manner of pos-
sibilities for understanding religious practice of that period. The Nag Hammadi texts
in particular provided a rich –albeit bewildering –source of counter-narratives to the
accepted foundations of Christianity, in particular. That the analytic bows employed
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— Jay Jo h n s t o n —
were stretched to accommodate contemporary agendas is a feature of all scholarship.

It seems to come as no surprise that marginalized women scholars celebrated sources
that confused and confounded dominant religious narratives and ascribed feminine
subjects with power, knowledge, and authority. Emphasis was placed on gnosis as a
style of thinking and/or a form of knowledge that subverted dominant, patriarchal
discourse.
One of the ironies of this celebratory scholarship is that much of it had its
foundations set in dimorphic concepts of gender, that is, the presumption that there
are only two subjectivities: the masculine and feminine. More recently, Benjamin
H. Dunning has taken up this issue of sexual dimorphism by applying a Derridean
framework to selected gnostic sources. In particular he reads On The Origin of the
World (Nag Hammadi Tractate II, 5) within the framework of sexual difference as
radical difference (that is ontological difference). As he argues, the identification of
this alterity does not simply re-enforce “a single hierarchical spectrum orientated
towards the ideal male” (2011: 76) or a conceptualization of “the first female human
as being ontologically secondary, derivative, or otherwise a figure of lack” (2011: 77)
but rather as positing an “inassimilable” sexual difference –alterity –at the heart of
dimorphic gender ascriptions (similarly Luce Irigaray’s work has posited sexual diffe-
rence as ontological difference). As such, sexual difference is not purely an issue of
the “body” but intimately interrelated with divinity. This form of ontological gender
dimorphism therefore disrupts other normative dualisms, especially that of “flesh and
spirit” (2011: 94).
Much has also been made of concepts of androgyny as read in gnostic texts: it
is also often approached through a dimorphic framework. Hannele Koivunen
(1994: 14) turned Gnosticism into a verb, “as a process describing how to reach
beyond dualism” placing androgyny as “key concept” between the male and female.
While acknowledging the existence of negative attributes to femaleness in gnostic
texts, she writes:
Femaleness and sexual metaphors are crucial in Gnostic tradition [sic]. They can
be interpreted positively from women’s point of view because femaleness is obvi-
ously present in androgynous divinity and the Gnostic cosmological, anthropo-
logical and soteriological myths are based on the metaphors of the harmonious
oneness of maleness, femaleness and androgyny.
(1994: 44)
Here, the feminine is perceived as not only implicit to the androgynous subject but
also in a harmonious relationship to the masculine. Gender dimorphism is also a
feature of Jungian approaches, for example June Singer’s Androgyny: The Opposites
Within ([1976] 1989), in which individual humans are ascribed male and female
principles. Significantly, androgyny has not been embraced positively by all feminist
philosophers and theologians enamored with gnostic texts. For example, Rosemary
Ruether rejected the use of the category because its conceptualization held in place
gender stereotypes:
The term thus continues to perpetuate the idea that certain psychic attributes are
to be labelled masculine and others are to be labelled feminine and that humans,
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by integrating these “masculine” and “feminine” sides of themselves, become

“androgynous.”
There is no valid biological basis for labelling certain psychic capacities, such
as reason, “masculine” and others, such as intuition, “feminine.”
(1983: 111)
Such interpretations further demonstrate the dominance of psychological paradigms

in the conceptualization of gender at this time. Ruether considered the concept of
androgyny as “confusing” and advocated that “all humans possess a full and equiva-
lent human nature and personhood, as male and female [sic]” (1983: 111).
A key figure for explorations of “feminine gnosis,” challenges to orthodox
Christian narratives, and advocacy of authoritative roles for women in the Church is
Mary Magdalene. As noted by Susan Haskins, advocacy of the importance of Mary
Magdalene in scholarship is built on references found in the Gospel of Philip, Pistis
Sophia, Gospel of Mary, Dialogue of the Saviour, Gospel of Thomas (1993: 37).
Haskins argues that the gnostic traditions of Mary Magdalene “reflect a surviving
historical tradition from Christ’s life” that has been “excluded from the orthodox
accounts of his ministry.” This exclusion she identifies as a “political decision” of
unknown origin but with the specific agenda to “reduce the role of women” (1993: 55).
It is clear, for Haskins and many other scholars, that the “recovery” of the Magdalene
traditions from gnostic sources requires “real world” revision of women’s roles in
orthodox Church organization and authority.
The arguments discussed in this section have highlighted selected approaches
to gnosis/gnosticism that have kept dimorphic concepts of gender in place and/or
proposed a “resolution” or equal mediation of both in the concept of androgyny.
The second section of this chapter turns to consider the way in which such binary
concepts of gender, perhaps ironically given the dualist metaphysical context, have
also been destabilized through the corollary of gnosis and queer theory.
QUEER G NO S IS
In more recent times, “queer” as a critical term has been employed to analyze gender
in gnostic treatises. The application of a “queer” framework may itself be considered
inherently paradoxical as it developed out of a need to designate identities without
the ascription of fixed gender identity. As Annamarie Jagose notes: “Queer is always
an identity under construction, a site of permanent becoming” (1996: n.p.). That
dualist belief systems and ontologies are now aligned, for some scholars at least, with
queer gender identities that disrupt both dimorphic concepts of gender and the ascrip-
tion of stable gender identities is quite nifty.
As I have noted previously (2013: 423–4), like the term “gender,” queer has been
employed in a number of different ways. Although it is most often considered to
denote fluid gender identity, it has been deployed as a particular epistemological
approach to reading sources and the construction of academic argument: the process
of “queering” accepted, normative discourses and traditions has become increasingly
well-known in the humanities. As designated “heretical” or “marginal” traditions,
ancient gnostic systems have been conceptually aligned with queer approaches and
epistemologies, due to their capacity to disrupt orthodox discourse.
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To queer is to propose both more options for subject positions than those already
in existence and to signal the subject as infinitely creative and changeable. Queer
theory has provided an avenue within dominant discourse for such subjects to self-
identify, “speak,” to take up a coherent position. To queer religious traditions is to
undermine the stability of the hierarchy and binary oppositions which provide its
foundations, by asking questions about what constitutes the normal, what subjects
are being left out or rendered ambiguous (and therefore not represented) and what it
is that is being sought to be controlled by the dominant structures.
Jonathan Cahana has published a number of readings of gnostic sources through
a queer lens. This work has included re-thinking gnostic concepts of androgyny
(2014) and making claims for a “gnostic” approach to gender (2015). In “Gnostically
Queer: Gender Trouble in Gnosticism” (2011) he applies Judith Butler’s concept of
gender “performativity” to argue that ancient gnostic texts sought to subvert norma-
tive gender ascriptions. His readings profoundly intertwine sex (sexual practices) and
gender identities, arguing that this was the “gnostics’ conviction.” (2011: 34)
This alignment of ancient gnosticism with sexuality, deviant or non-normative
practices, and identity positions, as well as alternative forms of knowledge (epistem-
ologies) also figures in Jeffrey Kripal’s development of “gnostic” as a method in the
study of religion. Kripal makes claims with regard to the queer reading of ancient
gnostic texts (and the New Testament) while also advocating that “gnostic” is a type
of discourse and a mode of analysis:
As I will use the category here, then, gnosis is a triple-edged word, implying at
once a privileging of knowing over believing, an affirmation of altered states of
consciousness and psychic functioning as valuable and legitimate modes of cog-
nition, and a critical-but-engaged encounter with the faith traditions themselves.
(2007: 13)
While it is outside the remit of this chapter to discuss the propositions with regard
to method in detail, it is sufficient to say that Kripal’s general orientation is towards
greater consideration of embodied knowledges –and therefore inherently gendered
ones –as well as using “gnosis” as a corollary for the subversive and the sexual.
Kripal “queers” the early Christian tradition by ascribing different gender roles and
orientations to central figures: “Sexual orientation in other words determined the
hierarchy of Jesus’ Kingdom, and it was the gay man, not the heterosexual married
man, who was clearly privileged by Jesus” (2007: 41). The identification of “queer”
Jesus is located by Kripal primarily in gnostic texts.
CONCLU S IO N
The works briefly surveyed in this chapter exemplify the profound effect of gnostic
sources on the understanding of early Christianity. They were and remain central
to challenges of normative, orthodox doctrines and cultures. As such “gnosis” and
“gnostic” have become a trope for subversion. Although diverse and confusing, the
sources enabled voices and subjects that had not previously been part of the scholarly
landscape to be present. Many of these critiques make obvious the assumed gender
ascriptions of ancient primary sources, and the way in which we read texts through
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the lens of the gender politics of our own time. This is significant and important dis-
ruption. Given the swathe of contention around the interpretation and lived praxis
of ancient gnosticism, the works of contemporary gender analysis will always say
far more about their own context of creation and what matters to the contemporary
scholar then they can about ancient concepts of gender. To that extent, the ancient
gnostics still keep their secrets.
Note: this chapter has been produced with the research assistance of Giselle Bader: I am
extremely grateful for her diligence and effort.
REFERENCES
Cahana, Jonathan. 2011. “Gnostically Queer: Gender Trouble in Gnosticism.” Biblical
Theology Bulletin 41 (1): 24–35.
———2014. “Androgyne or Undrogyne?: Queering the Gnostic Myth.” Numen 61: 509–24.
—— —2015. “Dismantling Gender: Between Ancient Gnostic Ritual and Modern Queer
BDSM.” Theology & Sexuality 18 (1): 60–75.
Christ, Carol. 1978. “Heretics and Outsiders: The Struggle Over Female Power in Western
Religion.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 61 (3): 260–80.
Daly, Mary. [1973] 1985. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation.
Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Dunning, Benjamin. 2011. Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Haskins, Susan. 1993. Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. London: HarperCollins.
Jagose, Annamarie. 1996. “Queer Theory.” Australian Humanities Review. Dec. n.p. www.
australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-Dec-1996/jagose.html.
Johnston, Jay. 2013. “A Deliciously Troubling Duo: Gender and Esotericism.” Egil Asprem and
Kennet Granholm (eds.). Contemporary Esotericism. London: Equinox, 410–25.
—— —2015. “Gender and the Occult.” Christopher Partridge (ed.). The Occult World.
Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge: 681–91.
Koivunen, Hannele. 1994. The Woman Who Understood Completely: A Semiotic Analysis of
the Mary Magdalene Myth in the Gnostic Gospel of Mary. Imatra: International Semiotics
Institute.
Kripal, J. 2007. The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
McKechnie, Paul. 1996. “ ‘Women’s Religion:’ and Second-Century Christianity.” Journal of
Ecclesiastical History. 47 (3): 409–31.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1983. Sexism and God- talk: Towards a Feminist Theology.
London: SCM Press.
Singer, June. [1976] 1989. Androgyny: The Opposites Within. Boston: Sigo Press.
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CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
MODERN PSYCHEDELIC GNOSIS
Christopher Partridge
INTRODUCTIO N
F or those scholars who began their study of religion in departments of theology,

as I did, the word “Gnosticism” will no doubt evoke memories of learning about
the leather-bound papyrus codices accidentally discovered near the town of Nag
Hammadi. They presented a form of religion based on γνῶσις (gnosis) – personal
“knowledge” or “insight” –the “experience” of which was understood to redeem the
self from its imprisonment within material existence. In some texts, gnosis, under-
stood as “knowledge of the self,” was conflated with “knowledge of God,” which
was discussed using the image of a “divine spark” that had become trapped in matter
and, when “redeemed,” returned to its divine source. Hence, the principal structures
of Gnosticism are typically understood in terms of a radical dualism: “matter and
spirit, light and darkness, good and evil; the opposition between this-worldly impris-
onment and other-worldly salvation; the linking of psychology, ontology, and soteri-
ology in the paired categories of sleep/awakening, forgetting/remembering, ignorance/
knowledge (gnosis)” (Galbreath 1981: 22). This, then, is our starting point when
considering modern gnosis. While we should be nervous about claiming that any
historical continuity exists between ancient and modern gnosis, nevertheless, if we
consider, for example, William Blake’s work, Carl Jung’s psychology, Eric Voegelin’s
pathology of modernity, Harold Bloom’s approach to literary criticism, or some of
the principal discourses within modern occulture, it is difficult to ignore the “gnostic
return in modernity” (O’Regan 2001; see also Grimstad 2002: 35–91).
That there are gnostic currents in modernity is perhaps unsurprising bearing in
mind the turn to the experiencing self. Inner subjectivities become the primary source
of significance, meaning, and authority for individuals (Partridge 2016a). This is con-
spicuous in psychedelic cultures (see Partridge 2018). Consider, for example, the ter-
minology. Coined in 1956 by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, ψυχή (psyche)
refers to “the soul” as well as aspects of “the self.” While defined more broadly as
“mind-manifesting” (1957: 429), Osmond’s term betrays a focus on inner experience
and the knowledge/liberation of the self, which is partly what Allen Ginsberg meant
by the “gnostic impulse” (1995: xvii) underlying the turn to psychedelics. Again, this
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— Modern psychedelic gnosis —
broadly gnostic orientation is also evident in another term, “entheogen,” which was
coined in 1979 by a small group of scholars, several of whom had become known
for their work in seeking to trace continuities between ancient mythology and ethno-
botany. Led by Carl Ruck, the group settled on the elision of ἔνθεος (entheos –full of
god, inspired, possessed) and γενέσθαι (genesthai –to become) to produce a portman-
teau meaning something along the lines of “to generate god within” (Ruck, Wasson,
Bigwood, Staples, and Ott 1979: 145).
I NEFFAB LE EXPERIEN CE AND D UAL IS M

“That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems
very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so
monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend them-
selves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites
of the soul” (Huxley 1994: 42). However, while some may be encouraged to induce
altered states by the urge to escape, they are rarely less than illuminating and often
profound visionary moments. “I took my pill at eleven,” Aldous Huxley recorded.
“An hour and a half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass
vase. The vase contained only three flowers.” While this may seem a rather mundane
observation, in fact, he was “seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his cre-
ation –a miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence” (1994: 7). He became
convinced that, as William James observed, psychoactive substances seem to have the
“power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth
by the cold facts and criticisms of the sober hour” (1926: 387). This is supported by
numerous accounts of psychedelic experiences (see, e.g., Grof 2009; Huxley 1994;
Masters and Houston 1973; Partridge 2018; Roberts 2001; Strassman 2001): “I took
mushrooms when I was eighteen and saw a universe of transcendent, shape-shifting,
mutant space art that no one will ever be able to explain to me with conventional
thought” (McKraken 2015: 202); “[I had] the most inspirational, life-changing, reli-
gious mystical experience I’ve ever had … You could do yoga and meditation for a
hundred years and maybe not get to the place you get to with thirty seconds on a pipe
… Initially when I came down I thought I would never speak again. What’s the point?
Words … they are so inadequate, lifeless, and stultifying” (Simon Posford, quoted in
St John 2015: 208).
This sense of ineffability, the first of James’s “four marks” of mysticism –“ineffa-
bility,” “noetic quality,” “transiency,” and “passivity” (James 1926: 380) –is a common
feature of psychedelic experiences. Because they are “discontinuous with ordinary
consciousness” they are difficult to communicate to those who have only experienced
“ordinary consciousness” (James 1926: 388). For example, Timothy Leary, who was
keen to make his psychedelic “insights available to others,” felt the need to “apolo-
gize for the flimsy inadequacy of [his] words. We just don’t have a better experiential
vocabulary” (1970: 13, 22). Again, Gordon Wasson bemoaned that he was “confined
within the prison walls of everyday vocabulary … How do you tell a man born blind
what seeing is like?” (1963: 32).
This sense of ineffability is rooted in dualism. There are two forms of con-
sciousness, two realities, one of which, the “Old World,” inhibits an understanding
of the occulted, transcendent “Other World” (Huxley 1999a: 62). Consequently,
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— C h r i s t o p h e r Pa r t r i d g e —
even non-dualistic psychedelic experiences, such as those of Huxley (e.g., 1994: 7–

11), are typically understood within a dualistic interpretative framework, in
that they require the transcendence of the everyday. As Wouter Hanegraaff has
commented regarding the understanding of gnosis in late antiquity, “what might
look like irreconcilable differences or even contradictions –the so-called ‘mon-
istic’ and ‘dualistic’ passages being the most frequently discussed e xample –may
instead be interpreted as reflecting successive levels of understanding, what is true
on one level being less than perfectly true on a higher level. And furthermore, if
‘rational discourse’ represents a lower level in principle, as frequently repeated by
the sources, then one should not be surprised to find that strict logical consistency
is not their very first priority” (2008: 135).
This brings us back to the primacy of experience: “mystical states are more like
states of feeling, than states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has
never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists.” Hence, “it
follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted
or transferred to others” (James 1926: 380). Again, Hanegraaff’s discussion of gnosis
in late antiquity is helpful: “when it comes to grasping the true mysteries of divinity,
the sources never cease to emphasize the total inadequacy of discursive language.” It
is, he notes, “precisely this point that is crucial to understanding what gnosis is all
about. It implies that theoretical discussions … were considered of strictly secondary
importance. As formulated in the Hermetic writings, reasoned discourse (logos)
simply ‘does not lead as far as the truth’ ” (2016: 382).
Psychedelic states become moments of redemption when gnosis is experienced.
These moments are thought about in a number of ways, not least as an awakening
from the sleep of ignorance (see Galbreath 1981: 22–6). As Leary argued, “the LSD
session … is an overwhelming awakening of experience” (1970: 112). Hence, just as
Huxley “had taken mescaline in a garden and shucked off the mind and awakened to
eternity” (Leary 1999: 180), so Leary’s own experience left him “feeling exhilarated,
awed, and quite convinced that [he] had awakened from a long ontological sleep.
This sudden flash awakening is called ‘turning on’ ” (1970: 13).
ANAESTHETIC R E VE L ATIO N
During the nineteenth century many were intrigued by the nature of drug-induced tran-
scendence. Aleister Crowley, for example, who insisted that “every man and woman is
a star” with the potential for glorification –an essentially gnostic thesis –used drugs
as spiritual technologies (Partridge 2016b). Again, the Spiritualist Emma Hardinge
Britten noted that, because “Hasheesh, Napellus, Opium, the juice of the Indian Soma,
or Egyptian Lotus plant, besides many other narcotics of special virtues, constitute a
large portion of the preparatory exercises by which Oriental Ecstatics produce their
abnormal conditions,” they might be considered for use within Western occultism
(1876: 171). She was particularly intrigued by the power of anaesthetics: “nitrous-
oxide gas, ether, and other stimulating and anaesthetic vapors” can be used as a
“powerful means of inducing … the trance state” (1876: 170). She wasn’t alone.
“Each time I am under the influence of an anaesthetic,” the Scottish chemist William
Ramsay wrote, “I am able to penetrate a little further into the unfathomable mystery”
(1894: 239).
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One of the most interesting interpretations of the anaesthetic experience, however,

was Benjamin Paul Blood’s The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy,
which had a particular influence on James (see Partridge 2018: 71–87). It is, more-
over, a good example of psychedelic gnosis: “all who enter the anæsthetic condition
… will date from its experience their initiation into the Secret of Life” (1874: 35). In
a later work, he recalled that
it was in the year 1860 that there came to me, through the necessary use of
anaesthetics, a Revelation or insight of the immemorial Mystery which among
enlightened peoples still persists as the philosophical secret or problem of the
world. It is an illumination of the cosmic centre, in which that field of thought
where haunt the topics of fate, origin, reason and divinity glows for a moment
in an inevitable but hardly communicable appreciation of the genius of being;
it is an initiation, historically realized as such, into the oldest and most intimate
and ultimate truth. Whoever attains and remembers it, or remembers of it, is
graduated beyond instruction in ‘spiritual things’; but to those who are philo-
sophically given it will recur as a condition which, if we are to retain a faith in
reason, should seem amenable to articulate expression, for it is obviously what
philosophers fail of.
(1920: vii)
The experience, as James understood it, was essentially mystical. It was, for example,
marked by passivity: “when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in,
the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed as if it were grasped
and held by a superior power” (1926: 381). As with the understanding of gnosis in
antiquity, which is “given to us by an act of God” (Hanegraaff 2008: 134), so the
anaesthetic revelation is “ ‘the gift of God,’ and according to nought besides; espe-
cially may I say, not according to knowledge” (Blood 1874: 32) –by which he meant
rational knowledge.
This is common during the experience of psychedelic gnosis: “[once] the charac-
teristic sort of consciousness … has set in,” there is a “deep letting go” (Strassman
2001: 132); “one falls immediately into a trance. One’s eyes are closed … At that
point one arrives in a place that defies description …” (McKenna 1991: 36). There is
little sense of personal agency. When the self is possessed, gnosis is revealed. Hence,
Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert famously advised readers of their influ-
ential 1962 manual, The Psychedelic Experience, to “trust your divinity … turn off
your mind, relax, float downstream” (2008: 6). To fully benefit from the psychedelic
experience, there is a need to surrender the self to gnosis.
CLEANSING THE DOORS O F P E RCE P TIO N

Arguably the most influential psychedelic thesis was posited by Huxley in his sem-
inal The Doors of Perception (see Partridge 2018: 191–224). The title, of course, was
inspired by Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were
cleansed, everything would appear to man as it really is –infinite” (Blake 1996: 80).
Convinced of the cleansing properties of psychedelics, Huxley argued that they could
circumvent normal cognitive processes, thereby enabling individuals “to cut a hole
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in the fence and look around [them] with what the philosopher Plotinus describes as
‘that other kind of seeing which everyone has, but few make use of’ ” (1999b: 253,
254). He had, of course, been thinking about the potential of hallucinogens for some
years. In Brave New World (1932) he had speculated about the government-approved
use of soma –a fictional, mescaline-like drug, named after the psychoactive substance
mentioned in the Rig Veda –the “euphoric, narcotic” effect of which had “all the
advantages of Christianity and alcohol,” but “none of their defects” (2007: 47). While
soma effectively functioned as “the opium of the people,” a profane substance that
stifled any feelings of unease that might lead to revolution and liberation, by the early
1950s his position had shifted. Indeed, in Island (1976 [1962]), a utopian fantasy
about a community threatened by materialism and greed, he reflected on “the ways in
which a substance akin to psilocybin could be used to potentiate the nonverbal edu-
cation of adolescents and to remind adults that the real world is very different from
the misshapen universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-
conditioned prejudices” (1999b: 255).
From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, “the world of everyday
life is not only taken for granted as reality by ordinary members of society in the
subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in their
thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these” (Berger and Luckmann
1971: 33). As with Gnosticism, so within psychedelic cultures, this process is typ-
ically profaned. We are “prisoners of the cognitive concepts and intellectual strat-
egies which are passed on from generation to generation” (Leary 1970: 57). Drugs
enable us to transcend these taken-for-granted realities and, therefore, to challenge
systems of meaning reified as “common sense.” Psychedelic cultures are, therefore,
always countercultures.
Huxley’s understanding of the human predicament was particularly influenced by
Henri Bergson –as well as C. D. Broad’s notion of Mind at Large. As his wife, Laura
Huxley, recalled, “especially after his psychedelic experiences, Aldous often mentioned
the Bergson theory –that our brain and nervous system are not the source of our
ideas, but rather a reducing valve through which Mind at Large trickles only the
kind of information that is necessary for us to survive on this planet” (1999c: 223).
The material brain imprisons the spiritual self within a contracted world of experi-
ence, separating it from an ocean of gnosis –“Mind at Large.” Likewise, drawing on
Huxley’s work, Leary, Metzner, and Alpert suggested that “there is a limitless range
of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond
the range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have
learned, beyond your notions of time and space” (2008: 5). Psychedelics open a tem-
porary “hole in the head,” thereby permitting “a fragment of Mind at Large to flow
in.” This “is what we usually call inspiration” (Huxley 1999a: 223) and central to
psychedelic gnosis, namely the perception of exposure to “something more than, and
above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which
our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of
reality” (Huxley 1994: 12–13).
This brings us to another of James’s marks of mysticism, “noetic quality”
(1926: 380). While psychedelic gnosis is, as Terence McKenna put it, “beyond human
grasp … somehow inexpressible” (quoted in Horgan 2003: 190; see also Davis 2016;
Partridge 2018: 318–34), nevertheless, he would have agreed with James that a “sense
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of profound meaning having been there persists.” Consequently, psychedelic states

need to be understood as “states of knowledge … states of insight into depths of
truth unplumbed by discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of
significance and importance …” As such, “they carry with them a curious sense of
authority for after-time” (James 1926: 380–1). Experiencers “have been ‘there,’ and
know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes
to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the
majority to order him to live in another way?” (James 1926: 423). Again, gnosis is a
helpful concept for thinking about the noetic quality of the psychedelic experience.
As Stanislav Grof concluded, while the psychedelic experience is “totally and clearly
beyond rational comprehension,” and thus difficult to convey meaningfully, “even a
short experiential exposure to it satisfies the subject’s intellectual, philosophical, and
spiritual craving. All of the questions that have ever been asked seem to be answered,
and there is no need to question further” (2009: 207).
NONORDINARY RE AL ITY
For some, such as Leary, psychedelic experiences should be understood as “thought-
forms made visible and audible,” “radiances of your own intellect,” none of which
“exist in reality,” but “only within your skull.” Hence, he advises, “whether you
experience heaven or hell, remember that it is your own mind that creates them”
(Leary, Metzner, and Alpert 2008: 5, 110). Others, however, particularly those
informed by shamanic perspectives, have claimed rather more for the psychedelic
experience. Carlos Castaneda, for example, who claimed to have been trained as “a
man of knowledge” (1970: 190) by an enigmatic Mexican shaman, don Juan Matus,
described psychoactive plants as gateways to “nonordinary” reality (see Partridge
2018: 308–18). This, he became convinced, was a reality “only slightly different from
the ordinary reality of everyday life” (1970: 208). That is to say, for all its weirdness
and apparent ephemerality, nonordinary reality is stable: “the component elem-
ents of nonordinary reality … were similar to the component elements of ordinary
reality, for they neither shifted nor disappeared, as would the component elements of
ordinary dreams. It seemed as if every detail that made up a component element of
nonordinary reality had a concreteness of its own, a concreteness I perceived as being
extraordinarily stable” (1970: 208). Hence, psychedelic states cannot be considered
“hallucinations.” Rather, as in Gnosticism, we should behave “toward these states of
nonordinary reality not ‘as if’ they were real, but ‘as’ real” (1971: 6). Indeed, although
more Platonic, Huxley also insisted that “there exists an ideal other world above and
beyond the world of matter” (1994: 76).
A decade before Castaneda’s experience, Wasson published a widely read art-
icle in Life magazine, in which he recounted “a celebration of ‘holy communion’
where ‘divine’ mushrooms were first adored and then consumed.” The rite, he told
his intrigued readers, “was led by two women, mother and daughter, both of them
curanderas or shamans” (1957: 100). The mother was María Sabina, a charismatic,
locally respected healer who agreed to introduce Wasson to “the saint children” (as
she referred to psychoactive mushrooms). As technologies of psychedelic gnosis,
they were understood as redemptive agents. “Our bodies lay there while our souls
soared” (1957: 293). He was persuaded that he was “seeing plain, whereas ordinary
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vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that
underlie the imperfect images of everyday life.” He continued, “the thought crossed
my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient
Mysteries?” (1957: 109).
This interest in the prehistory of psychedelia has become increasingly common
(e.g., Devereux 1997; Dobkin de Rios 1990; Wasson, Kramrisch, Ott, and Ruck
1986; Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck 2008). For example, the Mysteries to which
Wasson referred are those based at Eleusis from around 1500 BCE, which were
organized around the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Although evidence is scarce,
some suggest that the initiates were sworn to secrecy, following which they ritu-
ally imbibed “an LSD-like consciousness-altering drug” (Hofmann 1997: 35) made
from “the ergot of wheat or barley cultivated on the famous Rarian plain adjacent
to Eleusis” (Wasson 1963: 28). This psychedelic drink “evoked alterations in the
soul of the initiate” (Hofmann 1997: 32), thereby enabling a journey “through the
narrow Entrance of Plouton’s Cave, down into the subterranean labyrinth, across
the aquifer, perhaps in Charon’s boat, to regroup, as in the myth of Er, on the plains
of Elysion” (Ruck 2008: 13). Initiates experienced psychedelic gnosis, which led to
an understanding of “the congruity of the beginning and the end, of birth and death,
the totality and the eternal generative ground of being.” It must, continues Albert
Hofmann (the chemist responsible for synthesizing LSD), “have been an encounter
with the ineffable, an encounter with the divine, that could only be described through
metaphor” (1997: 32–33). For McKenna, the rituals at Eleusis constitute one of “the
last frail outposts in the West of a tradition of using psychoactive plants to dissolve
personal boundaries, and to gain access to gnosis; true knowledge of the nature of
things, that was many thousands of years old” (1992: 125).
PSY CHEDELIC GNO SI S AND HU M AN O RIG INS

Between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago there appeared a range of skills, technolo-
gies, and beliefs, including “fully representative symbolic art.” This, notes Graham
Hancock, “represents a spectacular enigma,” which has led many to the conclusion
that “whatever divine spark led our ancestors to start creating art caused all the other
changes as well” (2015: 6). His thesis is that our ancestors experienced “their great
evolutionary leap forward … because they were … inspired by supernatural agents”
initially encountered during altered states of consciousness (2015: 8–9). It was his
own experiences of psychedelic gnosis that led him to this conclusion.
The most influential psychedelic thinker to develop this thesis was McKenna, who
essentially argued that hallucinogenic mushrooms are the key to understanding the
evolution of human consciousness. Indeed, they imparted an alien gnosis. Spores,
which had drifted across the frozen vastness of space, settled in cow manure around
the communities of our ancestors. When mushrooms were eaten, they effectively
introduced the “divine spark” that led to emergence of the modern human conscious-
ness. “There is a hidden factor in the evolution of human beings … that called the
human consciousness forth from a bipedal ape,” which “involved a feedback loop with
plant hallucinogens” (1991: xiii). Mushrooms are, in other words, “repositories of
living vegetable gnosis” (1992: 7). Moreover, because “psilocybin is a source of gnosis”
(1991: 97) it enables an understanding of “the eternal nature of the mind” and how
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to “release it from the monkey” (1991: 41–2). Hence, while “the monkey body has
served to carry us to this moment of release,” psychedelics enable us to look forward
to “the transcendence of physis, the rising out of the Gnostic universal prison of iron
that traps the light: nothing less than the transformation of our species” (1991: 95–6).
CONCLU S IO N
The “gnostic impulse” within psychedelic discourses is difficult to ignore. As
Hanegraaff has argued,
Entheogenic sacraments are credited with the capacity of breaking mainstream

society’s spell of mental domination and restoring us from blind and passive con-
sumers unconsciously manipulated by “the system” to our original state of free
and autonomous spiritual beings … In short they are seen as providing gnosis
in a “gnostic-dualistic” rather than a “hermetic” sense: a salvational knowledge
of the true nature of one’s self and the universe, which does not just open the
individual’s spiritual eyes, but liberates him from the dominion by the cosmic
system.
(2013: 408)
Similarly, almost 40 years ago, Carl Raschke identified the quest for “chemical infin-
ities” in the counterculture of the 1960s as “modern Gnosticism,” because
in the translated consciousness of the acid “high” there arises what seems like
an ultimate abolition of both time and suffering. The “trip” takes the mind
behind the proscenium of time and space and puts it in contact with an unchan-
ging dimension of life. It throws open the gates of Eden, which has always been
sequestered out of sight in the copse and brambles of everyday concerns. The
eternal world now has an access.
(1980: 221)
While his discussion rests on a caricatured oversimplification of psychedelic gnosis,

nevertheless, we have seen that his point was not entirely wide of the mark. Indeed,
to some extent, Leary was happy to concur with those theological detractors who
dismissed “LSD zealots” as a “clique of modern gnostics concerned only with furthering
their private search for what they call inner freedom” (1995: 287). As far as he was
concerned, the psychedelic revolution was the latest moment in a long history which
included the “Gnostics” and “hermetics” (Leary 1995: 131). He also observed that,
during the 1960s, a number of key psychedelic thinkers, including Huxley, Wasson,
Gerald Heard, and Alan Watts, were aware “that the new drugs were reintroducing the
Platonic-gnostic vision” (Leary 1995: 111). Ginsberg concurred: “the new conscious-
ness born in these States can be traced back through old gnostic texts, visions, artists,
and shamans; it is the consciousness of our ground nature suppressed and desecrated.
It was always the secret tale of the tribe in America, this great scandal of the closing
of the doors of perception of the Naked Human Form Divine” (1995: xvii). Since then
others, such as Jim DeKorne, have understood the psychedelic state as “the Pleroma of
the gnostics, the astral plane of occultism” (2011: 51).
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CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
EXPOSING GNOSTICISM
Douglas E. Cowan
“A cornucopia of controversy,” evangelical philosopher Douglas Groothuis

called Gnosticism (1990: n.p.), while fellow Christian Marcia Montenegro
declared that Gnostic “DNA has taken root in the philosophies of men and it buds
and flourishes in false teachings across the spectrum” (2013: n.p.). Groothuis, a pro-
fessional academic, and Montenegro, an amateur apologist who writes for a var-
iety of online sources, are two examples of a relatively small, but disproportionately
influential group of Bible believers whose mission is to reinforce the correctness of
their version of the faith by demonstrating how and why they consider other belief
systems false. Known by scholars as the Christian countercult movement (Cowan
2003), this group must be distinguished from the secular anticult movement, which
emerged in the early 1970s. Although both movements are often concerned with
similar groups, significant differences separate them in terms of the dangers new or
alternative religions supposedly represent and the manner in which the threats should
be approached.
Put broadly, secular anticult resistance is located in what proponents consider the
violation of civil liberties by suspect groups. The most common of these over the past
decades have been the issue of deceptive recruitment tactics and the now-discredited
notion of “brainwashing” (see Bromley and Richardson 1983; Cowan and Bromley
2015). Christian opposition to new and alternative religions, on the other hand,
as well as such traditional religions as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, has been
ongoing for centuries and is essentially theological in nature: any faith different from
their own is seen as a dangerous competitor in a religious marketplace. Although
the rubrics vary, in the late modern period it is rare to find a Christian bookstore
without a few shelves of books devoted to “exposing” the truth about “Cults and
World Religions,” “Spiritual Warfare,” or “Other Faiths.” For tens of millions of their
fellow believers, Christian countercult writers have become significant “movement
intellectuals” (Eyerman and Jamison 1991) in the perpetual struggle to validate their
Christianity by continually pointing out the inadequacy of all other religions. Indeed,
in what amounts to the sine qua non of the movement, prolific countercult apologist
Dave Hunt wrote that “the only reason for becoming familiar with other religions
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— Douglas E. Cowan —
and other religious writings would be in order to show those who follow these false
systems wherein the error lies and thereby to rescue them” (1996: 68).
Although there are Gnostic churches and religious groups that claim to embrace
Gnostic teachings (many of which are considered in this volume), Gnosticism as a
distinct religious entity appears infrequently in countercult literature, especially when
compared to faith groups that countercult writers consider more overt threats to their
worldview. When it does appear, it is often subtle and subsumed to more general con-
demnation of the so-called New Age Movement (Ankerberg and Weldon 1996; Jones
1992). This is not to say that it is absent, however. In this brief essay, we will con-
sider two aspects of Gnosticism that do recur regularly in countercult apologetics: (a)
exposing the “heresy” of Gnosticism and gnostic thinking, particularly as this impacts
Christology and soteriology; and (b) exposing the means by which gnostic thinking
is ported into society through popular culture, for example, in works such as Dan
Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. Finally, we will ask what is at stake for those
committed to “exposing Gnosticism.”
EXPOSING GN OTICIS M
While there are a small number of Roman Catholics, in the main, countercult
apologists are conservative Protestants for whom Christology and soteriology
are grounded in the exclusivity of their theological claims, particularly the inerr-
ancy, infallibility, and insuperability of the Bible. This epistemological triumvirate
bounds their understanding of the virgin conception of Jesus, his sinless life, cruci-
fixion, physical resurrection, and, for many believers, his imminent return. Based on
these well-known fundamentals, countercult soteriology turns on the need to make
a personal confession of sin and accept Jesus as one’s “personal Lord and Savior.”
While this represents a fairly typical evangelical theology, what distinguishes the
countercult as a movement within evangelicalism is the means by which this reality
is maintained: aggressively and proactively pointing out the theological deficiencies
of other religious belief systems. This is an ongoing exercise that apologists insist
demonstrates the de facto superiority of their own religious worldview, by exten-
sion, their religious identity, and, ultimately, their salvation. Two principal tactics
are employed in this endeavor: (i) competing or alternative teachings are “refuted”
by comparing them to appropriate Biblical passages, and (ii) documents containing
alternative teachings are “discredited” in favor of the presumed reliability of the Bible.
In terms of the larger countercult agenda, these approaches serve the dual (albeit cir-
cular) purpose of countering teachings that challenge the exclusivity of conservative
Christian theological claims, while, at the same time, reinforcing the epistemological
grounding of those claims.
Marcia Montenegro, who trades on her personal history as a former New Age
adherent, intersperses her description of Gnosticism with Biblical quotes that she
believes are clear illustrations of the “false teachings” contained in the so-called
Gnostic gospels. Hastily generalizing about “Christian gnostic sects,” for example,
she claims that “Christian gnostics taught that Jesus did not have a true human nature
or body, and denied that he came in the flesh” (2013: n.p.). Because, she maintains,
this is “contradicted in John 1:14 ‘And the Word became flesh’, the Gnostic Jesus is
exposed in 2 John 1:17 as false teaching: “For many deceivers have gone out into the
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— Exposing Gnosticism —
world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ coming in the flesh. This is the
deceiver and the antichrist” (Montenegro 2013: n.p.; all emphases in the original).
The theological calculus here is simple: if a Biblical text contradicts (or is interpreted
to contradict) another religious text, the latter is by definition “false teaching.”
Similarly, writing in Christian Research Journal, the main publication for one of
the largest countercult organizations, the Christian Research Institute, philosopher
Douglas Groothuis contrasts selected passages from the Gnostic Gospels with what
he considers the true teachings of Jesus revealed in the canonical Bible. Citing passages
from the Sophia of Jesus Christ, for example, which describe God as “the great invis-
ible Spirit,” “He Who is ineffable,” “unnamable,” and “ever incomprehensible” –all
claims that confound conservative Christian certainty about the nature and mind of
the Divine –Groothuis claims that “the divide between the New Testament and the
Gnostic documents couldn’t be wider or deeper. Although the biblical Jesus had the
pedagogical tact not to proclaim indiscriminately, ‘I am God! I am God!’ the entire
contour of his ministry points to him as God in the flesh” (1990: n.p.). Contrasting
the Sophia with the canonical gospels, Groothuis opines, “John did not say, ‘In the
beginning was the silence of the silent silence’ or ‘the ineffable. Incarnation means
tangible and intelligent revelation from God to humanity” (1990: n.p.). Although
Groothuis’s presentation is considerably more sophisticated than Montenegro’s, both
the premise and the net result are the same: Gnosticism is exposed as a theological
fallacy not because its claims are wrong, necessarily, but because they contradict what
these Christian believers already hold to be true.
Groothuis also illustrates the second approach to “exposing Gnosticism”: chal-
lenging the validity and/or the authenticity of Gnostic texts. Because countercult
apologists are concerned with maintaining their particular version of evangel-
ical Christianity as the only legitimate faith, anything appearing on the theological
horizon that threatens this understanding must be countered and resolved. The dis-
covery of the Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi in 1945, as well as their introduction
to wider society through the work of Biblical scholars such as Elaine Pagels (1979)
and popularization by New Age believers, was seen as particularly dangerous. The
Nag Hammadi documents jeopardized the insuperability of the Biblical text, show-
casing the fact that there were multiple gospels circulating in the first centuries of the
Christian Era and competing for dominance among local groups of believers. And,
more importantly, they did present different, often conflicting visions of who Jesus
was and what it meant to be one of his followers. If the Gnostic gospels challenged
the tenets of received evangelical Christology, they contest by definition the nature of
soteriology. As Groothuis states, “these respective views of Jesus are lodged within
mutually exclusive worldviews concerning claims about God, the universe, humanity,
and salvation” (1991: n.p.).
For Groothuis, the authenticity (and, thus, authority) of evangelical Christianity
is grounded in what he considers the undeniable historicity of Biblical events.
Christianity’s “central claims are rooted in events,” he writes, “not just ideas; in
people, not just principles; in revelation, not speculation; in incarnation, not abstrac-
tion” (Groothius 1991: n.p.). To support this, though, his circular reasoning still turns
on the inerrancy of Scripture, and his claim, for example, that “historical accuracy
was certainly no incidental item to Luke in the writing of his Gospel,” indeed, “the
text affirms that Luke was after nothing less than historical certainty” (Groothuis
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1991: n.p.). Contrasting the “purportedly historical documents” of the Nag Hammadi

library with the canonical gospels, Groothuis criticizes the Gnostic texts on three
principal grounds: genre, historical reliability, and theological congruence.
Put simply, although many of the Nag Hammadi texts have been styled “Gnostic
gospels,” or in more popular form, “the lost books of the Bible,” because they don’t
look like the New Testament gospels they cannot be gospels. As we know, many of
the Gnostic texts are aphoristic, collections of sayings gathered over a period of time
and collected together by particular communities of believers against the threat of
confiscation or destruction. For Groothuis and other countercult apologists, though,
a “gospel” is a singular thing, a narrative that “presents the life of Jesus as a preacher,
teacher and healer,” and which should be “similar in style, if not content” to the
canonical gospels. “Yet,” he writes, “a reading of these ‘gospels’ reveals an entirely
different genre of material” (Groothuis 1991: n.p.). Moreover, and “without undue
appeal to the subjective,” he continues, “it can be safely said that the Gnostic material
on Jesus has a decidedly different ‘feel’ than the biblical Gospels” (Groothuis 1991).
Which is to say, because they do not have the same generic quality as the canonical
texts, their reliability is open to question.
For Groothuis, authority turns on the problem of historical reliability. “If a docu-
ment is historically reliable,” he writes, “it is trustworthy as objectively true … it is
faithful to fact” (1991: n.p.). Historical reliability, in turn, is a function of “integrity,
authenticity, and veracity.” That is, how well have documents been preserved over
time, especially in terms of changes, corrections, additions, and deletions? While he
contends that the original New Testament documents can be reconstructed “with a
high degree of accuracy,” the Nag Hammadi texts, which were hidden from view
for a millennium and a half, contain “notations such as ellipses, parentheses, and
brackets, indicating spotty marks in the texts … the situation may be likened to put-
ting together a jigsaw puzzle with numerous pieces missing” (Groothuis 1991: n.p.).
If integrity turns on reliable preservation and transmission, authority is grounded
in “the authorship of a given writing” (Groothuis 1991). Groothuis writes that “a
text is considered authentic if it can be shown to have been written by its stated or
implied author.” More importantly, and although any number of Biblical scholars
would disagree with him, Groothuis insists that “there is solid evidence that the New
Testament gospels were written by their namesakes” (1991: n.p.). Ignoring the issue
of pseudonymous authorship as a literary tactic common in Antiquity and the fact
that many of the same problems of preservation and transmission that he attributes
to the Gnostic texts can be applied to Biblical documents, Groothuis uses a simple
syllogism to demonstrate the problem with the Nag Hammadi material. Since, for
example, “the Letter of Peter to Philip is dated at the end of the second century or
even into the third” (1991: n.p.), the apostle cannot be the author. Therefore, this text
fails the countercult authenticity test. And, if a text is inauthentic in terms of author-
ship, its veracity is almost certainly called before the court.
Veracity, for Groothuis, “concerns the truthfulness of the author of the text”
(1991: n.p.). That is, “was the author in a position to relate what is reported, in terms
of both chronological closeness to the events and observational savvy? Did he or she
have sufficient credentials to relay historical truth” (1991: n.p.)? Because countercult
apologists privilege the canonical gospels as unassailable historical truth, anything
that presents material outside the bounds of that received information must be false.
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And, because many of the Gnostic texts offer interpretations of the Jesus event that
challenge or differ from that which Groothuis and his co-religionists believe is accur-
ately and completely relayed in the canonical texts, they are, ipso facto, “exposed”
as imposters to the Christian theological throne. “In other words,” writes Groothuis,
“these writings are simply drawing on preexisting Gnostic material and rearranging
it to conform to their Gnostic world view” (1991: n.p.).
As countercult exemplars, Montenegro and Groothuis demonstrate that the
Gnostic documents, and whatever beliefs the groups and communities that produced
them held, do not represent simply a textual problem. While criticizing texts against
the backdrop of the inerrant Bible is a strategy countercult apologists use with other
traditions as well, the basic problem is religious. That is, the ideas, themes, and claims
embodied in Gnosticism challenge the essential validity of evangelical Christian belief.
If, for example, as the Gospel of Philip avers, “the companion of the [Savior is] Mary
Magdalene,” and “[Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples and used to kiss her
[often] on her [mouth]” (Robinson 1996: 148), much of the systematic theology upon
which the evangelical project is predicated hangs in jeopardy. And, what if Jesus and
Mary did more than simply kiss?
EXP OSING POPUL AR CU LTU RE

But for one word, it is possible that few religious believers would have paid much
attention to Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel, The Da Vinci Code (2003). Had he not
included “Fact” in boldface at the top of a brief author’s note, much of the discussion,
debate, and criticism (and, undoubtedly, sales) of his book could have been avoided.
Based on such earlier examples of Christian conspiracism as Holy Blood, Holy Grail
(Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln 1983), Bloodline of the Holy Grail (Gardner 1996), and
The Templar Revelation (Picknett and Prince 1997), the central conceit in Brown’s
novel is the existence of a sacred bloodline tracing back to Jesus himself through his
sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene. The Da Vinci Code’s premise is hardly
new. Indeed, Brown defended himself in Britain against plagiarism charges brought
by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which had been published two decades
before. Although none of what Brown indicates as “Fact” has to do with this “holy
bloodline” precisely, his religious interlocutors were quick to decry what Marcia
Montenegro describes as “a keen interest in the Gnostic gospels” (2013: n.p.) she
believes his novel represents. In the minds of many critics, Brown’s novel is not par-
ticularly well-written, perhaps suitable for passing a lengthy airline flight, but worth
little more consideration than that. Yet, its publication (and Ron Howard’s 2006 film
adaptation) prompted an immediate flurry of books, articles, and blog posts, and
created something of a cottage industry dedicated to correcting, cracking, or exposing
The Da Vinci Code (see, for example, Bock 2004; Lutzer 2004; Witherington 2004).
When The Da Vinci Code “exploded on the scene,” prolific countercult apologist
Ron Rhodes wrote that he had “been asked by numerous Christians to provide evi-
dence against the claims in the book” (2007: n.p.) –as though the novel should be
considered only thinly veiled “fact.” Proceeding in the almost Thomist fashion that has
marked his work for decades, Rhodes identifies a number of potential challenges to
evangelical understanding of the Christian faith raised by the Nag Hammadi discovery,
then provides readers with “The Truth of the Matter.” Prefacing many of his answers
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with the disclaimer that Brown’s factual claims are, in fact, “preposterous,” “abso-
lute nonsense,” or that he “completely misrespresents biblical history” (2007: n.p.), he
proceeds along similar lines to fellow believers Montenegro and Groothuis.
“As far as the Gnostic Gospels go,” Rhodes writes, “one does not have to read them
for long to discover that they are irreconcilable with the New Testament Gospels. This
is an important point, because if the historical evidence supports the New Testament
Gospels (as I have argued above), the Gnostic Gospels are thereby proven to be false
and doctrinally unreliable” (2007: n.p.). Indeed, Rhodes concludes, “when all the
facts are considered, Brown’s Da Vinci Code poses no threat to historic Christianity”
(2007: n.p.).
These last quotes showcase the sine qua non of countercult apologetics. First, all
things –including products of popular culture –must be measured against the Biblical
texts of the Protestant canon, which is to say, measured against evangelical interpret-
ation of those texts. Once something is found to be incompatible with that interpret-
ation, which it almost inevitably will be, it is dismissed, as Rhodes says, “proven to
be false and doctrinally unreliable” (2007: n.p.). It is important here to consider the
position that writers such as these hold as movement intellectuals within the evangel-
ical community. Far more people will have heard about the Gnostic gospels –whether
through Brown’s novel or its pop culture discussion –than will take the time to read
either the documents themselves or reliable scholarly analyses of them. This seems axio-
matic. Thus, for millions of Christians who might be concerned about the implications
of The Da Vinci Code, Groothuis, Montenegro, Rhodes, and countless others become
significant voices of reassurance, vetting appropriate material for Christians and
reinforcing the correctness of their beliefs by pointing out the flaws in Brown’s novel.
The obvious question, though, is: why spend so much time, effort, and publishing
expense on a work of fiction? For Dallas Theological Seminary professor Darrell
Bock, because millions of readers might be deceived into believing that Brown was
actually making historical claims while wearing a novelist’s hat, “one needs a guide
for the terrain. For the issues of faith and relationship to God are too important to
be left to the confusing category of ‘historical’ fiction where the claim is that despite
being a novel the history is fact” (Bock 2004: 6). Although New Testament scholar
Ben Witherington wrote an entire book dissecting what he believes are dangerous
historical claims made in the novel, he ultimately dismisses The Da Vinci Code as
“a bad amalgam of old paganism and, strangely enough, old Gnosticism brought
back to life” (2004: 27). Evangelical pastor Erwin Lutzer concurs with both of his
co-religionists, but argues that the problem goes deeper than mere historical misstep.
The Da Vinci Code, he writes, “is a direct attack against Jesus Christ, the church, and
those of us who are his followers and call him Savior and Lord” (Lutzer 2004: xvii).
Indeed, “if it is true,” he concludes, “the entire structure of Christian theology is a plot
to deceive the masses … And if it is true, our faith –the faith of those who trust in
Christ –is groundless” (Lutzer 2004: xx). Which brings us to the question of what’s
at stake in exposing Gnosticism.
CONCLU S IO N
When conservative Christians, often working from within a larger countercult para-
digm, write about “exposing Gnosticism,” they mean a number of things, some
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explicit, others implicit. First, they are exposing what they consider the theological
flaws in Gnosticism and the dangers these flaws represent soteriologically. Second,
they are exposing Gnosticism’s place in any one of a number of conspiracy theories
in which conservative Christians all but inevitably play a key role. These can range
from vague notions of the “New Age,” which many apologists state is little more
than Gnosticism rebranded, to Gnosticism as a key component in the rise of the
Antichrist and the advent of the End Times. Third, “exposing Gnosticism” reminds
conservative Christians that they are surrounded on all sides by theological temp-
tation, that they must be constantly on guard, and that often the guise in which
the Tempter comes is that which looks most appealing. Fourth, and most import-
antly, “exposing Gnosticism” provides essential reality maintenance for evangelical
believers, reinforcing their own worldview by parsing its difference from potential
theological competitors. While readers may note that the same criticisms leveled by
countercult apologists at Gnosticism and Gnostic documents could easily be applied
to the Biblical texts and theological assumptions about them, this problem is rarely
acknowledged or addressed. Rather, because they accept that Gnosticism can be
demonstrated theologically invalid, the apologist’s Christianity must therefore be
valid. For these believers, there is no third option: i.e., that both could be wrong.
At stake here is the very nature of salvation. Evangelical soteriology is predicated on
an intricately arranged and carefully balanced set of theological predicates, grounded
in the inerrancy, infallibility, and insuperability of the received Biblical texts. Anything
that threatens either the nature of those texts or the doctrinal positions derived from
them raises for countercult apologists the all-important question: what if I’m wrong?
What if my understanding of the nature of God, Jesus, and salvation is incorrect –or
incomplete? This goes a long way to explaining the tremendous energy invested by
such believers in demonstrating, as Dave Hunt writes, “wherein the error lies.” Far
more than anything else, these efforts are reality-maintenance exercises intended to
reinforce the superiority of one religious view by pointing out the alleged inferiority
of all others.
Although they may be loath to admit it, because these believers hold to particu-
larly exclusivist soteriological claims, countercult apologists and the conservative
Christians they serve and alternative religious systems such as Gnosticism constitute
as an essential part of their religious worldview. That is, they require what they con-
sider aberrant, even heretical groups against which the orthodoxy of their own beliefs
may be continually compared and tested. Gnosticism cannot be accepted as an alter-
nate vision of the Jesus event that circulated among various communities of believers
in the early decades of the church. It is a dangerous religious competitor whose flaws
and errors must be relentlessly exposed.
REFERENCES
Ankerberg, John, and John Weldon. 1996. Encyclopedia of New Age Beliefs. Eugene,
OR: Harvest House Publishers.
Baigent, Michael, Leigh, Richard, and Henry Lincoln. 1983. Holy Blood, Holy Grail: The
Secret History of Christ and the Shocking Legacy of the Grail. New York: Bantam.
Bock, Darrell L. 2004. Breaking the Da Vinci Code: Answers to the Questions Everyone’s
Asking. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.
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Bromley, David G., and James T. Richardson (eds.). 1983. The Brainwashing/Deprogramming
Controversy: Sociological, Psychological, Legal, and Historical Perspectives. New York:
Edwin Mellen.
Brown, Dan. 2003. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday.
Cowan, Douglas E. 2003. Bearing False Witness? An Introduction to the Christian Countercult.
Westport, CT: Praeger.
Cowan, Douglas E., and David G. Bromley. 2015. Cults and New Religions: A Brief History.
Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison. 1991. Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Gardner. Laurence. 1996. Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed.
London: Element.
Groothuis, Douglas. 1990. “Gnosticism and the Gnostic Jesus.” Christian Research Journal 13
(2); available online at www.equip.org/article/gnosticism-and-the-gnostic-jesus.
——— 1991. “The Gnostic Gospels: Are They Authentic?” Christian Research Journal 13 (3);
available online at www.equip.org/article/the-gnostic-gospels-are-they-authentic.
Hunt, Dave. 1996. In Defense of the Faith: Biblical Answers to Challenging Questions. Eugene,
OR: Harvest House Publishers.
Jones, Peter. 1992. The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age.
Philipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing.
Lutzer, Erwin W. 2004. The Da Vinci Deception: Credible Answers to the Questions Millions
Are Asking about Jesus, the Bible, and The Da Vinci Code. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House.
Montenegro, Marcia. 2013. “The Gnostic Gene: The Persistence of Gnosticism.” Christian
Answers for the New Age (March); available online at www.christiananswersforthenewage.
org/Articles_Gnosticism.aspx.
Pagels, Elaine. 1979. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage Books.
Picknett, Lynne, and Clive Prince. 1997. The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True
Identity of Christ. New York: Touchstone.
Rhodes, Ron. 2007. “Crash Goes the Da Vinci Code”; available online at http://ronrhodes.org/
articles/crash-goes-the-da-vinci.html.
Robinson, James M. (ed.). 1996. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 4th edn. Leiden: Brill.
Witherington III, Ben. 2004. The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene,
and Da Vinci. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
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CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
GNOSTIC FICTION
Carole Cusack
INTRODUCTIO N
Since the rise of the novel as a popular literary form in the eighteenth century,
fiction writers have utilized motifs from “the cultic milieu” (Campbell 1972), a
parallel cultural stream opposed to both Christianity and the Enlightenment. The
cultic milieu includes occult sciences (astrology, alchemy, and so on), esoteric fra-
ternities, conspiracism, and other types of “rejected knowledge” (Webb 1974: 10).
The social networks mediating these alternative discourses were secretive and often
hostile to authority, both qualities that appealed to authors in the “gothic” and sen-
sationalist modes. Gothic fictions emphasized the Mediterranean Roman Catholic
world, including secret societies and exotic beliefs as plot devices (Nelson 2007).
Thus, gothic novels featured esoteric motifs but reading them was not intended to
lead to gnosis. In the nineteenth century esoteric novels were in vogue, the majority
of which were indebted to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842), a “Rosicrucian”
tale of the near-immortal adept Zanoni, his teacher Mejnour, neophyte Clarence
Glyndon, and the beautiful opera singer Viola Pisani. Zanoni’s marriage to Viola and
the birth of their child involves him forgoing immortality. Zanoni dies by the guillo-
tine in Revolutionary France. Zanoni influenced writers as diverse as Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky, who drew upon its encyclopedic occult lore in Isis Unveiled (1877), and
Charles Dickens, who in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) made use of Bulwer-Lytton’s
ending (Ferguson 2017: 430).
Knowledge of Gnosticism was fragmentary until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi
codices in Egypt in 1945, though Gnostic ideas were preserved in works like Against
Heresies (c. 180 CE) by Irenaeus of Lyon. In Gnostic fiction broad themes are more
influential than close reading of texts or the use of specific Gnostic doctrines. Thus,
Ingvild Gilhus’s description of Gnostic myth and ritual as focused on “the fallen soul
of man which must be restored to its original dwelling-place, that is, the pneumatic
(spiritual) world above” (Gilhus 1984: 108) is a useful simplification, which also
clarifies Zanoni as an anti-Gnostic novel, as the immortal realm is abandoned for
sexual love. Gilhus identifies Gnostic cosmologies as tripartite: the pneumatic realm
above, the material world below, “and between these worlds, the intermediate realm
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— Carole Cusack —
of the archons, the rulers of the seven spheres of the planets” (Gilhus 1984: 109). The
theme of spiritual ascent is therefore crucial in Gnostic novels, and motifs including
the secondary creator (demiurge), spirit/matter dualism, the hidden “true” God, and
the divine child Sophia also often appear (Mackey 1984: 112–14).
In the twentieth century the cultural currents of “Gnostic Modernity” and
“Modern Gnosticism” emerged. Hans Jonas, author of The Gnostic Religion: The
Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, a popular book that
was for decades the standard work in English (Jonas 1958), viewed Gnosticism as
“the predecessor of modern existentialism and nihilism” (Hanegraaff 2007: 88). In
a critique of his teacher Martin Heidegger, Jonas argued for the moral bankruptcy
of existentialist philosophy, using Gnosticism to “lay bare the hidden metaphysical
premises of an apparently non-metaphysical philosophy as well as its internal discon-
tinuity” (Cahana 2017). Jonas interpreted Modernity through a Gnostic lens, erasing
the important difference that ancient Gnostics believed they could escape alien-
ation in this world, where “for the existentialist no escape is possible” (Hanegraaff
2007: 88). An opposing view, found in Gershom Scholem’s study of the messianism of
Shabbatai Zvi, proposed Gnosticism as a creative spiritual orientation in modernity.
Scholem posited “a dialectical conflict between the normative tradition [Judaism
and Christianity] and the counter-tradition nourished by Gnostic myth” (Grimstad
2002: 78). This counter-tradition offered an initiatory pathway to those disillusioned
by normative religion.
Thus, both Jonas and Scholem used Gnosticism to interpret modernity; the former
to reveal it as a fraudulent ideal, while the latter repurposed it as a viable spiritual
alternative. This chapter considers three different models of “Gnostic fiction”: novels
which use Gnostic motifs as narrative devices, but do not offer a “Gnostic” experi-
ence of reading as transformative or soteriological; novels that function as a type of
Gnostic awakening; and finally, examples of late twentieth-century speculative fiction
by Philip K. Dick (1928–1982), who was himself a mystic and something of a Gnostic
(Dick 2011).
F ICTION UTILIZING G NO S TIC M OTIF S

Two novels utilizing Gnostic motifs are Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1989),
a highbrow metafiction with a small readership, and Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da
Vinci Code (2003), which sold approximately 80 million copies. The Da Vinci Code
(2006) film, starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, grossed 770 million dollars
worldwide, testifying to the appeal of the melange of motifs from the cultic milieu
that Brown harnessed, like a modern Bulwer-Lytton. Eco’s and Brown’s novels are
both 600 pages, and encyclopaedic in their references to occult Christianity, Gnostic
heresies, secret brotherhoods, and conspiracv theories. Foucault’s Pendulum and The
Da Vinci Code, however, differ in style and tone. Eco’s authorial voice is self-aware,
humorous, and mocking; his characters are intellectuals and the plot is driven by
conversation not action. Brown’s tone is earnest and self-important, with a pseudo-
significant unveiling of the solutions to the puzzles that drive the plot of this action
thriller (Morgan 2006). Eco’s descriptions of esoterica are integrated into the story
and he does not “talk down” to his readers, while Brown is explicitly pedagogical,
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— Gnostic fiction —
laboriously spelling out the meaning of The Da Vinci Code. The “Gnostic” elements
include: both novels drawing upon extra-canonical texts like the Gospel of Mary
and the Apocryphon of John (Barnstone and Meyer 2010); the authors employing
Grail legends, “secret” histories of the Cathar heretics, Freemasonry, and putatively
“occult” figures, including Leonardo da Vinci; and the protagonists being engaged
in the discovery of their true identity through the acquisition of esoteric knowledge
gained via a series of ordeals (Cusack 2004: 74).
Foucault’s Pendulum was published fourteen years before The Da Vinci Code, but
Dan Brown’s novel is discussed first, as he propounds a “Gnostic” alternative history
that Eco’s novel deconstructs. Brown’s hero Robert Langdon (a professor of religious
“symbology”) and heroine Sophie Neveu (a French cryptologist) flee from the Louvre
after the murder of Sophie’s grandfather, Jacques Saunière, the head of the secretive
Priory of Sion. They take refuge with Sir Leigh Teabing, a historian who explains
that the “Holy Grail” is not the chalice from the Last Supper but the bloodline of
Jesus and Mary Magdalene, who (contrary to the narrative presented in the New
Testament) married and had children. This secret was protected through the centuries
by Gnostics, Templars, Cathars, and the Priory of Sion. The elements of this tale were
adapted by Brown from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a conspiracist pseudo-
history by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (2006 [1982]). Sophie
and Langdon escape from Teabing, who is himself seeking the Grail, and travel to
London, where they decode various messages left by Saunière. The novel’s climax is
at Rosslyn Chapel, a medieval church near Edinburgh, where Sophie learns that she
is of the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and is reunited with her brother
and grandmother, whom she believed dead (Brown 2004 [2003]: 564–87). The Da
Vinci Code employs the trope of the Gnostic quest, but is an entertainment designed
to divert but not to enlighten.
Foucault’s Pendulum is the story of three men, Belbo, Diotallevi, and Casaubon,
who read manuscripts for an esoteric publisher, Manutius, in the 1970s. They call the
authors of these works “the Diabolicals”; one, Colonel Ardenti, has a document, “The
Ordonation of Provins,” which he believes reveals the location of a Templar treasure.
In Chapter 65 the friends concoct an esoteric document, which various Diabolicals
come to believe is authentic. Belbo goes to Paris to explain there is no secret and is
captured. In Chapter 111 Casaubon witnesses a rite in the Conservatoire des Artes et
Métiers, where the Foucault’s pendulum of the title is located. Many in the esoteric
assembly are known to him: Belbo is killed, hanged by the motion of the pendulum,
and the novel’s femme fatale, Lorenza Pellegrini, also dies. When Casaubon returns to
Italy, Diotallevi has died from cancer. The book ends with Casaubon, having realized
the truth of his situation, on a hillside in Piedmont near Belbo’s childhood home,
awaiting his death at the hands of the Diabolicals. Eco’s novel is ironic, and his atti-
tude to the labyrinthine narratives and conspiracies that the Diabolicals believe and
the three protagonists become fascinated by is simple: they are falsehoods, beau-
tiful like the sirens’ songs (Eco 1989: 532), but to be rejected. Belbo, Casaubon,
and Diotallevi are “lured and tempted by the fantasies of the Diabolicals … [and]
lose their lives but realise the ultimate value of truth” (Cusack 2004: 85). Foucault’s
Pendulum is a cautionary tale designed to rationally enlighten; judging by hostile
reviews and poor sales, it failed as entertainment.
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FICTION AS GNOSTIC AWAKE NING

Fictions intended to produce a Gnostic awakening in readers are difficult to identify
and rarely popular or widely read. The reputation of Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990)
is in the twenty-first century occluded. His late work The Avignon Quintet, set in the
1930s and 1940s, is a Gnostic metafiction which offers committed readers a trans-
formative experience. Durrell was born in India and rejected English culture and
Christianity. He identified with Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, and the Gnostic heresy,
and the demiurgic activity of writing is his principal subject in the Quintet: Monsieur,
or The Prince of Darkness (1974); Livia, or Buried Alive (1978); Constance, or
Solitary Practices (1982); Sebastian, or Ruling Passions (1982); and Quinx, or The
Ripper’s Tale (1985). Patrick Parrinder described the Quintet as: “an enigmatic and
secretive work, a cluster of dark passages and … treasure-filled caves … a deliberate
romance with a Holy Grail, a magic circle or Round Table of characters equipped
for the quest, and a threat of apocalyptic destruction regardless of whether the quest
succeeds or fails” (Parrinder 1985: 22–3).
All Durrell’s novels feature initiation rites, sexual entanglements, and labyrinths as
sources of wisdom. Monsieur presents five authors writing enmeshed texts: Durrell,
whose main “character” is Aubrey Blanford, also creates the characters Rob Sutcliffe,
Bruce Drexel, and Piers de Nogaret, all of whom “live” variations of the same life
story of adultery, betrayal, quest, and narration, in search of wholeness. Plot elements
include a Gnostic suicide club, the Templars, and the Holy Grail (which is possibly the
Philosopher’s Stone), which Hitler and the Nazis seek. Julius Raper notes that “the
central action of the series … is not the outward search for treasure, but the inward
process by which … Blanford uses his fictive imagination to recover the lost and
ignored dimensions of himself” (Raper 1990: 422).
The trauma of World War II and the tension between the life-wish and the death-
wish are powerful currents in the Quintet. The Gnostic suicide cult is revealed when
Bruce, Sylvie, and Piers visit Macabru in the Egyptian desert, where Akkad teaches a
Gnostic doctrine. The visitors take part in a ritual, as Akkad argues, “reason is power-
less –for this kind of understanding can only be soundless, wordless, breathless”
(Durrell 2004: 122). Akkad identifies Judeo-Christianity with matter and the demi-
urge, and proposes Gnosticism as the embrace of death that translates one to the
spiritual realm. In Livia, which focuses on the Templar treasure, the issue of moral
action in a world threatened by Nazism challenges the value of “spiritual” exit from
the world via suicide, and psychoanalysis and art are foregrounded as alternative
meaning systems. The Nazi-loving Livia, based on Unity Mitford, is balanced by
her sister Constance, the heroine of the Quintet, and a force of illumination. The
“treasure” Blanford uncovers is like the Tao, which Durrell understood as “an instant
of perfect attention, of crystal-clear apprehension that could last forever” (Raper
1990: 431). Constance is the pivot of the Quintet; as Gnosis is “the route back to …
wholeness” (Markert 1987: 559), which Constance, Blanford’s first love before he
married Livia, embodies.
The equation of suicide with Gnostic liberation is counter-intuitive, but Durrell
stated in an interview that in Tibetan tradition “one can detach oneself from the body
by correct breathing. One can become a living dead like myself. I think one starts
dying with one’s first breath, in the moment of birth” (Herbrechter 1999: 66). The
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Quintet continues with Sebastian, set in post-war Switzerland, and culminates with
Quinx, in which Constance, Blanford, Sutcliffe, Lord Galen, and others meet in post-
War Avignon to search for the Templar treasure in a quincunx of caves near the Pont
du Gard. Blanford and Constance are reunited, the treasure is not revealed, and, near
the end, Blanford exclaims “There is no meaning and we falsify the truth about reality
in adding one. The universe is playing, the universe is only improvising!” (Durrell
2004: 1333). The Quintet’s characters seek meaning and knowledge via Gnosticism,
sexual union, and psychoanalysis, and a world threatened by Nazism is an exemplary
case of the material realm under the rule of the lord of darkness. The reality is that
Durrell himself is the god of the Quintet, “its creator, in Gnostic terms Monsieur, the
perverse god to be denied by his creations who people the world of Avignon” (Nichols
1995: 60). The reader, who is initiated by reading the 1,400 pages of the Quintet,
attains integration and true vision by traversing the labyrinth of signs.
SPE CULATIVE FICTION AND G NO S TICIS M

Writing fiction is therefore an activity that makes an author a demiurge; the inven-
tion of a literary secondary world is what J. R. R. Tolkien calls “sub-creation,” to be
distinguished from the primary world and God, the true Creator (Selling 2008: 66). In
speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) this activity extends beyond the docu-
mentation of a mimetic world, involving a “departure from consensus reality,” which
Robert Galbreath argues “encompass[es] cognitive estrangement, violation of ground
rules, the moment of hesitation, entry into an Otherworld, and the intrusion of the
supernatural” (Galbreath 1988: 331). From any of these circumstances, revelatory
Gnosis can emerge. Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) had a profound mystical experience
in February and March of 1974, while recovering from surgery, of an entity he called
VALIS –“Vast, Active, Living Intelligence System” (Canaan 2008: 336). His novels
had employed Gnostic themes since he wrote Eye in the Sky (1957) in his twenties.
John Garvey argues that in Dick’s “stories, as in Gnostic theology, the world is … not
merely asleep, but deliberately deceived” (Garvey 2007: 14).
The VALIS Trilogy (1990) consists of VALIS (1978), The Divine Invasion (1980),
and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). VALIS has two narrators,
Horselover Fat and Phil (both versions of Dick, as Philip means “fond of horses” in
Greek and Dick is “fat” in German). Fat has Dick’s vision of VALIS and encounters
rock stars Eric and Linda Lampton, whose film, Valis, reveals their two-year-old
daughter Sophia is the Divine Child: both Christ and Buddha (Rossi 2011: 155).
Sophia tells Fat that “man is god and man is holy” and “reintegrates his shattered
psyche” (Mackey 1984: 115). Sophia dies in a failed experiment, and Fat seeks her
next reincarnation, while Phil offers a “rational” explanation of events. The Divine
Invasion features a scenario akin to Valentinian Gnosticism: God is born as an intel-
lectually disabled baby called Emmanuel, to a nonplussed woman who did not expect
a virgin birth. Emmanuel’s mission is to rescue the world from the devil, Belial, who
holds it captive. Dick links humanity’s fall to a split in the Godhead; “the tran-
scendent part (Yah) has remained absolute, while Emmanuel, [his partner] Zina, and
Belial represent fragmented aspects of deity fallen into the relative world” (Mackey
1984: 115). Emmanuel, who has some of the qualities of the Old Testament God, is a
demiurge who, through union with Zina, becomes whole and defeats Belial.
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The Transmigration of Timothy Archer tells of a bishop who ventures into the
Judaean desert seeking Gnostic scrolls and dies. Dick, who identified as an Episcopalian,
used the case of Bishop James Pike, who died in Israel in 1969 in his tale, which is
narrated by Archer’s daughter-in-law Angel (Garvey 2007: 16). On the day of John
Lennon’s assassination, Angel reflects on her family history, telling the story of her
father-in-law Tim and friend Kirsten, who were lovers. Angel’s husband Jeff suicided,
and he manifests in a séance and predicts the deaths of Kirsten (by cancer) and Tim in
the desert. Dick melded New Age ideas, Episcopalian Christianity, and Gnosticism in
a unique combination that is in some ways close to the vision articulated by Lawrence
Durrell. Jonas’s summary of Valentinus’s position is apposite: “What liberates is the
knowledge of who we were, what we became; what we were, whereinto we have
been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is and what
rebirth” (Jonas 1958: 45). Dick, like Durrell, had a Gnostic view of reality and used
fragmented novelists/narrators as the consciousness through which stories emerged;
these narrators, in their personal journey, achieve wholeness through the seeking of
knowledge and the getting of wisdom.
The extent to which Dick’s own spiritual quest was portrayed in his novels
remained unclear until the publication of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a text exam-
ining his visionary experiences, termed 2–3–74 (Dick 2011). It became clear that
Horselover Fat’s journal in VALIS was a fictional equivalent of Dick’s Exegesis, and
that Fat’s mystical and Gnostic experiences were the author’s too. While the idea
“that things are not what they seem” is hardly novel, Dick’s personal involvement
in the Gnostic “dilemma of humanity trapped in delusion, imprisoned in a world
ruled by malign and unseen forces” (Garvey 2007: 13) resulted in speculative fictions
that were equal parts theology, psychoanalytic therapy, and a new mythology for the
modern technological era.
CONCLU S IO N
Gnostic fictions, considered broadly, have a long history, in that the texts and codices
of the ancient world are properly, in the academic study of religion, to be understood
as fictions. These texts attempted to describe a vast world of the imagination, filled
with divine and semi-divine beings, hierarchically arranged in realms defined by their
closeness or remoteness from the hidden God. Humans, described in some sources
as “abortions” (Gilhus 1984: 110), though ill-born, have potential to ascend to the
spirit or pneumatic realm, and experience the presence of the hidden, true God. In
Gnostic novels of the modern era the spiritual quest for knowledge and integration is
foregrounded, and the trope of the material world under the domination of the evil
god, the Demiurge, is the backdrop against which this struggle is conducted. This
chapter has examined three different types of “Gnostic fiction”: novels that employ
Gnostic motifs solely as plot devices; novels that offer the prospect of reading as a
soteriological activity leading to Gnostic awakening; and examples of speculative
fiction, a genre uniquely suited to convey “knowledge of the transcendental … that
which lies beyond consensus reality, whether ontologically or epistemologically, but
which none the less is not unknowable” (Galbreath 1988: 332). These texts involve
both a Gnostic understanding of modernity, and a modern version of Gnosticism that
continues to appeal in the twenty-first century.
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REFERENCES
Baigent, Michael, Leigh, Richard, and Henry Lincoln. 2006 [1982]. The Holy Blood and the
Holy Grail. New York: Random House.
Barnstone, Willis, and Marvin Meyer. 2010. Essential Gnostic Scriptures. Boston, MA:
Shambhala.
Brown, Dan. 2004 [2003]. The Da Vinci Code. London: Corgi.
Cahana, Jonathan. 2017. “A Gnostic Critic of Modernity: Hans Jonas from Existentialism to
Science.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 86 (1): 158–80. doi:10.1093/jaarel/
lfx035.
Campbell, Colin. 1972. “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu, and Secularization.” A Sociological
Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5: 119–36.
Canaan, Howard. 2008. “Time and Gnosis in the Writings of Philip K. Dick.” Hungarian
Journal of English and American Studies 14 (2): 335–55.
Cusack, Carole M. 2004. “Esotericism, Irony and Paranoia in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s
Pendulum.” Edward F. Crangle (ed.). Esotericism and the Control of Knowledge.
Sydney: Sydney Studies in Religion: 63–85.
Dick, Philip K. 1990. The VALIS Trilogy. London: Book Club Associates.
——— 2011. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (eds. Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson).
Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Durrell, Lawrence. 2004. The Avignon Quintet: Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian and
Quinx. London: Faber and Faber.
Eco, Umberto. 1989. Foucault’s Pendulum (trans. William Weaver). London: Secker & Warburg.
Ferguson, Christine. 2017. “Occult Sciences.” John Holmes and Sharon Ruston (eds.). The
Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth Century British Literature and Science.
London: Routledge: 423–37.
Galbreath, Robert. 1988. “Fantastic Literature as Gnosis.” Extrapolation 29 (4): 330–7.
Garvey, John. 2007. “A Real Gnostic Gospel: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick.” Commonweal 4
May: 13–16.
Gilhus, Ingvild S. 1984. “Gnosticism: A Study in Liminal Symbolism.” Numen 31 (1): 106–28.
Grimstad, Kirsten J. 2002. The Modern Revival of Gnosticism and Thomas Mann’s “Doktor
Faustus.” Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, Suffolk: Camden House.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 2007. “Fiction in the Desert of the Real: Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.”
Aries: The Journal of Western Esotericism 7 (1): 85–109.
Herbrechter, Stefan. 1999. Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Christianity. Boston, MA: Beacon Books.
Mackey, Douglas A. 1984. “Science Fiction and Gnosticism.” The Missouri Review 7
(2): 112–20.
Markert, Lawrence W. 1987. “ ‘The Pure and Sacred Readjustment of Death’: Connections
between Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet and the Writings of D. H. Lawrence.”
Twentieth Century Literature 33 (4): 550–64.
Morgan, Gwendolyn A. 2006. The Invention of False Medieval Authorities as a Literary Device
in Popular Fiction: From Tolkien to the Da Vinci Code. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen
Press.
Nelson, Victoria. 2007. “Faux Catholic: A Gothic Subgenre from Monk Lewis to Dan Brown.”
boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 34 (3): 87–107.
Nichols, James R. 1995. “The Quest for Self: The Labyrinth in the Fiction of Lawrence Durrell.”
The International Fiction Review 22: 54–60.
Parrinder, Patrick. 1985. “Naming of Parts.” London Review of Books 7 (10): 22–3.
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Raper, Julius Rowan. 1990. “The Philosopher’s Stone and Durrell’s Psychological Vision in
Monsieur and Livia.” Twentieth Century Literature 36 (4): 419–33.
Rossi, Umberto. 2011. “The Holy Family from Outer Space: Reconsidering Philip K. Dick’s
The Divine Invasion.” Extrapolation 52 (2): 153–73.
Selling, Kim. 2008. Why Are Critics Afraid of Dragons? Understanding Genre Fantasy.
Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr. Müller.
Webb, James. 1974. The Occult Establishment. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
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CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CINEMA: EVIL DEMIURGES
IN HOLLYWOOD FILMS AT THE
THRESHOLD OF THE TWENTY-F IRST
CENTURY
Fryderyk Kwiatkowski
I n the last 30 years, Hollywood has released many works that incorporated themes
and ideas most typically linked with ancient Gnosticism (Wilson 2006). In this
chapter, I shall take a closer look at the rulers of the illusory worlds that were depicted
in the following films: Dark City (1998), The Matrix trilogy (1998–2003), and The
Truman Show (1998). All of them reflect basic characteristics of a malevolent and
malign world-creator that was presented especially in Sethian (Schenke 1974) or clas-
sical Gnostic texts (Layton 1995; Brakke 2010).
In this chapter, I shall narrow my perspective to show the historical origins of
certain strategies that were used in the depiction of cinematic world-creators which
can be traced back to classical Gnostic tradition. In the first part of this chapter, by
implementing a comparative approach, I will present the striking similarities between
the characteristics of Yaldabaoth, formulated especially in the Secret Revelation of John,
and cinematic world-rulers: Mr Book in Dark City, Source in The Matrix Revolutions,
and Christof in The Truman Show. In the last part, I will make a point that these figures
do not only mirror traits of Yaldabaoth but that they can be also viewed in the light of
the most widespread belief about Gnosticism, namely anticosmic dualism.
DEMONIZATION OF YAL DABAOTH
I n Gnostic writings, Yaldabaoth was depicted as a foolish, ignorant, and malevo-

lent lesser deity, who created the cosmos. He is ignorant of the existence of the
true transcendent God from whom everything originated. Firstly, similarly to the
Gnostic counterpart, cinematic world-rulers possess creative powers and build illu-
sory universes in which they entrap humans who are totally unaware of their meta-
physical position. As Gerard Luttikhuizen observed, in Gnostic texts a world-creator
is regarded as a Satanic figure (2006: 47). Firstly, in the Secret Revelation of John,
when Yaldabaoth appears for the first time, he is pictured as a lion-faced serpent. In
antiquity, this appearance was clearly understood as demonic and the image of a lion
referred to bestiality and cruel kingship (King 2006: 205).
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— Fryderyk Kwiatkowski —
Demonization of the cinematic world-creator in Dark City and The Matrix trilogy
is presented through similar means as in the Gnostic text. In the former work, Mr
Book at first sight seems to be akin to a human being. It is revealed, however, that
along with other aliens (the Strangers), who are extraterrestrial parasites and use
corpses as hosts, he does not resemble his prey but is essentially a monster (see
Figure 65.1).
At the end of The Matrix Revolutions, Neo, the main character of the trilogy,
encounters the Source. He is the central computing core for the machines and is respon-
sible for imprisoning human beings inside the computer simulation, the eponymous
Matrix. In The Matrix Reloaded, however, there is also another demiurgic figure, the
Architect, although he comprises merely one of the internal parts of the simulation and
for that reason should not be regarded as a Gnostic world-builder. Source’s demonic
outer appearance is clearly depicted through visual means (see Figure 65.2) and is
additionally underlined by his deep, penetrating voice which associates with power
and authority.
Figure 65.1 Mr Book from Dark City
Figure 65.2 The Source from The Matrix Revolutions
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— Cinema: evil demiurges in Hollywood films —
Figure 65.3 Christof in The Truman Show
In the Secret Revelation of John it is said that Yaldabaoth “had many outward
appearances, and relied upon all of them” (NHC II, 1; 11.36–12.2). This fragment
can be referred to the Source’s material representation that consists of a multitude
of tiny machines that are organized together in a way that resembles a human face.
Christof in The Truman Show lacks a demonic outer appearance like world-
creators in the other films (Figure 65.3). However, Gnostics developed another way to
imagine Yaldabaoth as a devilish creature. They presented him as an enemy of man-
kind through his hostile actions toward humanity (Luttikhuizen 2004: 155–9). This
strategy is also reflected in The Truman Show. It converges, however, with another fea-
ture of the Gnostic world-creator which is also reflected in Christof’s characteristics.
For that reason, I discuss his demonic traits in the following section.
STRATEGIES F OR KEEPING P E O P L E IN A S TATE

OF IGNOR ANCE
Gnostics regarded Yaldabaoth as a devilish entity by showing a plentitude of his
crimes toward humanity: imprisoning the lights of power, his attempt to take spiritual
power from Adam, mixing the light with darkness, etc. By taking into account this
strategy, Christof’s deeds toward Truman can be seen as demonic. The former uses
all kinds of techniques not to let Truman develop a desire to see the world outside
Seahaven, an artificially built micro-universe in which he has been placed without any
knowledge, and thus keeps him in ignorance. For example, when Truman was a child,
he went sailing with his father, who was played by one of the actors in Seahaven, just
like any other person in the city. Christof summoned a storm on the sea, by using
devices that were responsible for controlling the weather, to arrange a fictitious death
of his father. By doing so, he wanted to produce a waterfright in Truman to prevent
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him from crossing the sea behind which he could find an exit from the false world.
Thus Christof’s deed can be seen as cruel and inhuman, which in the light of Gnostic
approach toward Yaldabaoth makes him a demonic figure, regardless of his kind
voice and friendly appearance in front of TV cameras.
Comparatively, in the other films, world-creators also use plenty of methods to
keep entrapped people in the state of oblivion. In The Matrix trilogy, the machines
developed the simulation into which they plugged people’s minds to prevent them
from “waking up.” In Dark City, aliens likewise created a technology through which
they control imprisoned inhabitants of the city. Every day the Strangers replace the
memories of the dwellers, as a result of which they are unable to gain knowledge
about the true nature of their world.
In Gnostic texts, Yaldabaoth does not rule the material world on his own. He has
servants, called “archons.” However, they should not be perceived as completely inde-
pendent entities but rather as his manifestations (Thomassen 1993: 228–9). In Dark
City, they are represented by the rest of the aliens. Similarly to Mr Book, they wear
long black coats and their faces are as white as chalk (Figure 65.4).
Moreover, they share one universal psychic mind, including all the memories,
and thus are not essentially different from their master. In The Matrix trilogy,
archons are epitomized especially by the agents. They are highly intelligent sen-
tient computer programs which comprise an integral part of the simulation and
by preserving its illusory nature they protect it from destruction. The agents fulfill
their goals by preventing people from escaping the Matrix. Similarly to the aliens
in Dark City, they share one mind, although it is completely artificial. Apart from
Mr Smith, the agents lack any characteristic properties that would individualize
them. They wear black suits, dark sunglasses, and similar haircuts, which makes
them a part of a homogeneous group (see Figure 65.5). Except for the agents, there
are also other programs in the Matrix that represent archons and clearly disclose
demonic traits in outer appearance, for example the Twins in The Matrix Reloaded
(see Figure 65.6).
Figure 65.4 The Strangers in Dark City
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Figure 65.5 The agents in The Matrix
Figure 65.6 “One of the Twins” in the The Matrix Reloaded
In The Truman Show, all the inhabitants of Seahaven, except for the main char-
acter, Truman Burbank, can also be perceived as archons. Although they differ from
each other and display individualistic traits, it is because they are actors whose
role is to create a sense of authentic life wherever Truman goes. They secretly wear
earphones through which they are connected to the headquarters and take orders dir-
ectly from Christof. This shows that their personalities are fake since they do not act
on their own but according to the will of the director of the show. The individualism
of the actors is nullified because they constitute a part of a cleverly designed illusion
produced by Christof.
FLOO D
Since ancient Gnostics identified Yaldabaoth with the Old Testament God, they
interpreted the flood as another example of an atrocity he committed against man-
kind. In Biblical tradition, the flood is usually understood as the creator’s attempt to
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bring darkness upon humanity (“darkness was falling over everything upon earth”
[Berlin Codex 73: 16–18]). This motif found its portrayal in the films as well.
In Dark City, the flood was brought by the aliens, who detest sunlight. It is
depicted as never-ending darkness that covers the city. The dialectic between light and
darkness in the film can be read allegorically if we take into account Gnostic writings
in which light is associated with knowledge and life but darkness with ignorance. In
Dark City, this relationship is also mirrored, since the light leads the main character,
John Murdoch, to knowledge. His memory from childhood, which took place in sun-
light, ultimately brings him to Gnosis and liberation from the illusory world created
by the Strangers.
In The Truman Show, the flood found its depiction in quite a literal way. Christof,
after realizing that Truman is in the middle of a sea journey to leave his world,
summoned a storm to prevent him from doing so. Truman, however, by gaining know-
ledge about the illusory nature of his previous life, is not subjugated to Christof’s will
any more, even in the face of a deadly storm, and ultimately finds the exit. In The
Matrix, a flood is occurring when Morpheus passes Gnosis to Neo and reveals to him
the main idea that stands behind the creation of the virtual reality. Mopheus explains
that when the war between humans and machines had started people decided to
scorch the sky.
They believed that by cutting off the solar power, their opponents, who were
reliant on it, would not survive. This shows, however, that the flood was not caused
by Source and thus puts into question who actually should be regarded as a true
Gnostic creator –the humans who made the machines or perhaps the robots who
developed the Matrix? Thus, although there is not enough space to discuss these
issues in detail, it is vital to stress that Gnostic motifs in The Matrix trilogy were not
depicted in perfect line with the Nag Hammadi scriptures or even secondary sources
on Gnosticism. Instead of merely illustrating the Gnostic thought, the directors rather
reinterpreted, problematized, and applied it into a narrative fictional story in order
to better address contemporary religious issues and philosophical problems in which
technology plays a crucial role.
I GNORANCE, B LINDN E S S , F O O L IS HNE S S

In Gnostic writings, these features describe Yaldabaoth, who forgot his true origins
(Fischer-Mueller 1990: 90): namely that he is a product of higher realm, a materialized
outcome of Sophia’s desire (Thomassen 1993: 229). What all the films share in their
transformation of Gnostic themes is the lack of a higher, divine reality occupied by
the true God. This also has an effect on the role of the cinematic world-builders and
the meaning of the metaphysical structure of their realms. Conversely to Yaldabaoth,
they are not ignorant of the source of their existence. It is clear that the fictional
worlds they created comprise a part of the material cosmos in which they live. Their
ignorance, however, concerns human beings they entrapped, particularly how they
perceive human nature.
In Dark City, the aliens’ account of human nature stands behind the experiments
which they endlessly reiterate. They believe that it can be reduced merely to the com-
bination of people’s experiences and they try to validate this view by replacing mem-
ories of the dark city’s dwellers every day through the use of technology. The Strangers’
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account is undermined by the fact that the main character possesses superpowers
which did not stem either from his “actual” previous experiences or from the artificial
ones inserted by the world-creators.
In The Matrix trilogy, machines try to understand human beings primarily in
material terms. They conceive their bodies only as a source of bioelectrical energy
and their minds as a bunch of neural connections that can be arbitrarily stimulated
and controlled. It is true that the machines were able to transfer people’s conscious-
ness into a computer-generated reality. What is more, they even programmed returns
of the chosen ones whose ultimate function is to preserve the system. The trilogy,
however, suggests that the machines’ materialistic approach toward human nature,
expressed especially by the Architect, is false. Neo eventually puts an end to the war
between the machines and humans, which was not predicted even by the Oracle,
although she had foreseen the arrival of the last redeemer.
Correspondingly to previous works, in The Truman Show the world-maker of
Seahaven also believes that Truman’s entire life can be subjugated by completely con-
trolling both the physical and social environment around him. It appears that this idea,
which laid the foundations for the reality show, eventually contradicts the actions of
the main character. He gradually comes to know that the world around him is an
immense TV set and hardly any experience in his life could be regarded as authentic.
The experiment of creating a micro-universe which can be put under absolute control
was a total failure. On the one hand, this failure was due to technical issues since not
everything worked in accordance with the assumptions of its makers, e.g., a spotlight
which imitated a star fell off from the sky in front of Truman. Because of the creators’
mistakes on the set, he was able to discover the illusory nature of Seahaven. On the
other hand, not every actor obeyed Christof. Sylvia, one of the actors, who fell in love
with Truman, which he reciprocated, could not stand seeing him living in a dream,
and decided to tell him the truth about his life and the nature of Seahaven. Although
she did not have enough time to explain everything to him, her misbehavior toward
Christof partly resulted in Truman’s liberation.
EVIL DEMIURGE IN HO L LYWO O D

Apart from many important differences, both cinematic and Gnostic world-creators
attempt to forestall their prisoners from fleeing their realms. They are responsible for
the condition of mankind, which is defined by the state of ignorance and oblivion.
They falsely presume that by supervising the worlds they made, they are able to con-
trol human lives as well. The films echo the Gnostic thought, in that the essence of
human beings cannot be reduced to the determinants of the illusory world in which
one remains. In other words, human nature is endowed with an element which cannot
be controlled or even fully grasped. It transcends the boundaries of discursive ways
of comprehending which are epitomized by cinematic Gnostic world-builders. Not
only can human life be studied and fully explained by using clear, intelligible cat-
egories, they believe, but can also be arbitrarily shaped by any actions that would be
based on them. Although in the films there is no assumption that there exists a higher
world and because of that humans do not possess an element which would link them
with it, they are still depicted as entities who transcend the places in which they were
imprisoned. The main characters of these films do not share with ancient Gnostics
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such a clear picture of what should be seen as good but they know what is wrong with
the world around them. The reason they decide to pursue a better life is based on a
negative approach that stems from their subjective feelings. Like Gnostics, they fully
know from where they want to flee but they do not share with them such a firm belief
about where the final destination of their journey lies.
Contrarily to Yaldabaoth, cinematic world-makers do not build their realms by
unwittingly duplicating some ideal image of a perfect world. However, similarly
to their ancient Gnostic prototypes, their worlds should be seen as their spatial
representations which serve as a tool to entrap mankind and their essence within.
What is most interesting about the cinematic representations of Gnostic world
makers is that they can be viewed in the light of one of the most widespread beliefs
about Gnosticism: anticosmic dualism. In its basic form it designates an idea that the
material world, which was created by an evil, demiurgic, ignorant being, is perceived
as utterly evil. This assumption (supposedly) led Gnostics to the condemnation of the
universe and the human body as well. Firstly, cinematic world-creators are clearly
pictured as “bad guys,” that is, their motives are depicted as plainly immoral and
they stand in opposition to the protagonists. Secondly, their realms do not share
any link with some ideal sphere of goodness and harmony. They do not even figure
as its excessive caricature but can be seen only in terms of their material extensions
and hence as evil as well. Many Hollywood films which have emerged in the 1990s
and 2000s echoes the idea of anticosmic dualism, although, as recent studies have
shown, this concept does not reflect the content of the Gnostic texts at all (Williams
1999: 33–43; Waldstein 2000; King 2003: 123–4, 192–201). Thus it would be very
interesting to do further research and try to unravel not only how and why this mis-
conception has found its expressions in Hollywood but most importantly why it has
become attractive to contemporary viewers.
CONCLU S IO N
To conclude, in order to conceptualize the framework for examining the affinities
between ancient Gnostic ideas and popular culture at least three issues have to be
taken into account. Firstly, one should consider, of course, the recent outcomes in
Gnostic studies to be aware of academic approaches to Gnosticism and “the NHL”
to clearly depict what particular purposes stand behind using each method before
applying them to study popular culture. This requires a focus on “historiography,”
which focuses on describing what really happened in the past (Hanegraaff 2012: 375).
Secondly, one should take into account what particular image of Gnosticism
has been dominant and is preserved in Western culture and how it differs from our
current knowledge about this phenomenon from recent scholarship. This invokes
“mnemohistoriography,” which “tries to describe the genesis and historical develop-
ment of what a given culture imagines has happened” (Hanegraaff 2012: 375). On
the one hand, this distinction is helpful to outline specifically which ideas expressed
in popular culture we are able to connect with Gnosticism and “the NHL” by putting
them within a historical context. On the other, this can show that popular culture
not only derives from certain notions formulated during a particular time in the past
but also that it has been reproducing ideas which have been believed to be a part of
Gnosticism, as is the case with the concept of the evil Demiurge and his evil world.
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The third vital aspect of the research on Gnostic ideas in popular culture is to
clearly delineate not only the similarities between the ideas in question and their
modern reinterpretations but also how they differ from each other. By trying to
explain these discrepancies, one might better understand how Gnostic ideas have been
reinterpreted, what cultural functions they might serve, and why they have become
attractive in the last few decades, especially for an American audience.
Acknowledgement: Research for chapter was funded by the Jagiellonian University, under the
program “Erasmus+Placement.”
REFERENCES
Fischer-Mueller, E. Aydeet. 1990. “Yaldabaoth: The Gnostic Female Principle in Its Fallenness.”
Novum Testamentum 32 (1): 79–95.
Hanegraaff, Wouter. 2012. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western
Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
King, Karen L. 2003. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
King, Karen L. 2006. The Secret Revelation of John. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Layton, Bentley. 1995. “Prolegomena to the Study of Ancient Gnosticism.” L. Michael White
and O. Larry Yarbrough (eds.). The Social World of the First Christians: Essays in Honor of
Wayne A. Meeks. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995: 334–50.
Luttikhuizen, Gerard P. 2004. “The Demonic Demiurge in Gnostic Mythology.” Christoph
Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (eds.). The Fall of the Angels. Leiden: Brill: 148–60.
——— 2006. Gnostic Revisions of Genesis Stories and Early Jesus Traditions. Leiden: Brill.
Peter Nagel (ed.). Studia Coptica. Berlin: Akademie Verlag: 165–74.
Thomassen, Einar. 1993. “The Platonic and the Gnostic ‘Demiurge’.” Per Bilde, Helge K.
Nielsen, and Jørgen Podemann Sørensen (eds.). Apocryphon Severini: Studies in Ancient
Manichaeism and Gnosticism Presented to Søren Giversen. Aarhus: Aarhus University
Press: 226–44.
Journal of Early Christian Studies 8 (3): 341–72.
Williams, Michael A. 1999. Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious
Category. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wilson, Eric G. 2006. “Gnostic Cinema: The Blank Screen.” Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in
Film. New York: Continuum: 55–116.
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CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
MUSIC AND GNOSIS
Joscelyn Godwin
T he present book’s definition of gnosis as “deep knowledge in which the mys-

teries of the cosmos are unveiled” expresses a perennial claim on behalf of music.
Beethoven’s famous dictum that “music is a higher revelation than all their wisdom
and philosophy” (Godwin 1986: 199), even if he did not say it himself, finds echoes
in almost every epoch.
One rationale for this claim lies in the immaterial and non-referential nature of
music. Although often joined to words or gestures, as in song and dance, music in
itself has no imagery, no verbal content, and no tangible presence. It is invisible, yet
comes into being when it enters consciousness, usually through the ears. Yet it does
not even need an exterior voice or instrument to be heard. The aural imagination can
make music, ranging in intensity from the casual tunes that everyone hears in their
head to what Beethoven himself must have experienced, composing the most complex
works in a state of total deafness.
The ancient Indian scriptures, the Vedas and the Brahmanas, depict the creation
of the manifested worlds as a praise-song of the gods that summons all things into
being: the song itself is the substance and primordial matter out of which the worlds
are formed (Godwin 1989: 41). Its rhythms are the cycles within cycles of Hindu
chronology, but the song is outside time, thus perpetually accessible if one is attuned
to it. One response to this belief is the discipline of Shabda Yoga, the yoga of the
sound-current, especially cultivated in the modern Radha Soami Satsang. The method,
briefly summarized, is concentration on the “third eye” with the intention first of
hearing, then becoming absorbed in the primordial sound. This must be the highest
ambition of musical gnosis, leapfrogging over the entire phenomenon of music as we
know it in order to contemplate its unchanging source. A similar idea underlies the
advice given by some yoga teachers: that when listening to a musical performance,
one should not attend to the voice or the instrumental melody, but to the single tone
that persists throughout. Of course this only works in musical traditions based on a
drone, rather than on changing harmonies, such as Western music has used since the
Middle Ages. Some would see in this difference a symptom of the metaphysical dis-
tance between cultures.
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Islam also has a strong tradition of musically based gnosis. The tenth-century
encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity has the earliest treatise on the subject, ana-
lyzing the various degrees of response to music. At the summit is the experience
reported, or imagined, of Moses, “who when he heard the discourse of his Lord …
was in transports hearing this serene melody and thereafter considered all rhythms,
all melodies and all songs as insignificant” (Godwin 1986: 72–3). With this principle
in mind, the Sufis developed the practice of samā (“audition”) as a graded meditative
practice, beginning with the simple emotional response to a song or flute melody and
rising by stages to ecstatic union with the divine (Godwin 1986: 80–1).
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), one of the most avowedly gnostic of modern
composers, has said “I’m not communicating anything personally. I’m just making
music which makes it possible to make contact with this supra- natural world”
(Stockhausen 1989: 4). Critics have sneered at Stockhausen’s claim that he was a
being from the star system of Sirius who incarnated in order to bring a new music to
earthlings. But the claim had a respectable context in traditional cosmology, and spe-
cifically in the myth of the “harmony of the spheres.” This presupposes a geocentric
cosmos in which the earth is surrounded by the seven planetary spheres, the eighth
sphere that carries the fixed stars, the Primum Mobile that gives motion to the whole,
and thereafter an infinitude filled with gods, angels, etc., according to the relevant reli-
gion. The “Myth of Er” at the end of Plato’s Republic, reporting what we would call a
near-death experience, is the earliest written source of the tradition that these spheres
are somehow musical: Er witnesses singing Sirens perched on each one. Cicero and
Plutarch wrote similar accounts of initiates who ascended through the spheres in
spirit and returned to report on the music they heard there. Philo of Alexandria (ca.
30 BC–AD 45), who reconciled Judaic doctrines with Platonic philosophy, writes that
Moses on Mount Sinai heard it, but only because he “laid aside his body” and nei-
ther ate nor drank for 40 days and nights (Godwin 1986: 57). The Hermetic writings,
compiled in the early centuries of the Christian era, contain the description of how
the virtuous soul, upon leaving the body at death, ascends through the planetary
spheres until it enters the eighth sphere: that of the stars, presumably including Sirius.
There it joins the beings who are already there, hymning the Father, and it even hears
the Powers beyond the eighth sphere singing their own hymns (Copenhaver (ed.)
1992: 6).
From the Classical period onwards, the planetary harmony was firmly established in
the Western imagination. No one claimed to hear it any longer, but it furnished ample
material to poets. A different strain derived, as did Plato himself, from the tradition
of Pythagoras (sixth cent. BC). While his biographer Porphyry stated that Pythagoras
could hear the music of the spheres, he was writing in hagiographic mode centuries
after the master’s death. More certain is that Pythagoras either discovered empiric-
ally, or transmitted from the Babylonians, the connection of music with mathematics,
and demonstrated it using the monochord. The remarkable fact is that the intervals
which the ear perceives as harmonious correspond with simple, superparticular ratios
of string-lengths: the octave as 1:2, the fifth as 2:3, the fourth as 3:4, the major third as
4:5, the minor third as 5:6, the whole-tone as 8:9 or 9:10, and the semitone as 15:16.
With this discovery, harmony was recognized as a quantifiable science, leading to its
inclusion in the Quadrivium, the mathematical part of the Seven Liberal Arts –again
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— Jo s c e ly n G o d w i n —
anticipated by Plato when he recommended for his Republic the study of Arithmetic,
Geometry, Stereometry (solid geometry), Harmony, and Astronomy. One of the obvious
challenges was to apply this principle to the other Pythagorean topos, that of the har-
mony of the spheres. Various theories of how tones or intervals correspond to each
planet were already circulating in the ancient world. The music treatises of Ptolemy
(fl. 127–148) and especially Boethius (ca. 480–524/5) ensured their transmission to
the Western and Muslim Middle Ages, and such theories continued to be proposed,
adapting to developments in astronomy, right up to the twentieth century.
The attempt to comprehend the planetary motions in harmonic terms involves
all of the quadrivial arts, as Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was to demonstrate. He
first tried to explain the rationale for the arrangement of planetary orbits through
Stereometry, inserting the Platonic solids between the orbits, then later found an
answer in Harmony, incidentally discovering that those orbits are not circular but
elliptical. To Kepler, this densely mathematical investigation was “gnostic,” in the
sense that it gave humans insight into the mind of God. Thoroughly progressive in his
outlook, he addressed his contemporaries:
Follow me, you musicians of today, and judge the matter by your arts, unknown
to antiquity. In these last centuries, after two thousand years in the womb, ever-
prodigal nature has finally produced you to give the first true image of the uni-
verse. Through your counterpoints of many voices and through your ears she
has suggested what exists in her innermost bosom to the human intellect, most
beloved child of God the Creator.
(Godwin 1989: 244)
Gnosis here is not mysticism, but knowledge of things as they truly are. Kepler held
that the invention of polyphonic music, unknown to the ancients, has allowed us to
take a step further into God’s mind.
The same idea permeates the subdiscipline of “speculative music,” which uses
music and cosmology as keys to understanding each other. The most recent, poly-
mathic synthesis was that of Hans Kayser (1891–1964). His expositions of what he
called Harmonik identify the presence of the harmonic series and its unheard coun-
terpart, the subharmonic series, in the morphology of plants, the history of architec-
ture, Behmenist theology, and many other disciplines. For Kayser, the harmonic series
was not only the basis for the manifested world, in conformity with Pythagorean
doctrine, but included the key to the unmanifested Absolute: Brahma, the Tao, the
deus absconditus of Gnosticism, Boehme’s Ungrund, etc. (Kayser 2005: 185). Kayser
gives no practical instruction, but implies that to replace the modern, materialistic
worldview with that of universal harmony, still empirically based, is an essential
prelude to higher knowledge.
Another modern polymath, Rudolf Steiner (1861– 1925), gave a more occult
explanation, based on the Theosophical system of higher worlds. He writes about
how great artists, in sleep, experience the Astral world and its colors, and are able to
bring something of those colors back to earth in their paintings. He continues:
The musician, on the other hand, conjures up a still higher world. In the physical
world he conjures up the Devachanic world. Indeed, the melodies and harmonies
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— Music and gnosis —
that speak to us from the works of our great masters are faithful copies of the
Devachanic world … Man’s original home is in Devachan, and the echoes from
this homeland, this spiritual world, resound in him in the harmonies and mel-
odies of the physical world.
(Godwin 1987: 82)
For all the differences in language, this resembles the Hermetic ascent through the
levels of being, first those of the planets (the Astral world), then the higher spheres
where the gods (devas, in Hinduism) reside. Steiner values music as a foretaste of
what everyone can expect to experience during the period between incarnations,
or exceptionally (as in his own case) through perceiving higher worlds while still
embodied. He invented the discipline or art of eurhythmy (not to be confused with
Dalcroze’s eurhythmics) in order to cultivate this ability, through coordinating bodily
movements with sounds, both verbal and musical.
Another use of tone to help one enter higher states of consciousness employs the
aspirant’s own voice. Various methods emerged towards the end of the twentieth
century, some with a traditional basis, such as Tibetan overtone singing, Gregorian
chant, and Kabbalistic prayers expressed as vowels (Godwin 1991: 83–6). Others
were invented within the New Age movement, simple enough that they could be used
without any prior musical training or knowledge; we would include here pseudo-
shamanic practices and elementary forms of drumming, imitating African music.
Obviously there is a wide philosophical gap between methods of this kind and
those that respect the work of a composer or improviser who has mastered a complex
tradition. In the latter case, details matter, and the more subtle they are, the richer
the musical substance offered for contemplation, but there another gap appears.
Alain Daniélou (1907–1994), who became adept in Hindu music, writes of the great
deficiency of Western music due to its adoption of equal temperament (Daniélou
1995: 131–4). Jean Thamar, another traditionally minded musical philosopher and
follower of René Guénon, condemns Western post-Medieval music altogether for sac-
rificing the rich possibilities of seven or more modes and of untempered intervals –
in short, sacrificing melody for the sake of harmony (Godwin 1995: 216). On the
other side we find another Traditionalist, Marco Pallis (1895–1989, traveler to Tibet,
translator of Guénon), devoting himself to the playing of viola da gamba consorts.
He writes: “Like every genuine art, music provides an image of the Universe, at the
level of ‘the Lesser Mysteries’; when practiced with this truth in mind, it will serve as
a support of contemplation and the joy it incidentally evokes will be seen as a reflec-
tion of the Divine Bliss” (Pallis 1980: 125). Pallis was also a passionate admirer of
Richard Wagner’s operas. How different he was from another musical Buddhist, John
Cage (1912–1992)! In Cage’s aesthetic, which has had a tremendous influence on all
the arts, any sound, any noise, or even (and particularly) silence, is equally acceptable
as “music.”
In the end, the choice of methods for musical gnosis depends on one’s goal.
Music, uniquely among the arts, can serve both the positive approach, which
desires realization of higher states of being, knowledge of metaphysical realities,
the cosmological vision, etc., and the negative, in which the ego is extinguished in
the ineffable, or replaced by the “natural state” in which nirvana is co-present with
samsara.
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REFERENCES
Copenhaver, Brian P. (ed.). 1992. Hermetica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daniélou, Alain. 1995. Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of Tuning and Interval on
Consciousness. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.
Godwin, Joscelyn. 1986. Music, Mysticism and Magic: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge.
——— 1987. Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: The Spiritual Dimension of Music from
Antiquity to the Avant-Garde. London: Thames & Hudson.
——— (ed.) 1989. Cosmic Music: Musical Keys to the Interpretation of Reality. Rochester,
——— 1991. The Mystery of the Seven Vowels in Theory and Practice. Grand Rapids, MI:
Phanes.
——— 1995. Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 1750–1950. Rochester,
NY: University of Rochester Press.
Kayser, Hans. 2005. Textbook of Harmonics. n.p.: Sacred Science Institute. www.sacredscience.
com/archive/Kayser.htm.
Pallis, Marco. 1980. A Buddhist Spectrum. London: Allen & Unwin.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1989. Towards a Cosmic Music. Longmead: Element.
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CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
AESTHETICS AND VISUAL ART 1
Jay Johnston
T he term “gnostic aesthetics” does not designate any cohesive research field or spe-
cific theory of aesthetic value or engagement. Rather it has been employed to des-
ignate approaches that diverge from dominant aesthetic categories and frameworks of
experience or those understood to employ dualist frameworks. Similarly, no such cat-
egory of “gnostic” visual art exists either: that moniker has been used to characterize
artwork that either takes momentum or inspiration from discourses and traditions
identified as “gnostic” and/or which consciously positions itself in a subversive or
critical position in relation to dominant culture, materiality or “this world.” In the
latter case, the use of “gnostic” or “gnosis” often operates as a synonym for deviant,
secret, esoteric or hidden. The usage of the terminology in both cases is idiosyncratic.
This brief discussion will present examples of such usage and interpretation.
AESTHETIC DI M E NS IO NS
There is a general corollary between aesthetic experience and art-making and religious
or spiritual insight in popular Western consciousness: this conceptual intertwining is
often designated as theoaesthetics (e.g., Taylor 1992). I have discussed this relation
and its Romantic precursors previously (2008: 122–6) and it is sufficient to note here
that a simplistic link between creative practice and spiritual knowledge (“gnosis” in
this context!) is to be avoided. While it is true that some artists characterize their art-
istic practice as processes of religious revelation and/or spiritual seeking, no generic
relation of reciprocal causality exists. That is, there is nothing inherently spiritual
about creative practice.
That generalization aside, as I have previously discussed (2012), esoteric beliefs
have played a significant role in modernist visual arts practice. Although it was not
previously art historical fashion to acknowledge this heritage, the last decade or so
has seen a boom in research, exhibitions, and publications on the esoteric heritage
of modernism. Considerations of gnosticism can be viewed as a strain among this
broader field of production and inquiry (examples further discussed below).
In terms of aesthetic theory, a gnostic “affinity” has been gleaned in the work
of Theodor W. Adorno (1903– 1969) (Hohendahl 2013: 73). For example Peter
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Hohendahl discerns within Adorno’s volume Aesthetic Theory evidence of Gnostic

“thought patterns” that result in a “radically negative position toward empirical
history and its contemporary outcome.” (2013: 74). Other aesthetic theories have
evoked Gnosticism in relation to concepts of nihilism, for example Jacob Taubes’s
From Cult to Culture: Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason, presents
the second half of the volume under the section: “World Alienation: Gnosticism
and Its Consequences.” Taubes was particularly concerned with its relation to sur-
realism. As Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann and Wold-Daniel Hartwich note in their
Introduction to the volume:
For Taubes, Gnosticism is the form in which the virulence of religion’s revolu-
tionary potential remains undiminished both after and as a result of the end of its
confessional and institutional manifestations. Thus he might decode the traces of
religiosity in the modern world that is not only repressed and ever returning but
above all unacknowledged and displaced.
(2010: xxiii)
Taubes considered that the modern art movement of Surrealism and ancient
Gnosticism are related via nihilism. In particular, as clarified by Willem Styfhals,
Taubes “equates Surrealism’s nihilistic component with Gnosticism’s acosmism”
(2015: 283). As Styfhals goes on to recount, this nihilism is actually a “positive and
creative force” in that it engenders revolutionary action and creative “momentum.”
Indeed, in the specific context of Surrealist aesthetics: “negation and provocation are
aesthetical effects in their own right” (2015: 284).
These approaches celebrate a sensation- denying (Adorno) or world- denying
(Taubes) aesthetic orientation. The next section focuses more specifically on discus-
sion of gnostic influence on visual art production. The concern is less with accounts
of “gnostic” aesthetics and more with gnosis/gnosticism providing a framework or
influencing specific artistic practice.
VISUAL ART
Whether ancient gnostics made “pictures,” or not, is already a vibrant topic of debate
(e.g., Finney 1980–1981) and the re-use of ancient sigils and glyphs by contemporary
ritual practitioners has attracted my own interest (Johnston 2018 forthcoming).
However, “gnostic” in the context of visual arts practice is more usually deployed to
signal the selected artist’s/artwork’s distinction from recognizable or validated artistic
trends. For example see this comparison with Dada made by Hugo Ball:
There is a gnostic sect whose initiates were so stunned by the image of the
childhood of Jesus that they lay down in a cradle and let themselves be suckled by
women and swaddled. The dadaists [sic] are similar babes-in-arms of a new age.
(1974: 66)
A strategic image of grown men breastfeeding is designed to shock social mores and
render the Dada project similarly subversive. Much more recently, Matthew J. Dillon
proposed gnosticism as a shared category of imagination through which individuals
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can recoup and re-interpret Christian history (2016). Among his selected case studies
is the art practice of Laurence Caruana, described by Dillon as “one of the most pro-
ductive contemporary gnostics” (2016: 288). As such, Caruana has had an extensive
relationship with gnostic sources that manifests itself in publications and paintings.
Dillon’s analysis examines a series of paintings developed for a “planned gnostic
chapel in the southwest of France” (2016: 288). Clearly, there is evident knowledge of
ancient sources directly influencing the art production. In Dillon’s reading, Gnosticism
enables Caruana to respond to the “symbolic loss” of Christian culture in the modern
West and attendant personal identity loss via gnostic traditions. In particular, Carauna
considers symbolic representations as enabling access to gnosis: “Humans can come
to reconnect with the divine source of all through forms of symbolic thinking”
(2016: 291). Creative production in this framework assumes a salvific function.
There are, of course, many interpretations of visual art practice where the evidence
of direct engagement with ancient sources is scant, or non-existent, and in which
“gnostic” signals an interpretative framework for aspects of an artwork’s content
(not form or process) which is subversive, world-denying, anti-materiality/embodi-
ment and/or gestures towards knowledge as salvation. Such references are scattered
throughout all sorts of art historical critique and this final discussion presents a few
selected accounts as examples.
Well-known cultural critic Greil Marcus published –in the equally renowned maga-
zine Artforum International –“Bruce Conner: The Gnostic Strain” (1992: 74–9). In
this article-interview Marcus elaborated on the broader esoteric themes he discerned
in a series of works produced by Conner. As part of the enquiry, Marcus takes up
an investigation into Conner’s personal experience with esoteric groups: Conner’s
responses are suitably elusive and multifaceted. Although the first image (paper
collage) analyzed by Marcus, “Fear of Liberty” (1990), is a dystopian landscape of
eruption, destruction, and fear –with an all-seeing, disturbing eye positioned cen-
trally in the erupting geyser and making the viewer self-conscious of their own act of
looking –there is nothing in this scene of chaos and destruction that links to specific
ancient gnostic beliefs or cosmologies. Gnostic in this case is elusive and renders a
general affect of loss and misfortune (with cosmic accountability).
Donald Kuspit considers the abstract art of Helmut Federle as an inherently gnostic
enterprise. In a paragraph that exemplifies the very best of artspeak, he writes:
Federle’s paintings are an unusually direct visual realization of Gnosticism, saved

from intellectualism and glibness by mannerist disequilibrium and precarious
emotionality, that is, by disequilibrium intensified to the point of no return to
equilibrium, so that the emotionality correlate with it seems ‘mad’ uncontrollable.
(2000: 238)
What Kuspit is describing is the relation between forms on the canvas, a tension that
Kuspit detects between the “geometric” and the “gestural”: “they show gnostic uncer-
tainty about the outcome of the struggle between the forces of light and darkness.”
(2000: 238) Leaving aside the intricacies of this argument in the longue durée of
abstract painting, Kuspit is using Gnosticism both as an interpretive framework for
Federle’s art and as a form of validation. The canvas’s revelation of these themes is
key to its importance: “Federle utilizes a late Minimalist aesthetic, allowing him to
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articulate gnostic dualism … It also allows him the doubleness of conveying gnostic
conflict as both an existential and cosmological matter” (2000: 238). For Kuspit these
paintings, their very composition, act out gnostic conflicts –he sees them in the rela-
tion between line, color, and shape –and that is why they are to be valued.
One final example of the gnostic as interpretive framework will be given, to signal
the space between the more direct esoteric lineage exemplified by Marcus’s analysis
and the highly conjectural relations proposed by Kuspit. Liz Brooks presents the art
of Brian Catling as:
harnessing a gnostic way of knowing through untrammelled intuition to pene-

trate the unmediated experiential knowledge bound up in substance and artefacts.
(1992: 12)
Brooks’s emphasis is on presenting gnosticism as a mode of knowledge and an inter-

pretive approach to materiality. Further, she reads the angelic figures that populate
Catling’s poetry and performances as “Gnostical angels” [sic], figures based on the
descriptions of angels found in gnostic texts (although she is not specific about which
texts). Their gnostic features are identified as their very materiality: these are “earth
angels” and as such essentially corrupted. Ultimately, Brooks’s analysis seeks to
emphasize the transformative power of knowledge, its capacity to change perception,
to affect both the viewed and the viewer. Her analysis eschews gnosticism as mode
of knowing and way of conceptualizing the material and transcendent potential of
humans; yet there is no specific relation built with ancient sources.
CONCLUSION: GNO S TIC TRACE S

In conclusion, Gnostic/gnosticism/gnosis has been an attractive paradigm through
which to interpret modern and contemporary aesthetics and visual art. It enables the
recapitulation of several aesthetic themes from Romanticism including positioning
artwork as expressing direct relation with the divine /divine knowledge as well as
ascribing to art a redemptive and salvific role. In addition it figures the dystopic,
material degradation that all too unfortunately forms the experience of contemporary
life. In a world that teems ceaselessly with images the ability to designate some as
ontologically, intimately intertwined with human desperation and aspiration remains
enduringly appealing.
NOTE
1 This chapter has been produced with the research assistance of Giselle Bader: I
am extremely grateful for her diligence and effort
REFERENCES
Ball, Hugo. 1974. Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brooks, Liz. 1992. “Of Knowing and Haunting the World: The Gnostic Art of Brian Catling.”
Performance 65–66: 10–17.
696
697
— Aesthetics and visual art —
Dillon, Matthew J. 2016. “Symbolic Loss, Memory, and Modernization in the Reception of
Gnosticism.” Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 1: 276–309.
Finney, Paul C. 1980– 1981. “Did Gnostics Make Pictures?” Bentley Layton (ed.). The
Rediscovery of Gnosticism: Proceedings of the International Conference on Gnosticism at
Yale, New Haven, Connecticut, March 28–31, 1978. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill: 434–54.
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. 2013. The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Revisited.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Johnston, Jay. 2008. Angels of Desire: Esoteric Bodies, Aesthetics and Ethics. London: Equinox.
———2012. “Theosophical Bodies: Colour, Shape and Emotion from Modern Aesthetics to
Healing Therapies.” Carole Cusack and Alex Norman (eds.). Handbook of New Religions
and Cultural Production. Leiden: Brill: 153–70.
Johnston, Jay. 2018 (forthcoming). “Binding Images: The Legacy and Efficacy of Late Antique
Ritual Sigils, Spirit Beings and Design Elements.” Dylan Burns and Almut-Barbar Renger
(eds.). New Antiquities: Transformations ofAncient Religion in the New Age and Beyond.
Sheffield: Equinox.
Kuspit, Donald. 2000. Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries. New York: Allworth Press.
Marcus, Greil. 1992. “Bruce Conner: The Gnostic Strain.” Artforum International 31 (4): 74–9.
Styfhals, Willem. 2015. “The Gnostic ‘Sur’ in Surrealism: On Transcendence and Modern Art.”
Stéphane Symons (ed.). The Marriage of Aesthetics and Ethics. Leiden: Brill. 276–95.
Taubes, Jacob. 2010. From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason.
Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (eds.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Taylor, Mark C. 1992. Disfiguring: Art, Architecture and Religion. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press.
697
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I NDE X
Note: Page numbers in bold refer to tables and in italics to figures.
Abatur, Hibil Ziwa 192, 193, 195 168, 181–4, 205, 213, 221, 233, 254, 274–6,
Abd al-Jabbār 313 278, 326, 373, 374, 377–8, 399, 436, 483, 608
Abd ar-Rahman Jami 596 Agathodemon 200
Abdul Ghaffār 352, 355 Aggadah 375, 376, 377
Abel 130, 148, 196, 277, 385 Agrippa Castor 156
Abellio, Raymond 415, 416, 640 Agrippa, Cornelius, 369, 437
Abraham 47, 51, 93, 196, 261, 313, 342, Aguéli, Ivan (Abd al-Hadi) 530, 531, 534
356, 592 Ahriman 27, 51, 52, 184, 253–6, 274, 376
Abrasax 142, 218, 219 Ahura Mazda 45, 48, 253–6
Abu’l-Khaṭtạ̄ b 316 al-Ahsā’ī, Shaykh Ahmad ibn Zayn al-Dīn 580
Achamoth 164, 182, 210, 275 al-Farabi, Abu Nasr  346
Act of Peter 135 al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad 339
Acts of John 135 al-Hakim bi-Amri Allah 349, 356
Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles 135 al-Hamidi, Ibrahim  346
Acts of the Apostles 226, 383, 385 al-Kirmani, Hamid al-Din 338, 346
Acts of Thomas 104, 106, 135, 136, 273, 317, al-Muqtāna Baha’uddin 350, 352, 354
362, 573 al-Murshid, Abu ‘Isa  379
Adam 45, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 80, 81, 83, 84, 95, al-Muʾayyad fiʾl-Din al-Shirazi  338
97, 98, 119, 120, 121, 134, 138, 140, 142–4, al-Nadīm, Ibn, Fihrist 27, 226–9, 243, 310, 314,
149–50, 187–8, 195, 196, 221, 227, 237–8, 310, 315, 402
313–4, 323, 325, 342, 360, 363–5, 375, 376–9, al-Nahāwandī, Benjamin 375
385, 439, 441, 448, 450, 615, 653, 681; and Eve al-Nasafi, Muhammad b. Ahmad 344
13, 45, 52, 85, 97, 120, 143, 144, 151, 183, 237, al-Razi, Muhammad (Rhazes) 402, 403
313, 363, 364, 365, 376, 460, 471 al-Shahrastānī, Muhammad, 27
Adam Kadmon 50, 442 al-Sijistani, Abu Yaʿqub 338, 344–6
Adam Kasia 47, 188, 195, 196 Albigensians 389, 393, 394, 483, 484
Adam Pagria 47, 195 alchemy 18, 33, 397–405, 409, 416, 418, 421,
Adam, Paul 479, 480, 481 438, 439, 467, 475, 477, 549–51, 627
Adamantius 272, 273, 274 Alexandria 9, 37, 69, 82–83, 86, 87, 130, 156,
Adamas 144, 154 159, 208, 230, 259, 275, 278, 399, 400, 401
Adawīyya 358, 362 Alfassa, Mirra 603, 608
Addā, Mar 229, 230, 247 Ali, ‘Alī 51, 53, 316, 317, 339, 341, 346, 583
Adorno, Theodor W. 693, 694 Allogenes 13, 105, 111, 137, 138, 143, 145,
aeon(s), aiōn(es) 26, 30, 32, 41, 47, 53, 80, 82–83, 151–5, 180, 181, 184–5, 208, 209, 210, 214
86, 103, 122, 142, 150–1, 153–4, 157, 163–4, Allogenes 135, 138, 143, 148, 153
698
69
— I n d e x —
Allogenes the Stranger 148 Arnal, William 113–14

Allogenes, Temptation of 184 Arnald of Villanova 403
Alpert, Richard 655–6 Arnold, Gottfried 28, 410, 411, 412
Altizer, Thomas 469 Arnold, Thomas 596, 597, 599
Amelius 152, 153, 208, 276 Ascension of Isaiah 137, 139, 277
America 56, 337, 449, 493, 553–8 asceticism 11, 103, 113, 232, 235, 239, 264, 292,
Ammo, Mar 229 336, 622
Ammonius Saccas 208 Asclepius 33, 138, 202, 271, 401, 404
Amuli, Sayyid Haidar 588, 589 Ashmole, Elias 403
Analytical Psychology 32, 33, 417, 433 Askew Codex 10, 16, 19, 135, 137
Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis 485 Assmann, Aleida 694
Anderson, James 448 Assmann, Jan 694
angel(s) 27, 80, 81, 85, 138, 150–1, 157, 165–7, astrology 18, 32, 33, 36, 110, 128, 274, 275, 346,
172, 183, 197, 210, 220, 232, 241, 244, 274, 402, 409–10, 415, 419, 427, 442, 510
278, 309, 313, 317, 343–4, 360–2, 365–6, Athanasius of Alexandria 261–2, 265
372–9, 384–6, 390–1, 393, 470, 472, 540, 642, ātman 285–8, 289, 491, 626
696; see also Peacock Angel Attar, Fariduddin 330–1, 333–4, 336
Angra Mainyu 45, 48, 253 Atum 19, 109
Angus, Samuel 31 Audians 15, 111, 279, 313, 314, 316
Anthroposophy 31, 54, 510–11, 513, 550 Augustine 226, 232, 240, 241, 279, 389, 537
Antony, St 261, 262 Aurobindo, Sri 55, 603–8
Apelles 126 Austria 499–507
Apocalypse of Abraham 139 Authoritative Teaching 139
Apocalypse of Adam 14, 47, 66–68, 83, 105, Autogenes 142, 144, 149, 152–4
139–40, 143–4, 149, 151–2 Avens, Robert 417
Apocalypse of Enoch 151 Avesta 253, 257
Apocalypse of John the Divine 385 Axionicus 162
Apocalypse of Paul 137 Āz, Demoness of Greed 239, 248
Apocalypse of Peter 158, 159 Azazel, ‘Azāzi’īl 80, 317, 360, 370, 376
Apocalypse of the Strangers 313 Aztec 437, 611
Apocalypse of Zephaniah 139
apocalyptic writings 14–16, 22, 45, 48, 80, 83, 85, Baader, Franz von 411–2, 419
95, 103–4, 134, 137–8, 151, 154, 183, 227–8, Baal/Bel  451
235–6, 308, 310–11, 317, 404, 421, 439, 442, Babism/Bābism, Bābī, Bāb 53, 579–86
460, 488, 539, 570, 646, 674 Babylonia 105, 309, 310
Apocryphon of James 136, 137 Bach, Johann Sebastian 440
Apocryphon of John 11, 13, 14, 21, 69, 73, 80, 91, Bacon, Francis 439, 440
105–9, 111, 120, 122, 125–6, 135, 138–9, 141–3, Bacon, Roger 403
145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 158, 182, 314, 315, Bahir, Sefer Bahir 370–1, 373–4, 376
317, 365, 461, 673; see also Secret Book of John Bahonar, Muhammad Javad 592
Apollos 86 Baigent, Michael 673
Apuleius, Metamorphoses 136, 642 Bailey, Alice 31
Aquinas, Thomas 399, 403, 546 Bailey, Foster 638
ar-Rāzī, Abū Hātim 52 Bailly, Edmund 477–8
Arabia 28, 56, 229, 310, 311, 312, 555, 568, 600 Baktaman 613
Arberry, Arthur 528 Baktiotha 221
archon(s) 120, 130, 143, 149–52, 154, 158, 182, Balkan 382, 383, 387, 527
274, 365, 375, 398, 472, 608, 672, 682, 683 Ball, Hugo 694
Archontics 105, 111, 142, 147, 277 Balzli, Johannes 500–6
Arianism, Aryanism 272, 278, 502, 503 Bangladesh 595, 596, 597, 600, 601
Ario-gnosis 499, 500, 502, 505cal baptism 69, 86, 97, 98, 109, 140, 142, 150, 153,
Ariosophy 499, 500, 503, 504, 505, 507, 508 159, 167, 191, 197, 211, 225, 310, 391, 427;
Aristotle 128, 131, 210, 399, 427, 428, 429, 430, of Jesus 67, 97, 156, 157, 166–7, 386, 492;
437, 438 spiritual 98, 387, 390; in water 86, 187–8, 191,
Armanism 499, 501, 503, 505, 506 276, 277, 386, 397
Armenia 229, 231, 277, 279, 362, 516, 568 baptists 13, 15, 66, 69, 188, 226–8, 310, 314
699
70
— I n d e x —
Barbelo 47, 105, 140, 142, 144, 149–50, 152–4, Blunt, Henry 29
183–4, 219, 221, 276 Bock, Darrell 668
Barbelo-Gnostic(s) 12, 109, 125, 129, 182, body 11, 15, 26, 94, 97, 98, 102, 110, 121, 141,
275, 344 150, 152, 158, 166–8, 172–3, 188–9, 191, 195,
Barbeloism, Barbeloites 142, 144–5, 147 204, 205, 206, 213, 227, 231, 232, 240–4, 247,
Barber, Malcolm 36 273–5, 278–9, 285–6, 291, 297, 308, 313, 315,
Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules 479 317, 324–6, 354, 361–2, 390, 398, 404, 450,
Bardesanes, Bardaiṣan 29, 32, 35, 49, 273–4, 314 466, 470, 491, 510–5, 520, 522, 523, 540,
Barlaam 429, 430 550–1, 574, 591, 598, 611–2, 628, 629, 648,
Baronius, Caesar 28 659, 674, 685–6, 689; of Adam 150, 196, 378,
Barrès, Maurice 479–80 385; of Buddha 290–1; of Christ 64, 93, 94,
Barth, Fredrik 613 127, 130, 166–7, 171, 183, 383, 385, 386;
Basil of Poiana Mărului 431 crucified 159, 164, 166; of Eve 120, 196; of
Basil the Bogomil 384, 387 light 248, 250, 316; of Mani 227, 231; of
Basil the Great/Cappadocian 262–3, 265 Mary 127; psychic 166; spiritual 166, 273; as
Basilideans 101, 105, 129, 156–60 a trap, prison 44, 80, 94, 134, 191, 239, 248;
Basilides 12, 81, 87, 109, 112, 125, 128–30, 139, universal 197
156–60, 158, 159, 220, 317, 361, 398, 417 Boethius 690
Basilius Valentinus 404 Bogomilism, Bogomils 15, 16, 19, 32, 53, 106,
Baudelaire, Charles 475, 479, 642 110, 382–89, 390–1, 393–4
Bauman, Zygmut 640 Böhme/Boehme, Jacob 29, 53, 410–2, 419, 439–
Baur, Ferdinand Christian 9, 10, 17, 29, 30, 40, 469–70, 473, 690
412, 421 Bois, Jules 478, 485
Bayān b. Sam‘ān 316 Boisset, Yves-Fred  416
Bayle, Pierre 28 Boissin, Firmin /Simon Brugal 483
Bayley, Harold 55 Book of Baruch 375
Beausobre, Isaac de 28 Book of Genesis 49, 69, 83, 91, 98, 138, 141,
Bech, Jacob 388 148–9, 151–2, 202, 271, 364, 376–9, 385, 386,
Beethoven, Ludwig van 482, 688 441, 460, 464, 468, 633
Belial 84, 85, 675 Book of Giants 49, 230
Benz, Ernst 33 Book of Job 464
Berdyaev, Nicholas 432 Book of John the Baptizer 30, 189
Bergson, Henri 656 Book of Jubilees 95, 151
Berlin Codex 19, 102, 124, 135, 137, 142 Book of Mormon 56
Besant, Annie 451, 478, 487, 492–4 Book of Mysteries 49, 230
Best, Elsdon 611 Book of the Strangers 313
Bhagavad Gītā 285, 603 Book of Thomas the Contender 137, 139
Bianchi, Ugo 10, 34 Book of Thoth 219
Bible 11, 27, 46, 47, 49, 50, 70, 136, 159, 197, Book of Watchers 469
202, 313, 377, 440, 447, 468, 558, 560, 598, Book of Zoroaster 111, 257
641, 663–7 Book(s) of Enoch 139, 464, 469
Biblical antiheroes 184; apocrypha 201; creator Books of Jeu 110, 135, 137, 218
God 152; demiurgical(ism) 11, 12, 63, 64–65, Borborians, Borborites 130, 278
71–72, 141 Borella, Jean 417
Biès, Jean 417, 419 Bosnia 382, 383, 387, 388
Biller, Peter 392, 394 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne  441
Bjorndahl, Sterling 174 Bousset, Wilhelm 10, 51, 173, 254
Blake, William 454, 460–1, 464–73, 642, Boyce, Mary 254
652, 655 Boyle, Robert 404
Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 10, 19, 29, 30, Brahe, Tycho 404, 439
53, 54, 55, 413, 450–1, 478, 484, 487–97, brahma, brahman 285, 539, 604–5, 607
501–2, 511, 530, 534, 607, 638, 671 Brahmanism 528
Blochet, Edgard 30 Brakke, David 65, 68, 73, 103, 105, 111–4
Blood, Benjamin Paul 655 Breton, André 482
Bloom, Harold 419, 461, 468, 652 Bricaud, Jean (Joanny) 413, 480, 485
Blumenberg, Hans 457 Britten, Emma Hardinge 654
700
701
— I n d e x —
Broad, C. D. 656 Catling, Brian 696

Brooks, Liz 696 Celsus 12, 101, 130, 143
Brown, Dan 642, 664, 667–8, 672–3 Central Asia 225, 230, 233, 235, 307, 316,
Brown, Peter 119 338–40, 344, 517
Brown, Robert 470 Cerdo 127
Bruce Codex 10, 19, 105, 135, 137, 142, 142–3, Cerinthus 104, 105, 398, 607
145, 147–8, 152, 220, 374, 469 Chaboseau, Augustin 481, 485
Bruce, James 135, 469 Chaldaean Oracles 28, 30, 154, 271, 278, 438
Brucker, Jakob 18, 442 Charnock, Thomas 403
Brunei 595, 599, 600, 601 Chaucer, Geoffrey 403
Bruno, Giordano 29, 53, 404, 436–8 Chauvel de Chauvignie, Marie 484
Büchli, Jörg 202–3 Chif[f]let, Jean-Jacques  48
Buddeus, Franz 28 China 27, 106, 225, 233, 235, 246, 294,
Buddha 49, 103, 225, 229, 235, 246, 249, 279, 568–9, 596
284, 290–1, 295–7, 301, 450, 494, 518, 675 Chittick, William 590
Buddha-nature 249, 250, 251, 291, 297, 298 Christ 26, 27, 29, 44–5, 47, 49, 54, 66, 68, 85, 86,
Buddhahood 290, 294, 295, 297, 298, 302 97, 103, 127, 144, 152, 172, 197, 202, 261–2,
Buddhism, Buddhists 30, 32, 34, 54, 103, 245–7, 264, 266, 268, 275, 278, 279, 365, 386, 391,
249, 251, 283, 284, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290–2, 427, 430, 432, 438, 442, 448–50, 465, 469,
294–302, 418–9, 476, 481, 510, 528, 530, 494, 518, 541, 611, 614, 621, 624, 626, 675;
549, 568, 595–6, 601, 604, 623, 627, 632–3, and baptism 97, 150, 386; body of 93, 94;
663, 674 the bridegroom 97; cosmic 90, 622; crucified
Bulgakov, Sergius 432–3 158, 159, 278; flesh of 126–7; guise of 140; as
Bulgaria 382–4, 392–3, 431 intellect of the Father 157; intimate 627, 629; as
Bultmann, Rudolf 34, 64, 66 Logos 260; and Pleroma 164, 181; psychic 166;
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 671, 672 resurrected, risen 47, 90, 93–4, 98, 130; and
Buonaiuti, Ernesto 33 Satan 383, 387, 389–90; as savior 83, 90, 91,
Burckhardt, Titus 537 107, 279; and Seth 221; see also Jesus
Burns, Dylan 65, 68, 69, 72, 73, 222, 326 Christian 11, 12, 14, 15, 66; countercult
Bussell, Frederick W. 32 movement 663; Freemasonry 484; Gnosis,
Butler, Judith 649 Gnosticism 82, 181, 260, 262, 264, 268, 272,
Byron, George Gordon 460, 461, 462 277, 283, 416, 417; heresies, heretics 9, 13,
Byzantium, Byzantine Empire 278–9, 308, 382–4, 20, 156; Hermetic tradition 37; Hermeticism
393, 426–8 415, 420; Kabbalah/Kabbalism 37, 53,
369, 409, 440, 450, 469; Sethianism 155;
Cage, John 691 theosophy 29, 409–13, 417, 419, 469, 484, 532;
Cagliostro, Alessendro 449 see also Gnosticism, Jewish
Cahana, Jonathan 649 Christianity 14, 30, 34, 49, 71, 74, 90, 91, 107,
Cain 147, 148, 184, 277, 385, 461, 462 113–4, 120, 152, 159, 181, 206, 259, 260,
Cainites 105, 130, 145, 147, 184 264, 271, 273, 275, 276, 277, 283, 308, 341,
Cairo 337, 349 343, 358, 383, 387, 402, 409, 412, 415, 416,
Calinic of Cernica 431 427, 429, 440, 442, 449, 502, 510, 527, 533,
Calixte Mélinge /Abbé Alta 478, 480–1 549, 565–75, 604, 615, 632, 639, 647, 650,
Calvé, Emma 478, 485 656, 663, 665, 668–9, 671–2, 674; ancient,
Canonical Prayer Book 189 early 11, 73, 74, 108, 114, 148, 177, 328,
Cardinal Mazzella 483 410, 570, 575; Catholic 569; Episcopalian
cargo cult 614, 615 676; esoteric 478, 565, 571; orthodox 382;
Carpocrates of Egypt 101, 104, 106, 130, 366 proto-orthodox 181; Syrian 106, 379; see also
Carpocratians 105, 106, 125, 129 Gnosticism, Jewish
Caruana, Laurence 695 Christians 13, 20, 46, 49, 72, 73, 81, 85, 86, 87,
Castaneda, Carlos 657 90, 95, 96, 98, 100–1, 112, 125, 129, 130, 134,
Catharism, Cathars 15–16, 19, 32, 36, 55, 106, 157, 168, 231, 245, 254, 261, 271, 277, 311,
110, 374, 382, 387–94, 414, 483, 484–5, 673 330, 383, 388, 438, 479, 503, 508, 558, 667,
Catholicism, Catholics 10, 101, 382, 387, 410, 668, 669; aberrant 129; Gnostic, Gnosticizing
415, 438, 439, 441, 446, 478–83, 506, 567, 569, 28, 272; posing as 125
614, 664, 671 Chrysippus 125
701
702
— I n d e x —
Chwolson, Daniel 29 672, 675, 679–86; Bogomil 384–5; Cathar 389,

Cicero 136, 138, 689 390; Hermetic 203; Jewish 86, 91, 103, 204;
Clement of Alexandria 101, 128, 129–30, Mandaean 192, 361; in Marcion 104, 126, 127;
135, 145, 156, 157, 159–60, 162, 166–7, Ismaili 343, 345; Muslim 598; Sethian/classic
259–68, 409 Gnostic 105, 108, 111, 120, 138, 140, 142, 150,
Clément, Olivier 433 151, 152; Valentinian 165, 168; Yezidi 359–60;
Cloclet da Silva, Ana Rosa 624, 629 Zoroastrian 253, 255, 256
Colberg, Daniel 410, 440 Crowley, Aleister 414, 485, 622–3, 632, 654
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 454, 457, 459 Crusaders 339, 445, 529
Cologne Mani Codex 227, 228 Curran, Stuart 468
Colossians 17, 93–4, 131 Cusanus, Nicholas 437, 439
Compendium of the Teachings of Mani, the Cutsinger, James 542
Buddha of Light 246
Concept of Our Great Power 139 d’Olivet, Fabre 476
Concerning the Birth of his Body 227–8 d’Orléans, Étienne 483
Conner, Bruce 695 Dada 694
Constantine Chrysomallus 387 Daly, Mary 646, 647
Constantine Silvanus of Mananalis 279 Damascius 255
Constantinople 262, 278, 384, 394, 426, 568 Daniel, Daniel 488, 492
Conybeare, Frederick 29 Daniélou, Alain 691
Conze, Edward 34, 246 Daniélou, Jean 81
Coomaraswamy, Ananda 36, 537, 543, 544 Daniil the Hesychast 431
Cooper, John 37 Dārābī, Sayyid Yahyā 579
Corbin, Henri 33, 51, 417, 532–3, 535, 588 Darbre, Florence 180
Corinthians, First and Second 94, 98, 131 darkness 15, 94, 119, 120, 122, 174, 175, 188,
Cornelius Agrippa 369, 404, 437 191, 193, 204, 243–4, 246, 257, 264, 268, 272,
Corpus Hermeticum 83, 135, 201–6, 219, 398, 313, 352, 365, 378, 575, 681, 684; fall into 93,
400, 410, 414, 421, 436 120; forces of 192, 237, 247, 249, 279; king/
cosmogony 65, 84, 91, 95, 138, 139, 255, 343, lord of 195, 236, 360, 363, 675; queen of 49,
354, 375, 377, 382, 450, 455, 555, 588, 589, 192, 195; realm/world(s) of 14, 91, 92, 120,
590; Basilidian 157–8; Druze 354; Mandaean 121, 173, 192–5, 197, 236, 239, 243, 248, 325,
189, 195; Sethian 152; Shi‘i 360; Yezidi 365; 365; separation/liberation from 236, 237–8,
see also creation 240, 242, 243; sons of 85; see also light and
cosmology 173, 309, 439, 470; of alchemy 405; darkness
Aurobindo’s 607–8; Druze 350–57; Egyptian Dastin, John 403
203; Gurdjieff’s 519–20, 522–3; Hermetic 271; Davies, Owen 639
Ismaili 342–7; List’s 501–2; Mandaean 190; Davithe, Daveithe, Daveithai 105, 142, 149, 220
Manichaean 236–7, 274; Scientological 632–5; Dawson, Andrew 627, 629
Shi‘i 321–7; Steiner’s 511 Daysanism, Dayṣāniyya 314, 328
Coyle, Kevin 118 de Lapasse, Louis Charles Édouard 483
creation 15, 45, 48, 49, 50, 53, 65, 66, 72, 81, 82, de Nerval, Gérard 529
83, 152, 202, 205, 255, 256, 275, 316, 317, de Pasqually, Martinez 53, 450, 451, 484
333, 364–5, 385, 393, 394, 432, 436, 439–40, de Pouvourville, Georges-Albert Puyuo 478, 479
450, 460–1, 471, 582, 598, 607–8, 611, 633–4; de Staël, Madame Germaine 468
of Adam 120; archon of 154; Basilidian 128, Dead Sea Scrolls 10, 84, 85, 180, 565
158; in Catharism 390, 395; evil, 382, 108; of Debussy, Claude 477, 478, 485
humans 15, 45, 165, 195, 206, 237, 322, 324, DeConick, April 18, 19, 20, 67, 104, 109,
395; in Ismailism 343, 345; in Jewish tradition 110, 172
374–5, 377; in Mandaeism 189, 192–5; in Dee, John 404, 438, 642
Manichaeism 232, 237, 238; in Marcionism DeKorne, Jim 659
273; in Mazdakism 257; Shi‘i 324–6; in Demiurge 13, 15, 26, 44–45, 46, 81, 120, 130,
Valentinianism 165, 273; of the world 66, 72, 153, 173, 210, 272, 274, 374–5, 379, 398,
130, 141, 158, 164, 189, 193, 322, 324, 374; in 470, 471, 472, 510, 598, 607–8, 674, 675–6,
Yezidism 359–60; see also cosmogony 685–7; Basilidian 157; Bogomil 385; Cathar
creator 141, 313, 330, 365, 376–7, 398, 399, 390; Hermetic 106, 206, 400; Mandaean 195;
460–1, 465, 467, 470–1, 539, 606, 608, 611, Marcion’s 127, 128; Paulician 279; Plato’s 141,
702
703
— I n d e x —
151, 152, 153; Valentinian 125, 126, 165–8; Edessa 229, 272–3, 279
Yezidi 359 Église Gnostique 414, 485
Democritus 400, 436 Egypt 9, 10, 20, 28–29, 32, 33, 45, 51, 53, 64, 66,
Denkard 27, 256 83–84, 101–2, 122, 135, 147, 159, 177, 180,
Des Essarts, Fabre /Synesius 484, 485 201–2, 208, 219, 221–2, 225, 230, 232, 235,
Desjardins, Michel 70, 74 259, 278, 337–8, 349, 397–402, 436–7, 448–51,
Devil(s) 48, 49, 51, 91, 168, 183, 243, 255, 273, 468, 506, 517, 565, 569, 625, 671
274, 277–8, 384, 390, 392, 436, 467–8, 470, Egyptian Book of the Dead 399
555, 556, 560, 561, 675 Egyptian Gospel 140, 143, 148, 151, 152;
Diadochus of Photiki 266 see also Gospel of the Egyptians and Holy Book
Dialogue of the Savior 137, 649 of the Great Invisible Spirit
Dialogue with Trypho 162 Eichhorn, Johan Gottfried 412
Dick, Philip 641, 672, 675–6 Eisler, Robert 33
Dickens, Charles 671 Elchasai, Alchasaios 12, 227
Didymus 265 Elchasaites 49, 66, 235, 310
Dillon, Matthew J. 694–5 Eleleth 105, 137, 138, 142, 149, 220
Dionysius the Areopagite 266, 278, 430 Elenchos, Refutation of all Heresies 128,
Dioscoros of Aphrodito 222 156, 158–9
Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth 137–8 Eleusinian mysteries 29, 613, 642
Ditko, Steve 641 Eleusis 126, 658
DiTommaso, Lorenzo 641 Eliade, Mircea 33, 416, 532
Diwan Abatur 189, 193, 194–5 Elijah Muhammad 553–61
Doctrina Addai 273 emanation(s) 26, 27, 31, 32, 44–5, 47, 103, 128,
Doinel, Jules-Benoît 413–4, 418, 478, 480, 483, 189, 191–3, 203, 209–10, 212, 236–74, 315,
484, 485 330, 334, 335, 360, 362, 371, 377–8, 359, 403,
Dorn, Gerard 405 450, 472, 487, 528, 555, 588–9, 607–8, 610
Dositheos 81, 200 Emerald Tablet 398, 401, 402, 404–5
Douglas, Frederick 554–5 Empedocles 128, 436
Doyle, Conan 641 Encausse, Gérard /Papus 413, 475, 478–81,
Dragovitsa 383 484–5, 639
Drecoll, Volker 66–7 Enneads 205, 208, 211, 466
Drijvers, Han 35, 317 Enoch 45, 50, 52–4, 80, 84–5, 87, 137, 184, 196,
Drower, Lady Ethel 35, 190 376, 441, 449, 488–9, 492
Druzism, Druze 29, 32, 36, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, Ephesians 17, 92, 93, 94, 127, 131
349–57, 379, 528, 529, 554, 555 Ephraem Syrus of Nisibis 226, 238, 273
dualism 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 19, 21, 27, 31, 34, 36, Epictetus the Stoic 125
80, 85, 91, 105, 108, 110–1, 118, 141, 168, 172, Epicurus 136, 436
235, 236, 243, 253, 279, 324–5, 344, 371, 376, Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion 27, 105, 111,
382–4, 387–90, 393–4, 398, 410, 418, 461, 520, 121, 127, 129–31, 135–6, 142–5, 147, 159,
601, 608, 611, 648–9, 652, 653–4, 672, 679, 162–3, 184, 310, 314, 330, 366, 436, 468
686, 696 Epistle of Jude 184
Dunhuang 246, 247 Epistles (of Mani) 229, 230
Dunning, Benjamin H. 648 Eranos Jahrbuch, meetings 19, 32–3, 532
Durkin-Meisterernst, Desmond  226 Eruigena, John Scottus 279
Durrell, Lawrence 674–6 Ernst, Carl 528, 534, 597
Dussaud, René 29 eschatology 20, 48, 56, 65, 85, 93, 98, 144, 173,
197, 312, 342, 343, 356, 488, 492, 494–7, 581
Eaton, Richard 597 esotericism 9, 18, 21, 36, 37, 340, 347, 409–22,
Ebion 126 477–8, 484, 500, 505, 510–1, 527, 530, 531, 539,
Ebionites 310 545, 554, 587, 606, 607, 623, 629, 632, 638–40,
Ecclesia Gnostica 21, 418 643, 644, 646; see also knowledge: esoteric
Eckart, Dietrich 507 Essenism, Essenes 29, 53, 82, 83, 84, 85
Eckhardt, Meister 416, 538, 540, 545 Ethiopia 450, 469, 517, 568, 569
Eco, Umberto 642, 672–3 Eudemus of Rhodes 255
Edda 501, 502 Eugnostos the Blessed 69, 136, 138, 143, 144
Eden 56, 84, 120, 237, 378, 450, 460, 659 Euphrates 187, 191, 195, 196, 197, 277
703
704
— I n d e x —
Euthymius Zigabenus 384, 390 Gabler, Johann Philipp 18, 412

Evagrius Ponticus 264–5, 266, 267 Gabriel 48, 80, 142, 188, 189, 488
Evdokimov, Paul 433 Gabryab, Mar 229
Eve 56, 97, 119, 120, 121, 130, 140, 148, 149, Gaiman, Neil 641
150, 196, 277, 313–14, 363, 385; see also Adam Galbreath, Robert 675
and Eve Galtier, Gérard 483, 485
Excerpts from/of Theodotus 129, 157 Gamaliel 140, 142
Exegesis of the Soul 47, 136 Gärtner, Bertil 171
Exegetica (of Basilides) 156 Garvey, John 675
Exodus 263, 506 Gaster, Moshe 79
Ezekiel, Ezekiel 47, 79, 84, 94, 376, 378 Geertz, Clifford 600
Eznik of Kolb 27, 255, 256 Genesis 45, 49, 69, 83, 84, 91, 98, 138, 141, 148,
149, 151, 152, 202, 271, 376, 377, 385, 386,
Faivre, Antoine 37, 38, 638 460, 464, 468, 633
Fard, Wali Muhammad 553–5, 556–9 Germany 9–10, 374, 379, 432, 468, 499, 501, 502,
Farrakhan, Louis Muhammad 553, 556–61 503, 505, 506, 507, 508, 550
Father 128, 142, 144, 149, 157, 163, 164, 165, Gheorge of Cernica 431, 434
168, 174, 221, 227, 255, 274, 276, 278, 279, Ghulat, ghulāt 15, 36, 315, 316, 317, 321, 322,
362, 365, 384, 385, 386, 387, 390, 391, 393, 323, 324, 325, 326, 360, 379, 554
439, 451, 689; of Greatness 236, 250, 274, 317; Gibbon, Edward 43, 469
of Truth 80, 163, 229 Gilchrist, Alexander 468
Fātị ma, Fatimah 317, 598 Gilhus, Ingvild 671
Faucheux, Albert /(François) Charles Barlet 480, Ginsberg, Allen 652, 659
481, 484 Ginza Rba 47, 121, 189
Faye, Eugène de 30 Ginza Rba, Great Treasure 189, 191, 195
Feder, Gottfried 507 Giordano Bruno 29, 53, 404, 436, 437, 438,
Federle, Helmut 695 439, 442
Fehri, Sayyid Ahmad 593 Glaucias 156
Festugière, André-Jean 32, 204 gnosis 17, 18, 19, 28, 29, 31, 36, 38, 51, 53–56,
Ficino, Marsilio 28, 410, 420, 437, 438 64, 67, 80, 83, 85, 86, 105, 107–11, 120, 124,
Filastrius of Brescia 135, 142, 147 125, 133, 151, 168, 182–4, 188, 191, 193, 197,
Filoramo, Giovanni 469 200, 205, 206, 227–31, 244, 248, 257, 259–85,
Fiore, Gioacchino di 53 287, 290, 291, 295, 297, 298, 302, 307–8, 328,
First Apocalypse of James 118, 135, 137, 180, 329, 334–8, 340, 344, 347, 350, 351, 354, 355,
182, 374 364, 365, 379, 398, 405, 409–22, 427, 428, 429,
First Thought 80, 140, 142, 150 438, 439, 440, 447, 451, 457–8, 461, 477, 479,
Fitzgerald, James 289 483, 487, 491–2, 497, 499, 500, 518, 527–46,
Flamel, Nicolas 403, 640 571, 580, 581, 587, 590, 603–14, 621, 622, 626,
Florensky, Pavel 432 638, 643, 646, 647, 648, 650, 652–9, 671, 674,
Florovsky, Georges 432, 433 675, 684, 688–90, 693, 695; ancient 499, 500;
Fludd, Robert 404, 439 divine, holy 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265,
Fount of Knowledge 267, 268, 269 266, 372, 427, 429–34, 504, 606; and episteme
Fourth Book of Ezra 139 400; esoteric 56; “falsely so-called” 17, 100,
France 388, 389, 391, 393, 394, 446, 529 103, 124; feminine 649; higher, highest, supreme
Franckenberg, Abraham von 28, 411 262, 263, 267, 426, 428; and jñāna 30, 246,
Franzmann, Majella 118 283, 291, 605, 608; magnetic 420; modern 652;
Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua 623 musical 688, 691; mystical 432; philosophical
Fraternitas Saturni 414 422, 430; vs. pistis 17, 26; primeval 487;
Freemasonry, Freemasons 29, 36, 55, 405, 414, psychedelic 655–9; self- 33; secret, esoteric
445–50, 469, 481, 484, 501, 528, 529, 531, 615, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 502; spiritual 265;
623, 642, 644, 673 theological 260, 262, 263, 427; true 260, 317,
Freud, Sigmund 32, 55 334, 411, 417, 422, 492; universal 412, 413;
Friedlaender, Israel 315 Ur- 500, 501; see also knowledge
Friedländer, Moritz 29, 79, 81 Gnosis 9–10, 17, 18–21, 28, 29, 30, 31, 35, 37, 45,
Fugairon, Louis-Sophrone 484, 485 65, 108, 109, 114, 201, 235, 500, 501
704
705
— I n d e x —
Gnosticism 9–21, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 37, 38, Gospel of Judas 33, 105, 110, 130, 135, 137, 143,
48, 63–7, 70, 74, 79–87, 90, 100–14, 118, 144, 145, 147, 148, 159, 180, 183–4, 185, 272
126–7, 133, 147, 148, 165, 185, 191, 201, Gospel of Luke 127, 170, 181, 384, 385, 492,
204, 210, 217, 219, 235–6, 253, 283, 284–5, 493, 665
307, 309, 310, 326, 328, 329, 344, 347, 359, Gospel of Mary 90, 96, 98, 119, 121, 135, 137,
362, 365–79, 397–422, 454–73, 499–500, 510, 568, 574, 649, 673
520, 528, 529, 530, 538, 549–51, 554, 596, Gospel of Matthew 170, 385, 492
604, 608, 612, 632, 636, 638, 644–57, 663–76, Gospel of Philip 90, 97, 119, 121, 135, 166, 172,
679, 684, 686, 690, 693–6; “academic” 420; 568, 569, 574, 649, 667
ancient 35, 102, 106, 108, 109, 118, 410, 466, Gospel of the Egyptians 47, 68, 139, 140, 143,
468, 469, 471, 473, 549, 615, 650, 651, 679; 144, 145, 214, 366; see also Egyptian Gospel
Christian 17, 30, 201, 283; Christianizing 283; and Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit
“classic(al)” 13, 14, 15, 31, 33, 46, 48, 50, 69, Gospel of Thomas 21, 72, 90, 95, 96, 119, 122,
72, 80, 105, 106, 109, 111, 133, 143, 206, 135, 170–7, 366, 417, 568, 569, 572, 574, 649
283, 288, 309, 343, 611, 612; classic Christian Gospel of Truth 33, 37, 90, 135, 164, 166,
27, 32; classical Mediterranean 598; historical 221, 417
603, 604; Islamic 378, 533; Late Antique 603; Graham, James 529, 530, 534
modern 468, 473, 601, 659, 672; non-Christian Grant, Robert 31
66, 68; “post-gnostic” 420; pre-Christian 30, Gray, David 284
63, 64, 66–74, 201; primal 504; Romantic 462; Gregory of Nyssa 262, 263, 264, 265, 267
“Sethian” 69, 105, 106, 133, 142, 143, 147, Gregory of Sinai 431
148, 151, 326; Shi‘i 347; Sufi 530, 531, 595; Gregory the Theologian 262, 263, 265, 427
Syro-Mesopotamian 379; Ur- 505; Valentinian Grof, Stanislav 657
461, 462, 675 Groothuis, Douglas 663, 665–7, 668
Gnostic Church 418, 424, 483–5 Guaita, Stanislas de 476, 478, 479, 480, 481,
gnōstikoi 9, 10, 11, 12, 18, 26, 29, 65, 100–1, 106, 484, 485
111, 112, 124, 129, 130, 133, 271 Guénon, René 31, 55, 414, 416, 417, 480, 530,
gnōstikos 12, 100, 101, 112, 133, 397 531, 532, 534, 537, 542, 543, 691
God 79, 83, 140, 148–9, 157, 158, 200, 204, 205, Guidi, Michelangelo 315
206, 231, 233, 241, 262–4, 267, 269, 273–4, Gurdjieff, George Ivanovich 54, 418, 516–24, 624,
278–9, 309, 313, 315, 316, 321, 323–6, 331–46, 625, 627
352–65, 369, 372–94, 414–5, 476, 529, 539,
560; creator 26, 86, 91, 103–4, 108, 111, 120, Hadith, hadith 323, 331, 332, 333, 336, 360
140, 142, 149, 151–2, 192, 460, 611; false 151; Haenchen, Ernst 173
Hermetic 203; hidden 26, 80, 130, 189, 191, Hahn, August 29
359, 255, 610, 611, 672, 676; high 80, 109, Hall, Tom 499
152, 610; image of 152, 203, 356, 476; of the Hamann, Brigitte 507–8
Jews 44, 72, 203, 277; knowledge of 18, 108, Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von 29, 529
157, 200, 260, 262, 329, 333, 338, 372, 528, Hamza ibn Ali Ben Ahmad al-Zouzani 51,
540, 605, 652; providence of 157, 159, 262; 349, 350
son of 86, 152, 260, 261, 384, 390; supreme Hancock, Graham 658
103, 104, 108, 173, 359, 398; transcendent, Hanegraaff, Wouter 18, 19, 20, 21, 37, 38, 420,
transcendence of 65, 72, 109, 110, 263, 333, 629, 643, 654, 659
344, 350, 679; true 108, 128, 151, 182, 273, Harmozel 105, 142, 149, 220
276, 279, 465, 466, 611, 672, 676, 684; Harnack, Adolf von 10, 103, 104, 106, 309
union with 29, 52, 110, 154, 262, 400, 528; Harran Gawaita 85, 189, 196, 197
unknowable 154, 279, 330, 344 Hartlib, Samuel 440
Goethe, Wolfgang 436, 439, 468, 469, 510, 642 Hartmann, Franz 501, 505
good and evil 27, 32, 45, 128, 233, 236, 239, 244, Hartwich, Wold-Daniel  694
248, 255, 256, 257, 274, 279, 308, 344, 349, Hasan-i Sabbah 339, 347
352, 398, 399, 466, 467, 470, 471, 555, 652 Haskins, Susan 649
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas 507, 508 Haw(w)a Anana 121, 196
Gospel of Basilides 156 heaven(s) 14, 15, 45, 46, 48, 50, 53, 79, 81, 84, 86,
Gospel of John 34, 86, 91, 92, 93, 109, 202, 279, 92, 94, 98, 125, 130, 139, 158, 176, 189, 191,
385, 386, 393, 394 195–7, 213, 241, 274–7, 309, 310, 316, 326,
346, 362, 365, 370, 375, 377, 385–90, 439,
705
706
— I n d e x —
467, 469, 470, 471, 473, 492, 573, 580, 590, Holy Spirit 80, 144, 157, 158, 172, 182, 335, 384,
611; eighth 277; fall from 45, 238, 393, 450, 386, 430, 439, 483
611; layered 84, 616; lower 44, 84, 275, 277; Homer 47, 110, 125, 136
second 385; seventy-two 182; thirteen 47, 611; Horn, William Dennis 468, 469
thirteenth 184–5, 275; three 93, 98; twelve 610; Hosea 47, 94
two powers in 16, 370 Hubbard, Ron 56, 632–6
Hegel, Georg W. F. 9, 369, 411, 469, 510 Hudūd 51, 350, 352, 353, 354, 555
Hegemonius, Acta Archelai 156, 157, 159 Hughes, Langston 554, 555
Heidegger, Martin 10, 417, 418, 455, 672 Hunt, Dave 663
Heinsius, Daniel 440 Husserl, Edmund 416, 613
Hekhaloth literature 16, 370, 373, 376 Huxley, Aldous 537, 653–7, 659
Helen of Tyre 80, 82 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 478, 642
hell 49, 53, 243, 250, 324, 325, 467, 470, Hymn of the Pearl 104, 106, 135, 136, 274, 362,
471, 616 568, 569, 573
Hellenism 45, 66, 73, 82 Hymnscroll 247, 250
Helminski, Kabir 533, 534 Hypostasis of the Archons 105, 108, 136, 137,
Heracleon 125, 127, 162, 279 138, 140–1, 143, 145, 151–2, 314, 373
Heraclitus 128, 436 Hypsiphrone 137
Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes-Thoth 28, 50,
52, 102, 137, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206, 308, I Ching 415
400, 401, 402, 410, 413, 438, 441, 442, 448, Ialdabaoth see Yaldabaoth
450, 622 Iamblichus 28, 216
Hermetic: alchemy 357, 400; Brothers of Egypt 29; Iao 47, 143, 272
cosmology 271; enlightenment 404; Freemasonry Iblis 51, 317
449; Gnosis 87, 405, 606; movement 475, 485; Ibn Arabi 330, 334, 335, 336, 581, 588, 589, 590
Order of the Golden Dawn 477, 484, 485, 642; Ibn Habīb, Muhammad 311
religion, beliefs 18, 519; texts 18, 20, 28, 30, 33, Ibn Sa‘īd al-Andalusī 312
34, 35, 109, 135, 138, 200–6, 219, 271, 308, Ibn Umail, Muhammad 402
398, 438, 689; thought 185, 219, 404 Illuminism 50, 52, 442; Illuminati 36, 449, 644
Hermetica 28, 30, 32, 37, 83, 102, 104, 106, 110, India 27, 32, 49, 52, 54, 225, 230, 235, 274, 283,
134, 200, 201, 400, 420, 442; see also Corpus 286, 293, 338, 340, 346, 446, 450, 476, 501,
Hermeticum 568, 569, 595, 596, 597, 603, 606, 608
Hermeticism 106, 200, 308, 416, 510, 520 Indonesia 595, 597, 599, 600, 601
Hermetism 45; 200–6, 400, 410, 477, 519 insight 96, 118, 120, 133, 154, 246, 247, 249, 250,
Hermetists, Hermetics 46, 53, 134, 659, 203, 271, 257, 285, 289, 290, 328, 329, 331, 332, 353,
519, 607 355, 437, 447, 458–9, 497, 545, 610, 612, 652,
Herrmann, Arthur /Henri Selva 481 690, 693; see also gnosis and knowledge
Hess, Rudolf 507 International Gnostic Movement 418
Hibil Ziwa (Gabriel) 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, Interpretation of Knowledge 135, 139, 166
194, 195, 197 Introvigne, Massimo 629
Hillman, James 417 Invisible Spirit 140, 142, 150, 151, 153, 665
Hinduism, Hindus 283, 284, 286, 290, 291, 339, Iran 235, 254, 309, 312, 317, 338, 579, 587,
476, 487–9, 496, 510, 530, 550, 568, 596–601, 592, 593
623, 626, 627, 632, 633, 663, 688, 691 Iraq 309, 321, 340, 358, 568, 593
Hippolytus [pseudo-] of Rome, Refutation of All Irenaeus of Lyons, Against (the) Heresies 11, 12,
Heresies 12, 67, 100, 125, 128–9, 130, 135, 13, 17, 26, 47, 65, 69, 79, 80, 87, 100–06,
139, 142, 158, 162–4, 166, 171, 310, 313 111–3, 124–6, 128–31, 133, 135, 138, 142, 143,
Hishām ibn al-Kalbī 311, 312 144, 145, 147, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164,
History of Religions School 10, 31, 73 166, 167, 168, 180, 182, 210, 212, 278, 459,
Hitler, Adolf 507, 508, 674 468, 671
Hoeller, Stephan 418 Isaiah, Isaiah 47, 91, 93
Hofmann, Albert 658 Ishrāqī 52, 532
Hohendahl, Peter 693–694 Isidoros 129, 156, 157, 158, 159
Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit 105, 143, Isis 275, 277, 399, 451
148, 149, 150, 218; see also Egyptian Gospel Islam 15, 49, 50, 52, 256, 271, 279, 307–18, 327,
and Gospel of the Egyptians 328–36, 337–47, 355–61, 366, 378–9, 387, 402,
706
70
— I n d e x —
421, 527, 529–34, 553–62, 571, 580–1, 587, John the Revelator 488
588, 591, 593, 595–601, 663, 689 Jonas, Hans 10, 32, 33, 34, 104, 106, 279, 370,
Isma‘ilism, Isma‘ilis 32, 34, 35, 36, 56, 51, 313, 421, 455, 457, 672, 676
316, 337–47, 378, 379, 532, 533, 555 Jones, William 529
Ivanow, Wladimir 340 Jong, Albert de 254
Izutsu, Toshihiko 589 Jordan 48, 97, 106, 167, 188, 191, 192, 195, 197
Jounet, Albert, Alber Jhouney 478, 480, 484
Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber) 402, 403 Judaism 14, 16, 34, 45, 49, 73, 80, 81, 85, 87, 120,
Jackson, Howard 219 147, 151, 308, 341, 343, 373, 376, 412, 566,
Jacob al-Qirqasani  375 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 572; see also Jewish
Jacobus Golius 529 Judas 46, 137, 183–4
Jagose, Annamarie 649 Judas Thomas 139, 362
Jainism, Jains 32, 283, 286, 633 Jung Codex 33
James 72, 138, 182 Jung, Carl Gustav 18, 19, 32, 37, 55, 417, 418,
James, William 653, 655, 656 419, 549–51, 614, 652
Jeddism 644 Jungians 402, 405
Jenkins, Philip 529 Justin Martyr 14, 80, 81, 101, 124, 126, 162,
Jeremiah 47, 94 168, 259
Jerusalem 85, 90, 181, 182, 183, 197, 389, Justinian’s Code 279
449, 567 Justin the Gnostic 100, 104, 105, 375
Jesus 28, 35, 36, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53, 64, 72, 73,
74, 85, 86, 87, 90–98, 100, 103, 119, 121–2, Ka‘b al-Aḥbār 313
130, 137, 140, 149, 152, 156–9, 164, 167, 170, Kabbalah, Kabbalism 28, 29, 53, 79, 80, 204,
181–4, 196, 197, 225, 231, 275–6, 309, 310, 369–79, 402, 418, 421, 439, 440, 441, 442, 469,
342, 365, 383, 386, 413, 448, 465, 470, 471, 479, 506, 528, 531, 532, 603, 607, 626, 627
492, 494, 510, 518, 558, 565–70, 615, 649–50, Kahn, Joel 601
664–9, 669, 673, 694; Aeon 483; as Allogenes Kali Yuga 52, 56, 489
135, 143, 148; baptism of 97; Christ 66, 84, 94, Kalyptos 142, 153, 212
140, 225, 226, 229, 230, 235, 259, 465, 469, Kandinsky, Wassily 482
518, 665, 668; crucified 158, 164, 231; risen 13, Kant, Immanuel 468
90, 92, 96, 136, 138, 139, 181; as Savior 14, Kartir 225, 231, 253, 254
68, 86, 165; as Seth 140, 142, 184; the Splendor Kasser, Rodolphe 180
120; Thomas’s 171–7; see also Christ Kayser, Hans 690
Jewish: apocalypses 137; (Judeo-) Christian 47, Kelly, Edward 404
48, 49, 139, 177, 225, 228, 235, 309, 310, Kephalaia 35, 120, 121, 122, 123, 227, 229, 230,
311, 342, 343, 379, 344, 460, 539, 646, 674; 237, 247
Gnosticism/Gnostics 16, 30, 66, 81, 79, 87, 533; Kepler, Johannes 404, 439, 690
Kabbalah 33, 36, 50, 402, 415, 420, 438, 442, Khan, Inayat 530, 533, 534
506; mysticism 16, 45, 87, 369–79, 402, 432, Khan, Vilayat Inayat 533, 534
566, 571, 573, 642; origins of Gnosticism 16, Khayr, Abu Sa’id Abul 332
66, 79–87; texts 14, 16, 49, 72, 95, 137, 139, Khomeini, Ayatollah 587–93
141, 150, 151, 152, 171, 184, 201, 203, 317; Khunrath, Heinrich 404
see also Judaism Khusraw, Nasir-i  338
Jews 64, 66, 68, 69, 82, 87, 109, 134, 196, 201, King, Charles William 29, 528, 529, 530, 531,
203, 241, 360, 371, 448, 506, 556 532, 534
jñāna 30, 246, 250, 283, 284, 285, 287, 288, 289, King, Karen 11, 36, 64, 69, 70, 71, 73, 114, 118
291, 292, 293, 531, 538, 546, 605, 608 Kingsford, Anna 478, 484
Job 436, 464 Kircher, Athanasius 441
Jodorowsky, Alexandro 642 Kirmani, Karim Khan 580
Jogand-Pagès, Gabriel /Léo Taxil 484 Kitāb al-ashbāh wa l-azilla 325
Johannes Trimethius 404 Kitāb al-haft wa l-azilla 325
John 46, 72, 90, 92, 134, 138, 152, 313, 385, 386, Kitāb al-marātib wa l-daraj 324
450, 665 Kitāb al-sirāt 325
John Damascene 267–9, 310 Kitēbā ǰalwa 359, 361
John the Baptist 47, 85, 86, 187, 188, 189, 196, knowledge 21, 31, 36, 56, 79, 82, 83, 90, 100–2,
197, 276, 277, 391 107–11, 124, 129, 134, 150, 152, 164, 188,
707
708
— I n d e x —
191, 205, 244, 247, 250–1, 260–8, 279, 283–92, Laozi 246

295, 307–8, 323, 325, 328–36, 346–7, 356, 365, Lardner, Nathaniel 468
366, 371, 398, 340, 400, 405, 409, 412, 414, Larmandie, Léonce Comte de 481–2
415, 417, 420, 426–7, 430, 432, 433, 437–8, Latter-day Saints  55
440–2, 447–8, 457, 460, 461, 466, 476, 489, Laurant, Jean-Pierre  480
491, 499–500, 504, 521–2, 528, 531, 533–4, Lauterer, Ernst /Tarnhari 508
538–45, 571, 579–83, 598, 603, 605–7, 610, LaVey, Anton 643
613, 635, 638–44, 648, 650, 652, 658, 676, 684, Layard, John 33
688, 690, 691, 695, 696; body 290, 513, 514; Layton, Bentley 11, 12, 13, 35, 65, 110, 111, 112,
clairvoyant 511; divine 187, 260, 267, 329, 427, 113, 114, 143, 148, 177
429, 430, 431, 538, 581, 582, 605, 608, 647, Lazarelli, Ludovico 410
696; ecstatic 20; esoteric 18, 325, 340, 347, 351, Le Rouge, Gustave 641
352, 355, 581, 625, 638, 639, 640, 641, 642, Leadbeater, Charles Webster 451, 487, 492, 493
643, 644, 646, 673; “falsely so-called” 17–20, Leandro de Campos, Marcelo 624, 629
100; of the Father 163, 164; of God 18, 157, Leary, Timothy 653–6, 659
200, 260, 262, 329, 333, 338, 372, 528, 540, Lee, Stan 641
605, 652; heavenly 13; intellective 538; intuitive Lefroy, George 597
283, 285, 287, 290, 293, 329, 334, 335, 336; Leibniz, Gottfried 28, 442
metaphysical 329, 334, 335, 336, 354; mystical Leigh, Richard 673
17, 111, 350; otherworldly 13; perfect 21, Lejay, Julien (Jules) 480, 484
260, 264, 490; rational 655; religious 9, 349, Leloup, Yvon /Paul Sédir 480, 481, 484
359; revealed, revelatory 19, 133, 307–8, 533; Leonardo da Vinci 673
salvific, liberating 10, 12, 17, 18, 27, 86, 284, Letter of Peter to Philip 135–7, 180, 181, 182, 666
285, 338, 372–3, 409, 419, 659; scientific 517, Letter to Flora 131, 136, 168
518; secret, hidden 10, 13, 18, 144, 149, 188, Letter to the Hebrews 86
197, 328, 382, 409, 413, 450, 451, 487, 488, Lévi, Éliphas 412, 476, 477, 479
489, 499, 608, 613, 638, 640–3; self- 150, 154, Lewis, Harvey Spencer 485
200, 204, 333, 334, 522, 523, 635–6, 638, 652; Lidzbarski, Mark 30
special 12, 17, 105, 284, 329; spiritual 18, 26, Liebenfels, Lanz von 499, 500
100, 109, 267, 328, 330, 343, 346, 349, 510, Lieu, Samuel 36
693; suprarational 20, 416, 538; tree of 13, 17, Life of Moses 263
143, 151, 227, 460, 466, 471; universal 441, light 27, 50, 55, 92–96, 98, 109, 119, 120, 121,
442, 500; see also gnosis 158, 172–5, 177, 189, 191–4, 204, 206, 214,
Koester, Helmut 177 238–44, 246, 248–50, 257, 260, 265, 272, 275,
Koivunen, Hannele 648 276, 277, 286, 290, 317, 323, 334, 343, 345,
Komensky (Comenius); Jan 440 352, 354, 355, 356, 360, 362, 378, 399, 430,
Konai, Theodore bar 15, 27, 111, 310, 313, 439–40, 451–5, 459, 461, 477, 542, 574–5,
314, 315 606–7, 634; buddha(s) of Light 246, 250, 251;
Koran see Qur’an consumption of 232; cross of 232; and darkness
Koslowski, Peter 419 15, 27, 48, 85, 104, 109, 118, 119, 189, 191,
Kripal, Jeffrey 420, 650 195, 227, 236, 240, 242, 244, 246, 249, 255,
Krishnamurti, Jiddu 54, 487–8, 492, 493–7 257, 272, 274, 283, 308, 315, 344, 363, 365,
Kropp, Angelicus 217 399, 426, 652, 681, 684, 695; ejaculation of
Krumm-Heller, Arnoldo  623–4 120; elements 203, 232, 248; envoy(s) 247, 248;
Kubizek, August 508 father of 250, 255; king/lord of 191; garment
Kuhlmann, Quirinus 440 of 277, 362; maiden/virgin of 120, 242; nature/
Kuspit, Donald 695, 696 soul 247, 248, 250; realm/world(s) of 14, 20,
27, 86, 91, 97, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192,
La Rochefoucauld, Antoine de 481–2 195, 226, 236, 237, 239, 242, 243, 244, 247,
Lacroze, Émile Gary de 482 250–1, 309; salvation/liberation of 15, 91, 93,
Lacuria, Paul François Gaspard 477, 479 95, 120, 232, 237, 247; and shadow 51; sons of
Laffan, Michael 597 85; trapped 15, 91, 659; virgin of 120
Lahe, Jaan 85 Light Mind/Nous 240, 241, 242, 243, 247, 248, 249
Lalande, Emmanuel /Marc Haven 480–1 Lin Wushu 36
Lambdin, Thomas 177 Lincoln, Henry 673
Languedoc 392, 393 Lings, Martin 537, 544
708
709
— I n d e x —
List, Guido von 499–508 Marcionites 27, 103, 109, 129, 272–3, 279, 314
Llull, Ramon 403, 437 Marcus Magus 16, 79, 80, 125, 127, 162, 369
Logan, Alastair 69 Marcus, Greil 695
Logos 53, 84, 128, 140, 205, 260, 261, 262, 266, Maria the Jewess 401
268, 272, 374, 384, 539, 541 Mariategui, Maria de /Lady Caithness 478, 479, 484
Löhr, Winrich 129, 156 Marinus 273, 274
Lossky, Vladimir 433 Marjanen, Antti 64, 65
Lotus Sūtra 246, 301 Mark of Memphis 278
Lovecraft, H. P. 643 Mark the Ascetic 266
Lucretius 437 Markschies, Christoph 64, 79, 104, 108–9, 110
Lüdemann, Gerd 64, 67 Marsanes 105, 137, 138, 139, 143–4, 148,
Luke 126, 127, 665 151–5, 210
Luminaries 122, 138, 149, 154 Martha 96, 182, 275
Luria, Isaac 371, 378, 421 Martin, Ada 530
Lutheran(s) 112, 438, 439, 469 Martinism 450, 484, 485, 530, 531
Luttikhuizen, Gerard 69, 72, 73, 679 Marx, Karl 418
Lutzer, Erwin 668 Mary 35, 46, 127, 137, 158, 171, 275; of
Thomas 175–6
Macarius 266, 331 Mary Magdalene 35, 46, 96, 119, 121, 137, 175,
Mackey, Douglas 641 176, 649, 667, 673
MacRae, George 66, 68 Mash’af ē Řaš 359, 360, 363, 365
magic 16, 18, 21, 69, 84, 217, 218, 219, 110, 275, Massignon, Louis 33
276, 278, 404, 415, 427, 436, 438, 442, 477, Mataji, Shri Nirmala Devi 56
478, 481, 485, 612; sexual 414, 621, 622, 623, Mathers, Samuel 485
624, 627, 628, 629, 642 matter 27, 48, 126, 129, 165, 166, 168, 204, 210,
Mahābhārata 285, 288–9, 292 232, 278, 345, 353, 398–9, 405, 437, 450, 457,
Mahāyāna 246, 247, 287, 288, 290, 291, 292, 476, 477, 523, 540, 549, 551, 688; evil 17, 103,
297, 301 108, 273, 279, 398, 510; mixed with 158; and
Mahé, Jean-Pierre  215 spirit/soul/mind 108, 120, 127, 165, 168, 205,
Maier, Michael 404, 439 206, 236, 278, 308, 315, 398, 442, 488, 652,
Makarios of Corinth 431 672; spiritual 398; trapped in 91, 551, 652
Malaysia 595, 597, 599, 600, 601 Matter, Jacques 18, 29, 412
Malcolm X 554 Matthew 95, 137
Manara, Milo 642, 644 Mauchel, Lucien /Chamuel 478, 480, 481, 484
Mandaeans 14, 27, 29, 32, 47, 48, 49, 66, 85–6, Maximus the Confessor 53, 266–7, 268, 430
102, 104, 106, 107, 109–10, 118, 121, 183, Mazdaism 48, 274, 638
187–97, 276, 277, 310, 314, 361–5, 586 Mazdaists 29, 254, 256
Mandaeism 14, 15, 32, 48, 86, 188, 276, 308, 309, Mazdak 256, 257, 312, 314; Mazdakism 256,
317, 328, 361, 370, 371, 372, 378, 379 257, 317, 343
Mani 15, 32, 35, 48, 49, 105, 109, 114, 157, 225– Mazdakites 27, 257, 312
33, 235, 236, 237, 240, 244–7, 249–50, 255, McAmis, Robert 597
273, 274, 278–9, 309, 310, 362, 389, 445 McKechnie, Paul 71, 647
Manichaeans 15, 19, 27, 28, 32, 36, 48, 49, 66, McKenna, Terence 656, 658
107, 118, 121–23, 232, 237, 238, 239, 241, 250, Mead, George R. S. 10, 19, 30, 414, 530
254, 277, 278, 310, 311, 314, 389, 398 Mecca 311, 312, 355
Manichaeism 15, 27, 30, 33, 35, 36, 48, 50, 68, Medinet Madi 10, 247
104, 106, 109, 110, 114, 120–3, 159, 192, 193, Meher Baba 56
225, 229, 235–45, 246–51, 255, 257, 273, 274, Melanesia 614, 615
277, 279, 308–11, 316, 317, 328, 344, 358, 362, Melchizedek 86, 105, 139, 140, 143, 145, 148, 152
370–1, 374, 378, 379, 383, 387, 389, 391, 445, Menander 104, 105, 109, 112
450, 467, 533 Menasce, Jean de 33
Mansūr-al-Ḥallāj 596 Merkabah 370, 372, 373
Maori 610, 611 Merkabah/Merkavah mysticism 29, 79–80, 371, 573
Marcellina 100, 101, 106, 112, 113 Merkur, Dan 421
Marcion 12, 103, 104, 106, 109, 124, 126, 127, Mesmer, Franz 477
128, 131, 273, 308, 309, 316 Mesmerism, Mesmerists 29, 641
709
710
— I n d e x —
Mesopotamia 14, 15, 32, 84, 86, 225, 228, 231, 340, 341, 342, 346, 518, 554, 583, 588, 590,
233, 235, 254, 309, 310, 312, 314, 315, 316, 591, 598, 600
317, 326, 344, 358, 367, 402 Muhammad b. Ismaʿil 342, 343
Messina conference, definition 10, 11, 34, 35 Mukhammisa 316, 317
Metatron 50, 80, 375 Mulla Sadra 589, 590
metempsychosis 48, 240, 276, 326, 390; Müller, Max 29
see also transmigration Muntazari, Hossein Ali 591
Methodius of Olympus 272 Muslim(s) 27, 506, 527, 529, 530, 531, 595,
Metochites, Theodore 428–9 596–601
Metzner, Ralph 655, 656 Mutahhari, Murtada 593
Mexico 623, 624, 418 Myanmar 595, 601
Meyendorff, John 432, 433 Myésier, Thomas le 437
Meyer, Marvin 34, 177, 217, 220
Meyrink, Gustav 642 Naasene Hymn 135
Michael 85, 386 Naassenes 100, 104, 105, 110, 112, 113, 129, 130
Michelet, Victor-Émile 475, 477, 478, 480, Nabataeans 188
481, 482 Nag Hammadi 10, 33, 35, 104, 106, 124, 135,
Middle Platonism 49, 141, 210, 259 139, 147, 569, 652, 665; Codices 11, 12, 19,
Migne, Jacques Paul 29 34, 44, 45, 83, 84, 130, 135, 137, 143, 148,
Mignolia, Mike 641 170, 180, 182, 184, 200, 203, 206, 218, 671;
Milton, John 460, 461, 473 collection, corpus, library, texts 11, 13, 20, 21,
Miriai 85, 189 61, 72, 102, 105, 110, 111, 112, 136, 140, 144,
Mithraic mysteries 31, 254 158, 159, 166, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 219,
Mithraism 29, 33, 45, 55, 272, 277 222, 237, 272, 276, 308, 312, 313, 373, 398,
Mithras 68, 272 417, 468, 565, 568, 572, 647, 666, 684
Moderatus 152 Narcissus 457
Modiano, Raimonda 458 Naṣoraeans 47, 48, 188, 191, 196
moksa 287–9, 608, 628 Nasr, Sayyid Hossein 36, 532, 534, 535, 537, 543,
Monad 141, 168, 374, 442, 607 545, 587, 588
Monoimus 374, 607 Nation of Islam 56, 553–62
Montenegro, Marcia 663, 664, 665, 667, 668 National Socialism 17, 421
moon 52, 154, 205, 227, 228, 232, 233, 238, 243, Nature of the Rulers 148
362–3, 377, 378, 491, 513, 514 Nazarenes 29, 53
Moore, Alan 642 Nazism 499, 500, 506, 507, 508
Morard, Françoise 68 Neander, August 29, 30
Moravian thought 467 Nellas, Panogiotis 433
More, Henry 9, 28, 409, 442 Nelli, René 485
Moréas, Jean 475 Neo-Gnosticism 521–2, 484
Morisson, Grant 642 Neo-Hermeticism 409, 438
Morris, Joe 284 Neopatristic movement 432, 433, 434
Mortley, Raoul 118, 119 Neoplatonism 14, 26, 33, 49, 120, 153, 154, 185,
Moses 46, 47, 51, 72, 79, 82, 149, 196, 202, 203, 215, 216, 271, 279, 334, 338, 340, 344, 345,
261, 262, 263, 264, 342, 356, 385, 391, 413, 346, 371, 398, 400, 454, 455, 459, 465, 466,
436, 438, 448, 518, 592, 689 467, 469, 604, 607, 608
Mosheim, Johann Lorenz 468 Neopythagoreanism 29, 141, 168, 374
Mosse, George 507 Nesi, Gianluca 506, 507
Mother 31, 56, 82, 120, 122, 142, 144, 149, 150, Neugebauer-Wölk, Monika  412
153, 181, 239, 248, 274, 277, 451, 610; of all Neumann, Erich 33
80, 375; of creation 50; of Life 122, 274; of the New Age 55, 106, 110, 404, 416, 417, 418, 419,
Living 97, 144, 243; see also Barbelo 471, 612, 669, 676; movement 21, 417, 418,
Mouravieff, Boris 415 640, 641, 664, 665, 691
Mufaddal al-Ju‘fī 325 New Guinea Islands 613, 614
Mughīra b. Sa‘īd al-‘Ijlī 315, 316 New Testament 14, 17, 27, 31, 33, 46, 49, 64, 70,
Mughtasila 314 86, 113, 127, 136, 152, 184, 201, 202, 203,
Muḥammad 15, 51, 52, 53, 103, 307, 310, 312, 260, 275, 279, 383, 389, 411, 469, 495, 567,
316, 317, 321, 323, 326, 331, 332, 333, 339, 649, 666, 668
710
71
— I n d e x —
New Zealand 610, 611 Osmond, Humphry 652

Newton, Isaac 28, 404, 441, 442, 448, 449 Ostanes 204, 400
Nicholson, Reynold 528, 534 Otto, Walter 33
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain 431 Ouspensky, Peter Demianovich 517, 624
Nicodemus of Tismana 431 Ozouf, Mona 471
Nicolaitans 105
Nicolescu, Basarab 433 Pagels, Elaine 36, 118, 123, 665
Nicotheos 185 Pakistan 595, 601
Nietzsche, Friedrich 545, 605 Palamas, Gregory 428, 429, 430, 431, 433
nihilism 421, 672, 694 Palau 611
Niquinta 394 Palestine 84, 197, 310, 565, 566, 567, 575
nirvāna 54, 246, 251, 297, 490, 628, 691 Pallis, Marco 537, 691
Nizari 29, 51, 337, 338, 339, 340, 346, 347, 529 Pansophia 440
Noah 45, 47, 51, 53, 84, 85, 130, 196, 342, 350, pantheism 235, 335, 414, 419, 440, 454, 597
386, 441, 447, 448, 449 Paracelcism 410, 411, 412
Nock, Arthur Darby 131 Paracelsus 404, 410, 411, 438
Nonnus Panopolis 279 Paraclete 49, 225, 227, 483
Norea 16, 130, 135, 137 paradise 17, 52, 83, 84, 144, 149, 150, 151, 221,
Norton, Thomas 403 260, 317, 324, 333, 339, 360, 376, 378, 379,
Nous, nous 154, 163, 191, 205, 206, 247, 278, 471, 596
345, 533 Paraphrase of Seth 67, 129, 313
Numenius 45, 125, 152, 153 Paraphrase of Shem 67, 68, 107, 129, 138, 139,
Nuṣayrīs 29, 15 203, 313, 314, 315
Nuttall, A. D. 468 Parchor 156
Nyberg, Henrik 254 Paris 475, 476, 477–8, 479, 480, 482, 483–5,
517, 530
occult sciences 29, 308, 427, 580, 581, 671 Parousia 46
occultism 30, 409, 412–4, 481, 490, 491, 499, Parrinder, Patrick 674
538, 639, 641, 642, 643, 644, 654, 660; French Patticius, Patig, Fatiq 226, 227, 228
revival of 475–85; of List 499, 500, 501, 502; Paul 17, 46, 47, 64, 67, 71, 100, 109, 110,
and meditation 490, 491, 492, 494, 496–7 126, 131, 136, 152, 197, 226, 262, 279, 469,
Odes of Solomon 275, 568, 569 567, 568
Odilon Redon 477 Paulicians 19, 29, 32, 36, 106, 110, 279, 382, 383,
Ogdoad 80, 84, 158, 165, 167, 205, 373 387, 391
Ohrmazd 27, 253, 255, 256, 274, 376 Peacock Angel, Malak Tawus 52, 53, 256, 358,
Olcott, Henry Steel 487 350, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365
Old Testament 26, 27, 46, 49, 80–82, 86, 127, Pearson, Birger 64, 66, 79, 81, 83, 104, 105, 106,
131, 201–3, 260, 279, 383, 389, 460, 567, 107, 108, 109, 110, 114
675, 683 Pegg, Mark 392, 393, 394
On the Adventitious Soul 156 Péladan, Adrien 483
On the Flesh of Christ 126, 127 Péladan, Joséphin 476, 478, 479–83, 485
On the Origin of the World 120, 121, 136, 139, Percival, Milton O. 468
140, 143, 144, 373, 648 Perennialism 55, 416, 417, 419, 537–46
Ophite 13, 69, 73, 143, 144, 145, 344 Perfect Discourse 138, 202
Ophites, Ophians 12, 47, 101, 105, 110, 130, 147, Perkins, Pheme 66, 139
364, 369 Perry, Seamus 458
Oracles of Zoroaster 20 Persia 31, 49, 85, 232, 254, 256, 338, 339, 340,
Ordre Rose\+Croix Kabbalistique 480, 481 376, 450, 528, 569
Oreus 143 Peter 46, 119, 136, 156, 159, 176, 181, 275
Origen 14, 29, 49, 53, 101, 130, 135, 143, 157, Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay 389, 390
161, 219, 261, 262, 268, 272, 275, 278, 409, Peter of Sicily, History of the Paulicians 27,
614; Origenists 261, 278 279, 382
Oroiael 105, 142, 149, 220 Pfau, Thomas 458
Orpheus 28, 437, 438, 441 Pherecydes of Syros 156
Orphism 33, 437, 455 Philip 181, 275
Osiris 399, 451 Philippines 595, 599, 600
711
712
— I n d e x —
Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus 49, 81–2, 141, Protestants 18, 100, 101, 410, 438, 439, 440, 441,
152, 262, 275, 369, 375, 413, 689 446, 448, 480, 506, 558, 569, 614, 664, 668
Photius 27 Protophanes 142, 153
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 36, 410, 438 Provence 370, 374
Pike, Albert 446, 450, 451, 531 Proverbs 157, 374
Pike, James 676 Psalm-Book 120, 121, 122, 237
Piraino, Francesco 532 Psalms 47
Pistis Sophia 30, 56, 135, 137, 138, 184, 219, 220, Psellos, Michael 29, 206, 427, 428, 429
274, 372, 378, 510, 649 Pseudo-Hippolytus  158
Plato 12, 20, 28, 33, 49, 50, 110, 125, 126, Pseudo-Plato  136
128, 134, 137, 139, 141, 151, 152, 153, 154, Pseudo-Tertullian 142, 143, 147
201, 202, 208, 210, 213, 214, 271, 272, 398, psychedelics 652, 653, 654, 655, 656, 657,
413, 427, 430, 441, 450, 465, 466, 603, 658, 659
604, 607, 608, 689, 690; Phaedo 139, 152, Ptahil 14, 47, 192, 194, 195, 196
211; Phaedrus 139, 152, 211; Republic 33, Ptolemy, Ptolemaeus 125, 127, 130, 136, 139, 141,
134, 139, 210, 398, 689–90; Symposium 162, 163, 168, 690
153, 209–10 Puech, Henri-Charles  33
Platonic 28, 49, 50, 52, 53, 69, 72, 84, 109, 168, Pulver, Max 33
209, 260, 265, 273, 334, 398, 438, 462, 469, Pythagoras 28, 128, 131, 413, 436, 438, 441,
613, 657, 690 449–50, 518, 689
Platonism 32, 44, 45, 66, 106, 152, 159, 202, 278, Pythagoreanism 351, 455, 539, 638, 690
277, 427, 433, 454, 455, 465, 539, 607, 689;
Cambridge 9, 28, 409, 440 Qarara Codex 35, 180
Platonists 19, 46, 105, 108, 126, 141, 412, 437, Quakers 440
440, 442, 607 Quietists 440
Pleroma, plērōma 26, 51, 79, 82, 163, 164, 165, Quinney, Laura 457, 469, 470
166, 167, 168, 181, 190, 192, 204, 274, 343, Quispel, Gilles 18, 32, 33, 37, 79, 81, 372, 419
346, 373, 374, 607, 660 Qumran 10, 84, 85, 86
Plethon, Gemistos 29 Qur’ān, Quran, Koran 50, 309, 310, 312, 316,
Plotinus 20, 26, 45, 53, 111, 133, 141–2, 152, 153, 317, 322, 331–3, 335, 340–44, 347, 541, 558,
208–16, 271, 398, 427, 437, 466, 655 560, 579, 583–5, 588, 590, 592, 598, 599
Plutarch 138, 689 Qurrat al-‘Ayn, Fatima Baraghani 579, 581
pneuma 110, 272, 454, 461, 539
Poimandres 201, 203 Ra, Re 202, 400, 451
Poimandres 28, 83, 202, 203, 204, 271 Rabbinic literature 79, 370, 373, 374, 375
Poirier, Paul-Hubert  214 Radich, Michael 290
Poisson, Albert 481 Rahner, Hugo 33
Polti, Georges 481 Raine, Kathleen 468
Polycarp 126 Ramsay, Andrew 529
Pontus 127 Ramsay, William 654
Popul Vuh 54 Ramus, Petrus 440
Porphyry of Tyre 11–13, 20, 26, 65, 111, 133, 153, Raper, Julius 674
208, 271–2, 689; Vita Plotini 208 Raschke, Carl 659
Pratt, Hugo 641 Rashtī, Sayyid Kāzim 580
Prayer of Thanksgiving 135, 206 Rasimus, Tuomas 69, 73, 143, 144, 145, 148
Prayer of the Apostle Paul 135 Ray, Jean 641
Preisendanz, Karl 217 rebirth 49, 240, 285, 288, 297, 298, 324, 325,
Preston, William 449 326, 399; rounds of 285, 288; spiritual 206, 342
Prideaux, Humphrey 28 Redfield, James 642
Priestley, Joseph 468 reincarnation 15, 45, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 154, 157,
Primal/Primordial/First Man 31, 45, 48, 122, 195, 211, 240, 323–6, 355, 361, 362, 438, 495, 497,
197, 236, 243, 247, 255, 274, 582 501, 511, 555, 633
Priscillian 277, 278 Reitzenstein, Richard 31
Proclus Lycaeus 28, 125, 213, 278, 279, 427, 438 Reuchlin, Johannes 438, 442
Prodicus 101 Reuss, Theodor 414
Prometheus 461, 462, 471 Revelation of Adam 148
712
713
— I n d e x —
Revelation to John 13, 489, 492, 496 Salome 35, 171, 174, 175, 176, 182
Rhodes, Ron 667, 668 Samael 48, 142, 149, 150
Richet, Charles 478 Samaria 80, 81
Riffard, Pierre 638, 639 Samaritans 80, 81, 82, 277
Rig Veda 603, 607, 656 Sāmkhyā 287, 289
Rijckenborgh, Jan van (Jan Leene) 415 Saṃsāra 288, 289, 297, 691
Rittelmeyer, Friedrich 55 Sarapion of Thmuis 265
Rivers Scroll, Diwan Nahrawatha 48, 189, 190, Satan 27, 48, 52, 184, 274, 278, 360, 376, 378,
191, 197 382–7, 390, 391, 414, 460, 461, 467, 557, 643
Roberge, Michel 67 Satanael 384, 385, 386
Roberts, Jane 418 Satanism 479, 481, 642, 643
Robinson, Henry Crabb 454, 464–8, 473 Satie, Erik 477, 482
Robinson, James 34, 67 Saturninus 87, 104, 105, 111–2, 143
Roca, Paul 478, 479 Schelling, Friedrich 411, 510
Rochas, Albert de 481 Schenke, Hans-Martin 13, 69, 79, 105, 111, 142,
Roché, Déodat 483, 485 143, 144, 147, 148, 149
Roche, Julian 394 Schiller, Friedrich 468
Romania 416, 431, 433 Schlegel, Gustav 29, 640
Romanticism 420, 454–62, 696 Schmidt-Falk, Elsa  507
Rome 87, 100, 106, 112, 126, 162, 208, 277, 387 Schmidt, Carl 30, 147
Rops, Félicien 478 Schmithals, Walter 64
Rose Croix Catholique l’Aristie 481 Schmitt, Eugen Heinrich 414
Rosenberg, Alfred 507 Scholem, Gershom 16, 33, 79–80, 369, 370–6,
Rosenkreu(t)z, Christian 404 532, 672
Rosenruth, Knorr von 442 Schuler, Alfred 507
Rosicrucianism, Rosicrucians 29, 31, 55, 401, 404, Schultz, Wolfgang 17
405, 409–11, 415–6, 418, 439, 445, 476–8, Schuon, Frithjof 36, 416, 417, 531, 532, 534, 537,
480–3, 485, 501, 510, 511, 520, 528, 604, 623, 538, 539, 540, 541, 542, 546
629, 642, 671 Schuré, Édouard 475
Rossbach, Stefan 421 Scientology 56, 632–6
Round Dance of the Cross 135 Scopello, Madeleine 118
Roux, Saint-Pol  482 Scott, Walter 30
Rowling, J. K. 640 Second Apocalypse of James 138, 139, 201
Roy, Asim 597, 598 Second Discourse of Great Seth 148
Ruck, Carl 653 Second Logos of the Great Seth 158, 159
Rudolph, Kurt 10, 35, 48, 79, 118, 121, 310 Second Treatise of the Great Seth 47, 119,
Ruether, Rosemary 648, 649 139, 140
Rufinus of Aquileia 278 Secret Book of John 148, 679, 681; see also
Ruha 14, 195, 196, 360 Apocryphon of John
Rumi, Jalaluddin 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 336 Secret Book of Noria 366
Runciman, Steven 36, 394 Secret Revelation of John 679
Russia 431, 432, 433, 449, 517 Secundus 125, 127, 130, 162
Ruyer, Raymond 421 Sedgwick, Mark 328
Sefer Yezirah 50
Sabaoth 84, 108, 143, 221, 272, 277 Sefiroth 50, 372, 373, 374, 375, 378
Sabbateanism 370, 371 Segal, Alan 72
Sabians, Sabaeans 27, 28, 29, 188, 200, 310, 314 Semo Sancus 124
Sacred Epistles of Wisdom 350, 351, 353, 354, Sendivogius, Michael 404
355, 356 Seneca 136, 138
Sacy, Silvestre de 29 Sentences of Sextus 135
Saint-Martin, Louis-Claude de 29, 411, 412, 419, Septuagint 202, 203, 275
450, 476, 480 Seraphim of Sarov 431, 434
Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Alexandre 476, 477, 479 Sergius of Radonezh 431
Saklas 140, 142, 149, 150, 183 Sermon on the Light-Nous 247, 248
Salmān 317 Sermon on the Soul 238
Salman the Persian 51 serpent 13, 56, 130, 143, 364–5, 378, 611, 679
713
714
— I n d e x —
Seth 13, 16, 45, 47, 51, 69, 83–4, 85, 129, 130, Smith, Richard 629
134, 138, 140, 142–4, 148–9, 152, 154–5, Socrates 137, 520
183, 184, 196, 200, 221, 276, 277, 313, 326, Sodom and Gomorrah 46, 149, 150
418, 448 Solomon 46, 84, 196, 449; Temple of 441, 447,
Sethian 12, 13, 73, 111, 129, 133, 148, 149, 184; 448, 450
cosmogony 152, 168; Gnosticism 69, 105–6, Solovyov, Vladimir 432
133, 142, 143, 147–55, 183, 221, 323; texts 13, Sophia 26, 31, 49, 82, 120, 131, 136, 140, 144,
14, 20, 84, 105, 135, 138–40, 142, 144, 149–53, 149, 150, 151, 164–8, 182–4, 192, 195, 221,
155, 203, 209, 313, 326, 418, 679, 682 274–7, 364, 373, 378, 399, 432, 440, 612, 672,
Sethianism 14, 15, 47, 73, 111, 145, 155, 183, 675, 684
276, 326 Sophia of Jesus Christ 135, 137, 138, 143,
Sethians 13, 19, 47, 84, 105, 110–11, 129, 130, 144, 665
142, 147, 149, 151, 152, 154, 208, 210, 271, Sophiology 432, 433
277, 681 Sophist 141, 152
Sevrin, Jean-Marie  66, 69 Sorenson, Peter 468
Šēx-kirās, Spirit of Garment 361, 362 Sorsky, Nil 431
sex: sexual energy 628, 629; lust 122, 150, 317; soul(s) 44–54, 93, 97, 110, 129, 130, 134, 135–6,
practices, acts 214, 621, 625, 627–8, 650; ritual 139, 154, 157–9, 165, 172, 183, 188, 189, 195,
278, 622; symbolism 373, 414; temptation 121; 196, 209, 211, 213, 215, 235–45, 247–8, 261,
see also magic 268, 269, 278, 317, 325, 328, 334, 345–6,
Shabuhragan 49, 228 352–7, 362, 365, 386, 390, 398, 417, 442, 455,
Shah, Idries 533 457–9, 461, 470–3, 477, 511, 513, 518, 520,
Shahabadi, Mohammad Ali 589, 591, 592 527, 529, 531, 539–40, 598, 611, 612, 626,
Shaked, Shaul 254 629, 652, 653, 657, 658, 689; all-inclusive 352,
Shakespeare, William 555, 642 355; ascent/return to heaven of the 31, 46, 48,
Shambhala 476 51, 53, 64, 82, 98, 157, 158, 188, 231, 274,
Shankaracharya 604 345, 488, 596, 689; bodily confinement of 44,
Shapur I 225, 228, 230, 231, 253, 254, 255 134, 237, 273; cosmic 210; descent/fall of the
Shaykhism 579, 580 44, 45, 49, 51, 53, 455, 465; divine 237, 239,
Sheikh ‘Adi 358, 364 243, 244; divine origin of 71; escape of 47,
Sheikh Hasan 362 93, 97, 278; immortal 49, 152, 256, 450, 671;
Sheikh Sin 362, 363 imprisoned 188; liberated 233; living 49, 120,
Shekhinah 50, 432, 373 232, 238, 242, 385; partial non-descent of 209,
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 213; purification of 345, 401; reincarnation
461, 462 of 157, 326; salvation/liberation of 120, 135,
Shem 45, 47, 51, 83, 84, 85, 129, 196, 447, 448 473, 549; service 232; transmigration of 232,
Shi’ism, Shīʿite/Shiʿi Islam, Shiʿa 32, 33, 50, 51, 324, 326, 361, 390, 393; trapped 86, 93, 206,
315, 316, 321–7, 337–47, 360, 361, 364, 365, 275; universal 345, 346, 491; world 45, 213,
366, 378, 558, 579, 580, 581, 587, 588 239, 437
Shīrāzī, Sayyid ‘Ali Muhammad 579, 581 Southey, Robert 460
Shitil 47, 313 Souzenelle, Annick de 433
Silouan the Athonite 433, 434 Spain 277, 278, 371, 402
Silvanus 272 Speiser, Andreas 33
Simmel, George 638 Spenta Mainyu 253
Simon 51, 112, 126 Spinoza, Baruch 465, 467, 529, 534
Simon Magus 10, 12, 28, 30, 80–1, 105, 109, 112, spirit 110, 165, 183, 188, 238, 272, 279, 283, 331,
124, 125, 126, 128, 442 332, 335, 359, 361, 364, 372, 373, 398, 405,
Simon of Cyrene 140, 158 427, 432, 488, 494, 533, 540, 648
Simon Peter 119, 176 spirit and matter 308, 315, 398, 672
Simonianism, Simonians 81, 17, 101, 106, 112 spiritualism, spiritism 414, 478, 481, 538, 623,
Singer, June 648 627, 639, 641, 642
Sinnett, Alfred P. 54, 638 Sprengling, Martin 32
Sisinnios 231, 233 Sri Mataji Nirmala Devi 56
Šitil 196 Stăniloae, Dumitru 432, 433
Smith, Geoffrey 112, 113 Steiner, Rudolf 31, 43, 54, 414, 510–5, 690, 691
Smith, Morton 100 Steininger, Babette 507
714
715
— I n d e x —
Stethatos, Nicetas 428 Theodosius of Trnovo 431

Stobaei Hermetica 204 Theodosius the Great 27
Stockhausen, Karlheinz 689 Theodotus 129, 162
Stoicism, Stoics 72, 73, 93, 126, 158, 159, 265, Theodotus of Byzantium 12
272, 273 Theodotus the Banker 12
Stoker, Bram 642 Théon, Max 604, 607, 608
Stoyanov, Yuri 36, 387 Theophan the Recluse 431
Stromateis 129, 145, 156, 157, 162, 259, 260, 264 Theophrastia Valentiniana 28
Stroumsa, Gedaliahu 201 theōsis 29, 573
Stuckrad, Kocku von 21, 37 Theosophical Society 30, 31, 43, 53, 329, 413,
Styfhals, Willem 694 414, 418, 451, 478, 487, 490, 492, 493, 494,
Sufism, Sufis 29, 33, 36, 52, 53, 328–36, 339, 340, 495, 510, 530, 557, 623, 638, 639
356, 358, 360, 362, 366, 419, 420, 445, 527–35, Theosophy 29, 30, 31, 33, 49, 51, 53–55, 329,
539, 544, 571, 581, 587–9, 595–601, 604, 689 330, 335, 373–5, 379, 401, 409–13, 415, 417,
Suhrawardī, Shahab al-Din 52, 330, 334, 336 419, 429, 439, 469, 478, 484, 501, 502, 511,
Sultan Ezid 358 530–2, 550, 589, 600, 604, 623, 625, 627,
sun 52, 202, 227, 232, 238, 243, 271–2, 377, 400, 632, 690
437, 441, 451, 496, 503, 513–4, 583 Therapeutae 82, 83
Sundermann, Werner 248 thetans 56, 633
Surrealism 694 Theudas 138
Suzuki, Daisetsu 532 Third Book of Baruch 139
Swedenborg, Emanuel 29, 53, 412, 418, 469, 470, Thomas 46, 139, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175,
531, 642 177, 313
Switzerland 19, 180, 530, 675 Thomas Aquinas 399, 403
Symeon the New Theologian 426, 427, 428, Thomasius, Jacob 18
430, 434 Thomassen, Einar 66, 127
Synesius of Cyrene 400 Thoth 28, 102, 200, 202, 441, 308, 400, 441,
Syntagma 126, 142, 147 448, 450
Syria 32, 168, 230, 232, 273, 275, 276, 310, 312, Thought of Norea 105, 135, 143, 144, 148,
317, 338, 339, 340, 568 151, 152
Szlezák, Thomas 213 Three Steles of Seth 105, 135, 138, 143, 144, 145,
148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 200, 218
Talmud 370, 372, 377 Three Times, Three Great Moments 48, 236, 255
Tanakh 83 Thunder, Perfect Mind 69, 111, 139, 140
Tantric Buddhism 290, 291 Tibet 489, 517, 568, 625
Tantrism, Tantra 623, 624, 627, 628 Tikkune Zohar 378
Taoism 539, 568, 674 Timaeus 139, 141, 151, 153, 201, 202, 213, 607
Tarot 415, 418, 644 Timothy, First Epistle to 100
Tathāgatagarbha sūtras 249 To Thalassius 266, 267
Taubes, Jakob 694 Toland, John 440, 529
Tauler, John 543 Tolkien, J. R. R. 640, 644, 675
Taylor, Thomas 29, 36 Tomberg, Valentin 415, 416, 417, 419
Tayyibi 337, 338, 346, 347 Torah 79, 87, 371, 372, 375
Tchacos Codex 19, 33, 34, 35, 105, 110, 135, Traité (Manichaean) 247, 248, 249
137, 138, 143, 148, 180–5, 203 transmigration (of souls) 232, 250, 288, 296, 297,
Teacher 259, 264 324, 361, 393, 451; see also metempsychosis
Teachings of Silvanus 135 Treatise on the Resurrection 136, 166
Templars 29, 36, 55, 528, 529, 533, 674 Trevelyan, George 640
Tertullian of Carthage 126–8, 130, 135, 162, 163, Trimorphic Protennoia, Three Forms of First
164, 375, 468 Thought 68, 69, 105, 122, 140, 143, 144, 148,
Testimony of Truth 135, 159 151, 152
Thaddeus of Edessa 273 Tripartite Tractate 46, 139, 141, 158, 163, 164,
Thamar, Jean 691 166, 210, 212, 221
Theodora of Sihla 431 Tröger, Karl-Wolfgang  79
Theodore of Mopsuestia 255 Turan 229, 230
Theodoret of Cyrrhus 129, 135, 142, 147 Turfan 233, 247
715
716
— I n d e x —
Turner, John 66, 69, 209 wisdom 31, 52, 53, 55, 82, 93, 138, 150, 151, 164,
Twin 120, 225, 227, 228, 372 188, 241, 247–51, 260, 274, 290, 292, 297, 346,
354, 355, 372–5, 399, 436, 437, 438, 530, 533,
Umm al-Kitāb 316, 317, 379 537–42, 543, 546, 566–75; see also Sophia
Untitled Text 135, 143, 147, 148, 152 Wisse, Frederik 67
Upanishads 34, 43, 284, 285, 287, 290–2, 603, Witherington, Ben 668
604, 605, 607 Wood, Gabrielle 625
upāya kauśalya 246, 247 Wordsworth, William 454, 455, 456, 457, 459, 462
Urban, Hugh 622 Wotanism 499, 501, 504
Valentinian Exposition 139, 163 Xwadē 359, 360

Valentinianism 28, 67–8, 80, 97, 125, 129–30, Xwāstwānīft 238
135, 136, 141, 145, 162–8, 172, 182, 221, 279,
344, 374, 378, 411, 462, 675 Yaldabaoth, Ialdabaoth 47, 105, 120, 142–3,
Valentinians 27, 97, 105, 109, 110, 111, 113, 143, 149, 150, 151, 168, 219, 221, 274, 461, 679,
124–5, 126–7, 128, 130–1, 142, 159, 162–8, 681–4, 686
271, 273, 275, 276, 277, 369 Yamauchi, Edwin 68, 70, 71
Valentinus 12, 13, 28, 87, 109, 112, 125, 126, 127, Yannaras, Christos 433
128, 130–1, 143, 145, 148, 159, 162–4, 220, Yeats, William Butler 642
273, 369, 398, 607, 676 Yemen 338, 340, 346, 357, 568, 598
van den Broek, Roelof 18, 19, 20, 32 Yezidism 52–3, 256, 358–67
van Helmont, Frans 442 yoga 289, 419, 490, 495, 531, 598, 601, 603, 605,
Velichkovsky, Paisij 431 606, 628, 653, 688
Vigus, James 468 yuga 52, 55, 56
vijñāna 604, 605, 606, 608 Yušamin 192
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste 477
Vishnu Purana 501 Zaehner, Robert 253–4
Vital, Chaim 371 Zahr’il 195
Voegelin, Eric 421, 652 Zanjånl, Muhammad ‘Ali 579
Voltaire 28 Zardusht Khorragan 257
Zhiyi 294–302
Wagner, Richard 691 zindīq, zandaqa 311, 312
Wallace, Vesna 291 Zoccatelli, PierLuigi 624, 629
Ware, Mary 604 Zoë 120
Warith Deen, Mohammad 553, 555–6, 562 Zohar 371, 372, 378, 403
Wasson, Gordon 653, 657, 659 Zoroaster, Zarathustra 28, 49, 52, 134, 204, 225,
Watts, Alan 659 235, 253, 255, 257, 272, 274, 276, 279, 437,
Wautier, André 416 438, 450
Weber, Max 103 Zoroastrianism 27, 36, 45, 48, 49, 52, 193, 253,
Weor, Samaël Aun 31, 418, 621–9 254, 256, 257, 279, 343, 344, 358, 360, 376,
Westcott, William Wynn 485 377, 387, 399, 528, 533, 568
Whitehouse, Harvey 614 Zoroastrians 53, 184, 196, 230, 232, 245, 311,
Widengren, Geo 35, 254 312, 314, 398
Wilber, Ken 55 Zosimus the Panopolite 201, 202, 401
Wilberg, Peter 418 Zostrianos 95, 138, 185, 210, 276; Zostrianos,
Wili, Walter 33 Zostrian 13, 14, 20, 105, 111, 137, 143, 148,
Willermoz, Jean-Baptiste  450 151, 152, 154, 155, 208–11, 214, 218, 276,
Williams, Michael 11, 17, 63, 64, 65, 70, 71, 73, 277, 326
74, 124, 141 Zurvan 27, 31, 253, 254, 255, 257, 274, 376
Wilson, Robert 32, 34, 79, 81 Zurvanism 32, 48, 253–6, 344, 376–7
Wirth, Oswald 478, 480 Zvi, Shabbatai 672
716

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The Gnostic World is an outstanding guide to Gnosticism, written by a distinguished

Gunner B. Mikkelsen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Ancient History,

ROUTLEDGE WORLDS SERIES

THE BUDDHIST WORLD Forthcoming:

THE ISLAMIC WORLD THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WORLD,

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Garry W. Trompf,

The right of Garry W. Trompf, Gunner B. Mikkelsen and Jay Johnston to

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

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British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

1 Gnosticism, gnostics, and gnosis 9

2 The Gnostic World: a history of scholarship (until 2000) 26

3 Gnostics and temporality: from myth to macrohistory 43

4 Ancient pre-​Christian “Gnosticisms”: the state of the questions 63

5 The Jewish background to “Gnosticism”: a guide for the perplexed 79

6 Gnostic motifs in the New Testament 90

7 On ancient “Gnosticism” as a problematic category 100

8 Gender issues in the study of ancient Gnosticism 118

9 The Gnostics in early Christian heresiology 124

10 Genres of Gnostic literature and the “classical Gnostic”

11 Sethian Gnostic speculation 147

12 Basilides and the Basilidians 156

13 Valentinus and the Valentinians 162

14 Is the Gospel of Thomas Gnostic? 170

15 The Gospel of Judas and the Tchacos Codex 180

16 The Mandaeans: writings, ritual, and art 187

17 Hermetism and Gnosticism 200

18 Plotinus and the Gnostics 208

19 Gnostic elements in ancient magical papyri 217

20 Mani’s life 225

21 The Manichaean path to salvation 235

22 Insight and means in Chinese Manichaean texts 246

23 From “Zurvanism” to Mazdak 253

24 Christian gnosis: from Clement the Alexandrian to John Damascene 259

25 Gnostic vicissitudes in Late Antiquity 271

26 Jñāna: gnostic tendencies in early Hinduism and Buddhism 283

27 The discourse of truth in Chinese Tiantai Buddhism: “gnosis

28 Questions of Gnostic influence on early Islam 307

29 An agenda for the study of early Shiʿi cosmologies 321

30 Classic Sufism and gnosis 328

31 Ismailism and gnosis 337

32 Druze gnosis and the mystery of time 349

33 Gnostic elements in Yezidism 358

34 Gnosticism and Kabbalah 369

35 Bogomils and Cathars 382

36 Alchemy and gnosis from antiquity to early modern times:

M OD ERN: WEST, EAST, AND CU RRE NT IS S U E S

37 “Gnosis” as term and concept in the esoteric movements of the

38 Byzantine and modern Orthodox gnosis: from the eleventh to the

39 Pansophia, Christian Kabbalism, and the quest for universal

40 Freemasonry: gnostic images 445

41 British Romanticism: gnostic longings 454

42 William Blake, the ancient Gnostics, and the birth of modern

44 The “Lost Word” key and esoteric eschatology: Blavatsky’s

45 The philosophy of Guido von List (1848–​1919): connecting

46 Rudolf Steiner: multiple bodies 510

47 Gnostic sensibility in Gurdjieff’s “Work” 516

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

4 Ancient pre-Christian “Gnosticisms”: the state of the questions 63

45 The philosophy of Guido von List (1848–1919): connecting

58 The neo-Gnostic synthesis of Samael Aun Weor 621

Victoria Arakelova is Associate Professor, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian-

Francis Lacroix is a doctoral student under the supervision of Jean-Marc Narbonne

Jean-Marc Narbonne is a Professor in Ancient Philosophy at Université Laval

there are some provocative –even transgressive –aspects of this evidence which call

MYST I CISM, ESOTERICISM, AND NE O - G NO S TICIS M

Mahé, Jean-Paul. 1978–1982. Hermès en Haute-Égypte. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval,