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 John Powers THE HINDU WORLD Sushil Mittal, Gene Thursby THE ISLAMIC WORLD Andrew Rippin THE OCCULT WORLD Christopher Partridge THE GNOSTIC WORLD Garry Trompf, Gunner Mikkelsen, and Jay Johnston

Forthcoming: THE BIBLICAL WORLD, SECOND EDITION John Barton THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WORLD, SECOND EDITION Philip F. Esler https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Worlds/book-series/WORLDS

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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

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List of contributors

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Introduction Garry W. Trompf

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THEORETICAL  7 1 Gnosticism, gnostics, and gnosis Dylan M. Burns

9

2 The Gnostic World: a history of scholarship (until 2000) Garry W. Trompf

26

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

43

ANCIENT  6 1 4 Ancient pre-​Christian “Gnosticisms”: the state of the questions Carl B. Smith II

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5 The Jewish background to “Gnosticism”: a guide for the perplexed Garry W. Trompf

79

6 Gnostic motifs in the New Testament Pheme Perkins

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7 On ancient “Gnosticism” as a problematic category Michael A. Williams

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8 Gender issues in the study of ancient Gnosticism Majella Franzmann

118

9 The Gnostics in early Christian heresiology Mark Edwards

124

10 Genres of Gnostic literature and the “classical Gnostic” school of thought John D. Turner

133

11 Sethian Gnostic speculation John D. Turner

147

12 Basilides and the Basilidians Jean-​Daniel Dubois

156

13 Valentinus and the Valentinians Einar Thomassen

162

14 Is the Gospel of Thomas Gnostic? David W. Kim

170

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

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16 The Mandaeans: writings, ritual, and art Brikha H. S. Nasoraia

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17 Hermetism and Gnosticism Jean-​Pierre Mahé

200

18 Plotinus and the Gnostics Francis Lacroix and Jean-​Marc Narbonne

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19 Gnostic elements in ancient magical papyri Malcolm Choat

217

20 Mani’s life Iain Gardner

225

21 The Manichaean path to salvation Jason David BeDuhn

235

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22 Insight and means in Chinese Manichaean texts Gunner B. Mikkelsen

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23 From “Zurvanism” to Mazdak Garry W. Trompf and Milad Milani

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24 Christian gnosis: from Clement the Alexandrian to John Damascene Doru Costache

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25 Gnostic vicissitudes in Late Antiquity Garry W. Trompf

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26 Jñāna: gnostic tendencies in early Hinduism and Buddhism Gregory Bailey

283

27 The discourse of truth in Chinese Tiantai Buddhism: “gnosis beyond gnosis” Haiyan Shen with Brikha H. S. Nasoraia

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MEDIEVAL  3 0 5 28 Questions of Gnostic influence on early Islam John C. Reeves

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29 An agenda for the study of early Shiʿi cosmologies Mushegh Asatryan

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30 Classic Sufism and gnosis Milad Milani

328

31 Ismailism and gnosis Farhad Daftary

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32 Druze gnosis and the mystery of time Adnan Kasamanie

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33 Gnostic elements in Yezidism Victoria Arakelova and Garnik Asatrian

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34 Gnosticism and Kabbalah Michael Schneider

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35 Bogomils and Cathars Zdenko Zlatar

382

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36 Alchemy and gnosis from antiquity to early modern times: “as above so below” Peter Marshall

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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 Antoine Faivre  Translated by Korshi Dosoo

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38 Byzantine and modern Orthodox gnosis: from the eleventh to the twenty-​first century Doru Costache

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39 Pansophia, Christian Kabbalism, and the quest for universal knowledge in the early modern West Garry W. Trompf

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40 Freemasonry: gnostic images Garry W. Trompf

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41 British Romanticism: gnostic longings William Christie

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42 William Blake, the ancient Gnostics, and the birth of modern Gnosticism Peter Otto 43 Gnosis and the “French Occult Revival” and its offshoots Tobias Churton

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44 The “Lost Word” key and esoteric eschatology: Blavatsky’s Gnosis the core of Krishnamurti’s teaching Al Boag

487

45 The philosophy of Guido von List (1848–​1919): connecting Gnosticism to Nazism Jeffrey D. Lavoie

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46 Rudolf Steiner: multiple bodies Wayne Hudson

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47 Gnostic sensibility in Gurdjieff’s “Work” Constance A. Jones

516

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48 Western Sufism and gnosis Mark Sedgwick

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49 Gnosis: a Perennialist perspective Harry Oldmeadow

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50 Carl Jung on Gnosticism Robert A. Segal

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51 Elevating the family in the Nation of Islam: discerning the “gnostic factor” Dennis Walker

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THE EAST (AND BE YO ND )  5 6 3 52 Inner tradition: recovering the Christianity of the East Lynn C. Bauman

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53 Gnosis in Bābism and gnostic signs in Bābī talismans Denis M. MacEoin

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54 Ayatollah Khomeini’s gnoseology and its impact on his political worldview Emad Bazzi

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55 Syncretistic Sufi Gnosticism in South and South East Asia Clinton Bennett

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56 Aurobindo and supermind Peter Heehs

603

57 Of Gnosis in tribal and “primal” cultures Garry W. Trompf

610

CURRENT  6 1 9 58 The neo-​Gnostic synthesis of Samael Aun Weor Bernard Doherty

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59 Scientology and Gnosticism: L. Ron Hubbard’s “The Factors” (1953) Donald A. Westbrook and James R. Lewis

632

60 Gnostic and esoteric filaments in popular culture Adam Possamai

638

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61 Feminist gnosis and modern gender issues Jay Johnston

646

62 Modern psychedelic gnosis Christopher Partridge

652

63 Exposing Gnosticism Douglas E. Cowan

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64 Gnostic fiction Carole Cusack

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65 Cinema: evil demiurges in Hollywood films at the threshold of the twenty-​first century Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

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66 Music and Gnosis Joscelyn Godwin

688

67 Aesthetics and visual art Jay Johnston

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Index

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FI GU RE S

13.1 16.1 16.2 16.3 22.1 35.1 35.2 36.1 52.1 52.2 53.1 53.2 57.1 65.1 65.2 65.3 65.4 65.5 65.6

The Valentinian Pleroma according to Irenaeus Image of Hibil Ziwa from the Rivers Scroll Image of Abatur at the Scales (from Diwan Abatur) Image of Ptahil (from Diwan Abatur) Fourteenth-​century relief of Mani, the Buddha of Light, in Cao’an temple, Jinjiang, Fujian Bogomil and Cathar church offices compared Bogomil and Cathar tenets compared The Emerald Tablet in Johann Daniel Mylius, Basilica Philosophica (1618) Early Christianity 30–​130 CE Culturally interpreted streams of Christianity Bābī talisman combining pentagram and circle, with central jadim of Quranic verses Complex but predominantly circular Bābī talisman with Quranic verses A Catholic catechist teaching Fugughe youth (Papuan Highlands) and introducing a totally new cosmos and its layers (1930s) Mr Book from Dark City The Source from The Matrix Revolutions Christof in The Truman Show The Strangers in Dark City The agents in The Matrix “One of the Twins” in the The Matrix Reloaded

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164 190 193 195 251 388 390–1 405 570 574 584 585 616 680 680 681 682 683 683

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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 xii

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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 figures 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 papyrology, 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. xiii

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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, politics, 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). xiv

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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 “speculative 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 philosopher 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 influence 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 universities 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 fifteen 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. xvi

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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, translation, 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 particular 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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INTRODUCTION Garry W. Trompf

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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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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 pronouncing 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 formulaic 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 discreetly 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,” “mystical,” “occult,” “theosophical,” “sapiental,” and not just what is “Gnostic[al].” In toto, moreover, both the variegation and interwovenness point to a “World” of consciousness 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 extraordinary 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,” despising 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 interchangeability, 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 geographical spread: gnōsis, for example, being cognate to the Sanskrit jñāna; with Gnostic 2

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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 distinction 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 3

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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 relevant 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, enabling 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 resurgent 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

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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

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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 elucidate 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 historical 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 development 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 theologian 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, 9

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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 analyzing “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 existentialism 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 definition 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). 10

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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 conference, “Gnosticism” had become a muddled, confused term commanding no consensus 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 construct 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 criticism, 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,” “libertinism,” 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, marginalize, 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 literature 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 11

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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 philosopher 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 12

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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 predominant 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 combination 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 baptismal group (Schenke 1981: 607; cf. Burns 2014a: 154–​5). Tuomas Rasimus (2009) has recognized a separate, distinctive set of mythologoumena –​particularly the valorization 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 perhaps 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 knowledge 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 literary 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 13

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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 charismatic, educated teachers, whose names their proto-​ orthodox opponents knew and condemned. Their literature employs the scriptural strategies  –​philosophically informed exegesis regarding problems typical of early churches  –​of Christian Platonists like Justin Martyr or Origen of Alexandria, presupposing a strong ecclesial 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 individuals 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 14

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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 development. 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 religion,” 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 circulate, 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 cosmologies 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 unambiguously 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 millennium 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 15

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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 investigation 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 general, 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). 16

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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 religion (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 conflict 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 sometimes 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 knowledge 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 central 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 17

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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 realities 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 enlightenment, 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 esoteric 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). 18

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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 emergence 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 central 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 phenomenon 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 demarcate 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 experience 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, historically 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 construct 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 19

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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 religion,” 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 century 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. 20

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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 independent, 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.

REFERENCES Amir-​ Moezzi, Ali (ed.). 2016. Esotérisme shi’ite:  ses racines et ses prolongements. Paris: Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études. Asatryan, Mushegh. 2017. Controversies in Formative Shiʿi Islam: The Ghulat Muslims and Their Beliefs. London: I. B. Tauris. Asatryan, Mushegh and Dylan M. Burns. 2016. “Is Ghulat Religion Islamic Gnosticism? Religious Transitions in Late Antiquity.” Ali Amir-​Moezzi (ed.). Esotérisme shi’ite:  ses racines et ses prolongements. Paris: Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études: 55–​86. 21

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— Dylan M. Burns — Baur, Ferdinand-​Christian. 1975 (1853/​60). “Die Gnosis.” Kurt Rudolph (ed.). Gnosis und Gnostizismus. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: 1–​16. BeDuhn, Jason. 2016. “Secrets of Heaven:  Manichaean Cosmology in its Late Antique Context.” Anna van den Kerchove and Luciana Soares Santoprete (eds.). Gnose et manichéisme:  Entre les oasis d’Égypte et la Route de la Soie:  Hommage à Jean-​Daniel Dubois. Turnhout: Brepols: 195–​214. Bee, Guido. 2005. “Audians.” Wouter Hanegraaff, Antoine Faivre, and Roelof van den Broek (eds.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill: 141–​2. Bianchi, Ugo (ed.). 1970. Le Origini dello Gnosticismo: Colloquio di Messina, 13–​18 Aprile 1966. Leiden: Brill. Brakke, David. 2010. The Gnostics. Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —​—​—​2011. “Scriptural Practices in Early Christianity: Towards a New History of the New Testament Canon.” Jörg Ulrich, Anders-​ Christian Jacobson, and David Brakke (eds.). Invention, Rewriting, Usurpation: Discursive Fights over Religious Traditions in Antiquity. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang: 263–​80. Brashear, William. 1995. “The Greek Magical Papyri: An Introduction and Survey; Annotated Bibliography (1928–​1994).” Wolfgang Haase (ed.). Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II.18.5. Berlin/​New York: Walter De Gruyter: 3380–​684. Buckley, Jorunn Jacobsen. 2002. The Mandaeans:  Ancient Texts and Modern People. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bukovec, Predrag. 2013. “ ‘Endmeer und Schilfmeer’. Mit einem Exkurs zur Herkunft der Mandäer.” Barbara Kolkmann-​Klamt (ed.). Jenseitsvorstellungen im Orient. Kongreßakten der 2. Tagung der RVO (3./​4. Juni 2011, Tübingen). Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac: 397–​444. Bultmann, Rudolf. 1933. “Gignōskō, Gnōsis.” Theologisches Wörterbuch des Neuen Testaments 1: 688–​719. Burns, Dylan M. 2007. “Seeking Ancient Wisdom in the New Age: New Age and Neo-​Gnostic Commentators on the Gospel of Thomas.” Kocku von Stuckrad and Olav Hammer (eds.). Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and its Others. Leiden: Brill: 252–​89. —​—​—​ 2014a. Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. —​—​—​2014b. “Apocalypses Amongst Gnostics and Manichaeans.” John Collins (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature. New York: Oxford University Press: 358–​72. —​—​—​2015. “Ancient Esoteric Traditions: Mystery, Revelation, Gnosis.” Christopher Partridge (ed.). The Occult World. London: Routledge: 17–​33. —​—​—​2016. “Providence, Creation, and Gnosticism According to the Gnostics.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24 (1): 55–​79. —​—​—​Forthcoming, 2019. “The Nag Hammadi Codices and Graeco-​Egyptian Magical and Alchemical Literature.” Hugo Lundhaug and Christian Bull (eds.). The Nag Hammadi Codices as Monastic Books. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Cahana, Jonathan. 2014. “None of Them Knew Me or My Brothers:  Gnostic Antitraditionalism and Gnosticism and as a Cultural Phenomenon.” Journal of Religion 94 (1): 49–​73. Collins, John. 1979. “Morphology of a Genre.” Semeia 14: 1–​19. Couliano, Ioan. 1992. The Tree of Gnosis:  Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. DeConick, April. 2016. The Gnostic New Age. New York: Columbia University Press. Dillon, Matthew. Forthcoming, 2018. “The Impact of Scholarship on Contemporary ‘Gnosticism(s)’: A Case Study on the Apostolic Johannite Church and Jeremy Puma.” Dylan M. Burns and Almut-​Barbara Renger (eds.). New Antiquities: Transformations of Ancient Religion in the New Age and Beyond. London: Equinox. 22

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— Gnosticism, gnostics, and gnosis — Faivre, Antoine. 2010. “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. Paris: AIBL –​Diffusion De Boccard: 87–​112. Filoramo, Giovanni. 2000. “Gnosis/​Gnostizismus, I.  Religionswissenschaftlich.” Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3: cols.: 1043–​4. Gardner, Iain. 2016. “Dualism.” Robert A. Segal and Kocku von Stuckrad (eds.). Vocabulary for the Study of Religion. Brill Online. Available from http://​referenceworks.brillonline. com/​entries/​vocabulary-​for-​the-​study-​of-​religion/​dualism-​COM_​00000283. Gardner, Iain and Samuel Lieu (eds.). 2004. Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gruenwald, Ithamar. 1981. “Aspects of the Jewish-​Gnostic Controversy.” Bentley Layton (ed.). The Rediscovery of Gnosticism: Proceedings of the International Conference on Gnosticism. Leiden: Brill: 713–​23. Halm, Heinz. 1982. Die islamische Gnosis. Die extreme Schia und die ʽAlawiten. Zürich: Artemis. Hanegraaff, Wouter. 2008. “Altered States of Knowledge:  The Attainment of Gnōsis in the Hermetica.” International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 2: 128–​63. —​—​—​ 2012. Esotericism and the Academy:  Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​2016. “Gnosis.” Glenn Magee (ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 381–​92. Hanegraaff, Wouter, et  al. (eds.). 2006. Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill. Herrmann, Klaus. 2013. “Jüdische Gnosis? Dualismus und ‘gnostische’ Motive in der frühen jüdischen Mystik.” Christoph Markschies and Johannes van Oort (eds.). Zugänge zur Gnosis:  Akten zur Tagung der Patristischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft vom 02.-​05.01.2011 in Berlin-​Spandau. Leuven: Peeters: 43–​90. Holzhausen, Jens. 2005. “Valentinus and Valentinianism.” Wouter Hanegraaff, Antoine Faivre, and Roelof van den Broek (eds.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill: 1144–​57. Jonas, Hans. 2001 (1958). The Gnostic Religion:  The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon Press. King, Karen. 2003. What is Gnosticism? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —​—​—​ 2006. The Secret Revelation of John. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Koschorke, Klaus. 1981. “Patristische Materialen zur Spätgeschichte der Valentinianischen Gnosis.” Martin Krause (ed.). Gnosis and Gnosticism: Papers read at the Eighth International Conference on Patristic Studies (Oxford, September 3rd-​8th 1979). Leiden: Brill: 120–​39. Lahe, Jaan. 2012. Gnosis und Judentum:  Alttestamentliche und jüdische Motive in der gnostischen Literatur und das Ursprungsproblem der Gnosis. Leiden: Brill. Leicht, Reimund. 2000. “Gnostic Myth in Jewish Garb:  Niriyah (Norea), Noah’s Bride.” Journal of Jewish Studies 51: 133–​40. Layton, Bentley. 1995. “Prolegomena to the Study of Ancient Gnosticism.” Michael White and Larry Yarbrough (eds.). The Social World of the First Christians: Essays in Honor of Wayne Meeks. Minneapolis: Fortress Press: 334–​50. Lazier, Benjamin. 2008. God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lundhaug, Hugo, and Lance Jenott. 2015. The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Markschies, Christoph. 2000. “Gnosis/​Gnostizismus, II. Christentum.” Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3: cols. 1045–​53. —​—​—​ 2001. Gnosis: An Introduction. London and New York: T. & T. Clark. 23

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— Dylan M. Burns — Marjanen, Antti. 2005. “What Is Gnosticism? From the Pastorals to Rudolph.” Antti Marjanen (ed.). Was There a Gnostic Religion? Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society: 1–​53. —​ —​ —​2008. “Gnosticism.” Susan A. Harvey and David G. Hunter (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 203–​17. Mazur, Zeke. 2010. “The Platonizing Sethian Gnostic Background of Plotinus’ Mysticism.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. Merkur, Dan. 1993. Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pearson, Birger. 2005. “Gnosticism as a Religion.” Antti Marjanen (ed.). Was There a Gnostic Religion? Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society: 81–​101. Rasimus, Tuomas. 2009. Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking. Rethinking Sethianism in Light of the Ophite Evidence. Leiden: Brill. Reeves, John C. 2011. Prolegomena to a History of Islamicate Manichaeaism. Sheffield: Equinox. Rudolph, Kurt. 1987. Gnosis:  The Nature and History of Gnosticism. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. —​—​—​1996. “Der Gnostische ‘Dialog’ als Literarisches Genus.” Kurt Rudolph. Gnosis und spätantike Religionsgeschichte. Leiden: Brill: 103–​22. Schenke, Hans-​Martin. 1981. “The Phenomenon and Significance of Gnostic Sethianism.” Bentley Layton (ed.). The Rediscovery of Gnosticism:  Proceedings of the International Conference on Gnosticism. Leiden: Brill: 588–​616. Scholem, Gershom. 1960. Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Schultz, Wolfgang. 1975 (1910). “Dokumente der Gnosis.” Kurt Rudolph (ed.). Gnosis und Gnostizismus. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: 238–​79. Scott, Alan B. 1995. “Churches or Books? Sethian Social Organization.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 3:2: 109–​22. Segal, Alan. 2002. Two Powers in Heaven:  Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism. Boston and Leiden: Brill. Sennis, Antonio (ed.). 2016. Cathars in Question. York: York Medieval Press; Boydell Press. Smith, Geoff. 2015. Guilt by Association:  Heresy Catalogues in Early Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stoyanov, Yuri. 2000. The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy. London and New Haven: Yale University Press. Tardieu, Michel, Anna van den Kerchove, and Michaela Zago (eds.). 2013. Noms barbares I: Formes et contextes d’une pratique magique. Turnhout: Brepols. Thomassen, Einar. 2008. The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the Valentinians. Leiden: Brill. Turner, John D. 2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Louvain and Paris: Peeters. van Bladel, Kevin T. 2017. From Sasanian Mandaeans to Ṣābians of the Marshes. Leiden: Brill. van den Broek, Roelof. 2006. “Gnosis I  (Gnostic Religion).” Wouter Hanegraaff, Antoine Faivre, and Roelof van den Broek (eds.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill: 403–​15. —​—​—​ 2012. Gnostic Religion in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Harnack, Adolf. 1975 (1886). “Die Versuche der Gnostiker, eine apostolische Glaubenslehre und eine christliche Theologie zu schaffen, oder: die akute Verweltlichung des Christentums.” Kurt Rudolph (ed.). Gnosis und Gnostizismus. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: 142–​73. von Stuckrad, Kocku. 2010. Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities. Leiden: Brill. —​ —— ​ ​2013. “Afterword:  Mysticism, Gnosticism, and Esotericism as Entangled Discourses.” April DeConick and Grant Adamson (eds.). Histories of the Hidden God: 24

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— Gnosticism, gnostics, and gnosis — Concealment and Revelation in Western Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical Traditions. Durham: Acumen: 312–​19. Waldstein, Michael. 2000. “Hans Jonas’ Construct ‘Gnosticism’:  Analysis and Critique.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8 (3): 341–​72. Wasserstrom, Steven. 1999. Religion After Religion:  Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Williams, Michael. 1996. Rethinking “Gnosticism”:  Arguments for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —​—​—​2005a. “Sethianism.” Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen (eds.). A Companion to Second-​Century ‘Heretics’. Leiden: Brill: 32–​63. —​—— ​ ​2005b. “Was There a Gnostic Religion? Strategies for a Clearer Analysis.” Antti Marjanen (ed.). Was There a Gnostic Religion? Helsinki:  Finnish Exegetical Society: 55–​79. Yamauchi, Edwin. 1983. Pre-​ Christian Gnosticism:  A Survey of the Proposed Evidences. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.

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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, presumptuous 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 themselves 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 encyclopedic 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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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 character” (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 comparable 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 dichotomizing 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 fornication 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, generating 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 28

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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 sympathy with gnōstikoi ([1864] 1887: vi), he traced “Gnostic remains” into Mithraism, Sufism, and the Druze, on to the Templars, Rosicrucians, and (to many Lodges’ nervousness!) 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, esoteric 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. 29

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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 reconsider 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 outlook 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 30

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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 disentangling 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 syncretism” 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 31

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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 enormous 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 psychoanalytic 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

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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 appreciative 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 (famously 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, parallel 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). 33

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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 development 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 translating 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 “official” 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 34

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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 centuries BCE, with all the signs that it originated out of responses to the Jesus phenomenon (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 preserving 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 availability 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 diversity 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 consideration of a wider Gnostic world, and new Manichaean texts entailed medieval provenances and disparate places (Barnstone and Meyer 2003). With NHCs highlighting Mary Jesus’s Mother, Mary Magdalene, and Salome, and female leadership in church worship, who can truly gauge the effect of The Gnostic Gospels (1979), 35

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by Princeton’s Elaine Pagels (1943–​), on social impetuses for the feminization in contemporary 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 authorities 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 histories 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). 36

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In looking beyond his Western tradition from Utrecht, Gilles Quispel, significantly 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 history 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 discipline, 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 scholarship 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 esoteric  –​even the famous Valentinian Gospel of Truth might be intentionally “exoteric” (Attridge 1986) –​or whether the esoteric had to involve secrecy (von Stuckrad 2004). Modern scholarship is also necessarily involved in getting straight ongoing 37

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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 theosophy 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 contextualizing the many specialist articles in this book that follow.

REFERENCES Angus, Samuel. 1925. The Mystery-​ Religions and Christianity:  A Study of the Religious Background of Early Christianity. London: John Murray. Anz, Wilhelm. 1897. Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des Gnostizismus: Ein religionsgeschichtlicher Versuch. Leipzig: Hinrichs. Attridge, Harold. 1986. “The Gospel of Truth as an Exoteric Text.” Charles Hedrick and Robert Hodgson, Jr (eds.). Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism and Early Christianity. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson: 239–​55. Barber, Malcolm. 2000. The Cathars. London: Longman. Barnstone, Willis and Marvin Meyer (eds.). 2003. The Gnostic Bible. Boston: Shambhala. Bartikyan, Hrach. 1961. Istochniki dla izoocheniya Pavlikianskogo dviseniya. Yerevan: Armenian Academy of Sciences. Baur, Ferdinand. 1831. Das manichäische Religionssystem. Tübingen: Osiander. —​—​—​1847. Lehrbuch der christliche Dogmengeschichte. Stuttgart: Ad. Becher. Bianchi, Ugo (ed.). 1967. Le origini dello gnosticismo:  Colloquio di Messina, 13–​18 aprile 1966. Leiden: Brill. Blavatsky, Helena. 1877. Isis Unveiled: A Master-​Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. New York: J.W. Bouton, 2 vols. —​—​—​ 1886. The Secret Doctrine Würzburg Manuscript. Cotopaxi, CO: Eastern School. —​—​—​ 1994. On the Gnostics (ed. Henk Spierenburg). San Diego, CA: Point Loma Publications. Blochet, Edgard. 1902. “Études sur l’ésotérisme musulman.” Journal asiatique 19: 489–​531; 20: 49–​111. —​—​—​ 1913. Études sur le gnosticisme musulman. Rome: Editrice Italiana. Böhlig, Alexander, and Christoph Markschies. 1994. Gnosis und Manichäismus: Forschungen und Studien zu Texten von Valentin und Mani. Berlin: De Gruyter. Bousset, Wilhelm. 1907. Hauptprobleme der Gnosis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 38

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— G a r r y W.   T r o m p f — Godwin, Joscelyn. 1994. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Goodrick-​Clarke, Clare, and Nicholas. 2005. “Introduction,” to G.R.S. Mead and the Gnostic Quest. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2005. Grant, Robert. 1959. Gnosticism and Early Christianity. New York: Cornell University Press. —​—​—​ (ed.). 1961. Gnosticism: An Anthology. London: Collins. Grätz, Heinrich. 1846. Gnostizismus und Judenthum. Krotoschin: B.L. Monasch. Gündüz, Şinasi. 1994. The Knowledge of Life: The Origins and Early History of the Mandaeans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, Manly P. 1928. The Secret Teaching of all Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Philosophy. San Francisco: H.S. Crocker. Hamilton, Janet, and Bernard Hamilton, with Yuri Stoyanov (sel. and trans.). 1998. Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c.650–​ c.1405. Manchester:  Manchester University Press. Hamzehee, Reza. 1991. Land of Revolutions: A Historical and Typological Study of Iranian Social Movements. Göttingen: Re. Hanegraaff, Wouter. 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Western Thought. Leiden: Brill. —​—​—​ 2012. Esotericism and the Academy:  Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​ 2013. Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Edinburgh: A. & C. Black. Hassan, Ihab. 1973. “The New Gnosticism:  Speculations on an Aspect of the Postmodern Mind.” Boundary 2 (Duke University) 1 (3) (Spring): 547–​59. Henning, Walter. 1937. Ein manichäisches Bet-​und Beichtbuch. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hilgenfeld, Adolf. 1882. “Das Johnannes-​ Evangelium, alexandrinisch oder gnostisch?” Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie 25: 388–​435. Hoeller, Stephan. 2002. Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing. Wheaton, IL: Quest. Holz, Hans. 1984. “Eranos –​eine moderne Pseudo-​Gnosis.” Jacob Taubes (ed.). Religionstheorie und politische Theologie. Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh: 249–​63. Jacobovici, Simcha, and Barrie Wilson. 2014. The Lost Gospel. New York: Pegasus. Jonas, Hans. 1934. Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2 vols. —​—​—​ 1966. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York: Harper & Row. Jung, Carl. 1958. The Undiscovered Self (trans. Richard Hull). London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul. King, Charles. (1864) 1887. The Gnostics and their Remains. London: David Nutt. King, Karen. 2003. What is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kristeller, Oscar. 1972. Renaissance Concepts of Man, and Other Essays. New  York: Harper & Row. Labib, Pahor. 1956. Coptic Gnostic Papyri in the Coptic Museum at Old Cairo. Cairo: Government Press: vol. 1. Layton, Bentley (trans. and annot.). 1987. The Gnostic Scriptures. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Lebreton, Jules. 1910. Histoire du dogme de la Trinité des origines au Concile de Nicée, vol. 2: De Saint Clément à Saint Irénée. Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne. Legge, Francis. 1915. Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity, being Studies in Religious History from 330 B.C. to 330 A.D. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: vol. 1. Lieu, Samuel, van Oort, Johannes, and Aloïs van Tongerloo (eds.). 1996–​. Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum. Turnhout: Brepols: vols. 1–​. Lieu, Samuel, Sims-​ Williams, Nicholas, et  al. 1999–​ . Dictionary of Manichaean Texts. Turnhout: Brepols. 40

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— T h e G n o s t i c   Wo r l d — Mahé, Jean-​Paul. 1978–​1982. Hermès en Haute-​Égypte. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2 vols. Makarem, Sami. 1974. The Druze Faith. Delmar, NY: Caravan. Manuel, Frank. 1974. The Religion of Isaac Newton. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marjanen, Antti (ed.). 2005. Was there a Gnostic Religion? Helsinki:  Finnish Exegetical Society. Matter, Jacques. 1828. Histoire critique du gnosticisme et de son influence sur les sectes religieuses et philosophiques des six premiers siècles de l’ère chrétienne. Paris: F.G. Levraut, 2 vols. Mead, George. 1900. Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: Some Short Sketches among the Gnostics, etc. London: Theosophical Publishing Society. —​—​—​1906. “The Gnosis of the Mind.” The Theosophical Review 38 (August): 501–​10. Ménard, Jacques (ed.). 1977–​. Bibliothèque Copte de Nag Hammadi. Québec:  Presses de l’Université Laval. Merkur, Daniel. 1993. Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions. Albany, NY: SUNY. Meyer, Marvin (ed.). 2007. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures:  The International Edition. New York: HarperOne. Mikkelsen, Gunner. 1997. Biographia Manichaica:  A Comprehensive Bibliography of Manichaeism through 1996. Turnhout: Brepols. Nanji, Azim. 1978. The Nizari Ismaili Tradition in the Indo-​Pakistan Subcontinent. Delmar, NY: Caravan. Oliveira, Pedro. 2017. “What is the Link between Theosophy and the TS?” Theosophy in Australia 81 (1): 5–​10. Pagels, Elaine. 1979. The Gnostic Gospels. London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson. Peel, Malcolm. 1969. The Epistle to Rheginos:  A Valentinian Letter on the Resurrection. London: SCM. Pétrement, Simone. 1984. Le Dieu séparé: Les origines du gnosticisme. Paris: Cerf. Prideaux, Humphrey. 1724. The True Nature of the Imposture fully display’d in the Life of Mahomet, etc. London: E. Curll. Quispel, Gilles.1951. Gnosis als Weltreligion. Zurich: Origo. —​—​—​ 1988. De deerde component van de Europese cultuurtraditie. Utrecht: Hes Uitgevers. —​—​—​ (ed.). 1992. De hermetische gnosis in de loop der eeuwen:  Beschouwingen over de invloed van een Egyptische religie op de cultuur van het western. Baarn: Tirion. —​—​—​ (comm.). 1996. Asclepius. Amsterdam: Pelikaan. Reitzenstein, Richard. 1921. Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium:  religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen. Bonn: Marcus & Weber. Riffard, Pierre. 1990. Ésotérisme. Paris: Robert Laffont. Robinson, James. 1977. (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Leiden: Brill. —​ —​ —​1979. “The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices.” Biblical Archaeology 42: 206–​24. —​—​—​ 2006. The Secrets of Judas:  The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and his Lost Gospel. San Francisco: Harper. —​—​—​ 2014. The Nag Hammadi Story. Leiden: Brill, 2 vols. Rudolph, Kurt. 1978. Die Gnosis: Wesen und Geschichte einer spätantiken Religion. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang. —​—​—​1983. “ ‘Gnosis’ and ‘Gnosticism’ –​The Problems of their Definition and their Relation to the Writings of the New Testament.” Alastair Logan and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.). The New Testament and Gnosis. London: Bloomsbury: 21–​37. Runciman, Steven. 1947. The Medieval Manichee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, Carl (ed.). 1925. Pistis Sophia. Hauniae: Gyldendalske-​Nordisk. 41

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— G a r r y W.   T r o m p f — —​—​—​and Hans Polotsky. 1933. “Ein Mani-​Fund in Ägypten:  Originalschriften des Mani und seine Schüler.” Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-​historische Klasse 1: 45–​90. Schmidt-​Biggemann, Wilhelm. 2004. Philosophia Perennis:  Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought. Dordrecht: Springer. Scholem, Gershom. 1960. Zur Kabbala und ihrer Symbolik. Zurich: Rhein. Scholer, David. 1971–​2009. Nag Hammadi Bibliography [1948–​2006]. Leiden: Brill, 3 vols. Schroeder, Caroline. 2017. “Gender and the Academy Online: The Authentic Revelations of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” Tony Burke (ed.). Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha. Eugene, OR: Cascade: 304–​25. Scott, Walter. 1924–​1936. Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings … ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4 vols. Segal, Robert (sel. and introd.). 2013. The Gnostic Jung: Selections from the Writings of C.G. Jung and his Critics. London: Routledge. Simuț, Corneliu. 2014. F.C. Baur’s Synthesis of Böhme and Hegel:  Redefining Christian Theology as a Gnostic Philosophy of Religion. Leiden: Brill. Smith. Geoffrey. 2015. Guilt by Association: Heresy Catalogues in Early Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Huston. 1976. Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition. New York: Harper & Row. Sprengling, Martin 1939. “The Berlin Druze Lexicon.” American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 57 (1): pt. 1, 388–​414. Stoyanov, Yuri. 1994. The Hidden Tradition in Europe. London: Penguin. Stroumsa, Gedaliahu. 1984. Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology. Leiden: Brill. Trompf, Garry. 1987. “Missiology, Methodology and the Study of New Religious Movements.” Religious Traditions 8: 95–​106. —​—​—​2006. “From the Esoteric to the Exoteric and Back Again:  Themes from Antiquity to Post-​Modernity.” Edward Crangle (ed.). Esotericism and the Control of Knowledge. Sydney: University of Sydney: 22–​62. van den Broek, Roelof. 2013. The Gnostic Religion in Antiquity. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. van den Broek, Roelof, and Wouter Hanegraaff (eds.). 1998. Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. van den Broek, Roelof, and Cis van Heertum (eds.). 2000. From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme: Gnosis, Hermetism and the Christian Tradition. Amsterdam: Pelikaan. von Stuckrad, Kocku. 2004. Was ist Esoterik? Kleine Geschichte des geheimen Wissens. Munich: C.H. Beck. Voegelin, Eric. 1952. “Gnostische Politik.” Merkur (Stuttgart) 6 (4): 301–​17. Wasserstrom, Steven. 1999. Religion after Religion:  Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Widengren, Geo. 1973. The Gnostic Attitude (trans. and ed. Birger Pearson). Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbara. Wilson, Robert. 1955 “Gnostic Origins.” Vigiliae Christianae 9: 193–​211. Yamauchi, Edwin. 2003. Pre-​ Christian Gnosticism:  A Survey of the Proposed Evidences. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Yates, Frances. 1964. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul. Zaehner, Robert. 1975. Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zarrinkoub, Adolhossein. 1970. Persian Sufism in Historical Perspective (spec. issue [3–​4]): Iranian Studies 3: 139–​220.

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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 historical 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 synoptically 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 generic 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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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 emanation 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 speculation 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 potentially 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 changeability 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 relevant 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

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•

•

•

•

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 astrological 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 figures 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 historiography 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 indicative, 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 consummating 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 45

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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 conceptual approaches to time by classic (mainly Christian) Gnostics make these generalities 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 possibly 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 “normative 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 46

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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 principalities –​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 “grandiose 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 “sympathetic 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 distinguish 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 47

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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 disorder 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 overcoming 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 sacrifice, 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 universe 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]), 48

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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 history 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 universe 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 49

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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 entrapment 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 celestial 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 intervention, 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 purpose here to introduce forms of distinctly Gnostic macrohistory in the Muslim ambience, and these are found above all in Shi‘a thought, and from its allowances to Zoroastrian, Hermetic, Platonic, and Illuminist impetuses. 50

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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 51

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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 deterioration 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 astrologically 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 reincarnation 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 52

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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 alternation 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 53

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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 cosmological position by competitor Alfred Sinnett in The Mahatma Letters (1880–​1884), where he expounded the idea of huge Buddhist-​looking and seemingly endless undulating 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 materialization, 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 54

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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 problematic 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 serious 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 55

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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 alternative 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 feminine Holy Spirit, to prepare for extraordinary times ahead (Trompf 2012: 69). The typical salvific purport of these newer macrohistories is that a blessed spiritual 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.

REFERENCES Açikyildiz, Birgül. 2014. The Yezidis:  The History of a Community, Culture and Religion. London: Tauris. Ali, Raushan. 1925. “Sufism.” William Hare (ed.). Religions of the Empire: A Conference on Some Living Religions within the Empire. London: Macmillan: 135–​47. 56

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— Gnostics and temporality — Atkinson, William [?]‌. [1908] 2003. The Kybalion: A Study of Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece. Sydney: AMORC. Barrett, Charles. 1972. New Testament Essays. London: SPCK. Bayley, Harold. 1912. The Lost Language of Symbolism. London: vol. 1. Bayme, Steven (ed. and comm.). 1997. Understanding Jewish History: Texts and Commentaries. New York: KTAV. Bianchi, Ugo. 1982. “Le Gnosticisme et les origines du christianisme.” Julien Ries (ed.). Gnosticisme et monde hellénistique. Louvain: Institut Orientaliste: 211–​35. Bousset, Wilhem. 1901. “Himmelreise der Seele.” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 4: 229–​77. Boyce, Mary. 1989. A History of Zoroastrianism. Leiden: Brill: vol. 1. Bracht, John. 1990. “The Americanization of Adam.” Garry Trompf (ed.). Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements. Berlin: De Gruyter: 97–​142. Casadio, Giovanni. 1993. “Gnostische Wege zur Unsterblichkeit.” Erik Hornung and Tilo Schabert (eds.). Aufstehung und Unsterblichkeit. Munich: Wilhelm Fink: 203–​254. Christie-​Murray, David. 1989. A History of Heresy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohn, Norman. 2001. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come:  The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. New Haven: Yale University Press. Colpe, Carsten. 1967. “ ‘Die Himmelreise der Seele’:  Ausserhalb and Innerhalb der Gnosis.” Ugo Bianchi (ed.). Le Origini dello gnosticismo: Colloquio di Messina, 13–​18 aprile 1966. Leiden: Brill: 429–​47. Corbin, Henri. 1964. Histoire de philosophie islamique. Paris: Gallimard: vol. 1. —​—​—​1966. “The Visionary Dream in Islamic Spirituality.” Gustave von Grunebaum and Roger Callois (eds.). The Dream and Human Societies. Berkeley: University of California Press: 381–​408. Corbin, Henri, and Mohammad Mo’in (comm. and eds.). 1955. Commentaire de la Qasida Ismaélienne d’Abu’l-​Haitham Jorjani. Teheran: Institut Franco-​Iranien. Culianu, Ioan. 1983. Psychanodia: A Survey of the Evidence concerning the Ascension of the Soul and its Relevance. Leiden: Brill. De Smet, Daniel. 2007. Les Épîtres sacrées des Druzes: Rasā’il al-​Ḥikma, Volumes 1 et 2. Louvain: Peeters. Desjardins, Michel. 1990. Sin in Valentinianism. Atlanta: Scholars. Evans, Craig, Webb, Robert, and Richard Wiebe (eds.). 1993. Nag Hammadi Texts and the Bible: A Synopsis and Index. Leiden: Brill. Faessel, Victor. 2006. “The Tyranny of the Horizon.” Journal of the Interdisciplinary Study of Monotheistic Religions 2: 17–​36. Festugière, André-​Jean. 1949. La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, vol. 2: Le Dieu cosmique. Paris: J. Gabalda. French, Brendon. 2000. “The Theosophical Masters.” Doctoral dissert., University of Sydney, Sydney: vol. 1. Gardner, Iain. 2010. “Mani’s Book of Mysteries: Prolegomena to a New Look at Mani, the ‘Baptists’ and the Mandaeans.” ARAM 22: 321–​34. Gilhus, Ingvild. 1985. The Nature of the Archons:  A Study in the Soteriology of a Gnostic Treatise from Nag Hammadi (CGII, 4). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Godwin, Joscelyn. 2011. Atlantis and the Cycles of Time: Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Havrda, Matyás. 2007. Grace in Valentinian Soteriology. Claremont, CA: IAC. Heehs, Peter. 1994. “Myth, History, and Theory.” History and Theory 33 (1): 1–​19. Holzhausen, Jens. 1994. Der ‘Mythos vom Menschen’ im hellenistischen Ägypten:  Eine Studie zum ‘Poimandres’ (CH. 1), zu Valentin und dem gnostischen Mythos. Bodenheim: Athenäum-​Hain-​Hanstein. Johnson, Julian. [1939] 1980. The Path of the Masters. Delhi: Radha Soami Satsang Beas. 57

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— G a r r y W.   T r o m p f — Jonas, Hans. 1963. The Gnostic Religion. Boston: Beacon. Jung, Carl. 1951. Aion: Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte. Zurich: Rascher. Kant, Sanjay. 1990. God Descends on Earth. Goa: Newsflash. Knox, Wilfred. 1961. St Paul and the Church of the Gentiles. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Luttikhuizen, Gerard. 1997. “The Thought Pattern of Gnostic Mythologizers and their Use of Biblical Tradition.” John D. Turner and Anne McGuire (eds.). The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years. Leiden: Brill: 89–​101. Marrou, Henri. 1967. “La Théologie de l’histoire dans la gnose valentinienne.” Ugo Bianchi (ed.). Le Origini dell gnosticismo: Colloquio di Messina, 13–​18 aprile 1966. Leiden: Brill: 215–​26. McDermott, Robert. 1984. “Historical Vision.” Robert McDermott (ed.). The Essential Steiner. San Francisco: Harper & Row: 212–​26. Nasoraia, Brikha and Garry Trompf. 2010. “Mandaean Macrohistory.” ARAM 22: 391–​425. Pecotic, David. 2004. “Body and Correspondence in G.I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.” Doctoral dissert., University of Sydney, Sydney. Perkins, Pheme. 1993. Gnosticism and the New Testament. Minneapolis, MN:  Augsburg Fortress. Pike, Albert. 1871. Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Charleston, SC: A.M. Puech, Henri-​Charles. 1951. “La Gnose et le temps.” Eranos-​Jahrbuch 20: 57–​113. Quispel, Gilles. 1992. “Hermes Trismegistus and the Origins of Gnosticism.” Vigiliae Christianae 46 (1): 1–​19. —​—​—​1996. “Valentinus and the Gnostikoi.” Vigiliae Christianae 50 (1): 1–​4. Reeves, John. 1996. Heralds of that Good Realm:  Syro-​Mesopotamian Gnosis and Jewish Traditions. Leiden: Brill. Rothstein, Mikael. 2009. “ ‘His Name was Xenu. He used Renegades…’ Aspects of Scientology’s Founding Myth.” James Lewis (ed.). Scientology. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 365–​87. Rudolph, Kurt. 1978. Die Gnosis: Wesen und Geschichte einer spätantiken Religion. Leipzig: Koehler and Armelang. Scharmer, Otto. 1997. “Rudolf Steiner:  History as Development towards Emancipation and Freedom.” Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah (eds.). Macrohistory and Macrohistorians. London: Praeger: 90–​7. Scholem, Gerschom. 1974. Kabbalah. New York: Quadrangle. Schweizer, Eduard. 1956. “Gegenwart des Geistes und eschatologische Hoffnung bei Zarathustra, spätjüdischen Gruppen, Gnostikern und den Zeugen des Neuen Testamentes.” William Davies and David Daube (eds.). The Background of the New Testament and its Eschatology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 482–​508. Shapira, Dan. 2010. “On Kings and the Last Days in Seventh Century Iraq: A Mandaean Text and its Parallels.” ARAM 22: 133–​70. Stroumsa, Gedaliahu. 1984. Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology. Leiden: Brill. Tardieu, Michel. 1974. Trois mythes gnostiques: Adam, Éros et les animaux d’Égypte dans un écrit de Nag Hammadi (II.5). Paris: Études Augustiniennes. Tervahauta, Ulla. 2015. A Story of the Soul’s Journey in the Nag Hammadi Library: A Study of Authentikos Logos (NHC V,3). Leiden: Brill. Tröger, Karl-​Wolfgang. 1981. “The Attitude of the Gnostic Religion towards Judaism.” Bernard Barc (ed.). Colloque internationale sur les textes de Nag Hammadi (Québec, 22–​25 août 1978). Québec: Université de Laval: 86–​98. Trompf, Garry. 1979a. “The Future of Macro-​historical Ideas.” Soundings 62 (1): 70–​89. —​—​—​ 1979b. The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press: vol. 1. —​—​—​ 1980. Religion and Money: Some Aspects. Adelaide: Charles Strong Memorial Trust. 58

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— Gnostics and temporality — —​ —​ —​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. —​ —— ​ ​1998. “Macrohistory in Blavatsky, Steiner and Guénon.” Antoine Faivre and Wouter Hanegraaff (eds.). Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion. Louvain: Peeters: 268–​96. —​—​—​2005. “Macrohistory.” Wouter Hanegraaff et  al. (eds.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill: 701–​16. —​—​—​2012. “Macrohistory and End-​time Beliefs in New Religious Movements:  Un tour d’horizon.” Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review 31 (1): 59–​109. —​ —​ —​2013. “Theosophical Macrohistory.” Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein (eds.). Handbook of the Theosophic Current. Leiden: Brill: 375–​403. Trompf, Garry, and Adnan Kasamanie. 1981. “The Druze and the Quaker: Reflections on the Social Implications of Mysticism.” Prudentia (Suppl. Vol.): 188–​94. Turner, John. 2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Louvain: Peeters. Ulansey, David. 1989. The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varma, Vishwanath. 1976. The Political Philosophy of Sri Auriobindo. Delhi:  Motilal Banarsidass. Walker, Dennis. 1990. “The Black Muslims in American Society.” Garry Trompf (ed.). Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements. Berlin: De Gruyter: 343–​90. Widengren, Geo. 1965. Mani and Manichaeism (trans. Charles Kessler). London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson.

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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 scholarship. Further, there are two major challenges that loom large in the academy. The first is the challenge of methodology, particularly what evidence one considers essential 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 abandonment 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 analysis of specific phenomena, with “Biblical demiurgical” offered as a modest introductory 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 63

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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 continues 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 contribution 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 category “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 normative 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. 64

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In 2008, Antti Marjanen lamented, “in the current scholarly discussion no consensus 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 preserve 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 himself, 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 nominalist 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 distinction 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 observable in Antiquity. 65

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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 precedence (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 chronologically 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 orientation. 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 66

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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 paucity 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 demonstrate 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 document. 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 67

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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 identify 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 descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Illuminator. He further contends for a second century date for Apoc. Adam based upon inscriptional 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 68

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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 representative 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 independent 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 providence 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 dependence; (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 methodological 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 conclusion 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 demonstrable 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 70

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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 confusion 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 existence 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 evidence 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 existence 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 particular “part” or feature of what was once considered the Gnostic religious phenomenon. 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 71

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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 special 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  crucial 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 theological 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 convergence 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 century proved a significant hermeneutical space in which postulations and traditions were forged into a distinctive Gnostic school of thought. 72

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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 73

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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 foreign 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 something 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 hermeneutical problems keep demanding our attention and solution.

REFERENCES Askeland, Christian. 2014. “A Fake Coptic John and its Implications for the ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’.” Tyndale Bulletin 65 (1): 1–​10. Bauer, Walter. 1971. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (eds. and transl. Robert A. Kraft et al.). Philadelphia: Fortress. Original German edition, 1934. Brakke, David. 2010. The Gnostics:  Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buckley, Jorunn J. 2006. The Great Stem of Souls:  Reconstructing Mandaean History. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. 74

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— Ancient pre-Christian “Gnosticisms” — Bull, Christian H., Liv I. Lied, and John D. Turner (eds.). 2012. Mystery and Secrecy in the Nag Hammadi Collection and Other Ancient Literature: Ideas and Practices: Studies for Einar Thomassen at Sixty. Leiden: Brill. Bultmann, Rudolf. 1925. “Die Bedeutung der neuerschlossenen mandäischen und manichäischen Quellen für das Verständnis des Johannesevangeliums.” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 24: 100–​45. Burns, Dylan. 2016. “Providence, Creation, and Gnosticism According to the Gnostics.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24 (1): 55–​79. Cameron, Ron, and Arthur J. Dewey. 1979. The Cologne Mani Codex (P. Colon. inv. nr. 4780) “Concerning the Origin of His Body.” Missoula, MT: Scholars Press. Colpe, Carsten. 1961. Die religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Darstellung und Kritik ihres Bildes vom gnostischen Erlösermythus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Conner, Miguel. 2011. Voices of Gnosticism. Dublin: Bardic Press. Davies, Stevan. 2011. Interview: “Stevan Davies on the First Christian Heretics and Visionaries.” Miguel Conner. Voices of Gnosticism. Dublin: Bardic Press: 9–​22. Desjardins, Michel. 1994. “Yamauchi and Pre-​Christian Gnosticism.” Wendy E. Helleman (ed.). Hellenization Revisited:  Shaping a Christian Response within the Greco-​Roman World. Lanham, MD: University Press of America: 63–​7. —​—​—​2005. “Rethinking the Study of Gnosticism.” Religion & Theology 12 (3): 370–​84. Drecoll, Volker H. 2013. “Martin Hengel and the Origins of Gnosticism.” Kevin Corrigan and Tuomas Rasimus (eds.). Gnosticism, Platonism and the Late Ancient World: Essays in Honour of John D. Turner. Leiden: Brill: 139–​65. Ehrman, Bart D. 2004. Truth and Fiction in “The Da Vinci Code.” New  York:  Oxford University Press. Hartog, Paul A. (ed.). 2015. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christian Contexts: Reconsidering the Bauer Thesis. Eugene, OR: Pickwick. Hedrick, Charles. 1980. The Apocalypse of Adam:  A Literary and Source Analysis. Chico, CA: Scholars Press. Jonker, Erastus. 2014. “Defining Gnosticism after the Publication of the Gospel of Judas.” Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 40 (2): 301–​20. King, Karen L. 2003. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. —​—​—​2005. “The Origins of Gnosticism and the Identity of Christianity.” Antti Marjanen (ed.). Was There a Gnostic Religion? Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society: 103–​20. —​—​—​ 2006. The Secret Revelation of John. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —​—​—​2014. “ ‘Jesus said to them, “My wife …” ’ A New Coptic Papyrus Fragment.” Harvard Theological Review 107 (2): 131–​59. Koester, Helmut. 1990. Ancient Christian Gospels:  Their History and Development. Philadelphia: Trinity. —​—​—​ 2007. From Jesus to the Gospels:  Interpreting the New Testament in Its Context. Minneapolis: Fortress. Köstenberger, Andreas J., and Michael J. Kruger (eds.). 2010. The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity. Wheaton: Crossway. Layton, Bentley. 1987. The Gnostic Scriptures:  A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions. New York: Doubleday. —​—​—​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: 334–​50. Logan, Alastair H. B. 1996. Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy: A Study in the History of Gnosticism. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. 75

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— Carl B. Smith II — —​—​—​ 2006. The Gnostics: Identifying an Early Christian Cult. London: T. & T. Clark. Lüdemann, Gerd. 2003. “Appendix I:  On the Problem of Pre-​Christian Gnosticism.” Idem. Primitive Christianity: A Survey of Recent Studies and Some New Proposals (trans. John Bowden). New York: T. & T. Clark: 147–​62. Original German edition, 2002. —​ —​ —​2005. “Did Gnosticism Ever Exist?” Antti Marjanen (ed.). Was There a Gnostic Religion? Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society: 121–​32. Lupieri, Edmundo. 2002. The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Luttikhuizen, Gerard P. 2006. Gnostic Revisions of Genesis Stories and Early Jesus Traditions. Leiden: Brill. MacRae, George W. 1978a. “Nag Hammadi and the New Testament.” Barbara Aland (ed.). Gnosis: Festschrift für Hans Jonas. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: 144–​57. —​—​—​ 1978b; 1988. “The Apocalypse of Adam (V,5). Introduced and translated by George W.  MacRae.” James M. Robinson (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Library in English. San Francisco: Harper & Row: 277–​8. Marjanen, Antti (ed.). 2005. Was There a Gnostic Religion? Helsinki:  Finnish Exegetical Society. —​ —​ —​2008. “Gnosticism.” Susan A. Harvey and David G. Hunter (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 205–​11. Markschies, Christoph. 2003. Gnosis:  An Introduction (trans. John Bowden). London:  T. & T.  Clark. First German edition, Die Gnosis, was published in 2001; 3rd edn. Munich: Beck, 2010. McKechnie, Paul. 2001. The First Christian Centuries:  Perspectives on the Early Church. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity. Meyer, Marvin (ed.). 2007. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures:  The International Edition. New York: HarperOne. —​—​—​2011. Interview: “Marvin Meyer on Judas the Heroic Priest and Gnostic Philosophy.” Miguel Conner. Voices of Gnosticism. Dublin: Bardic Press: 183–​99. Morard, Françoise (ed.). 1985. L’Apocalypse d’Adam (NH V,5). Québec:  Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Pagels, Elaine. 2003. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New York: Random House. —​—​—​2011. Interview: “Elaine Pagels on Understanding Gnosticism.” Miguel Conner, Voices of Gnosticism. Dublin: Bardic Press: 135–​48. Parrott, Douglas M. 1988. “The Apocalypse of Adam (V,5), Edited by Dougls [sic] M. Parrott.” James M. Robinson (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Library in English. San Francisco: Harper & Row: 278. Pearson, Birger. 1990. Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress. —​—​—​2005. “Gnosticism as a Religion.” Antti Marjanen (ed.). Was There a Gnostic Religion? Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society: 81–​101. —​—​—​ 2007. Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. Minneapolis: Fortress. Perkins, Pheme. 1993. Gnosticism and the New Testament. Minneapolis, MN:  Augsburg Fortress. Perrin, Nicholas. 2007. Thomas, the Other Gospel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Pétrement, Simone. 1990. A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism (trans. Carol Harrison). San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Ramelli, Ilaria. 2014. “Gnosis  –​Gnosticism.” Angelo Di Berardino (ed.). Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic: vol. 2: 139–​47. Rasimus, Tuomas. 2009. Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking: Rethinking Sethianism in Light of the Ophite Evidence. Leiden: Brill. Roberge, Michel. 1988. “The Paraphrase of Shem (VII,1), Introduced by Michel Roberge.” James M. Robinson (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 3rd edn. San Francisco: Harper & Row: 339–​41. 76

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— Ancient pre-Christian “Gnosticisms” — —​—​—​ 2007. “The Paraphrase of Shem (VII,1), Introduced and Translated by Michel Roberge.” Marvin Meyer (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition. New York: HarperOne: 437–​71. Robinson, James M. (ed.). 1977. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 1st edn. San Francisco: Harper & Row. —​—​—​ (ed.). 1988. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 3rd edn. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Robinson, Thomas A. 1988. The Bauer Thesis Examined:  The Geography of Heresy in the Early Christian Church. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Rudolph, Kurt. 1995. “Geheimnis und Geheimhaltung in Gnosis und Manichäismus.” Hans G. Kippenberg and Guy G. Stroumsa (eds.). Secrecy and Concealment: Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions 65. Leiden: Brill: 265–​87. Schenke, Hans-​Martin. 1981. “The Phenomenon and Significance of Gnostic Sethianism.” Bentley Layton (ed.). The Rediscovery of Gnosticism:  Volume 2:  Sethian Gnosticism. Leiden: Brill: 588–​616. Scopello, Madeleine. 2007. “The Revelation of Adam NHC V,5, Introduced by Madeleine Scopello.” Marvin Meyer (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition. New York: HarperOne: 343–​5. Segal, Alan. 1977. Two Powers in Heaven:  Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism. Leiden: Brill. Sevrin, Jean-​Marie. 1986. Le dossier baptismal séthien. Études sur la sacramentaire gnostique. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Smith II, Carl B. 2004. No Longer Jews:  The Search for Gnostic Origins. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. —​—​—​2015. “Post-​Bauer Scholarship on Gnosticism(s).” Paul A. Hartog (ed.). Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christian Contexts. Eugene, OR: Pickwick: 60–​88. Stanton, Graham N., and Nicholas Perrin. 2013. “Q.” Joel B. Green, Jeannine K. Brown, and Nicholas Perrin (eds.). Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. 2nd edn. Downers Grove: InterVarsity: 711–​18. Turner, John D. 2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval; Louvain and Paris: Peeters. —​—​—​2007. “Sethian Gnosticism:  A Revised Literary History.” Nathalie Bosson and Anna Boud’hors (eds.). Actes du huitième congrès international d’études coptes, Paris, 28 juin –​3 juillet 2004: Volume 2. Leuven: Peeters: 899–​908. Williams, Michael A. 1996. Rethinking “Gnosticism”:  An Argument for Dismantling of a Dubious Category. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —​—​—​2005. “Was There a Gnostic Religion? Strategies for a Clearer Analysis.” Antti Marjanen (ed.). Was There a Gnostic Religion? Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society: 55–​79. Wisse, Frederik. 1970. “The Redeemer Figure in the Paraphrase of Shem.” Novum Testamentum 12: 130–​40. —​—​—​ 2000. “Introduction to VII,1, The Paraphrase of Shem.” James M. Robinson (ed.). The Coptic Gnostic Library:  A Complete Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Volume 4. Leiden: Brill: 15–​23. Yamauchi, Edwin. 1970. Gnostic Ethics and Mandaean Origins. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press. —​—​—​ 1978. “The Apocalypse of Adam, Mithraism, and Pre-​Christian Gnosticism.” Jacques Duchesne-​Guillemin (ed.). Études Mithraiques. Actes du 2e Congrés International, Téhéran, du 1er au 8 septembre 1975. Téhéran: Bibliothèque Pahlavi; Leiden: Brill: vol. 4: 537–​63. —​ —​ —​1979. “Pre-​ Christian Gnosticism in the Nag Hammadi Texts?” Church History 48: 129–​41. 77

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— Carl B. Smith II — —​—​—​ 1983. Pre-​Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Proposed Evidence. 2nd edn. Grand Rapids: Baker; 1st edn. 1973. —​—​—​1988. “History-​of-​Religions School.” Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and James I. Packer (eds.). New Dictionary of Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity: 308–​9. —​ —​ —​1997. “The Issue of Pre-​ Christian Gnosticism Reviewed in Light of the Nag Hammadi Texts.” John Turner and Anne McGuire (eds.). The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical Literature Commemoration. Leiden: Brill: 72–​88. —​—​—​2005. “Elchasaites, Manichaeans, and Mandaeans in the Light of the Cologne Mani Codex.” Glenn A. Carnagey, Sr., Glenn Carnagey, Jr., and Keith N. Schoville (eds.). Beyond the Jordan: Studies in Honor of W. Harold Mare. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock: 49–​60.

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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 tradition 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 corroboration of Jewish-​Gnostic effects. The trouble is, however, these Jewish mystical 79

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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 temporarily 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 structure 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 80

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– 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 prominently Pearson (1990; cf. 2004), to focus more on Egypto-​Alexandrian Judaism as Gnosticism’s key source. Here Jewish mentalities incorporated various if highly relevant (Hellenistic) strands. Philo Judaeus (d. ca. 50 CE) philosophized about Creation in a Platonizing vein, yet was disturbed by antinomian Jews disregarding all religious ceremonies, heretics (or mīnīm as they appear in the Talmud) whom Rudolph (1967: 116), following Friedländer’s cue, reckoned as “Jewish Gnostics.” Philo himself 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). 81

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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 numerological 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 “characteristic 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 cultural 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 rebellion (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 82

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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 philosophia (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 persuading 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 provide 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 derivation. 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 apocalyptic, 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, preserving 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). 83

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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 otherwise 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 differently. 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 sometimes 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 literature 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 conventionally 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)! 84

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The conflict between the forces of light and darkness, a dualistic motif, is a recognizable stress common to Gnostic and Qumranite thought, drawing “the distinction” 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 literature 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 hinterland 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 85

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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 certainly 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 mystical 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 preoccupation 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 significantly, 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 acculturative 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 86

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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.

REFERENCES Alexander, Philip. 1992. “The Fall into Knowledge: The Garden of Eden/​Paradise in Gnostic Literature.” Paul Morris and Deborah Sawyer (eds.). A Walk in the Garden:  Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden. Sheffield: JSOT: 91–​104. Berchman, Robert. 1984. From Philo to Origen:  Middle Platonism in Transition. Chico, CA: Scholars. Bietenhard, Hans. 1951. Die himmlische Welt im Urchristentum und Spätjudentum. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Bóid, Rory. 1990. [Review of] “Z. Ben-​Hayyim, Tibåt Mårqe.” Bibliotheca Orientalis 57 (5–​6): 736–​9. Casadio, Giovanni. 1999. “From Hellenistic Aiōn to Gnostic Aiōnes.” Dieter Zeller (ed.). Religion im Wandel der Kosmologien. Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 175–​90. Dalbert, Peter. 1954. Die Theologie des hellenistisch-​ jüdischen Missionsliteratur unter Ausschluss von Philo und Josephus. Hamburg: Reich. Daniélou, Jean. 1964. The Theology of Jewish Christianity (trans. John Baker). London: Darton, Longman & Todd. DeConick, April. 2013. “Who is Hiding in the Gospel of John? Reconceptualizing Johannine Theology and the Roots of Gnosticism.” April DeConick and Grant Adamson (eds.). Histories of the Hidden God: Concealment and Revelation in Western Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical Traditions. Durham: Acumen: 13–​29. Deutsch, Nathaniel. 1995. The Gnostic Imagination: Gnosticism, Mandaeism, and Merkabah Mysticism. Leiden: Brill. 87

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— G a r r y W.   T r o m p f — Fossum, Jarl E. 1985a. The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origins of Gnosticism. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. —​—​—​1985b. “The Origin of the Gnostic Concept of the Demiurge.” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 61: 142–​52. Franzmann, Majella. 1989. “Living Water: Mediating Element in Mandaean Myth and Ritual.” Numen 36: 156–​72. Friedländer, Moritz. 1898. Der vorchristliche jüdische Gnostizismus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gaster, Moshe. 1893. “Das Shiur Komah.” Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 37: 179–​85. Golb, Norman. 1995. Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran. New York: Scribner. Goodenough, Erwin R. 1935. By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. —​—​—​ 1962. An Introduction to Philo Judaeus. New York: Barnes & Noble. Grant, Robert. 1966. Gnosticism and Early Christianity. New York: Harper. Hilgenfeld, Adolf. 1890. “Der Gnostizismus.” Zeitschrift für wissenschafliche Theologie 33: 1–​63. Knibb, Michael (sel.). 1987. The Qumran Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lahe, Jaan. 2017. Gnosis und Judentum:  Alttestamentiche und jüdische Motive in der gnostischen Literatur und das Ursprungsproblem der Gnosis. Leiden: Brill. Lange, Armin, Meters, Eric, Reynolds, III, Bennie, and Randall Stylers (eds.). 2011. Light against Darkness:  Dualism in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and the Contemporary World. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Levi, Habib. 1956. Tarikh-​i Yahud-​i Iran. Tehran: Berukhim: vols. 1–​2. MacRae, George. 1987. Studies in the New Testament and Gnosticism. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier. Nasoraia, Brikha. 2004. “Christian and Mandaean Perspectives on Baptism.” [spec. issue of] Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56 (1–​4): 319–​47. Nasoraia, Brikha, and Garry Trompf. 2010. “Mandaean Macrohistory.” ARAM 22: 391–​425. Pearson, Birger. 1984. “Jewish Sources in Gnostic Literature.” Michael E. Stone (ed.). The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud. Leiden: Brill: vol. 2, pt. 2: 443–​81. —​—​—​ 1990. Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress. —​—​—​ 2004. Gnosticism and Christianity in Roman and Coptic Egypt. Edinburgh:  T. & T. Clark. Pfeiffer, Robert. 1949. History of New Testament Times. London: Black. Quispel, Gilles. 1969. “Gnosis.” Vox Theologica 39: 27–​35. —​—​—​1997. “The Asclepius:  From Hermetic Lodge in Alexandria to the Greek Eucharist and the Roman Mass.” Roelof van den Broek and Wouter Hanegraaff (eds.). Gnosis and Hermeticism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press: 69–​78. —​—​—​2000. “Hermes Trismegistus and The Origins of Gnosticism.” Roelof van den Broek and Cis van Heertum (eds.). From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme: Gnosis, Hermetism and the Christian Tradition. Amsterdam: Pelikaan: 145–​66. Robinson, James (dir). 1977. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Leiden: Brill. Rudolph, Kurt. 1960. Die Mandäer, vol. 1:  Prolegomena:  Das Mandäerproblem. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. —​—​—​ 1965. Theogonie, Kosmogonie und Anthropogonie in den mandäischen Schriften. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. —​ —​ —​1967. “Randerscheinungen des Judentums und das Problem der Entstehung des Gnostizismus.” Kairos 9: 105–​23. 88

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— The Jewish background to “Gnosticism” — Schäfer, Peter. 2011. The Origins of Jewish Mysticism. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. Schenke, Hans-​ Martin. 1980. “Die jüdische Melchisedek-​ Gestalt als Thema der Gnosis.” Karl-​Wolfgang Tröger (ed.). Altes Testament, Frühjudentum, Gnosis. Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt: 111–​36. Scholem, Gershom. [1962] 1991. On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. New York: Schocken. Segal, Alan F. 1977. Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism. Boston and Leiden: Brill. Smith II, Carl. 2004. No Longer Jews:  The Search for Gnostic Origins. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. Stone, Michael E. 1980. Scriptures, Sects and Visions: A Profile of Judaism from Ezra to the Jewish Revolts. London: Collins. —​—​—​ 2018. Secret Groups in Ancient Judaism. Oxford and New  York:  Oxford University Press. Tröger, Karl-​Wolfgang. 1973. “Die hermetische Gnosis.” Karl-​Wolfgang Tröger (ed.). Gnosis und Neues Testament. Gütersloh: Mohn: 97–​119. Trompf, Garry. 1971. “The Conception of God in Hebrews 4:12–​ 13.” Studia Theologica 25: 123–​32. —​—​—​1999. “When was the First Millenarian Movement? Qumran and the Implications of Historical Sociology.” Arvind Sharma (ed.). The Sum of our Choices: Essays in Honour of Eric J. Sharpe. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press: 230–​64. —​—​—​2002. “Introduction 1: The Long History of the Dead Sea Scrolls Scholarship.” [spec. issue of] Journal of Religious History 26 (2): 123–​44. Trudinger, Peter L. 2004. The Psalms of the Tamid Service: A Liturgical Text from the Second Temple. Leiden: Brill. Turner, John. 2002. “Time and History in Sethian Gnosticism.” Hans-​Gebhard Bethge et  al (eds.). For the Children, Perfect Instruction. Leiden: Brill: 203–​14. Tyloch, Witold. 1968. Aspekty Społeczne Gminy z Qumran. Warsaw: PWN. Wilson, Robert McL. 1958. The Gnostic Problem: A Study of the Relations between Hellenistic Judaism and the Gnostic Heresy. London: Mowbray. Wolfson, Harry. 1960. “The Pre-​existent Angel of the Magharians and al-​Nahāwadi.” Jewish Quarterly Review 11: 89–​106. Xeravits, Géza (ed.). 2010. Dualism in Qumran. London: T. & T. Clark. Yamauchi, Edwin M. 1973. Pre-​ Christian Gnosticism:  A Survey of Proposed Evidences. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock; London: Tyndale. —​ —​ —​1981. “Jewish Gnosticism? The Prologue of John, Mandaean Parallels, and the Trimorphic Protennoia.” Roloef van den Broek and Maarten Vermaseren (eds.). Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions presented to Gilles Quispel. Leiden: Brill: 467–​97.

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CHAPTER SIX

GNOSTIC MOTIFS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT Pheme Perkins

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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; 90

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(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 experience (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 psychic 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 mythological 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 enlightenment. 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 91

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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 92

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from the one portrayed in the synoptic gospels by reinforcing the opening proclamation 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 process 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 firstborn 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 93

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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 physical 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 cosmology 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 harmonious 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 94

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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 salvation” 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 emergence 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 95

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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 enlightenment 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 salvation, 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 auditory visions, whether entirely sincere or a bit of rhetorical sarcasm, provided opportunity 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. 96

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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: philosophical, 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 acknowledges 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 heavenly 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 counterpart 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 transformation, 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 formula 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 97

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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 resurrection 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. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 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 figures 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 terminology from the philosophical tradition as mentioned above. Irenaeus of Lyons (180 CE), in his “Exposure and Refutation of Knowledge (gnosis) Falsely So-​Called,” conventionally 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 100

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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 knowledgeable (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 content 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 mythology 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 101

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“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 century and the discovery or new awareness of manuscript evidence widened the application of the category “gnostic/​gnosticism” even further. For example, some now used the label also for extra-​Christian phenomena such as ancient Greco-​Egyptian literature 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 promote 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 “knowledge” 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 conscious 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 102

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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 “fundamentalist” 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), religious 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 “cumulative 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”/​“interpretive categories” used to “analyze and label modes of religious thought and practice” (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. 103

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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., alienation, 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 theorize 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 evidence 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. 104

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2. The important work of Birger Pearson is more grounded in close textual analysis and historical method than was Jonas’s, although Pearson does invoke typology. 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 tradition 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 dimension 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” special features also in certain heresiological accounts, such as Epiphanius’s accounts of the “Sethians” and “Archontics” (Panarion 39–​40), and above all, Irenaeus’s description 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 105

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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), presumably 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 tradition 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 unmistakable 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 themselves 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 conflation. 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 106

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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 “knowledge (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 ‘knowledge’ ” 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 analytical value ensues from building all of these features into something called “Gnosticism”? His fourth feature, “innovation and reinterpretation,” specifically 107

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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 salvation (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 “gnosticism” or “gnosis” as a category is actually appropriate, because the “unitary phenomenon 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 sometimes 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) tendency 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 distinction between a supreme God and the creator of the world. But a more pertinent observation is that when Markschies then presents “a history 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, 108

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though Markschies acknowledges that this notion is found in popular Platonic philosophy (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 spirituality 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); 109

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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” religion 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 dualistic 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” 110

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(Layton 1995: 334). He suggested that “Gnosticism” be defined as an “inductive category” (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 lecture 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 category (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 mystical 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 111

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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 original 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 112

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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 themselves “gnostics,” but in the common noun sense of “persons capable of knowledge,” 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 pertinent 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 salvation, followed one of two lifestyles: fanatical asceticism or the opposite, wild licentiousness –​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 century and onward that in retrospect created a singularity of message (“Christianity”) in what are now New Testament writings  –​“the fabrication of Christianity that 113

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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 certainly 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 similarities 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 feature 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 fundamentally 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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REFERENCES Arnal, William. 2011. “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’ and the Second-​Century Invention of Christianity.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23: 193–​215. BeDuhn, Jason D. 2000. The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bloom, Harold. 1992. “New Heyday of Gnostic Heresies.” New York Times, April 26. Brakke, David. 2010. The Gnostics:  Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buckley, Jorunn J. 2002. The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Copenhaver, Brian P. (ed.). 1992. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English translation, with notes and introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeConick, April D. 2016. The Gnostic New Age:  How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today. New York: Columbia University Press. Desjardins, Michel R. 1990. Sin in Valentinianism. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Doresse, Jean. 1960 (1958). The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics: An Introduction to the Gnostic Coptic Manuscripts Discovered at Chenoboskion. New York: Viking Press. Grimstad, Kirsten J. 2002. The Modern Revival of Gnosticism and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Harnack, Adolf. 1901 (1893). History of Dogma, vol. 1. London: Williams & Norgate. Havrda, Matyáš, Hušek, Vít, and Jana Plátová (eds.). 2012. The Seventh Book of the Stromateis: Proceedings of the Colloquium on Clement of Alexandria (Olomouc, October 21–​23, 2010). Leiden: Brill. Jenott, Lance 2011. The Gospel of Judas: Coptic Text, Translation, and Historical Interpretation of the ‘Betrayer’s Gospel. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Jonas, Hans. 1963. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon Press. —​—​—​ 1964 (1934). Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Teil I:  Die mythologische Gnosis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kasser, Rodolphe, and Gregor Wurst (eds.). 2008. The Gospel of Judas, together with the Letter of Peter to Philip, James, and a Book of Allogenes:  Critical Edition. Washington DC: National Geographic Society. King, Karen L. 2003. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Layton, Bentley. 1987. The Gnostic Scriptures:  A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. —​—​—​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 Press: 334–​50. Lee, Philip J. 1987. Against the Protestant Gnostics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lieu, Samuel N.  C. 1992. Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Lilla, Salvatore R.  C. 1971. Clement of Alexandria:  A Study in Christian Platonism and Gnosticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Litwa, David (trans. and ed.). 2016."Introduction" to Refutation of all Heresies. Atlanta: SBL: xxvii–​liii. Markschies, Christoph. 2003. Gnosis: An Introduction (trans. John Bowden). London: T. & T. Clark.

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— Michael A. Williams — Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, Marvin. 2007. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures. New York: HarperCollins. Meyer, Marvin, and James M. Robinson (eds.). 2008. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures:  The Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred Gnostic Texts. New York: HarperOne. Pagels, Elaine. 1979. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage Books. Pearson, Birger A. 1994. “Is Gnosticism a Religion?” 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, 3th-​8th September, 1990. Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider: 105–​14. —​—​—​2005. “Gnosticism as a Religion.” Antti Marjanan (ed.). Was there a Gnostic Religion? Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht: 81–​101. —​—​—​ 2007. Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Pétrement, Simone. 1990. A Separate God:  The Christian Origins of Gnosticism. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Robinson, James M. (ed.). 1988. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. San Francisco: Harper & Row. —​—​—​ (ed.). 2000. The Coptic Gnostic Library: A Complete Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Leiden: Brill. Schenke, Hans-​Martin. 1974. “Das sethianische System nach Nag-​Hammadi-​Handschriften.” Peter Nagel (ed.). Studia Coptica. Berlin: Akademie-​Verlag: 165–​73. —​—​—​1981. “The Phenomenon and Significance of Gnostic Sethianism.” Bentley Layton (ed.). The Rediscovery of Gnosticism: Proceedings of the International Conference on Gnosticism at Yale, New Haven, Connecticut, March 28–​ 31, 1978, vol. 2:  Sethian Gnosticism. Leiden: Brill: 588–​616. Schmidt, Carl. and Violet Macdermot (eds.). 1978. The Books of Jeu and the Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Smith, Geoffrey S. 2014. Guilt by Association:  Heresy Catalogues in Early Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1978. Map is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion. Leiden: Brill. Smith, Morton. 1981. “The History of the Term Gnostikos.” 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: 796–​807. Smith, Wilfred C. 1991 (1962). The Meaning and End of Religion. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Tite, Philip L. 2009. Valentinian Ethics and Paraenetic Discourse:  Determining the Social Function of Moral Exhortation in Valentinian Christianity. Leiden: Brill. Turner, John D. 1995. “Typologies of the Sethian Gnostic Treatises from Nag Hammadi.” Louis Painchaud and Anne Pasquier (eds.). Les textes de Nag Hammadi et le problème de leur classification: Actes du colloque tenu à Québec du 15 au 19 septembre 1993. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval; Louvain and Paris: Peeters: 169–​217. —​—​—​ 2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval; Louvain: Peeters. Voegelin, Eric. 1968. Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays. Chicago: H. Regnery Co. Völker, Walther. 1952. Der wahre Gnostiker nach Clemens Alexandrinus. Berlin:  Akademie Verlag; Leipzig: Hinrichs. Waldstein, Michael. 2000. “Hans Jonas’ Construct ‘Gnosticism’:  Analysis and Critique.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8: 341–​72. Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society:  An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New  York: Bedminster Press. Williams, Michael A. 1996. Rethinking “Gnosticism”:  An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 116

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— On ancient “Gnosticism” as problematic — —​—​—​2005a. “Sethianism.” Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen (eds.). A Companion to Second-​Century Christian ‘Heretics’. Leiden: Brill: 32–​63. —​ —— ​ ​2005b. “Was There a Gnostic Religion? Strategies for a Clearer Analysis.” Antti Marjanen (ed.). Was There a Gnostic Religion? Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: 5–​29. —​—​—​2013. “A Life Full of Meaning and Purpose: Demiurgical Myths and Social Implications.” Eduard Iricinschi, Lance Jenott, Nicola D. Lewis, and Philippa Townsend (eds.). Beyond the Gnostic Gospels:  Studies Building on the Work of Elaine Pagels. Tübingen:  Mohr Siebeck: 19–​59. —​—​—​2016. “Gnosticism Emergent: The Beginning of the Study of Gnosticism in the Academy.” April D. DeConick (ed.). Religion:  Secret Religion. Farmington Hills, MI:  Macmillan Reference USA: 3–​22. Wisse, Frederik. 1981. “Stalking Those Elusive Sethians.” 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: 563–​76.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

GENDER ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF ANCIENT GNOSTICISM Majella Franzmann

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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 subject. Raoul Mortley’s Womanhood (1981) focused on redressing the shortage of scholarship 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 generally 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 ascertain, 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) 118

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Mortley’s early work illustrated how androgyny represented the epitome of perfection, 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 division, 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 condition 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 119

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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 forgetfulness 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 heavenly 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 120

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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 earth, The woman followed , 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, virginal –​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 tendency 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 121

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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 enormously in their teachings and practices, these polarities and negative views were relatively 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 community 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 children 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 122

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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

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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 knowledge 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 124

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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, suspect 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 orthodoxy (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 themselves Gnostics” –​not his “Gnostici Barbelo” but the Carpocratians, whose determination 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 “progressive” 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 indifferent 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 125

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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 sarcastic 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 general 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 126

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condensation of spirit which entered Mary’s womb from above without deriving anything 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 (notwithstanding 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 ubiquitous 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 testimonies, together with the quotations in Epiphanius, that we rely for any alternative reconstruction of Marcion’s “New Testament.” 127

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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. 128

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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, unparalleled 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 mistaken 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 129

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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 himself augment our knowledge of this elusive figure. Thus he is at once more sympathetic 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 seduction 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 embellishment, 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 130

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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 variation 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 conversely 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 ecclesiastical witnesses:  it is likely enough that both Ptolemaeus and Valentinus wrote in different registers, sometimes expounding the whole of their system, sometimes practicing 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 sympathetic reading of Gnostic thought than selective paraphrases whose very faithfulness 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. 131

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— Mark Edwards — —​—​—​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. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 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 Dubious Category. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 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

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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 religious 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 enabling 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 tradition. 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 discontent with the perceived defects and inequalities in the sub-​intelligible world, an

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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 authoritative, 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 religious 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. 134

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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 hundred 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 135

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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 combination 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 philosophical 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 doctrine 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 136

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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 dialogue, 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: fifteen 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 traditional 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 heavenly 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 137

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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 originally 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 dialogue 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 monologue 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 martyrdom 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 heavenly 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 contemplative 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 138

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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 immanent 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 139

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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 metaphysically 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 paradoxical 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 140

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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 (perhaps 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 interpretations 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 uncomfortably 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 paradigmatic “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 absolutely unique and self-​directed supreme deity is excused from any responsibility for 141

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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 conflagration, 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 secondary 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 identified 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 142

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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 identified 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 143

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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 responsible 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 tripartite group of “classic gnostic” texts whose components can be distinguished by the artificial names “Ophite,” “Barbeloite,” and “Sethite,” designating originally independent 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 144

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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, especially 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. King, Karen L. 2005. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard 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. Rasimus, Tuomas. 2009. Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking: Rethinking Sethianism in Light of the Ophite Evidence. Leiden: Brill. Robinson, Gesine. 2004. Das Berliner “Koptische Buch” (P  20915):  Eine wiederhergestellte frühchristlich-​theologische Abhandlung. Leuven: Peeters. 145

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— Jo h n D .   Tu r n e r — 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. Schenke, Hans-​Martin. 1974. “Das sethianische System nach Nag-​Hammadi-​Handschriften.” 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 Category. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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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 compendium 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 147

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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 evidence, 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, incorruptible 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 “generation,” “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) 148

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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 destruction 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 heavenly 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 149

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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 personified 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 physical 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 potential thinking and self-​knowledge of the supreme deity (the Invisible Spirit) initially achieves full actuality in the person of his First Thought (Barbelo), whose intelligence 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 baptism) 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 individual Gnostic in the act of coming to know oneself by reenacting the myth of the vicissitudes of knowledge itself. 150

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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 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. 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. 151

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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 display 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 superficially 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 identified 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 intentional 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 152

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ascent to the level of the highest unknown deity, not to mention their use and development 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 transcendent 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 153

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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 contemplation 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 originally 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 mysticism 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 analogies 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. 154

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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. Rasimus, Tuomas. 2009. Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking: Rethinking Sethianism in Light of the Ophite Evidence. Leiden: Brill. Schenke, Hans-​Martin. 1974. “Das sethianische System nach Nag-​Hammadi-​Handschriften.” 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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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 monograph 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. 156

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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 propose 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 tendency 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 predecessor 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, 157

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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 doctrine (Grant 1979), and in particular Aristotelian sources of Basilides’s cosmogony (Bos 2000; 2005; 2011) and Stoic sources of his ethics (Löhr 1996). One characteristic 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 apocalyptic 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 158

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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 significant 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 education in Platonism and Stoicism of that period illustrates how Christianity used the 159

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resources of philosophy to establish a theological reflection in the Alexandrian tradition, 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 . Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary.” Manichaeism in Mesopotamia and the Roman East. Leiden: Brill: 203–​305. 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. 160

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— Basilides and the Basilidians — 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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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 generation 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 confident 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; 162

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Thomassen 2006: 23–​7). It is quite possible that Valentinus never composed a systematic 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 himself, 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 163

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Deep + Mingling Ageless + Union Self-producing + Pleasure Immobile + Blending Only-begotten + Happiness

Advocate + Faith Paternal + Hope Maternal + Love 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 incompletely 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 successively 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 164

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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 transcendent 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 precise soteriological significance of these events, however, is variously interpreted in the sources. Two main positions may be distinguished. According to the first, the 165

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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 corporeal 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 probably 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 redemption 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. 166

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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 herself 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 plausible that those leaders also offered instruction after the manner of the philosophical 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 167

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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 salvation. 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 distinctively 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 century, 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-​ 05.01.2011 in Berlin-​ Spandau. Louvain: Peeters: 113–​28. 168

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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, obviously its discovery within a cache containing many obviously Gnostic texts is crucial 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 communities well established to put them together textually, even under the leadership of 170

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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 interrogating 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 formidable 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 process of Thomas’s textual development. 171

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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 omnipresent 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 172

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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 dimension 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). 173

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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 plausibly had the opportunity to converse privately with her Master. Thomas’s Jesus evidently 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 canonical 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 communication 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).” 174

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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 originally 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 tradition 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 directly 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, announcing “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 175

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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, systematically and philosophically advocated the reasonable position of the female disciple 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 concept 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. 176

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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 religious 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 environment. 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.” The Journal of Religion 67 (2): 183–​202. 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 Hypostasis of the Archons, and Indexes. Leiden: Brill: 96–​128. Bearsley, Patrick. 1980. “Mary the Perfect Disciple: A Paradigm for Mariology.” Theological Studies 41: 461–​504. 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 Gospels. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press: 831–​4. 177

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— D a v i d   W.   K i m — 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 Thomas. Leiden: Brill. —​—​—​ 2001. Voices of the Mystics:  Early Christian Discourse in the Gospels of John and Thomas and Other Ancient Christian Literature. Sheffield:  Sheffield Academic Press; London: T. & T. Clark. —​—​—​ 2005. Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas:  A History of the Gospel and Its Growth. London: T. & T. Clark. 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. New York: Macmillan. Grenfell, Bernard, and Arthur Hunt (ed., trans, and comm). 1904. New Sayings of Jesus and Fragment of a Lost Gospel from Oxyrhynchus. London: Henry Frowde. Jackson, Blomfield. 1900. Twenty-​Five Agrapha or Extra-​Canonical Sayings of Our Lord. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York: E. & J.B. Yong & Co. Kim, David. 2009 [and forthcoming]. “The Thomasene Logia: The Genesis of a Jesus Tradition.” Doctoral diss., University of Sydney. Klauck, Hans-​Josef. 2003. Apocryphal Gospels (trans. Brian McNeil). London: T. & T. Clark. Kloppenborg, John. 1988. Q Parallels:  Synopsis, Critical Notes, and Concordance. Sonoma, CA: Polebridge. Koester, Helmut. 1990. Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development. London: SCM. Lambdin, Thomas. 1996. “The Gospel of Thomas (II, 2).” James Robinson (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Library in English (fourth revised edn.). Leiden: Brill: 124–​38. Layton, Bentley. 2000. A Coptic Grammar with Chrestomathy and Glossary: Sahidic Dialect. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Marjanen, Antti. 1996. The Woman Jesus Loved:  Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi Library and Related Documents. Leiden: E.J. Brill. —​—​—​1998a. “Women Disciples in the Gospel of Thomas.” Risto Uro (ed.). Thomas at the Crossroads: Essays on the Gospel of Thomas. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark: 89–​106. —​—​—​ 1998b. “Is Thomas a Gnostic Gospel?” Risto Uro (ed.). Thomas at the Crossroads: Essays on the Gospel of Thomas. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark: 107–​26. —​—​—​2006. “The Portrait of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas.” Jon M. Asgeirsson et al. (eds.). Thomasine Traditions in Antiquity: The Social and Cultural World of the Gospel of Thomas. Leiden: Brill: 209–​19. McGuire, Anne. 1999. “Women, Gender, and Gnosis in Gnostic Texts and Traditions.” Ross Kraemer and Mary D’Angelo (eds.). Women and Christian Origins. Oxford:  Oxford University Press: 257–​99. Mead, George. 1984. Pistis Sophia:  A Gnostic Miscellany (foreword by Richard Russell). Blauvelt, NY: Spiritual Science Library. Meyer, Marvin. 1985. “Making Mary Male: The Categories ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in the Gospel of Thomas.” New Testament Studies 31 (4): 554–​70. Pagels, Elaine. 1999. “Exegesis of Genesis 1 in the Gospels of Thomas and John.” Journal of Biblical Literature 118 (3): 477–​96. Patterson, Stephen. 1993. The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus. Sonoma, CA: Polebridge. —​—​—​ 2013. The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Origins. Leiden: Brill. Puech, Henri-​Charles. 1954. “Un logion de Jésus sur bandelette funéraire.” Bulletin de la Société Ernest Renan, N.S. 3: 6–​9. Riley, Gregory J. 1995. “Influence of Thomas Christianity on Luke 12: 14 and 5: 39.” Harvard Theological Review 88 (2): 229–​35. 178

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— Is the Gospel of Thomas gnostic? — Shish-​Halevy, Ariel. 1988. Coptic Grammatical Chrestomathy:  A Course for Academic and Private Study. Leuven: Peeters. Taylor, Charles. 1905. The Oxyrhynchus Sayings of Jesus Found in 1903 with The Sayings Called ‘Logia’ Found in 1897. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Uro, Risto. 1998. “Is Thomas an Encratite Gospel?” Risto Uro (ed.), Thomas at the Crossroads: Essays on the Gospel of Thomas. Edinburgh: T. &. T. Clark: 140–​62.

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THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS AND THE TCHACOS CODEX Garry W. Trompf and David W. Kim

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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, possibly through bad storage, even by having some stake driven through it (!), unfortunate 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 180

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“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 salvation 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 “necessary suffering” explained “many times before” (cf. Lk 24:25–​6), including that 181

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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, specifying 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. 182

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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 “sacrifice” 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 astrological 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 integrate 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 implication 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 183

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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 crucifixion 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 habitually 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 speculative 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 concentration 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 184

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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 completing 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 reassurance 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. Lundhaug, Hugo, and Lance Jenott. 2015. The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 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. 185

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— G a r r y W.   T r o m p f a n d D a v i d   W.   K i m — 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. Stroumsa, Gedaliahu. 1984. Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology. Leiden: Brill. 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. Turner, John D. 2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval; Louvain and Paris: Peeters. Wire, Antoinette C. 1990. “Allogenes: Introduction.” William W. Hedrick (ed.). Nag Hammadi Codices XI, XII, XIII. Leiden: E.J. Brill: 173–​91. Zaehner, Robert. 1955. Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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THE MANDAEANS: WRITINGS, RITUAL, AND ART Brikha H. S. Nasoraia

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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 countries) (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 usually 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 originally 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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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 188

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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 comparing 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 redemption 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. 189

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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,” promising “everlasting life to the soul.” Most water, though, was not “life-​giving”; it was 190

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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 primordial “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, specifically 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 eternally. 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) 191

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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 “boundaries” 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 equivalent 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 marvellous,” 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 special Mandaean feature comes with Ptahil, whose creation is imperfect and incomplete (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) 192

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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, everything 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 dramatically, 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 identified 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 193

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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’ inspirational 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 literal 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 proclivity; 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 194

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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 vividly 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 somewhere 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) 195

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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 constitute 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) mythologies, 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/​prehistory), 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 punishment 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 196

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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, heavenly 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 balancing” 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 possible, and thus structurally akin to Paul’s cosmic Christ.

REFERENCES Brandt, Wilhem. 1915. “Mandaeans.” James Hastings (ed.). Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark: vol. 8, 380–​93. Buckley, Jorunn. 1978. “Spirit Ruha in Mandaean Religion.” (Doctoral diss., University of Chicago), Chicago, IL. Buckley, Jorunn. 1989. “Why Once is not Enough:  Mandaean Baptism (Maṣbuta) as an Example of a Repeated Ritual.” History of Religions 29: 23–​34. Chwolsohn, Daniel A. 1856. Die Ssabier und das Ssabismus. St. Petersburg:  Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaft: vol. 2. 197

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— Brikha H. S. Nasoraia — Crangle, Edward, and Brikha Nasoraia. 2010. “Soul Food: The Mandaean Laufani.” ARAM Periodical 22: 97–​132. Deutsch, Nathaniel. 1999. Guardians of the Gate:  Angelic Vice Regency in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill. Drower, Ethel S. 1937. The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran: Their Cults, Customs, Magic, Legends, and Folklore. Oxford: Clarendon. —​—​—​ 1960. The Secret Adam: A Study of Naṣoraean Gnosis. Oxford: Clarendon. Franzmann, Majella. 1989. “Living Water: Mediating Element in Mandaean Myth and Ritual.” Numen 36: 156–​72. Gündüz, Şinasi. 1994. The Knowledge of Life: The Origins and Early History of the Mandaeans and their Relation to the Sabians of the Qur’an and to the Harranians. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Haardt, Robert (ed.). 1971. Gnosis: Character and Testimony (trans. James F. Hendry). Leiden: E.J. Brill. Lupieri, Edmondo. 2002. The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Macuch, Rudolf. 1965. Handbook of Classical and Modern Mandaic. Berlin: De Gruyter. Moscati, Sabatino. 1959. Lezioni di Linguistica Semitica. Rome: Università di Roma. Nasoraia, Brikha H.  S. (as Saed) 2000a. “Al-​ ehtefalat al-​ mandaeah /​The Mandaean Ceremonies.” Majid Fandi Al-​Mubaraki (ed.). Studies in Mandaeanism: History and Beliefs. Sydney: Al-​Mubaraki: 83–​99. —​—​—​(as Saed) 2000b. “Al-​mandaeyah wal-​takwin /​Mandaeism and Creation.” Majid Fandi Al-​Mubaraki (ed.). Studies in Mandaeanism. Sydney: Al-​Mubaraki: 101–​20. —​—​—​(as Saed) 2000c. “Khalq al-​ensan-​adam wa-​hawaa /​The Creation of Human, Adam and Eve.” Majid Fandi Al-​Mubaraki (ed.). Studies in Mandaeanism. Sydney: Al-​Mubaraki: 142–​71. —​—​—​ 2004a. “Naṣiruta:  Deep Knowledge and Extraordinary Priestcraft in Mandaean Religion.” Edward F. Crangle (ed.). Esotericism and the Control of Knowledge. Sydney: University of Sydney: 306–​60. —​—​—​(as Saed) 2004b. “Christian and Mandaean Perspectives on Baptism.” [spec. issue of] Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56 (1–​4): 319–​47. —​—​—​2005. “A Critical Edition, with Translation and Analytical Study of Diuan Qadaha Rba d-​Dmuth Kušţa.” Doctoral diss., University of Sydney, Sydney. —​—​—​2010a. “The Esoteric and Mystical Concepts of the Mandaean Naṣoraean Illustrated Scroll: The Scroll of the Great Creation of the Image/​Likeness of the Truth.” Doctoral diss., University of Sydney, Sydney. —​ —​ —​2010b. “The Mandaean Approach to Protecting the Human Soul from Defilement.” Edward F. Crangle (ed.). The Pathway to the Centre –​Purity and the Mind. Sydney: Dhammachai International Research Institute Inc.: 143–​69. —​—​—​2012. “Sacred Text and Esoteric Praxis in Sabian Mandaeism.” Bayram Çetinkaya (ed.). Religious and Philosophical Texts: Rereading, Understanding and Comprehending Them in the 21st Century. Istanbul: Sultanbeyli Belediyesi: vol. 1, 27–​54. —​—​—​ 2013a. “Mandaean Sacred Art.” ARAM Periodical 25 (1–​2): 463–​78. —​—​—​ 2013b. “An Investigation into Diwan Qadaha Rba D-​Dmut Kusta Copied by Yahia Ram Zihrun, Sabian Mandaean Priest.” ARAM Periodical 25 (1–​2): 401–​14. —​—​—​2013c. “Mystical Elements in Mandaean Sacred Art: A Brief Study of Folio 6 of the Secret Mandaean Scroll Diwan Qadaha Rba d-​Dmuth Kušţa.” The International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society (Vancouver) 2 (4): 33–​45. —​—​—​ 2017a. Mandaeism: History, Beliefs, Worship and Celebrations. Taipei: Weber. —​—​—​ 2017b. Mandaeism: A Key to Understanding the Mandaean Religion. Taipei: Weber. —​—​—​ 2018. The Mandaean Rivers Scroll (Diwan Nahrawatha):  An Analysis. New  York: Routledge. 198

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— The Mandaeans: writings, ritual, and art — Nasoraia, Brikha, and Edward Crangle. 2010. “The Asuta Wish Adam Kasia and the Dynamics of Healing in Mandaean Contemplative Praxis.” ARAM Periodical 22: 349–​90. Nasoraia, Brikha, and Garry Trompf. 2010. “Mandaean Macrohistory.” ARAM Periodical 22: 391–​425. Nöldeke, Theodor. 1875. Mandäische Grammatik. Halle: Waisenhaus. Rudolph, Kurt. 1960–​1961. Die Mandäer I-​II. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2 vols. —​—​—​ 1965. Theogonie, Kosmogonie und Anthropogonie in den mandäischen Schriften. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. —​—​—​ 1978. Mandaeism. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Segal, Judah B., and Erica Hunter. 2000. Catalogue of Aramaic and Mandaic Incantation Bowls in the British Museum. London: British Museum. Segelberg, Eric. 1958. Masbūtā:  Studies in the Ritual of the Mandaean Baptism. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell. 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 200

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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 special 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 revelation of Poimandres (Corpus Hermeticum [= CH] I) contains so many Jewish elements –​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 periodical 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 201

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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 hieroglyphic 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 additional 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 202

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author had access only to the Greek version, the Hebrew cannot have had any relevance 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 hesitate 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 203

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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 monistic 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 204

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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. 205

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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 initiation 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 inescapable 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 narcissistic 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.

REFERENCES Bousset, Wilhelm. 1914. “Review of J. Kroll, Die Lehren des Hermes Trismegistus. Münster i.W.:  Aschendorff, 1914.” Göttinger Gelehrter Anzeiger:  617–​ 755. Repr. in Bousset, Religionsgeschichtliche Studien, Leiden: Brill, 1960: 97–​191 (with additional footnotes). Büchli, Jörg 1987. Der Poimandres. Ein paganisiertes Evangelium. Tübingen:  J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). 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. 206

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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 information 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 particular 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). 208

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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 emanation 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 209

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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 210

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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 realities? 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 (compare 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 something with them after all.

The doctrine of the salvation Even though several details of their systems may vary, both enterprises, Plotinus’s articulate 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. 211

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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 “tragedy 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 harmonious 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 eternity of the world, the emanation activity being through and through an eternal phenomenon (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 necessarily 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” 212

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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 understandable, 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 contemplation, 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 213

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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 (forthcoming): 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 importance 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: 214

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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 intellectual handymen than doctrine thinkers, they show more freedom in the interpretation 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 philosopher and “scholar” on the one side, and some Gnostic celebrants and free-​spirited 215

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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.

REFERENCES Armstrong, Arthur H. (trans.). 1966–​1988. Plotinus:  Enneads, vols. I–​VII. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chiaradonna, Riccardo. 2005. “La dottrina dell’anima non discesa in Plotino e la conoscenza degli intelligibili.” Eugenio Canone (ed.). Per una storia del concetto di mente. Rome: Leo S. Olschki Editore: 27–​50. D’Ancona, Cristina. 2003. Plotino. La discesa dell’anima nei corpi (Enn. IV 8[6]‌). Plotiniana arabica (Pseudo-​teologia di Aristotele, capitoli 1 e 7; Detti del sapiente greco). Padova: Il Poligrafo. Ferroni, Lorenzo, and Jean-​Marc Narbonne. 2012. Plotin, Œuvres complètes, vol. I. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. —​—​—​ (forthcoming). Plotin, Œuvres complètes, Traités 30–​33, II, vol. 3.  Paris:  Les Belles Lettres. Linguiti, Alessandro. 2001. “Plotino sulla felicità dell’anima non discesa.” Aldo Brancacci (ed.). Antichi e moderni nella filosofia di età imperiale: Atti del colloquio internazionale, Roma, 21–​23 settembre 2000. Napoli: Bibliopolis: 213–​36. Mahé, Jean-​Pierre, and Paul-​Hubert Poirier (eds.). 2007. Écrits Gnostiques: La bibliothèque de Nag Hammadi. Paris: Gallimard. Mazur, Zeke. 2018. Introduction and Commentary to Plotinus’ Treatise 33 (II 9)  Against the Gnostics and Related Studies. Edited by Francis Lacroix and Jean-​Marc Narbonne. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Merlan, Philip. 1969. Monopsychism, Mysticism, Metaconsciousness: Problems of the soul in the Neoaristotelian and Neoplatonic tradition. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Meyer, Marvin (ed.). 2007. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures. New York: HarperOne. Narbonne, Jean-​Marc 2008. “L’énigme de la non-​descente partielle de l’âme chez Plotin: la piste gnostique/​ hermétique de l’ὁμοούσιος.” Laval théologique et philosophique 64 (3): 691–​708. —​—​—​2014. “Matter and Evil in the Neoplatonic Tradition.” Pauliina Remes and Svetla Slaveva-​Griffin (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism. London and New York: Routledge: 231–​44. Poirier, Paul-​Hubert. 2012. “À propos de la νεῦσις dans les textes de Nag Hammadi.” Laval théologique et philosophique 68 (3): 619–​26. Schniewind, Alexandrine. 2003. L’éthique du sage chez Plotin:  Le paradigme du Spoudaios. Paris: Vrin. Szlezák, Thomas A. 1979. Platon und Aristoteles in der Nuslehre Plotins. Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co. Turner, John D. 2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval; Louvain and Paris: Peeters. Unger, Dominic J., and John J. Dillon (trans.). 1992. St. Irenaeus of Lyon: Against the Heresies. Book 1. New York: Paulist Press.

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GNOSTIC ELEMENTS IN ANCIENT MAGICAL PAPYRI Malcolm Choat

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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 cosmogonical 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. 217

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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 understand 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. 218

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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 combinations 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 vocabulary 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 transmission 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 219

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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 overlapping 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 seemingly fused into one being in Meyer and Smith 1994: 129 (BL Or. 6794), an invocation 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 independent 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 luminaries 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 considerable variation –​have been transmitted together with their title. Yet there is little 220

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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 commonly 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 considerable 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 221

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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 overlapping 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” incorporating 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.

REFERENCES Betz, Hans D. (ed.). 1992. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells. 2nd edn. Chicago. Brashear, William M. 1991. Magica Varia. Brussels: Fondation Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth. —​—​—​1995. “The Greek Magical Papyri: An Introduction and Survey; Annotated Bibliography (1928–​ 1994).” Wolfgang Haase (ed.). Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Berlin: De Gruyter: II 18.5: 3380–​4. Burns, Dylan (in press a). “Magical, Coptic, Christian: The Great Angel Eleleth and the ‘Four Luminaries’ in Egyptian Literature of the First Millennium C.E.” Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott (eds.). The Nag Hammadi Codices in the Context of Fourth-​and Fifth-​Century Christianity in Egypt. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. —​—​—​(in press b). “The Nag Hammadi Codices and Graeco-​Egyptian Magical and Alchemical Literature.” Hugo Lundhaug and Christian Bull (eds.). The Nag Hammadi Codices as Monastic Books. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Choat, Malcolm, and Iain Gardner. 2013. A Handbook of Ritual Power in the Macquarie Collection (P.Macq. I 1). Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. 222

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— Gnostic elements in ancient magical papyri — Daniel, Robert W., and Franco Maltomini 1990–​ 1992. Supplementum Magicum, 2  vols. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. De Bruyn, Theodore. 2013. “A Late Witness to Valentinian Devotion in Egypt?” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 18: 120–​33. De Haro Sanchez, Magali. 2010. “Le vocabulaire de la pathologie et de la thérapeutique dans les papyrus iatromagiques grecs. Fièvres, traumatismes et ‘épilepsie’.” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 47: 131–​53. Dickie, Matthew W. 2001. Magic and Magicians in the Greco-​Roman World. London and New York: Routledge. Dieleman, Jacco. 2005. Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-​Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian ritual (100–​300 C.E.). Leiden: Brill. Dosoo, Korshi. 2016a. “Baktiotha:  The Origin of a Magical Name in P.Macq. I  1.” Paolo Buzi, Alberto Camplani, and Federico Contardi (eds.). Coptic Society, Literature and Religion from Late Antiquity to Modern Times. Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Rome, September 17th-​22nd, 2012, and Plenary Reports of the Ninth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Cairo, September 15th-​19th, 2008. Louvain: Peeters: II, 1237–​44. —​—​—​2016b. “A History of the Theban Magical Library.” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 53: 251–​74. Evans, Erin M. 2015. The Books of Jeu and the Pistis Sophia as Handbooks to Eternity: Exploring the Gnostic Mysteries of the Ineffable. Leiden: Brill. Faraone, Christopher A., and Dirk Obbink (eds.). 1991. Magika hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fowden, Garth. 1993. The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frankfurter, David. 1998. Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —​—​—​ 2017. Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gardner, Iain. 2016. “The Sethian Context to a Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power (= P.  Macquarie I).” Tomasz Derda, Adam Łatjar, and Jakub Urbanik (eds.). Proceedings of the 27th International Congress of Papyrology. Warsaw:  Fundacja im. Rafała Taubenschlaga: 755–​66. Griffith, Francis L., and Herbert Thompson. 1904–​1909. The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden, 3 vols. London: H. Grevel & Co. Jackson, Howard M. 1989. “The Origin in Ancient Incantatory ‘Voces Magicae’ of Some Names in the Sethian Gnostic System.” Vigiliae Christianae 43: 69–​79. Jasnow, Richard, and Karl-​ Theodor Zauzich. 2005. The ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth:  A Demotic Discourse on Knowledge and Pendant to the Classical Hermetica. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Kotansky, Roy. 1980. “Two Amulets in the Getty Museum:  A Gold Amulet for Aurelia’s Epilepsy:  An Inscribed Magical Stone for Fever, ‘Chills’, and Headache.” J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 8: 181–​8. Kropp, Angelicus. 1930–​1931. Ausgewählte koptische Zaubertexte, 3 vols. Brussels: Fondation Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth. Kühner, Ruth. 1980. “Gnostische Aspekte in den koptischen Zaubertexten.” Bulletin de la Société d’égyptologie de Genève 4: 61–​4. Lundhaug, Hugo, and Lance Jenott. 2015. The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. MacCoull, Leslie S. B. 1987. “P. Cair. Masp. II 67188 Verso 1–​5: The Gnostica of Dioscorus of Aphrodito.” Tyche: Beiträge zur alten Geschichte, Papyrologie und Epigraphik 2: 95–​7. 223

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— Malcolm Choat — McBride, Daniel R. 1997. “Gnostic and Traditional Egyptian Religious Affinities in the Magical Papyri.” Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 27: 42–​59. Meyer, Marvin. 1996. The Magical Book of Mary and the Angels (P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 685). Heidelberg: C. Winter. —​—— ​ ​2004. “Mary Dissolving Chains in Coptic Museum Papyrus 4958 and Elsewhere.” Mat Immerzeel and Jacques van der Vliet (eds.). Coptic Studies on the Threshold of a New Millennium: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Coptic Studies, Leiden, 27 August  –​2 September 2000. Louvain, Paris, and Dudley, MA:  Peeters:  I, 369–​76. Meyer, Marvin, and Paul Mirecki. 2001. Ancient Magic and Ritual Power. Leiden: Brill. Meyer, Marvin, and Richard Smith. 1994. Ancient Christian Magic:  Coptic Texts of Ritual Power. San Francisco: Harper. Mirecki, Paul, and Marvin Meyer (eds.). 2002. Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World. Leiden: Brill. Pernigotti, Sergio. 1995. “La magia copta:  i testi.” Wolfgang Haase (ed.). Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Berlin: De Gruyter: II 18.5, 3685–​730. Preisendanz, Karl. 1973–​1974. Papyri Graecae Magicae, 2 vols. 2nd edn. Rev. Albert Henrichs. Stuttgart: Teubner. Ritner, Robert K. 1995. “Egyptian Magical Spells under the Roman Empire:  The Demotic Spells and their Religious Context.” Wolfgang Haase (ed.). Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Berlin: De Gruyter: II 18.5, 3333–​79. Rossi, Francisco. 1894. “Di alcuni manoscritti copti che si conservano nella Biblioteca nazionale di Torino.” Memorie della Reale Accademia delle scienze di Torino 44: 21–​70. Willis, William H., and Klaus Maresch. 1998. The Archive of Ammon Scholasticus of Panopolis, vol. 1: The Legacy of Harpocration. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

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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 substantially 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 225

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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 evidence 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 difficult 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 modeling 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  commonly 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 226

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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 sectarian 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 everything (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 227

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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 communities, 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 development 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 228

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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 miraculous 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  development 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 anything 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 perhaps 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 229

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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 organization 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 230

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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 tragedy 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 religious 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 telescoping 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 farewell 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 tragedy 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 231

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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 complex 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 carnality 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 worldwide 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 activities; 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): 232

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However, they claim that not only do the powers of God effect this purgation 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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 233

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE MANICHAEAN PATH TO SALVATION Jason David BeDuhn

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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 pantheistic 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 antecedent 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 twentieth 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 typological definitions of “Gnosticism” were formulated a century ago, and its association 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 235

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accounts that represented Manichaean teachings through the lens of Western philosophical 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 mythology, 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 existence, 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 separate 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 boundaries 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. 236

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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 contrast to Gnostic cosmological views (BeDuhn 2016). Manichaean cosmology, then, represents a detailed schematic of the cosmos as a mechanism of salvation, knowledge 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 237

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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 concentration 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 subsequent 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 fragmentation 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 conventional 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 individual 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 238

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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, 239

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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 consequently 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 oversimplification to equate this passage of the soul’s substance through time with reincarnation, as that term typically is used. Ordinary humans, even Manichaean laypeople, do not experience metempsychosis at death, that is, their intact souls do not transmigrate 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 240

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or soul within the body, the Light Mind puts it into shape, adds complementary qualities, 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 separate 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 241

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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 processing 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 242

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point of the individual’s death. Only the Manichaean elect attain sufficient solidification 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 accompanies 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. 243

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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 distinction, as even the tiniest fragment of divine light possesses the personified qualities typically associated with human individuality, responsibility, and the potential tragedy 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” transmitted to the divine realm. At the human level of this vast cosmic project, knowledge –​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 history here; it entailed not only the careful transmission of Mani’s original texts and 244

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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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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, “understood 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 especially 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, 246

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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 repeatedly, and especially the Light-​Nous (Light Mind), the main protagonist in the microcosmic 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 accommodative 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/​knowledge 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), 247

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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 purified lands (cols. 147–​83; Tractatus: 39–​46). The actions of the Light-​Nous are comparable 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 gradually 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 248

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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 “original 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 argument 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

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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 emancipation 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 250

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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 understand,” 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 essential 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 distinctly 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 251

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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

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ommonly taken as a Zoroastrian “heresy,” the accentuation of Zurvan (divinity of Time) as generating the two Great Spirits, the beneficent Ohrmazd and malevolent 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 scholarly controversy (starting from Spiegel 1871–​1878: vol. 2, 175–​87), and one impinging 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 253

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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 possible 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 organization 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 outwardly accommodating, incorporating those famed “Chaldaic”-​Babylonian astrological 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 religion 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 254

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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 influence” this Zurvanite thrust “came to exert on many Gnostic faiths” and their preoccupation 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 recognizing 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 255

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of Zoroastrianism or a special deviation from it in Sasanian times, it certainly did present problems for the Mazdaist mainstream believers, since it put in doubt the positive value of Creation by Ohrmazd. How better to handle Hellenistic-​looking philosophizing 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 eventually 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 concern 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, 256

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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 communistic 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 esoteric, 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 symbolism 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 alternative to the mainstream, indeed in contradiction to the “established church,” it became political. Kavad renounced his affiliation and left the Mazdakites to a horrible 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 original 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 257

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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. Zaehner, Robert. 1955. Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​ 1961. The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

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CHRISTIAN GNOSIS: FROM CLEMENT THE ALEXANDRIAN TO JOHN DAMASCENE Doru Costache

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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 experience, 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 phenomenon 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 philosophical 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 –​perhaps 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. 259

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Clement was concerned with perfection, which, as depicted for the Alexandrine intelligentsia, he construed complexly. Perfection was unreachable without the curricular 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 primarily 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 profound 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. 260

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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 knowledge 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 purification, 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 transformation. 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 pedagogy 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 purification (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 epistemological 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, knowledge 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 261

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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 providence; realizing God’s eternity and the creation’s ephemeral condition; and contemplating 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 substance 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 depiction 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 262

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a more consistent interest in writing on gnosis and perfection. He affirmed an inextricable connection between lofty discourse, an experientially authenticated knowledge, 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 purification. The genuine teacher was the accomplished gnostic who, like Moses, has undertaken 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 unanimously 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 nevertheless 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 mountaineer “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. 263

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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 present circumstances (23). Nevertheless, the advanced possessed a comprehensive grasp of reality (16). This holistic perception corresponded to an existential accomplishment 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 progress 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 legitimize 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 worthwhile 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 “spiritual 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 typically 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 essentially 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 266

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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 communion (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 perfection. 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 culminating 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 doctrinal 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, 267

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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, therefore, “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 inferiority 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 conviction echoed Clement’s and was somehow at variance with the monastic commonplace 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 pretend 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 268

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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 trajectory 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.

REFERENCES Adrahtas, Vassilis. 2003. “Theology as Dialectics and the Limits of Patristic Thought in the Post-​modern World: A Reading into St John of Damascus.” Phronema 18: 109–​27. Beeley, Christopher A. 2008. Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blowers, Paul M. 2012. Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​2015. “Mystics and Mountains: Comparing Origen’s Exegesis of the Transfiguration and Gregory of Nyssa’s Exposition of the Sinai Theophany.” Phronema 30 (2): 1–​18. —​—​—​ 2016. Maximus the Confessor:  Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bradshaw, David. 2010. “Maximus the Confessor.” Lloyd P. Gerson (ed.). The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: vol. 2, 813–​28. Bucur, Bogdan G. 2015. “Hierarchy, Eldership, Isangelia:  Clement of Alexandria and the Ascetic Tradition.” Doru Costache, Philip Kariatlis, and Mario Baghos (eds.). Alexandrian Legacy: A Critical Appraisal. Newcastle-​upon-​Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2–​45. Casiday, Augustine. 2002. “ ‘All Are from One’: On St. Antony the Great’s Protology.” Studia Monastica 44 (2): 207–​27. —​—​—​ 2013. Reconstructing the Theology of Evagrius Ponticus: Beyond Heresy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Choufrine, Arkadi. 2002. Gnosis, Theophany, Theosis:  Studies in Clement of Alexandria’s Appropriation of His Background. New York: Peter Lang. Cooper, Adam G. 2015. “Spiritual Anthropology in Ambiguum 7.” Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 360–​77. Costache, Doru. 2013a. “Meaningful Cosmos: Logos and Nature in Clement the Alexandrian’s Exhortation to the Gentiles.” Phronema 28 (2): 107–​30. —​—​—​2013b. “Christian Worldview: Understandings from St Basil the Great.” Doru Costache and Philip Kariatlis (eds.). Cappadocian Legacy: A Critical Appraisal. Sydney: St Andrew’s Orthodox Press: 97–​126. DelCogliano, Mark. 2010. Basil of Caesarea’s Anti-​Eunomian Theory of Names:  Christian Theology and Late-​Antique Philosophy in the Fourth Century Trinitarian Controversy. Leiden: Brill. Lilla, Salvatore R.  C. 1971. Clement of Alexandria:  A Study in Christian Platonism and Gnosticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 269

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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 commentary 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 antagonistic to the Christians and more “pro-​establishment” (Porphyry, Kata Christianōn apud Macarius Magnes, Apocrit. 2–​4; Iamblichus, De mysteriis Aegyptiorum), also dissociating 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 271

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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” (illuminating 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 disparate 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 traditionalist 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), 272

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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 maintain 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 interpretations 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” providing 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 273

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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, 274

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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 275

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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 artificial “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 metempsychosis (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 positively 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/​messenger 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 276

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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) purposely 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 277

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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 himself, 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, understandably, 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 278

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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 descend 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 epithet 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). 279

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REFERENCES Barnard, Leslie W. 1974. The Graeco-​Roman and Oriental Background of the Iconoclastic Controversy. Leiden: Brill. Bowersock, Glen. 1978. Julian the Apostate. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyce, Mary, and Frantz Grenet. 1991. A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 3: Zoroastrianism under Macedonian and Roman Rule. Leiden: Brill. Bray, John. 1997. Gallienus: A Study in Reformist and Sexual Politics. Adelaide: Wakefield. Burns, Dylan. 2014. Apocalypse of the Alien God:  Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Chadwick, Henry. 1976. Priscillian of Avila:  The Occult and the Charismatic in the Early Church. Oxford: Clarendon. Cirillo, Luigi. 2009. “The Mani Logion:  ‘The Purification that was Spoken about is That which comes through Gnosis’ (CMC 84, 9–​ 12).” Jason BeDuhn (ed.). New Light on Manichaeism:  Papers from the Sixth International Congress on Manichaeism. Leiden: Brill: 45–​59. Denzey, Nicola. 2005. “Baidaisan of Edessa.” Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen (eds.). A Companion to Second-​Century Christian ‘Heretics.’ Leiden: Brill: 159–​84. Dodds, Eric R. 1965. Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Drecoll, Volker. 2010. “The Greek Text behind the Parallel Sections in Zostrianos and Marius Victorinus.” John Turner and Kevin Corrigan (eds.). Plato’s Parmenides and its Heritage, vol. 1: History and Interpretation from the Old Academy to Later Platonism and Gnosticism. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature: 195–​212. Drijvers, Han. 1966. Bardaisan of Edessa. Assen: Van Gorcum. —​—​—​1981. “Odes of Solomon and Psalms of Mani: Christians and Manichaeans in Third-​ Century Syria.” Roelof van den Broek and Maarten Vermaseren (eds.). Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions: Presented to Gilles Quispel. Leiden: Brill: 117–​30. Fontaine, Petrus. 1993–​ 1995. The Light and the Dark:  A Cultural History of Dualism. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben: vols. 8–​10. Franzmann, Majella. 2005. “A Complete History of Early Christianity: Taking the ‘Heretics’ Seriously.” Journal of Religious History 29 (2): 117–​28. Gardner, Iain. 2013. “Once More on Mani’s Epistles and Manichaean Letter-​ Writing.” Zeitschrift für Anitikes Christentum 17 (2): 291–​314. Garsoïan, Nina. 1967. The Paulician Heresy:  A Study of the Origin and Development of Paulicianism in Armenia and the Eastern Provinces of the Byzantine Empire. The Hague: De Gruyter. Gibbons, Kathleen. 2012. “Nature, Law and Human Freedom in Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of the Countries.” David Brakke, Deborah Deliyannis, and Edward Watts (eds.). Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity. Farnham, UK: Ashgate: 43–​55. Haenchen, Ernst. 1956. “Aufbau und Theologie des ‘Poimandres’.” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 53: 149–​91. Halsberghe, Gaston H. 1972. The Cult of Sol Invictus. Leiden: Brill. Hamilton, Janet, and Bernard Hamilton, with Yuri Stoyanov (eds.). 1995. Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World c. 650–​c. 1450. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hanegraaff, Wouter, and Jeffrey Kripal. 2011. Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism. New York: Fordham University Press. Jarry, Jacques. 1968. Hérésies et factions dans l’Empire Byzantin du IVe au VIIe siècle. Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale. Jonas, Hans. 1963. The Gnostic Religion. Boston: Beacon. 280

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— G a r r y W.   T r o m p f — —​—​—​2000. “Introduction.” Catherine Barry et  al. (eds.), Zostrien (NH VIII,1). Louvain: Peeters: 116–​39. —​—​—​2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval; Louvain and Paris: Peeters. van Bladel, Kevin. 2017. From Sasanian Mandaeans to Ṣābians of the Marshes. Leiden: Brill. van den Broek, Roelof. 2013. The Gnostic Religion in Antiquity. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. van der Vliet, Jacques. 2005. “Fate, Magic and Astrology in Pistis Sophia Chaps. 15–​21.” Anthony Hilhorst and George H. van Kooten (eds.). The Wisdom of Egypt: Jewish, Early Christian, and Gnostic Essays in Honour of Gerard P. Luttikhuizen. Leiden: Brill: 519–​36. Wood, Philip. 2010. ‘We Have No King but Christ.’ Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c. 400–​585). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zaehner, Robert. 1955. Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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JÑĀNA: GNOSTIC TENDENCIES IN EARLY HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM Gregory Bailey

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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 scholastic 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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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 vicarious, 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 preeminent signifier designating a condition of knowledge capable of liberating its agent 284

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from ongoing rounds of rebirth, while also enabling a person to lead a contented tranquil 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 indication that jñāna was not central to different religious (primarily ascetic) paths and tendencies focused on liberating knowledge. Note how samyagjñāna “correct knowledge,” and mithyājñāna “false knowledge” as the opposite of liberating power/​process, 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 identity 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 –​specifically 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 fundamental 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 everywhere 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 285

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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/​subject 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, 286

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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 recurring 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 literature. One passage (6.20) summarizes what is found in earlier Upaniṣads while also 287

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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 distinction 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 philosophies 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 dualities, 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 meditation 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 288

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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 gradually 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 condition 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 complex 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. 289

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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 intuitive 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 tradition. 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, knowledge 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 existentially one understands them. It is gained either by a flash of insight henceforth 290

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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 existence 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 knowledge; 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 omniscient, 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 reflection 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 291

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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 manifestation 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 nonexistence, 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 intellectual 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 traditional 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 292

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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

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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 conception 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 hierarchically 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 universal 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 liberating 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 categories 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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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, knowledge 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 knowledge 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 295

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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 (ignorance, 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 faculties. The first two links of the Twelvefold Causality “ignorance” and “volitional activity” are conceptually understood as the actual cause of the six worlds of transmigration, 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 substantial 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 perfectly 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 condition 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 297

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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 production 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 identification 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 faculties, 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 298

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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 existence 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 existence, 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 299

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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 liberation, 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 negation 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 diligent 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 300

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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 revelation 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 existence 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. 301

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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 framework 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.” 302

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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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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

QUESTIONS OF GNOSTIC INFLUENCE ON EARLY ISLAM John C. Reeves

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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 307

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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 impartation 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 isolation 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 oppositions 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 centuries 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 308

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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 frequently 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 contemporary 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 multiple 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 crucifixion 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 309

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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 sporadically 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 religious 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 permanently 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 structural 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 sequential 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 310

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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 identifies 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 reportedly 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 311

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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 plausible 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 application 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 circulate 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 312

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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 possibly 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 certain pseudepigraphic apocalypses, and he proceeds to provide his reader with several 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 further:  ‘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, 313

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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 successfully correlated with much earlier Gnostic works like the Apocryphon of John, the Hypostasis of the Archons, and the Books of the Strangers which were independently 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 recognizable gnostic works continued to circulate in the Muslim East during the final centuries 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 valuable 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 penetrate certain regions of Roman and Persian Mesopotamia; local “baptist” communities 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 information 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 314

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interests within contemporary Muslim society at the beginning of the second millennium 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 certainly provide some critical evidence for the regional survival of factions, ideologies, and perhaps most importantly, scriptures and interpretative traditions that are intimately 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 discoveries 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 315

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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 knowledge 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 prominent 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 certain 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, especially Manichaeism. As in the theosophical teachings associated with Mughīra, God has an anthropoid “body of light” which manifests in pentadal extensions termed five 316

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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 adversarial 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 esoteric 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 indeterminate number of Biblically based and allied fringe movements that flourished in certain 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 317

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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 “cosmology.” 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 themselves or their close associates, and have in most cases undergone oral transmission before being recorded. And although the authorship and dating of individual 321

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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 likewise 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 fragmentary 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 creation 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 322

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“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 community. 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 understand 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 relationship 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). 323

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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 systematically 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 unwillingness 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 spiritual 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 324

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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, introduce 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 absolute 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 generic term used for reincarnation, especially as found in heresiographic literature, is 325

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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 lifetime (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 herewith 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 reincarnation because in contemporary Greek thought, human souls underwent metempsychosis 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 326

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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.

REFERENCES Abu Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā (eds.). 2006–13. Silsilat al-​turāth al-​ʿalawī. Lebanon: Dār li ajl al-​maʿrifa, 13 vols. Amir-​Moezzi, Mohammad Ali. 1994. The Divine Guide in Early Shiʿism:  The Sources of Esotericism in Islam (trans. David Streight). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. —​—​—​ 2011. The spirituality of Shiʿi Islam. London: I.B. Tauris. Amir-​ Moezzi, Mohammad Ali, and Christian Jambet. 2014. Qu’est-​ ce que le shî’isme? Paris: Ed. du Cerf. Asatryan, Mushegh (ed. and trans.). 2015. “An Early Shiʿi Cosmology: Kitāb al-​ashbāh wa l-​ azilla and its Milieu.” Studia Islamica 110: 1–​80. —​—​—​ 2017. Controversies in Formative Shiʿi Islam: The Ghulat Muslims and their Beliefs. London: I.B. Tauris. —​—​—​2016. “Shiite Underground Literature Between Iraq and Syria: The Book of Shadows and the History of the Early Ghulat.” Tzvi Langermann and Robert Morrison (eds.). Texts in Transit in the Medieval Mediterranean. University Park: Penn State University Press. Asatryan, Mushegh, and Dylan Burns. 2016. “Is Ghulāt Religion Islamic Gnosticism? Religious Transmissions in Late Antiquity.” Mohammad Ali Amir-​Moezzi et al. (eds.). L’ésoterisme Shiʿite: ses racines et ses prolongements. Turnhout: Brepols. Burns, Dylan. 2014. Apocalypse of the Alien God:  Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dakake, Maria. 2007. Charismatic Community: Shiʿite Identity in Early Islam. Ithaca: State University of New York Press. Gerami, Mohammad. 2012. Nakhustin munāsibāt-​i fikrī-​yi tashayyuʿ. Tehran:  Imam Sadiq 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 328

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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 experience. Difficulties in assessing the role of “gnosis” in Sufism arise from related difficulties 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 experience 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 spiritual 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 329

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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 indelible 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/​demiurge 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 330

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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 engagement 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 fundamental 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 experience 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]) 331

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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 experience –​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 particular, 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 process, 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 dispute 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 literature, 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 biographical 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 332

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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 demonstrate 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 contractual 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 333

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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 comprehension and language (Conference, ll. 4272–​90). The passage points to the deeper mysteries 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 334

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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 realities 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 mysticism 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 categorical 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 considerations 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, 335

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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 development 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 development in Islamic history, and specifically among the mystics of Islam, exhibits experiential 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 territories (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 solitary Muslims, in the first instance, prior to the subsequent cross-​pollination of ideas through the momentum of Hellenism in ninth-​century Baghdad.

REFERENCES Andrae, Tor. 1987. In the Garden of Myrtles. (Trans. Birgitta Sharpe). New  York:  State University of New York. Corbin, Henri. 1970. Oeuvres philosophiques et mystiques d’al-​Suhrawardī. Tehran: Institut Franco-​Iranien. Halm, Heinz. 1982. Die islamische Gnosis. Die extreme Schia und die ʿAlawiten. Zurich: Artemis. —​—​—​1996. “The Cosmology of the pre-​Fatimid Ismāʿīliyya.” Farhad Daftary (ed.). Mediaeval Ismaʿili History and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massignon, Louis. 1922 (1954). Essai sur les origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste. Milani, Milad. 2013. Sufism in the Secret History of Persia. London: Acumen. —​—​—​ 2018. Sufi Political Thought. London: Routledge. Nicholson, Reynold. 1994. Studies in Islamic Mysticism. Richmond: Curzon. Schimmel, Annemarie. 1975. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill:  The University of North Carolina Press. Walbridge, John. 1999. The Leaven of the Ancients. New York: SUNY Press. Walbridge, John, and Hossein Ziai. 1999. “Translators’ Introduction.” The Philosophy of Illumination:  Shihab al-​ Din Suhrawardi. Provo, UT:  Brigham Young University Press: xv–​xxxvii. 336

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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 diversity 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 scholarship, 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 classical 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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Ismaili thought. From early on, the Ismailis had concerned themselves with intellectual issues, including the mysteries of the Creation and the sacred history of humankind 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 elegant 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 intellectually 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 tradition 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. 338

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Within an extremely hostile environment, the Nizari state did not produce a substantial 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 communities 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 339

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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 doctrine was Gnostic from early on, representing a “new Gnostic” tradition in Shiʿi Islam, based on esoteric and initiatory knowledge (deriving from the Greek gnosis, transmitted 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 centuries 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 intellect could not apprehend them by its own independent efforts. Only through the spiritual 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 occasionally 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 340

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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 dissimulation, 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 knowledge 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 341

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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 eschatological 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 religious 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 esoteric 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 342

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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 indefinitely 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, mythological 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 dignitaries 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). 343

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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 distance 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 doctrine 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 conception 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 metaphysical 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 philosophical Ismailism, which was basically Gnostic, yet Neoplatonically so, in its cosmological and soteriological import (Walker 1994; De Smet 2012). In the Neoplatonized Ismaili cosmology, God is described as absolutely transcendent, beyond human comprehension, beyond any name or attribute, beyond 344

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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 fundamental 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 original 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 existence towards his ultimate Source and Creator, in quest for the bliss in an eternal afterlife. 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 hierarchy 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. 345

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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, notably 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 doctrinal 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 conception 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. 346

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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. London: I.B. Tauris. 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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 91–​115. 347

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— Farhad Daftary — —​—​—​ 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

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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 inheritance 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 necessarily 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 individual 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. 349

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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 religion 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 metaphysical 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 symbolic 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 nascent 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 numerical 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 350

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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 septenary 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 consciousness 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 prominent 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, 351

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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 opposition 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 origination 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 process 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 receptacle 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 sufficient 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 simplicity (Al-​Quaylli, Khabāyyah, pp.  503–​5). “Verily, verily, I  say unto you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). 352

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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 trajectory 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 concentric 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 intermediary 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 difficulties 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. 353

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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 practitioner 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 psychological comfort and turns into an obstacle to inner awakening. The fourth admonition 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 practice of the virtues, since metaphysical knowledge has moral concomitance, otherwise 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 354

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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 knowledge 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 allegorical 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 spiritual 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 355

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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 possibility adapted to the needs of different sectors of humanity. The Druze medieval commentator Abdul Ghaffar presents five reasons for reincarnation 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 perspective 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 356

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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 outward 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 knowledge 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 subjugation 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. Trompf, Garry, and Adnan Kasamanie. 1981. “The Druze and the Quaker: Reflections on the 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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GNOSTIC ELEMENTS IN YEZIDISM Victoria Arakelova and Garnik Asatrian

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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 fundamentally 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 distinctively 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 doctrine 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 358

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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; everything 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, particularly 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 emergence 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 formation. 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 ˇalwa ȷ (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 perception 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 359

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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) 360

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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 designate 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 ambivalent 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 361

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incarnation, use the Turkish word dun or Persian ˇāme ȷ (“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 celestial 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-​ˇȷ 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 originate 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 household 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 specific Gnostic system –​that of those Ophites, for instance, who extolled the paradisiacal 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 generally 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 signifying 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 364

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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 serpent. 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 profanation 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). 365

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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 communities, 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 celibacy, 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 composition 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 masculine” (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 doctrine 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 366

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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, generally, 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.

REFERENCES Ahmed, Sami. 1975. The Yazidis: their Life and Beliefs. Miami: Field Research Projects. Arakelova, Victoria. 2001. “Healing Practices among the Yezidi Sheikhs of Armenia.” Asian Folklore Studies 60 (2): 319–​28. —​ —​ —​2002. “Three Figures from the Yezidi Folk Pantheon.” Iran and the Caucasus 6 (1–​2): 57–​69. —​—​—​2004. “Notes on the Yezidi Religious Syncretism.” Iran and the Caucasus 8 (1): 19–​28. —​—​—​2006. “K istorii formirovaniya yezidskoj obščiny.” Iran-​Name:  Armenian Journal of Oriental Studies 40: 63–​6. —​—​—​2011a. “On Some Derogatory Descriptions of Esoteric Religious Groups.” Mediaeval and Modern Iranian Studies, Cahiers de Studia Iranica. Paris: Peeters: 33–​44. —​—​—​2011b. “The Yezidi Religion and the Heretic Milieu of the Region.” Nesim Doru (ed.). Idil: From the Past to the Future. Istanbul: Shirnak University: 261–​70. —​—​—​2015. “The Shibboleths of Heresies: On Some Essential Markers of the Near Eastern Non-​Dogmatic Milieu.” Anna Krasnowolska and Renata Rusek-​Kowalska (eds.). Studies on the Iranian World-​II: Medieval and Modern. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press: 119–​28. Asatrian, Garnik. 1998. Etyudy po iranskoj etnologii. Yerevan: Caucasian Centre for Iranian Studies. —​ —​ —​2007. “Foremother of the Yezidis.” Fereydun Vahman and Claus Pedersen (eds.). Religious Texts in Iranian Languages. Copenhagen:  Kongelige Danske Videnkabernes Selskab: 323–​8. Asatrian, Garnik, and Victoria Arakelova. 2014. The Religion of the Peacock Angel:  The Yezidis and their Spirit World. Routledge: New York. Asatrian, Garnik, and Nikolay Gevorgian. 1988. “Zaza Miscellany: Notes on some Religious Customs and Institutions.” Werner Sundermann et al. (eds.). A Green Leaf: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Jes P. Asmussen. Leiden: Brill: 499–​508. Bar-​Asher, Me’ir, and Arieh Kofski. 2002. The Nuşayrī-​’Alawīs Religion: An Enquiry into its Theology and Liturgy. Leiden: Brill. Bittner, Maximilian. 1913. Die heilige Bücher der Jeziden oder Teufelsanbeter (kurdisch und arabisch). Vienna: Akademie der Wussenschaften in Wien. Bois, Thomas. 1966. The Kurds. Beirut: Khayats. Boyce, Mary. 1979. The Zoroastrians. London: Routledge. Brashear, William. 1993. “Ein mithräischer Katechismus aus Ägypten in Berlin.” Antike Welt: Zeitschrift für Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte 1: 2–​19. Drower, Ethel. 1941. Peacock Angel. London: J. Murray. —​—​—​ 1962. Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran. Leiden: Brill. Duchesne-​Guillemin, Jacques. 1988. “On the Origin of Gnosticism.” Werner Sundermann et al. (eds.). A Green Leaf: Papers in Honour of Professor Jes P. Asmussen. Leiden: Brill: 349–​63. Eliade, Mircea. 1958. Patterns in Comparative Religion (trans. Rosemary Sheed). New York: Sheed and Ward. 367

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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 anachronistic. 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 beginning 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 369

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of Gnosticism (Scholem 1961: 3–​7, 35). Scholem admits that in reality Jewish mysticism 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 continuity 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 especially 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 concept 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 mystical 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 contemporary 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 description 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 370

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Ages. According to Scholem’s concept, in Kabbalah there are two opposing tendencies:  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 contrast, 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 observance 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 dominant to this day, although several alternative theories have been put forward. Antinomianism, proceeding from profound theological premises, invites a comparison 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 categories 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 371

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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 interpretation 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 righteous, 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 372

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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 influence 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 literature 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 373

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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 mysticism 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 transferring 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 participation in the Creation of the world (Urbach 1979: 184–​213). Apparently in many 374

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cases we are dealing with theological censorship, which suppressed the early demiurgic 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 cosmogony: “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 375

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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 complex 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 meaningful 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). 376

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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 apocalyptic 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 seventy 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 influential 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 377

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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 principle 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 378

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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.

REFERENCES Abrams, Daniel. 1997. Sexual Symbolism and Merkavah Speculation in Medieval Germany: A Study of the Sod ha-​Egoz Texts. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Alexander, Philip. 1984. “Comparing Merkavah Mysticism and Gnosticism:  An Essay in Method.” Journal of Jewish Studies 35: 1–​18. Anderson, Gary. 2000. “Ezekiel 28, the Fall of Satan, and the Adam Books.” Gary Anderson, Michael Stone, and Johannes Tromp (eds.). Literature on Adam and Eve:‎ Collected Essays. Leiden: Brill: 133–​47. Asatryan, Mushegh, and Dylan Burns. 2016. “Is Ghulat Religion Islamic Gnosticism? Religious Transitions in Late Antiquity.” Ali Amir-​Moezzi (ed.). Esotérisme shi’ite: ses racines et ses prolongements. Paris: Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études: 55–​86. Burns, Dylan. 2014. Apocalypse of the Alien God:  Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Chernus, Ira. 1982. Mysticism in Rabbinic Judaism:  Studies in the History of Midrash. Berlin: De Gruyter. Dan, Joseph. 1999. The “Unique Cherub” Circle: A School of Mystics and Esoterics in Medieval Germany. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Drower, Ethel. 1960. The Secret Adam: a study of Naṣoraean Gnosis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Farber-​Ginat, Asi. 1996. “The Husks Precede the Fruit –​On the Question of the Origin of Evil in the Early Kabbalah.” Eshel Beer Sheva 4: 118–​42 [Hebrew]. 379

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— Gnosticism and Kabbalah — —​—​—​ 2012a. Scattered Traditions of Jewish Mysticism: Studies in Ancient Jewish Mysticism in Light of Traditions from the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, Hellenistic Literature, Christian and Islamic Sources. Los Angeles: Cherub [Hebrew]. —​—​—​ 2012b. The Appearance on the High Priest:  Theophany, Apotheosis and Binitarian Theology From Priestly Tradition of the Second Temple Period Through Ancient Jewish Mysticism. Los Angeles: Cherub. —​—​—​ 2018. God, the Great Angel, and Satan: Studies in Jewish Angelology and Demonology. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute [Hebrew]. Scholem, Gershom. 1927. “The Traditions of R.  Jacob and R.  Isaac, sons of R.  Jacob ha-​ Kohen.” Madda’e ha-​Yahadut 2: 165–​293 [Hebrew]. —​—​—​1928. “Zur Frage der Entstehung der Kabbala.” Korrespondenzblatt des Vereins zur Gründung einer Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums [n.n.]: 4–​26. —​—​—​1931–​1932. “An Inquiry in the Kabbala of R. Isaac ben Jacob Hacohen.” Tarbiz 2–​ 3: 415–​42, 33–​62 (respectively). —​—​—​ 1961. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books. —​—​—​ 1969. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. New York: Schocken Books. —​—​—​ 1987. Origins of the Kabbalah (ed. Zwi Werblowsky). Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. —​—​—​ 1991. On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead:  Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. New York: Schocken Books. Séd, Nicolas. 1979. “Les douze hebdomades, le char de Sabaoth et les soixante-​douze langues.” Novum Testamentum 21: 156–​84. Segal, Alan. 1978. Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Early Christianity and Gnosticism. Leiden: Brill. Shahar, Shulamit. 1974. “Le Catharisme et le début de la cabale.” Annales 29: 1185–​1210. Shoemaker, Stephen J. 2003. The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, Miklós. 1983. Studies in Early Ismā‘īlism. Leiden: Brill. Stroumsa, Gedaliahu G. 1984. Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology. Leiden: Brill. —​—​—​1993. “Gnosis and Judaism in Nineteenth Century Christian Thought.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 2: 45–​62. Tishby, Isaiah. 1942. The Doctrine of Evil and the ‘Kelippah’ in Lurianic Kabbalism. Jerusalem: Magnes [Hebrew]. —​—​—​1955. “Gnostic Doctrines in Sixteenth-​Century Jewish Mysticism.” Journal of Jewish Studies 6: 146–​52. —​—​—​ (ed.). 1989. The Wisdom of the Zohar:  An Anthology of Texts. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 3 vols. Urbach, Ephraim. 1979. The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. Vallée, Gérard. 1981. A Study in Anti-​Gnostic Polemics: Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Epiphanius. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Wolfson, Elliot. 1990. “God, the Demiurge and the Intellect: On the Usage of the Word ‘Kol’ in Abraham Ibn Ezra.” Revue des Études Juives 144: 77–​111. —​—​—​ 1994. Through a Speculum that Shines:  Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —​—​—​1995. “Metatron and Shi‘ur Qomah in the Writings of Haside Ashkenaz Mysticism.” Karl-​Erich Grözinger and Joseph Dan (eds.). Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah. Berlin: De Gruyter: 60–​92.

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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 absolute 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 382

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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 language 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 hypothesis 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 themselves 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 relevant tracts) they were called Manichaeans. There were two strands of Bogomilism, however, of moderate and absolute 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 383

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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 information 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 384

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who were enticed by the lightening of their burdensome services and other excessive 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 shamelessly 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 385

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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 physical, 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 immaterial 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 beginning 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 386

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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 voluntarily 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. 387

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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 heretical, 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 document 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 BONS HOMMES, BONS CHRETIENS

“MR’SNI LJUDE” “KR’ST’JANI I KR’ST’JANICE KOI GREHA NE LJUBE,” “KR’ST’JANI I KR’ST’JANICE KOI SU PRAVE VERE APOSTOLSKE” “DOBRI MUŽJE” STROJNIK STARAC GOST DJED

BONI HOMINES DIACONUS FILIUS MINOR DFILIUS MAIOR EPISCOPUS

Figure 35.1  Bogomil and Cathar church offices compared 388

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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 themselves 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

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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 moderate 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 testimonies of Peter and Euthymius Zigabenus side-​by-​side we can plot the similarities: PRINCIPAL THEMES

MOVEMENTS

SATAN AS STEWARD FOR GOD THE FATHER SEDUCTION OF ANGELS: PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD SATAN’S PLEA TO GOD AFTER HIS FALL SATAN AS DEMIURGE DIVISION OF THE ELEMENTS BY SATAN

BOGOMILS ACC. TO ZIGABENOS, MODERATE CATHARS BOGOMILS ACC. TO ZIGABENOS, MODERATE CATHARS MODERATE CATHARS GNOSTICS, BOGOMILS, CATHARS BOGOMILS ACC. TO ZIGABENOS, MODERATE CATHARS MODERATE CATHARS

SATAN’S CREATION OF THE VISIBLE WORLD WITH GOD’S PERMISSION SATAN’S CREATION OF CELESTIAL BODIES SATAN’S CREATION OF THE STARS CREATION OF THE ATMOSPHERE CREATION OF THE HUMAN BODY PUTTING LIFE INTO HUMAN BODY

MODERATE CATHARS

MODERATE CATHARS CATHARS BOGOMILS, CATHARS 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

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MOVEMENTS

PROCREATION OF SOULS SATAN’S REIGN SATAN’S BOASTING HATRED OF THE CROSS REJECTION OF THE LAW OF MOSES CHRIST’S BIRTH

MODERATE CATHARS BOGOMILS, CATHARS GNOSTICS, THE APOCRYPHA PAULICIANS, BOGOMILS, CATHARS GNOSTICS, BOGOMILS, CATHARS GNOSTICS, PAULICIANS, BOGOMILS, CATHARS MODERATE CATHARS BOGOMILS, CATHARS

MARY AS AN ANGEL CONDEMNATION OF JOHN THE BAPTIST IDENTIFICATION OF JOHN THE BAPTIST WITH ELIJAH REJECTION OF BAPTISM WITH WATER

GNOSTICS, MODERATE CATHARS

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 subsequent 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 cardinal 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

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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

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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 underwent 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 continually 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, paradoxically, 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

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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 information 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 century 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 forcing 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 transitory 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 absolute 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 medieval 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: Cambridge University Press. 394

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— Bogomils and Cathars — 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. Truhelka, Ćiro. 1911. “Testament Gosta Radina.” Glasnik Zemaljskog muzeja Bosne i 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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— Zdenko Zlatar — —​ —— ​ ​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). Istanbul: Isis. Zerner, Monique (ed.). 2001. L’histoire du catharisme en discussion: le ‘concile’ de Saint-​Felix (1167). Nice: Centre d’études médiévales de Nice.

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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 concentrate 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

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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 spiritual 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 intermediate, “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, 398

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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 transmute 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 picture, 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 399

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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 energies, 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 treatise 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). 400

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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), probably 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 alchemical 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 setback 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 underground, 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). 401

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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 century, 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 alchemical 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 prevent influences of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, with its concepts of 402

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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 epistemic 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 mercury,” 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 corporeality 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 403

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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 foundation 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 completely 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 philosophical establishment, though even in its lost reputation, even deprecation as occultist, 404

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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 centuries (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 exoteric 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 willfully 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. 405

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— Pe t e r M a r s h a l l — 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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 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: University of Pennsylvania Press. 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. Yates, Frances. 1964. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul. —​—​—​ 1972. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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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 understand 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 philosophical 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 precisely, 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 knowledge 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 discursive 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 esotericism (in the sense, let us recall, of “esoteric movements of the modern West”). 409

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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 centuries 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 beginning of the nineteenth century, almost completely absent from the esoteric vocabulary, 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 pejorative 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 410

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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; however, 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 accompanied 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 philosophical and religious movements, including esotericism. Nonetheless, this semantic slippage does not appear to have taken place in a marked fashion before the beginning 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 concept 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 –​practical 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). 411

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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 positive. 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 introduction, 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 nineteenth century (notably that of Hegel), by way of Böhme in the seventeenth –​despite 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 tendency 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 412

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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 consideration 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.” 413

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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 interpretation 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 philosopher 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 414

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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 dogmatic 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 tradition 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 interrogate their reciprocal relationships, he develops the majority of his “Tombergian meditations”: mysticism is the experience of union with Nature, or with the transcendental 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; essentially, 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 415

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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 construct 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 ‘particular’ 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 416

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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, knowledge 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 psychological 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. 417

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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 characteristic 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 esotericism: 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 personalities, among whom properly called esotericists belonging to other families play a large rôle (Weor 2002; and see ch. 58). 418

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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 elements 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 419

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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 typological 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 transformation 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 several 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 certain 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). 420

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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 esotericism, 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 philosophy 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 “philosophical” a tendency to apply the term “gnosis” without necessarily giving it an otherwise 421

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“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 colloquium 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 specialty 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 international des 11 et 12 décembre 2008 à l’Institut de France. Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-​Lettres, 2009: 87–​112.

REFERENCES Abellio, Raymond. 1973. La Fin de l’esotérisme. Paris: Flammarion. —​—​—​ 1981. Approches de la Nouvelle Gnose. Paris: Gallimard. —​—​—​ 1989. Manifeste de la Nouvelle Gnose. Paris: Gallimard. Avens, Roberts. 1984. New Gnosis. Dallas, TX: Spring. Biès, Jean. 1987. Arts, gnose et  alchimie:  Trois sources de régénérescence. Paris:  Courrier du Livre. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. 1877. Isis Unveiled. [Repr.]:  Los Angeles:  The Theosophy Company. Bloom, Harold. 1996. Omens of Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. New York: Riverhead Books. Bonardel, Françoise. 1998. “Gnose (Occident Moderne).” Dictionnaire critique de l’ésotérisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France: 544–​8. Borella, Jean. 2007. Problèmes de Gnose. Paris: L’Harmattan. 422

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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 — Burns, Dylan. 2007. “Seeking Ancient Wisdom in the New Age.” Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (eds.). Polemical Encounters. Esoteric Discourse and its Others. Leiden: Brill: 253–​90. Couliano, Ioan. 1990. The Tree of Gnosis. Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism. San Francisco: Harper. Depraz, Nathalie, and Jean-​ François Marquet (eds.). 2000. La Gnose, une question philosophique. Pour une phénoménologie de l’invisible. Paris: Cerf. Ewers, Tilman. 1988. “C. G. Jung –​Psychologie und Gnosis.” Peter Koslowski (ed.). Gnosis und Mystik in der Geschichte der Philosophie. Zurich: Artemis: 328–​51. Faivre, Antoine. 2012. L’Esotérisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Gilly, Carlos. 1992.“Das Bekenntnis zur Gnosis von Paracelsus bis auf die Schüler Jacob Böhmes.” Gilles Quispel (ed.). De Hermetische Gnosis in de loop der eeuwen: Beschouwingen over de invloed van een Egyptische religie op de cultuur van het Westen. Baarn: Tirion: 400–​42. Goodrick-​Clarke, Clare, and Nicholas Goodrick-​Clarke. 2005. G.R.S. Mead And The Gnostic Quest. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Guénon, René. 1976. Mélanges. Paris: Gallimard. Hakl, Hans Thomas. 2005. “Fraternitas Saturni.” Wouter Hanegraaff et al. (eds.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill: 379–​82. Hammer, Olav. 2001. Claiming Knowledge. Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Leiden: Brill. Hanegraaff, Wouter. 1992a. “Esoterie, occultisme en (neo)gnostiek: historische en inhoudelijke verbanden.” Religieuze Bewegingen in Nederland 25: 1–​28. —​—​—​1992b. “A Dynamic Typological Approach to the Problem of ‘Post-​Gnostic’ Gnosticism.” Aries 19: 5–​44. —​—​—​1994. “The Problem of ‘Post-​Gnostic’ Gnosticism.” Ugo Bianchi (ed.), The Notion of ‘Religion’ in Comparative Research: Selected Proceedings of the XVI IAHR Congress. Rome: L’Erma: 625–​32. —​—​—​ 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture. Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Leiden: Brill. —​—​—​1998. “On the Construction of ‘Esoteric Traditions’.” Antoine Faivre and Wouter Hanegraaff (eds.). Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion. Louvain: Peeters: 11–​62. —​—​—​ 1999. “Gnosis II: Moderne.” Metzler Lexikon Religion. Stuttgart: Metzler: vol. 1: 506–​10. —​—​—​2007. “Gnosticism.” Kocku von Stuckrad (eds.). The Brill Dictionary of Religion. Leiden: Brill: vol. 2: 790–​98. —​ —​ —​2008a. “Reason, Faith, and Gnosis:  Potentials and Problematics of a Typological Construct.” Peter Meusburger et  al. (eds.). Clashes of Knowledge. Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Science and Religion. Dordrecht: Springer: 133–​44. —​—​—​2008b. “Altered States of Knowledge: The Attainment of Gnosis in the Hermetica.” The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 1: 128–​63. —​ —​ —​2009. “Kabbalah in Gnosis Magazine (1985–​ 1999).” Boaz Huss (ed.). Kabbalah and Contemporary Spiritual Revival. Beer-​ Sheva:  Ben-​ Gurion University of the Negev Press: 251–​66. —​—​—​2010. “Magnetic Gnosis: German Romantic Mesmerism and the Quest for Superior Knowledge.” Andreas Kilcher (ed.). Die Enzyklopädik der Esoterik: Allwissenheitsmythen und universalwissenschaftliche Modelle in der Esoterik der Neuzeit. Paderborn:  Wilhelm Fink, 2010. —​—​—​2015. “How Hermetic was Renaissance Hermetism?” Aries 15: 179–​209. Hoeller, Stephan. 2002. Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing. Wheaton: Quest Books. Introvigne, Massimo. 2005. “Rijckenborgh (Jan van).” Wouter Hanegraaff et  al. (eds.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill: 993–​4. 423

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— Antoine Faivre — Jonas, Hans. 1978. “Le Syndrome gnostique:  typologie d’une pensée, d’une imagination et d’une sensibilité.” La Religion gnostique. Le message du Dieu Étranger et les débuts du christianisme (trans. Louis Evrard). Paris: Flammarion: 442–​63. Jung, Carl. 1916 (1996). Les Sept sermons aux morts:  Le problème du quatrième. Paris: L’Herne. —​—​—​ 2009. Das rote Buch = Liber novus (ed. Sonu Shamdasani). Düsseldorf: Patmos. Koslowski, Peter. 1988a. “Philosophie, Mystik, Gnosis.” Peter Koslowski (ed.). Gnosis und Mystik in der Geschichte der Philosophie. Zurich: Artemis: 9–​14. —​—​—​1988b. “Franz von Baader. Spekulative Dogmatik als christliche Gnosis.” Peter Koslowski (ed.). Gnosis und Mystik in der Geschichte der Philosophie. Zurich: Artemis: 243–​59. —​—​—​ (ed.). 1988c. Gnosis und Mystik in der Geschichte der Philosophie. Zurich: Artemis. —​—​—​ (ed.). 1993. Die Philosophie, Theologie und Gnosis Franz von Baaders. Spekulatives Denken zwischen Aufklärung, Restauration und Romantik. Vienne: Passagen. —​—​—​ 2001. Philosophie der Offenbarung. Antiker Gnostizismus, Franz von Baader, Schelling. Paderborn: Schöningh. Laurant, Jean-​Pierre. 1992. L’Esotérisme chrétien en France au XIXe siècle. Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme. —​—​—​ 1993. L’Esotérisme. Paris: Cerf. Mahé, Jean-​Pierre, and Paul-​Hubert Poirier (eds.). 2007. Écrits gnostiques: La Bibliothèque de Nag Hammadi. Paris: Gallimard. McKnight, Stephen. 1995. “Eric Voegelin and the Changing Perspective on the Gnostic Features of Reality.” Robert Segal (eds.). The Allure of Gnosticism. The Gnostic Experience in Jungian Pyschology and Contemporary Culture. Chicago: Open Court: 126–​45. Merkur, Dan. 1993. Gnosis:  An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Mouravieff, Boris. 1961–​65. Gnôsis. Étude et commentaires sur la tradition ésotérique de l’orthodoxie orientale. Paris: La Colombe: 3 vols. Nasr, Hossein. 1981. Knowledge and the Sacred. New York: Crossroad. Needleman, Jacob (ed.). 1974. The Sword of Gnosis:  Metaphysics, Cosmology, Tradition, Symbolism. Baltimore: Penguin. Neugebauer-​Wölk, Monika. 2012. “Der Esoteriker und die Esoterik: Wie das esoterische im 18. Jahrhundert zum Begriff wird und seinen Weg in die Moderne findet.” Aries 10 (1): 217–​31. Pasi, Marco. 2005. “Ordo Templi Orientis.” Wouter Hanegraaff et  al. (eds.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Westerrn Esotericism. Leiden: Brill: 898–​906. Quispel, Gilles. 1988. “Inleiding.” Gilles Quispel (ed.). Gnosis –​de derde component van de Europese cultuurtraditie. Utrecht: HES: 9–​10. Ritman, Jost. 1988. “De universele gnosis. De homo universalis.” Gilles Quispel (ed.). Gnosis –​ de derde component van de Europese cultuurtraditie. Utrecht: HES: 167–​84. Roberts, Jane, and Robert Butts. 1972. Seth Speaks:  The Eternal Validity of the Soul. San Rafael, CA: Amber-​Allen. Rossbach, Stefan. 1996. “Gnosis, Science, and Mysticism: A History of Self-​Referential Theory Designs.” Social Science Information 35 (2): 233–​56. Ruyer, Raymond. 1974. La Gnose de Princeton. Des savants à la recherche d’une religion. Paris: Fayard. Schmitt, Heinrich Eugen. 1903. Die Gnosis. Grundlagen der Weltanschauung einer edleren Kultur. Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 2 vols. Schuon, Frithjof. 1957. Sentiers de Gnose. Paris: La Colombe. —​—​—​ 1978. L’Esotérisme comme principe et comme voie. Paris: Dervy. Sheppard, Harry. 1957. “Gnosticism and Alchemy.” Ambix. The Journal of the Society for the Study of Alchemy and Early Chemistry 6 (2) (December): 86–​101. Singer, June. 1992. A Gnostic Book of Hours: Keys to Inner Wisdom. San Francisco: Harper. 424

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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 — Smith, Richard. 1995. “The Revival of Ancient Gnosis.” Robert Segal (ed.). The Allure of Gnosticism. The Gnostic Experience in Jungian Pyschology and Contemporary Culture. Chicago: Open Court: 204–​10. Tomberg, Valentin. 1972. Meditationen über die Grosssen Arcana des Taro. Meisenhain-​am-​ Glau: Anton Hain. English: Meditations on the Tarot. A Journey into Christian Mysticism. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/​Putnam, 1986. Van den Broek, Roelof, and Wouter Hanegraaff (eds.). 1998. Gnosis and Hermeticism From Antiquity to Modern Times. Albany: SUNY. Vieillard-​Baron, Jean-​Louis. 1999. Hegel et l’idéalisme allemand. Paris: Vrin. Wautier, André. [online]. Dictionnaire des gnostiques et des principaux initiés. http://​misraim3. free.fr/​gnosticisme/​Dictionnaire.pdf. Weor, Samaël. 2002. Introduction to Gnosis. London: Gnostic Editions. Wilberg, Peter. 2003. From New Age to New Gnosis. The Contemporary Significance of a New Gnostic Spirituality. London: New Gnosis Publications. Zander, Helmut. 2007. Anthroposophie in Deutschland (Theosophische Weltanschauung und gesellschaftliche Praxis 1884–​1945). Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2 vols.

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BYZANTINE AND MODERN ORTHODOX GNOSIS: FROM THE ELEVENTH TO THE TWENTY-​ FIRST CENTURY Doru Costache

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he following is of necessity a scanty survey of significant moments in the last millennium 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 afterwards 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 recalcitrant 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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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 experience 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 deified –​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 beginning 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 intellectual 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 contemporary, 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 polymath 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 curriculum to astrology, magic, and esotericism. He subordinated the disciplines to philosophy, 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 mystically 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 illumination 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 participate 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 mystical 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 unprecedented 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 astronomer 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 428

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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 tradition (Bydén 2002: 184, 186–​7, 207). Briefly, the apophatic method entailed a prudent attitude concerning human competence 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 429

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battling for logic. Instead, he turned to articulating his main concern, namely, that unenlightened from above, human reasoning was incompetent in matters of divine knowledge. 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 illumination 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 prayerful 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 unapproachable (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 theology, 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 430

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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 spiritual 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 century, 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 431

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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 contemplation,” 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 revelation 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 certainties 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 immortality –​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 alienation from tradition remarked about late Medieval and modern Orthodox theology. Florovsky discussed this matter in Ways of Russian Theology (1937), 432

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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 realities. 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 potential 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 testimonies, 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 existential 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 extraordinarily 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 participatory 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 433

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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 hallmark 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 discourse 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.

REFERENCES Alfeyev, Hilarion. 2000. St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bradshaw, David. 2004. Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bydén, Borje. 2002. “ ‘To Every Argument there is a Counter-​Argument’: Theodore Metochites’ Defence of Scepticism (Semeiosis 61).” Katerina Ierodiakonou (ed.). Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 183–​217. Costache, Doru. 2008. “Queen of the Sciences? Theology and Natural Knowledge in St Gregory Palamas’ One Hundred and Fifty Chapters.” Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion 3: 27–​46. —​—​—​2011. “The Other Path in Science, Theology and Spirituality: Pondering a Fourteenth Century Byzantine Model.” Transdisciplinary Studies 1: 39–​54. —​—​—​2015. “Adam’s Holiness in the Alexandrine and Athonite Traditions.” Doru Costache, Philip Kariatlis, and Mario Baghos (eds.). Alexandrian Legacy:  A Critical Appraisal. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars: 322–​68. Duffy, John. 2002. “Hellenic Philosophy in Byzantium and the Lonely Mission of Michael Psellos.” Katerina Ierodiakonou (ed.). Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 139–​56. Golitzin, Alexander. 1997. On the Mystical Life: St Symeon the New Theologian the Ethical Discourses, vol. 3: Life, Times, and Theology. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Ierodiakonou, Katerina. 2002. “The Anti-​ Logical Movement in the Fourteenth Century.” Katerina Ierodiakonou (ed.). Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 219–​36. Kaldellis, Anthony. 2007. Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lauritzen, Frederick. 2012.“Psellos the Hesychast: A Neoplatonic Reading of the Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor.” Byzantinoslavica 70 (1): 167–​80. Liiceanu, Gabriel. 2013. Jurnalul de la Păltiniş:  Un model paideic în cultura umanistă. Bucharest: Humanitas. Linde, Fabian. 2010. The Spirit of Revolt: Nikolai Berdiaev’s Existential Gnosticism. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Louth, Andrew. 2012. “The Influence of the Philokalia in the Orthodox World.” Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif (eds.). The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 50–​60. —​—​—​ 2015. Modern Orthodox Thinkers:  From the Philokalia to the Present. Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press.

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— Byzantine and modern Orthodox gnosis — —​ —​ —​2008. “The Patristic Revival and its Protagonists.” Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 188–​202. McGuckin, John A. 2005. “Christian Spirituality in Byzantium and the East (600–​1700).” Arthur Holder (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell: 90–​105. —​—​—​(ed.). 2010. “Gregory Palamas (1296–​1359), Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts.” Arthur Holder (ed.). Christian Spirituality: The Classics. Abingdon: Routledge: 136–​47. —​—​—​ (ed.). 2011. The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-​Blackwell. Meyendorff, John. 1987. Byzantine Theology:  Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press. —​—​—​ 2001. The Byzantine Legacy in the Orthodox Church. New  York:  St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Nichols, Aidan. 1999. Light From the East:  Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology. London: Sheed & Ward. Nicolaidis, Efthymios. 2011. Science and Eastern Orthodoxy: From the Greek Fathers to the Age of Globalization. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Plekon, Michael. 2008. “The Russian religious revival and its theological legacy.” Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 203–​17. Russell, Norman. 2004. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scrima, André. 2010. Timpul rugului aprins:  Maestrul spiritual în tradiția răsăriteană. Bucharest: Humanitas. Sophrony, Archimandrite. 1991. Saint Silouan the Athonite. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Stăniloae, Dumitru. 1992. Din istoria isihasmului in ortodoxia română. Bucharest: Scripta. Tanev, Stoyan. 2017. Energy in Orthodox Theology and Physics:  From Controversy to Encounter. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Tatakis, Basil N. 2007. Christian Philosophy in the Patristic and Byzantine Tradition. New York: Orthodox Research Institute. Ware, Kallistos. 2012. “St. Nikodimos and the Philokalia.” Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif (eds.). The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 9–​35. Zaharia, Ciprian. 1996. “Biserica ortodoxă română şi traducerile filocalice şi patristice în limbile moderne.” Dan Zamfirescu (ed.). Paisianismul, un moment românesc în istoria spiritualităţii europene. Bucharest: Roza Vânturilor: 46–​64.

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PANSOPHIA, CHRISTIAN KABBALISM, AND THE QUEST FOR UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE EARLY MODERN WEST Garry W. Trompf

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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” doctrine, 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 436

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so captivating to various Renaissance humanists. In Bruno’s view, an occult intellectual 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 eventually worked itself out to a decisive renovatio of Egyptianism in the new heliocentric 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 intellectual “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 unification 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 intellectual 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, 437

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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 consciousness 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 encompass 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 scintillating (Skinner 1978: 151–​77) or in straitening Lutheran neo-​scholastic methods (Elert 1962). The emergent quests for the unity of knowledge expressed dissatisfaction 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 available 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 reincarnation (Ogren 2009). In this atmosphere, alchemical and astrological principles modified 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. 438

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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 correspondence 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 religious 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 utopian 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). 439

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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 knowledge 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 doctrine 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 subjectivism, 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 440

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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 “spectacle” 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 covertly 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 emergent 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 correspondence 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 harmonies 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 441

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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 seventeenth 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 theology, 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.

REFERENCES Barnes, Robin. 1988. Prophecy and Gnosis; Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bernart, Luciana de. 1986. Immaginazione e scienza in Giordano Bruno: l’infinito nelle forme dell’esperienza. Pisa: ETS. Bowen, James. 1967. “Introduction” to Johannes Amos Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus. Sydney: Sydney University Press: 1–​33. Classen, Albrecht. 2017. “Magic in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age.” Albrecht Classen (ed.). Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time. Berlin: De Gruyter: 1–​108. Copenhaver, Brian. 1980. “Jewish Theologies of Space in the Scientific Revolution: Henry More, Joseph Raphson, Isaac Newton and their Predecessors.” Annals of Science 37: 489–​548. Coudert, Alison. 1995. Leibniz and the Kabbalah. Dordrecht: Springer. Deinert, Herbert. 1964. “Die Entfaltung des Bösen im Böhmes Mysterium Magnum.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 79 (1): 401–​10. 442

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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 — Elert, Werner. 1962. The Structure of Lutheranism (trans. Walter Hansen). Saint Louis, MO: Concordia: vol. 2. Evans, John. 1973. Rudolf II and his World:  A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–​1612. Oxford: Clarendon. Evans, Robert, and Alexander Marr (eds.). 2006. Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Faivre, Antoine, and Frederick Tristan (eds.). 1979. Kabbalistes chrétiens. Paris: Albin Michel. Fletcher, John. 2008. A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, ‘Germanus Incredibilis’ (ed. Elizabeth Fletcher). Leiden: Brill. Fredén, Gustaf. 1958. “Orpheus and the Goddess of Nature.” Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis 64: 5–​176. Godwin, Joscelyn. 2015. Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World: His Life, Work, and the Search for Universal Knowledge. London: Thames & Hudson. Greengrass, Mark, Leslie, Michael, and Timothy Rayler (eds.). 2002. Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation:  Studies in Universal Communication. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Hanegraaff, Wouter. 1993. “In den beginne was de toorn: Het demonische bij Jacob Böhme.” Ab and Aleid De Jong (eds.). Kleine Enyclopedie van de Toorn. Utrecht: CIP: 43–​56. —​—​—​ 2012. Esotericism and the Academy:  Rejected Knowledge of Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanratty, Gerald. 1997. Studies in Gnosticism and in the Philosophy of Religion. Dublin: Four Courts. Hotson, Howard. 2011. “The Ramist Roots of Comenian Pansophia.” Steven Reid and Emma Wilson (eds.). Ramus, Pedagogy, and the Liberal Arts. Farnham, UK: Ashgate: 227–​52. Katz, David. 2017. The Occult Tradition:  From the Renaissance to the Present Day. London: Pimlico. Killeen, Kevin, and Peter Forshaw (eds.). 2007. The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science. London: Palgrave/​Macmillan. Koch, Josef. 1973. Kleine Schriften. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura: vol. 1. Lehmann-​Brauns, Sicco. 2004. Weisheit in der Weltgeschichte:  Philosophisches Geschichte zwischen Barock und Auklärung. Berlin: De Gruyter. Leinkauf, Thomas. 2007. “Sapere e universalità: la struttura della scientia universalis all’inizio dell’età moderna.” Frederico Vercellone and Alessandro Bertinetto (eds.). Athanasius Kircher: L’idea di scienza universale. Milan: Mimesis: 21–​38. Ogren, Brian. 2009. Renaissance and Rebirth: Reincarnation in Early Modern Italian Kabbalah. Leiden: Brill. Rogers, Graham, Vienne, Jean-​Michel, and Yves Zarka (eds.). 1997. The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics and Religion. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Rosenthal, Franz. 2007. Knowledge Triumphant:  The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill. Rumsey, David. 1997. “Bach and Numerology:  ‘Dry Mathematical Stuff’?” Literature and Aesthetics 7: 144–​65. Sabbatino, Pasquale. 1993. Giordano Bruno e la ‘mutazione’ del Rinsacimento. Florence: Leo Olschki. Schmidt-​Biggemann, Wilhelm. 2004. Philosophia perennis:  Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought. Dordrecht: Springer. Secchi, Pietro. 2006. “Del Mar più che del ciel amante:” Bruni e Cusano. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Segal, Robert. 1986. Poimandres as Myth: Scholarly Theory and Gnostic Meaning. Berlin: De Gruyter. Sfez, Jocelyne. 2012. L’Art des conjectures de Nicolas de Cues. Paris: Beauchesne. 443

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— G a r r y W.   T r o m p f — Skinner, Quentin. 1978. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: vol. 2. Stolzenberg, Daniel. 2001. “Kircher among the Ruins:  Esoteric Knowledge and Universal History.” Daniel Stolzenberg (ed.). The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 127–​39. Talbot, Ann. 2010. “The Great Ocean of Knowledge:” The Influence of Travel Literature on the Work of John Locke. Leiden: Brill. Traninger, Anita. 2011. “The Secret of Success: Ramism and Lullism as Contending Methods.” Steven Reid and Emma Wilson (eds.). Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts. Farnham, UK: Ashgate: 113–​31. Trompf, Garry. 1991. “On Newtonian History.” Stephen Gaukroger (ed.). The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition. Dordrecht: Kluwer: 213–​49. —​—​—​2008. “Introduction: Athanasius Kircher as Esoteric Thinker and the State of Kircher Scholarship.” John Fletcher. A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, ‘Germanus Incredibilis’ (ed. Elizabeth Fletcher). Leiden: Brill: xxi–​xxxiv. —​—​—​2011. “The Classification of the Sciences and the Quest for Interdisciplinarity:  A Brief History of Ideas from Ancient Philosophy to Contemporary Environmental Science.” Environmental Conservation 38 (2): 113–​26. Trompf, Garry, and Adnan Kasamanie. 1981. “The Druze and the Quaker: Reflections on the Social Implications of ‘Mysticism.” [Spec. issue of] Prudentia: 187–​205. Vondung, Klaus. 1992. “Millenarianism, Hermeticism, and the Search for a Universal Science.” Stephen McKnight (ed.) Science, Pseudo-​Science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press: 118–​40. Walker, Daniel P. 1972. The Ancient Theology:  Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yates, Frances. 1964. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul. —​—​—​ 1972. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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CHAPTER FORTY

FREEMASONRY: GNOSTIC IMAGES Garry W. Trompf

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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 worldwide 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 “particular places and cities,” and to spread the “message” (including that of the rescuing 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 fraternity 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 445

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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 scientific 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 constitutionalist 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 manpower 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 446

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… 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 paraphernalia 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 distinctly 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 447

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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 disclosure through emblem and ritual. Basic Masonic concepts were detectable: in the Harcourt formulation Love of God and neighbor were the “primitive” and “universal 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 448

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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 conservatism 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 classical) 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 speculative 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 outside 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. 449

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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 reconciliation, 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 heavenly 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 legislator,” 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 450

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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 resurrection, connecting sun, planets, immortality, transmigration, goodness, and the pyramids as “universal symbol” for them all –​such Egyptophile propensities eventually 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 philosophic. It concerns “that Equilibrium … Masonry incessantly labours to accomplish 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 persons’ previous lives, Leadbeater presented himself as “the Inner Head” of “All True Freemasons” (from 1915), a highly irregular move (Tillett 1982: 168). By clairvoyance 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 originating 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 legitimately or not, have approached and unveiled it for its loyalists as “a way of Gnosis.”

REFERENCES Benimeli, José A.F. 2014. “Freemasonry and the Catholic Church.” Henrik Bogdan and Jan A.M. Snoek (eds.). Handbook of Freemasonry. Leiden: Brill: 139–​54. Bernal, Martin. 1991. Black Athena:  The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. London: Vintage: vol. 1. 451

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— G a r r y W.   T r o m p f — Bogdan, Henrik. 2007. Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Daughton, James. 2006. An Empire Divided:  Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–​1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deschamps, Simon. 2017. “From Britain to India:  Freemasonry as a Connective Force of Empire.” E-​rea 14 (2): 1–​23. Duncan, Malcolm. [1866]. Masonic Ritual and Monitor: A Guide to the Three Degrees if the Ancient York Rite. 3rd edn. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald. Edighoffer, Roland. 2001. “Utopie et sodalité selon Johann Valentin Andreæ.” Richard Caron et al. (eds.). Ésotérisme, gnoses et imaginaire symbolique: Mélanges offerts à Antoine Faivre. Louvain: Peeters: 373–​88. Faivre, Antoine. 1972. “le Temple de Salomon dans la théosophie maçonnique.” Australian Journal of French Studies 9 (3): 274–​89. Granholm, Kennet. 2014. “Constructing Esotericisms.” Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm (eds.), Contemporary Esotericism. New York: Routledge: 24–​48. Gregorius, Fredrik. 2014. “Inventing Africa.” Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm (eds.). Contemporary Esotericism. New York: Routledge: 49–​71. Hannah, Walton. 1984. Darkness Visible:  A Christian Appraisal of Freemasonry. Exeter:  Augustine. Harland-​Jacobs, Jessica. 2007. Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–​ 1927. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Harwood, Jeremy. 2006. The Secret History of Freemasonry. London: Lotrenz. Hass, Ludwik. 1982. Wolnomularstwo w Europie Srodkowo-​Wschodniej w XVIII I  XIX wieku. Warsaw: Ossolinskich. Haverstick, John. 1968. The Progress of the Protestant. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Jones, Bernard. 1950. Freemasons’ Guide and Compendium. London: George G. Harrap. —​—​—​ 1969. Freemasons’ Book of the Royal Arch. London: George G. Harrap. Knoop, Douglas, Jones, Gwilym P., and Douglas Hamer (eds.). 1978. Early Masonic Pamphlets. London: Q[uatuor] C[oronati] Correspondence Circles. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1988. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McCalman, Iain. 2003. The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason. New York: HarperCollins. Manuel, Frank. 1963. Isaac Newton, Historian. Boston, MA: Belknap Press. Mazet, Edmond. 1992. “Freemasonry and Esotericism.” Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (eds.). Modern Esoteric Spirituality. New York: Crossroad: 247–​76. Pike, Albert. 1871. Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Charleston, SC: A.M. Popkin, Richard H., and Gordon M. Weiner (eds.). 1994. Jewish Christians and Christian Jews from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Roberts, John. 1972. The Mythology of the Secret Societies. London: Secker & Warburg. Shah, Idris. 1964. The Sufis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Snoek, Jan. 1998. “On the Creation of Masonic Decrees: A Method and its Fruits.” Antoine Faivre and Wouter Hanegraaff (eds.). Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion. Leuven: Peeters: 145–​90. Snoek, Jan, and Henrik Bogdan. 2014. “Freemasonry.” Christopher Partridge (ed.). The Occult World. New York: Routledge: 157–​72. Stevenson, David. 1990. The Origins of Freemasonry:  Scotland’s Century, 1590–​ 1710. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tabbert, Mark. 2006. American Freemasons:  Three Centuries of Building Communities. New York: New York University Press.

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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 454

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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, 455

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          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 spiritual 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 degeneration 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 spiritual 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 appalling 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. 458

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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 perception 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 459

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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 460

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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 primordial, 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 hierarchy (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 representative, 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 461

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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).

REFERENCES Bloom, Harold. 1982. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York: Oxford University Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 1996. Shipwreck with Spectator:  Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (trans. Steven Rendall). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cantor, Paul. 1985. Creature and Creator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, Paul (ed.). 1967. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan: vol. 3.

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— British Romanticism: gnostic longings — Erdman, David V. (ed.). 1982. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Rev. edn. Berkeley: University of California Press: 33–​44. Halmi, Nicholas (ed.). 2014. Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose. New York: Norton. Halmi, Nicholas, Magnuson, Paul, and Raimonda Modiano (eds.). 2004. “Biographia Literaria.” Chapter 14. Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose. New York: Norton: 372–​552. Jonas, Hans. 1963. The Gnostic Religion. Boston, MA: Beacon Books. Marchand, Leslie. (ed.). 1979. “In the Wind’s Eye.” Byron’s Letters and Journals. London: John Murray: vol. 9. McGann, Jerome (ed.). 1986. Byron. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Modiano, Raimonda. 2001. “Historicist Readings of The Ancient Mariner.” Nicholas Roe (ed.). Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. Oxford: Clarendon: 271–​96. Mumford Jones, Howard. 1974. Romanticism and Revolution. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press. O’Regan, Cyril. 2001. Gnostic Return in Modernity. New  York:  State University of New York Press. Perry, Seamus. 2001. “Coleridge and the End of Autonomy.” Nicholas Roe (ed.). Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. Oxford: Clarendon: 246–​70. Pfau, Thomas. 2007. “The Philosophy of Shipwreck: Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge’s Catastrophic Modernity.” MLN 122 (5), December: 949–​1004. Quinney, Laura. 2001. “Romanticism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism.” Charles Mahoney (ed.). A Companion to Romantic Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell: 412–​24. Reiman, Donald H., and Neil Fraistat (eds.). 2002. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. New York: Norton. Rudolph, Kurt. 1983. Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (trans. Robert Wilson). San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. 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

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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 theological 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 464

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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 bafflement 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 consubstantial 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 465

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“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 oppositions 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), 466

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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 467

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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 468

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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 obviously 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). 469

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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 trajectory 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. 470

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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 contemporaneous 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 vegetation, 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 beginning, 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 contemporaneous 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 471

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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, problematizing 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 doctrinal statements) that was able to encompass both of these moods, while nevertheless 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 purpose (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 energies 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 catalyst 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 feminine counterpart). And it inspires the non-​violent politics, notions of radical forgiveness, 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 consistency 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. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 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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— Pe t e r   O t t o — 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. Jonas, Hans. 1963. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of 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 immaterial, 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 aspiration 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 esoteric 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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The Abstract [figure] which invokes the Rosicrucian tradition was named by Adepts, Elias Artista. The initiate who takes to the Great Work [of transmutation], 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 differentiation 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. 476

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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 resonant 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 “primordial 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 commercial 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 “independent 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 sensitivity (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 penetrate 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 477

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(1842–​1898), and Claude Debussy filed into the shop, delighting in Bailly’s conversation. 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 archetypal 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), heterodox 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). 478

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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 magnificent 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 479

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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 proclivities 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, systematizing 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 practically 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 religion.” 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 absolutist 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 combining 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 certitude 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 financial 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 482

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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 further, 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). 483

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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 hierarchical 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 persuasion 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 legitimacy (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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THE “LOST WORD” KEY AND ESOTERIC ESCHATOLOGY: BLAVATSKY’S GNOSIS THE CORE OF KRISHNAMURTI’S TEACHING Al Boag

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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 certain 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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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 eschatology: 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 knowledge 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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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 themselves “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 physical 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 exclusive and secretive Esoteric Section (ES) of the TS, with the purpose “to strike the keynote” 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 spiritual 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 transcend 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 keynote “Fa of human nature,” the “middle key” of the seven human principles, the vibrations of the pituitary and pineal glands would intensify and awaken kundalini 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 490

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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 keynote 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 discern 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 compassion 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. 491

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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 allegories 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 purpose” 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 illumination 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 correspondence) 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). 492

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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 fulfillment 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 century 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 imagination –​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 religion. 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) 493

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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 evolutionary 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 separate 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 appropriate 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) 494

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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 keynote 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 involuntary breathless attention with, according to him, its all-​encompassing significance 495

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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. (Krishnamurti 1998: 9) 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; … (Krishnamurti 1998: 97) 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 spontaneous breathless meditation was a profound “mystery” which evoked compassion. 496

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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 spontaneous 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. 497

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— Al Boag — 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. —​—​—​ (1982) 1998. Krishnamurti’s Journal. Madras: Krishnamurti Foundation, India. —​—​—​ (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

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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 salvation 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 “gnosticism” 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 499

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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 knowledge 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 mythical). 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) 500

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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 activities: an elitist esoteric group that met in secret and was reserved for the more spiritually 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 (individuality) 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: supplemental 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 501

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utilized Norse deities (Norn and Urdam) as the progenitors of the various races as distinct 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, enabling 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 noticeably 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 clairvoyance 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 triskelion and the swastika as well as from runes. In 1908, List published The Secret of Runes (Das Geheimnis der Runen), tracing 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 502

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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 elimination –​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 503

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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 esoteric 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). 504

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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 similarities 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 esotericism” (Nesi 2002: 409). They kept Ariosophy alive by hiding it in the German language 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 505

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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 “scientific 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 atrocities 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 conclusion 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] 506

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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 individuals 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 knowledge 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 dedication 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 recommendation 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 507

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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 personally (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 “supernatural!,” 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 influence 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. 508

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CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

RUDOLF STEINER: MULTIPLE BODIES Wayne Hudson

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udolf Steiner (1861–​ 1925) was a modernist esotericist and the founder of Anthroposophy, arguably the most important esoteric movement of the twentieth 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, ranging 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 reinterpretation 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 spiritual philosophy of thinking advanced by the German Idealists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. 510

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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 theosophy 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 formative 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 virtually 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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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 physical 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 consciousness 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 knowledge. Steiner offers his readers projective anthropology and projective cosmosophy, which, allied to appropriate practices, have the capacity to elicit and support significant 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 development. 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 etheric 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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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 organization. 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 participate 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 hierarchies 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 distinguish 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 knowledge 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 carefully 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 probability. It is to mark out a space for human freedom and social practice, a space consistent with ancient traditions for the formation of mystical elites in many cultures. 514

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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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GNOSTIC SENSIBILITY IN GURDJIEFF’S “WORK” Constance A. Jones

INTRODUCTIO N This paper examines the legacy of George Ivanonich Gurdjieff (1866[?]‌–​1949), specifically 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 demonstrate 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 esoteric 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 recitation, 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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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 evidence 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 religion 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 exposition 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 hypnosis’ ” (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 qualities also constitute the aims of his teaching and the Work, the esoteric school he founded.

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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 accompanied 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 transformation. 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 manifestation. 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 ignorance (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 individual 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 consciousness 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 constrain 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 penetrate 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 degeneration 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 imagination 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 cultural 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 purpose. 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 522

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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 transformation 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 transformation 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, conscious 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 sensibility. Organized around systematic analysis of the human condition and recognition 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 523

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in groups, calls for an integration of the ideas of the teaching with personal experience. 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 provide 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.

REFERENCES Borella, Jean 1995. “René Guénon and the Traditionalist School.” Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (eds.). Modern Esoteric Spirituality. New York: Crossroad: 330–​58. Conge, Michel. 1999. A Study of the Ideas of G.I. Gurdjieff. Tusten, NY: Lake Press. De Dampierre, Pauline. 1996. “The Role of Movements.” Jacob Needleman and George Baker (eds.). Gurdjieff:  Essays and Reflections on the Man and his Teaching. New York: Continuum: 290–​5. De Salzmann, Michel. 1985. “Footnote to the Gurdjieff Literature.” J. Walter Driscoll and the Gurdjieff Foundation of California. Gurdjieff:  An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland. De Salzmann, Jeanne. 2010. The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Driscoll, Walter (ed.). 2002. “A Teacher of Dancing: Gurdjieff and his Movements.” Gurdjieff International Review 5 (1). http://​www.gurdjieff.org/​. Ellwood, Robert S., and Harry B. Partin. 1988. Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America. 2nd edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Faivre, Antoine. 1992. “Introduction I.” Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (eds.). Modern Esoteric Spirituality. New York: Crossroad: xi–​xxii. Fideler, David R. 1987. “Introduction.” Kenneth S. Guthrie (ed.). The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes: 19–​54. 524

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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 ” — Finch, Henry L. 1996. “The Sacred Cosmos: Teachings of Gurdjieff.” Jacob Needleman and George Baker (eds.). Gurdjieff:  Essays and Reflections on the Man and his Teaching. New York: Continuum: 8–​29. Guénon, René. 1996. The Crisis of the Modern World. Ghent, NY:  Sophia Perennis et Universalis. Gurdjieff, George I. 1988 (1933). The Herald of the Coming Good:  First Appeal to Contemporary Humanity. Edmonds, Washington: Sure Fire. —​—​—​ 1993 (1950). Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An objectively impartial criticism of the life of man. Aurora, Oregon: Two Rivers. —​—​—​ 1973. Views from the Real World:  Early Talks in Moscow, Essentuki, Tiflis, Berlin, London, Paris, New  York, Chicago, As Recollected by His Pupils. Foreword Jeanne de Salzmann. New York: E.P. Dutton. —​—​—​ 1981. Life is Real Only Then, When “I Am”. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —​—​—​ 1985. Meetings with Remarkable Men. London: Penguin Arkana. —​—​—​ 2009. Transcripts of Gurdjieff’s Meetings 1941–​1946. London: Book Studio. Jones, Constance A. 2005. G.I. Gurdjieff e la sua eredità. Turin: Elledici. Lacarriere, Jacques. 1977. The Gnostics. New York: E.P. Dutton. —​—​—​1996. “Letter to a Contemporary Gnostic.” Jacob Needleman and George Baker (eds.). Gurdjieff:  Essays and Reflections on the Man and his Teaching. New  York:  Continuum: 156–​62. Lachman, Gary. 2011. The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus. Edinburgh: Floris. —​—​—​ 2013. The Caretakers of the Cosmos:  Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World. Edinburgh: Floris. —​—​—​ 2015. The Secret Teachers of the Western World. New York: Tarcher. Meyer, Marvin. 2003. “Gnosticism, Gnostics, and The Gnostic Bible.” Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer (eds.). The Gnostic Bible. Boston, MA: Shambhala: 1–​19. Moore, James. 1991. Gurdjieff:  The Anatomy of a Myth, A  Biography. Rockport, MA: Element. Needleman, Jacob, 1992. “G.I. Gurdjieff and His School.” Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (eds.). Modern Esoteric Spirituality. New York: Crossroad. —​ —​ —​1996. “Gurdjieff, or the Metaphysics of Energy.” Jacob Needleman and George Baker (eds.). Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teaching. New York: Continuum: 70–​85. —​—​—​2006. “The Gurdjieff Tradition.” Wouter J. Hanegraaff in collaboration with Jean-​ Pierre Brach, Roelof van den Broek, and Antoine Faivre (eds.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: E.J. Brill: 450–​4. Nicolescu, Basarab. 1996. “Gurdjieff’s Philosophy of Nature.” Jacob Needleman and George Baker (eds.). Gurdjieff:  Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teaching. New York: Continuum: 37–​69. Nott, Charles S. 1961. Teachings of Gurdjieff: The Journal of a Pupil. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —​—​—​ 1969. Journey Through This World: The Second Journal of a Pupil. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ouspensky, Piotr D. 1949. In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. New York: Harcourt Brace. —​—​—​ 1968. The Fourth Way. New York: Knopf. —​—​—​ 1974. The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution. New York: Vintage. —​—​—​ 1986. A Further Record: Extracts from Meetings 1928–​1945. London: Arkana. —​—​—​ 1981 (1911). Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought, A Key to the Enigmas of the World. New York: Random House.

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Printed music Gurdjieff, George I., and Thomas de Hartmann. 1990. Music for the Gurdjieff Movements and Exercises. 2 vols. New York: Triangle Editions. Gurdjieff, George I., and Thomas de Hartmann. 1996. Music for the Piano. 4 vols. New York: Schott. De Hartmann, Thomas. 1989. Music of Gurdjieff–​de Hartmann. New York: Triangle Books.

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CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

WESTERN SUFISM AND GNOSIS Mark Sedgwick

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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 comparable 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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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 “knowledge” 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 currently 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 translation, without considering possible parallels or links with Late Antiquity. Neither they nor Arberry use the term “gnosticism.” Instead, they all describe Sufism as “mysticism” (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 development 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 transmitted 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 528

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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 “esoteric doctrines” (King 1887: 415). This change reflected the influence of a more general 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 contemporary 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 philosopher 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 529

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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 perennial 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 practicing 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 universal 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 530

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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 emanation, 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 follower, 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 531

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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 identifying 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, however, 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 532

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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 countries … 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 “spirituality” 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 carefully positions itself between classical Islamic Sufism and general non-​Islamic spirituality, 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 participation in the Threshold Society, the third of which is to make “the Mevlevi tradition” one’s “primary spiritual commitment.” This “entails a willingness to 533

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acquaint oneself with and understand the sources and framework of the Sufi tradition, 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, sociological form” (Helminski 2011). Helminski follows general practice in using “gnostic” to translate ʿarif, but generally 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 “completion,” 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 somewhat differently, but the meaning as always close to ʿarif, and Helminski’s translation 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 compatible 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 534

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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 significance in Western culture that transcends particular conceptions.

REFERENCES Aguéli, Ivan. 1988a. “Le traité de l’unité (Risâlatul-​ahadiyah) par le plus grand des Maîtres spirituels Mohyiddun ibn Arabi.” Ivan Aguéli (ed.). Écrits pour La Gnose: traité de l’unité. Milan: Arche: 11–​133 [from La Gnose 1911]. —​ —​ — 1988b. “L’Art pur.” Ivan Aguéli (ed.). Écrits pour La Gnose:  traité de l’unité. Milan: Arche: 34–​49 [from La Gnose 1911]. Arberry, Arthur. 1935. The Doctrine of the Sūfīs. Kitāb al-​Ta‘arruf li maḏẖab ahl al-​taṣawwuf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​ 1950. Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam. London: Allen and Unwin. Arnaldez, Roger. 2012. “Al-​Insān al-​Kāmil.” Peri Bearman et al. (eds.). Encyclopaedia of Islam. Leiden: Brill, s.v. Bailey, Nathan. 1726. An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, Comprehending the Derivations of The Generality of Words in the English Tongue. London: [R. Ware et al.]. Chajes, Julie. 2016. “Construction Through Appropriation:  Kabbalah in Blavatsky’s Early Works.” Julie Chajes and Boaz Huss (eds.). Theosophical Appropriations:  Esotericism, Kabbalah and the Transformation of Traditions. Beer-​Sheva: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press: 33–​72. Corbin, Henri. 1960. Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —​—​—​ 1969. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. Princeton NJ:  Princeton University Press. —​—​—​2010. “From the Gnosis of Antiquity to Ismaili Gnosis.” Henri Corbin (ed.). Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis. Abingdon: Routledge: 151–​94. —​—​—​ 2014. History of Islamic Philosophy (trans. Lliadain and Philip Sherrard). Abingdon: Routledge. Ernst, Carl. 1997. Sufism: An Introduction to the Mystical Tradition of Islam. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Guénon, René. 1971. “La gnose et la franc-​maçonnerie.” Études sur la Franc-​Maçonnerie et le Compagnonnage. Paris: Éditions Traditionnelles: vol. 2: 257–​61 [from La Gnose, March 1910]. —​—​—​1976. “La Gnose et les écoles spiritualists.” Mélanges. Paris: Gallimard: 176–​212 [from La Gnose 1909]. Hanegraaff, Wouter. 2012. Esotericism and the Academy:  Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helminski, Kabir. 1999. The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path of Transformation. Boston: Shambhala. —​—​—​2011. “Purpose and Participation.” Threshold Society website, 1 April 2011, accessed 14 March 2017. https://​sufism.org/​threshold/​threshold-​society-​purpose-​and-​participation-​4. Hisashi, Mizuno. 2001. “Le travail de l’écriture dans le voyage en orient. Le « catéchisme des druses » à la façon de Gérard de Nerval.” Revue de littérature comparée 300 (4): 511–​25. Inayat Khan. 1914. A Sufi Message of Spiritual Liberty. London:  Theosophical Publishing Society. —​—​—​2005a. “Philosophy, Psychology and Mysticism.” http://​wahiduddin.net/​mv2/​XI/​XI_​II_​ 1.htm 535

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— Mark Sedgwick — —​—​—​2005b. “The Unity of Religious Ideals.” http://​wahiduddin.net/​mv2/​IX/​IX_​26.htm Inayat-​Khan, Zia. 2006. “A Hybrid Sufi Order at the Crossroads of Modernity: The Sufi Order and Sufi Movement of Pir-​O-​Murshid Inayat Khan.” Doctoral dissert., Duke University, Durham, NC. Jenkins, Philip. 2002. Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way. New York: Oxford University Press. King, Charles. (1864) 1887. The Gnostics and Their Remains, Ancient and Medieval. London: Bell and Daldy. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1981. Islamic Life and Thought. London: Routledge. —​—​—​ 1991. Sufi Essays. New York: SUNY Press. —​—​—​ 1993. An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines:  Conceptions of Nature and Methods Used for Its Study by ‘Ikhwân as-​Safâ’, al-​Bîrûnî, and Ibn Sînâ. New York: SUNY Press. —​—​—​2010. “Doctrinal Sufism and Theoretical Gnosis.” Akbar S. Ahmed and Tamara Sonn (eds.). The SAGE Handbook of Islamic Studies. London: SAGE: 304–​26. Nicholson, Reynold. 1898. Selected Poems from the Dīvāni Shamsi Tabrīz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​ 1914. The Mystics of Islam. London: G. Bell and Sons. Partner, Peter. 1982. The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pike, Albert. 1871. Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Charleston, SC: A.M. Piraino, Francesco. 2015. “Le développement du soufisme en Europe: Au-​delà de l’antinomie modernité et tradition.” Doctoral dissert., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Schuon, Frithjof. 2006. Gnosis: Divine Wisdom. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom. –​–​–​–​ 2011. Understanding Islam. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom. Sedgwick, Mark. 2004. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​ 2016. Western Sufism:  From the Abbasids to the New Age. New  York:  Oxford University Press. Shah, Idries. 1977. The Sufis (1964). London: Octagon Press. Van den Bos, Matthijs. 2005. “Transnational Orientalism. Henry Corbin in Iran.” Anthropos 100: 113–​25. Vilayat Inayat Khan. 1999. Awakening: A Sufi Experience. New York: J. P. Tarcher. —​—​—​ 2011. Life is a Pilgrimage. New Lebanon, NY: Omega. Wroth, Warwick. 2004. “King, Charles William (1818–​ 1888).” Lawrence Goldman (ed.). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 200, s.v.

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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 significant 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 manifold 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 humankind, 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, 537

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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 necessarily 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 phenomenon 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 several 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 religious 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 relation to the contemplative soul, insofar as they enter into contact with it” (Schuon 1984: 176n).

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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 relation 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 frequently 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 possible 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 “boundaries 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 understood as a precise technical term taken from the Latin intellectus and from medieval 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 540

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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 ‘pneumatic,’ 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 intellect –​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 541

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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 cornerstone 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 essentially 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 pejorative 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 purview a state of knowing which may hitherto be unspoken, unheard, invisible as it were; metaphysics brings gnosis into the realm of human discourse. 542

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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 limitless. 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 “definition,” 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 philosophy: 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 philosophy 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 demonstrate 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: 543

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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 framework 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 certitude 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 sufficient 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 forgotten 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, wherewith 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 544

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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, totalitarian 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 theology 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 intelligence 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). 545

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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 contemplation, 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 sufficient 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. 546

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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.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —​—​—​ 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. 547

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— Harry Oldmeadow — —​—​—​ 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.

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CHAPTER FIFTY

CARL JUNG ON GNOSTICISM Robert A. Segal

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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 relentlessly transforms those tenets into outward expressions, or projections, of the unconscious. 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

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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 unconscious 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 progression 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 exclusively 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 identification 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. 550

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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 consciousness. 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 temporary. 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 reversion 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 unconscious –​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 divinity and matter –​is in Jungian terms the predicament: the dissociation of the unconscious 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

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— 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

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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 possibility or by severe provocation would NOI have exploded into Jihad. A  covert reverence for orderly aspects and rational achievements of white America remains

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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 establish 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 fearlessly (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 personalities 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 traumatizing 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 structure 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

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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 thousand 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 subculture, 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? 555

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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 welfare 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 century 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, individualism, 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 societies 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 556

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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 everywhere 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 complete 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 control 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 557

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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 nationalist 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 contain. 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 558

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females because of the old practice of infanticide). In this they have been simultaneously 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 pitifully 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 foolishness.” 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.” 559

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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 economically 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, 560

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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, entrepreneurship, 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 physically 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 protect 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 certain 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 changing, 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 neighborhood 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 561

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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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CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

INNER TRADITION: RECOVERING THE CHRISTIANITY OF THE EAST Lynn C. Bauman

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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 inception 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 identified 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 565

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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 tradition 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 contemplative. 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 566

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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 immediate 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 historical 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 linguistic 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 dogmatic, 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 567

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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 contemporary scholars are making a good case for this new and insightful understanding concerning these early Eastern and Western divisions of Christianity and the consequent 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 “mysteries” 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 expression 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 568

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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 homeland 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 examination 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 569

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Early Christianity

Beta

Alpha

30−130 CE

Occidental Christianity

Oriental Christianity

Greco-Roman (Gentile)

Syrian-Asian (Semitic)

Pauline Christianity (Greek)

Rational Thought Linear Logical Rational Propositional Literalhistorical realism Monological Prefers prose language to poetic speech Pauline letters as example.

Syrian Christianity (Syriac)

Theological Propositional language Concrete and Certain Historical events Focus on the final Events of Jesus’ Life and the doctrinal meaning of his death. Oriented to dogma Teaching about Jesus. Empirical Impulse Thomas

Paul

Sapiential Seeing and Intimate Knowing

Luke

Mark Interiorized Judaism John

Non-Torah Observant Focus on the wisdom teaching of Yeshua Inner Observance and Ascetical Ideal Poetic and Imagistic Use of symbol and Symbolic metaphor Thought Visionary Events Non-linear Oriented toward wisdom Visionary Impulse Trans-logical Non-rational Metaphoricsymbolic MM Image Mythic Narrative Philip Dialogical Prefers poetic speech Psalms and Proverbs, Aphoristic James and Visionary .

Peter Matthew

Johannine Christianity (Greek Coptic) Sees Jesus as the Savior of all humanity Experiences Jesus as the Cosmic Christ. Apocalyptic Seeing Spiritual and inner orientation Belief in Name of Jesus Gnostic Impulse Beta Forms of Christianity The Christ-Movement

The project of western Christianity is salvation. The salvation of the soul based upon belief. The focus of the East is upon enlightenment. The journey toward Enlightenment based on inner revelation. In the West: assistance comes from without— through the Savior. In the East: assistance from within—the Teacher. Praxis: through the Church—West, Through personal discovery—East.

Jewish Christianity (Aramaic) Torah-Observance Loyalty to the Teacher Emphasis on the Messiah Ascetical Ideal Practical Ethics Real World Experience. Law and Order Impulse

Alpha Forms of Christianity The Jesus-Movement

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 570

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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, realization, 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 spirituality 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 perennial 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 experience 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 contemporary 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 available 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 571

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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 intellectually, but had to be grasped and lived inwardly if it was to be experienced as transformative (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 original 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 spiritually. 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 572

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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 hermeneutical 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 tradition 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 573

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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) Syriac-Persian Christianity

Greco-Roman Christianity

Thomas

Paul

MM Luke Philip

James

Mark

Egyptian-Coptic Christianity

Jewish-Aramaic Christianity John

Peter Matthew

Beta Forms of Christianity The Christ-Movement

Alpha Forms of Christianity The Jesus-Movement

Figure 52.2  Culturally interpreted streams of Christianity 574

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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 ourselves, 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 discovery 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 compelled 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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alfeyev, Hilarion. 2000. The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. [Anonymous Monk of the West]. 2004. Christianity and the Doctrine of Non-​Dualism (trans. Alvin Moore, Jr., and Marie Hansen). Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis. Aslan, Reza. 2013. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. New York: Random House. Barker, Margaret. 1988. Enoch the Lost Prophet. London: SPCK. —​—​—​ 2004. Temple Theology: An Introduction. London: SPCK. —​—​—​ 2011. Temple Mysticism. London: SPCK. Barnhart, Bruno. 1993. The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center. New York: Paulist Press. Bauman, Lynn C. 1990. “The Hermeneutics of Mystical Discourse.” Doctoral dissert., University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington. —​—​—​ 2002. The Gospel of Thomas: Wisdom of the Twin. Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press. Bauman, Lynn C., Bauman, Ward J., and Cynthia Bourgeault. 2008. The Luminous Gospels: Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and Philip. Telephone, TX: Praxis Publishing. —​—​—​ 2014. In Trouble and in Wonder: A Spiritual Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas. Telephone, TX: Praxis. Baumer, Christoph. 2006. The Church of the East:  An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity. London: I.B. Tauris. 575

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— Ly n n C .   B a u m a n — Besserman, Perle. 1977. Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Boyarin, Daniel. 2013. The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. New York: New Press. Bruteau, Beatrice. 1995. What We Can Learn From the East. New York: Crossroad. Bütz, Jeffrey J. 2005. The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. —​—​—​ 2010. The Secret Legacy of Jesus: The Judaic Teachings that Passed from James the Just to the Founding Fathers. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Campbell, Joseph. 2008. Hero With a Thousand Faces. 3rd edn. Novato, CA:  New World Library. Cameron, Ron. 1982. The Other Gospels: Non-​Canonical Gospel Texts. Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press. Cheetham, Tom. 2003. World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books. —​—​—​ 2005. Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. —​—​—​ 2007. After Prophecy:  Imagination, Incarnation, and the Unity of the Prophetic Tradition. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books. —​—​—​ 2012. All the World an Icon:  Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Chilton, Bruce. 2000. Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography. New York: Doubleday. Chilton, Bruce, and Jacob Neusner (eds.). 2001. The Brother of Jesus: James the Just and his Mission. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Chittick, William. 1994. Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-​‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Clement, Olivier. 1993. The Roots of Christian Mysticism. Hyde Park, NY: New City. Colless, Brian (trans.). 2008. The Wisdom of the Pearlers: An Anthology of Syriac Christian Mysticism. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. Corbin, Henri. 1976. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran. London: I.B. Tauris. —​—​—​ 1978. The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Boulder, CO: Shambhala. —​—​—​ 2005. Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Dalrhymple, William. 1997. From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Daniélou, Jean. 1964. The Theology of Jewish Christianity (trans. John Baker) Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. Davidson, John. 1995. The Gospel of Jesus:  In Search of His Original Teaching. Rockport, MA: Element. Davies, Stevan. 1983. The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom. New York: Seabury. DeConick, April. 1996. Seek to See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of Thomas. Leiden: Brill. —​—​—​ 2004. Voices of the Mystics:  Early Christian Discourse in the Gospels of John and Thomas and Other Ancient Christian Literature. New York: T. & T. Clark International. —​—​—​ 2007. The Original Gospel of Thomas: With a Commentary and New English Translation of the Complete Gospel. London: T. & T. Clark. —​—​—​ (ed.). 2006. Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature. Eliade, Mircea. 1965. The Myth of Eternal Return (trans. Willard Trask). New York: Pantheon Books, 1965. Elior, Rachel. 2004. The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism (trans. David Louvish). Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. 576

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— Recovering the Christianity of the East — Ernst, Carl. (trans.). 1977. Ruzbihan Baqli, The Unveiling of Secrets: Diary of a Master. Chapel Hill, NC: Parvardigar Press. Fideler, David. 1993. Jesus Christ Sun of God:  Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books. Flusser, David. 1988. Judaism and the Origins of Christianity. Jerusalem: Magness Press. Fujita, Neil. 1986. A Crack in the Jar: What Ancient Jewish Documents Tell Us About the New Testament. New York: Paulist Press. Grant, Robert, with David Noel Freedman. 1960. The Secret Sayings of Jesus: According to the Gospel of Thomas. New York: Collins. Helminski, Edmund. 1992. Living Presence: A Sufi Way of Mindfulness and the Essential Self. New York: Perigee. Izutsu, Toshihiko. 1994. Creation and The Timeless Order of Things: Essays in Islamic Mystical Philosophy. Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press. Jenkins, Philip. 2008. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-​Year Gold Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia –​and How It Died. New York: Harper. Jeremias, Joachim. 1955. The Parables of Jesus (trans. S. H. Hooke). New  York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons. Keenan, John P. 2005. The Wisdom of James:  Parallels with Mahayana Buddhism. New York: The Newman Press. Keizer, Lewis. 2009. The Kabbalistic Words of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas: Recovering the Inner-​Circle Teachings of Yeshua. Kindle Edition, Amazon Digital Services. Khalidi, Tarif. 2001. The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leloup, Jean-​Yves. 2005. The Gospel of Thomas:  The Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. —​—​—​ 2006. The Sacred Embrace of Jesus and Mary: The Sexual Mystery at the Heart of the Christian Tradition. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Louth, Andrew. 1981. The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —​—​—​ 1983. Discerning the Mystery:  An Essay on the Nature of Theology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Meyer, Marvin. 2006. “Be Passersby:  Gospel of Thomas 12, Jesus Traditions, and Islamic Literature.” Jon Asgeirsson, April DeConick, and Risto Uro (eds.). Thomasine Traditions in Antiquity: The Social and Cultural World of the Gospel of Thomas. Leiden: Brill: 256–​71. —​—​—​ 1992.The Gospel ofThomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus.New York: HarperSanFrancisco. —​—​—​ 2003. Secret Gospels: Essays on Thomas and the Secret Gospel of Mark. New York: T. & T. Clark International. —​—​—​ 2007. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures. The International Edition. New  York: HarperOne. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1981. Knowledge and the Sacred:  The Gifford Lectures. New  York: Crossroads. —​—​—​ 2007. The Garden of Truth:  The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. New York: HarperOne. Pagels, Elaine. 2003. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New York: Random House. Palmer, Martin. 2001. The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity. New York: Ballantine Wellspring. Patterson, Stephen. 1993. The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus. Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press. Patterson, Stephen, Robinson, James, and Hans-​Gebhard Bethage. 1998. The Fifth Gospel: The Gospel of Thomas Comes of Age. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International. Riegert, Ray, and Thomas Moore. 2003. The Lost Sutras of Jesus:  Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks. Berkeley, CA: Seastone. 577

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— Ly n n C .   B a u m a n — Robinson, James, and Marvin Meyer (eds.). 1988. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. New York: Harper and Row. Shayegan, Dariush. 1990. Henri Corbin:  La topographie spirituelle d'Islam iranien. Paris: Éditions de la Différence. Tabor, James. 2006. The Jesus Dynasty: the Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family and the Birth of Christianity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Zibawi, Mahmoud. 1995. Eastern Christian Worlds. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. Zinner, Samuel. 2011a. The Gospel of Thomas: In the Light of Early Jewish, Christian and Islamic Esoteric Trajectories. London: Matheson Trust. —​—​—​2011b. The Abrahamic Archetype: Essays on the Transcendent and Formal Relationships between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Cambridge: Archetype.

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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 treatise (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 579

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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 corollary 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 divinely 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 580

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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 celestial 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 esoteric 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 significance 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 metaphysical 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 581

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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 importance 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 creation 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 existence 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 outward 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 582

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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 relevant 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 symbolically 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 talisman 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 talisman (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 talisman 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 unprecedented 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 583

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Figure 53.1  Bābī talisman combining pentagram and circle, with central jadim of Quranic verses Source: MacEoin collection

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

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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 crucial. 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 evidence (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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AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI’S GNOSEOLOGY AND ITS IMPACT ON HIS POLITICAL WORLDVIEW Emad Bazzi

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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 general 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 background for his struggle against the Shah’s regime and was responsible for the formation 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 wayfarer 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 587

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Sufism in the Sunni world while it poured into the whole structure of Shiism especially 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 intercede 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 continue 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 everything 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 revelation 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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(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 curriculum, 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 respectively 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 indebtedness 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 initial 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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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 proximity 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 innumerable 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 590

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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 background 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/​politics 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 perfect 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 seminary for Tehran. Many of these students, like Hossein Ali Muntazari and Murtada 591

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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 destroy 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 academic 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: 592

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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 conformity 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 secondary 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. 593

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SYNCRETISTIC SUFI GNOSTICISM IN SOUTH AND SOUTH EAST ASIA Clinton Bennett

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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 596

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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 subjectivity 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 creating links between Sufism and aspects of this spiritual background, including reverence 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 religion, one that produces “multiple-​religious identity” in many Asian contexts, is characteristic 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 597

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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 groundbreaking 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 598

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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 administration. 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, possibly 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 proselytizing 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 influential 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 599

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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 elements. Santri tends to be coastal, abangan rural. Abangan, routinely dubbed syncretistic, 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 character 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 commonly 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 understood to be un-​Islamic, whether in the economic, educational, legal, political or religious spheres. Calls to Islamicize society, heard throughout the region, generally aim to make it less democratic, less Sufi, less pluralist, less tolerant of diversity 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 600

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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 generally 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, experiential, 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. 601

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CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

AUROBINDO AND SUPERMIND Peter Heehs

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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 spiritual 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 spiritual collaborator. From Alfassa he picked up certain neo-​Kabbalistic ideas that she 603

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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 multitudinous 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 characteristic 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 lifetime 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 604

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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 “knowledge.” 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 neologism “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 philosopher 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 definition 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 605

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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 cartography 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 beginning.) 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 606

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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 descent 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 indirectly 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 intermediate 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. •

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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 primarily 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 607

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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 partial rather than integral harmonies (Aurobindo 2012:  147). Plato and many Gnostic thinkers spoke of a Demiurge or Craftsman who is the effective creator 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. 608

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OF GNOSIS IN TRIBAL AND “PRIMAL” CULTURES Garry W. Trompf

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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 (usually 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 provide 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 610

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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 malevolent 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, rescuing 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 611

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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 deployment 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 psychedelic “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 612

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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 phenomenological 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 613

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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 difference 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 expectation to absorb the discursive materials put on the islanders by Christian missionaries. 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 exposition 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 614

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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 initiative 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 indelibly powerful narratives of Adam and Jesus, has generated experimental world picturing 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 interpretation” 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, aircraft, 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 independent 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 theologian 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 transmitted to him, and whether they are “fully traditional,” or anticipate or reflect religious 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 615

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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.

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— Of Gnosis in tribal and “primal” cultures — Eliade, Mircea. 1972. Shamanism:  Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (trans. Willard Trask). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Errington, Frederick. 1974. Karavar:  Masks and Power in a Melanesian Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Flaherty, Gloria. 1992. Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. 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. Swain, Tony, and Garry Trompf. 1995. Religions of Oceania. London: Routledge. 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. —​—​—​ 2004. Melanesian Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​ 2005. In Search of Origins:  The Beginnings of Religions in Western Theory and Archaeological Practice. Eligin, IL: New Dawn. 617

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— G a r r y W.   T r o m p f — —​ —​ —​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. Yandit, Kirine. 2017. “Ownership and Support of Theological Education Institutions in Papua New Guinea.” Doctoral dissert., Australian College of Theology, Sydney.

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CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

THE NEO-​G NOSTIC SYNTHESIS OF SAMAEL AUN WEOR Bernard Doherty

INTRODUCTIO N

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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 introduction to the thought of one such self-​identified Neo-​Gnostic, the Columbian esoteric 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 designate 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 himself 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 synthesis of all religions” (2012 [1950]: 90). As Weor wrote in his most important work 621

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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 geographical 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., ejaculation 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 622

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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 accessible 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 further 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 623

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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 authoritative 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: 624

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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 demarcation 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 invisible 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 dominate 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 process 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). 625

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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 proceed 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 meditation 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 lifetime 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 existential 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). 626

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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 communities (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 sacrificing 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 “sacrificing 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 627

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(mudrās –​in particular vajrolīmudrā) which, according to the form of Tantric physiology 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 “ ‘sensual 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). 628

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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 homologous 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 consciousness 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 unexplored 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 overview 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). 629

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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. 630

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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 — —​ —​ —​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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SCIENTOLOGY AND GNOSTICISM: L. RON HUBBARD’S “THE FACTORS” (1953) Donald A. Westbrook and James R. Lewis

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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 orientation (Lewis 2015; Westbrook 2017). Academic researchers have begun to more seriously 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 philosophy 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. 632

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“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 interpretations 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 potentialities: “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 communication 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 “reincarnation” 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 633

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simple language … as a writer, that happens to be as simple as I can say something. 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 dimension. 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) 634

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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 systematize 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 transition 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 efficacy 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, 635

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he made clear that Dianetics and Scientology are designed to provide personal spiritual 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 observation” (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, subjective 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. 636

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— Scientology and Gnosticism — 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, NJ: Princeton University Press. —​—​—​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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GNOSTIC AND ESOTERIC FILAMENTS IN POPULAR CULTURE Adam Possamai

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n numerous studies, the concepts of Gnosticism and esotericism are understood in different ways. Riffard (1990) provides an interesting analysis of the word esoteric in its various interpretations by different groups. For example, in Antiquity, Gnostic groups called esotericism, gnosis; for Pythagoreanism esotericism was synonymous 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 doctrine 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 synonymous 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 638

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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 culture and esotericism. There is no need to explore the complexity, the origin, and history 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 esotericism 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 theoretical 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 predominant 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 639

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“simplified” version is now a source of inspiration for many creators of popular culture, 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 philosophies) 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 aristocracy 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 historical 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 640

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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 mysticism. 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 metaphysical, 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 641

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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, sometimes 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 642

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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 spirituality. 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 violence 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 643

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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 knowledge, 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 proliferation 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 esoteric 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. 644

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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)

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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 esotericism, 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 critique 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 certainly 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.

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he quotation presented at this chapter’s opening is drawn from feminist philosopher Mary Daly’s (1928–​2010) volume Beyond God the Father:  Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation ([1973] 1985). Although extended discussion of 646

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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 feminism and the present generation, has been built up: not by merely excluding from consideration relevant evidence about Gnosticism/​heresy, but by actually misapplying 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 possibilities 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 647

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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 difference 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 obviously present in androgynous divinity and the Gnostic cosmological, anthropological 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, 648

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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 equivalent 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 ascription 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. 649

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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 normative 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 (epistemologies) 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 cognition, 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 650

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the lens of the gender politics of our own time. This is significant and important disruption. 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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MODERN PSYCHEDELIC GNOSIS Christopher Partridge

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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, understood 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 imprisonment and other-​worldly salvation; the linking of psychology, ontology, and soteriology 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 conspicuous in psychedelic cultures (see Partridge 2018). Consider, for example, the terminology. 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 652

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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 ethnobotany. 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 portmanteau 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 themselves 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 creation  –​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, religious 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 –​“ineffability,” “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 “apologize 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 consciousness, two realities, one of which, the “Old World,” inhibits an understanding of the occulted, transcendent “Other World” (Huxley 1999a:  62). Consequently, 653

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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 ‘monistic’ 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 transcendence. 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). 654

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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, moreover, 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 philosophically 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; especially 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 characteristic 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 influential 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 seminal 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 655

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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 education 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 typically profaned. We are “prisoners of the cognitive concepts and intellectual strategies 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 experience, 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 temporary “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 656

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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 elements 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 article 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 657

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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 ritually 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, technologies, 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 consciousness. “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 658

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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 consumers 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 infinities” 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 unchanging 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 consciousness 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). 659

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REFERENCES Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1971. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Blake, William. 1996. Selected Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blood, Benjamin P. 1874. The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy. Amsterdam, New York: self-​published. —​—​—​ 1920. The Pluriverse: An Essay in the Philosophy of Pluralism. Boston, MA: Marshall Jones Company. Britten, Emma Hardinge. 1876. Art Magic, or, Mundane, Sub-​Mundane, and Super-​Mundane Spiritualism. New York: self-​published. Castaneda, Carlos. 1970. Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —​—​—​ 1971. A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan. New York: Simon & Schuster. Davis, Erik. 2016. “The Weird Naturalism of the Brothers McKenna: Esoteric Media and the Experiment at La Chorrera.” International Journal for the Study of New Religions 7 (2): 175–​98. DeKorne, Jim. 2011. Psychedelic Shamanism: The Cultivation, Preparation, and Shamanic Use of Psychotropic Plants. 2nd edn. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Devereux, Paul. 1997. The Long Trip:  A Prehistory of Psychedelia. Harmondsworth: Arkana. Dobkin De Rios, Marelene. 1990. Hallucinogens:  Cross-​Cultural Perspectives. Bridport, Dorset: Prism. Galbreath, Robert. 1981. “Problematic Gnosis: Hesse, Singer, Lessing, and the Limitations of Modern Gnosticism.” Journal of Religion 61 (1): 20–​36. Ginsberg, Allen. 1995. “Foreword.” Timothy Leary. High Priest. Berkeley, CA:  Ronin Publishing: xvii–​xxi. Grimstad, Kristen. 2002. The Modern Revival of Gnosticism and Thomas Mann’s “Doktor Faustus.” Rochester, NY: Camden House. Grof, Stanislav. 2009. LSD: Doorway to the Numinous. Rochester, NY: Park Street Press. Hancock, Graham. 2015. “Introduction.” Graham Hancock (ed.). The Divine Spark: Psychedelics, Consciousness, and the Birth of Civilization. London: Hay House. Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 2008. “Altered States of Knowledge: The Attainment of Gnōsis in the Hermetica.” The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 2: 128–​63. —​ —​ —​2013. “Entheogenic Esotericis.” Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm. (eds.). Contemporary Esotericism. Sheffield: Equinox: 392–​409. —​ —​ —​2016. “Gnosis.” Glenn Alexander Magee (ed.). Cambridge Handbook to Western Mysticism and Esotericism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 381–​92. Hofmann, Albert. 1997. “The Message of the Eleusinian Mysteries for Today’s World.” Robert Forte (ed.). Entheogens and the Future of Religion. San Francisco:  Council on Spiritual Practices: 41–​0. Horgan, John. 2003. Rational Mysticism. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company. Huxley, Aldous. 1976. Island. St Albans, NF: Triad/​Panther Books. —​—​—​ 1994. The Doors of Perception; Heaven and Hell. London: Flamingo. —​—​—​1999a. “Mescaline and the ‘Other World’ (1955).” Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer (eds.). Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience. Rochester, NY: Park Street Press. 61–​6. —​—​—​1999b. “Culture and the Individual (1963).” Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer (eds.). Moksha:  Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience. Rochester, NY: Park Street Press: 247–​56. 660

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— Modern psychedelic gnosis — —​—​—​1999c. “Love and Work (1962).” in Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer (eds.). Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience. Rochester, NY: Park Street Press. 217–​33. —​—​—​ 2007. Brave New World. London: Vintage. James, William. 1926. The Varieties of Religious Experience:  A Study in Human Nature. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Leary, Timothy. 1995. High Priest. Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing. —​ —​ —​1999. “Mushrooms for Lunch.” Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer (eds.). Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience. Rochester, NY: Park Street Press: 180–​2. —​—​—​ 1970. The Politics of Ecstasy. London: Paladin. Leary, Timothy, Metzner, Ralph, and Richard Alpert. 2008. The Psychedelic Experience:  A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. London: Penguin. Masters, Robert, and Jean Houston. 1973. The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. London: Turnstone Books. McKenna, Terence. 1991. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco. —​—​—​ 1992. Food of the Gods: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution. New York: Bantam Books. McKraken, Thad. 2015. “Why I don't do Psychedelics very often Anymore.” Graham Hancock (ed.), The Divine Spark:  Psychedelics, Consciousness. and the Birth of Civilization. San Francisco: Disinformation: 202–​6. O’Regan, Cyril. 2001. Gnostic Return in Modernity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Osmond, Humphrey. 1957. “A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 66: 418–​34. Partridge, Christopher. 2016b. “Aleister Crowley on Drugs.” International Journal for the Study of New Religions 7 (2): 125–​51. —​—​—​2016a. “Occulture and Everyday Enchantment.” James R. Lewis and Inga B. Tøllefsen (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. Oxford: Oxford University Press: vol. 2, 315–​32. —​—​— 2018. High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Ramsay, William. 1894. “Partial Anæsthesia.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 9: 235–​44. Raschke, Carl. 1980. The Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism and the origins of the New Religious Consciousness. Chicago, IL: Nelson-​Hall. Roberts, Thomas B. (ed.). 2001. Psychoactive Sacramentals:  Essays on Entheogens and Religion. San Francisco, CA: Council of Spiritual Practices. Ruck, Carl. 2008. “Hindsight.” Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck. The Road to Eleusis:  Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Thirtieth anniversary edition. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. 11–​18. Ruck, Carl, Bigwood, Jeremy, Staples, Danny, Ott, Jonathan, and R. Gordon Wasson. 1979. “Entheogens.” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11 (1–​2): 145–​6. St John, Graham. 2015. Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT. Berkeley, CA: Evolver Editions. Strassman, Rick. 2001. DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Rochester, NY: Park Street Press. Wasson, R. Gordon. 1957. “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” Life. 13 May:  100–​7; 109–​10; 112–​13; 117–​18; 120.   —​—​—​1963. “The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico:  An Inquiry into the Origins of the Religious Idea Among Primitive Peoples.” The Psychedelic Review 1 (1): 27–​42. 661

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EXPOSING GNOSTICISM Douglas E. Cowan

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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 professional academic, and Montenegro, an amateur apologist who writes for a variety 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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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 condemnation 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 consider 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 inerrancy, infallibility, and insuperability of the Bible. This epistemological triumvirate bounds their understanding of the virgin conception of Jesus, his sinless life, crucifixion, 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 extension, 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 circular) 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 664

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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 invisible 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”:  challenging the validity and/​or the authenticity of Gnostic texts. Because countercult apologists are concerned with maintaining their particular version of evangelical Christianity as the only legitimate faith, anything appearing on the theological horizon that threatens this understanding must be countered and resolved. The discovery 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, showcasing 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 abstraction” (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 665

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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 document 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 putting 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 authorship, 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. 666

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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 accurately 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 particularly 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 evidence 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 667

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with the disclaimer that Brown’s factual claims are, in fact, “preposterous,” “absolute 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 interpretation of those texts. Once something is found to be incompatible with that interpretation, 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 evangelical 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 axiomatic. 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 paradigm, write about “exposing Gnosticism,” they mean a number of things, some 668

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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 temptation, 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 importantly, “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 particularly 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 consider aberrant, even heretical groups against which the orthodoxy of their own beliefs may be continually compared and tested. Gnosticism cannot be accepted as an alternate 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. 669

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— Douglas E. Cowan — 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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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 fraternities, 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 sensationalist 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 guillotine 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 671

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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 discontinuity” (Cahana 2017). Jonas interpreted Modernity through a Gnostic lens, erasing the important difference that ancient Gnostics believed they could escape alienation 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” experience 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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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 attitude to the labyrinthine narratives and conspiracies that the Diabolicals believe and the three protagonists become fascinated by is simple:  they are falsehoods, beautiful 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 transformative 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 powerless  –​for this kind of understanding can only be soundless, wordless, breathless” (Durrell 2004: 122). Akkad identifies Judeo-​Christianity with matter and the demiurge, 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 674

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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 invention 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 documentation 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 intellectually 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 transcendent 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. 675

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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 examining 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. 676

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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. Jonas, Hans. 1958. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of 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. 677

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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 classical 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 malevolent 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 illusory universes in which they entrap humans who are totally unaware of their metaphysical 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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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 responsible 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 680

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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 mankind through his hostile actions toward humanity (Luttikhuizen 2004: 155–​9). This strategy is also reflected in The Truman Show. It converges, however, with another feature 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 681

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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 independent 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 sentient 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 682

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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 character, 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 directly 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 mankind. In Biblical tradition, the flood is usually understood as the creator’s attempt to 683

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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 sunlight, 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 knowledge 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 combination of people’s experiences and they try to validate this view by replacing memories of the dark city’s dwellers every day through the use of technology. The Strangers’ 684

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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 consciousness 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 controlling 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 control 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 categories, 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 685

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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 misconception 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 development 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. 686

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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 Brakke, David. 2010. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 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. Schenke, Hans-Martin. 1974. “Das sethianische System nach Nag-Hammadi-Handschriften.” 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. Waldstein, Michael. 2000. “Hans Jonas’ Construct ‘Gnosticism’:  Analysis and Critique.” 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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MUSIC AND GNOSIS Joscelyn Godwin

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he present book’s definition of gnosis as “deep knowledge in which the mysteries 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 distance 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, analyzing 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 specifically 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 religion. 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 neither 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 empirically, 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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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 harmony 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 universe. 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, polymathic 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 counterpart, the subharmonic series, in the morphology of plants, the history of architecture, 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 690

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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 melodies 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 sacrificing 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 reflection 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. 691

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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, VT: Inner Traditions. —​—​—​ 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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AESTHETICS AND VISUAL ART 1 Jay Johnston

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he term “gnostic aesthetics” does not designate any cohesive research field or specific theory of aesthetic value or engagement. Rather it has been employed to designate approaches that diverge from dominant aesthetic categories and frameworks of experience or those understood to employ dualist frameworks. Similarly, no such category 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 artistic 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 693

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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 surrealism. 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 revolutionary 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 discussion 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 694

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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 productive 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/​embodiment 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 magazine 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 centrally 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 uncertainty 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 695

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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 relation 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 penetrate 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 interpretive 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.

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— 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.

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Note: Page numbers in bold refer to tables and in italics to figures. Abatur, Hibil Ziwa 192, 193, 195 Abd al-​Jabbār 313 Abd ar-​Rahman Jami 596 Abdul Ghaffār 352, 355 Abel 130, 148, 196, 277, 385 Abellio, Raymond 415, 416, 640 Abraham 47, 51, 93, 196, 261, 313, 342, 356, 592 Abrasax 142, 218, 219 Abu’l-​Khaṭtạ̄ b 316 Achamoth 164, 182, 210, 275 Act of Peter 135 Acts of John 135 Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles 135 Acts of the Apostles 226, 383, 385 Acts of Thomas 104, 106, 135, 136, 273, 317, 362, 573 Adam 45, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 80, 81, 83, 84, 95, 97, 98, 119, 120, 121, 134, 138, 140, 142–​4, 149–​50, 187–​8, 195, 196, 221, 227, 237–​8, 310, 313–​4, 323, 325, 342, 360, 363–​5, 375, 376–​9, 385, 439, 441, 448, 450, 615, 653, 681; and Eve 13, 45, 52, 85, 97, 120, 143, 144, 151, 183, 237, 313, 363, 364, 365, 376, 460, 471 Adam Kadmon 50, 442 Adam Kasia 47, 188, 195, 196 Adam Pagria 47, 195 Adam, Paul 479, 480, 481 Adamantius 272, 273, 274 Adamas 144, 154 Adawīyya 358, 362 Addā, Mar 229, 230, 247 Adorno, Theodor W. 693, 694 aeon(s), aiōn(es) 26, 30, 32, 41, 47, 53, 80, 82–​83, 86, 103, 122, 142, 150–​1, 153–​4, 157, 163–​4,

168, 181–​4, 205, 213, 221, 233, 254, 274–​6, 278, 326, 373, 374, 377–​8, 399, 436, 483, 608 Agathodemon 200 Aggadah 375, 376, 377 Agrippa Castor 156 Agrippa, Cornelius, 369, 437 Aguéli, Ivan (Abd al-​Hadi) 530, 531, 534 Ahriman 27, 51, 52, 184, 253–​6, 274, 376 Ahura Mazda 45, 48, 253–​6 al-​Ahsā’ī, Shaykh Ahmad ibn Zayn al-​Dīn 580 al-​Farabi, Abu Nasr  346 al-​Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad 339 al-​Hakim bi-​Amri Allah 349, 356 al-​Hamidi, Ibrahim  346 al-​Kirmani, Hamid al-​Din 338, 346 al-​Muqtāna Baha’uddin 350, 352, 354 al-​Murshid, Abu ‘Isa  379 al-​Muʾayyad fiʾl-​Din al-​Shirazi  338 al-​Nadīm, Ibn, Fihrist 27, 226–​9, 243, 310, 314, 315, 402 al-​Nahāwandī, Benjamin 375 al-​Nasafi, Muhammad b. Ahmad 344 al-​Razi, Muhammad (Rhazes) 402, 403 al-Shahrastānī, Muhammad, 27 al-​Sijistani, Abu Yaʿqub 338, 344–​6 Albigensians 389, 393, 394, 483, 484 alchemy 18, 33, 397–​405, 409, 416, 418, 421, 438, 439, 467, 475, 477, 549–​51, 627 Alexandria 9, 37, 69, 82–​83, 86, 87, 130, 156, 159, 208, 230, 259, 275, 278, 399, 400, 401 Alfassa, Mirra 603, 608 Ali, ‘Alī 51, 53, 316, 317, 339, 341, 346, 583 Allogenes 13, 105, 111, 137, 138, 143, 145, 151–​5, 180, 181, 184–​5, 208, 209, 210, 214 Allogenes 135, 138, 143, 148, 153

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— ​ I n d e x —​ Allogenes the Stranger 148 Allogenes, Temptation of 184 Alpert, Richard 655–​6 Altizer, Thomas 469 Amelius 152, 153, 208, 276 America 56, 337, 449, 493, 553–​8 Ammo, Mar 229 Ammonius Saccas 208 Amuli, Sayyid Haidar 588, 589 Analytical Psychology 32, 33, 417, 433 Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis 485 Anderson, James 448 angel(s) 27, 80, 81, 85, 138, 150–​1, 157, 165–​7, 172, 183, 197, 210, 220, 232, 241, 244, 274, 278, 309, 313, 317, 343–​4, 360–​2, 365–​6, 372–​9, 384–​6, 390–​1, 393, 470, 472, 540, 642, 696; see also Peacock Angel Angra Mainyu 45, 48, 253 Angus, Samuel 31 Anthroposophy 31, 54, 510–​11, 513, 550 Antony, St 261, 262 Apelles 126 Apocalypse of Abraham 139 Apocalypse of Adam 14, 47, 66–​68, 83, 105, 139–​40, 143–​4, 149, 151–​2 Apocalypse of Enoch 151 Apocalypse of John the Divine 385 Apocalypse of Paul 137 Apocalypse of Peter 158, 159 Apocalypse of the Strangers 313 Apocalypse of Zephaniah 139 apocalyptic writings 14–​16, 22, 45, 48, 80, 83, 85, 95, 103–​4, 134, 137–​8, 151, 154, 183, 227–​8, 235–​6, 308, 310–​11, 317, 404, 421, 439, 442, 460, 488, 539, 570, 646, 674 Apocryphon of James 136, 137 Apocryphon of John 11, 13, 14, 21, 69, 73, 80, 91, 105–​9, 111, 120, 122, 125–​6, 135, 138–​9, 141–​3, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 158, 182, 314, 315, 317, 365, 461, 673; see also Secret Book of John Apollos 86 Apuleius, Metamorphoses 136, 642 Aquinas, Thomas 399, 403, 546 ar-​Rāzī, Abū Hātim 52 Arabia 28, 56, 229, 310, 311, 312, 555, 568, 600 Arberry, Arthur 528 archon(s) 120, 130, 143, 149–​52, 154, 158, 182, 274, 365, 375, 398, 472, 608, 672, 682, 683 Archontics 105, 111, 142, 147, 277 Arianism, Aryanism 272, 278, 502, 503 Ario-​gnosis 499, 500, 502, 505cal Ariosophy 499, 500, 503, 504, 505, 507, 508 Aristotle 128, 131, 210, 399, 427, 428, 429, 430, 437, 438 Armanism 499, 501, 503, 505, 506 Armenia 229, 231, 277, 279, 362, 516, 568

Arnal, William 113–​14 Arnald of Villanova 403 Arnold, Gottfried 28, 410, 411, 412 Arnold, Thomas 596, 597, 599 Ascension of Isaiah 137, 139, 277 asceticism 11, 103, 113, 232, 235, 239, 264, 292, 336, 622 Asclepius 33, 138, 202, 271, 401, 404 Ashmole, Elias 403 Askew Codex 10, 16, 19, 135, 137 Assmann, Aleida 694 Assmann, Jan 694 astrology 18, 32, 33, 36, 110, 128, 274, 275, 346, 402, 409–​10, 415, 419, 427, 442, 510 Athanasius of Alexandria 261–​2, 265 ātman 285–​8, 289, 491, 626 Attar, Fariduddin 330–​1, 333–​4, 336 Atum 19, 109 Audians 15, 111, 279, 313, 314, 316 Augustine 226, 232, 240, 241, 279, 389, 537 Aurobindo, Sri 55, 603–​8 Austria 499–​507 Authoritative Teaching 139 Autogenes 142, 144, 149, 152–​4 Avens, Robert 417 Avesta 253, 257 Axionicus 162 Āz, Demoness of Greed 239, 248 Azazel, ‘Azāzi’īl 80, 317, 360, 370, 376 Aztec 437, 611 Baader, Franz von 411–​2, 419 Baal/​Bel  451 Babism/​Bābism, Bābī, Bāb 53, 579–​86 Babylonia 105, 309, 310 Bach, Johann Sebastian 440 Bacon, Francis 439, 440 Bacon, Roger 403 Bahir, Sefer Bahir 370–​1, 373–​4, 376 Bahonar, Muhammad Javad 592 Baigent, Michael 673 Bailey, Alice 31 Bailey, Foster 638 Bailly, Edmund 477–​8 Baktaman 613 Baktiotha 221 Balkan 382, 383, 387, 527 Ball, Hugo 694 Balzli, Johannes 500–​6 Bangladesh 595, 596, 597, 600, 601 baptism 69, 86, 97, 98, 109, 140, 142, 150, 153, 159, 167, 191, 197, 211, 225, 310, 391, 427; of Jesus 67, 97, 156, 157, 166–​7, 386, 492; spiritual 98, 387, 390; in water 86, 187–​8, 191, 276, 277, 386, 397 baptists 13, 15, 66, 69, 188, 226–​8, 310, 314

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— ​ I n d e x —​ Barbelo 47, 105, 140, 142, 144, 149–​50, 152–​4, 183–​4, 219, 221, 276 Barbelo-​Gnostic(s) 12, 109, 125, 129, 182, 275, 344 Barbeloism, Barbeloites 142, 144–​5, 147 Barber, Malcolm 36 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules 479 Bardesanes, Bardaiṣan 29, 32, 35, 49, 273–​4, 314 Barlaam 429, 430 Baronius, Caesar 28 Barrès, Maurice 479–​80 Barth, Fredrik 613 Basil of Poiana Mărului 431 Basil the Bogomil 384, 387 Basil the Great/​Cappadocian 262–​3, 265 Basilideans 101, 105, 129, 156–​60 Basilides 12, 81, 87, 109, 112, 125, 128–​30, 139, 156–​60, 158, 159, 220, 317, 361, 398, 417 Basilius Valentinus 404 Baudelaire, Charles 475, 479, 642 Bauman, Zygmut 640 Baur, Ferdinand Christian 9, 10, 17, 29, 30, 412, 421 Bayān b. Sam‘ān 316 Bayle, Pierre 28 Bayley, Harold 55 Beausobre, Isaac de 28 Bech, Jacob 388 Beethoven, Ludwig van 482, 688 Belial 84, 85, 675 Benz, Ernst 33 Berdyaev, Nicholas 432 Bergson, Henri 656 Berlin Codex 19, 102, 124, 135, 137, 142 Besant, Annie 451, 478, 487, 492–​4 Best, Elsdon 611 Bhagavad Gītā 285, 603 Bianchi, Ugo 10, 34 Bible 11, 27, 46, 47, 49, 50, 70, 136, 159, 197, 202, 313, 377, 440, 447, 468, 558, 560, 598, 641, 663–​7 Biblical antiheroes 184; apocrypha 201; creator God 152; demiurgical(ism) 11, 12, 63, 64–​65, 71–​72, 141 Biès, Jean 417, 419 Biller, Peter 392, 394 Bjorndahl, Sterling 174 Blake, William 454, 460–​1, 464–​73, 642, 652, 655 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 10, 19, 29, 30, 53, 54, 55, 413, 450–​1, 478, 484, 487–​97, 501–​2, 511, 530, 534, 607, 638, 671 Blochet, Edgard 30 Blood, Benjamin Paul 655 Bloom, Harold 419, 461, 468, 652 Blumenberg, Hans 457

Blunt, Henry 29 Bock, Darrell 668 body 11, 15, 26, 94, 97, 98, 102, 110, 121, 141, 150, 152, 158, 166–​8, 172–​3, 188–​9, 191, 195, 204, 205, 206, 213, 227, 231, 232, 240–​4, 247, 273–​5, 278–​9, 285–​6, 291, 297, 308, 313, 315, 317, 324–​6, 354, 361–​2, 390, 398, 404, 450, 466, 470, 491, 510–​5, 520, 522, 523, 540, 550–​1, 574, 591, 598, 611–​2, 628, 629, 648, 659, 674, 685–​6, 689; of Adam 150, 196, 378, 385; of Buddha 290–​1; of Christ 64, 93, 94, 127, 130, 166–​7, 171, 183, 383, 385, 386; crucified 159, 164, 166; of Eve 120, 196; of light 248, 250, 316; of Mani 227, 231; of Mary 127; psychic 166; spiritual 166, 273; as a trap, prison 44, 80, 94, 134, 191, 239, 248; universal 197 Boethius 690 Bogomilism, Bogomils 15, 16, 19, 32, 53, 106, 110, 382–​89, 390–​1, 393–​4 Böhme/​Boehme, Jacob 29, 53, 410–​2, 419, 439–​ 40, 469–​70, 473, 690 Bois, Jules 478, 485 Boisset, Yves-​Fred  416 Boissin, Firmin /​Simon Brugal 483 Book of Baruch 375 Book of Genesis 49, 69, 83, 91, 98, 138, 141, 148–​9, 151–​2, 202, 271, 364, 376–​9, 385, 386, 441, 460, 464, 468, 633 Book of Giants 49, 230 Book of Job 464 Book of John the Baptizer 30, 189 Book of Jubilees 95, 151 Book of Mormon 56 Book of Mysteries 49, 230 Book of the Strangers 313 Book of Thomas the Contender 137, 139 Book of Thoth 219 Book of Watchers 469 Book of Zoroaster 111, 257 Book(s) of Enoch 139, 464, 469 Books of Jeu 110, 135, 137, 218 Borborians, Borborites 130, 278 Borella, Jean 417 Bosnia 382, 383, 387, 388 Bossuet, Jacques-​Bénigne  441 Bousset, Wilhelm 10, 51, 173, 254 Boyce, Mary 254 Boyle, Robert 404 Brahe, Tycho 404, 439 brahma, brahman 285, 539, 604–​5, 607 Brahmanism 528 Brakke, David 65, 68, 73, 103, 105, 111–​4 Breton, André 482 Bricaud, Jean (Joanny) 413, 480, 485 Britten, Emma Hardinge 654

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— ​ I n d e x —​ Broad, C. D. 656 Brooks, Liz 696 Brown, Dan 642, 664, 667–​8, 672–​3 Brown, Peter 119 Brown, Robert 470 Bruce Codex 10, 19, 105, 135, 137, 142, 142–​3, 145, 147–​8, 152, 220, 374, 469 Bruce, James 135, 469 Brucker, Jakob 18, 442 Brunei 595, 599, 600, 601 Bruno, Giordano 29, 53, 404, 436–​8 Büchli, Jörg 202–​3 Buddeus, Franz 28 Buddha 49, 103, 225, 229, 235, 246, 249, 279, 284, 290–​1, 295–​7, 301, 450, 494, 518, 675 Buddha-​nature 249, 250, 251, 291, 297, 298 Buddhahood 290, 294, 295, 297, 298, 302 Buddhism, Buddhists 30, 32, 34, 54, 103, 245–​7, 249, 251, 283, 284, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290–​2, 294–​302, 418–​9, 476, 481, 510, 528, 530, 549, 568, 595–​6, 601, 604, 623, 627, 632–​3, 663, 674 Bulgakov, Sergius 432–​3 Bulgaria 382–​4, 392–​3, 431 Bultmann, Rudolf 34, 64, 66 Bulwer-​Lytton, Edward 671, 672 Buonaiuti, Ernesto 33 Burckhardt, Titus 537 Burns, Dylan 65, 68, 69, 72, 73, 222, 326 Bussell, Frederick W. 32 Butler, Judith 649 Byron, George Gordon 460, 461, 462 Byzantium, Byzantine Empire 278–​9, 308, 382–​4, 393, 426–​8 Cage, John 691 Cagliostro, Alessendro 449 Cahana, Jonathan 649 Cain 147, 148, 184, 277, 385, 461, 462 Cainites 105, 130, 145, 147, 184 Cairo 337, 349 Calinic of Cernica 431 Calixte Mélinge /​Abbé Alta 478, 480–​1 Calvé, Emma 478, 485 Canonical Prayer Book 189 Cardinal Mazzella 483 cargo cult 614, 615 Carpocrates of Egypt 101, 104, 106, 130, 366 Carpocratians 105, 106, 125, 129 Caruana, Laurence 695 Castaneda, Carlos 657 Catharism, Cathars 15–​16, 19, 32, 36, 55, 106, 110, 374, 382, 387–​94, 414, 483, 484–​5, 673 Catholicism, Catholics 10, 101, 382, 387, 410, 415, 438, 439, 441, 446, 478–​83, 506, 567, 569, 614, 664, 671

Catling, Brian 696 Celsus 12, 101, 130, 143 Central Asia 225, 230, 233, 235, 307, 316, 338–​40, 344, 517 Cerdo 127 Cerinthus 104, 105, 398, 607 Chaboseau, Augustin 481, 485 Chaldaean Oracles 28, 30, 154, 271, 278, 438 Charnock, Thomas 403 Chaucer, Geoffrey 403 Chauvel de Chauvignie, Marie 484 Chif[f]let, Jean-​Jacques  48 China 27, 106, 225, 233, 235, 246, 294, 568–​9, 596 Chittick, William 590 Christ 26, 27, 29, 44–​5, 47, 49, 54, 66, 68, 85, 86, 97, 103, 127, 144, 152, 172, 197, 202, 261–​2, 264, 266, 268, 275, 278, 279, 365, 386, 391, 427, 430, 432, 438, 442, 448–​50, 465, 469, 494, 518, 541, 611, 614, 621, 624, 626, 675; and baptism 97, 150, 386; body of 93, 94; the bridegroom 97; cosmic 90, 622; crucified 158, 159, 278; flesh of 126–​7; guise of 140; as intellect of the Father 157; intimate 627, 629; as Logos 260; and Pleroma 164, 181; psychic 166; resurrected, risen 47, 90, 93–​4, 98, 130; and Satan 383, 387, 389–​90; as savior 83, 90, 91, 107, 279; and Seth 221; see also Jesus Christian 11, 12, 14, 15, 66; countercult movement 663; Freemasonry 484; Gnosis, Gnosticism 82, 181, 260, 262, 264, 268, 272, 277, 283, 416, 417; heresies, heretics 9, 13, 20, 156; Hermetic tradition 37; Hermeticism 415, 420; Kabbalah/​Kabbalism 37, 53, 369, 409, 440, 450, 469; Sethianism 155; theosophy 29, 409–​13, 417, 419, 469, 484, 532; see also Gnosticism, Jewish Christianity 14, 30, 34, 49, 71, 74, 90, 91, 107, 113–​4, 120, 152, 159, 181, 206, 259, 260, 264, 271, 273, 275, 276, 277, 283, 308, 341, 343, 358, 383, 387, 402, 409, 412, 415, 416, 427, 429, 440, 442, 449, 502, 510, 527, 533, 549, 565–​75, 604, 615, 632, 639, 647, 650, 656, 663, 665, 668–​9, 671–​2, 674; ancient, early 11, 73, 74, 108, 114, 148, 177, 328, 410, 570, 575; Catholic 569; Episcopalian 676; esoteric 478, 565, 571; orthodox 382; proto-​orthodox 181; Syrian 106, 379; see also Gnosticism, Jewish Christians 13, 20, 46, 49, 72, 73, 81, 85, 86, 87, 90, 95, 96, 98, 100–​1, 112, 125, 129, 130, 134, 157, 168, 231, 245, 254, 261, 271, 277, 311, 330, 383, 388, 438, 479, 503, 508, 558, 667, 668, 669; aberrant 129; Gnostic, Gnosticizing 28, 272; posing as 125 Chrysippus 125

701

702

— ​ I n d e x —​ Chwolson, Daniel 29 Cicero 136, 138, 689 Clement of Alexandria 101, 128, 129–​30, 135, 145, 156, 157, 159–​60, 162, 166–​7, 259–​68, 409 Clément, Olivier 433 Cloclet da Silva, Ana Rosa 624, 629 Colberg, Daniel 410, 440 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 454, 457, 459 Cologne Mani Codex 227, 228 Colossians 17, 93–​4, 131 Compendium of the Teachings of Mani, the Buddha of Light 246 Concept of Our Great Power 139 Concerning the Birth of his Body 227–​8 Conner, Bruce 695 Constantine Chrysomallus 387 Constantine Silvanus of Mananalis 279 Constantinople 262, 278, 384, 394, 426, 568 Conybeare, Frederick 29 Conze, Edward 34, 246 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 36, 537, 543, 544 Cooper, John 37 Corbin, Henri 33, 51, 417, 532–​3, 535, 588 Corinthians, First and Second 94, 98, 131 Cornelius Agrippa 369, 404, 437 Corpus Hermeticum 83, 135, 201–​6, 219, 398, 400, 410, 414, 421, 436 cosmogony 65, 84, 91, 95, 138, 139, 255, 343, 354, 375, 377, 382, 450, 455, 555, 588, 589, 590; Basilidian 157–​8; Druze 354; Mandaean 189, 195; Sethian 152; Shi‘i 360; Yezidi 365; see also creation cosmology 173, 309, 439, 470; of alchemy 405; Aurobindo’s 607–​8; Druze 350–​57; Egyptian 203; Gurdjieff’s 519–​20, 522–​3; Hermetic 271; Ismaili 342–​7; List’s 501–​2; Mandaean 190; Manichaean 236–​7, 274; Scientological 632–​5; Shi‘i 321–​7; Steiner’s 511 Coyle, Kevin 118 creation 15, 45, 48, 49, 50, 53, 65, 66, 72, 81, 82, 83, 152, 202, 205, 255, 256, 275, 316, 317, 333, 364–​5, 385, 393, 394, 432, 436, 439–​40, 450, 460–​1, 471, 582, 598, 607–​8, 611, 633–​4; of Adam 120; archon of 154; Basilidian 128, 158; in Catharism 390, 395; evil, 382, 108; of humans 15, 45, 165, 195, 206, 237, 322, 324, 395; in Ismailism 343, 345; in Jewish tradition 374–​5, 377; in Mandaeism 189, 192–​5; in Manichaeism 232, 237, 238; in Marcionism 273; in Mazdakism 257; Shi‘i 324–​6; in Valentinianism 165, 273; of the world 66, 72, 130, 141, 158, 164, 189, 193, 322, 324, 374; in Yezidism 359–​60; see also cosmogony creator 141, 313, 330, 365, 376–​7, 398, 399, 460–​1, 465, 467, 470–​1, 539, 606, 608, 611,

672, 675, 679–​86; Bogomil 384–​5; Cathar 389, 390; Hermetic 203; Jewish 86, 91, 103, 204; Mandaean 192, 361; in Marcion 104, 126, 127; Ismaili 343, 345; Muslim 598; Sethian/​classic Gnostic 105, 108, 111, 120, 138, 140, 142, 150, 151, 152; Valentinian 165, 168; Yezidi 359–​60; Zoroastrian 253, 255, 256 Crowley, Aleister 414, 485, 622–​3, 632, 654 Crusaders 339, 445, 529 Curran, Stuart 468 Cusanus, Nicholas 437, 439 Cutsinger, James 542 d’Olivet, Fabre 476 d’Orléans, Étienne 483 Dada 694 Daly, Mary 646, 647 Damascius 255 Daniel, Daniel 488, 492 Daniélou, Alain 691 Daniélou, Jean 81 Daniil the Hesychast 431 Dārābī, Sayyid Yahyā 579 Darbre, Florence 180 darkness 15, 94, 119, 120, 122, 174, 175, 188, 191, 193, 204, 243–​4, 246, 257, 264, 268, 272, 313, 352, 365, 378, 575, 681, 684; fall into 93, 120; forces of 192, 237, 247, 249, 279; king/​ lord of 195, 236, 360, 363, 675; queen of 49, 192, 195; realm/​world(s) of 14, 91, 92, 120, 121, 173, 192–​5, 197, 236, 239, 243, 248, 325, 365; separation/​liberation from 236, 237–​8, 240, 242, 243; sons of 85; see also light and darkness Dastin, John 403 Davies, Owen 639 Davithe, Daveithe, Daveithai 105, 142, 149, 220 Dawson, Andrew 627, 629 Daysanism, Dayṣāniyya 314, 328 de Lapasse, Louis Charles Édouard 483 de Nerval, Gérard 529 de Pasqually, Martinez 53, 450, 451, 484 de Pouvourville, Georges-​Albert Puyuo 478, 479 de Staël, Madame Germaine 468 Dead Sea Scrolls 10, 84, 85, 180, 565 Debussy, Claude 477, 478, 485 DeConick, April 18, 19, 20, 67, 104, 109, 110, 172 Dee, John 404, 438, 642 DeKorne, Jim 659 Demiurge 13, 15, 26, 44–​45, 46, 81, 120, 130, 153, 173, 210, 272, 274, 374–​5, 379, 398, 470, 471, 472, 510, 598, 607–​8, 674, 675–​6, 685–​7; Basilidian 157; Bogomil 385; Cathar 390; Hermetic 106, 206, 400; Mandaean 195; Marcion’s 127, 128; Paulician 279; Plato’s 141,

702

703

— ​ I n d e x —​ 151, 152, 153; Valentinian 125, 126, 165–​8; Yezidi 359 Democritus 400, 436 Denkard 27, 256 Des Essarts, Fabre /​Synesius 484, 485 Desjardins, Michel 70, 74 Devil(s) 48, 49, 51, 91, 168, 183, 243, 255, 273, 274, 277–​8, 384, 390, 392, 436, 467–​8, 470, 555, 556, 560, 561, 675 Diadochus of Photiki 266 Dialogue of the Savior 137, 649 Dialogue with Trypho 162 Dick, Philip 641, 672, 675–​6 Dickens, Charles 671 Didymus 265 Dillon, Matthew J. 694–​5 Dionysius the Areopagite 266, 278, 430 Dioscoros of Aphrodito 222 Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth 137–​8 Ditko, Steve 641 DiTommaso, Lorenzo 641 Diwan Abatur 189, 193, 194–​5 Doctrina Addai 273 Doinel, Jules-​Benoît 413–​4, 418, 478, 480, 483, 484, 485 Dorn, Gerard 405 Dositheos 81, 200 Douglas, Frederick 554–​5 Doyle, Conan 641 Dragovitsa 383 Drecoll, Volker 66–​7 Drijvers, Han 35, 317 Drower, Lady Ethel 35, 190 Druzism, Druze 29, 32, 36, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 349–​57, 379, 528, 529, 554, 555 dualism 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 19, 21, 27, 31, 34, 36, 80, 85, 91, 105, 108, 110–​1, 118, 141, 168, 172, 235, 236, 243, 253, 279, 324–​5, 344, 371, 376, 382–​4, 387–​90, 393–​4, 398, 410, 418, 461, 520, 601, 608, 611, 648–​9, 652, 653–​4, 672, 679, 686, 696 Dunhuang 246, 247 Dunning, Benjamin H. 648 Durkin-​Meisterernst, Desmond  226 Durrell, Lawrence 674–​6 Dussaud, René 29 Eaton, Richard 597 Ebion 126 Ebionites 310 Ecclesia Gnostica 21, 418 Eckart, Dietrich 507 Eckhardt, Meister 416, 538, 540, 545 Eco, Umberto 642, 672–​3 Edda 501, 502 Eden 56, 84, 120, 237, 378, 450, 460, 659

Edessa 229, 272–​3, 279 Église Gnostique 414, 485 Egypt 9, 10, 20, 28–​29, 32, 33, 45, 51, 53, 64, 66, 83–​84, 101–​2, 122, 135, 147, 159, 177, 180, 201–​2, 208, 219, 221–​2, 225, 230, 232, 235, 259, 278, 337–​8, 349, 397–​402, 436–​7, 448–​51, 468, 506, 517, 565, 569, 625, 671 Egyptian Book of the Dead 399 Egyptian Gospel 140, 143, 148, 151, 152; see also Gospel of the Egyptians and Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit Eichhorn, Johan Gottfried 412 Eisler, Robert 33 Elchasai, Alchasaios 12, 227 Elchasaites 49, 66, 235, 310 Eleleth 105, 137, 138, 142, 149, 220 Elenchos, Refutation of all Heresies 128, 156, 158–​9 Eleusinian mysteries 29, 613, 642 Eleusis 126, 658 Eliade, Mircea 33, 416, 532 Elijah Muhammad 553–​61 emanation(s) 26, 27, 31, 32, 44–​5, 47, 103, 128, 189, 191–​3, 203, 209–​10, 212, 236–​74, 315, 330, 334, 335, 360, 362, 371, 377–​8, 359, 403, 450, 472, 487, 528, 555, 588–​9, 607–​8, 610 Emerald Tablet 398, 401, 402, 404–​5 Empedocles 128, 436 Encausse, Gérard /​Papus 413, 475, 478–​81, 484–​5, 639 Enneads 205, 208, 211, 466 Enoch 45, 50, 52–​4, 80, 84–​5, 87, 137, 184, 196, 376, 441, 449, 488–​9, 492 Ephesians 17, 92, 93, 94, 127, 131 Ephraem Syrus of Nisibis 226, 238, 273 Epictetus the Stoic 125 Epicurus 136, 436 Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion 27, 105, 111, 121, 127, 129–​31, 135–​6, 142–​5, 147, 159, 162–​3, 184, 310, 314, 330, 366, 436, 468 Epistle of Jude 184 Epistles (of Mani) 229, 230 Eranos Jahrbuch, meetings 19, 32–​3, 532 Eruigena, John Scottus 279 Ernst, Carl 528, 534, 597 eschatology 20, 48, 56, 65, 85, 93, 98, 144, 173, 197, 312, 342, 343, 356, 488, 492, 494–​7, 581 esotericism 9, 18, 21, 36, 37, 340, 347, 409–​22, 477–​8, 484, 500, 505, 510–​1, 527, 530, 531, 539, 545, 554, 587, 606, 607, 623, 629, 632, 638–​40, 643, 644, 646; see also knowledge: esoteric Essenism, Essenes 29, 53, 82, 83, 84, 85 Ethiopia 450, 469, 517, 568, 569 Eudemus of Rhodes 255 Eugnostos the Blessed 69, 136, 138, 143, 144 Euphrates 187, 191, 195, 196, 197, 277

703

704

— ​ I n d e x —​ Euthymius Zigabenus 384, 390 Evagrius Ponticus 264–​5, 266, 267 Evdokimov, Paul 433 Eve 56, 97, 119, 120, 121, 130, 140, 148, 149, 150, 196, 277, 313–​14, 363, 385; see also Adam and Eve Excerpts from/​of Theodotus 129, 157 Exegesis of the Soul 47, 136 Exegetica (of Basilides) 156 Exodus 263, 506 Ezekiel, Ezekiel 47, 79, 84, 94, 376, 378 Eznik of Kolb 27, 255, 256 Faivre, Antoine 37, 38, 638 Fard, Wali Muhammad 553–​5, 556–​9 Farrakhan, Louis Muhammad 553, 556–​61 Father 128, 142, 144, 149, 157, 163, 164, 165, 168, 174, 221, 227, 255, 274, 276, 278, 279, 362, 365, 384, 385, 386, 387, 390, 391, 393, 439, 451, 689; of Greatness 236, 250, 274, 317; of Truth 80, 163, 229 Fātị ma, Fatimah 317, 598 Faucheux, Albert /​(François) Charles Barlet 480, 481, 484 Faye, Eugène de 30 Feder, Gottfried 507 Federle, Helmut 695 Fehri, Sayyid Ahmad 593 Festugière, André-​Jean 32, 204 Ficino, Marsilio 28, 410, 420, 437, 438 Filastrius of Brescia 135, 142, 147 Filoramo, Giovanni 469 Fiore, Gioacchino di 53 First Apocalypse of James 118, 135, 137, 180, 182, 374 First Thought 80, 140, 142, 150 Fitzgerald, James 289 Flamel, Nicolas 403, 640 Florensky, Pavel 432 Florovsky, Georges 432, 433 Fludd, Robert 404, 439 Fount of Knowledge 267, 268, 269 Fourth Book of Ezra 139 France 388, 389, 391, 393, 394, 446, 529 Franckenberg, Abraham von 28, 411 Franzmann, Majella 118 Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua 623 Fraternitas Saturni 414 Freemasonry, Freemasons 29, 36, 55, 405, 414, 445–​50, 469, 481, 484, 501, 528, 529, 531, 615, 623, 642, 644, 673 Freud, Sigmund 32, 55 Friedlaender, Israel 315 Friedländer, Moritz 29, 79, 81 Fugairon, Louis-​Sophrone 484, 485

Gabler, Johann Philipp 18, 412 Gabriel 48, 80, 142, 188, 189, 488 Gabryab, Mar 229 Gaiman, Neil 641 Galbreath, Robert 675 Galtier, Gérard 483, 485 Gamaliel 140, 142 Gärtner, Bertil 171 Garvey, John 675 Gaster, Moshe 79 Geertz, Clifford 600 Genesis 45, 49, 69, 83, 84, 91, 98, 138, 141, 148, 149, 151, 152, 202, 271, 376, 377, 385, 386, 460, 464, 468, 633 Germany 9–​10, 374, 379, 432, 468, 499, 501, 502, 503, 505, 506, 507, 508, 550 Gheorge of Cernica 431, 434 Ghulat, ghulāt 15, 36, 315, 316, 317, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 360, 379, 554 Gibbon, Edward 43, 469 Gilchrist, Alexander 468 Gilhus, Ingvild 671 Ginsberg, Allen 652, 659 Ginza Rba 47, 121, 189 Ginza Rba, Great Treasure 189, 191, 195 Giordano Bruno 29, 53, 404, 436, 437, 438, 439, 442 Glaucias 156 gnosis 17, 18, 19, 28, 29, 31, 36, 38, 51, 53–​56, 64, 67, 80, 83, 85, 86, 105, 107–​11, 120, 124, 125, 133, 151, 168, 182–​4, 188, 191, 193, 197, 200, 205, 206, 227–​31, 244, 248, 257, 259–​85, 287, 290, 291, 295, 297, 298, 302, 307–​8, 328, 329, 334–​8, 340, 344, 347, 350, 351, 354, 355, 364, 365, 379, 398, 405, 409–​22, 427, 428, 429, 438, 439, 440, 447, 451, 457–​8, 461, 477, 479, 483, 487, 491–​2, 497, 499, 500, 518, 527–​46, 571, 580, 581, 587, 590, 603–​14, 621, 622, 626, 638, 643, 646, 647, 648, 650, 652–​9, 671, 674, 675, 684, 688–​90, 693, 695; ancient 499, 500; divine, holy 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 372, 427, 429–​34, 504, 606; and episteme 400; esoteric 56; “falsely so-​called” 17, 100, 103, 124; feminine 649; higher, highest, supreme 262, 263, 267, 426, 428; and jñāna 30, 246, 283, 291, 605, 608; magnetic 420; modern 652; musical 688, 691; mystical 432; philosophical 422, 430; vs. pistis 17, 26; primeval 487; psychedelic 655–​9; self-​ 33; secret, esoteric 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 502; spiritual 265; theological 260, 262, 263, 427; true 260, 317, 334, 411, 417, 422, 492; universal 412, 413; Ur-​ 500, 501; see also knowledge Gnosis 9–​10, 17, 18–​21, 28, 29, 30, 31, 35, 37, 45, 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, 48, 63–​7, 70, 74, 79–​87, 90, 100–​14, 118, 126–​7, 133, 147, 148, 165, 185, 191, 201, 204, 210, 217, 219, 235–​6, 253, 283, 284–​5, 307, 309, 310, 326, 328, 329, 344, 347, 359, 362, 365–​79, 397–​422, 454–​73, 499–​500, 510, 520, 528, 529, 530, 538, 549–​51, 554, 596, 604, 608, 612, 632, 636, 638, 644–​57, 663–​76, 679, 684, 686, 690, 693–​6; “academic” 420; ancient 35, 102, 106, 108, 109, 118, 410, 466, 468, 469, 471, 473, 549, 615, 650, 651, 679; Christian 17, 30, 201, 283; Christianizing 283; “classic(al)” 13, 14, 15, 31, 33, 46, 48, 50, 69, 72, 80, 105, 106, 109, 111, 133, 143, 206, 283, 288, 309, 343, 611, 612; classic Christian 27, 32; classical Mediterranean 598; historical 603, 604; Islamic 378, 533; Late Antique 603; modern 468, 473, 601, 659, 672; non-​Christian 66, 68; “post-​gnostic” 420; pre-​Christian 30, 63, 64, 66–​74, 201; primal 504; Romantic 462; “Sethian” 69, 105, 106, 133, 142, 143, 147, 148, 151, 326; Shi‘i 347; Sufi 530, 531, 595; Syro-​Mesopotamian 379; Ur-​ 505; Valentinian 461, 462, 675 Gnostic Church 418, 424, 483–​5 gnōstikoi 9, 10, 11, 12, 18, 26, 29, 65, 100–​1, 106, 111, 112, 124, 129, 130, 133, 271 gnōstikos 12, 100, 101, 112, 133, 397 God 79, 83, 140, 148–​9, 157, 158, 200, 204, 205, 206, 231, 233, 241, 262–​4, 267, 269, 273–​4, 278–​9, 309, 313, 315, 316, 321, 323–​6, 331–​46, 352–​65, 369, 372–​94, 414–​5, 476, 529, 539, 560; creator 26, 86, 91, 103–​4, 108, 111, 120, 140, 142, 149, 151–​2, 192, 460, 611; false 151; Hermetic 203; hidden 26, 80, 130, 189, 191, 359, 255, 610, 611, 672, 676; high 80, 109, 152, 610; image of 152, 203, 356, 476; of the Jews 44, 72, 203, 277; knowledge of 18, 108, 157, 200, 260, 262, 329, 333, 338, 372, 528, 540, 605, 652; providence of 157, 159, 262; son of 86, 152, 260, 261, 384, 390; supreme 103, 104, 108, 173, 359, 398; transcendent, transcendence of 65, 72, 109, 110, 263, 333, 344, 350, 679; true 108, 128, 151, 182, 273, 276, 279, 465, 466, 611, 672, 676, 684; union with 29, 52, 110, 154, 262, 400, 528; unknowable 154, 279, 330, 344 Goethe, Wolfgang 436, 439, 468, 469, 510, 642 good and evil 27, 32, 45, 128, 233, 236, 239, 244, 248, 255, 256, 257, 274, 279, 308, 344, 349, 352, 398, 399, 466, 467, 470, 471, 555, 652 Goodrick-​Clarke, Nicholas 507, 508 Gospel of Basilides 156 Gospel of John 34, 86, 91, 92, 93, 109, 202, 279, 385, 386, 393, 394

Gospel of Judas 33, 105, 110, 130, 135, 137, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 159, 180, 183–​4, 185, 272 Gospel of Luke 127, 170, 181, 384, 385, 492, 493, 665 Gospel of Mary 90, 96, 98, 119, 121, 135, 137, 568, 574, 649, 673 Gospel of Matthew 170, 385, 492 Gospel of Philip 90, 97, 119, 121, 135, 166, 172, 568, 569, 574, 649, 667 Gospel of the Egyptians 47, 68, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 214, 366; see also Egyptian Gospel and Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit Gospel of Thomas 21, 72, 90, 95, 96, 119, 122, 135, 170–​7, 366, 417, 568, 569, 572, 574, 649 Gospel of Truth 33, 37, 90, 135, 164, 166, 221, 417 Graham, James 529, 530, 534 Grant, Robert 31 Gray, David 284 Gregory of Nyssa 262, 263, 264, 265, 267 Gregory of Sinai 431 Gregory the Theologian 262, 263, 265, 427 Grof, Stanislav 657 Groothuis, Douglas 663, 665–​7, 668 Guaita, Stanislas de 476, 478, 479, 480, 481, 484, 485 Guénon, René 31, 55, 414, 416, 417, 480, 530, 531, 532, 534, 537, 542, 543, 691 Guidi, Michelangelo 315 Gurdjieff, George Ivanovich 54, 418, 516–​24, 624, 625, 627 Hadith, hadith 323, 331, 332, 333, 336, 360 Haenchen, Ernst 173 Hahn, August 29 Hall, Tom 499 Hamann, Brigitte 507–​8 Hammer-​Purgstall, Joseph von 29, 529 Hamza ibn Ali Ben Ahmad al-​Zouzani 51, 349, 350 Hancock, Graham 658 Hanegraaff, Wouter 18, 19, 20, 21, 37, 38, 420, 629, 643, 654, 659 Harmozel 105, 142, 149, 220 Harnack, Adolf von 10, 103, 104, 106, 309 Harran Gawaita 85, 189, 196, 197 Hartlib, Samuel 440 Hartmann, Franz 501, 505 Hartwich, Wold-​Daniel  694 Hasan-​i Sabbah 339, 347 Haskins, Susan 649 Haw(w)a Anana 121, 196 heaven(s) 14, 15, 45, 46, 48, 50, 53, 79, 81, 84, 86, 92, 94, 98, 125, 130, 139, 158, 176, 189, 191, 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, 611; eighth 277; fall from 45, 238, 393, 450, 611; layered 84, 616; lower 44, 84, 275, 277; second 385; seventy-​two 182; thirteen 47, 611; thirteenth 184–​5, 275; three 93, 98; twelve 610; two powers in 16, 370 Hegel, Georg W. F. 9, 369, 411, 469, 510 Hegemonius, Acta Archelai 156, 157, 159 Heidegger, Martin 10, 417, 418, 455, 672 Heinsius, Daniel 440 Hekhaloth literature 16, 370, 373, 376 Helen of Tyre 80, 82 hell 49, 53, 243, 250, 324, 325, 467, 470, 471, 616 Hellenism 45, 66, 73, 82 Helminski, Kabir 533, 534 Heracleon 125, 127, 162, 279 Heraclitus 128, 436 Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes-​Thoth 28, 50, 52, 102, 137, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206, 308, 400, 401, 402, 410, 413, 438, 441, 442, 448, 450, 622 Hermetic: alchemy 357, 400; Brothers of Egypt 29; cosmology 271; enlightenment 404; Freemasonry 449; Gnosis 87, 405, 606; movement 475, 485; Order of the Golden Dawn 477, 484, 485, 642; religion, beliefs 18, 519; texts 18, 20, 28, 30, 33, 34, 35, 109, 135, 138, 200–​6, 219, 271, 308, 398, 438, 689; thought 185, 219, 404 Hermetica 28, 30, 32, 37, 83, 102, 104, 106, 110, 134, 200, 201, 400, 420, 442; see also Corpus Hermeticum Hermeticism 106, 200, 308, 416, 510, 520 Hermetism 45; 200–​6, 400, 410, 477, 519 Hermetists, Hermetics 46, 53, 134, 659, 203, 271, 519, 607 Herrmann, Arthur /​Henri Selva 481 Hess, Rudolf 507 Hibil Ziwa (Gabriel) 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197 Hillman, James 417 Hinduism, Hindus 283, 284, 286, 290, 291, 339, 476, 487–​9, 496, 510, 530, 550, 568, 596–​601, 623, 626, 627, 632, 633, 663, 688, 691 Hippolytus [pseudo-​] of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies 12, 67, 100, 125, 128–​9, 130, 135, 139, 142, 158, 162–​4, 166, 171, 310, 313 Hishām ibn al-​Kalbī 311, 312 History of Religions School 10, 31, 73 Hitler, Adolf 507, 508, 674 Hoeller, Stephan 418 Hofmann, Albert 658 Hohendahl, Peter 693–​694 Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit 105, 143, 148, 149, 150, 218; see also Egyptian Gospel and Gospel of the Egyptians

Holy Spirit 80, 144, 157, 158, 172, 182, 335, 384, 386, 430, 439, 483 Homer 47, 110, 125, 136 Horn, William Dennis 468, 469 Hosea 47, 94 Hubbard, Ron 56, 632–​6 Hudūd 51, 350, 352, 353, 354, 555 Hughes, Langston 554, 555 Hunt, Dave 663 Husserl, Edmund 416, 613 Huxley, Aldous 537, 653–​7, 659 Huysmans, Joris-​Karl 478, 642 Hymn of the Pearl 104, 106, 135, 136, 274, 362, 568, 569, 573 Hymnscroll 247, 250 Hypostasis of the Archons 105, 108, 136, 137, 138, 140–​1, 143, 145, 151–​2, 314, 373 Hypsiphrone 137 I Ching 415 Ialdabaoth see Yaldabaoth Iamblichus 28, 216 Iao 47, 143, 272 Iblis 51, 317 Ibn Arabi 330, 334, 335, 336, 581, 588, 589, 590 Ibn Habīb, Muhammad 311 Ibn Sa‘īd al-​Andalusī 312 Ibn Umail, Muhammad 402 Illuminism 50, 52, 442; Illuminati 36, 449, 644 India 27, 32, 49, 52, 54, 225, 230, 235, 274, 283, 286, 293, 338, 340, 346, 446, 450, 476, 501, 568, 569, 595, 596, 597, 603, 606, 608 Indonesia 595, 597, 599, 600, 601 insight 96, 118, 120, 133, 154, 246, 247, 249, 250, 257, 285, 289, 290, 328, 329, 331, 332, 353, 355, 437, 447, 458–​9, 497, 545, 610, 612, 652, 690, 693; see also gnosis and knowledge International Gnostic Movement 418 Interpretation of Knowledge 135, 139, 166 Introvigne, Massimo 629 Invisible Spirit 140, 142, 150, 151, 153, 665 Iran 235, 254, 309, 312, 317, 338, 579, 587, 592, 593 Iraq 309, 321, 340, 358, 568, 593 Irenaeus of Lyons, Against (the) Heresies 11, 12, 13, 17, 26, 47, 65, 69, 79, 80, 87, 100–​06, 111–​3, 124–​6, 128–​31, 133, 135, 138, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 180, 182, 210, 212, 278, 459, 468, 671 Isaiah, Isaiah 47, 91, 93 Ishrāqī 52, 532 Isidoros 129, 156, 157, 158, 159 Isis 275, 277, 399, 451 Islam 15, 49, 50, 52, 256, 271, 279, 307–​18, 327, 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, 588, 591, 593, 595–​601, 663, 689 Isma‘ilism, Isma‘ilis 32, 34, 35, 36, 56, 51, 313, 316, 337–​47, 378, 379, 532, 533, 555 Ivanow, Wladimir 340 Izutsu, Toshihiko 589 Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber) 402, 403 Jackson, Howard 219 Jacob al-​Qirqasani  375 Jacobus Golius 529 Jagose, Annamarie 649 Jainism, Jains 32, 283, 286, 633 James 72, 138, 182 James, William 653, 655, 656 Jeddism 644 Jenkins, Philip 529 Jeremiah 47, 94 Jerusalem 85, 90, 181, 182, 183, 197, 389, 449, 567 Jesus 28, 35, 36, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53, 64, 72, 73, 74, 85, 86, 87, 90–​98, 100, 103, 119, 121–​2, 130, 137, 140, 149, 152, 156–​9, 164, 167, 170, 181–​4, 196, 197, 225, 231, 275–​6, 309, 310, 342, 365, 383, 386, 413, 448, 465, 470, 471, 492, 494, 510, 518, 558, 565–​70, 615, 649–​50, 664–​9, 669, 673, 694; Aeon 483; as Allogenes 135, 143, 148; baptism of 97; Christ 66, 84, 94, 140, 225, 226, 229, 230, 235, 259, 465, 469, 518, 665, 668; crucified 158, 164, 231; risen 13, 90, 92, 96, 136, 138, 139, 181; as Savior 14, 68, 86, 165; as Seth 140, 142, 184; the Splendor 120; Thomas’s 171–​7; see also Christ Jewish: apocalypses 137; (Judeo-​) Christian 47, 48, 49, 139, 177, 225, 228, 235, 309, 310, 311, 342, 343, 379, 344, 460, 539, 646, 674; Gnosticism/​Gnostics 16, 30, 66, 81, 79, 87, 533; Kabbalah 33, 36, 50, 402, 415, 420, 438, 442, 506; mysticism 16, 45, 87, 369–​79, 402, 432, 566, 571, 573, 642; origins of Gnosticism 16, 66, 79–​87; texts 14, 16, 49, 72, 95, 137, 139, 141, 150, 151, 152, 171, 184, 201, 203, 317; see also Judaism Jews 64, 66, 68, 69, 82, 87, 109, 134, 196, 201, 203, 241, 360, 371, 448, 506, 556 jñāna 30, 246, 250, 283, 284, 285, 287, 288, 289, 291, 292, 293, 531, 538, 546, 605, 608 Job 436, 464 Jodorowsky, Alexandro 642 Jogand-​Pagès, Gabriel /​Léo Taxil 484 Johannes Trimethius 404 John 46, 72, 90, 92, 134, 138, 152, 313, 385, 386, 450, 665 John Damascene 267–​9, 310 John the Baptist 47, 85, 86, 187, 188, 189, 196, 197, 276, 277, 391

John the Revelator 488 Jonas, Hans 10, 32, 33, 34, 104, 106, 279, 370, 421, 455, 457, 672, 676 Jones, William 529 Jong, Albert de 254 Jordan 48, 97, 106, 167, 188, 191, 192, 195, 197 Jounet, Albert, Alber Jhouney 478, 480, 484 Judaism 14, 16, 34, 45, 49, 73, 80, 81, 85, 87, 120, 147, 151, 308, 341, 343, 373, 376, 412, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 572; see also Jewish Judas 46, 137, 183–​4 Judas Thomas 139, 362 Jung Codex 33 Jung, Carl Gustav 18, 19, 32, 37, 55, 417, 418, 419, 549–​51, 614, 652 Jungians 402, 405 Justin Martyr 14, 80, 81, 101, 124, 126, 162, 168, 259 Justinian’s Code 279 Justin the Gnostic 100, 104, 105, 375 Ka‘b al-​Aḥbār 313 Kabbalah, Kabbalism 28, 29, 53, 79, 80, 204, 369–​79, 402, 418, 421, 439, 440, 441, 442, 469, 479, 506, 528, 531, 532, 603, 607, 626, 627 Kahn, Joel 601 Kali Yuga 52, 56, 489 Kalyptos 142, 153, 212 Kandinsky, Wassily 482 Kant, Immanuel 468 Kartir 225, 231, 253, 254 Kasser, Rodolphe 180 Kayser, Hans 690 Kelly, Edward 404 Kephalaia 35, 120, 121, 122, 123, 227, 229, 230, 237, 247 Kepler, Johannes 404, 439, 690 Khan, Inayat 530, 533, 534 Khan, Vilayat Inayat 533, 534 Khayr, Abu Sa’id Abul 332 Khomeini, Ayatollah 587–​93 Khunrath, Heinrich 404 Khusraw, Nasir-​i  338 King, Charles William 29, 528, 529, 530, 531, 532, 534 King, Karen 11, 36, 64, 69, 70, 71, 73, 114, 118 Kingsford, Anna 478, 484 Kircher, Athanasius 441 Kirmani, Karim Khan 580 Kitāb al-​ashbāh wa l-​azilla 325 Kitāb al-​haft wa l-​azilla 325 Kitāb al-​marātib wa l-​daraj 324 Kitāb al-​sirāt 325 Kitēbā ǰalwa 359, 361 knowledge 21, 31, 36, 56, 79, 82, 83, 90, 100–​2, 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, 295, 307–​8, 323, 325, 328–​36, 346–​7, 356, 365, 366, 371, 398, 340, 400, 405, 409, 412, 414, 415, 417, 420, 426–​7, 430, 432, 433, 437–​8, 440–​2, 447–​8, 457, 460, 461, 466, 476, 489, 491, 499–​500, 504, 521–​2, 528, 531, 533–​4, 538–​45, 571, 579–​83, 598, 603, 605–​7, 610, 613, 635, 638–​44, 648, 650, 652, 658, 676, 684, 688, 690, 691, 695, 696; body 290, 513, 514; clairvoyant 511; divine 187, 260, 267, 329, 427, 429, 430, 431, 538, 581, 582, 605, 608, 647, 696; ecstatic 20; esoteric 18, 325, 340, 347, 351, 352, 355, 581, 625, 638, 639, 640, 641, 642, 643, 644, 646, 673; “falsely so-​called” 17–​20, 100; of the Father 163, 164; of God 18, 157, 200, 260, 262, 329, 333, 338, 372, 528, 540, 605, 652; heavenly 13; intellective 538; intuitive 283, 285, 287, 290, 293, 329, 334, 335, 336; metaphysical 329, 334, 335, 336, 354; mystical 17, 111, 350; otherworldly 13; perfect 21, 260, 264, 490; rational 655; religious 9, 349, 359; revealed, revelatory 19, 133, 307–​8, 533; salvific, liberating 10, 12, 17, 18, 27, 86, 284, 285, 338, 372–​3, 409, 419, 659; scientific 517, 518; secret, hidden 10, 13, 18, 144, 149, 188, 197, 328, 382, 409, 413, 450, 451, 487, 488, 489, 499, 608, 613, 638, 640–​3; self-​ 150, 154, 200, 204, 333, 334, 522, 523, 635–​6, 638, 652; special 12, 17, 105, 284, 329; spiritual 18, 26, 100, 109, 267, 328, 330, 343, 346, 349, 510, 693; suprarational 20, 416, 538; tree of 13, 17, 143, 151, 227, 460, 466, 471; universal 441, 442, 500; see also gnosis Koester, Helmut 177 Koivunen, Hannele 648 Komensky (Comenius); Jan 440 Konai, Theodore bar 15, 27, 111, 310, 313, 314, 315 Koran see Qur’an Koslowski, Peter 419 Kripal, Jeffrey 420, 650 Krishnamurti, Jiddu 54, 487–​8, 492, 493–​7 Kropp, Angelicus 217 Krumm-​Heller, Arnoldo  623–​4 Kubizek, August 508 Kuhlmann, Quirinus 440 Kuspit, Donald 695, 696 La Rochefoucauld, Antoine de 481–​2 Lacroze, Émile Gary de 482 Lacuria, Paul François Gaspard 477, 479 Laffan, Michael 597 Lahe, Jaan 85 Lalande, Emmanuel /​Marc Haven 480–​1 Lambdin, Thomas 177 Languedoc 392, 393

Laozi 246 Lardner, Nathaniel 468 Larmandie, Léonce Comte de 481–​2 Latter-​day Saints  55 Laurant, Jean-​Pierre  480 Lauterer, Ernst /​Tarnhari 508 LaVey, Anton 643 Layard, John 33 Layton, Bentley 11, 12, 13, 35, 65, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 143, 148, 177 Lazarelli, Ludovico 410 Le Rouge, Gustave 641 Leadbeater, Charles Webster 451, 487, 492, 493 Leandro de Campos, Marcelo 624, 629 Leary, Timothy 653–​6, 659 Lee, Stan 641 Lefroy, George 597 Leibniz, Gottfried 28, 442 Leigh, Richard 673 Lejay, Julien (Jules) 480, 484 Leloup, Yvon /​Paul Sédir 480, 481, 484 Leonardo da Vinci 673 Letter of Peter to Philip 135–​7, 180, 181, 182, 666 Letter to Flora 131, 136, 168 Letter to the Hebrews 86 Lévi, Éliphas 412, 476, 477, 479 Lewis, Harvey Spencer 485 Lidzbarski, Mark 30 Liebenfels, Lanz von 499, 500 Lieu, Samuel 36 Life of Moses 263 light 27, 50, 55, 92–​96, 98, 109, 119, 120, 121, 158, 172–​5, 177, 189, 191–​4, 204, 206, 214, 238–​44, 246, 248–​50, 257, 260, 265, 272, 275, 276, 277, 286, 290, 317, 323, 334, 343, 345, 352, 354, 355, 356, 360, 362, 378, 399, 430, 439–​40, 451–​5, 459, 461, 477, 542, 574–​5, 606–​7, 634; buddha(s) of Light 246, 250, 251; consumption of 232; cross of 232; and darkness 15, 27, 48, 85, 104, 109, 118, 119, 189, 191, 195, 227, 236, 240, 242, 244, 246, 249, 255, 257, 272, 274, 283, 308, 315, 344, 363, 365, 399, 426, 652, 681, 684, 695; ejaculation of 120; elements 203, 232, 248; envoy(s) 247, 248; father of 250, 255; king/​lord of 191; garment of 277, 362; maiden/​virgin of 120, 242; nature/​ soul 247, 248, 250; realm/​world(s) of 14, 20, 27, 86, 91, 97, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 226, 236, 237, 239, 242, 243, 244, 247, 250–​1, 309; salvation/​liberation of 15, 91, 93, 95, 120, 232, 237, 247; and shadow 51; sons of 85; trapped 15, 91, 659; virgin of 120 Light Mind/​Nous 240, 241, 242, 243, 247, 248, 249 Lin Wushu 36 Lincoln, Henry 673 Lings, Martin 537, 544

708

709

— ​ I n d e x —​ List, Guido von 499–​508 Llull, Ramon 403, 437 Logan, Alastair 69 Logos 53, 84, 128, 140, 205, 260, 261, 262, 266, 268, 272, 374, 384, 539, 541 Löhr, Winrich 129, 156 Lossky, Vladimir 433 Lotus Sūtra 246, 301 Lovecraft, H. P. 643 Lucretius 437 Lüdemann, Gerd 64, 67 Luke 126, 127, 665 Luminaries 122, 138, 149, 154 Luria, Isaac 371, 378, 421 Lutheran(s) 112, 438, 439, 469 Luttikhuizen, Gerard 69, 72, 73, 679 Lutzer, Erwin 668 Macarius 266, 331 Mackey, Douglas 641 MacRae, George 66, 68 magic 16, 18, 21, 69, 84, 217, 218, 219, 110, 275, 276, 278, 404, 415, 427, 436, 438, 442, 477, 478, 481, 485, 612; sexual 414, 621, 622, 623, 624, 627, 628, 629, 642 Mahābhārata 285, 288–​9, 292 Mahāyāna 246, 247, 287, 288, 290, 291, 292, 297, 301 Mahé, Jean-​Pierre  215 Maier, Michael 404, 439 Makarios of Corinth 431 Malaysia 595, 597, 599, 600, 601 Malcolm X 554 Manara, Milo 642, 644 Mandaeans 14, 27, 29, 32, 47, 48, 49, 66, 85–​6, 102, 104, 106, 107, 109–​10, 118, 121, 183, 187–​97, 276, 277, 310, 314, 361–​5, 586 Mandaeism 14, 15, 32, 48, 86, 188, 276, 308, 309, 317, 328, 361, 370, 371, 372, 378, 379 Mani 15, 32, 35, 48, 49, 105, 109, 114, 157, 225–​ 33, 235, 236, 237, 240, 244–​7, 249–​50, 255, 273, 274, 278–​9, 309, 310, 362, 389, 445 Manichaeans 15, 19, 27, 28, 32, 36, 48, 49, 66, 107, 118, 121–​23, 232, 237, 238, 239, 241, 250, 254, 277, 278, 310, 311, 314, 389, 398 Manichaeism 15, 27, 30, 33, 35, 36, 48, 50, 68, 104, 106, 109, 110, 114, 120–​3, 159, 192, 193, 225, 229, 235–​45, 246–​51, 255, 257, 273, 274, 277, 279, 308–​11, 316, 317, 328, 344, 358, 362, 370–​1, 374, 378, 379, 383, 387, 389, 391, 445, 450, 467, 533 Mansūr-​al-​Ḥallāj 596 Maori 610, 611 Marcellina 100, 101, 106, 112, 113 Marcion 12, 103, 104, 106, 109, 124, 126, 127, 128, 131, 273, 308, 309, 316

Marcionites 27, 103, 109, 129, 272–​3, 279, 314 Marcus Magus 16, 79, 80, 125, 127, 162, 369 Marcus, Greil 695 Maria the Jewess 401 Mariategui, Maria de /​Lady Caithness 478, 479, 484 Marinus 273, 274 Marjanen, Antti 64, 65 Mark of Memphis 278 Mark the Ascetic 266 Markschies, Christoph 64, 79, 104, 108–​9, 110 Marsanes 105, 137, 138, 139, 143–​4, 148, 151–​5, 210 Martha 96, 182, 275 Martin, Ada 530 Martinism 450, 484, 485, 530, 531 Marx, Karl 418 Mary 35, 46, 127, 137, 158, 171, 275; of Thomas 175–​6 Mary Magdalene 35, 46, 96, 119, 121, 137, 175, 176, 649, 667, 673 Mash’af ē Řaš 359, 360, 363, 365 Massignon, Louis 33 Mataji, Shri Nirmala Devi 56 Mathers, Samuel 485 matter 27, 48, 126, 129, 165, 166, 168, 204, 210, 232, 278, 345, 353, 398–​9, 405, 437, 450, 457, 476, 477, 523, 540, 549, 551, 688; evil 17, 103, 108, 273, 279, 398, 510; mixed with 158; and spirit/​soul/​mind 108, 120, 127, 165, 168, 205, 206, 236, 278, 308, 315, 398, 442, 488, 652, 672; spiritual 398; trapped in 91, 551, 652 Matter, Jacques 18, 29, 412 Matthew 95, 137 Mauchel, Lucien /​Chamuel 478, 480, 481, 484 Maximus the Confessor 53, 266–​7, 268, 430 Mazdaism 48, 274, 638 Mazdaists 29, 254, 256 Mazdak 256, 257, 312, 314; Mazdakism 256, 257, 317, 343 Mazdakites 27, 257, 312 McAmis, Robert 597 McKechnie, Paul 71, 647 McKenna, Terence 656, 658 Mead, George R. S. 10, 19, 30, 414, 530 Mecca 311, 312, 355 Medinet Madi 10, 247 Meher Baba 56 Melanesia 614, 615 Melchizedek 86, 105, 139, 140, 143, 145, 148, 152 Menander 104, 105, 109, 112 Menasce, Jean de 33 Merkabah 370, 372, 373 Merkabah/​Merkavah mysticism 29, 79–​80, 371, 573 Merkur, Dan 421 Mesmer, Franz 477 Mesmerism, Mesmerists 29, 641

709

710

— ​ I n d e x —​ Mesopotamia 14, 15, 32, 84, 86, 225, 228, 231, 233, 235, 254, 309, 310, 312, 314, 315, 316, 317, 326, 344, 358, 367, 402 Messina conference, definition 10, 11, 34, 35 Metatron 50, 80, 375 metempsychosis 48, 240, 276, 326, 390; see also transmigration Methodius of Olympus 272 Metochites, Theodore 428–​9 Metzner, Ralph 655, 656 Mexico 623, 624, 418 Meyendorff, John 432, 433 Meyer, Marvin 34, 177, 217, 220 Meyrink, Gustav 642 Michael 85, 386 Michelet, Victor-​Émile 475, 477, 478, 480, 481, 482 Middle Platonism 49, 141, 210, 259 Migne, Jacques Paul 29 Mignolia, Mike 641 Milton, John 460, 461, 473 Miriai 85, 189 Mithraic mysteries 31, 254 Mithraism 29, 33, 45, 55, 272, 277 Mithras 68, 272 Moderatus 152 Modiano, Raimonda 458 moksa 287–​9, 608, 628 Monad 141, 168, 374, 442, 607 Monoimus 374, 607 Montenegro, Marcia 663, 664, 665, 667, 668 moon 52, 154, 205, 227, 228, 232, 233, 238, 243, 362–​3, 377, 378, 491, 513, 514 Moore, Alan 642 Morard, Françoise 68 Moravian thought 467 More, Henry 9, 28, 409, 442 Moréas, Jean 475 Morisson, Grant 642 Morris, Joe 284 Mortley, Raoul 118, 119 Moses 46, 47, 51, 72, 79, 82, 149, 196, 202, 203, 261, 262, 263, 264, 342, 356, 385, 391, 413, 436, 438, 448, 518, 592, 689 Mosheim, Johann Lorenz 468 Mosse, George 507 Mother 31, 56, 82, 120, 122, 142, 144, 149, 150, 153, 181, 239, 248, 274, 277, 451, 610; of all 80, 375; of creation 50; of Life 122, 274; of the Living 97, 144, 243; see also Barbelo Mouravieff, Boris 415 Mufaddal al-​Ju‘fī 325 Mughīra b. Sa‘īd al-​‘Ijlī 315, 316 Mughtasila 314 Muḥammad 15, 51, 52, 53, 103, 307, 310, 312, 316, 317, 321, 323, 326, 331, 332, 333, 339,

340, 341, 342, 346, 518, 554, 583, 588, 590, 591, 598, 600 Muhammad b. Ismaʿil 342, 343 Mukhammisa 316, 317 Mulla Sadra 589, 590 Müller, Max 29 Muntazari, Hossein Ali 591 Muslim(s) 27, 506, 527, 529, 530, 531, 595, 596–​601 Mutahhari, Murtada 593 Myanmar 595, 601 Myésier, Thomas le 437 Naasene Hymn 135 Naassenes 100, 104, 105, 110, 112, 113, 129, 130 Nabataeans 188 Nag Hammadi 10, 33, 35, 104, 106, 124, 135, 139, 147, 569, 652, 665; Codices 11, 12, 19, 34, 44, 45, 83, 84, 130, 135, 137, 143, 148, 170, 180, 182, 184, 200, 203, 206, 218, 671; collection, corpus, library, texts 11, 13, 20, 21, 61, 72, 102, 105, 110, 111, 112, 136, 140, 144, 158, 159, 166, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 219, 222, 237, 272, 276, 308, 312, 313, 373, 398, 417, 468, 565, 568, 572, 647, 666, 684 Narcissus 457 Naṣoraeans 47, 48, 188, 191, 196 Nasr, Sayyid Hossein 36, 532, 534, 535, 537, 543, 545, 587, 588 Nation of Islam 56, 553–​62 National Socialism 17, 421 Nature of the Rulers 148 Nazarenes 29, 53 Nazism 499, 500, 506, 507, 508 Neander, August 29, 30 Nellas, Panogiotis 433 Nelli, René 485 Neo-​Gnosticism 521–​2, 484 Neo-​Hermeticism 409, 438 Neopatristic movement 432, 433, 434 Neoplatonism 14, 26, 33, 49, 120, 153, 154, 185, 215, 216, 271, 279, 334, 338, 340, 344, 345, 346, 371, 398, 400, 454, 455, 459, 465, 466, 467, 469, 604, 607, 608 Neopythagoreanism 29, 141, 168, 374 Nesi, Gianluca 506, 507 Neugebauer-​Wölk, Monika  412 Neumann, Erich 33 New Age 55, 106, 110, 404, 416, 417, 418, 419, 471, 612, 669, 676; movement 21, 417, 418, 640, 641, 664, 665, 691 New Guinea Islands 613, 614 New Testament 14, 17, 27, 31, 33, 46, 49, 64, 70, 86, 113, 127, 136, 152, 184, 201, 202, 203, 260, 275, 279, 383, 389, 411, 469, 495, 567, 649, 666, 668

710

71

— ​ I n d e x —​ New Zealand 610, 611 Newton, Isaac 28, 404, 441, 442, 448, 449 Nicholson, Reynold 528, 534 Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain 431 Nicodemus of Tismana 431 Nicolaitans 105 Nicolescu, Basarab 433 Nicotheos 185 Nietzsche, Friedrich 545, 605 nihilism 421, 672, 694 Niquinta 394 nirvāna 54, 246, 251, 297, 490, 628, 691 Nizari 29, 51, 337, 338, 339, 340, 346, 347, 529 Noah 45, 47, 51, 53, 84, 85, 130, 196, 342, 350, 386, 441, 447, 448, 449 Nock, Arthur Darby 131 Nonnus Panopolis 279 Norea 16, 130, 135, 137 Norton, Thomas 403 Nous, nous 154, 163, 191, 205, 206, 247, 278, 345, 533 Numenius 45, 125, 152, 153 Nuṣayrīs 29, 15 Nuttall, A. D. 468 Nyberg, Henrik 254 occult sciences 29, 308, 427, 580, 581, 671 occultism 30, 409, 412–​4, 481, 490, 491, 499, 538, 639, 641, 642, 643, 644, 654, 660; French revival of 475–​85; of List 499, 500, 501, 502; and meditation 490, 491, 492, 494, 496–​7 Odes of Solomon 275, 568, 569 Odilon Redon 477 Ogdoad 80, 84, 158, 165, 167, 205, 373 Ohrmazd 27, 253, 255, 256, 274, 376 Olcott, Henry Steel 487 Old Testament 26, 27, 46, 49, 80–​82, 86, 127, 131, 201–​3, 260, 279, 383, 389, 460, 567, 675, 683 On the Adventitious Soul 156 On the Flesh of Christ 126, 127 On the Origin of the World 120, 121, 136, 139, 140, 143, 144, 373, 648 Ophite 13, 69, 73, 143, 144, 145, 344 Ophites, Ophians 12, 47, 101, 105, 110, 130, 147, 364, 369 Oracles of Zoroaster 20 Ordre Rose\+Croix Kabbalistique 480, 481 Oreus 143 Origen 14, 29, 49, 53, 101, 130, 135, 143, 157, 161, 219, 261, 262, 268, 272, 275, 278, 409, 614; Origenists 261, 278 Oroiael 105, 142, 149, 220 Orpheus 28, 437, 438, 441 Orphism 33, 437, 455 Osiris 399, 451

Osmond, Humphry 652 Ostanes 204, 400 Otto, Walter 33 Ouspensky, Peter Demianovich 517, 624 Ozouf, Mona 471 Pagels, Elaine 36, 118, 123, 665 Pakistan 595, 601 Palamas, Gregory 428, 429, 430, 431, 433 Palau 611 Palestine 84, 197, 310, 565, 566, 567, 575 Pallis, Marco 537, 691 Pansophia 440 pantheism 235, 335, 414, 419, 440, 454, 597 Paracelcism 410, 411, 412 Paracelsus 404, 410, 411, 438 Paraclete 49, 225, 227, 483 paradise 17, 52, 83, 84, 144, 149, 150, 151, 221, 260, 317, 324, 333, 339, 360, 376, 378, 379, 471, 596 Paraphrase of Seth 67, 129, 313 Paraphrase of Shem 67, 68, 107, 129, 138, 139, 203, 313, 314, 315 Parchor 156 Paris 475, 476, 477–​8, 479, 480, 482, 483–​5, 517, 530 Parousia 46 Parrinder, Patrick 674 Patticius, Patig, Fatiq 226, 227, 228 Paul 17, 46, 47, 64, 67, 71, 100, 109, 110, 126, 131, 136, 152, 197, 226, 262, 279, 469, 567, 568 Paulicians 19, 29, 32, 36, 106, 110, 279, 382, 383, 387, 391 Peacock Angel, Malak Tawus 52, 53, 256, 358, 350, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365 Pearson, Birger 64, 66, 79, 81, 83, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 114 Pegg, Mark 392, 393, 394 Péladan, Adrien 483 Péladan, Joséphin 476, 478, 479–​83, 485 Percival, Milton O. 468 Perennialism 55, 416, 417, 419, 537–​46 Perfect Discourse 138, 202 Perkins, Pheme 66, 139 Perry, Seamus 458 Persia 31, 49, 85, 232, 254, 256, 338, 339, 340, 376, 450, 528, 569 Peter 46, 119, 136, 156, 159, 176, 181, 275 Peter of les Vaux-​de-​Cernay 389, 390 Peter of Sicily, History of the Paulicians 27, 279, 382 Pfau, Thomas 458 Pherecydes of Syros 156 Philip 181, 275 Philippines 595, 599, 600

711

712

— ​ I n d e x —​ Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus 49, 81–​2, 141, 152, 262, 275, 369, 375, 413, 689 Photius 27 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 36, 410, 438 Pike, Albert 446, 450, 451, 531 Pike, James 676 Piraino, Francesco 532 Pistis Sophia 30, 56, 135, 137, 138, 184, 219, 220, 274, 372, 378, 510, 649 Plato 12, 20, 28, 33, 49, 50, 110, 125, 126, 128, 134, 137, 139, 141, 151, 152, 153, 154, 201, 202, 208, 210, 213, 214, 271, 272, 398, 413, 427, 430, 441, 450, 465, 466, 603, 604, 607, 608, 689, 690; Phaedo 139, 152, 211; Phaedrus 139, 152, 211; Republic 33, 134, 139, 210, 398, 689–​90; Symposium 153, 209–​10 Platonic 28, 49, 50, 52, 53, 69, 72, 84, 109, 168, 209, 260, 265, 273, 334, 398, 438, 462, 469, 613, 657, 690 Platonism 32, 44, 45, 66, 106, 152, 159, 202, 278, 277, 427, 433, 454, 455, 465, 539, 607, 689; Cambridge 9, 28, 409, 440 Platonists 19, 46, 105, 108, 126, 141, 412, 437, 440, 442, 607 Pleroma, plērōma 26, 51, 79, 82, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 181, 190, 192, 204, 274, 343, 346, 373, 374, 607, 660 Plethon, Gemistos 29 Plotinus 20, 26, 45, 53, 111, 133, 141–​2, 152, 153, 208–​16, 271, 398, 427, 437, 466, 655 Plutarch 138, 689 pneuma 110, 272, 454, 461, 539 Poimandres 201, 203 Poimandres 28, 83, 202, 203, 204, 271 Poirier, Paul-​Hubert  214 Poisson, Albert 481 Polti, Georges 481 Polycarp 126 Pontus 127 Popul Vuh 54 Porphyry of Tyre 11–​13, 20, 26, 65, 111, 133, 153, 208, 271–​2, 689; Vita Plotini 208 Pratt, Hugo 641 Prayer of Thanksgiving 135, 206 Prayer of the Apostle Paul 135 Preisendanz, Karl 217 Preston, William 449 Prideaux, Humphrey 28 Priestley, Joseph 468 Primal/​Primordial/​First Man 31, 45, 48, 122, 195, 197, 236, 243, 247, 255, 274, 582 Priscillian 277, 278 Proclus Lycaeus 28, 125, 213, 278, 279, 427, 438 Prodicus 101 Prometheus 461, 462, 471

Protestants 18, 100, 101, 410, 438, 439, 440, 441, 446, 448, 480, 506, 558, 569, 614, 664, 668 Protophanes 142, 153 Provence 370, 374 Proverbs 157, 374 Psalm-​Book 120, 121, 122, 237 Psalms 47 Psellos, Michael 29, 206, 427, 428, 429 Pseudo-​Hippolytus  158 Pseudo-​Plato  136 Pseudo-​Tertullian 142, 143, 147 psychedelics 652, 653, 654, 655, 656, 657, 658, 659 Ptahil 14, 47, 192, 194, 195, 196 Ptolemy, Ptolemaeus 125, 127, 130, 136, 139, 141, 162, 163, 168, 690 Puech, Henri-​Charles  33 Pulver, Max 33 Pythagoras 28, 128, 131, 413, 436, 438, 441, 449–​50, 518, 689 Pythagoreanism 351, 455, 539, 638, 690 Qarara Codex 35, 180 Quakers 440 Quietists 440 Quinney, Laura 457, 469, 470 Quispel, Gilles 18, 32, 33, 37, 79, 81, 372, 419 Qumran 10, 84, 85, 86 Qur’ān, Quran, Koran 50, 309, 310, 312, 316, 317, 322, 331–​3, 335, 340–​44, 347, 541, 558, 560, 579, 583–​5, 588, 590, 592, 598, 599 Qurrat al-​‘Ayn, Fatima Baraghani 579, 581 Ra, Re 202, 400, 451 Rabbinic literature 79, 370, 373, 374, 375 Radich, Michael 290 Rahner, Hugo 33 Raine, Kathleen 468 Ramsay, Andrew 529 Ramsay, William 654 Ramus, Petrus 440 Raper, Julius 674 Raschke, Carl 659 Rashtī, Sayyid Kāzim 580 Rasimus, Tuomas 69, 73, 143, 144, 145, 148 Ray, Jean 641 rebirth 49, 240, 285, 288, 297, 298, 324, 325, 326, 399; rounds of 285, 288; spiritual 206, 342 Redfield, James 642 reincarnation 15, 45, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 154, 157, 211, 240, 323–​6, 355, 361, 362, 438, 495, 497, 501, 511, 555, 633 Reitzenstein, Richard 31 Reuchlin, Johannes 438, 442 Reuss, Theodor 414 Revelation of Adam 148

712

713

— ​ I n d e x —​ Revelation to John 13, 489, 492, 496 Rhodes, Ron 667, 668 Richet, Charles 478 Riffard, Pierre 638, 639 Rig Veda 603, 607, 656 Rijckenborgh, Jan van (Jan Leene) 415 Rittelmeyer, Friedrich 55 Rivers Scroll, Diwan Nahrawatha 48, 189, 190, 191, 197 Roberge, Michel 67 Roberts, Jane 418 Robinson, Henry Crabb 454, 464–​8, 473 Robinson, James 34, 67 Roca, Paul 478, 479 Rochas, Albert de 481 Roché, Déodat 483, 485 Roche, Julian 394 Romania 416, 431, 433 Romanticism 420, 454–​62, 696 Rome 87, 100, 106, 112, 126, 162, 208, 277, 387 Rops, Félicien 478 Rose Croix Catholique l’Aristie 481 Rosenberg, Alfred 507 Rosenkreu(t)z, Christian 404 Rosenruth, Knorr von 442 Rosicrucianism, Rosicrucians 29, 31, 55, 401, 404, 405, 409–​11, 415–​6, 418, 439, 445, 476–​8, 480–​3, 485, 501, 510, 511, 520, 528, 604, 623, 629, 642, 671 Rossbach, Stefan 421 Round Dance of the Cross 135 Roux, Saint-​Pol  482 Rowling, J. K. 640 Roy, Asim 597, 598 Ruck, Carl 653 Rudolph, Kurt 10, 35, 48, 79, 118, 121, 310 Ruether, Rosemary 648, 649 Rufinus of Aquileia 278 Ruha 14, 195, 196, 360 Rumi, Jalaluddin 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 336 Runciman, Steven 36, 394 Russia 431, 432, 433, 449, 517 Ruyer, Raymond 421 Sabaoth 84, 108, 143, 221, 272, 277 Sabbateanism 370, 371 Sabians, Sabaeans 27, 28, 29, 188, 200, 310, 314 Sacred Epistles of Wisdom 350, 351, 353, 354, 355, 356 Sacy, Silvestre de 29 Saint-​Martin, Louis-​Claude de 29, 411, 412, 419, 450, 476, 480 Saint-​Yves d’Alveydre, Alexandre 476, 477, 479 Saklas 140, 142, 149, 150, 183 Salmān 317 Salman the Persian 51

Salome 35, 171, 174, 175, 176, 182 Samael 48, 142, 149, 150 Samaria 80, 81 Samaritans 80, 81, 82, 277 Sāmkhyā 287, 289 Saṃsāra 288, 289, 297, 691 Sarapion of Thmuis 265 Satan 27, 48, 52, 184, 274, 278, 360, 376, 378, 382–​7, 390, 391, 414, 460, 461, 467, 557, 643 Satanael 384, 385, 386 Satanism 479, 481, 642, 643 Satie, Erik 477, 482 Saturninus 87, 104, 105, 111–​2, 143 Schelling, Friedrich 411, 510 Schenke, Hans-​Martin 13, 69, 79, 105, 111, 142, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149 Schiller, Friedrich 468 Schlegel, Gustav 29, 640 Schmidt-​Falk, Elsa  507 Schmidt, Carl 30, 147 Schmithals, Walter 64 Schmitt, Eugen Heinrich 414 Scholem, Gershom 16, 33, 79–​80, 369, 370–​6, 532, 672 Schuler, Alfred 507 Schultz, Wolfgang 17 Schuon, Frithjof 36, 416, 417, 531, 532, 534, 537, 538, 539, 540, 541, 542, 546 Schuré, Édouard 475 Scientology 56, 632–​6 Scopello, Madeleine 118 Scott, Walter 30 Second Apocalypse of James 138, 139, 201 Second Discourse of Great Seth 148 Second Logos of the Great Seth 158, 159 Second Treatise of the Great Seth 47, 119, 139, 140 Secret Book of John 148, 679, 681; see also Apocryphon of John Secret Book of Noria 366 Secret Revelation of John 679 Secundus 125, 127, 130, 162 Sedgwick, Mark 328 Sefer Yezirah 50 Sefiroth 50, 372, 373, 374, 375, 378 Segal, Alan 72 Semo Sancus 124 Sendivogius, Michael 404 Seneca 136, 138 Sentences of Sextus 135 Septuagint 202, 203, 275 Seraphim of Sarov 431, 434 Sergius of Radonezh 431 Sermon on the Light-​Nous 247, 248 Sermon on the Soul 238 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, 134, 138, 140, 142–​4, 148–​9, 152, 154–​5, 183, 184, 196, 200, 221, 276, 277, 313, 326, 418, 448 Sethian 12, 13, 73, 111, 129, 133, 148, 149, 184; cosmogony 152, 168; Gnosticism 69, 105–​6, 133, 142, 143, 147–​55, 183, 221, 323; texts 13, 14, 20, 84, 105, 135, 138–​40, 142, 144, 149–​53, 155, 203, 209, 313, 326, 418, 679, 682 Sethianism 14, 15, 47, 73, 111, 145, 155, 183, 276, 326 Sethians 13, 19, 47, 84, 105, 110–​11, 129, 130, 142, 147, 149, 151, 152, 154, 208, 210, 271, 277, 681 Sevrin, Jean-​Marie  66, 69 Šēx-​kirās, Spirit of Garment 361, 362 sex: sexual energy 628, 629; lust 122, 150, 317; practices, acts 214, 621, 625, 627–​8, 650; ritual 278, 622; symbolism 373, 414; temptation 121; see also magic Shabuhragan 49, 228 Shah, Idries 533 Shahabadi, Mohammad Ali 589, 591, 592 Shaked, Shaul 254 Shakespeare, William 555, 642 Shambhala 476 Shankaracharya 604 Shapur I 225, 228, 230, 231, 253, 254, 255 Shaykhism 579, 580 Sheikh ‘Adi 358, 364 Sheikh Hasan 362 Sheikh Sin 362, 363 Shekhinah 50, 432, 373 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462 Shem 45, 47, 51, 83, 84, 85, 129, 196, 447, 448 Shi’ism, Shīʿite/​Shiʿi Islam, Shiʿa 32, 33, 50, 51, 315, 316, 321–​7, 337–​47, 360, 361, 364, 365, 366, 378, 558, 579, 580, 581, 587, 588 Shīrāzī, Sayyid ‘Ali Muhammad 579, 581 Shitil 47, 313 Silouan the Athonite 433, 434 Silvanus 272 Simmel, George 638 Simon 51, 112, 126 Simon Magus 10, 12, 28, 30, 80–​1, 105, 109, 112, 124, 125, 126, 128, 442 Simon of Cyrene 140, 158 Simon Peter 119, 176 Simonianism, Simonians 81, 17, 101, 106, 112 Singer, June 648 Sinnett, Alfred P. 54, 638 Sisinnios 231, 233 Šitil 196 Smith, Geoffrey 112, 113 Smith, Morton 100

Smith, Richard 629 Socrates 137, 520 Sodom and Gomorrah 46, 149, 150 Solomon 46, 84, 196, 449; Temple of 441, 447, 448, 450 Solovyov, Vladimir 432 Sophia 26, 31, 49, 82, 120, 131, 136, 140, 144, 149, 150, 151, 164–​8, 182–​4, 192, 195, 221, 274–​7, 364, 373, 378, 399, 432, 440, 612, 672, 675, 684 Sophia of Jesus Christ 135, 137, 138, 143, 144, 665 Sophiology 432, 433 Sophist 141, 152 Sorenson, Peter 468 Sorsky, Nil 431 soul(s) 44–​54, 93, 97, 110, 129, 130, 134, 135–​6, 139, 154, 157–​9, 165, 172, 183, 188, 189, 195, 196, 209, 211, 213, 215, 235–​45, 247–​8, 261, 268, 269, 278, 317, 325, 328, 334, 345–​6, 352–​7, 362, 365, 386, 390, 398, 417, 442, 455, 457–​9, 461, 470–​3, 477, 511, 513, 518, 520, 527, 529, 531, 539–​40, 598, 611, 612, 626, 629, 652, 653, 657, 658, 689; all-​inclusive 352, 355; ascent/​return to heaven of the 31, 46, 48, 51, 53, 64, 82, 98, 157, 158, 188, 231, 274, 345, 488, 596, 689; bodily confinement of 44, 134, 237, 273; cosmic 210; descent/​fall of the 44, 45, 49, 51, 53, 455, 465; divine 237, 239, 243, 244; divine origin of 71; escape of 47, 93, 97, 278; immortal 49, 152, 256, 450, 671; imprisoned 188; liberated 233; living 49, 120, 232, 238, 242, 385; partial non-​descent of 209, 213; purification of 345, 401; reincarnation of 157, 326; salvation/​liberation of 120, 135, 473, 549; service 232; transmigration of 232, 324, 326, 361, 390, 393; trapped 86, 93, 206, 275; universal 345, 346, 491; world 45, 213, 239, 437 Southey, Robert 460 Souzenelle, Annick de 433 Spain 277, 278, 371, 402 Speiser, Andreas 33 Spenta Mainyu 253 Spinoza, Baruch 465, 467, 529, 534 spirit 110, 165, 183, 188, 238, 272, 279, 283, 331, 332, 335, 359, 361, 364, 372, 373, 398, 405, 427, 432, 488, 494, 533, 540, 648 spirit and matter 308, 315, 398, 672 spiritualism, spiritism 414, 478, 481, 538, 623, 627, 639, 641, 642 Sprengling, Martin 32 Sri Mataji Nirmala Devi 56 Stăniloae, Dumitru 432, 433 Steiner, Rudolf 31, 43, 54, 414, 510–​5, 690, 691 Steininger, Babette 507

714

715

— ​ I n d e x —​ Stethatos, Nicetas 428 Stobaei Hermetica 204 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 689 Stoicism, Stoics 72, 73, 93, 126, 158, 159, 265, 272, 273 Stoker, Bram 642 Stoyanov, Yuri 36, 387 Stromateis 129, 145, 156, 157, 162, 259, 260, 264 Stroumsa, Gedaliahu 201 Stuckrad, Kocku von 21, 37 Styfhals, Willem 694 Sufism, Sufis 29, 33, 36, 52, 53, 328–​36, 339, 340, 356, 358, 360, 362, 366, 419, 420, 445, 527–​35, 539, 544, 571, 581, 587–​9, 595–​601, 604, 689 Suhrawardī, Shahab al-​Din 52, 330, 334, 336 Sultan Ezid 358 sun 52, 202, 227, 232, 238, 243, 271–​2, 377, 400, 437, 441, 451, 496, 503, 513–​4, 583 Sundermann, Werner 248 Surrealism 694 Suzuki, Daisetsu 532 Swedenborg, Emanuel 29, 53, 412, 418, 469, 470, 531, 642 Switzerland 19, 180, 530, 675 Symeon the New Theologian 426, 427, 428, 430, 434 Synesius of Cyrene 400 Syntagma 126, 142, 147 Syria 32, 168, 230, 232, 273, 275, 276, 310, 312, 317, 338, 339, 340, 568 Szlezák, Thomas 213 Talmud 370, 372, 377 Tanakh 83 Tantric Buddhism 290, 291 Tantrism, Tantra 623, 624, 627, 628 Taoism 539, 568, 674 Tarot 415, 418, 644 Tathāgatagarbha sūtras 249 Taubes, Jakob 694 Tauler, John 543 Taylor, Thomas 29, 36 Tayyibi 337, 338, 346, 347 Tchacos Codex 19, 33, 34, 35, 105, 110, 135, 137, 138, 143, 148, 180–​5, 203 Teacher 259, 264 Teachings of Silvanus 135 Templars 29, 36, 55, 528, 529, 533, 674 Tertullian of Carthage 126–​8, 130, 135, 162, 163, 164, 375, 468 Testimony of Truth 135, 159 Thaddeus of Edessa 273 Thamar, Jean 691 Theodora of Sihla 431 Theodore of Mopsuestia 255 Theodoret of Cyrrhus 129, 135, 142, 147

Theodosius of Trnovo 431 Theodosius the Great 27 Theodotus 129, 162 Theodotus of Byzantium 12 Theodotus the Banker 12 Théon, Max 604, 607, 608 Theophan the Recluse 431 Theophrastia Valentiniana 28 theōsis 29, 573 Theosophical Society 30, 31, 43, 53, 329, 413, 414, 418, 451, 478, 487, 490, 492, 493, 494, 495, 510, 530, 557, 623, 638, 639 Theosophy 29, 30, 31, 33, 49, 51, 53–​55, 329, 330, 335, 373–​5, 379, 401, 409–​13, 415, 417, 419, 429, 439, 469, 478, 484, 501, 502, 511, 530–​2, 550, 589, 600, 604, 623, 625, 627, 632, 690 Therapeutae 82, 83 thetans 56, 633 Theudas 138 Third Book of Baruch 139 Thomas 46, 139, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 313 Thomas Aquinas 399, 403 Thomasius, Jacob 18 Thomassen, Einar 66, 127 Thoth 28, 102, 200, 202, 441, 308, 400, 441, 448, 450 Thought of Norea 105, 135, 143, 144, 148, 151, 152 Three Steles of Seth 105, 135, 138, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 200, 218 Three Times, Three Great Moments 48, 236, 255 Thunder, Perfect Mind 69, 111, 139, 140 Tibet 489, 517, 568, 625 Tikkune Zohar 378 Timaeus 139, 141, 151, 153, 201, 202, 213, 607 Timothy, First Epistle to 100 To Thalassius 266, 267 Toland, John 440, 529 Tolkien, J. R. R. 640, 644, 675 Tomberg, Valentin 415, 416, 417, 419 Torah 79, 87, 371, 372, 375 Traité (Manichaean) 247, 248, 249 transmigration (of souls) 232, 250, 288, 296, 297, 324, 361, 393, 451; see also metempsychosis Treatise on the Resurrection 136, 166 Trevelyan, George 640 Trimorphic Protennoia, Three Forms of First Thought 68, 69, 105, 122, 140, 143, 144, 148, 151, 152 Tripartite Tractate 46, 139, 141, 158, 163, 164, 166, 210, 212, 221 Tröger, Karl-​Wolfgang  79 Turan 229, 230 Turfan 233, 247

715

716

— ​ I n d e x —​ Turner, John 66, 69, 209 Twin 120, 225, 227, 228, 372

wisdom 31, 52, 53, 55, 82, 93, 138, 150, 151, 164, 188, 241, 247–​51, 260, 274, 290, 292, 297, 346, 354, 355, 372–​5, 399, 436, 437, 438, 530, 533, 537–​42, 543, 546, 566–​75; see also Sophia Wisse, Frederik 67 Witherington, Ben 668 Wood, Gabrielle 625 Wordsworth, William 454, 455, 456, 457, 459, 462 Wotanism 499, 501, 504

Umm al-​Kitāb 316, 317, 379 Untitled Text 135, 143, 147, 148, 152 Upanishads 34, 43, 284, 285, 287, 290–​2, 603, 604, 605, 607 upāya kauśalya 246, 247 Urban, Hugh 622 Valentinian Exposition 139, 163 Valentinianism 28, 67–​8, 80, 97, 125, 129–​30, 135, 136, 141, 145, 162–​8, 172, 182, 221, 279, 344, 374, 378, 411, 462, 675 Valentinians 27, 97, 105, 109, 110, 111, 113, 143, 124–​5, 126–​7, 128, 130–​1, 142, 159, 162–​8, 271, 273, 275, 276, 277, 369 Valentinus 12, 13, 28, 87, 109, 112, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130–​1, 143, 145, 148, 159, 162–​4, 220, 273, 369, 398, 607, 676 van den Broek, Roelof 18, 19, 20, 32 van Helmont, Frans 442 Velichkovsky, Paisij 431 Vigus, James 468 vijñāna 604, 605, 606, 608 Villiers de l’Isle-​Adam, Auguste 477 Vishnu Purana 501 Vital, Chaim 371 Voegelin, Eric 421, 652 Voltaire 28 Wagner, Richard 691 Wallace, Vesna 291 Ware, Mary 604 Warith Deen, Mohammad 553, 555–​6, 562 Wasson, Gordon 653, 657, 659 Watts, Alan 659 Wautier, André 416 Weber, Max 103 Weor, Samaël Aun 31, 418, 621–​9 Westcott, William Wynn 485 Whitehouse, Harvey 614 Widengren, Geo 35, 254 Wilber, Ken 55 Wilberg, Peter 418 Wili, Walter 33 Willermoz, Jean-​Baptiste  450 Williams, Michael 11, 17, 63, 64, 65, 70, 71, 73, 74, 124, 141 Wilson, Robert 32, 34, 79, 81 Wirth, Oswald 478, 480

Xwadē 359, 360 Xwāstwānīft 238 Yaldabaoth, Ialdabaoth 47, 105, 120, 142–​3, 149, 150, 151, 168, 219, 221, 274, 461, 679, 681–​4, 686 Yamauchi, Edwin 68, 70, 71 Yannaras, Christos 433 Yeats, William Butler 642 Yemen 338, 340, 346, 357, 568, 598 Yezidism 52–​3, 256, 358–​67 yoga 289, 419, 490, 495, 531, 598, 601, 603, 605, 606, 628, 653, 688 yuga 52, 55, 56 Yušamin 192 Zaehner, Robert 253–​4 Zahr’il 195 Zanjånl, Muhammad ‘Ali 579 Zardusht Khorragan 257 Zhiyi 294–​302 zindīq, zandaqa 311, 312 Zoccatelli, PierLuigi 624, 629 Zoë 120 Zohar 371, 372, 378, 403 Zoroaster, Zarathustra 28, 49, 52, 134, 204, 225, 235, 253, 255, 257, 272, 274, 276, 279, 437, 438, 450 Zoroastrianism 27, 36, 45, 48, 49, 52, 193, 253, 254, 256, 257, 279, 343, 344, 358, 360, 376, 377, 387, 399, 528, 533, 568 Zoroastrians 53, 184, 196, 230, 232, 245, 311, 312, 314, 398 Zosimus the Panopolite 201, 202, 401 Zostrianos 95, 138, 185, 210, 276; Zostrianos, Zostrian 13, 14, 20, 105, 111, 137, 143, 148, 151, 152, 154, 155, 208–​11, 214, 218, 276, 277, 326 Zurvan 27, 31, 253, 254, 255, 257, 274, 376 Zurvanism 32, 48, 253–​6, 344, 376–​7 Zvi, Shabbatai 672

716