This text is derived from "Approaching Gnosticism" by John Lash.
http://www.metahistory.org/ApproachingGnosticism.php
Copyright resides with the author.Content
No scholar today regards the actual content of Gnosticism to be worthy of discussion. The message of the Gnostics is lost in endless debate over the textual meaning of the surviving materials. Scholars assume that Gnostic texts are valuable for what they tell us about the origins of Christianity, period. But using Gnostic texts to legitimate Christianity is contradictory to its radical message. The Gnostic protest against Judeo-Christian religion is written clear and large in the surviving materials, chaotic and fragmentary as they may be. I use what I call the "Lego method" of Gnostic scholarship to select those elements from the surviving materials that build into a consistent and coherent message, distinct from Judaic and Christian doctrines. Scholars also use the Lego method, putting together selected pieces of text to highlight a specific doctrine or viewpoint, but without admitting they do so, or why they do so. They take no interest in recovering the actual message of Gnosticism.
My intention in reworking the Gnostic materials is transparent: to reconstruct the Pagan, pre-Christian teachings of Gnosis that were preserved in the Mystery Schools. If I have not been merely wasting my time, my efforts (underway for 30 some years, and counting) might contribute to four results that would impact deeply on modern spiritual life:
First, we see the Gnostic protest against the patriarchal/Salvationist agenda for what it was: an attempt to impart the knowledge that can free us from blind enslavement to that agenda;
Second, we recognize the rich spiritual heritage of pre-Christian Europe, destroyed in a centuries-long rampage of sexual, spiritual and intellectual genocide;
Third, we rediscover and reclaim the Sophia Scenario, a myth to guide the human species toward a sane and sustainable future;
Fourth, we acquire a unique corrective view of certain paranormal aspects of human experience, closely related to the mind control games of patriarchy.
This is quite a tall order, I know. Nevertheless, I believe that nothing less than this is acceptable where genuine experience of Gnosis is concerned. There is huge responsibility involved in knowing what Gnostics knew. I am convinced that the way for the human species to co-evolve with Gaia can best be discovered, and perhaps only discovered, on the visionary path of Gnosis.
The Message
History and content go together in Gnosticism, because Gnostics had an alarming message about history. After thirty odd years of research and reflection, I am convinced that they had the key knowledge we need to shatter the historical framework of the patriarchal/dominator agenda, and thereby undermine that agenda for good and all. Gnostic ideas assume a central and imperative role in Metahistory.org because they present the best chance we have to break away from the death-grip of the Western historical narrative.
The unique knowledge Gnostics tried to impart to the world at large concerns the identity of Jehovah, the "father god" of Judeo-Christian religion. Gnostics claimed that the supernatural being billions of people take for God is insane and actually working against humanity. The core teaching specifies that Jehovah is really an alien entity, not just a bad idea or a delusional belief. It also specifies that Jehovah and his minions, the Archons, used the Jewish people to make an intervention into the human race. The Archons deviate us from our humanity through religious beliefs. Salvationism (i.e., reliance on a superhuman savior) germinated in the Jewish apocalyptic sect of the Zaddakim and went pandemic in Christian ideology centered on a transhuman messiah, Jesus Christ.
In short, Gnostics warned that Judeo-Christian religion is a deviant program implanted in the human mind, like a computer virus. Salvationism is an ideological virus, and its origin is not human. This is the core teaching of the gnostikoi, "those who know about divine matters." Search where you will, I don't think you will find this message anywhere else. Gnosis is the knowledge of how we are deviated, by what, and for what.
So much for the bad news, the spooky part of the message. But Gnostics also had sublime good news to impart. They had a beautiful message about what guides us, the insuperable power of knowing that inheres in us and cannot be deviated. (This I call the wisdom endowment, or Sophianic endowment.) They presented a grand cosmic story in which humanity is intimately allied with the Goddess Sophia of the Pleroma, She who becomes Gaia. This story describes how Jehovah and the Archons were produced by the "fall of Sophia," before our world was created by Her embodiment. Then, when the earth emerged, it was captured in the planetary system, habitat of the Archons. Gnostics taught that these inorganic entities influence us by a kind of telepathic link. They use the power of suggestion when our attention is dulled by fatigue or over-stimulation. Gnostic texts contain vivid accounts of first-hand encounters with Archons, and they explain the motives and methods of the alien forces in explicit language.
But the message of Gnosticism is not "Blame it on the Archons." Far from it. The core teaching of Gnosis specifies that this alien species is not an autonomous force of evil that works against us. The Archons represent error, not evil. They do not cause mistakes in our learning process, but they affect our thinking so that our mistakes go undetected and extrapolate beyond the scale of correction. If we cannot correct our minds and redirect our actions, we cannot participate in Gaia's process of alignment with the Pleroma, the celestial Gods.
Hence the Archons present a special test in our effort to recognize and actualize our divine endowment.
And the Archons are, after all, our cosmic cousins, the offspring of Gaia-Sophia, though in a different way than we are. They are not the only extra-human species with which we have contact on earth, but they are unique in their predatory role. Gnostics taught that not all that happens in our minds originates there. This is an occult observation, compatible with the most advanced theories of noetic science today. It is, I would say, the single most important concept in the entire field of cognitive psychology. It explains how humans can be programmed to act in deviant and destructive ways, contrary to good sense, compassion, gut emotion, personal conscience, and their sense of humanity. Since the agents of the global program of domination (the "Illiminati") use occult techniques of mind control, understanding the Archon thesis of the Gnostics can alert us to how we are being manipulated. The implications of "Archon theory" are profoundly practical and far-reaching.
Risking Sanity
All this strange business concerning Jehovah and the Archons is written large and clear in Gnostic texts, but ignored by scholars for obvious reasons. If we also ignore this scenario, dismissing it as a bizarre fantasy, a religious psychosis, or a remnant of Pagan superstition, we lose the opportunity to develop a coherent culture myth that connects humanity to its cosmic origins and to the future of the planet itself. Knowing how we are deviated could be the best thing that ever happened to us, spiritually speaking.
Sometimes, you have to put sanity at risk to find out what it really means to be sane.
This is the startling message of R. D. Laing who insisted that our very capacity for experience can be destroyed by conditioning that alienates us from what we intrinsically know. Alienation is also a theme that informs the best work of Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer whose genius is currently recognized worldwide due to cinematic adaptation of his books. Relating the work of R. D. Laing, Philip K. Dick and others such as Wilhelm Reich to the Gnostic message, helps us to realize its contemporary power.
The surviving Gnostic texts, thought to be Coptic translations of Greek-language originals, are skant and derivative. These materials are too fragmentary and incoherent to reveal the full scope of what the Gnostics had to say, although all the essential clues are there. It is unrealistic to expect the average seeker to plow into these obscure materials and come up with a clear understanding of the core teaching of the Mysteries. After hundreds of readings of the Nag Hammadi coidces and related materials, I can attest to how extremely difficult it is to extract a coherent message from these pitiful remains. Nevertheless, from these flakes of papyrus a powerful visionary system can be inferred. Everything that goes into my reconstruction of the core teaching of Gnosis is based on specific clues in the Coptic codices, although I do not always cite the textual clues because the proof process regarding these materials is tedious, meticulous and exhausting.
It's much easier to find the core teaching in ourselves, in the intuitive knowing of our hearts where humanity dwells and our bond to Gaia is rooted.
The Plasmate
When all is said and done, approaching Gnosticism involves an act of faith, indicated by Gnostics as Pistis Sophia, "confidence in the indwelling wisdom." You have to believe that you can discover innately whatever you are seeking to know through an external quest for knowledge. Philip K. Dick believed this was so. This conviction informs his best writings, especially the Valis Trilogy, a masterpiece permeated with genuine, first-hand, re-invented Gnosticism. Dick said that the discovery at Nag Hammadi in December, 1945, was not merely a find of documents, but the release of a living impulse, something he called "the plasmate." This is "the living information slumbering at Nag Hammadi century after century.... The plasmate had gone hiding at Nag Hammadi and was loose again in our world." (Valis, 180) It is a spiritual impulse charged with numinous content, a core teaching that lives and regenerates within those who learn it. This knowing within is Gnosis, not the assurance of a divine self, but the awakening of a faculty of higher cognition, insight that transcends human limits. Whoever touches that core teaching is touched by divine revelation. An ever-new, ever-true, ongoing revelation.
There is no better way to approach Gnosticism than through the eye of the heart, where this revelation is perpetually in birth.
Archon From Greek archai, "origins, beginning things, prior in time." In the classical Mediterranean world, archon was commonly used for the governor of a province, or, more loosely, any religious or governmental authority. Hence the plural, Archons, is often translated in Gnostic texts as "the Authorities." (There is no Coptic word for Archon, so Gnostic texts use the Greek term in Coptic transliteration.) Pronounced Ar-kon. Adjective, Archontic (Ar-KON-tik). In my usual habit of attempting the impossible, I propose three definitions, or three levels of definition:
Level One: Cosmological
In Gnostic cosmology, Archons are a species of inorganic beings that emerged in the solar system prior to the formation of the earth. They are cyborgs inhabiting the planetary system (exclusive of the earth, sun and moon), which is described as a virtual world (stereoma) they construct by imitating the geometric forms emanated from the Pleroma, the realm of the Generators, the Cosmic Gods. The Archons are a genuine species with their own proper habitat, and may even be considered to be god-like, but they lack intentionality (ennoia: self-directive capacity), and they have a nasty tendency to stray from their boundaries and intrude on the human realm. Archons are said to feel intense envy toward humanity because we possess the intentionality they lack
The Gaia Mythos describes how the Archons were produced by fractal impact in the dense elementary field arrays (dema) of the galactic limbs, when the Aeon Sophia plunged unilaterally from the galactic core. See especially Episode 10. This event is also described in detail in Alien Dreaming.
Level Two: Noetic-Psychological
In Gnostic psychology, the noetic science of the Mystery Schools, Archons are an alien force that intrudes subliminally upon the human mind and deviates our intelligence away from its proper and sane applications. They are not what makes us act inhumanely, for we all have the potential to go against our innate humanity, violating the truth in our hearts, but they make us play out inhumane behavior to weird and violent extremes. Left to our own devices, we would sometimes act inhumanely and then correct it, contain the aberration. Obviously, we do not always do so. In the exaggeration of our insane and inhumane tendencies, and in extreme, uncorrected deviance from our innate intelligence, Gnostics saw the signature of an alien species that piggy-backs on the worst human failings.
Hence, Archons are psycho-spiritual parasites. Yet as offspring of the Aeon Sophia, they are also our cosmic kin. As inorganic entities of two types, embryonic and reptilian, Archons can at moments penetrate the terrestrial atmosphere and terrorize humans, although there is no reason or order to these forays, for the aliens cannot remain for very long in the biosphere and, anyway, they have no master plan to accomplish here. The ontological status of the Archons is dual: they exist both as an alien species independent of humankind, and as a presence in our minds, rather like a set of programs operating in our mental environment. The risk they pose by invading our mental software is far greater than any physical risk they might pose by erratically breaching the biosphere.
Working through telepathy and suggestion, the Archons attempt to deviate us from our proper course of evolution. Their most successful technique is to use religious ideology to insinuate their way of thinking and, in effect, substitute their mind-set for ours. According to the Gnostics, Judeo-Christian salvationism is the primary ploy of the Archons, an alien implant. Our capacity to discern alien forces working in our minds is crucial to survival and co-evolution with Gaia who, as Sophia, accidentally produced the Archons in the first place. (This comment belongs to Level One, the cosmological definition, but as so often happens with Gnostic teachings, noetic and cosmic elements tend to merge.) By recognizing and repelling the Archons, we claim our power, define our boundaries in the cosmic framework, and establish our purpose relative to Gaia, the indwelling intelligence of the planet.
Level three: Sociological
In the Gnostic view of human society, the Archons are alien forces that act through authoritarian systems, including belief-systems, in ways that cause human beings to turn against their innate potential and violate the symbiosis of nature. LIVE spelled backwards is EVIL, but the Archons are not evil in the sense that they possess autonomous powers of destruction, able to be applied directly upon humanity. They are agents of error rather than evil — but human error, when it goes uncorrected and runs beyond the scale of correction, turns into evil and works against the universal plan of life. Gnostics taught that the Archons exploit our tendency to let our mistakes go uncorrected.
Because the Archons need human complicity to gain power over humankind, any one who assists them can be considered a kind of Archon, an accessory. How do humans assist the Archons? One way (suggested in the Level Two definition) is by accepting the mental programs of the Archons — that is, adopting the alien intelligence as if it were human-based — and implementing those programs by actually enforcing them in society. Another way is by actively or passively conforming to the agendas so proposed and imposed.
Jacques Lacarriere suggests that Gnostics detected the humanized face of the Archons in all authoritarian structures and and systems that deny authenticity and self-determination to the individual. He argues that Gnostics recognized "the fundamentally corrupt character of all human enterprises and institutions: time, history, powers,states, religions, races, nations..." (The Gnostics, p. 24) Corruption occurs, not because we make errors, but because the errors we make go uncorrected and extrapolate beyond the scale of correction. Lacarriere says that Gnostics reached this conclusion "out of rational observation of the natural world and human behavior." Ultimately, they asserted the "contention that all power — whatever kind it may be — is a source of alienation... All institutions, laws, religions, churches and powers are nothing but a sham and a trap, the perpetuation of an age-old deception." (p. 28-29) This may seem like a dark view of human affairs, but given the evidence of history (not to mention current events), it cannot be said to be unfair or exaggerated.
For an intimate glimpse of Gnostic teaching on the Archons, including advice on how to act when directly confronted by them, consider the passage from The First Apocalypse of James, cited in
Redeemer Complex
Term in the study of the history of religions for an ensemble of beliefs and assumptions focussed on a supernatural figure who is imagined to have the power to "save" humanity and "redeem" the world, usually through a moment of final reckoning and retribution, Judgement Day.
The Gnostic protest against Judeo-Christianity has not been fairly or adequately stated by scholars, mainly because the scholars who specialize in Gnostic studies are constrained by their religious conditioning. Consequently, whenever the anti-Judaic and anti-Christian elements of Gnostic teachings become evident, they are immediately dismissed, treated as not worth considering. This unfortunate situation has produced a deeply misleading impression: we are left thinking that Gnostics must have been bad people if they rejected the religious tradition that has inspired humanity to high moral standards, such as justice, altruism, brotherly love, and forgiveness.
In fact, the Gnostics protested, not against the clear and obvious moral values that have tradionally been attributed to Judeo-Christian faith, but against the ideology of divine salvation enshrined in the Redeemer Complex. The specific elements of the Complex to which they objected are: creation as the handiwork of a male deity, the Father God, rather than as an ever-ongoing process involving divinities of both genders; supremacy of the male Father God conceived as a judge and lawgiver; repression of the Feminine; the god-given dominion of humanity over the Earth; the creation of humanity "in God's image"; the corrupt nature of sexuality and the natural world; the supernatural source of atonement; the physical resurrection of the body, in the special case of Jesus Christ, and in the general case of the resurrection of humanity in the end time; eternal punishment and damnation for sinners and infidels; divine retribution, the apocalypse at the end of history.
This ensemble consists of some factors that provide a supporting frame for the Complex, such as the belief that the Father God creates humanity in His image, and others that reflect the Complex directly, such as the belief that the suffering of the Redeemer somehow changes human experience.When all is said and done, the core belief here resolves into two components: belief in the supernatural power of the Redeemer to "correct" all that is wrong in the world, and belief in the redemptive power of the Redeemer's suffering — and, by extension, of all human suffering. In a full metacritical analysis, the Complex is nothing but an elaborate strategem that compels us to believe in the redemptive value of suffering.
This belief-system reflects the "blackmail of transcendence" noted by George Steiner (see Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness). It is in fact a method of extortion that forces believers who accept the redemptive value of suffering, focussed in the ideal of the Divine Redeemer, either to adopt the role of the victim or to adopt the role of the perpetrator, for there can be no victims without perpetrators. This insidious complex induces what R. D. Laing called a schizophrenic "knot". I call the hidden core of the Redeemer Complex the victim-perpetrator bind. As long as we accept to be victims ("Blessed are ye who are persecuted for righteousness sake...") and let perpetrators do as they will ("Resist not evil... Turn the other cheek... Do good to those who harm you."), the Redeemer Complex will look like the best solution for the unresolved agonies of the human condition. Rather than live bravely with irresolution and injustice, people will inevitably turn to the Redeemer Complex for a false sense of consolation, not to mention the reassurance of being succoured by God. Rather than finding consolation in human love and solidarity with all species, they will look beyond the Earth for it. They will accept the delusion of vicarious atonement rather than have no atonement at all.
Gnostics saw through the Redeemer Complex to the supreme error as its core: the error of believing that we need to be atoned by a "Higher Power," when in reality we are beyond the need for atonement. Instead of atonement, they proposed that humanity at large can be voluntarily involved in the "correction" of the Divine Sophia, the Goddess who fell from the Pleroma to become Gaia. They taught that we, as individuals, can achieve true atonement (i.e., attunement) by aligning with Gaia, the living Earth, and expanding our consciousness to its full, divine, cosmic potential. The dose of divine intelligence, Nous, endowed in us by Sophia, is the very faculty through which we learn how to coevolve with Her. The correction of Sophia was the Gnostic alternative to the Redeemer Complex.
Scholars identify the historical origins of the Redeemer Complex in the soter, "savior," of Zoroastrian religion, but this provenance is very obscure and fraught with difficulties. (Hence the tongue-tangling term, soteriological, so-TARE-ee-oh-LODGE-ih-cull, used by scholars for redemptive programs and end-of-the-world schemes involving a divine savior figure.) Another likely candidate for the prototype of the Redeemer would be the avatara, "the one who descends," of Hindu mythology, exemplified in the ten Avatars of Vishnu, the God who dreams the universe. This model is comparable to, and in fact at the origin of, the lineage of reincarnating Bodhisattvas seen in the Tibetan tulkus, some of whom walk among us today. The Gnostics also had a conception of a lineage of enlightened teachers, the Phosters or Illuminators, also called Nous Illuminators or Revealers. These teachers, who may be men or women, are not conceived as incarnations of divinity (a key element in the Redeemer Complex) but as fully human, albeit exceptional, instruments of divine knowledge. The Gnostic Revealer does not save anyone, but he or she presents the knowledge that saves. The saving knowledge is not a doctrinal formulation in definitive terms, and cannot be reduced to a set of fixed rules, for it evolves in the course of human experience. Gnosis is a revelation of novelty and open-ended learning, hence Revealers must appear through time to discover and develop the new insights and lessons that apply as human experience changes. Gnostics were particularly outraged by the exclusive conception of the Judeo-Christian Redeemer because they viewed it as a counterfeit to the Revealer, and counterfeiting, or simulation, is the signature of the Archons. Hence they attributed the Redeemer Complex to the deviant insinuations of the Archons. Whatever its origins, the soter of prehistory came to be defined along special lines in the Messiah of the ancient Hebrews, which in turn became converted into the Christ of Pauline and Johannine doctrines. In Islam, the third branch of Abrahamic religion, the figure of the Redeemer is dually represented by a book of supreme and unquestionable spiritual authority, the Koran, and by a messianic figure, the Madhi, "he who is guided," imagined to be a man who will arise at the end of the world to lead the faithful.
A clear contrast between belief in the Christian Redeemer and the Gnostic teaching on the innate power of humanity to realize itself can be seen in these two quotes: For God so loved the world that he gave his Only-Begotten Son that whosoever believeth in hin should not perish but have everlasting life. New Testament, The Gospel of John
A great power was emanated to you, which the Originator, the Eternal One, endowed in you before you came to this place, in order that those things that are difficult to distinguish, you might distinguish, and those things that are unknown to the multitude you might know, and that you might be released sane and whole to the One who is yours, in you, who was the first to save and does not need to be saved. Allogenes (NHC, XI, 3.50)
resolute belief: cannot be altered by evidence or proof to the contrary.
Example: Some people believe that Elvis never died. This belief cannot be altered by evidence or proof to the contrary. Only if Elvis was to appear publicly, and it were proven genetically that it is he, properly aged, could this belief be validated. Lacking this validation, the belief remains resolute and the strength of it (the word resolution is etymologically equivalent to strength) resides in the fact that it cannot be disproven. In terms of Karl Popper's criterion for scientific ideas, resolute belief is "non-falsifiable."
The Promise of a Lonely Planet
Two: The Passion of Sophia
One thing I would say about Gnostic cosmology — May this comment be helpful to those who struggle with its density and difficulty — is that the stranger it gets, the more sense it makes. Such, at least, has been my experience over 30 odd years of delving into these recondite materials. Gnosticism has been called science fiction theology, and I cannot think of a more apt characterization. But what if the science fiction elements in Gnosticism turn out to be "true fiction" — fact in a fantastic disguise? Well, I guess it could be said that all I'm doing in this site to recover the original Mystery teachings of the Gnostics is to prepare people for that eventuality. It could be the most liberating revelation of our time. It could be the breakaway from reliance on faith and fantasy toward the living proof of enlightenment.
" Let your mind awaken." The Apocalypse of Paul.
"So also that you receive divine empowerment, but unless you receive it through knowledge, you will not be able to find it at all." The Apocalypse of Peter.
"Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics taught. There is no other road to salvation." Philip K. Dick. Valis, p. 236. Entry 44 from "The Exegesis."
The "Virgin Sophia" pictured as the wisdom that permeates the material world-hence, a Kabalistic representation of the Fallen Sophia. Geheime Figuren des Rosenkreuzer, 1785. Such schemas may arise from visionary contact with Gaia, but it is unlikely that scrutiny of them will lead to it.
A Living Planet
The stereoma is not alive as we are, but it is animated in a peculiar way that might be compared to computer animation. The virtual reality zone of the Archons is a fabrication of inorganic chemistry which they inhabit and keep running, like custodians who live in the structure they maintain. Archons can be imagined as fully employed cyborgs, extraterrestrial worker-drones in charge of the "celestial mechanics" of the solar system. The solar system exclusive of the Earth, that is.
Having looked at how the Archons convert the proto-planetary disk into a full-blown planetary system by imitating the designs of the Pleroma, it is time to look at what the Aeon Sophia is doing while all this transpires. As I have explained elsewhere in the site, Gnostic accounts of how Sophia becomes metamorphosed into the Earth do not survive in the paltry Coptic materials, but are found in the paraphrases of the Church Fathers, such as Irenaeus:
And when she could not pass by the Pleromic boundary (Horos) and return to the place from which she had plunged due to her wild and unmatched passion (enthymesis), Sophia was left in isolation, outside. Now she was resigned to undergo every sort of manifold and varied passion to which she was subject; and thus, on the one hand, she suffered grief because she had not attained the object of her desire [the triple world-system of her original Dreaming. JLL], and on the other hand, she suffered fear that life itself would fail her, as the primordial light had already done, fading to opacity; and all the while, she was in great perplexity...
The ensemble of her passions was the substance from which the matter of this world was formed. From her desire to return to the infinite life of the Pleroma, every ensouled creature belonging to this world, and even to the world of the Demiurge [Lord Archon], derived its origin. All other things owed their being to her terror and sorrow. From her tears, all that is of the liquid realms was formed; from her smile, all that is lucent; from her grief and perplexity, all the corporeal elements of this world. ( Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book One, IV. 1-3. My italics.)
In a development parallel to, but independent of, the Archontic simulation that produces the planetary system, there arises the planetary embodiment of the Goddess. The Aeon Sophia is a living, self-aware current of high-porosity, mass-free radiance, Organic Light that acquires mass and convolves upon itself, spinning into a foetal ball. As the Sun spins elementary matter into the whirling banded plane of the proto-planetary disk, Sophia forms an independent center, a node of organic life opposed to the inorganic planetary shells. This is how "the earth has consolidated itself through Sophia." (On the Origin of the World, 103: 1). The paraphrase of Irenaeus contains some clues on how Gnostic seers (whom we may now recognize as genuine scientists in their own right) might have perceived the difference between organic and inorganic matter: they distinguished "animal substance" from "matter" as such. (Against Heresies I, 5) Curiously, the former, organic matter, is said to be right-handed, and the latter left-handed. In chirality, the property of handedness, Gnostics seem to have detected abiogenesis: the organization of organic life on an inorganic basis. This is one of the great unsolved mysteries of natural science. The Gnostic distinction recalls the insight of Louis Pasteur, who believed that chirality, seen for instance in the left-hand spin of the DNA helix, conceals the ultimate secret of life.
As one anonymous wit observed, "Hydrogen is an odorless, invisible, inorganic vapor that gradually turns into people." How, then, can the organic arise from the inorganic? In our world system, due to the anomaly introduced by the generation of the Archons, all organic forms, from flatworms to human bodies, are seated on an inorganic base-or so it appears. The chemical elements present at the formation of the solar system are all inorganic-hydrogen, nitrogen, helium, carbon, iron, etc.- yet they produce and sustain a vast array of organic life-forms. In Gnostic science, this is explained by the fact that a living planet, the Earth, is captured in an inorganic field and is thus subject, to an extent, the laws of that fields. The stereoma is like a scaffolding but not merely a passive one. The extraterrestrial planetary frame does not merely enclose the Earth in an inorganic grid, it mingles with terrestrial physics. The living planet is like the yolk-albumin component of an egg, and the planetary system is like the shell, composed of calcium. The total chemistry of the egg is one process, even though shell and innards have their own chemistry. So it is with abiogenesis in the planetary system where the Earth is seated.
This analogy is particularly apt. Let's recall that eggs are oval-shaped, not spherical. Likewise, the complete planetary system that emerges from Sophia's metamorphosis within the frame of the Archontic stereoma is an oval structure, having two foci or nodes: Sun and Earth. The proto-planetary disk with a living planet incorporated is an oval or egg-shaped plane, rather than a circular disk. Around the Sun-node the planets are spun from a mix of inorganic components. Around the Earth-node cohere the rudiments of a solid orb with a unique atmosphere. Gnostic myth clearly describes how the elements of the biosphere are formed from the sentient life of the Aeon Sophia, independent of the Archontic stereoma. It may not be just "by chance" (and how lucky for us!) that the Earth is positioned neither too close to the Sun, nor too far away.
If Gnostics were right, astrophysicists in the future may come to consider that the proto-planetary disk was ovalesque rather than circular. Not such a huge surprise, really, since the orbits into which the planets eventually settled are known to be ovals, not perfect circles. The Earth does not revolve around the Sun in a perfect circle, but in an ellipse. This was the momentous discovery of Johannes Kepler-or was it merely his recovery of what Egyptian astronomers (i.e., Gnostics seers on the Nile) knew, as Kepler himself insisted?
The Conversion of the Sun
An organic world captured in an inorganic planetary system: this is how Gnostics saw the Earth. As we might expect, then, the Sun, the central star of the planetary system, has an exceptional role to play in the Fallen Sophia scenario. Let's recall that a sun-star and a moon-satellite figured in the threefold triple ennoia, Sophia's original Dreaming of a world outside the Pleroma. This is how She preconceived a special habitat for humankind and the myriad species. In the Aeonic Dreaming, the mother star is symbiotic with the Earth and its satellite, the Moon. What the Aeon projected on the cosmic level we on Earth experience as a given. Normally, we do not feel ourselves integrated into a planetary system, but into a three-body cosmos. Sun and Moon are constantly present, tangible and visible. They mark the rhythms of life, impacting us in many ways, down to the cellular level. The planets cannot be said to do likewise, for they are not immanently and intimately active in all life-processes, even in our conscious living habits, as Sun and Moon are.
(Schema of the three-body-cosmos, depicted in an alchemical book. Michael Maier, Septimania Philosophica, 1616.)
In The Apocryphon of John, the Sun is called by a name from the Mystery Schools: Sabaoth, pronounced SAH-buy-ot. The Gnostic cosmological treatises describe how, early in the evolution of the solar system, the Sun-star becomes aligned in a special way with the emergent Earth. In the idiom of the myth, this event is called the conversion of Sabaoth. This occurs in a three-way interaction between the Aeon Sophia, Yaldabaoth, and Sabaoth. As we have already seen, Yaldabaoth declares himself to be the sole creator-god, lord of all he beholds. Seeing his image in the light of the newborn Sun, he declares himself the sovereign power in the cosmos."After the founding of the planetary world, Salkas said to his angels, 'I am a jealous god, and apart from me nothing has come to be." (The Gospel of the Egyptians, 58, 25-30) "He came to have authority over matter, and Sophia withdrew into her own interior light." (On the Origin of the World, 8.)
But other witnesses and participants in these cosmic events see things differently, especially Sabaoth, the emergent mother star. One cosmological text, On the Origin of the World, treats this event more extensively than any other.
When the Aeon Sophia saw the impiety of the Lord Archon she was filled with anger. Remaining invisible to him, she said, "You are mistaken, Samael (that is, blind god), for there is an immortal Child of Light who has been in existence before you, and who will appear among your modelled forms (plasmata), and that one will trample you in scorn, just as a potter's clay is pounded down. And you will descend to your origin, the Abyss, along with your legions. For at the consummation of your works, the entire defect that has become manifest from the true origin of the cosmos will be abolished, and the cosmos will cease to be as it is, and it will be as it never was."
Saying this Sophia revealed her image in the cosmic waters, and then withdrew into her interior light.
Now when Sabaoth, the son of Yaldabaoth, heard the voice of the Aeon Sophia, he sang praises to her and condemned his putative father [the chief Archon]... He praised the Sophia because she informed him of the Child of Light ("the immortal man") and its radiant Power. Then the Aeon Sophia stretched out her finger and poured upon Sabaoth some of her own radiant Power, to be condemnation to Yaldabaoth. When Sabaoth was illumined in this way, he received great authority against all the Archons, the forces of chaos. Since that day he has been called "Lord of the Vital Forces." (Orig World 25-27, with paraphrases.)
This mythic cosmology asserts that the Sun, presumably a massive dynamo of inorganic chemistry, stands with the Earth and against the planetary system — but this is precisely the reality of terrestrial physics, isn't it? Massive as it is, the Sun is nurturing to life on Earth, a true mother star. It provides prana, vital force, in a constant stream delicately filtered by the terrestrial atmosphere, so that the lethal elements in sunlight are eliminated. James Lovelock was initially clued to the Gaia Hypothesis by the observation that the Earth remained livable, and sustained a constant temperature, during eons when the solar temperature fluctuated wildly. The myth tells us that the life-supporting properties of solar radiation were invested in the Sun by the Aeon Sophia, "who poured upon Sabaoth some of her own radiant Power." This is, of course, another outrageous notion, typical of Gnostic myth-making. But could it in any sense be physically true? Well, if scientists eventually come to recognize the nature of plasmatic surges from the galactic core, as they seem on the verge of doing, it might be theoretically conceivable that such a current, engaged frontally with an emergent sun, could alter the chemistry of the nascent solar orb. Stars are continually being born in the nebular regions of the galactic limbs, but not all of them are frontally affected by a raw plasmatic surge. This appears to be the unique cosmic event described in the conversion of Sabaoth.
Lunar Pearl
The original emanation of the Aeon Sophia, trimorphic protennoia or "three-formed intent", is to produce a three-body system, the most simple and elegant model of planetary evolution: star-planet-satellite. Due to the planetary domain of the Archons having formed from the unforeseen effects of cosmic impact, the three-body world is captured in a seven-body system, consisting of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, plus Sun and Moon. These seven bodies are collectively called the Heptad.
In the Heptad, only the first five bodies belong exclusively to the Archontic realm. Due to the "conversion of Sabaoth," the physics of the Sun are integrated closely with the terrestrial biosphere. Thus, Sun, Moon and Earth reflect, although in a compromised manner, the three-formed intent of the Aeon Sophia, the pure autopoetic focus of that current, as it were. Sun and Moon remain dominated by inorganic chemistry, yet they are intimately integrated into the organic chemistry of the biosphere. The Moon emerges during the same period that "the earth has consolidated itself through Sophia" (just cited), and acts as a counterweight to the Heptad. With its pearl-like rotundity, the Moon represents the condensed end of the original "shoot" of cosmic plasma from the galactic core. Imagine a molten bubble of foam-like Pleromic plasma condensed and ossified, absorbing inorganic elements that would otherwise have penetrated the biosphere and loaded it down too heavily.
In other words, the Moon was formed rather like the pearl in an oyster. A grain of sand irrirates the oyster which then secretes a milky fluid that hardens into a pearl. In the bizarre perspective of Gnostic science, the Moon was not ejected physically from the Earth, as the current, admittedly shaky theory of lunar formation asserts. Instead, the Moon was distilled from the biosphere by an act of secretion, a slow discharge of inorganic elements. It makes sense, then, that the Moon and it cycles remains intimately linked ("structurally coupled" in the jargon of systems theory) to all life-forms on earth. The material of the lunar mass was extracted from the earth-mass, but the form, the living patterns of the lunar node of the three-body world, were retained. This is consistent with Sophia's retention of her original ennoia, the Dreaming that patterns a three-body cosmos: star-planet-satellite, Sun, Earth, Moon.
Observing the Planets
We all participate organically in the dynamics of the three-body cosmos, but it takes a deliberate act of attention just to recognize the planetary cosmos. Most people cannot tell planets from stars, and once it is pointed out, it still takes considerable training to appreciate fully. During the many years that I gave sky-watching tours in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I had to repeat the elementary facts of planetary motion over and over again. After I had pointed out a planet in the sky, and described its position relative to the background constellations, I had to explain carefully how the planet's position would change in the course of a month, a year, ten years. Fortunately, the classes I led had the opportunity to observe the planets for months at a time under the crystal-clear skies high in the Sangre de Christos mountain range, the southernmost end of the Rockies Chain.
But even repeated observation is not sufficient when it comes to understanding the planetary realm beyond the three-body cosmos we inhabit. It is necessary to combine direct observation with a rather complex process of visualization, for as the planet-bodies are perceived, their cycles must be simultaneously conceived. In the classes I held in Santa Fe, we regularly spent a good part of our time looking at diagrams of planetary movement, such as the retrograde cycle of Mars. For a group exercise-one could almost say, a group meditation-I proposed that we carefully compute the key moments in such a cycle, and pay conscious attention to those moments as they were transpiring, to see if we might detect any corresponding patterns in the events of our lives, or any psychological "currents" that might be associated (not causally, but through symbolic parallels) with the rhythms of the planets. It was a daring and sometimes revealing experiment, by no means easy to pull off. It took considerable training for the participants to be able to follow how a planet moves over several months. Without diagrams constantly on hand (usually stuck on the fridge), they would not have been able to keep up the exercise.
Considerable practical difficulties are involved in learning the planetary system. Both long-cycle and short-cycle observations are problematic in their own ways. Of the two most rapid planets, Mercury and Venus, the first is too close to the Sun to be frequently or easily seen. Venus is a spectacular sight, and her cycles, including the retrograde shifts that bring her close to the earth, are by far the easiest to follow. But the short-cycle advantages of viewing Venus do not permit good observation of how she moves relative to the stable background of the constellations. For this one needs to track the long-cycle planets, Jupiter and Saturn, whose slow trek through the constellations can be observed in meticulous detail. However, long-cycle viewing requires month-by-month regularity in sky-watching sessions, not to mention the right atmospheric conditions. Mars presents the best mix of short-cycle advantages (rapid and easily detectible motion) and long-cycle advantages (tracking the planet's passage through the constellations). I realize that it may seem arbitrary, if not purely artificial, to distinguish the Earth-Moon-Sun system from the planetary system in the way I am proposing. This is one of those weird notions that comes out of Gnostic teachings, or what's left of them. But as I have already noted, the stranger it gets with Gnosticism, the more sense it makes. From years of teaching people how to observe the skies, I am convinced that getting in synch with the planets is, and can only be, a forced experience. No matter how comfortable you become with planet-watching, it remains a highly orchestrated act. Compared to the semi-conscious ease with which we synch into the cycles of the Sun (i.e., the seasons) and the Moon (week-month intervals),participating in the planetary system is awkward and arduous. And beyond computing and tracking the planets, the experience of empathic contact with these far-off orbs is hard to muster.
Fatal Habits
The word planet means "wanderer," or in a literal sense, "deviant." It derives from the Greek word plané, "error, deviation, going astray." Plané (pronounced PLAH-nay) is one of a half dozen key terms in the Gnostic texts. It is always used to describe the action of the Archons: "And they steered people who had followed them into great troubles, by leading them astray with many deceptions." (Apoc John II, 29, 30 — 30, 10.) Plané is "leading astray," or "deceit," although the Greek word apate is used in a more specific sense for the latter.(A Gnostic nuance: leading astray differs from deception in that the former occurs when natural or innate tendencies are misdirected or exaggerated, whereas with the latter a specific element or tactic of deception must be applied to those innate tendencies, and as such it comes from outside.) The Coptic equivalent to plané is sorem, but this term is rarely used. Apparently, the Greek was preferred because it directly associates error, the Archons, and the planetary realm.
Gnostics used another Greek word, heirmarmene (pronounced High-MAR-muh-KNEE) for the rigid system of control associated with the planetary regions. They taught that such control, displayed in the clockwork regularity of "celestial mechanics," was hostile to human life and contrary to the living pulsations of the three-body cosmos. Scholars translate heirmarmene as "the rule of fate," and they label the Gnostic view of the planetary spheres as "astral determinism." So much confusion and misinterpretation surround this subject that it difficult to get a clear fix on how Gnostics actually understood "the rule of fate." Here again is an example of how Gnostic scholars might improve their grasp of their subject by looking outside their own field. Consider this brief passage from The Apocryphon of John:
For from that fate (heirmarmene) which the Archons devised, came forth every sin and injustice and blasphemy, and the chain of forgetfulness and ignorance, and every severe command with serious sins and great fears attached to it. And thus the whole world was made blind in order that we may not know the One which is beyond all this ... And because of this chain of forgetfulness those who are enmeshed do not see their own errors, for they are bound with the measures of times and moments, since fate has rule over everything that is so measured. (II,28, 21 -35. My italics.)
Without going into a long commentary here, I would note one point. "The chain of forgetfulness and ignorance" immediately recalls the "chain of interdependent origination," a concept central to Buddhist teachings on karma. The chain consists of twelve links (nidanas), the first of which is ignorance (avidya). Buddhist teachings assert that when we become enmeshed in the karmic chain-reaction based on ignorance, we forget ourselves and become blind to the One Reality -that is, the pure awareness called Rigpa in Tibetan. It seems almost self-evident (to me, anyway) that this passage is a close paraphrase of Buddhist teaching on karma. Hence, the "astral determinism" of the Gnostics was very likely a version of Asian karma theory.
Gnostics undoubtedly taught about karma, and they seem to have framed their ideas about it in a celestial metaphor that included the Archons as psychological "drivers" who enslave us to habitual and unfulfilling patterns of behavior. Tibetan Buddhism also uses an elaborate metaphor for karma enmeshment: the "wheel of life," comprised of the Three Poisons, the Six Realms, and the Twelve Nidanas. This model can be correlated point by point to the astrological paradigm of signs and planets. In my opinion, the Gnostic heirmarmene and the Tibetan wheel of life are two versions of the same teaching on karmic determinism. For Gnostics the Archontic realm of the planets was a cosmic reflection of the forces of habit that drive human beings into blind and unfulfilling behavior. The system of fatal error reinforces itself, and that is the rule of fate, the tyranny of the Archons.. In Buddhism we escape from the wheel of karma by awakening to the mind nature or Buddha Nature, but Gnosis proposes a different path. In Goddess-based spirituality, we transcend our behavioral bondage by flowing ecstatically into the great continuum of life, connecting to the planetary body of Gaia.
Sensuous Beholding
If the passions of Sophia have congealed and morphed into the elements of the biosphere, as Gnostics taught, then the empathy we as human beings can feel with nature must be resonant with what She feels. To genuinely feel nature is to recognize that it feels back. And how it feels back. We might coin a term here: feelback, the emotive dimension of feedback. And indeed, the feelback of Gaia toward us does feed us, does nurture us. It keeps us alive every moment of our lives-and who knows, the magnificent tendrils of Her love may be what loops us into this planet in the first place, and then back out again.
In Hindu Tantra the serpent power compressed in the human body is called Kundalini, literally, "little Kunda." The big Kunda is the massive coiling telluric power of the Goddess. In the hilarious exploits of Castaneda and his "sorcerer's party," this force is called "the Tumbler." I have seen it at loose along the flanks of the Sierra de Libar in Andalucia, causing a vast stretch of the mountain chain to writhe. The sensuous abandon of the Dragon current expresses the bliss of the Earth as it dances nakedly in space. The sorcerer takes this current into the glow of h/ir eyes.
It is hard to see such things and live, but it much worse to live without seeing them.
Elsewhere in this site, I have proposed the term biomysticism for the practice of loving communion with Gaia.The term might be objectionable in view of the Reichian slant that I like to give to all matters concerning our communion with the Goddess. With Gnostic acumen, Reich detected in mysticism a displacement of biological and affective forces into a disembodied Beyond. Biomysticism is the opposite: the reclaiming of the feeling-knowledge in our bodies, the sweet strong somatic surge that comes up from the soles of our feet and churns into a warm ball in the solar plexus, as if the tummy were a honey-pot basking in the sun. We live because we are perpetually plugged into this delicious current, the Tumbler, Mahakundala, and not because we are simply given a finite dose of life-force that gradually runs out. If we knew how to receive the earth force in gratitude and reverence, consciously, intentionally, each moment, we would not have to die as we do but we could shed our skins like snakes, as the old initiates did. Gaia's feelback makes us morphically immortal.
Even when we attempt to flee from natural bliss, we are pulled back into it. It could be argued that even the Christian mystics, who verge on disembodiment in their unnatural lust to reach the Beyond and see the face of God, are tricked by Eros and so fall back into the embrace of the Goddess. The ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila has often been compared to orgasmic rapture. Teresa was a hot dame, but more vividly erotic you cannot get than Hildegard of Bingen, who converted her vision of the Divine into music and paintings. One image in particular presents graphic evidence of massive feelback bliss. (From Scivias, in the Rupertsberg Codex, 12th Century.)
"Then I saw a huge object, round and shadowy. Like an egg it was pointed at the top... Its surrounding layer was bright fire (Empyreum). Beneath this lay a dark skin. In the bright fire hovered a reddish, sparkling fireball..." (Cited in Alexander Roob, Alchemy & Mysticism, p. 120)
It would be hard to imagine a more vivid, perfectly detailed image of the female genitalia, complete with a fringe of foliate adornment. Everything is revealed: the starburst clitoris, the vermilian labia, inner and outer, the pinhole of the urethra discreetly depicted as a crescent Moon, the tunnel of the vagina furrowed with ruggia (for that slippery grip), the opening to the womb, the stem of the cervix, a cache of ova waiting to be fertilized. This is biomysticism in action, evidence that the highest revelation of God is indistinguishable from the miracle of our natural functions.
And there is more, for Hildegarde's "vision of the cosmos" (Roob) is also a neat demonstration of the three-body world, Sophia's original Dreaming. Egg and oval set up the overall composition. Sun, Moon and Earth are beautifully aligned on a vertical axis. This is all there is, all there needs to be. The sacred figuration of the womb of Gaia is stamped anatomically on the body of all women of the human species, and through that gate we all come into life, we emerge into the greater womb, the biosphere. It is all there in Hildegarde's vision, including even the subliminal trace of a three-headed demon-the three-chambered brain, squawk-box of the human ego?
I do not know much about the life of Hildegarde of Bingen, who lived from 1098 to 1179, but I suspect that it was not fabulous in sensual terms-at least not as far as overt sensuality and sexual experience were concerned. It simply could not have been so. Little Hilda was a sickly child "given into the service of the Church" by devout parents, and she lived constantly in the fearful, repressive atmosphere of the nunnery. Yet from well before adolescence, Hildegarde was having visions that she dared to relate to those around her. Something stirred inside her and produced a huge outpouring of pictures and musical inspiration. Others wrote down her words and visions for her. These renditions were "interspersed with salutary admonitions to live in the fear of the Lord (Catholic Encyclopedia)." Of course they were. Among the works left to posterity by Hildegarde of Bingen are hundreds of letters fifty allegorical homilies, a list of nine hundred words in an unknown language, seventy hymns with melodies, a manual of nine books on plants, trees, stones, fishes, birds, reptiles and metals, a medical treatise, and, of course, the Scivias, the records of her visions. One of her poetical books is the "Liber divinorum operum," a "contemplation of all nature in the light of faith. Sun, moon, and stars, the planets, the winds, animals, and man, are in her visions expressive of something supernatural and spiritual, and as they come from God should lead back to Him." Why, thank you, authors of the on-line Catholic Encyclopedia. This is just what I have been trying to say. Almost.
Loving Gaia
The yonic imagery of Hildegard of Bingen and the luscious contours of the Coco De Mer are displayed in Metahistory.org because they match the message of the site. If it is true that about 60 percent of all traffic on the Internet is pornographic, lusting cybernauts can now get their kicks from the real thing. Sensuous beholding of the Earth produces the feelback effect, and this in turn fosters what Inga Muscio outrageously calls "a cuntlovin' attitude." In his introduction to her book, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, Deep Ecologist Derrick Jensen wrote:
Merely to reside in the sensual as the world burns isn't good enough. Nor is it good enough merely to mourn the losses both inside and out. Both of these are necessary, but not sufficient.... If you're in love, with your life, with your body, with your lover, with the tree outside your door, with the world that gives rise to all of these, the fact that we're all deeply, deeply fucked doesn't matter a damn to your actions: if you're in love, you act to protect your beloved. If we are to survive, we must reclaim our planet from those corporations which-and people who-are destroying it. But even before this, we must reclaim our own bodies and our hearts from that same grasp.
Tenderness is the essence of the cuntlovin' attitude, and in what we learn through ecstasy, through surrender and sensuous beholding, we may come to realize that a supreme strength inheres in tenderness, sublime healing power that comes through our connection to Gaia-Sophia. We do not die, today, not merely because we do not cease to live, but because we are perpetually healed into life. The inpouring is constant, and in the feelback it becomes conscious. Love that and see what follows. Where religion affects our lives, there is always lots of talk about love. Personally, I detest this. Especially when the love talk tells us that "God's love" is operating in our lives. God loves you. Jesus loves you. And they want us to love each other. If there is anything good in this kind of talk, it is hugely overweighed by the use of such language as a pretext to hid a multitude of evils, transgressions against body and mind alike. Love talk is the perpetrator's favorite foil. I say let's practice kindness and shut up about love, shut the fuck up-unless there is something funny or sexy to say, unless there are love secrets to impart. Just think of Hildegarde. Even with the curse of religion on her soul, she went into massive feelback. Erotically handicapped by her time and surroundings, she became what many of her gender might aspire to be: not the Madonna or even Madonna herself, but a genuine mystical woman with a cunt full of stars.
Somewhere I said that loving Gaia is the height of human destiny. This is one of my love secrets. To learn from the Gnostics about the passions of Sophia is both a high challenge and a humbling experience. A challenge because the mythos engages our powers of attention and imagination at a genius level. No one evolves in this story who does not love to learn. And it is humbling because it sets us up for feelback, however and whenever it may come. As we venture into the mythos, shifting ever deeper into body-knowledge, we become biomystically gifted and erotically giving, generous as the gods themselves. If generosity is the signature trait of Divinity, rather than love-well, that wouldn't be such a bad deal, would it? As for loving Gaia and being loved by Her, this is the supreme path of human discovery. It leads beyond fear and hope, promise and pretence, it surpasses all claims and all speculations about the Divine, it puts religion to shame. The call to this path tingles like soft wildfire in our cells.
Encounters with Aliens in a Mystery School Text
Here and there the Coptic Gnostic materials contain passages that describe encounters with the ET-like beings, sometimes with explicit advice about how to handle these entities. What beliefs are implied in such testimony? And what are we to believe about such testimony? I will attempt to address both these questions in this brief topical essay.
Occult Instruction
For a first-hand look at the testimony, let's consider a passage from The First Apocalypse of James (NHC V, 3), a revelation dialogue in which an unnamed teacher (the "Lord" or "Master") confers secret knowledge upon a Gnostic named James: The Master said: James, behold, I shall reveal to you the path of your redemption. Whenever you are siezed and you undergo death-pangs (mortal fear), a multitude of Archons may turn on you, thinking they can capture you. And in particular, three of them will sieze you, those who pose as toll collectors. Not only do they demand toll, but they take away souls by theft.
Now, when you come under their power, one of them who is the overseer will say to you: "Who are you, and where are you from?"
You are then to say to him, "I am a child of humanity and I am from the Source."
He will then say to you, "What sort of child are you, and to what Source do you belong?"
You are to say to him, "I am from the pre-existent Source, and I am the offspring of the Source."
Then he will say to you, "Why were you sent out from the Source?"
Then you are to say to him, "I came from the Pre-existent One so that I might behold those of my kind and those who are alien."
And he will say to you, "What are these alien beings?"
You are to say to him: "They are not entirely alien, for they are from the Fallen Sophia (Achamoth), the female divinity who produced them when she brought the human race down from the Source, the realm of the Pre-Existent One. So they are not entirely alien, but they are our kin. They are indeed so because she who is their matrix, Sophia Achamoth, is from the Source. At the same time they are alien because Sophia did not combine with her like in the Source (her divine male counterpart), when she produced them."
When he also says to you, "Where will you go now?"
You are to say to him, "To the place when I came, the Source, there shall I return." And if you respond in this manner, you will escape their attacks.
(NHC V, 3. 33 — 34: 1- 25. Translation from NHLE 1990, pp. 265-6 and Kurt Rudolf, Gnosis, p. 174-5.)
Considerable information is packed into this exchange. The resemblance to contemporary reports of close encounters is undeniable: the Archons induce a state of mortal panic, they often appear in threes, they perform abductions ("take away souls by theft"). These details accord closely with contemporary ET/UFO lore. But in a striking departure from the current literature, the Gnostic teacher gives explicit instructions on how to face the alien entities. The vast amount of material on the ET-UFO phenomenon available today does not present a book, or barely even a paragraph, on defence against alien intrusion. Gnostic writings not only describe such encounters, they prescibe defensive action. The Master offers cogent counsel for keeping the Archons in their place.
Gnosis is a remembering of our origins. The student is instructed to remember the cosmic birthright of humankind, and to affirm its direct link to the Pleroma, the Source. Specifically, the student is taught to reecall and repeat the key episode in Gnostic mythology, the fall of the Aeon Sophia, to effectuate a defence against the Archons. By doing so, the student demonstrates initiated knowledge of the origin and identity of the beings s/he is facing. The mere knowledge of cosmic matters disempowers the Archons.
The Coptic materials become increasingly relevant as we realize they do not merely present pedantic or recondite commentaries on a dead religion, but vital insights on the timeless spiritual dilemmas of humanity, insights as valid today as they were 2000 years ago. Describing the find at Nag Hammadi, Tobias Churton writes, "Had Mohammed Ali not broken open the jar, we would not be able to hear these things. In the truest sense of the word, these things are dynamite. One might have imagined headlines throughout the world..." (The Gnostics, p. 12)
But there were no such headlines, even in the tabloids. It took many years before the codexes were translated and still, even today, no scholar will allow that these rare Coptic codices contain reliable accounts of encounters with ET-like entities.
Ideological Virus
In another passage of The First Apocalypse of James, the Master refers to those people "who exist as the type of the Archons." (30:20) Gnostics were not only alert to the intrusion of the Archons, they were also acutely aware of the possibility of humans becoming totally "Archontized." This threat appears to have emerged in a particularly alarming way in that era to which Philip K. Dick often refers: the first century of the Common Era, when the Incarnation of Christ is said to have occured, according to Christian belief. Both the time and the place where Archontic molding of human character set in strongly are specified in the Nag Hammadi texts. In his Gnostic view of the human condition, PKD assumed that the spiritual life of humanity was arrested at that moment. It is as if the behavior of those "who exist as the type of Archons" locked into place in that era, and came to dominate all subsequent centuries-lasting until the moment, so PKD believed, that the Nag Hammadi texts were discovered.
In a close parallel to Philip K. Dick's vision of "the Empire," Wilhelm Reich saw the rise of a similar syndrome which he characterized as "the mechanico-mystical" complex. (See The Mass Psychology of Fascism, in extenso.) Its signature is "authoritarian ideology," identical with fascism. Significantly, archon was the common term for "governer," or "authority" in Roman times. In some translations of the Coptic texts, archon (in plural, archontoi) is rendered as "the authorities." Reich's analysis of what I propose to call the mystico-fascist complex focusses on National Socialism, the Nazi movement, which he experienced first-hand, but The Mass Psychology of Fascism contains ample referenes to Catholicism and the Holy Roman Empire, the millennial ancestor of the mystico-fascist program In allusion to the fascist ideology of the "authorities", Philip K. Dick wrote: "The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one." (Valis, p. 235, citing entry 41 from "The Exegesis.")
This is purely a Gnostic insight, compatible with passages in the NHC and deeply resonant with Reich's views on the massenpsychosen of Roman Christianity. (It might be argued that the Nazis were not Christians, but in fact Hitler imagined himself as a Grail Knight, modelled after Wagners's Parsifal, and the saviour complex of Judaeo-Christian belief is wholly transposed into Nazi racial ideology-hence the "Aryan Christ" identified by C. G. Jung.) Reich warned that since the breakdown of the pre-Christian ethos of earth-oriented Paganism, "the biological core of humanity has been without social representation." (Ibid., p. xii). This is a staggering observation, to say the least.
The "authorities" exhibit the behavior of spiritual zombies, people who exemplify a baffling mix of mystical and militaristic fixations. (What I have called behavioral cloning is widely evident in both militaristic and mystical behavior, such as we see today in neocon religious realpolitik, although it is also embodied in the mass conformity of global consumerism and the rites of technophilia.) According to Reich, these fixations, focussed on the master fixation on a transcendent God beyond the Earth, arise from the repression and displacement of somatic sensations, especially sexual-genital feelings. Philip K. Dick agreed with Reich in observing that the mystico-fascist ideology grows like armor around people who adopt these fixations, either through violent imposition or psychological intimidation ("conversion"). It operates like a virus, "imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes it enemies." (Valis, p. 235) The ideology of the authorities can infect even those who resist it. Hence it turns humanity against itself. But it would appear that some Gnostics were immune to infection-not by accident, but due to their deliberate practice of orgiastic sexual techniques to produce immunity, and due, in equal measure, to their explicit teachings on the Archons and how to resist them, as seen in the above passage from The First Apocalypse of James. Gnostic observers on the ground when Christianity arose saw salvationist ideology exactly the way Philip K. Dick did: as a virus. An ideological virus, to be precise. Pagan intellectuals of the day even used that very term for the fanaticism of the converts.
Gnostics saw the tyranny of belief, of metaphysical fantasies that underwrite militaristic agendas, in the rise of early Christianity. We can only imagine what they would see today in the political religiosity of the American right.
Defending Humanity
What are we to make, then, of Gnostic beliefs about the Archons? It might be said that Gnostics believed that only by confronting what is insane and inhumane in ourselves, can we truly define what is human. In essence, to define humanity is to defend it against distortion. Gnostics believed that the capacity for distortion of humanitas is inherent in our minds, but is not in itself potentially deviant. Since we are endowed with nous, a dose of divine intelligence, we are able to detect and correct distorted thinking, what the Tibetan Buddhists call krol'pa, "thoughts that lead astray," mental fixations that turn us away from humanitas, our true identity. However, they also believed there is an alien spin that can add a truly deviant element to our thinking. The effect of the Archons is not to make us err, but to make us, largely through dullness and distraction, disregard our errors, so that they extrapolate beyond the scale of correction.
The Archons cast a 'trance" over Adam... They put him into a sleepy state, but it was his perception they dulled... They make our hearts heavy that we may not pay attention and may not see. So we lose the reflection of the Divine Light within us.. . [Thus the Arcons acted on humanity] with a view to deceive. When the life-spirit increases and the illuminating power of the body strengthens the soul, no one can lead you astray into the lessening of your humanity. But those on whom the counterfiet spirit preys are alienated from humanity and deviated... The despicable spirit gains strength by leading us astray. The Archons burden the soul, attracting us to works of evil, and pull us down into oblivion, making us forget who we are. (The Apocryphon of John, II, 22: 14-10, through 27-20.)
The catechism on alien encounters in The First Apocalypse of James is not exceptional. A great deal of Gnostic teaching was dedicated to the theory of error I have just summarized. In a practical sense, Gnostic teachers in the Mystery Schools instructed the neophytes in how to face the Archons both as alien intruders, comparable to the Greys and Reptilians of contemporary lore, and as tendencies in their minds. The detection of Archontic intrusion in both these modes of experience seems to be unique to the finely nuanced noetic science of the Mysteries.
In the Gnostic view, human beings "who exist as the type of the Archons" are those who blindly follow religious ideologies of an insane and inhumane nature, for it is primarily through religious beliefs that the Archons intrude upon us. Behavior driven by such beliefs produces pathological personality fixations, resulting in the spiritual zombie. All scholars agree that some Gnostics condemned equally the Jewish origins of the Christian salvationist program, and the Pauline-Johannine program itself. Doing so, they did not spread a hate message against anyone. Rather, they attempted to expose what they perceived to be the hateful and deceiving message disguised in the Judeo-Christian ideology of salvation. At the source of this message, they detected the subliminal intrusion of the Archons into the human mind. Hence the preponderance (more than half, by my estimate) of politically and theologically incorrect passages in the Coptic materials. Whether or not Gnostics were delusional about the Archons is a private judgement call. But a fair and open-minded reading of the Coptic texts will not yield much evidence for derangement on their part. The seers who exposed derangement were not deranged. They were sober and methodical in describing what they knew, and extremely conscientious in prescribing action to face the perceived threat. They believed that they really had identified that most baffling of all enigmas: the root cause of inhumanity in human nature.
What are we to believe about all this today? There is an issue of credibility here, of course-that is to say, we may consider the source of Gnostic teachings apart from their content. But Gnosis is by definition a matter of knowing and not of believing. It is about enlightenment, not faith. To give Gnostics credit for actually knowing what they claimed to know it only the first step. Beyond that, we must confirm what they knew by our own resources, our own faculties. This is the perennial challenge of Gnosis, the living, ever-renewing cognition of the human spirit.
Knowledge of that which is alive can alone banish terror. Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm.
Zero Tolerance
Eisenman's work, supplemented by the investigations of other scholars such as Hugh Schonfield and John Allegro, shows that the rites, the ethics and the ideology (that is, the supernatural element) of Christianity did not emerge from mainstream Judaism, but from the beliefs held by a minor sect of ultra-radical Jews who were violently at odds with their own tradition. In no way was Christianity a simple outgrowth of the everyday Judaism that flourished in ancient Palestine, maintaining a peaceful coexistence with Pagan religion in its rainbow coalition of local cults and sects. Devout Jews of the pre-Christian era followed strict rules of hygeine and ritual, certainly, but they did not impose their way of life on non-Jews. Like Paganism, Palestinian Judaism was innately tolerant, adopting a social philosophy of live and let live. Scholars such as Martin Hengel (Judaism and Hellenism, 1974) have shown that Judaism, even in its strictest orthodoxy, co-existed peacefully with the Greco-Oriental Mysteries in ancient Palestine, including the cult centers where Gnostic taught and initiated.
The Zaddikim were anything but tolerant, however, and they wished to impose their views on the entire world — or the world be damned. In fact, this little-known sect introduced into the religious life of humanity the notion of a superhuman standard for human behavior, a standard impossible to realize in human and corporeal terms. Tzaddik, "absolute righteousness," is not just an ideal for good behavior: it is a callous demand for conformity to an impossible standard of purity and self-control, an inhumane ideal. The minute sect who lived in self-exile in the caves by the Dead Sea were infected with the belief that they were, if not better than the rest of humanity, at least cognizant of what was required to be better, to excell and surpass the human race, to be Tzaddik, pure and righteous. This ideal was incorporated by Christianity into the figure of the human/divine hybrid, Jesus Christ.
The Power Behind the Messiah
Of course, the entire Jewish world awaited the coming of the Messiah, their racial-religious liberator, since the days of the Babylonian Exile (circa 600 BCE). But the Zaddikkim sect held special notions regarding the identity of the long-awaited King. According to the secret teachings of the Zaddikite elect, even the Messiah (who was in fact two Messiahs in one, but that is another story) was not the ultimate model, for there was a power hidden behind the Messiah, and that power alone was the ultimate source of spiritual authority for the Zaddikite elect. The name of this entity was rarely spoken, and his operations were jealously guarded from the time of the first Jewish king, Saul.
Yet Saul of Tarsus, who became known as the Apostle Paul, arrogantly declared the secret teaching he had received in Damascus when he was abducted, brainwashed, and converted to the Zaddikite cause (as Robert Eisenman explains, or as may be inferred from his explanations of the political features of the DSS). It is extremely strange that theologians and lay devotees of the Christian faith studiously ignore the bizarre disclosure of "Saint Paul." It occurs in Hebrews, Chapter 5, where Paul discusses the authority of the "priesthood" he hopes to establish through faith in the divine-human hybrid, "Christ Jesus":
For every high priest taken among men is ordained for men in things pertaining to God... And no man taketh this honor unto himself. So also Christ glorified not himself to be made a high priest; but he that said unto him, Thou art my Son, to day I have begotten thee. And he saith also in another place, Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek... And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation to all that obey him; called of God an high priest after the order of Melchizedek. (5, 1- 10)
Paul explains that to have a Messiah, literally "the anointed," one must have an anointer. The Hebrew word "messiah" was applied to a Jewish king anointed with holy oil, after the model of the entronement of sacred kings throughout the Middle East (although the adoption of the rites of sacred kingship by the ancient Hebrews was an anomaly, an aberration in their religious life — but that, too, is another story.) Christ, from the Greek verb khrio, "anointing," is Paul's substitution for "Messiah." Both Christ and Messiah mean "the anointed one," but with the shift from Hebrew to Greek this term acquires a supernatural spin. Or to say it otherwise, in the Pauline Christ the secret, superhuman identity of the Zaddikite Messiah becomes disclosed.
Chirst is the Anointed One, as every Christian knows. But who did the anointing? For someone to be anointed, there must be someone of a higher spiritual standing who anoints. Anointing is an empowerment, but the transfer of power must be from the anointer, who bestows it, to the anointed, who receives it. In his amazing disclosure, Paul declares the obvious: the Christ-Messiah must receive his power and authority from elsewhere: "Christ glorified not himself to be made a high priest." Most theologians would argue that it is from the Father God, Jehovah, that the anointing power derives, and that it was symbolically enacted through the baptism by John in the Jordan, but Paul tells a different story. He attributes the power to anoint (or ordain) Christ to a secret agent, Melchizedek. This name means "prince or regent" (melchi-) of "righteousness" (zaddik).
Paul continues his disclosure of Zaddikite secret doctrine by describing in a specific manner the nature of the Anointer, Melchizedek:
First being by interpretation King of Righteousness, and after that also, King of Salem, which is King of Peace; Without father, without mother, having neither beignning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually. (7, 2- 3)
Search where you will, but you will rarely find a reference to Melchizedek as the spiritual authority behind Christ. Apart from Paul's astonishing disclosure, this figure is only mentioned a few times in the Bible. In the Old Testament (Genesis, 14) , Melchizedek, accompanied by two other "angelic" figures, appears to Abraham at the grove of Mamre. This meeting has widely been interpreted as an ET encounter "of the fourth kind" in ET/UFO lore and Biblical Ufology. Anyone who closely reads Paul's description of Melchizedek may well wonder what kind of entity is being indicated. A human or humanoid form that is neither born nor dies, has no parentage or genetics in human terms, and lives perpetually, i.e., in possession of virtual immortality — what manner of creature is this? Today we have a word for it, a word that begins, like Christ, with a c.
Melchizedek is the secret agent behind the Zaddikite ideology of divine (read: impossible) perfection, which also implies divine retribution for all those who do not meet the Transhuman Ideal, or who harm and oppose those who revere the Transhuman Ideal, the faithful ones who look to it for their salvation, for their release from the human condition. Here is the source of what George Steiner has called "the blackmail of transcendence," the inhumane belief system that arose, not from Judaic religion, but from the Zaddakim. (Bluebeard's Castle, cited in Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, p. 58.) Steiner wrote that "the creed of Sinai tore up the human psyche by its most ancient roots," (p. 38) but the Zaddikite ideology of perfection was even more devastating than the guilt-complex incurred by the divinely ordained rules of the Mosaic Code. "The Judaic summons to perfection" (Steiner again, cited in Shepard, p. 106) has put a curse upon the entire world. The Transhuman Ideal is the main psychological tool of the Dominator mindset (cf. Terence McKenna, Riane Eisler) that operates in the religious-governmental alliance of the global power game. Whether those who propogate the Ideal are Nazis or Neocons — and lately it is pretty hard to tell the dfference — the effect is the same: dissociation from the human condition and alienation from the body ("the basic schizoid position," Sherpar, p. 85) Melchizedek lurks in the long dark shadow of patriarchy.
But Gnostics, who could stand in the darkness even while they downloaded the Light, were aware of what hides in that shadow. Among the Mystery centers in Palestine was the encampment of the Archontics, just below Qumran Khirbet on the west bank of the Dead Sea. Gnostic seers detected the Archons by the paranormal faculties they acquired through training in the Mysteries, but they also perceived the infection of an alien mindset in the doctrines of the Zaddikites. In violation of their sacred vow of anonymity, some Gnostics came out openly and protested the Judeo-Christian ideology of the Divine Redeemer, the Christ-Messiah anointed by Melchizedek. They warned against the "counterfeiting spirit" (antimimon) of the Archons, "who lead Adam astray so that it might lose its connection to the Pleroma." (The Apocryphon of John, II, 21). For Gnostics, "Adam" was the code-word for the true humanitas, as well as for our capacity to recognize it: to know ourselves. They attributed the virulent and hateful emotions of the Zaddakite fanatics, horrifically evident in the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls, to madness due to Archontic deviation:
From the grief [and desperation, that causes humans to submit to the Archons] came envy, jealousy, distress, trouble and pain, callousness, anxiety, mourning, and more. [By the pleasure of the Archons] such wickedness arises, along with empty pride, and all it entails. And from the desire [to be other than human] come anger, wrath, bitterness and embittered passions. And from the fear [of failing to be human] come dread, fawning, agony, and shame. And these are useful things, as well as dreadful things. (The Apocryphon of John, II, 18)
This passage reads like an inventory of the emotions expressed in page after page of the Qumranic writings. It ends with the astute observation that, as horrible as these feelings are, they are useful to some people. I wonder who that could be? The beliefs of the Zaddikim present some of the most intolerant and hateful ideas ever spawned by the human mind. Both in language and content, the Dead Sea Scrolls literally seethe with hatred. In passage after passage, these sectarian writings incite racial and religious violence. They are blatant testaments to virulent and genocidal rage. They alternately scream damnation and plead for retribution. They call for the destruction of the world by supernatural powers so that those faithful to the ideal of Tzaddik can be "culled" from the lot, rescued from the well-deserved damnation of the human race. The Tzaddikim resemble a combination of the Branch Davidians of Waco and the Heaven's Gate suicide cult, with all the worst features of these sects magnified to the tenth degree.
And this madness was the source of Christian religion.
Gnostic spies on the Dead Sea who attempted to alert the general population to the dangers of Zaddikite salvationist ideology were silenced, and the Mystery Schools were targeted for eradication, "spiritual cleansing." But in the fragments of Gnostic teaching that survive, the warning is clear enough:
Others [who claim to know Mysteries] will change the meaning by evil means, distorted words, and will impose misleading mysteries. Those who do not understand the true experience of the Mysteries will speak as if they do understand, and will boast that the truth is theirs alone... In arrogance, and filled with unnatural pride, they shall envy the immortal soul... for the wish of the Archons is to appropriate what they lack from the creation of this world [nous, the dose of divine intelligence], the intellectual spirit. And so they join forces with those they have misled.
Many others, also, who oppose truth and are messengers of error (plane) will set up their errors into a system of law to work against the pure knowing of the heart, and looking from their distorted perspective, will believe that good and evil are from the same source [the Father God].
And they will propagate a harsh fate for the entire world.
The Rule of the Righteous Ones
A month ago Bill Moyers was honored with the Global Environment Citizen Award by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. The award was presented by Meryl Streep. Excerpts here are from his acceptance speech published on Monday, December 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org.
In his talk, Bill Moyers discussed the fundamentalist religious mania that informs American politics, and has done so for some time now. Given the scout's honor earnestness with which President George W. Bush declares his personal faith in public, and demonstrates it in political terms, it is perhaps no surprise that Bible Belt fundamentalism has been guiding White House political prerogatives since the first Reagan term. Believe it or not, the Texan politician often described "as the most powerful man in the world" says he was called to his mission by God. And believe it not, God has an agenda, a master plan that President Bush is intent on fulfilling. A plan that Bill Moyers finds deeply disturbing.
A Mere Scottish Lass
It may come as a suprise to some people that God's plan involves the full-scale destruction of the planet we inhabit. In some bizarre manner, He, the Creator God and Father of Jesus, wants to destroy the world in order to save humanity — or a select portion of it, anyway. But then it makes sense that the Supreme Being who created this world has the right to annihilate it, doesn't it? It does to some people. And not just a few, either. The promise of a planetary holocaust is actually cherished by millions of God-fearing Christians around the world, and strategically anticipated by the politicians who lead them. Those living in the USA who share George W. Bush's "faith" made "god-damned" sure he got reelected. The promise of global annihilation is not new in American politics. Moyers recalls how James Watt, President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, "told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, 'after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back..' " Watt was not the only member of the Reagan White House known to hold such extremist views. Reagan himself firmly believed that Armegeddon would happen in the Middle East. For at least 20 years now the political policies of the USA have been underwritten by a divine agenda. We can only wonder, How far back does this complex run?
In metahistorical terms, the Armageddon scenario breaks down into a core belief system with narrative variations. Bush and Co. are operating on a recent variation described by Bill Moyers in a paraphrase he credits to British writer, George Monbiot, : "Once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow." Moyers adds sardonically: "I'm not making this up." Yes, Bill, we know that, but someone else certainly did. As far as historians can tell, the author of this script seems to have been an itinerant Evangelist named John Nelson Darby. Taking advantage of the ambiguous and contradictory material on Jesus in the NT, Darby came up with the idea that Jesus would return twice, once to summon the faithful to the Father, and again to reign over a celestial battle above Armageddon in the Middle East. Darby was himself inspired by an unnamed Scottish girl who had visions of the Second Coming around 1830, when she was in her teens.
Thus, a mere wisp of a Scottish lass originated the script that enshrines the beliefs held by the leading politicians of the American right today. Not to mention untold millions of ordinary American citizens and other Christians around the world, including a continually burgeoning number of "converts" in Africa, many of whom are impoverished Blacks dying of AIDS and terrorized by local wars. No wonder they passionately embrace the endtime story. Anything to escape the hell of their lives on earth.
Esteemed historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., author of fourteen books, observes that in the 19th century when the Darby narrative emerged, "all presidents of course professed belief in a heavenly father, though religion did not occupy a major presence in their lives." He also notes that in his youth, "Presidential Evangelicals were a disdained minority," and "born-again fundamentalists could be relied on to be anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic." All this began to change with Jimmy Carter, and now, Schlesinger explains, "the Protestant Right has formed an alliance with right-wing Catholics over abortion and with right-wing Jews over the Holy Land." ("Holy War" in Playboy, December 2004. Painting of Bush and Rumsfeld as Crusaders by John Thompson, with the article.)
The result is, fundamentalists now outnumber mainline Protestants — i.e., those who may tend to distance themselves from the endtime mythos. With this shift, the bizarre visions of a Scottish teenager have come to the forefront of religious imagination in the USA.
The Germ of Madness
Schlesinger's careful analysis shows how religion and politics have become allies over the past forty years, but it does not explain the immense appeal of the Armageddon complex as such. I would propose two observations, one short focus and one long focus. First, in short focus, it is obvious that believing in the will of God to destroy the natural world is a fantastic way to rationalize the destruction of nature by consumption and pollution. Americans are known for contributing to environmental havoc at a level that far exceeds their numbers-I can't cite those figure here, but we have all seen them. How do you soothe your conscience about driving a SUV and consuming an inordinate share of the world's natural resources? Well, if the destruction you wreak is but a small contribution to a larger scheme in which God is going to set all things right...
Second, in long focus, there is deeper meaning in the fundamentalist coalition with Catholics and Jews, noted by Schlesinger. The religion of Roman Catholicism is not a religion at all-at least not in the sense that it provides genuine moral and spiritual guidance for the masses. Roman Catholicism is a political ideology in religious guise, and has been little more than that since the days of Constantine, the faux-convert Emperor who married the Empire to the One True Faith. Others before Bill Moyers have observed that Christianity provides religious cover for a fascist globalization scheme (convert, conquer, colonialize, consume), but this insight only goes halfway to the core of the madness to which Moyers is now alerting the world. The catholic ("universal") program of salvation institutionalized by Constantine predates him by about 500 years, so the Jewish-Catholic alliance has deeper, pre-Christian roots. Thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, historians of religion now understand that the salvationist ideology championed by American neocons in geopolitical terms dates back to obscure cultic origins in Palestine. We are looking here into a deep, deep fissure in the human psyche. The shocking revelation of the DSS exploded upon the world in 1991 after nearly fifty years of suppression and disinformation by the Ecole Biblique, the team of Catholic scholars and archeologists assigned to excavate the caves at Qumran and produce an "official view" on the Scrolls. Led by Father Roland de Vaux, and working with the full support by the Vatican, the Ecole Biblique attempted to keep the world ignorant about many things concerning the DSS, but especially one point, one crucial and sensational lesson of history: Christianity did not emerge from mainstream Jewish religion, but from a radical Jewish sect that was, in its own time and setting, hostile to the entire world, including the Jewish people themselves.
In short, the message of universal love attributed to Christianity and encoded into the political tactics of Roman Catholicism is the outgrowth of a genocidal cult complex, the belief system of the Zaddikim, "the Righteous Ones." This was an extremist splinter group whose policies of sectarian hatred speak from the Scrolls with clarion intensity and blood-chilling conviction. The mad hunger for a world-scale holocaust goes back to the Zaddikim. So violent and so vengeful were the beliefs held by this group that they had to retreat to the hills south of Jerusalem, both to escape the Roman authorities (that Qumran was a fortress and not a peaceful settlement of hippie-like "Essenes" was one of the archeological findings suppressed by de Vaux), as well as to avoid the wrath of devout mainstream Jews who perceived the sectarians (and rightly so) as a danger to the survival of the Jewish community under Roman occupation.
The organization of the Qumranic extremists was three-layered. The core group of ideologues, the Zaddikim, held some highly esoteric beliefs regarding how the world would end and the Righteous would be saved. Surrounding them was a mesoteric group, the Chassidim, the "Pious Ones," who knew less about the core ideology but served it by enforcing inhumane standards of purity on the cult members. Surrounding these two circles were the Zealots, a band of cutthroats like Judas Escariot (literally, "Knifeman") and burly enforcers like Simon Peter (literally, "Rocky"). The Zealots were known assassins who killed their fellow Jews as readily as they did Romans. In fact, the practice of crucifixion began among the Jews in the early days of the Zaddikim movement, around 150 BCE. The militant wing of the Zaddikim were terrorists, comparable to Islamic groups like Hamass who today are fighting for liberation of Palestine from the Jews-just as the Zealots fought to liberate the same territory from Roman occupation, over 2000 years ago.
Among these terrorists was a special character, Jesus of Palestine, a man revered and protected by the Zealots because they regarded him as the national liberator, the Messiah who would be King of the Jews. Jesus was, in effect, the Yasar Arafat of the Jewish Liberation Front.
Contrary to the popular notion that Christianity (in all its forms) grew out of Jewish religion, studies by DSS scholars not controlled by the Vatican now show that the larval form of Christian-Catholic salvationism is uniquely found in Zaddikim ideology, not in the mainstream religion of the ancient Hebrews. The "Righteous Ones" were xenophobic extremists who endangered ordinary Jews and used Hebrew religion to mount a political end-game with Rome. Among the Zealots were genuine freedom-fighters who died at their own hands, Pagan-style, rather than surrender to the Romans at Masada. Such partisans were ignorant of the secret agenda of the inner circle. After 70 CE, the movement to overthrow Roman occupation did not survive, but the bizarre ideology of the Zaddikim did.
The Messiah Complex
The moment that George W. Bush's first Attorney General, John Ashcroft, was informed of his appointment, he was at home with his father. Ashcroft dropped the phone, ran to the kitchen, siezed a bottle of Mazola oil, and had himself anointed by his dad in imitation of messianic rituals from the Old Testament. The Hebrew word "messiah" simply means "anointed with oil." From the time of Saul, before 900 BCE, the Jewish king who underwent this ceremony was ritually called "Son of God." Originally, the title had no connotation of divinity. It simply meant that the king was required to serve Yahweh, aka the tribal god Jehovah, as a son serves his father. In fact, the ancient Hebrews explicitly rejected the notion of human divinity, and this is why devout Jews today do not recognize Jesus as such. The Jewish messiah complex, including the belief that the ancient Hebrews were the Chosen People of the sole true Creator God, was never fulfilled in mainstream Jewish religion, and remains today an unrealized project. But the sectarian core myth survived, and mutated wierdly. During the Babylonian Captivity, around 600 BCE, some Hebrew religionists absorbed the Persion myth of Celestial Warfare in which Absolute Good is pitted against Absolute Evil into their theological corpus. Further developed by the visionary prophets such as Ezekiel and Daniel, this theme became the central fixation of the Zaddikim for whom the Messiah was both a national-racial liberator and a supernatural avenger. All this is written large and clear in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the millenial testament of the Zaddikim. When the Zaddikim, Chasidim and Zealots were wiped out by the Romans, lest they destabilize the Empire, the Empire took on the Messianic complex like a virus caught by the conqueror from the conquered. In fact, Pagan intellectuals of the time referred to Christianity as an "incendiary virus" spreading over the Mediterranean world. The virulent endtime ideology, at first confined to the tiny sect of the Zaddikim, burst into pandemic proportions via the "catholic" message of universal love-which just happens to have a hate-driven holocaust scenario attached to it. How odd. Anyway, the combination of a religious message of love with the guarantee of fascist enforcement of God's Plan (a plan inherited from the ancient Hebrews, and originally intended for them alone, but now revised for the world at large) is a win-win situation. If you are on God's side.
All this takes us a long way from Schlesinger's well-honed observations, but the continuity is evident enough. The recent alliance of the Protestant Right with Catholics and Jews is an inevitable merge, historically speaking, for all three factions share a common taproot that traces back to the Zaddikim belief in divine retribution. With this infernal collusion driving world events, the prospects are terrifying. At least, Bill Moyers finds them so. To my knowledge, he is the first widely respected social commentator in the USA to state in public that fundamentalist endtime theology is too weird to be believed. "I can see in the look on your faces just how hard it is for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility."
This is fine and frank. We see a respected journalist making himself vulnerable. But in a metahistorical perspective, Moyers has hardly begun to tackle the credibility issue here. The fact that endtime theology (or annihilation theology, as I propose to call it) is credible to many is a bare fact of our times. Any journalist might report it as such. The trick is, the report is credible, but what it reports about is not credible to those who do not embrace the messianic ideology of fundamentalism. What is most shocking to Moyers is that those who are in the category of non-believers, the infidels, now find themselves sidelined in history, disempowered socially and politically by those who do believe. Considering the alarm signalled by Bill Moyers in his keynote talk, it may really be time to look at religious beliefs with a critical eye, to see if they might be insane and inhumane. Of course, it is dangerous to propose the critique of beliefs, as we do in this site, because it seems to violate the general principle of tolerance for all faiths. But what happens when you tolerate a belief system that is itself intolerant? The genocidal ideology of the Dead Sea Scrolls exemplifies religious intolerance coupled with endtime fanaticism. Scary stuff, this. But the insanity did not die with the Zaddikim. The formula that once threatened the Roman Empire became incorporated into it. More lately, it has been incorporated into global imperialism and enshrined in the heart of millions who cherish it with their lives, believing that it represents a message of universal love delivered by the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was sent to earth by the Father God. The message of love and tolerance is like a sugar coating on the genocidal pill. Now that's really scary.
Fulfilling the Plan
Present-day Crusaders for messianic Christianity are guided by a recent script, the Rapture scenario paraphrased by Monbiot, which itself is but a variation of the far older core complex, the Zaddikim ideology of the endtime. This being so, it is not unreasonable to suppose that George W. Bush and those around him could make decisions with a calculated view of hastening the end, making things get worse so that God's plan will be fulfilled, and the sooner the better. "I welcome faith to help solve the nation's deepest problems, " George W. has stated. (Cited by Schlesinger.) When questioned about Iraq by Bob Woodward, one of the journalists who exposed Watergate, Bush responded in a way that left the reporter with the impression that "the president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's master plan."
Bush told Woodward that before invading Iraq he did not seek counsel from his mortal father, who had fought Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War of 1991, but he appealed to "a higher father." Schlesinger comments:
The higher father evidently tells him what he most wants to hear and imparts a messianic drive to his discourse. George W. Bush has remade himself through redemption and transformation, and he may well regard it as his God-given destiny to redeem and transform the Middle East.
All this sounds rather familiar by now, and we may even be getting vaguely bored hearing about the President's messianic pretences. But hold on a second. Let's consider the insane logic of the Righteous Ones a little more closely. It may be that President Bush declares one aim in public and pursues another in reality. This he would do to be completely consistent with his divine calling and implement the Divine Plan. Thus, the mission to "redeem and transform the Middle East" would be a pretext, a cover for other intentions. What if the invasion of Iraq was never intended to succeed in the first place? This makes sense in terms of annihilation theology, for Iraq could well be the decisive move in the Religious Wars Cum Oil Wars that cannot be won, and will ultimately bring the world as we know it to a gruesome end.
President Bush, a direct descendent of the Zaddikim, the Righteous Ones, has the God-given right to make it play out this way. Or so he believes.
Moral Imagination
What the Zaddikim wanted 2000 years ago in Palestine-the destruction of the entire world so that the Righteous can be rescued-could happen on a global scale today because of beliefs held by millions of people, beliefs they are unwilling or unable to question, and which they will not tolerate having put in question by anyone. Bill Moyers is shocked by the way these beliefs are encoded in the endtime narrative as an historical drama, including the Rapture (the last-minute rescue of the believers), and the wholesale destruction of the natural world. At the conclusion of his acceptance speech, he poignantly asks:"What has happened to our moral imagination?"
Good question, this. Metahistory tries to answer that question from many angles. One of the savviest responses I know comes from Theodore Roszak. Writing in Where the Wasteland Ends on the "pathological extremism" of Judeo-Christian beliefs, Roszak says:
From Judaism, Christianity inherited a passionate concern for the historicity of belief. In a way that contrasts sharply with the mythopoeic outlook of all other religions, Judaism embeds the heroes and prodigies of its tradition in a worldly chronology. Even the stories of the creation and of Eden lack that sense of being located in the "dream-time long ago," which is the necessary dimension of myth....
For Christians, this inherited prejudice in favor of historicity became the very foundation of their soteriology [i.e., their belief in divine salvation. JLL]... Christianity alone could claim historical validity for its gospel. It alone taught the Word become flesh-at one time, in one place, in one human personality... Christ belonged to history and his rivals were mere myths.
Clearly, there occured with the advent of Christianity a deep shift in consciousness which severely damaged the mythopoeic powers [of humankind]. ( p. 133-4. Italics added.)
If the planet is being run to ruin on a wacko religious script, many of us have genuine cause to be alarmed, but there is a deeper concern as well, a concern that Metahistory.org tries to address by proposing a different story to guide the species.
How, we may ask, can the recent "Scottish version" of the millennial annihilation theology of the Zaddikim hold such power over human imagination? Roszak's metacritique goes to the heart of the dilemma: the historical myth so loved by President Bush can command great appeal because something behind that story, something that produced it in the first place, damaged human imagination at the core. Due to this damage, we submit to the endtime narrative and cannot counter it with a different story. We are imaginatively disempowered, as if something alien to the human spirit has intruded upon our species' Dreaming, stunting our capacity to imagine our place on Earth and in the cosmos at large. If there is any way to correct the course of history, if there is to be a healing of the story-telling faculty upon which we as a species depend to delineate our path, it must be made at the core where the damage is located.
How, then, do we locate the core of moral imagination?
The Enigma of the Archons
In all the "high strangeness" of the Gnostic materials, the strangest of all things is certainly the presence of the Archons. Here we confront a genuine enigma. Where do we situate these weird entities in the narrative of the Gaia Mythos? Are they to be regarded as real entities, a species in their own right, albeit a non-terrestrial one? What is their relation to Gaia, the intelligence of the biosphere? And how do the Archons in turn relate to humanity?
Non-Ordinary Reason
Gnostics explored these questions in a sober and consistent way, but to follow in their tracks we must first observe a caveat: Do not expect the inquiry into the Archons to be rational. At least not in the ordinary sense of rationality. Aristotle observed that the mark of a mature mind is to entertain an idea without accepting it — without "buying" it , as we say today. I am not insisting that anyone buy the Archon theory of Gnosticism. I propose that we examine and sample it, that's all. Equanimity is essential when it comes to the enigma of the Archons. This inquiry calls for application of a special faculty that might be called non-ordinary reason. What this is can be illustrated by a Woody Allen joke (from the film Manhattan):
A man comes to a psychiatrist in behalf of his brother who suffers the affliction of believing he is a chicken, and behaving accordingly. "It's terrible to see, Doctor. The way he goes around clucking and scratching. The family is going through hell with this. What can you do? Can psychiatry help my brother?" The doctor responds that certainly it can. "Even in advanced delusions like this, therapy can often bring the patient back to reality," the doctor assures him. "I am willing to work with your brother, to do whatever it takes. It will be a long haul, though." Assuming that the man is encouraged, the psychiatrist consults his agenda. "When can you bring your brother in for the first session?" he asks. Suddenly the man furrows his brow. "Sorry, Doc. I'd like to, but I can't do that. I really can't. We need the eggs."
The man's response is entirely rational within the context of his imagination. When Trekkies (devotees of the cult TV series, Star Trek) avidly discuss characters and events in the series, they are using non-ordinary reason. The Pokeman card-trading phenomena triggered an explosion of non-ordinary reason in which children had to recite in rigorous detail the behaviors and traits specific to over a hundred different entities. In Internet MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) players assume fictional identities that must behave in consistent way, exhibiting a kind of virtual rationality. The reasoning involved in such role-playing is rigorous, for players cannot cause their "avatars" to do anything they like. The avatars must have specific codes of behavior. Developing and maintaining such codes involves non-ordinary reason.
In effect, non-ordinary reason is just like ordinary reason, except that its subject matter is imagined rather than perceived.
Gnostic seers had to be skilled in non-ordinary reason to interpret the experiences they underwent in states of heightened perception. Not everything in the cosmos or in the human psyche can be reduced to rational terms, of course, and that in any case is not the point of non-ordinary reasoning. The point is, to bring sane and sober understanding to aspects of human experience that lie beyond the limits of ordinary sense perception.
This essay treats the Archons in the context of the imaginal exercise proposed in Coco De Mer: our participation in Gaia's Dreaming. What we learn about these entities, and ourselves in relation to them, will involve non-ordinary reason, but it will not be irrational nonsense. Contemplating the Archons is not an exercise in fantasy or a game of make-believe. Far from it. If the Gnostics were right, it is primarily by detecting how the Archons work that we can know our own minds work, and claim the sovereign power of intelligence endowed in us by Sophia.
Fractal Visions
The Archons may be regarded as progeny of Sophia, but not in the same sense as species born and sustained in Gaia's womb, the terrestrial biosphere. In fact, they are called Archons (from the Greek archai, "primordial, first, antecedent in time") because they arise in the planetary system before Earth was formed into a habitat for life. Sophia's unilateral Dreaming produced a power surge from the cosmic center, and the Goddess, shooting forth like a torrential current, impacted the inert fields of primordial matter in an unusual way. Gnostic texts use the term "aborted fetus" to describe the results of this impact.
A veil exists between the world above, and the realms that are below; and shadow came into being beneath the veil. Some of the shadow became matter, and was projected apart. And what Sophia created became a product in the matter, like an aborted fetus. (The Hypostasis of the Archons, 94: 5 — 15)
To the Coco de Mer icon we can now add a graphic variation to suggest how the Archons emerge from Sophia's Dreaming, like a leak from a placenta. As explained in the preceding essay of this trilogy, the Coco de Mer with cosmic detailing represents the "trimorphic protennoia," the original three-body world of Sophia's Dreaming. Our world, the terrestrial biosphere coupled with the sun and the moon, is the manifestation of thisDreaming. With the arising of the Archons, another Dreaming comes into play outside our threefold world order. I propose to call this the Alien Dreaming. (This choice of language will become self-evident as we proceed.) This other Dreaming is a spin-off of Sophia's power of emanation, an exotic spill, yet it does not impede or arrest Her original Dreaming.
The Gaia Mythos describes how the impact of the Aeon Sophia upon the density of atomic matter produced a massive fracture, like the shatter pattern on an ice pond. The pattern has a center where Sophia is located (identified by the Mandelbrot Set), and a spider-web extension of fracture lines that run in all directions (the frozen sea of fractal waves). Episode 9 describes how Sophia, situated in the center of the impact zone, sees around Her something like a sea of tensile waves, and riding the waves, or actually composing the waves they appear to ride, are self-repeating forms that resemble seashorses. These seahorses are similar to the forms that appear at high reiteration of the equation for the Mandelbrot Set. These forms correspond to the anatomical type spontaneously generated from formless atomic matter by Sophia's impact, a type called the "shadow body," haibes in Coptic.
A word on fractals: although fractal-like patterns appear in nature (in ferns, for instance: the disposition of the leaves on a stem is repeated in the form of the stemmed branches), the self-similar forms produced by high iteration are not natural, strictly speaking. Fractals such as those pictured here result from feeding a mathematical formula into a computer and having the formula reprocess itself, over and over again. However, the forms so produced do resemble the famous "paisley" seen by many people who took LSD in the 1960s. I would argue, first, that fractals are consistently seen in altered states, and second, that the patterns thus seen may also represent real, though supernatural processes in the cosmos at large.
The fractal formations described in the Gaia Mythos (Episodes 9 — 10) are actual physical phenomena that occur spontaneously when an Aeon (a mass-free, high-porosity current of stellar plasma) pours into the dense fields of elementary matter. At first these "fractal seahorses" seem to be inanimate structures, rigid and almost crystalline in nature, but by the very fact that Sophia beholds them, they become animated. In the second stage of the unfoldment described in Trimorphic Protennoia, the Aeon Sophia "descends to empower her fallen members by giving them spirit or breath." (NHLE 1996, p. 511) Thus the tensile forms morph from semi-rigid seahorses into rounded fetal forms with tails, but the tails, it seems, keep falling off and turning into other embryos. By this bizarre process of self-repeating generation, the neonate horde of the Archons emerges.
The Lord Archon
The Hypostasis of the Archons describes a further development that follows the initial emergence of the foetal Archontic entities. In the passage cited here, I apply some concepts drawn from modern astronomy to develop a more vivid picture of events presumably observed by Gnostic seers in the cosmos at large:
A veil exists between the world above [in the galactic core], and the realms that are below [exterior, in the galactic limbs]; and shadow came into being beneath the veil. Some of the shadow [dark mass] became [atomic] matter, and was projected apart [partially formed into elementary arrays, the dema]. And what Sophia created [by her impact] became a product in the matter [the dema], [a neonate form] like an aborted fetus. And [once formed] it assumed a plastic shape molded out of shadow, and became an arrogant beast resembling a lion. It was androgynous, because it was from [neutral, inorganic] matter that it derived. (The Hypostasis of the Archons, II, 4, 93:30 ff, with my glosses in brackets.)
A close reading reveals a crucial detail: after the initial formation of the embryonic Archon types, a second variant of "shadow body" arises, with distinct characteristics of its own. The Hypostasis of the Archons describes it as "an arrogant beast resembling a lion," but this creature is also described (in another cosmological text, the Apocryphon of John 10: 5) as "a serpentine body (drakon) with a lion-like face." Thus there are two distinct types of Archons: a foetal or embryonic type, and a drakonic or reptilian type.
In The Hypostasis of the Archons (93: 30 — 94:5), a supplicant asks the great angel Eleleth, "Teach me about the faculty of the Archons, how did they come into being, and by what kind of genesis, of what material, and who created them and produced their force." The teachings given in response to this question were precise and detailed. Two distinct variants of the Archon type are indicated, and their behaviors are also specified. Another cosmological treatise, The Tripartite Tractate, states that "the two orders [of Archons] assaulted one another, fighting for command because of their manner of being." (84: 5-15) Due to the two distinct stages of their generation, the Archons are invested with an aggressive and divisive nature, fighting among their own ranks. The problem is provisionally resolved, however, when the reptilian type assumes dominance over the massive horde of neonates, and, indeed, over the entire realm of the dema affected by Sophia's plunge:
Opening his eyes, he [the drakonic Archon] saw a vast quantity of matter without limit [spread through the galactic limbs], and he became arrogant, saying "It is I who am God [the sole deity of these regions], and there is no other apart from me." (Hyp Arch, 94:20)
While the neonate Archons are inert, their forms arrested at a premature stage of development, the reptilian leader is aggressive, territorial, and charged with demonic powers. For one thing, he is a formidable shapeshifter:
Ialdabaoth had a multitude of faces more than all of them, so that he could put a face before all of them, according to his desire... He shared his fire with them, therefore he became lord over them. Because of power of the glory he possessed of his mother's light, he called himself God. And he did not obey the place from which he came. (The Apocryphon of John, 11:35 — 12:10)
The declaration of the chief Archon that he is the only god in the cosmos is, needless to say, a defining moment in Gnostic cosmology — if not in human evolution as well. All the cosmological texts describe this event, with slight variations. Gnostics were insistent on the identification of Yaldabaoth with Yahweh or Jehovah, the tribal god of the Hebrews. This deity is not only blind, but witless and insane (Hypostasis of the Archons 89: 24-25). To Gnostics insanity is not so much unsoundness of mind as the consequence of failure to correct mental errors. The mentality of the Archons "cannot be rectified," and, what's worse, "the archontic nature is not capable of development." (Gilhus, The Nature of the Archons, p. 40) Due to the manner of their generation, Archons have no ennoia, no innate intentionality. Theirs is an Alien Dreaming, set apart from the biosphere, the intelligent life-field of Gaia.
The concept of a god who is both void of will power and insane is apparently unique to Gnosticism. Needless to say, when Gnostics expressed their views on the identity of Jehovah to devout Jews and to Christians who also revered the Jewish Father God, they were not well received.
The Apocryphon of John adds crucial details to the Archon scenario. For one thing, it presents a rare instance where Sophia is actually called the mother of the Archons. It also says of the chief Archon that "he did not obey the place from which he came." This is a telling detail. The fact that the chief Archon moves away from the places where he arose indicates a key concern of Gnostics: the boundary-violating tendencies of the Archons. From the outset they are an invasive species. The drakonic Archon is said to be blind (Coptic bille), so he does not see either the Pleroma or Sophia. "Blindness of the spiritual world characterizes the Archons." (Gilhus, p. 17). He is called Samael and Saklas. Samael is Hebrew and Saklas is Aramaic for "blind one." Understanding the blindness of the Archons is crucially important to our detection of how they can affect humanity.
Alias Jehovah
The chief of the Archons is also called the Lord Archon. He is also given the bizarre name, Yaldabaoth (pronounced Yall-DAH-buy-OT). Scholars disagree on what this name might mean, and how it was derived. By one translation it means "the child who crosses space." By another, it means "chief of the horde." (Jarl Egil Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord, p. 332-6.) Thus it seems to slur together allusions to both types of Archons. In the Old Testament the title yhwh seba'ot, Yahweh Sebaoth, occurs 276 times as the title of the father god. (Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, p. 155) Gershom Scholem, pre-eminent scholar of the Cabala and Jewish mysticism, explained Ialdabaoth as "a compound of the Aramaic active participle yaled (i.e., 'to beget') and the name Abaoth, which represents an abridged form of the name Sabaoth. Thus, Ialdabaoth means 'the begetter of Sabaoth'." (Nathaniel Deutsch, The Gnostic Imagination, p. 55) And there are half a dozen more interpretations.
It is likely that the name Ialdabaoth is simply a variant of Jehovah, the paternal father god of the Hebrews. Gnostics identified Jehovah with the Lord Archon and rejected the OT and the entire Judaic plan for salvation as a subterfuge of the Archons. It makes sense that they would have used the same term used by Jews to expose the true nature of the Jewish deity.
When it came to knowledge that they considered crucial to human survival, and to humanity's coevolution with Sophia, Gnostics could be confrontational, and totally unconcerned about whom they might offend. Their uncompromising and sometimes scornful attitude, combined with their failure to anticipate the high degree of physical violence that would be triggered by their challenge to Judeo-Christian beliefs, undoubtedly fuelled the vicious fanatisicm that destroyed the Mysteries. Magnification of the fractal Archon generation presents a graphic image that seems to fit the scenario described by Gnostic seers. The embryonic type, or neonate Archon, is clearly defined, but so is another entity: the reptilian Archon with its avaracious jaw and long spermatic tail. This "arrogant beast" seems to lunge at the entrails of the embryonic type. Right at the point where the embryonic Archon would have a nurturing umbilicus, the reptilians move in invasively. The neonate Archon remains passive, apparently sucking its finger or thumb!
Something odd is happening in the lower part of the neonate's body, for its seahorse-tail is precariously jointed to the torso. The embryonic type remains self-absorbed, but reacts to the aggression of the other type by dropping its tail, as frightened reptiles do. We wonder if the disjointed tail will form another neonate, or another reptilian. The reptilian form does appear to be fractally repeated in the tail-structure of the embryonic type, as if the tail broke off and became an entity of its own, rather than another embryo.
The element of fear figures largely in the behavior of the Archons and their effect on humanity. In the Old Testament, fear of God is held to be one of the primary marks of religious experience. The possibility that human fear is a kind of nutriment for certain invasive extraterrestrials has been widely argued in the ET/UFO debate. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth says that the agenda of the Archons is "fear and slavery." The Archons wish to keep humankind under "the contraint of fear and worry." (NHLE 1990, p. 367) Other passages also warn against the Archons' use of fear as a psychological weapon.
In another striking detail, the reptilian type seems to be holding a sphere in its jaws, recalling the mythical image of a serpent who offers forbidden fruit: for instance, the Serpent in the Garden of Hyperborea with the golden apple in its mouth. Is the neonate eating from this rounded fruit? Gnostics had their own version of what transpired in the Garden of Eden, events in which the Archons were deeply involved, and so it is perhaps not surprizing to see hints of the Paradise scenario at this primal stage of cosmic activity.
All this activity in the fractal generation of the Archons is imaginal, but it is not imaginary, i.e., not purely made up in our minds. Recreating what Gnostic seers observed is a sober use of imagination, not a flight into make-believe. It takes non-ordinary reason to describe what is happening here, but the scenario so developed is entirely reasonable and coherent on its own terms.
Foetal Conflict
However the Gnostic seers of the Mysteries came to imagine the generation of the Archons, the high-iteration fractals around the Mandelbrot Set fit their scenario in an uncanny manner. And they do more as well, for the fractal embryos and reptilians also mimic features of human gestation (or vice versa). In human conception, the embryonic sac consists of two parts: the yolk sac (4 in the illustration below), and the foetal mass attached to it (1), suspended in amniotic fluid (2). At the moment the developing embryo gains initial anatomical definition, it is fish-like (a fact that medical science likes to use to remind us of our pre-human origins). It has a distinct head, and a tail, and a third feature, the umbilicus that connects it to the yolk sac through which it is fed. The fractal generation of the Archons exhibits all these features in a clear and precise manner.
As the embryo grows, the yolk sac (4) contracts, and there is at the same time a secondary development. Also connected to the umbilicus is the allontois (5), a vesicle that fills the interspace between the amnion (3) and the chorion (7), the outermost boundary of the entire placental sac. A kind of morphological tension plays between these evolving structures: for the allontois to grow, it must contract or press back (repress) the yolk sac that feeds the growing fetus. Unless the allontois grows in this manner, the protective placenta cannot be fully matured. A similar tension pertains between the embryonic Archons and the reptilians. Just as embryonic development in humans is divided between the growth of the fetus fed from the yolk sac, and the repression of the yolk sac to produce the full-grown placenta from the allontois membrane, the power of the Archons is divided by the nature of their generation ("because of their manner of being," cited above) This conflict is partially resolved when the reptilian type assumes dominance over the massive horde of neonates.
Gnostics certainly knew what an aborted foetus looks like. Morally opposed to biological procreation by humans, they were known to practice birth control, and must have assisted others to do so. They would have known from direct observation that the foetus aborted at an advanced stage of gestation does not resemble a half-baked omelette; it has the vestiges of anatomical form. Their choice of this bizarre metaphor must have been intentional, reflecting the occult perception that Archon anatomy mimics the neonate form of humans. Such a metaphor is extremely valuable, not only because it allows us to visualize what Gnostic seers detected by extrasensory perception, but also because it establishes a close tie between the human species on earth and the pre-terrestrial Archons.
For more on this tie, see the closing passage, "Cosmic Cousins."
The Serpent Power
The description of a "lion-headed serpent" for the Ialdabaoth is arresting. For Gnostics the lion represented the blind force of procreation (an association that probably stems from Egyptian Mystery schools, not to mention observation of the force and noise of lions mating in the desert), so the sperm-like body of the lion-headed reptilians is even more appropriate. This drakonic type of Archon appears on Gnostic germs, not because the Gnostics worshipped the reptilians- far from it- but because they viewed the image as a magical antidote to Archontic influence. Rather in the way a skull on a label indicates a poisonous liquid, thus preventing us from mistaking it for a liquid that is safe to drink, the lion-serpent image was represented on Gnostic amulets to ward off Archontic intrusion.
The lion-headed serpent of the Gnostics is called by magical names such as Ophis, Knuphis, and Abrasax. In the occult anatomy of Asian mysticism and Yoga, this reptile is known as Kundalini, the serpent power. Gnostics who practiced Kundalini yoga were called Ophites, from the Greek ophis, "snake." This cult was condemned by early Christians as pagan "snake-worshippers." To the mundane and uninitiated mind, the Kundalini serpent can only be conceived by crude literalization. To Gnostics, the lion-headed serpent crowned with solar rays was not only the image of the Lord Archon, but also of the source of spiritual power that allows human beings to resist that entity.
Experts who do not look outside Gnosticism to understand it never mention Kundalini, but unorthodox and esoteric scholars such as G. R. S. Mead, Helena Blavatsky, and C. W. King (Gnostics and Their Remains) make the connection routinely, as do comparative mythologists such as Joseph Campbell and Alain Danielou. In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell shows how the image of Kundalini, the "serpent power," appears in world art from the Indus Valley circa 2300 BCE and continues right across the spectrum of ancient cultures, well down into the Common Era. As late at the 16th century, golden thalers in Germany (Campbell, Fig. 8) showed the Crucifixion on one face and a serpent draped over the cross on the other. At that late date, Christ would have been identified with Kundalini — without an inkling of why, however — but to Gnostics the snake on the cross was a cancellation of the saving power attributed to crucifixion (i.e., the glorification of suffering as a redemptive force). Arousal of Kundalini produces ecstacy, triggers superconsciousness, opens the occult faculties, and releases waves of healing energy that flush physiological and hormonal secretions through the body.
As the mythical serpent guarding the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis, Kundalini was "the messenger of salvation" for Gnostics. In a complete reversal of the usual reading of the Fall, Gnostics regarded the serpent as a spiritual ally to primal humanity, "the first to attempt to release mankind from bondage to an unknowing god who had identified himself with the Absolute and thus blocked the way to the tree of eternal life. (Campbell , p. 78) The "unknowing god" who falsely identified himself with the Absolute is of course Yaldabaoth, alias Jehovah.
Gnostics taught that nous, the spiritual intelligence endowed in humanity, could be blocked by the Archons. This occurs through Archontic intrusion (subject of the forthcoming companion essay, How We Are Deviated), involving a kind of subliminal invasion at the level of thought and language (i.e., mental syntax). But nous could be reinforced through accessing the power of Kundalini, an ecstatic current that normally rests dormant in the human body. In his monograph on the Archons, I. S. Gilhus notes that "the erotic strategy is the most important means used by the pneumatics to save the lost light." (p. 51) Pneumatics is the Gnostic terms for humans who pursue the path of psychosomatic illumination, the key method of Gnostic religion. Pneuma, "spiritual force," is developed by cultvation of nous, "higher intelligence." But the Archons present a blind field of resistance to this process: in short, they rely on humans remaining ignorant of their inherent spiritual potential.
When Kundalini is raised from its dormant state, higher intelligence blossoms, and there are other effects as well. Gnostic sects such as the Ophites practiced the communal raising of Kundalini to produce an protective envelope against Archontic intrusion. In effect, they held Kundalini, the sexual-spiritual energy locked in the body structure, to be the main instrument of defense against the Archons. The Dialogue of the Savior, NHC III, 5 (85), contains this exchange:
Judas said, "Behold, The authorities (Archons) dwell above us, so it is they who will rule over us."
The savior said, "It is you who will rule over them. But only when you rid yourselves of jealousy, and take on the protection of the Light, and enter the nymphion (bridal chamber)."
The savior-teacher is emphatic that we have power over the Archons, but he also makes it clear that some human failings impede the use of our power. The Greek word phthonos may be translated as "jealousy" or "envy." Gnostics considered envy to be the signature of the Archons, as well as the key human failing that makes us vulnerable to their intrusion. "The protection of the Light" comes through activated Kundalini, often described as a lightning-like tide of electrified light that pours through the body. "Nymphion" is a code word for the ambient cell of psychophysical protection generated by high levels of Kundalini.
Sir John Woodruffe, the great transmitter of Hindu Tantric wisdom to the West, directly identified the practice of Kundalini yoga (raising the serpent power through the channels of the spine) with Gnostic rites of "serpent worship." (Shakti and Shakta, p. 191 ff.) Buddhist scholars such as E. A. Evans-Wentz, J. M. Reynolds, and H. V. Guenther have made similar observations, but Gnostic scholars have not reciprocated because they do not look outside their genre to understand the theory and practice of Gnosis.
The lion-serpent image is displayed over and over in heiroglyphic form on the walls of the Temple of Horus at Edfu, forty miles south of Nag Hammadi. In the cult of Hathor celebrated there, the lion-serpent represented the "royal seed" of the pharoahs. The royal child Horus is often depicted in a finger-sucking gesture that vividly recalls the posture of the embryonic Archons. Did Egyptian priests who directed the breeding of the dynastic families have intimate knowledge of Kundalini, as well as the Archons? The Kundalini serpent is displayed in Egyptian sacred art by a standing cobra, or a pair of corbras, sometimes wound on a staff, and by the uraeus, the cobra headress of divine empowerment. The ceremonial braid on the side of Horus' head was yet another indication of the serpent power.The pharaonic braid, traditionally worn on the right side of the head, visually repeats the form of the spermatic cobras of Edfu. The sacred iconography carries explicit, but highly occult knowledge: Horus is the child who right-brain cerebral functions are heightened by the serpent power.
The "esoteric" imagery of the serpent power operates at several levels at once. We shall see that the complex biological symbolism of Gnostic myth has much to teach us about the nature of the Archons, as well as how we can resist them.
The Rape of Eve
Ialdabaoth is also called the Archigenetor, "the master breeder." (Apoc John II, 12, 25) Gnostics, to whom ethics must be consistent with cosmology, regarded biological procreation, insofar as it is an involuntary act, as a mindless mechanism that makes humans accessory to the head Archon. How Ialdabaoth breeds his own type, and controls the breeding of the embryo-types, and may even be involved in interbreeding with humans — are some of the more baffling elements in the Sophia mythos. Several texts in the NHC describe the Archons' attempt to "rape Eve": i.e., inseminate the human species. The texts make it clear, however, that they do not succeed in their aims. The Hypostasis of the Archons describes this episode: Then the Archons approached Adam. and when they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became greatly agitated and in arousal for her. They said to one another, "Come let us sow our seed in her," and they pursued her. And she, the mother of the living, laughed at them for their witlessness and blindness; and in their clutches she turned into a tree, and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself. (89: 15-25)
This passage demonstrates the imaginal sophistication of Gnostic vision. Gnostics seers discerned the Archons attempt to inseminate Eve — to interfere in the genetics of the human species, if you will — but they also observed that the attempt was a failure. The metamorphosis of Eve into a tree recalls the Greek myth of Daphne who turned into a laurel. (This parallel shows that Gnostic cosmo-mythology was not a fluke, but a system of visionary knowledge deeply rooted in the indigenous mind of pre-Christian Europe.) For Gnostics, the visions they beheld in altered states were empirically true and could be tested. By doing so, they were able to develop extraordinary insight into the superhuman worlds, the activities of the gods, the relation of humanity to alien species, and the long-term experience of the human species.
The above scenario describes how the Archons fail to capture Eve, yet they somehow engage her shadow, a mere reflection. This implies that although the Archons cannot access our genetic structure, they may affect or distort our image of woman, of the Feminine, and in that sense they really can succeed in defiling Eve. They may distort our sense of our own genetic make-up.
As it so often does, Gnostic insight into cosmic order challenges us to understand what is happening in our own minds. Is there some way in which we humans have defiled the image of woman? For instance, by imposing on women an artificial notion of identity, a falsification of their true nature? If so, we would be regarded by Gnostics as accessory to the rape of Eve by the Archons. Is there evidence in the world today that we have a distorted view of genetics? If so, this distortion, and the actions that proceed from it, would fully merit being regarded as consequences of the Archons' deviating effect on human behavior.
Enter The Annunaki
The above passage from The Hypostasis of the Archons calls to mind current scenarios of alien intervention in human genetics. Most theories of the ET breeding program assume that whatever the aliens (usually, the embryonic Grey types are suspect) might choose to do, they can do. But Gnostic seers who applied non-ordinary reasoning to their observations of the Archons reached a different conclusion. In the Gnostic view, it would be a huge error to assume the Archons are doing things they cannot do, for that would give them power over us. Gnostics taught that the main danger we face with the Archons lies less in what they can actually do than in what we falsely believe they can do. Their trump card is deceit (apaton and plane in Greek), especially deceit about the nature and extent of their powers. "For their delight is bitter, and their beauty is depraved. Their pleasure is in deception." (The Apocryphon of John BG 56, 3-7)
Strange as they are, certain elements in the Gnostic mythos of our species may now begin to look familiar.The theme of alien insemination of the human race also occurs in archaic narratives from ancient Sumeria, dating to the third millennium BCE, and it is rampant in contemporary ET/UFO lore. Sumerian accounts describe an alien species called the Annunaki, who are credited with producing the human species by genetic engineering, and also with inaugurating civilization. These narratives are found on cuneiform tablets dating to circa 1800 BCE, but they preserve late redactions of much earlier versions. Apparently, the story about alien intervention is one of the oldest scripts of our species. Many people who follow the ET/UFO debate are aware of the Sumerian accounts of the Annunaki, who are easily equated with modern-day ETs, but there is a total absence of reference to the Gnostic scenario of the Archons in the controversy so far. The Gnostic account of Archon/Annunaki activities differs on many significant points from what is found in the Sumerian accounts. For one thing, Gnostics did not regard Archons as superior beings who jump-start civilization. Nor did they consider the Archons capable of accessing the human genome (called by them the Anthropos), although they did grant some role for Archontic activity in our physical evolution. This point is extremely difficult to clarify, however... By far the most striking difference between the Sumerian and Gnostic accounts is that the former contain no inkling of the Sophia mythos and no explanation of how the Archons, alias Annunaki, originated. This is a considerable lacuna, to say the least.
In his elaborate reworking of the Sumerian materials, Zecharia Sitchin describes the Annunaki as a highly advanced non-human species who inhabit the planet Nibiru, an outrider of the solar system with a period of 3600 years. In Sitchin's version of prehistory, the Annunaki came to earth in quest of gold for manufacturing a colloidal suspension needed to stabilize their atmosphere. (For a full account, see Sitchin's last book, The Lost Book of Enki.) Although Sitchin appears to be a legitimate Sumerologist with a profound grasp of ancient languages, no orthodox scholar endorses his scenario for the Annunaki. At worst, it is dismissed as an "ancient astronauts" fantasy dressed up in scholarly robes. I am unable to say whether Sitchin's account of the Annunaki on Nibiru is an accurate rendition of cunieform texts or a fantasy extrapolated in his mind.
Significantly, Sitchin never describes the physical appearance of the Annunaki of either type. One of the great benefits of the Gnostic Archon scenario is that it does provide vivid descriptions of these entities. Is it a coincidence that the embryonic and serpentine Archons described in Gnostic texts present an identical match to the two kinds of ETs most frequently reported in modern times, the Greys and the Reptilians? If the Gnostics got this part of the intervention scenario right, what else did they get right?
Cosmic Cousins
The same maniifestations that created our religious beliefs, created our UFO beliefs. A serious look at the Phenomenon would cause a revision of our way of looking at religion.
John Keel, UFO: Operation Trojan Horse
It is startling to find vivid and detailed descriptions of predatory aliens in obscure texts dating from the 4th century CE, but the revelations of Gnosis are nothing if not startling. Some ancient reports of "UFO sightings" do exist, but Gnostic material on the Archons does not merely present "reports." It explains their origins in the cosmic order, their nature (inorganic, imitative, without intentionality), their appearance and tactics, their attitude toward humanity, and more. A more clear and coherent solution to "the Phenomenon" (the ET/UFO enigma) could hardlly be imagined.
The "high strangeness" of the Gnostic Archon material poses a credability issue, of course. We are faced with the choice of believing that these texts represent an accurate account of what Gnostic seers observed in states of non-ordinary reality — that is, a reliable report of genuine parapsychological research achieved by remote viewing, lucid dreaming, clairvoyant observation, and then carefully assessed by non-ordinary reason — or believing that Gnostics were mere fantasists, mystics deluded by their visions, wacko cult weirdos, or worse.
How, then, can we determine if the Gnostic account of the Archons was delusional or if it presents reliable knowledge of alien intervention? In Sources of the Gaia Mythos, I discussed the indigenous concept of the Dreamtime, the timeless play of creative awareness in the Eternal Now, and its variant, Dreaming:
When the Dreamtime comes to expression in particular knowledge and behavior, the Aborigines refer to the Dreaming of the creature who embodies that knowledge and exhibits that behavior. For instance, the Kangeroo Dreaming is the summation of the innate knowledge and instinctual behavior of all kangaroos, going back to the Dreamtime ancestors. One could say, in biological terms, it is the enactment of the genome of the Kangeroo species.
All creatures, organic and inorganic, human and non-human, live and die by the Dreamings that play through them. In the Aboriginal worldview the unique gift of humans to create culture stems from our capacity to remember and retell the Dreaming, not only of our own species, but of others as well. The indigenous belief that the role of humanity is to remember the events of the Dreaming for all creatures accords with the suggestion presented in Sharing the Gaia Mythos: the human species enables a memory-circuit for Gaia.
To apply these ideas to the problem of the Archons, let's recall that we, the human species, are involved in a special way in Gaia's Dreaming, which originates from the trimorphic protennoia, the threefold primal intention of the Aeon Sophia. Our proper boundaries are defined by the earth-moon-sun trinity, and our wisdom endowment unfolds, given by Sophia, unfolds within the unique conditions of the biosphere, the womb of Gaia. However, there is another Dreaming that leaks into the Earth Dreaming, rather like a wireless message that bleeds through into a conversation in progress on another frequency.
Something extremely weird is happening on Earth due to a fissure in the human mind, and this fissure in turn arises from an anomaly in the cosmic order. "The world system we inhabit came about by a mistake." (The Gospel of Philip, NHC II, 3, 75.1) The magical journey of awareness in which we co-evolve with Gaia's Dreaming is deviated or distorted by an alien influence, so the Gnostics taught. On this recondite point they seem to have agreed with the old Yaqui sorcerer, don Juan, who said to Carlos Castaneda, "Human beings are on a journey of awareness, which has been momentarily interrupted by extraneous forces."
In the companion essay, How We Are Deviated, we will look more closely at how Gnostics described the intrusion of these extraneous forces, the alien entities who are also our cosmic cousins.
Everything we learn about the Archons teachs us something crucial about ourselves.
Gnosticism: is notoriously difficult to define. In 1966 an entire conference was convened in Messina, Italy, solely for that purpose, but it produced no lasting result. Having catalogued no less then twenty-seven definitions of Gnosis, and added eight or ten of my own, I can attest that no single definition is adequate, for it takes a range of approaches to understand this unique religious system.
For a concise initial definition of Gnostic spirituality, I propose: the way of knowing God through the divine intelligence endowed in humanity by God. The famous counsel of the Pythian oracle at Delphi, "Know Thyself" might be expanded into a formula for Gnosis: "Know that within thyself which is divine, and through it, come to know Divinity". The full array of notions associated with Gnosticism requires a term-by-term analysis of seven definitions that run into each other:
GNOSIS. The word means simply "knowledge", but of a special kind. It derives from the root gno-, "to know, cognize, discern". This Greek verb-root matches the Sanskrit jna-, which carries the same meaning. In Buddhism prajna is the "supreme discernment" of the true nature of reality. Likewise, Gnosis is the knowing of what is true and real in the ultimate sense. Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1965) gives: "immediate knowledge of spiritual truth", contrasted to mere belief, unquestioning faith, and blind acceptance of doctrines prescribed by authorities. In short, Gnostic spirituality is an anti-authoritarian path based on first-hand experience of Divinity. It encourages an intuitive, i.e., direct, experiential, approach to God. It assumes the possibility of revelations from beyond the human realm, but it requires cognitive training to assess these revelations. Gnosis is the yoga of intellect that unifies far-seeing mental-mystical vision with the wisdom of the body. Developing the hidden powers of the mind/body link to reach beyond the preset limits of human knowing is the predilection of the
GNOSTICISM. This is a term in use only since around 1750. The -ism indicates a label invented by scholars. Gnosticism in this sense is the historical profile of the Pagan religious movement, and Gnosis for the method that uniquely distinguishes the members of that movement. Gnosis is both a methodical discipline and the superior insight acquired through that discipline. Gnosticism is known through writings produced in the period when it clashed with Christianity, so there was initially a tendency to assume that Gnosis (the method) did not exist before that time. Most scholars now reject this view, although no scholar has identified with confidence the remote pre-Christian origins of
GNOSTIC RELIGION. This is what Gnosticism really was in its own time, on its own terms: a Pagan religious movement of deep and ancient origins. Its connection to the Mystery Religions known to have existed for thousands of years all over the ancient world will be demonstrated in several chapters. Testimony from early Christians who opposed Gnostic religion, as well as from Pagan philosophers and historians who were sympathetic to it, indicates that its ultimate origins were Asian. Close and vivid parallels between Gnosticism and Buddhism seem to converge in Bon Po, an Asian wisdom tradition dating to 18,000 BCE according to a recently revealed secret oral tradition. Thus, Gnostic religion may have existed for millennia before it was turned into
GNOSTIC HERESY, as Gnostic teachings were called by those who opposed them. Heresy if about having options. Gnosticism was made into a heresy — i.e., something to be rejected as false or perverted — because it presented a set of clear options to the belief template of Christianity. In the literal sense, to be heretical means "able to choose for oneself". The first proponents of Christianity wanted to impose their view unilaterally on the entire world, so they could not tolerate any competition. Gnosticism challenged emergent Christian doctrines with a range of opposing views. For instance, Gnosticism took ignorance, rather than sin, to be the fundamental problem facing humanity. In large measure, the persuasion of Christian ideology depends on the sense of being a sinner, someone who needs to be saved. Had the teachings of Gnostic heresy become widely known and accepted, the Christian plan for salvation might have collapsed before it got to square one. There was another threat, as well, for Gnosticism did not merely contradict and invalidate Christian doctrines, point blank. In some cases, it offered a different way of stating those doctrines. Most importantly, it presented an alternative view of salvation that came to be formulated in what may be called
GNOSTIC CHRISTIANITY. This is the set of views found in some Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi that present other ways to state Christian doctrines, rather than flat-out refutations of those doctrines. Gnostic religion existed for millennia, but Gnostic Christianity arose between 200 BC and 400 AD in response to the heady brew of messianic and apocalyptic impulses that were fermenting in Asia Minor, Egypt and Palestine. In the melee of the times, attempts were made to reconcile or even merge Gnosis with Judaeo-Christian doctrines. Some texts from Nag Hammadi were written with the intent to portray the Christian savior, Jesus Christ, as a Gnostic master, an illuminated sage, but other texts are clearly non-Christian and even blatantly anti-Christian.
The "soft view" of Gnostic heresy highlights the former documents, sometimes called "Gnostic Gospels" to conflate them with the New Testament. It favors reconciling Gnostic views with Christian orthodoxy, thus producing a better, kinder, more enlightened, planet-friendly and feminist-slanted version of Christianity. In the "hard view" Gnosis cannot and ought not be reconciled with Christian faith. Essentially and originally, Gnosis is Pagan. Gnostic Christianity is Pagan religion adapted to an alien or extraneous scheme. Scholars meticulously distinguish between pre-Christian, anti-Christian, non-Christian and Christianized texts in the complete inventory of surviving Gnostic literature known to scholars as the
GNOSTIC COPTIC LIBRARY. This consists of the thirteen Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC), comprising fifty-odd documents, and three preceding independent finds: the Berlin, Bruce and Askew Codices. Few of these texts are complete but there is, amazingly, enough extant first-hand material to reconstruct the essential Gnostic philosophy. For reasons no scholar can explain, all of this literature appears in Coptic translations of lost Greek originals. Coptic is a made-up language that emerged in the first centuries of the Christian Era in Egypt. Used primarily for monastic libraries, it draws upon the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek loan-words. Unlike Greek, a language whose grammatical structure permits elaborate phrasing, Coptic is elementary to the point of bluntness, yet it is not without subtleties, either. Both Greek and Coptic terms figure in the special terminology used by Gnostics to explain error, ignorance, deception and the problem of guidance.
guidance One of the great enigmas of human experience and a central issue of metahistory. May be conceived as the equivalent in the human species to navigational instinct in other species.
In The Territorial Imperative, Robert Ardrey described the research of zoologist Archie Carr who tagged thousands of green-backed turtles on a beach in Costa Rica where they nested in shallow coastal waters, and tracked many of them to far-off feeding haunts on the coast of Venezuela. In both locales, the turtles returned to exactly the same beaches and nesting coves. To do so they had to navigate over thousands of miles of open, often tumultuous ocean and arrive with pin-point precision. Ardrey comments that Carr's finding, published in 1965, "may be regarded as science's last word or dying gasp on the homing of animals." (135)
Although better known for his sensational thesis on the origins of human aggression, developed in African Genesis and The Hunting Hypothesis, Ardrey would better be remembered for his poetic and technically skillful writing on the homing instincts of dozens of animals, birds and fishes. His testament to the navigational faculties inborn to many species leads directly to the question: Is there an equivalent navigational instinct in homo sapiens? For his own part, Ardrey would say no: "Man is one species brilliantly equipped ty nature to get himself hopelessly lost." (134)
Or perhaps not. It could be that the navigational instinct in the human species does exist, but needs to be triggered in a certain manner, the way instinctual programs in other species are triggered by what ethologist, Konrad Lorenz, called the IRM, Innate Releaser Mechanism. John Bleibtreu explains:
Since Lorenz's original experiments, IRM's have been discovered operative in numbers of bird and mammalian behavior sequences. For example, a stick pointed at a nestful of fledglings will release the gaping, chirping, food-soliciting behavior of the chicks. Or, if a kite in the shape of a hawk's silhouette is flown head-first over a group of young birds, it will release fright and escape behaviors. That this is both innate and highly specific has been proven in various controlled experiments. The specificity of the releaser is incredible for if the kite it hauled tail-first instead of head-first over the chicks, they will not respond with the appropriate behavior. (264)
Bleibtreu comments that in the human species, due to the way "humans developed their capacity to allow part of an abstraction to represent the whole," symbols and even single words can operate as IRM's. Citing the example of the crucifix, he says "this single visual object has come to represent an intricately complex constellation of abstractions, which includes doctrine, history, philosophy; an entire way of life." (Ibid.) A good many other examples could be cited to demonstrate how in the human species a symbol, a word or even a mental abstraction can trigger a "mammalian behavior sequence." As in the animal kingdom, "the specificity of the releaser is incredible." The hammer and sickle (Soviet flag) triggers a different response from a star and sickle-shaped moon (Islamic flag).
It could be argued that these examples do not correlate to a "navigational instinct" in homo sapiens, but they might point in the direction of such a faculty. The power of belief seems to be the operative factor in human nature, "innate and highly specific," that causes human beings to act in a certain way, but the dynamics of belief do not entirely account for our sense of moral direction. Is this a placebo effect: I act as if I am guided simply because I believe myself (imagine myself) to be guided? If so, the sense of guidance derived from the Bible and other traditional sources of religious could be purely illusory. The enigma remains unsolved. See also ideology.
salvationism Proposed term in metahistorical discourse for belief-systems that place the responsibility for the fulfillment of humanity outside itself, usually in the hands of a superhuman creator deity, such as the Father God of the Abrahamic faiths.
All three religions that trace their origins to the Biblical Patriarch Abraham present salvationist programs, with slight variations: Judaism, Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, and more), and Islam. For a concise evaluation of this schema, see the four concerns.
Every religion consists of four components: a narrative, a set of rites, ethics, and ideology. For instance, the religion of the ancient Hebrews consists of the "sacred narrative" in the Old Testament (recounted in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible), the rites practiced by the adherents, the ethics proposed by the spiritual leaders or authorities (such as the Ten Commandments, said to be dictated to Moses by Jehovah), and the ideology implied in or attached to all the preceding.
Any theme or mytheme that forms part of the structure of a religion will find experssion in some or all of these modes. For example, the theme of atonement. The OT narrative tells the story of the atonement of the Jews in various episodes, most notably the atonement that followed their escape from Egypt. This episode, taken for an actual historical event, becomes the basis of rites of atonement to be periodically practiced. The episode (which is exemplary or paradigmatic, in the sense that Mircea Eliade applied to myths) presents the model for rites and also the framework for ethical practices. Finally, an ideology is contained in or attached to the ensemble of narrative, rites, and ethics. Usually, the ideological component consists of a set of beliefs relating to supernatural things, to God or the "Divine Plan," and to other notions which, because they are not normally subject to verification by direct personal experience, are taken as a matter of belief. For instance, the belief that God protects those who practice rites of atonement is an ideological premise.
Salvationism, the dominant religious belief-system on the planet, consists of all four components, but the innermost, driving dynamic of salvationist doctrines resides primarily in the ideology, the unverifiable beliefs attached to the system. As noted in this site, Gnostics who observed the rise of the Christian salvationist program out of Jewish sectarian ideology (primarily, the cult of the Zaddakim) and protested against what they saw as erroneous beliefs, did not attack anyone who held beliefs those beliefs, but they attacked the beliefs that were held. In turn, Gnostics themselves were physically attacked, and the Mystery Schools where they preserved a millennial tradition of initiatory teaching were destroyed. The destruction took centuries, beginning in the time of the adoption of Christian as the state religion of the Roman Empire, and continuing into the Middle Ages. I point all this out, once again, at the risk of becoming tedious, not only to signal your attention to the greatest untold story of Western civilization — i.e., the destruction of the Mysteries and the sacred heritage of Europan indigenous wisdom, of which the Mysteries were the finest flowering — but also, and even more pointedly, to indicate that
Salvationist religion cannot, and did not, succeed in prevailing on the planet by peaceful conversion or by the persuasion of its intrinsic and irresistable truth.
Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, was no fool, nor was he a devout Christian. Even his biographer, Eusebius, clearly fudges the account of Constantine's "conversion," attributed to a vision of the Cross in the skies. (Once again, this incident has been interpreted as an ET/UFO sighting, thus linking salvationism to the perennial presence of alien entities on Earth, and suggesting their possible intervention in human religious experience.) It was politically expedient to make Christianity the state religion, because the new faith conferred supernatural authority on the governing powers. We see the clear and consistent extension of this political ploy in the arrogant religious fascism of the American government under presidents Bush, although the root of this tyranny may be traced back to antecedent sources.
In short, I am saying that salvationist religion is not a religion in any true sense of the word: it is political ideology in the disguise of religion. Christianity was nothing but this from its conception. It did not become perverted into mystico-fascism, for it was originally conceived as such. Salvationism prevails in world events, and tyrannizes the minds of millions of people today, as it has through the last twenty centuries, because it has the ideological components of a totalitarian control system in which the ultimate source of control is unquestionable and beyond accountability. Beyond human conscience and correction.
The main ideological components of Judeo-Christian-Islamic salvationism are: * Creation as the handiwork of a male deity, the Father God, rather than as an ever-ongoing process involving divinities of both genders. * The supremacy of the male Father God who is also conceived as a judge and lawgiver. * The derivation of moral codes by God's dictation to chosen messengers — who are always men, of course (Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed). This masculine bias is the signature of "revealed religion," the academic-theological term for salvationism. * The repression of the Feminine, evident not only in the elimination of Pagan Goddesses from the Old Testament, but also in the mysogyny of the New Testament, promulgated by Saint Paul, and the sexual apartheid of Islam. * Dominion of humanity over the Earth, declared by the Father God who creates the human species "in His image." This ideological issue sets up a social control system defined by the mandate to consume and ravage the Earth. In effect, global consumerism is totally consistent with the Biblical ideology of human supremacy. * The dogma of the Fall, sin and redemption. * The inarnation of divinity in human form-affirmed in Christianity, denied in mainstream Judaism but not in the apocalyptic ideology of the Zaddikim, and denied again in Islam which, however, ascibes to a single holy book, the Koran, the status attributed to Jesus Christ by Christians. * The corrupt nature of sexuality and the natural world — an attitude falsely attributed to Gnostics by early Christian ideologues, in a clever and largely successful attempt to disquise their own sex-hating and world-rejecting tendencies by attributing them to the diabolized Other. * The Divine Redeemer complex, common to all three variants. * The physical resurrection of the body, in the special case of Jesus Christ, and in the general case of the resurrection of humanity in the end time. * Eternal punishment and damnation for sinners and infidels. * Divine retribution, the apocalypse at the end of history. * The efficacy of vicarious rites of atonement (Jewish festivals, the Catholic Mass, the Islamic Haj, etc)
Take all this away and what do you have? Not much, for there is not much to salvationist religion when the ideological dynamic is removed.
But it might be protested, Is any form of genuine religion possible without these elements? Certainly. Genuine religion devoid of salvationist elements existed widely in the Pagan cultures of Europa, and it was demonstrated, and still just barely is, in the indigenous spiritual wisdom of native peoples such as the Australian aborigines, and native-mind cultures in the Americas, the Artic, and Polynesia. To some extent, but not completely, Asian metaphysical systems such as Dzogchen and Vedanta are free of salvationist elements. Gnosis, the path of direct knowing of divine matters, was a method of illuminism, contrasting in a profound way to salvationism by its emphasis on experience over authority, learning over doctrine.
In Gnosis no doctrines were sacred or beyond question, nor should anything presented in the form of Gnostic teachings today be so taken. The knowledge cultivated in the Mysteries was testable by direct experience, and indeed, the initiators insisted that neophytes learn for themselves the basics of experimenal mysticism. Each generation of mystai extended the process of ongoing revelation and elaborated on the wisdom developed by those who had preceded them. Gnostics were prolific writers, and although they did not hold anything produced by an individual author to be sacred, for them treaching and learning were a sacred commitment. "God is discourse" says a Gnostic saying. The discourse they pursued was open-ended, innovative, expansive.
All the elements of the above list depend on enforcement by authorities, such as Pope and President, who present themselves to be the representatives of the supernatural powers who underwrite the salvationist program. In the Gnosis of the Mysteries, there were no such intermediaries between the initate and the supreme experience of initiation: encountering the Gods and exploring the wonders of this world, Earth, and the cosmos beyond. The purpose of the Mysteries was to teach how to know Gaia and co-evolve in Her purposes.
The purpose of salvationist religion is social control.
ET/UFO interventionist scenarios represent a special class of salvationism. In the narratives recorded on cuneiform, Sumerian scribes produced the earliest surviving record of a salvationist program in which ET-like entities, the Annunaki, intervene in human evolution. However, not everything written on clay tablets needs to be taken for true, does it?
This entry is in development...
self-concern Proposed term for human narcissism, borrowed from Castaneda who called it"self-reflection." In The Power of Silence, don Juan describes a shift of the assemblage point that applied for the entire human species, resulting in a movement away from silent knowledge toward self-concern.
Silent knowledge is the generic human capacity for knowing the world via our deep intutive link to the cosmos, but self-concern short-circuits this link. Self-concern may be equated with the rise of narcissism during the Arien Age. In one of his more striking observations, Rudolf Steiner said that human forebrain circuits matured in the 6th century BCE. The result was, Greek rationalism, but a side effect of the rational emphasis is intensification of self-consciousness. Why? Because rationalization is an abstractive process, a mental act that puts us at a distance from what we are thinking about. Applied to nature, this faculty distances us from the external world and erodes the sense of participation. We are onlookers to nature, rather than involved with it. Applied to human nature, this faculty tends to produce an infinite regress: the self observing the self observing the self observing the self... There is really only one level, one permutation, of self observing itself, but there appears to be infinite nested levels of self-observing. Narcissism is a black hole of regressive self-concern.
The true avatar of the Piscean Age (begins 120 BCE) is not Christ but Narcissus. Or perhaps Christ is Narcissus?
From Castaneda we learn that ancient humanity could master many forms of magic and technology through silent knowledge. This involves selfless communion with the cosmos, by which we come to understand directly how it works, and then, later, we work out mentally how it works. Greek rationalism reversed this activity, so that we began work out how things work before we knew, in silent knowledge, how they work. This shift lead to a brief flare of heightened mental achievement, the Golden Age in Greece and globally, the Age of the "Masterminds" such as Gotama, Mahariva, Kung Fu Tze, Pythagoras, and others- but the flare quickly faded. Try to think of anything significant that happened in Greece after 300 BCE. Do you detect a void? Unfortunately, Hellenistic philosophy, an outgrowth of the rationalist emphasis, helped to build up the Christian redeemer, and so Jesus Christ became the focal point of human self-concern. Humanity is encouraged to see Christ as if viewing itself in a mirror, but we are really the tormented Narcissus contemplating his own reflection. The Christic reflection is deviant and inauthentic, as I have argued elsewhere.
"As the feeling of the individual self became stronger, man lost his natural connection to silent knowledge. Modern man, being heir to that development, therefore finds himself so hopelessly removed from the source of everything that all he can do is express his despair in violent and cynical acts of self-destruction." The Power of Silence, p. 169ff.
War, for the spiritual warrior, is the struggle against the overweening power of self-concern. "Self-pity is the real enemy and the source of man's misery. Without a degree of self-pity for himself, man could not be as self-important as he is... Once the force of self-importance is engaged, it develops its own momentum. It is this seemingly independent nature of self-importance that gives us a false sense of worth." Ibid., p. 171
"The position of self-reflection forces the assemblage point to assemble a world of sham compassion, but of very real cruelty and self-centeredness. In that world the only real feelings are those convenient for the one who feel them." Ibid., p. 174
"It was self-reflection that disconnected mankind from the spirit in the first place." Ibid., p 179.
Although don Juan does not comment in an historical vein, I would situate the shift to self-reflection — which I am calling self-concern — in the 6th century BCE. See the Socrates essay for further reflections on this problem.
slave motif: a theme that emerges prominently in Levantive mythology, asserting that the human species was created to serve the creator god.
Curiously, belief in the slave status of humanity seems to have arisen in a time and cultural setting that saw human society being initially defined on its own terms, distinct from interdependence with other species in the natural world. Alienation from Sacred Nature may be closely allied to what Joseph Campbell called mythic dissociation, a disorientation that introduces a sharp and unbridgeable difference between spirit and matter. This makes sense in terms of the argument proposed by some revisionists of prehistory: namely, that the introduction of agriculture in the Neolithic Age initiated a trend toward enslavement. It is now known that in hunting and gathering cultures people work far less hours, and far less intensively, than they do in agricultural societies. That independence from Nature would produce an inordinate dependence upon human labor is a trick that seems to have been missed by the leading minds of the earliest urban agricultural centers in the Fertile Crescent.
Or perhaps cleverly exploited. In the great urban centers of Mesopotamia, whose wealth and organization depended upon mass-scale agriculture, the priest class was closely allied to the merchant class. In fact, these two elite groups, the priesthood and the "management" for mercantile affairs, formed the two grounding points of the base line of a pyramid with theocracy at the apex. Among the tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia, the vast majority record financial transactions, inventories, legal contracts. Religious documents written at the same time and in the same manner may well have reflected the ideology of social control enacted in Mesopotamian politics under the absolute rule of theocrats, the presumed children of the gods. Texts that designate the King of Ur or Nippur as the agent and descendent of the Annunaki, the Sumerian sky-gods, were written by a male priesthood at the behest of the theocrats, in order to legitimate their divine status and their mundane power.
If scripting formulas used by the priest-scribes allowed them to cast humanity in the role of slaves, it would have served the theocrats nicely. A populace averse to accept the slavish routines of large-scale agriculture could have been persuaded to accept the work if they were made to believe that the slave status was divinely ordained.
Sophia Mythos The story of Sophia's plunge from the galactic core into the outer limbs is told in the Gaia Mythos, a reworking of the Gnostic creation-myth. This myth is unique in the way it accounts for the evolution of the solar system, the anomaly of the planet earth, the emergence of humanity in two biological genders at conflict with each other, the influence of predatory extrahuman forces on the human species, and the identity of Sophia with Gaia, the Magna Mater of the Mystery Schoos. See also Earth Goddess.
Sophianic principle, also called the Gaia-Sophia Principle. This principle asserts that the same intelligence that works in human instincts and supports our survival skills also enables us to act morally, to perform compassionate actions based on clear intentions. If our ethical and survival instincts are complementary, any division between them will threaten our survival and produce immoral (i.e., insane) behavior. Deep ecology, as formulated by Arne Naess and others, assumes the integrity of survival and ethical capacities, as does the ecological philosophy of Edward Goldsmith (The Way). Metahistory goes deeper into this issue by its challenge to beliefs and belief-systems (ideologies). It proposes that beliefs alienate us from their own experience, corrupt our sense of humanity, and undermine human potential. Because beliefs are the single most dangerous element in human reality, belief-change is the most radical strategy for personal liberation from social conditioning, and, by extension, large-scale improvement of social conditions.
Sorcery From Latin, sors, "fate, alloted experience." Related to the French sortir, "to leave, go out, depart," and sortilege, "divination, casting of spells" Widely believed to be the practice of "black magic," sorcery can be viewed in a more enlightened way as a path that involves the practitioner in a magical view of the world. With the mixed implications of "fate" (Latin root) and "departure" (French verb), sorcery could be defined as the way to depart from fate, or change fate. This definition depends, of course, on the beliefs we attach to the obscure notion of fate. Let's just say, for argument, that fate implies finding oneself in a fixed frame of circumstances, a situation not of one's own intending. Some people believe that we are all born into such a situation, a life we did not choose in advance because we did not pre-exist it. Others believe that we all choose the specific circumstances of life: e.g., to be born at a certain time and place, with certain parents, with particular gifts and handicaps. For those who hold this belief, there is no fate, there is only destiny: a prearranged pattern of experience.
Let's assume, however, that we believe in fate, not destiny. According to this belief, we assume that we did not choose beforehand to come into life, to have blue eyes, to have certain parents, to be musically gifted, etc. In this view, to live means to find oneself in a set of conditions not of one's own choosing. To alter these conditions, or escape from them entirely, would then be the defined aim of sorcery, according to what I will call the revised definition. The subtance and general outlines of this definition can be found in the works of Carlos Castaneda. (Some people believe that Castaneda's works are fictional, purely invented, while others insist they relate facts, things that acrually happened. The argument is futile, since neither belief can be definitively proven. In any case, if Castaneda did invent his stories, this does not prevent the message and teachings conveyed in those stories from being true. The Catcher in the Rye is a work of fiction, a novel, yet its message is profoundly true. The same can be said of Castaneda's opus.)
Spiritual Masters
Perhaps there is no idea in the entire range of New Age interests that has had so powerful an impact on Western thinking as that of spiritual masters. The willingness to believe in such masters and the eagerness to revere them can be viewed as a response to Nietzsche's gloomy announcement that "God is dead." This news, delivered at the end of the last century at the very moment the first migration of Indian masters was hitting Western shores, has been overthrown today by the testimony of many people who believe there are those among us who have actually "realized God," or who embody divinity on Earth-the widest and loosest definition of a spiritual master.
The prototype of a master is the Avatar, a divine being who appears widely in worldwide mythology, and specifically in the Hindu myth of the Ten Avatars of Vishnu. The Avatar is a world-savior, a definitely superhuman being who descends into embodiment on Earth to perform a deed of service or salvation. In the mythology of the Mayan Indians, for instance, Hunab Ku is the divinity, the actual God, who assumes embodiment in the high priest Kinebahan, who founds the lineage of the Ah Kin, the Solar Priesthood. Similar examples abound all through world myth, though the distinction between the actual God and the human Avatar of the God is not always so clear.
With the Avatar, there is certainly a God in the works, a superhuman entity who assumes human form. But with spiritual masters as they have become known in the West in the last hundred years, the distinction is often blurred. Yet a "God- realized" person is not to be confused with a God: It is a human being who has achieved an exceptional relationship to God, to the Divine Being-someone above and beyond the usual run of people.
Traditionally, spiritual masters always come out of a specific lineage. This goes back to times before history, to the scenario of the ancient priesthoods and holy sages. Most of the Eastern mythologies describe human beings of high spiritual attainment, like the Rishis of ancient India, or the Imams of Arabia. Then, coming down into the time of historical records, there is evidence of many spiritual lineages that claim these mythical figures as their founding fathers. Thus the lineage of the Rishis, at first purely mythical, carries through into the time of the first historical sages and from there right down into the modern sages who appear in the West-though the continuity is purely hypothetical and cannot in any case be fully proven.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, for instance, claimed to represent a line of descent going back directly to the Indian sage Shankaracharya, who lived either in the ninth or the second century a.d. (scholars disagree), and from him all the way back to the legendary prehistorical Rishis. By this he implied a direct, oral, person-to-person continuity for the lineage-a high claim of authenticity. The same thing is frequently cited in the traditions of Zen: direct oral transmission from one master to another, down the centuries. Another well-known lineage is the special case of the tulkus, the reincarnating lamas of Tibetan Buddhism.
While the idea of a timeless spiritual lineage is impressive to many Westerners, it does not figure largely in the most recent crop of masters to attract wide followings: Muktananda, Sai Baba, Sri Chinmoy, Raj-neesh. In their cases, popular appeal depends upon the master being viewed as a special God-realized person, regardless of how one got to be that way. In rare cases, a master may be a Westerner whose attainment is believed to equal that of the Eastern prototypes: Da Free John (previously Baba Free John, born Franklin Jones). Far less known, and difficult to assess, is the question of purely Western masters, initiates who direct their own rebirths and appear in successive historical periods, sometimes as famous figures but more often as obscure agents working behind the scenes. In this curious area, claims of who-was-who are often incredible, historical conundrums and conspiracies loom large, and the problem of how to track serial reincarnations remains unsolved.
Combined with Gaia, this term denotes the primary assumption of Metahistory, outlined in the orientation essay, Insane and Inhumane: namely, that the cosmic intelligence operating throughout the biosphere is evidence of a super-earthly power, Sophia, manifesting within the boundaries of terrestrial life, Gaia. In Gnostic cosmology, Sophia is the name of an Aeon, a cosmic deity of female gender, who is initially seen in the company of the Pleroma, the gods of the galactic center. As such she is called the Aeon (pronounced A-on) Sophia.
The issue of spiritual masters is-or ought to be-deeply problematic for the Western mind, because in the case of the Eastern masters it involves the tremendous question of how we imagine divinity on Earth, God in human form. How does God make an "in-person" appearance in our midst? This remains a great challenge for the modern seeker, though all too often the naive and uncritical acceptance of masters by Westerners has left us, for the most part, quite blind to the exciting possibilities of the question.
The Biblical tale of Moses in the bulrushes has been told to countless millions of children over many generations. Adherents to the faith are led to believe that this episode is a unique event in the "sacred history" of the ancient Jews, but is this really so? See Bible.
belief-change The act of changing what one believes, especially by examaning and rejecting received beliefs and adopting aligned beliefs; and, going even more deeply into this process, by changing the way one views belief itself. I call these the relative and radical forms of belief-change, respectively.
Relative belief-change involves letting go of one belief and developing another. This is really an exchange of beliefs, adopting one in place of another. It may take an entire lifetime to exchange a single belief. This is not a testimony to the power or intrinsic truth of beliefs, but rather to the way beliefs confer identity on those who adopt them. This dynamic is self-enforcing: you identify with a belief and the belief in turn defines and strengthens your sense of identity. Under to the spell of consensus reality, millions of people find their identities in what they believe — to such an extent that, lacking those beliefs, they would have no idea who they are.
In metahistorical analysis, defining yourself by what you believe looks like an extremely dangerous procedure. Unless you are able to determine if the beliefs you hold are insane and inhumane, the identity acquired through adopting beliefs could be delusional.
Of course, most people in the world today did not adopt the beliefs they hold in the first place. Our beliefs are more often chosen for us than by us. Relative belief-change begins with the act of questioning the beliefs chosen for us by family, racial background, culture, education, religion and government. If any of those beliefs are found to be untrue or harmful, then can be rejected, and others adopted in their stead.
Prizewinning author Barry Lopez has written extensively on the link that connects humans with nature. Like many others, Lopez was brought up to believe that humans are distinct from and superior to all other animals — if, indeed, humans can be considered to be animals at all. Lopez gradually abandoned this belief as untrue and exchanged it for a belief in the kinship of all species. Describing this shift, he said, "I would say that seeking nature has caused me to change my identity. I now regard myself as part of nature." The belief-change undergone in his life involved throwing off an entire sets of beliefs about how humanity is related to the natural world, the non-human and the Other. This process led to the dissolution of the entire belief-system chosen for him. Lopez presents an example of advanced belief-change, but it is still relative, still a matter of exchanging one belief or set or beliefs for another.
Radical belief-change goes beyond shedding particular beliefs or exchanging one belief (humans are separate from and superior to nature) for another (humans are part of nature, and not dominant to other species). Radical change involves a deep shift in the way beliefs are viewed, rather than a mere shift in belief. One of the most difficult but crucial lessons of metahistory is that we can assess beliefs to see it they are insane and inhumane. Doing so, we look deeply into the dynamic of belief. One of the first things we learn is that the power of particular beliefs depends in large measure on the nature of belief being left unquestioned and unexamined. Metacritique delves into the dynamic of believing.
Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." To rephrase this famous statement in metahistorical terms, we could say, "The unexamined belief is not worth holding." True enough, but the examined belief may not be worth holding, either. In other words, a great many beliefs, once they are examined, may prove to be worthless as indicators of truth or guides to experience, although they may serve to define identity and confer a sense of belonging. One of the more astringent lessons of metahistory is that beliefs are not adopted because they are true, but come to be regarded as true because they have been adopted. (This argument is developed via a dialogue process in Socratic Sessions, One.) Their value is not to carry truths that are acquired from the direct experience of the individual, but to insure the individual identity and participation in social terms.
Beliefs are tools for social conditioning, rather than expressions of inner realization or universal truth.
This assertion is a good example of radical belief-change because it does not propose that any belief is better or worse than any other; rather, it exposes the inner dynamic of believing. With radical belief-change, one believes less and less and comes to rely more and more on the evidence of direct personal experience. On this path there is a possibility of liberation from all forms of conditioning that impede or conceal the authentic resources of the individual. Hence, belief-change is essential to the full actualization of human potential. See also Morris Berman on ideologies.
It must be said, however, that radical belief-change carries a definite risk of social alienation, because so much of what happens in human society depends on the sharing of unexamined beliefs. One can become very unpopular very quickly by putting certain beliefs in question, especially religious beliefs. Radical belief-change is always intimate and deeply personal, specific to the individual who undertakes it. It may be debatable that belief-change of this kind is even possible on the social level, because it would dissolve the very fabric of society.
Relative belief-change is a way to overcome the conditioning that prevents us from realizing our authenticity as human beings. It is a path of spiritual awakening and transformation. Radical belief-change is a way, not only to overcome, but also to oppose the conditioning that deviates us, individually and collectively, from the true potential of humanitas. In metahistory we consider these two forms of belief-change to be the most effective strategies for shifting human behavior at the individual level, and, beyond that, perhaps for plotting a course correction for the human species as a whole.
Biblical UFOlogy The category of studies and speculations which propose that angels described in the Bible — such as those seen in the visions of Ezekiel, or the one who wrestled with Jacob at the Jabbok ford on the Jordan River, or the Angel Gabriel who announced the birth of Jesus to Mary — were actually extraterrastrials or ET-like entities who are assumed to have a benevolent attitude toward humanity, consistent with the fulfillment of "God's plan." A subset of intervention theory, Biblical UFOlogy treats events described in the Old and New Testaments as testimony of encounters with aliens, i.e, non-human entities assumed to be of superior intelligence and advanced evolution. In some respects, this theory dovetails with the hypothesis of "ancient astronauts" made famous by Erich von Daniken. In both cases, supernatural events attributed to God are implemented by ET-like entities manifesting as angels. If the ET/angels are assumed to have been sent by God, the question of whether or not they proceed from advanced civilization elsewhere in the universe remains open. The main assumption is, they are allies and instruments of the Will of God. This belief reflects the deep religiosity of ET/UFO speculation.
All the best (i.e, most intellectually sophisticated, well-informed, cogent and critical) commentators on the ET/UFO enigma agree on its religious dimension:
Did ancient man misinterpret UFO manifestations by placint them in a religious context? Apparently not. The literature indicates that the phenomena carefully cultivated the religious frame of reference in early times, just as the modern manifestations have carefully supported the extraterrestrial frame of reference. - John Keel, Operation Trojan Horse, p. 216
Contactee organizations may become the basis of a new "high-demand" religion. The current conservative backlash against "decadent" morality and social liberalism has led many to consider their spiritual orientation. The Catholic Church is at a critical point in its history, and many other religions are in trouble... The creeds of UFO organizations often emphasize themes of sexual repression, racial segragation, and conservative values... Especially noticable in this respect is the attention received by "the Two" and the widespread Melchizedek groups. Inherent in such sectarian activity is the seed of revolutionary religious movements of almost unlimited potential. - Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception, p. 241
The aliens take the place of a God of salvation history working for humanity's redemption. The goal of history, according to seduction narratives, is not the union of God and man in Christ; rather, it is the union of humanity and alien towards which the UFO godlings strive. The barely disguised grafting of these theological elements of America's most popular religion onto the bizarre phenomenon of UFO abductees argues strongly for the phenomena's strongly religious character. - John Whitmore, "Religious Dimensions of the UFO Abductee Experience," in The Gods Have Landed, edited by James R. Lewis.
But if we are to interpret the ET/UFO in religious terms, the way we analyse the issue depends on what we assume about religion in the first place. Biblical UFOlogy assumes that OT/NT religion is a genuine and veracious expression of the spiritual striving of humanity, if not a direct revelation of God's Plan for our species. Those who propound this view assume that "God" is the benevolent Creator who has good intentions for humanity and works through the ET/Aliens to achieve the Divine Plan.
Gnostics, however, took an entirely different of view of ETs allied with the Creator God. The Gnostic theory of Alien intrusion states, first, that one specific type of inorganic being, called Archons, is predatory toward humanity, and second, that the Creator God of the Old Testament is a reptilian of the Archontic species, a demented deity who falsely considers himself to be the master and maker of our planetary world, and is actively working against the evolution of humanity. Thus, Gnostics assumed malevolent intent on the part of Jehovah, the supreme deity of Judeo-Christianity, whom they called Ialdabaoth. They warned of a pseudo-God at loose in the cosmos who works to deceive and deviate the human species from its proper course of evolution.
Gnostics were specific in exposing the motive and method of the Archons and their overlord, Jehovah-Ialdabaoth. They saw in the Judeo-Christian ideology of salvation both the evidence and instrument of alien subterfuge. Hence, their views represent a diametric opposite to Biblical UFOlogy insofar as the latter assumes that ET/Aliens are doing God's Will and serving the true needs of humanity. By contrast, Gnostics taught that the Archons want to alienate us from our true birthright, the wisdom endowment (nous) of the Goddess Sophia. In Gnostic cosmology, the emergence of the Archon species in the cosmic order is a special episode in the Fallen Goddess Scenario. In Biblical UFOlogy the entire narrative ignores any reference to the Goddess Sophia or her ancient cognates, such as Asteroth and Astarte, telluric female divinities of ancient Palestine to whom Sophia (vaguely indicated by the Hebrew Shekinah) can be equated.
The seminal text of Biblical UFOlogy, The Bible and Flying Saucers, was published in 1968, thus preceding von Daniken by several years. Its author, Barry H. Downing, was a serious Biblical scholar whose research is deep and whose writing is sober and carefully measured. Often his tone is gently chiding of traditional belief: "One may not be pleased with the theological implications that Christ ascended in some sort of space vehicle, but the implications fit the evidence better than the suggestion that there was no Ascension at all." (p. 47-8) Downing's intention is to preserve the miraculous aspects of Biblical history, but to explain them in terms of advanced technology; yet he does not impose this explanation, he merely proposes it.
Downing's assertion that "beings from another world were the external agent which caused the Hebrew-Christian tradition" (p. 47) seems to parallel the Gnostic view that Judeo-Christian doctrines were inspired by the deviant entities called Archons- but, of course, Downing assumes that "the Hebrew-Christian tradition" is a valid religious trajectory of humanity, and Gnostics did not. In Downing's view, the alien origin of the Hebrew-Christian tradition does not invalidate the doctrines it carries, or the "sacred history" it embodies, because he assumes that flying saucers and ETs might well be the means God has adopted to teach and guide humanity. Gnostics, by contrast, believed that the Archons used Judeo-Christian doctrines to infect humanity with errors and deviate it from its proper course of development.
At the very moment when Judeo-Christian ideology was taking shape, Gnostics came forth from the relative anonymity of the Mystery Schools and engaged the proponents of the new religion in argument, pointing in no uncertain terms to the erroneous and deviant nature of such doctrines as monotheistic creation, the moral sovereignty of Jehovah, dominion of the human species over the Earth, the repression of the Goddess, sin and redemption, the incarnation of divinity in human form, vicarious atonement, blind faith in the saving power of Jesus, the resurrection of the body in the end time, and divine retribution. Almost nothing is left of the Gnostic protest against these ideological and supernatural tenets of Christianity, because thaat protest had to be entirely eradicated so that the Christian program of salvation could be propagated without informed resistence or critical dissent. The fifty-odd texts in the Nag Hammadi cache are pitiful fragments, mere flakes of what once was expressed in parchments and codices that ran into the tens of thousands, filling the libraries of the Mystery Schools in Biblos, Antioch, Alexandria and elsewhere, all over the classical world.
The teachers from the Mystery Schools refuted such doctrines as these in oral argument as well as in countless tracts and full-length books that were later destroyed so that no convincing refutation of salvationist doctrines survived. But Gnostics only launched a frontal assault on the beliefs of the early Christians: they did not attack the Christians themselves. By contrast, the converts to the new religion that eventually was codified in two vast movements, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christianity, physically attacked the Gnostics, destroyed their writings, and demolished the Mystery Schools.
Heresy had to be invented — and eradicated — so that the One True Faith could prevail.
Thus Christianity arose from a centuries-long program of spiritual-intellectual genocide. The true story of the destruction of the indigenous spiritual traditions of Europa has yet to be told. Unfortunately, the well-meaning attempts of Biblical UFOlogists to reconcile the modern ET/UFO phenomenon with the "Divine Plan" completely disregard the Gnostic protest against Judeo-Christian religion. Doing so, they perpetuate the cover-up of the single greatest spiritual catastrophe in our history — the destruction of Gnosis, the way of knowing as the Gods know.
Christos From the Greek verb khriein, "to anoint." Literally, "the anointed." Direct equivalent to the Hebrew messiah, a title used for the anointed kings in ancient Jewish religion, and retained in specific reference to the Messiah, the awaited savior, the spiritual hero and judge. When shortened to Christ, this is certainly the most problematic and misleading term in world religion. Discerning the Gnostic Christos from the Christian Christ is one of the essential tasks we face in recovering the true message of Pagan Mysteries.
The identification of Jesus (human) as "the Christ" (superhuman, divine, "Only-Begotten Son of God) was made by Saint Paul around 75 CE, but the divinity of Jesus Christ was not established as a doctrinal matter until the Nicean Council of 325 CE. At that event, the Emperor Constantine forced the vote so that he could meld his political power with the mystique of a fast-growing new religion, later to be known Christianity. Belief in the divinity of Jesus may be an inspiring and comforting thing to many people, but to the faux-convert Constantine it was savvy political move, a way to underwrite Roman law by divine authority. The Roman Catholic alliance of fascism with salvationist in the Divine Redeemer was to exercise a death-grip on the world for many centuries, and still does, although that grip is failing.
Before Constantine, certain Emperoros had declared themselves divine. They were viewed as arrogant fools by the general public, and rejected as charlatans by Gnostics and others among the Pagan intelligentsia. The claim to divinity of the emperors (the assumption of "divine afflatus," as it was called) was an attempt by the decadent tryants of the failing empire to steal the prestige associated with the telestai, the initiates in the Mysteries; and, to a certain extent, to imitate Alexander the Great, who was the first to attempt this ploy. Constantine was extremely clever in seeing that he could not declare himself divine, but then he didn't have to, because there was a better option: instead of declaring himself a god, he aligned himself with the Christos, the god-man.
The decline of the Mystery Schools after the Augustan Era [29 BCE — 14 CE] was in part due to a massive popular demand for a kind of personal salvation that the Mysteries (being a transpersonal path) did not offer. This demand, in turn, was part of a general movement that arose at the turn of the Age, from Aries to Pisces, around 150 BCE. The Greek astronomer is credited with discovering precession around that time, but in fact, he only disclosed publicly what had been known to initiates for centuries. This disclosure had catastrophic results, because it produced in the masses a false sense of empowerment. The conviction that everyone had a personal fate that could be changed at will was a popular assumption of the time, due to a widespread misunderstanding of the meaning of precession (change in the stars: change of fate). The massive demand for a change of personal fate led to a "New Age" movement, baptism cults, a rage for conversion. The Mysteries were unable to respond to the rampant narcissism of the moment...
One huge factor in this upsurge of narcissism (self-concern) was the emergence in the collective unconscious of a numinous figure or role model for humanity. Eventually, the image of the god-man Jesus Christ was formulated to meet this need, but it did not really satisfy it. It is an inauthentic solution to the human need for a generic sense of humanity, a species identity. Nevertheless, the solution persisted, and, having become ingrown to human dignity, now presents an enormous obstacle to defining and realizing our generic sense of humanity.
In strict usage, the Gnostic Christos ought not to be equated with the Pauline Christ, the Incarnation, or the Joannine Christ, the Word Made Flesh. The confusion of the Gnostic Aeon Christos with the Christ of doctrinal Christianity is one of the greatest obstacles to a clear understanding of Gnostic cosmology and psycho-mythology.
The Aeon Christos who figures in the Gaia Mythos is not the same as Christ in Pauline-Joannine theology. It is completely wrong to attribute the qualities and powers of "Jesus the Christ" to that Aeon, that Pleromic entity. It is also incorrect to suppose that the true and original teachings of Christianity were Gnostic, and were transmitted by initiates who knew the true identity of the Aeon Christos, but then these teachings came to be twisted and muddled by lesser minds who siezed upon the illuminist message for personal and political gain. The doctrines concerning Christ, as constrasted to the illuminist message about Christos, were perverse from the outset. Christian doctrines of salvation and divine intervention cannot be salvaged by the argument that they contain the germ of true illuminist teachings. Not should they be, in my opinion.
Throughout this site Christos will be used in rigorous and deliberate distinction from Christ.
Radical Gnostic teaching denies that Christ is a superhuman agent, a redeemer sent by the Father God, once and once only. It denies the Incarnation, and challenges the claim that any human or superhuman being can represent humanity. No entity has that privilege. Gnostics taught the recognition of the Anthropos, primal precreated humanity, not Christ in the conventional sense. And Christ does not represent the Anthropos. Humanity as a species represents the Anthropos, but no single entity represents humanity.
Christos in the Pauline cult was derived from the Messiah of Zaddikim ideology: it is a superhuman standard, associated with a deviant and inauthentic model of human potential. The sectarian ideal of Tzaddik implies a formula of absolute righteousness that cannot be judged by human standards. The particular spin of Tzaddik is the demand that humans be held to a superhuman criterion, a model of perfection that originates beyond life on Earth. Since it is impossible to meet this standard, the destruction of humankind is required, yet those who have been faithful to Tzaddik, although falling short of it, will be supernaturally restored to life in an afterworld provided by the Father God.
The diabolical logic of the Qumranic sectarians was carried over intact into Christianity, and the model of supernatural perfection transferred to the figure of Jesus Christ. Today devout Christians believe that JC presents an unattainable ideal — he was, after all, divine before he was human — but in the very act of striving for the impossible we better ourselves as human beings. The imitatio Christi is considered to be a perfectly logical ideal, and, because the operative belief here involves a superhuman being, the ideal has a potent preclusive effect: considering how we might live up to an impossible model, we tend to ignore and discount models that show us what is really possible for our species. In other words the superhuman ideal, although it seems to elevate our sense of human potential, actualy impedes our ability to self-actualize (in Maslovian terms). It cripples our evolutionary development, even as if seems to inspire us to the highest levels of moral and spiritual attainment.
Gnostics recognized that the superhuman ideal of Tzaddik, transferred into the figure of the Divine Redeemer, actually works against humanity's efforts at self-actualization. This erroneous spiritual ideal defeats our true spiritual potential, our capacity to develop the wisdom endowment of nous, divine intelligence. Gnostics attributed this thwarting affect to the scheming of the Archons who insinuate a false ideal in our minds, thus obscuring our innate sense of the true potential of our species.
In the Sophia Mythos, Christos is the Aeon of the Pleroma often coupled with Sophia. In one version of the myth, Christos and Sophia are paired in the Pleroma, making a syzygy, a divine dyad. They are said to emanate the Anthropos, the template for humanity. Hence they are a version of the divine parents (twinned). My retelling of Gnostic cosmology in the Gaia Mythos uses this motif.
In a further development of the Mythos, Sophia is said to have been unable to manage the rampant life-forms that emerged and swarmed over her body once she metamorphosed into the living planet, Earth. Looking on from the galactic rore, the Pleromic gods responded by sending the Aeon Christos into the chaotic matrix of the biosphere. The paraphrase of this episode found in Irenaeus says that Christos "imparted a figure" to Sophia, thus allowing her to bring the rampant species into order. Today we would say that Christos "configured" for Sophia the instinctive intelligence of the myriad species, so that they could become self-sufficient, each type of animal life following its own innate biological program. The intervention of the Aeon Christos had effects for the entire biosphere, and affected the human species in a particular way as well. See Mijotes.
civilization From Middle Latin, civis, "a person inhabiting the city." Hence " to civilize" means to develop cities and live in cities, although it has come to mean something considerably more than that: namely, to endow people with moral principles and inculcate forms of behavior superior to those presumed of savages or uncivilized people. (In Origins under Themes I suggested that civilization is just a fancy name for citification.)
Arguments about how civilization arose are as varied as those about its value, although the latter are apparently more recent. Plato assumed a high value for civilization, epitomized for him in the legend of Atlantis and represented in his time by the effete, male-only intellectual milieu of Athens.
Many beliefs are attached to the question of how civilization originated. Among conventionally minded historians it is widely believed that the first civilizations arose in the Middle East and Egypt around 4500 BCE, but Marija Gimbutas, Riane Eisler, Stan Gooch, James Mellart and other, more radically minded historians have presented evidence to support the belief that civilized societies, rather than full-blown urban centers, date from as much as three thousand years earlier.
Beliefs about how civilization began are hotly debated, and equally so, of late, are beliefs about its value. The debate splits drastically into pro and con: those who believe that civilization is the greatest achievement of the human species, and those who believe it is a grave pathological deviation. One of the leading voices among the latter group is Stanley Diamond. In In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization, he offered this view:
The crisis in the Western world and its imperial hinterlands, which is also the crisis of humanity, cannot be confined to social, economic or technological "problems"; it inheres in our definition, our very understanding of man. We live in what we pridefully call civilization, but our laws and machines have taken on a life of their own; they stand against our spiritual and physical survival.
(Cited in Jensen, L, 268)
Speaking rather more bluntly, naturalist and author John A. Livingston says: "Civilization cripples the mind and cripples the heart by offering humanistic ideology in place of our evolved naturalness or wildness." (Ibid., p. 56) Both Diamond and Livingston express the belief that civilization is harmful to the essential nature of our species, not to mention other species, animal and plant, which homo sapiens must consume to the point of extinction in order to sustain its civilized way of life.
In his Laws, Plato advised the exclusion of poets from the ideal society. This is a crucial clue to civilization because it implies that the poetic-visionary mode of knowledge (represented by the mythic image of Tree and Well) must be excluded if a high degree of social organization is to be achieved.
Yet it can also be argued that poetic-visionary knowledge is what really sustains, enlivens and renews human culture through the course of time.
The evidence from native-mind cultures that have survived for thousands of years, such as the Australian Aborigines, shows unequivocally that long-term survival in tribal society depends upon the continuity of shamanic tradition.
The shaman (who may be a woman or a man) is the poet and seer who preserves and renews the wisdom of the species. The suggestion that such wisdom must be excluded for civilization to arise raises some troubling reflections.
compound belief: combines various modes of belief in the same syndrome.
Example: political beliefs in the Arab world are often associated with the theocratic imperative of Islam and the imposition of shariya, Islamic law. Addressing the world press, leaders of the Taliban state unequivocally that there is no division between religion and politics in the Islamic state. The combination of religion and politics makes for a heady mix of compound belief. This mix is already devastating, but when you add to it racial and sexual scripts coded with other beliefs you have compound belief in a dense and nefarious amalgamation. In compound belief each element reinforces the other, making this mode of believing enormously difficult to refute.
Second example: The "troubles" that have plagued Northern Ireland for close to 40 years are largely incomprehensible to the outside world, and not easily understood even by those who have grown up with them. Historical, racial, religious, political and familial beliefs combine in a dense knot of compond beliefs. The composition can vary from one neighborhood to the next, and all variations are practically impenetrable to reasoned inquiry. The popular label for this dangerous mix is "sectarian." From Ireland to Iran to Indonesia, violence driven by belief-based sectarian hatred fuels social conflict and turns community living into a nightmare.
Sectarian hatred is often based on compound beliefs that cannot be renounced by those who hold them, mainly due to the fear of jeopardising some precious component of the personality (say, racial identity, or religious piety, or political affiliation). Compound beliefs thrive on complexity. In Northern Irelaand the grip of compound belief is so intense that it has given rise to a joke, "If you're not confused, you don't know what's happening." This joke expresses the deep exasperation of people who realize tragically that they cannot see beyond the enmeshment of the compound beliefs that drive them.
correction
Just think about it! What a tremendous prospect the Gnostics have left us. We are involved in how the intelligence of the earth is consciously integrated into the larger scheme of the galaxy. We ought not to get too inflated about this fantastic prospect, however. After many years of reflection, I am convinced that Gaia-Sophia can achieve correction even if we fail in our opportunity to participate in the process. If She cannot achieve it with and through the human species, She will find another way. This is my humble opinion, anyway. (I suspect that Gnostics ardently debated this question. Some believed that human participation was indispensible to Sophia's correction, while others believed that our involvement was only accessory, and, lacking it, Sophia could manage re-alignment to the Pleroma by other means. I leave the issue open....)
According to the Gnostic origin myth found in Trim. Prot., Sophia's opportunity to achieve Her correction with some kind of unique involvement by humanity is pre-disposed by Her descent. The most we could say, perhaps, is that our co-evolutionary role in Sophia's correction is consistent with Her story from the outset, and if we miss the chance She presents to us, the failure in our part of Her experiment will change that story.
credibility Trust conferred on the source of a belief, rather than in the substance of the belief itself.
Credibility is highly problematic in metahistorical discourse, because it places the issue of authority before the question of veracity. This shift distracts from clear and direct inquiry into the nature of beliefs. Consider ths example:
In the The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, there is a passage where the art historian Leigh Teabing states a known historical fact: the divinity of Jesus was decided by vote at the first Nicean Council of 325 CE. To be precise, it was decided to make the divinity of Jesus a strict doctrine, to be preached as absolute truth and, if necessary, imposed by force. Another character, the heroine Sophie Neveu, appears to be shocked that the divinity of Jesus Christ was decided by a vote. This is a novelistic way to put into question the common assumption held by Christians, that Jesus was recognized (by some people, at least) as the "Son of God" in his own time and setting.
In response to this fictional ploy (cleverly used here to present a little-known historical fact) Christianity Today published an article by Ben Withingerington III, posted 05/21/04: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/006/7.26.html
In the article, one of many generated by the ongoing debate around the DVC, Witherington states flatly that : "The issue of canon — what books constitute the final authority for Christians — is no small matter." Here, right off the top, he appeals to the credibility of the source (the canon), rather than to the veracity of the beliefs to be considered. When credibility is invoked, the implication is always the same: this is worth believing because it has been deemed believable (by some "authority" or other).
Witherington builds his argument by proposing that certain things were believed about Jesus well before the Nicean Council of 325. "By the time we get to the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus), there is a strong sense of what is and is not sound doctrine, particularly in terms of salvation and the person of Jesus Christ." Coming to the point, he asserts that Paul's letters, the main source of the "Son of God" ideology, were "considered authoritative" already in the end of the 1st Century CE. Thus he counters Dan's Brown tactic of creating the impression that the divinity of Jesus was a bogus attribution, merely decided by vote.
Witherington's case rests on the assumption that a belief considered authoritative by earliest Christians ought to be viewed as true. This shows how the issue of credibility often gets in the way of the critique of beliefs.
For metahistorians, the point is not who believed that Jesus was the Son of God , or when this belief was authoritatively established, but whether or not this belief in itself is sane or insane. Of course, we look closely at the historical perspective. We consider how beliefs emerge, grow and dies over the centuries. But at the end of the day, we live in the present and we ourselves must determine the veracity of a belief, here and now, regardless of the authority or canonical weight attached to it.
Jesus is often considered to have the highest credibility of anyone who ever lived, because he represents the ideal human being, believed by many to be a divine/human hybrid. On this conundrum, Alan Watts writes with typical wit:
We are spiritually paralyzed by the fetish of Jesus. Even to atheists he is the supremely good man, the exemplar and moral authority with whom no one may agree. Whatever our opinions, we must perforce wrangle the words of Jesus to agree with them. Poor Jesus! If he had known how great an authority was to be projected upon him, he would never have said a word. (Beyond Theology, p. 108)
The authority attributed to Jesus is of course a great ploy, an effective device for intimidation. To say anything against Jesus or what Jesus is believed to have said, is to risk looking very bad, indeed. For centuries those who spoke against Jesus, or even against anything that lesser authorities, those who declared themselves "protectors of the faith," said concerning Jesus and his message, were violently suppressed, tortured and killed.
The use of violence to enforce credibility is common to the conquering religions, Christianity and Islam, although it must be said that historically Islam has a better record on tolerance. The formula for the perpetration of righteous violence against those who resist religious authority was laid down in the OT narratives. Although largely fictionalized, theBiblical accounts of the ancient Hebrews committing genocide and wholesale slaughter on various peoples of the ancient Middle East provided the model for later atrocities to be committed by Christians. Although Muslims proved to be more tolerance in their campaigns of conquest, the Koran is devoted by about in page in four to threats and imprecations directed against "infidels," that is, those who doare not credible, not able or willing to believe what the sacred scriptures say.
Thanks to the Salvationist ideology driving American foreign policy since the Reagen era, and following upon the global polarization of Islam VS the West in the wake of 911, CNN and FOX now show images of crowds of Muslims brandishing Korans and pictures of clerics, mullahs and ayatollahs. The fomenting rage of these crowds does not feed on what they believe as much as on who. I the average Muslin cannot explain his own religious beliefs beyond the rote pronouncement of a few cliches — which is likely, and the same can be ssaid for the average Christian, although less so for orthodox Jews, who are fanatical about doctrine — but it hardly matters. The faces in the crown are empowerd by the face on the placard, whose credibity carries the force of divine sanction. Credibility is dangerous stuff.
deism Belief in a creator god who does not intervene in creation by supernatural means and stands detached from human affairs ("paring his nails," as one character irreverently says in James Joyce's Ulysses). Deists believe that nature sufficiently demonstrates the divine capacities of the creator god who masterminded it and manifested it. This belief leaves open the question of how God might view human affairs; i.e., with approval or disapproval.
Sophia is an Aeon, a dreaming god. Aeons dream and emanate worlds, but they do not always penetrate into the worlds they produce. In this sense, they might be compared to scientists of a wise and benevolent kind — if, indeed, we can imagine such scientists — who set up an experiment and let its run its course, without interfering in how it unfolds. To put ourselves in the minds of the Aeons, we must imagine that the experimental worlds they produce are more interesting if they don't intervene in them once initial conditions have been set up. Nevertheless, many mythologies do refer to the intervention of deific beings in the human world. We would do well to ask which of these stories are true and helpful, and which are delusional, or intentionally distorted by malicious scripting.
Sophia's involvement in her extra-Pleromic emanation is anomalous, a freak event. It comprises two aspects: a non-intentional plunge, followed by a redemptive return movement. Dreaming of how to projet a world all by Herself, Sophia departs from the vortex of higher-dimensional star-flux in the galactic core and plunges down and out, out and away, into the swirling elementary matter in the galactic limbs. This is the first descent described in the paraphrase. Then there is an intermediary phase, the second descent, in which She imparts animation to the world-process She has instigated. Then there is the ricorso or redemptive action in which Sophia, working through a special power that She endows in humanity, brings correction to the cosmic process She has inaugurated.
Correction is required in the cosmic order because Sophia's initial Dreaming was skewed.
When the term first appeared in 1564, deism was associated with the views of religiously minded people who opposed Bible-based religion. Later, it became synonymous with the label of freethinker. In his Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson defined the deist as "a man who follows no particular religious but acknowledges the existence of God, without any other article of faith." Politically and ethically, deism has been associated with movements that tend toward religious tolerance, the idealization of the natural capacities of the human species, and the promotion of free speech and political liberty.
Many of the "Founding Fathers" of the United States were deists who debated how to keep religion out of government. Thomas Jefferson, who compiled his own Bible from selected passages in the New Testament, rejected the supernaturalism of Christianity and viewed Jesus as a teacher of morality rather than the incarnation of divinity. George Washington firmly advocated the separation of church from state and struggled to keep any reference to Deity out of the Constitution. When questioned directly on his views by a diplomat, Joel Barlow, then American consul to Algiers, the first president responded flatly: "The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." Curiously, the question had originally been put to Barlow from a Muslim leader in Tripoli. This shows that at that early date some religious leaders in the Arab world were closely observing the formation of the new nation, perhaps comparing it with their own version of fundamentalist theocracy. (EP 2, 334)
The debate continues today, with fundamentalists insisting on the central role of religion in government. Like Ronald Reagan before them, Presidents Bush, pere et fils, play up religion strongly and adhere to a literal interpretation of the Bible, especially the passages on Armageddon. Deists view the Bible as a fallible text contrived by priests for the purposes of controlling the populace.
Earth Goddess A mythological figure universally recognized in indigenous cultures as well as in the Gnostic scenario of the Fallen Goddess.
As far as I know the explicit identification of the Fallen Sophia with Gaia is unique to my presentation of Gnostic teachings in this site and elsewhere. The equation seems more than obvious, however. It is known on the testimony of Hippolytus, who wrote against Paganism, that all Mystery cults, despite their rich diversity, were universally dedicated to the worship of the Magna Mater, the Great Mother (W. W. King, Gnostics and Their Remains, p. 111). This is none other than the planetary Goddess whom we today call by the ancient Greek name for the Earth, Gaia.
Magna Mater was the generic name for the planet we inhabit, considered by ancient peoples of Europa to be a "mother goddess." In Gnostic cosmology, the Aeon Sophia, a divinity from the Pleroma, becomes embodied in the planet Earth. Hence the equation is complete: Magna Mater = Earth Goddess = Gaia.
In many places around the world, especially in third- and fourth-world cultures, the Earth Goddess is still revered by native peoples whose lives depend on a close bond with the environment. (Nepalese custom of revering Dariti Mata by "touching earth".)
Today, Navajo Indians in the deserts of the American Southwest still speak lovingly in their ancient stories of Changing Woman, one of the Holy People from the primordial era of world creation, who fashioned the first Navajo people from a mixture of cornmeal and shreds of her own epidermis. She is the very embodiment of life's orchestrated diversity and nature's awesome cyclic powers of rebirth and regeneration. In some sense, she is also a reflection of the wondrous, endlessly self-renewing, maternal earth itself, whose form traditional Navajo envision as a woman. Mountains and mesas are the contours of this feminine body, the geological expression of her heart, skull, breast, and internal organs. Fertile soil is her living flesh. Vegetation is her dress. The spinning of the seasons is a visible manifestation of her dynamic be4auty, ecological balance, and vitality. (Suzuki and Knudtsen, Wisdom of the Elders, p. 3)
This beautiful passage is one of dozens that could be cited in support of the belief that the physical Earth is the embodiment of a feminine divinity. This belief is basic to the extension of Deep Ecology under development in Metahistory.org. It is also basic to the Gnostic and Pagan spirituality of Europe, a vast body of ethnic traditions that were exterminated with the rise of Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion.
If my thesis that Gnosis was a sophisticated form of Goddess-based shamanism has any truth in it, Gnostics could not possibly have been nature-haters who rejected the sensory world and detested their own bodies, as is so often claimed. At least one scholar confirms my view, albeit obliquely:
The Mysteries had assumed a terrestrial deficiency that the universal soteriological goddess transformed for her initiates, thereby maintaining an essentially positive view of the cosmos. - Luther H. Martin, Hellenistic Religions, p. 134
Translated into plain English this means that initiates in the Mystery Schools, where Gnostics held faculty positions, took the Earth Goddess for their savior and therefore took a positive view of the natural world. Although he asserts the positive view of the Mysteries, Martin says that "a gnostic alternative radically revalued this world as something to be rejected completely and transcended." (Ibid, p. 134) Here he parrots the usual negative hype on Gnosticism, and he is not the only one. Erik Davis, in his otherwise brilliant book TechGnosis, also mindlessly and uncritically repeats the usual negative rap on Gnosticism. It seems that this habit will die hard, if it ever does....
I would argue that the essence of the Mystery religions was a Gnostic vision that embraced the natural world but rejected the misconceived views we impose on it. The "deficiency" (Greek kenoma) of the Goddess Sophia was a handicap due to her separation from the Pleroma, the galactic core, but it was also the occasion for coevolution between Sophia and humanity. The initiates were called telestai (singular telestes) in recognition of their specialist knowledge of the ultimate goal (telos) of human existence: coevolution in service to Gaia-Sophia. Gnosticism was a religious path of experimentation based on directives for coevolution, rather than on dogmas or doctrinal propositions. The directives came from the seers who communed with Sacred Nature in non-ordinary states of reality. (See also below: entheogenic theory of religion.)
Religion can be a complicated business, especially when we get into doctrinal formulations of unverifiable propositions such as virgin birth, resurrection, and the "end of days." However, there is a clear-cut choice of belief between the remote Father God, exclusive of all other divinities, and the Earth Goddess whose presence allows for a plethora of other spirits and deities. I maintain that the most compelling "proof" (if proof is what one needs) of the veracity of believing in the Earth Goddess versus the Sky God Father, is what could be called proof by ethics. Look at the rules for living prescribed for the Sky Father God and transmitted to humanity via his male emissaries (Moses, Jesus, Mohammed), then consider what kind of rules of living (ethical code) could be based on recognition of the Earth Goddess as both a source of physical life and a transcendent link to the Sky Gods of the Pleroma. The choice of beliefs here comes down to a choice between ecological ethics, exemplified in the earth-based morality of indigenous peoples and the Sophianic ethics of Gnosticism, contrasted to the "revealed" moral code of the Sky Father God.
We behave as we behold.
egodeath The experience of momentary dissolution of the personal ego, or fixed and familiar sense of identity, typically undergone in shamanic initiations and trance states induced by meditation, Tantric sex, ecstatic dance, and ingestion of psychoactive plants-or a combination of all the above, if you're up for it.
The joy and the terror of every psychonaut is to die before dying, to undergo the dissolution of personal identity in an altered state. The sensation of egodeath may be so intense as to verge on a sense of actually, physically dying. As the ego melts away, demonic apparitions arise. (Cremation ground guardian. Linrothe and Watt, Demonic Divine, Cat. no. 12, detail.)
What are we to make of the ferocious entities (better said, apparitions) that appear to the person whose ego is dissolving? Here is where belief plays a decisive role in shamanic visionary experience. The apparitions respond to what the psychonaut believes, but they may do so either by conforming to the beliefs held by the experiencer, or by shattering them. If, for instance, the person undergoing egodeath believes that the demonic entities perceived are capable of killing him or her, they may do so. The result would be a self-induced death, but this rarely occurs because the protective demons are benevolent and would not be inclined to force the issue in this way.
Those not prepared to undergo egodeath will be scared away from it, and so the experience itself is protected from interlopers and irresponsible trippers. In The Psychedelic Experience, three Harvard professors (Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner) made a brilliant analogy between egodeath and physical death. They do this by paraphrasing the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a manual to be read to the dying person, or the deceased, to assist them in passing through the bardos (transit-zones) of the afterdeath state. Having experimented clinically with LSD, and taken it themselves, they were aware that the start of the "acid trip" usually involves a distinct sense of mortality. As LSD comes on, the subject begins to think that he or she is going to die. The three shamans from academia realized that the physical death-experience described by stages in the Tibetan manuals also applied to egodeath under the influence of LSD. They wrote The Psychedelic Experience as a guide to dissolution of the ego.
Transegoic instruction is subliminal. The plant-teachers lower the threshold of resistence to the streaming of "information" through the sense-organs. In his spontaneous experience of "cosmic consciousness," German mystic Jacob Boehme described how he was able to" read the signature of all things." (For a discussion of this incident, see visionary trance.)
Eternal Conflict: one of the five master themes of metahistory.
Eternal Conflict is the experiential pattern that emerges when humanity alters its life-sustaining bond with nature. Still deep in prehistory, the human species begins to define itself on its own terms, to form societies, to introduce culture. All this involves differentiation from nature and entails conflict. Social identity develops through conflict ("taking sides") and social power is acquired by mastery of conflict. Now what appears to be conflict in nature, such as the interplay of light and darkness, becomes symbolic of what is developing in humanity, in collective soul-life. Here the human species enters a long experiment that is highly paradoxical, because every conflict challenges it to restore balance, within and without.
The belief that the human species is in conflict with nature, a hostile environment to be dominated in order to survive, conflicts with the belief that civilized societies can exist in harmony with the natural world and other species. Many myths from around the world attest to memories and visions of paradise, an Edenic way of life, and the question of how humanity departed from this condition is much debated. Conflict and competition exist in nature without overwhelming the symbiotic balance that supports all species, but the presence of humanity somehow alters this equation. Eternal Conflict need not be viewed as a superhuman cosmic situation, Good Versus Evil, however. Rather, it is an ongoing dilemma that humankind experiences as it emerges from empathic participation in Sacred Nature.
faith The confidence that what one knows, feels, or senses is ultimately real and can be verified by direct personal experience. Distinguished from belief, which always involves suppositions that cannot be verified, faith may be regarded as intuitive certainty, rather than blind reliance on suppositions. For instance, to have faith in life after death is not the same as embracing beliefs about life after death. Faith, defined as confidence in what it is possible to experience or achieve for oneself, can exist independent of beliefs.
Having said that, I must add that faith is rarely defined in this manner. Rather, it is taken conventionally as a blanket term for reliance on whatever one believes. To say, "I follow my faith," means to live and act in accordance with beliefs "taken on faith," i.e., beliefs received in a prescripted, doctrinal form, especially beliefs in regard to matters considered to lie beyond explanation or proof, such as survival of consciousness after death. Those who live by faith in this sense insist on its necessity, for there are some things that we humans simply cannot know, cannot explain out of our limited capacities of reason.
So, there is a basic difference between conventional faith and what might be called dynamic faith, as defined in the first paragraph, above.
Conventional faith not only calls for reliance on personal beliefs, it may also call for accepting beliefs that are neither chosen nor evaluated by the person who adopts them. In the polemic writings of Tertullian, one of the Church Fathers who opposed the Pagan Mysteries, "the personal systems of the heresiarchs [Gnostics] are contrasted with the teachings of the Apostles who 'had no faith of their own' and did not choose what they believed." Tertullian defined heresy as "personal choice exercised in matters where it does not apply." (H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth, p, 9.) In his view, the faith of the Apostles is superior to any subjective views that might be developed through "personal systems" of interpreting reality.
Tertullian's formula is the most extreme endorsement of blind faith imaginable, and it is not at all uncommon in the world today. It is widespread because it works, after a fashion. If what I believe has not been chosen by me but for me, the faith I hold in my beliefs will seem even more transcendent to my personal reality. Such faith aligns me to powers greater than myself — yes, but what exactly are these powers? Those who live by this extremist code assume that the faith derived from beliefs not of their own choosing aligns them to a superhuman agency, God. But where do these items of received belief come from? Where do the "laws of God" originate? In every instance, they are supplied by religious institutions. But faith in the beliefs provided by an institution such as Islam or the Catholic Church aligns its adherents, not to Allah or God, but to the donor institution. What is taken for a connection to Divinity is really an obligation to take the word of God's self-appointed representatives "on faith." . In great measure, the blindness of conventional faith resides in how it allows the believer to ignore where his or her faith is actually based. It is as if I relied on a cable tv service to supply me with programs to watch, but assumed that the programs come from superior beings on Mars. Delusion of this type of passes for normal in the realm of world religions.
It is said that the presidency of George W. Bush is "resolutely faith-based." His life story is now widely regarded as an example of the power of belief to shape human affairs. (Newsweek, March 10, 2003) The American president often expresses his faith in his political judgements. Some people admire him for boldly stating his faith, while others find such a blatant expression of personal faith inappropriate to his secular role as world leader. By stating his faith in such a forthright manner, Bush calls upon the allegiance of those who share the same belief-system. This self-serving tactic almost certainly decided his election to a second term.
The power of faith appears to reside in psychological dynamism: the act of believing something that cannot be determined by reason or direct experience confers exceptional strength on the believer. Thus, President Bush acquires a higher measure of strength through his faith — i.e., his beliefs regarding matters that cannot be proven by reason or verified by direct experience. By accepting to believe what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge, the believer transcends those limits. But is this tactic of transcendence really as valid as it seems? In fact, this kind of faith allows the individual to abandon reason and forgo interpretation. In the belief that some matters simply cannot be understood by the human mind out of its own capacities, many people rely on faith; in doing so, they do not consider that their belief about the limits of human knowledge may be fallacious. In other words, they believe that faith is necessary where our powers of explanation fail. The assumption here is, that faced with our limits, our powers of explanation fail absolutely. The idea that our limits are not fixed and absolute but subject to expand as we develop the capacities inherent to human potential, never enters into the equation of conventional faith. In short, conventional faith is a flat refusal to accept and explore human potential.
The issue of faith is extremely problematic, because attaching this term to the act of belief makes it almost impossible to conceive of another kind of faith, one that does not rely on belief. However, in metahistorical perspective, faith in the human species — that is, faith in human potential- is just that other kind. Gnostics had a special term for faith in human potential. They called it Pistis Sophia, "confidence in indwelling wisdom."
In the Afterword of The Seeker's Handbook (1991) I tried to distinguish faith from belief in this statement: "Faith is the commitment to achieve what can be imagined, while belief is reliance on nonverifiable systems of description." With this language I drew on a Gnostic cue concerning the aspect of our divine endowment called epinoia, or "the luminous epinoia." In essence, the Sophianic endowment is nous, "divine intellect," but Gnostics, in their discipline as masters of noetic science, were able to discern how nous unfolds in one direction toward reason and in another beyond it, toward revelation. They called the reasoning faculty dianoia, "through intelligence," and the imaginative faculty, epinoia, "hyper-intelligence." With dianoia, we reason through (dia) experiences. With epinoia, we enter directly into a visionary mode of awareness, an altered state of knowledge. In the concept of the Pistis Sophia, Gnostics affirmed their faith in the complementary operation of these powers.
Fallen Goddess Scenario The creation myth of the Gnostics, describing how a goddess from the Pleroma came to be embodied in the planet earth. Also called the Sophia Mythos, this is not, technically speaking, a creation myth in the sense of the Biblical account of creation in Genesis: rather, it is a mythopoetic rendition of emanation theory.
Although allusions to a feminine deity identified with the earth are widespread in mythology and indigenous lore, Gnostic materials present the unique case of a full-blown scenario that describes how such a deity (Aeon) on the cosmic level turns into a planetary body. In short, Gnosticism presents the elements for a unique narrative about Gaia-Sophia, the Goddess who became the earth.
Note: This entry is more than a definition: it is a summary of several factors pertaining to the Fallen Goddess scenario (abbreviated FGS), including the source materials for the narrative. As the FGS is cited so frequently through Metahistory.org, I thought it would be helpful to provide a resume of the narrative and an overview of its derivation. This entry contains links to key places in the site where the FGS is discussed. The full-blown story form of the scenario is of course found in the Gaia Mythos.
Unfortunately, due to the sparse and fragmentary nature of the textual evidence, the Fallen goddess Scenario has to be reconstructed, and re-imagined, often by making extrapolations from slim and scattered clues. I call this the imaginal reworking of the mythos. This task involves, in part, a transposition of the mystical and symbolic language of the Gnostic materials into astronomical terms. (For more on extrapolations and astronomical language, see Coco de Mer, Part One: The Human Role in Gaia's Dreaming.)
Eight key features mark the complete scenario: 1, The mandala of Aeons (cosmic gods) in the Pleroma 2, The Pleromic projection of the Anthropos, the human species. 3, The plunge of the Aeon Sophia from the Pleroma 4, The emergence of the Archons, an inorganic species 5, The formation of the Mother Star 6, The intervention of the Aeon Christos to assist Sophia 7, The full metamorphosis of Sophia into Gaia, the planet earth 8, The correction of Sophia, involving humanity
Of these eight features, 1 through 5 are entirely pre-terrestrial. These features concern events that occur before Sophia becomes embodied in the earth, events that prove to be preparatory to the conditions of terrestrial life — for instance, the capture of the organic earth in the inorganic planetary system. Features 6 and 7 concern the formation of the planetary body, the biosphere, and the appearance of all species, including humanity, the outgrowth of the Anthropos, or divine template (feature 2). Feature 8 concerns current and future events in the biosphere and the prospect of co-evolution of our species with Gaia-Sophia.
(In the synopsis of the Gaia Mythos, four Parts are indicated. Part One, "Fallen Goddess," comprises features 1 through 6 in the above summary. Part Two, "Gaia Awakening," comprises features 6 (tied over to Part One) and 7. The remaining two Parts of the Gaia Mythos are entirely concerned with feature 8.)
The task of piecing together the FGS relies on longish passages and isolated clues in the Nag Hammadi Codices and in paraphrases of Gnostic cosmology found in the polemics of the Church Fathers. The NHC materials are widly inconsistent in how they present the full-scale cosmological narrative. The most consistent, near- complete versions of the FGS occur in four documents, the longest in the NHC. Basic Cosmology (Pages refer to leaves in the codices, each leaf or sheaf being written on both sides: hence 31 pages = 16 leaves.):
The Apocryphon of John. 31 pages. Found in three versions of various lengths in the NHC and in one fragmentary version in a non-NHC text. This is most comprehensive text on the Sophia mythos, giving a relatively coherent overview of all eight features.
The Hypostasis of the Archons. 11 pages. Omits features 1 and 2, presents crucial details on the activity of the Archons and Sophia's correction (feature 8). On the Origin of the World. 30 pages. Found in two versions in the NHC. Omits features 1 and 2, presents a detailed treatment of features 4 and 5, including the Gnostic narrative of Adam and Eve. Ends with a rare apocalyptic passage referring to feature 8.
The Tripartate Tractate. 78 pages, longest in the NHC. Describes the Sophia Mythos without using the name of Sophia. For instance, Sophia's plunge (feature 3) is called "The Imperfect Begetting of the Logos." Refers to the chief Archon as the Demiurge, a term found in Plato and the Hermetica. Contains important details on episodes 4 through 8, with an emphasis on the salvific action of the Aeon Christos. This text presents the Demiurge as an artisan assisting the Pleromic gods, rather than as an aberration and adversary to them and, by extension, to humanity. In this and other elements, Tri Trac is not genuinely Gnostic. Rather, it more closely resembles Hermetic texts that develop a favorable view of the Demiurge (i.;e., the Archons) as an "artificer" who assists the Pleromic gods in engineering the world-process.
Other cosmological texts:
Trimorphic Protennoia. 15 pages. A revelation discourse presenting the descent of the Aeon Sophia in obscure mystical language. Rich with allusion, although it contains almost no concete elements of cosmology. For an extended discussion of this text, see Sophia's Passion in Coco de Mer, Part One.
The Paraphrase of Shem (41 pages), like The Tripartate Tractate, presents the FGS in abstract language, but even more vaguely. This text is allegorical rather than mythological. Sophia is named, but not as a main character. Paraph Shem features Darkness, Spirit and Nature as the three principal actors in the cosmic drama. In allusion to feature 4, the emergence of the Archons, it refers to an "afterbirth" rather than an "abortion." It is difficult to extract anything relevant to the FGS from this material.
A Valentinian Exposition (8 pages, very fragmentary) describes the Pleroma and paired Aeons (feature 1), omits 2, the projection of the Anthropos, and treats 4 in a manner specific to the Valentinian School, contrasted to the Sethian School, whose version I follow in reconstructing the mythos. This text refers to feature 6 by the phrase, "Jesus and Sophia revealed the creature," and other obscure clues relating to the mysterious co-action of these Aeons in the formation of all species. It uniquely describes Sophia laughing despite Her unexpected exile from the Pleroma; in short, amusing Herself as She can. Val Exp contains the memorable, almost taunting line: "Indeed, the Devil is one of the divinities." This refers to the Gnostic view that Ialdabaoth, the chief Archon, is a diabolic entity, but still entitled to divine status, of a kind.
In A Valentinian Exposition, feature 6, the intervention of the Aeon Christos in behalf of Sophia, tends to be treated separately from the evolutionary narrative. The precise manner in which Christos assists Sophia, and the ongoing effects of this intervention for humanity, are deeply problematic issues in Gnostic study. Some texts make Christos and Sophia the paired Aeons who project the Anthropos, the template for the human species (feature 2) — hence, presenting them as the divine parents of humanity. This action occurs within the Pleroma, before Sophia falls. There follows an intervention of Christos into Sophia's evolving world — this is feature 6, the least developed episode in the FGS. Some clues on this feature of the scenario occur in the parallel texts The Sophia of Jesus Christ and Eugnostos the Blessed.
The intervention of the Aeon Christos in the evolution of species while Sophia is transforming into Gaia is described in the paraphrase of Irenaeus more completely than in any surviving text. See Ante-Nicene Fathers in Gnostic Materials in the Bibliography. .
Reworking the FGS:
As explained elsewhere in the site, I use the Lego method to select from all texts those materials that will support a coherent preconceived version of the Sophia mythos. Scholars are obliged to work in the same way, but since they are not intent upon producing a coherent narrative of any kind, they end up merely putting the material in categories. In effect, they sort the Lego pieces into piles, but do not attempt to make anything from the parts so selected. There are about half a dozen piles, with various pieces common to different piles. The Lego pieces for FGS tend to accumulate in four piles, labelled Valentinian, Sethian, anti-Jewish and anti-Christian.
In the Valentinian version of the Sophia mythos, the Aeon Sophia does not really depart from the Pleroma, only Her enthymesis (desire) does. This version is closely paraphrased by the Church Fathers who took a particular interest in it because Valentinian teachings tend to fit Christian salvationist ideology in some respects. Hence Valentinian Lego pieces are often found in the pile labelled Christian Gnosticism. Before Nag Hammadi appeared in English (1979), Hans Jonas wrote The Gnostic Religion, published in 1958. It contains (in Ch. 8) an important paraphrase of the Valentinian system. Jonas explains how "the Intention or Desire of the Sophia, hypostasized in its separation from her, is now a new personal being: the lower Sophia or Achamoth." (p. 186) His description of the suffering of Sophia and the origination of matter is helpful in understanding my version of the scenario, even though Jonas relies largely on Valentinian ideas, which I generally do not follow.
My imaginal reworking of the FGS emphasizes Sethian Gnosticism which is not only non-Christian but also anti-Christian and anti-Jewish. In the Sethian version, Sophia really does depart from the Pleroma. By its own definition, Sethian Gnosticism presents the teaching of Illuminators, Buddha-like teachers who appear periodically in the world to bring the message of enlightenment. The illuminators cannot be confounded with Christ-like saviors who intervene in history. They are messengers, not messiahs. The Gnostic Christos is not the Christ of Saint Paul. Sethian Gnosticism represents the non-messianic expression of an illuminist message, direct pointing to the truth that frees us. The contrast between salvationism and illuminism is central to the treatment of Gnosticism in Metahistory.org.
The message of Gnosis for today comes in two parts: the imaginal reworking of the Fallen Goddess Scenario, and the protest against Judeo-Christian-Islamic ideology. Because scholars get lost in sorting through the Lego pieces of surviving materials, they do not arrive at a fair presentation of either of these components. On the one hand, their specialist restrictions prevent them from acquiring a general overview of the mythos. On the other hand, they are daunted by the Archon thesis and even perhaps shocked by the identification of Ialdabaoth, the chief Archon, with Jehovah, the father god of the Old Testament. Yet the Archon thesis cannot be ignored, for it provides the crucial hinge between the mythic cosmology of the Gnostics and their critique of religious ideology. My treatment of the materials contributing to the FGS is intended both to highlight and to correlate these two components.
McKenna thesis Variation and extension of the Wasson thesis on the origins of religion through the use of psychoactive plants including fungi ( mushrooms).
Terence McKenna (1949 — 2000) was a brilliant exponent of the use of psychoactive plants for the purposes of expanding human consciousness and encountering the Sacred. His views on the historical role of profane plants such as sugar and tobacco .. the addiction and enslavement of civilization.
The McKenna thesis has two aspects that distinguish it from Wasson: first, the claim that ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms in prehistory caused or at least augments the growth of the forebrain circuits of Homo sapiens, and second, that some species of mushrooms such as Stropharia cubensis are emissaries from elsewhere in the universe. On the first point, McKenna went one step further than Wasson, who claimed that experimentation with psychoactive plants was the origin of religious experience, but not of higher consciousness itself, as McKenna argued. On the second point, McKenna took an even greater step. He proposed that mushroom spores can circulate freely through interstellar space, seeding various worlds with trans-galactic intelligence. The 'humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds' carries the essence of experience of many species and weaves countless life-threads into a vast tapestry of living intelligence. In short, McKenna saw in the "starseed" mushrooms a kind of unitive Logos, a transcendent species capable of overseeing and integrating the vast and varied realms of experience known to the creatures in those worlds.
Mijotes Literally, "half-united." Also spelled "mesotes." A strange term found only a couple of times in the Gnostic materials, NHC and elsewhere, referring to the intrapsychic capacity of humans being to follow their hearts and find their way in life by reliance on interior resources.
The mijotes might be defined as the auto-pilot function evident in many species, and not unique to humanity. For humans it isthe innate capacity that enables us to direct our personal lives toward goal that transcend our personal limits. This function has been recognized in religious teachings, mysticism, and modern psychology — consider, for instance, the "transcendent function" in the individuation process of C. G. Jung.
In New Age terms the mijotes is widely recognized as the "inner guide." However, most modern interpretations of the inner guiding function assume that it directs people toward personal fulfillment, rather than towards transpersonal aims. There is a strong narcissistic slant here, typical of the self-concern of the Piscean Age. Jesus, the primary mythological figure of the Age, is identified with this function and regarded as an indwelling presence:"the living Jesus" (a term that occurs in some Gnostic texts).
According to the Fallen Goddess Scenario, at a certain moment when Sophia was transforming into the earth, the Aeon Christos intervened to help Her put things in order. Paraphrases of this episode by the Church Fathers state that Christos "imparted a figure" to the vast matrix of species potential gestating in the newborn earth.(Ireneaus, Against Heresies, Book One, Ch. IV.1) Because Sophia alone could not manage all abundant life She was producing, and bring it into a coherent form, Christos imparted a self-guiding function to the myriad species, including humanity. We call it instinct. This function as it persists uniquely in human beings is called the mijotes, "half-united," because Christos produced it by half-uniting with the emergent species in Gaia's womb. After this exceptional deed of intervention, in which the entire Pleroma was involved (see below), Christos withdrew back to the cosmic center.
In the Gnostic view, Christos is an Aeon of the Pleroma, not the sole son of god who becomes incarnate in Jesus, but in Christian doctrines Christos is uniquely identified with the man Jesus as the savior of humanity. Clearly, this doctrine is a slurred or deliberately spun version of the Gnostic teaching on the intervention of Christos. Gnostic texts distinguish "the living Jesus" (that is, the intrapsychic guiding function) from the man Jesus, variously alleged to be the Messiah (for Jews) and the Incarnation (Christians). Some modern-day Christians also hold this distinction, insisting that they experience Jesus/Christ as an indwelling presence, a soul guide, and dismissing the doctrinal fixations attached to Jesus as the historical instrument of God. However, this view still does not dissociate Jesus in a sufficient way from the Old and New Testament, so that the nature of the Gnostic mijotes can be accurately discerned.
For Gnostics, as well as for some modern-day mystics who have encountered the "Etheric Christ," the mijotes is clearly a function and not an entity — or a function that works like an entity!! It is the primary navigational resource for human beings, an innate guiding capacity that was "installed" when the Aeon Christos "configured" the matrix of intelligent species burgeoning in Gaia's womb. Perhaps language borrowed from the realm of computer sciences can describe the Mijotes in a way that sets it apart from association with the historical and doctrinal Jesus.
Consistent with the analogy to computer operations, I call the mijotes "the cursor." The cursor on the computer screen has no content or intelligence of its own, yet it functions as a master mechanism in two ways: it "leads and locates" text, and it calls up specific applications. This is exactly how "the living Jesus" functions intrapsychically, yet nothing it does can be attributed to an indwelling entity as such. Imagine if I were to suppose that the cursor that leads and locates each line of text I write here were writing the text, or providing me with the ideas to be expressed in the text. The cursor does nothing of the sort. It is merely a dynamic index. It is void of content. It merely enables me to organize what I contain, internally.
When I point the cursor to an icon or item on a pull-down menu, and click, it gives me an application, a program to run, yet it is not the cursor itself that runs the application or supports the program. The application is "installed," and the cursor merely accesses it. Additional to acting as a dynamic index for writing text or calculating, the cursor functions as an accessing device. Here the analogy has to be slightly adjusted, because Gnostic cosmology states that the Aeon Christos deliberately configured some aspects of species intelligence. It describes how Christos, working with the entire Pleroma, did provide the installations, although Christos does not run the installations: they run all by themselves. Similarly, the installations I access by the cursor on my computer screen were designed and installed by technicians, a team of code-writers, but I do not require the presence of the team or any individual of it to run the programs. Once the installations have been installed by Christos, the mijotes persists as a capacity for accessing and activating them.
What are these automatic installations? These are human instincts, including love. In The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, the spirit of the Aeon Christos , channelled through the initiate, declares:
Before the foundation of the world, when the company of Aeons focussed in the Eight [where Sophia resides, outside the Pleroma], and when they had conferred on how to unite with Her, the answer was perfected in the ineffable realms by a living word, so that the impeccable uniting could be consummated by the Mesotes of Jesus, who inhabits them all [living species], and possesses them all, and who abides in the undivided power of love. (65:30 — 66:10)
What is called here "the living word" is comparable to the code in which computer programs are written. Once again, the cursor does not write this code, but it allows us to use it, and it activates the code so that programs are set running. Treat. Seth. describes the intrapsychic guiding function as "harmony of life and faith." (66: 25) This suggests that we have to live out the guiding process, existentially, but also have faith in how it works. In the Gnostic sense, faith in Jesus is faith in the cursor, in our human instincts, not irrational belief in a salvific power that dwells within or works upon us from a transmundane realm. Recognition of the inner teacher does not oblige anyone to enter institutional religion, adopt religious doctrines, admit the uniqueness and superiority of the historical Jesus as the Incarnation, or embrace the message of the Gospels. For Gnostics the operations of the mijotes are rational and super-rational, not beyond rationality but in a higher octave or extension of it. When our instincts kick in, we can operate on a level of rationality superior to ordinary reason. The mijotes "agreed with Nous [divine intelligence, the Sophianic endowment], which extends and always will extend into joyous unity, trustworthy, faithful in listening. .. It is rational wisdom, [the] spirit of truth in every mind." (66: 30 — 67:5) For more on the mijotes, see The Ultimate Jesus Trip (forthcoming).
Moral Design is one of the five master themes of metahistory.
Moral design is the imperative for acting truthfully in the situations posed by complex historical developments. It determines the way we define the purpose of the human adventure. Initial attempts to define purpose emerge in the context of another master theme, Eternal Conflict, because conflict demands moral judgments and forces black-and-white choices. Yet the sense of morality does not come into full operation until humanity is able to conceive a design, a pattern of overall and pervasive intention in the cosmos. In great measure, the record of history shows how humankind has interpreted the course of human events with the aim of understanding how everything that happens might fit into a master scheme.
What morality might have been when we lived in nature, before history, is uncertain, but within the flow of history morality is continually tested. Civilization is possible, we believe, because we have codified moral principles through the great religions. The three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, can be defined as world-scale belief-systems because they have impacted world history more powerfully than any other religious or philosophical systems. All three assert that the ultimate form of moral design is a contract between humanity and a creator god. This belief contrasts with spiritual philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism, which do not posit the existence of a creator god, as well as with the sacred traditions of indigenous people who find moral design in contact with nature and communion with non-human species. The course of history has largely been shaped by the dominance of the three world religions which all assert the superiority of the human species in the eyes of a single male creator god. The search for Moral Design outside the monotheistic paradigm represents one of the foremost challenges of metahistory.
Mysteries, Mystery Schools The mosaic system of initiatory cults of pre-Christian antiquity, each cult adapted to its region but all cults equally dedicated to the Magna Mater, the Great Goddess or Earth Mother. The fomer term is used for the initiatory system proper, and the latter for the university system of schools in which the initiates (telestes) taught.
To understand life in Pagan times, it is useful to ask: How were people educated? The answer may be surprizing, because it closely links Pagan religion with secular education, a combination difficult for us to appreciate.
Consider the Roman Empire in the times before the Christian Era, around 250 CE, for instance. The Empire stretched all across Europa and extended as well into the Mediterranean regions, including the Levant and North Africa. Ruins of the Greco-Roman era are found today in Libya, Italy, Turkey, the Balkans, Iberia, Ireland, and the British Isles as far north as the Orkney Islands. This vast array of archeological sites is evidence of the network of the Mystery cults. In each place where ruins are now found, regional cults flourished. At the same time, the infrastructure of the Mysteries was integral, common to all regions. Druids from Scotland could have conversed with Etruscan seers from Italy and Egyptian priests at Luxor, as well as with Indian Brahmins and Buddhist monks, known to have been present in Alexandria in the 3rd Century BCE. To those who carried out its program, the Mystery Experience was stated and sustained in universal terms. Having grasped this picture, we can add another dimension to it. The seers and adepts of the Mysteries did not merely initiate, they also educated. Part of their mission was directed inward, focussed on maintaining the sacred rites and inducting new generations of mystes, but another part was directed outward to the secular world. In Fragments of A Faith Forgotten, G. R. S. Mead wrote:
A persistent tradition in connection with all the great Mystery-institutions was that their several founders were the introducers of all the arts of civilization; They were either themselves gods or instructed in them bythe gods. They were the teachers of the infant races. They taught the arts, the nature of the gods, the unseen worlds, cosmology, anthropology, etc. ...We find the ancient world honey-combed with these institutions....The Mysteries were committed to the care of the most advanced pupils of humanity.(p. 46)
The last sentence is particularly telling. It indicates that in order to be the teachers of humanity, the initiates had to be good pupils. To be qualified for the extraordinary mission of guiding humanity, they had to be able to learn at genius level. To some extend what they learned they kept within the inner circles, sharing it exclusively with neophytes and fellow initiates. But to a great extent they imparted what they learned to the outside world. They set up educational guilds and developed an agenda based on the ninefold principle of the Muses. All throughout the classical world they taught arts and crafts. They wrote prolifically, and by the Christian era libraries existed in all the cult centers. Some of the larger libraries, such as that of Biblos in Lebanon and Alexandria in Egypt, held hundreds of thousands of texts. Almost all this literature was destroyed during the rise of Christianity, and later, the rise of Islam.
Knowing little or nothing of the situation in ancient Europa, modern people tend to assume that there could not have been much real education in antiquity. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to Gilbert Highet,
When the roman Empire was at its height, law and order, education, and the arts were widely distributed and almost universally respected. In the first centuries of the Christian era there was almost too much literature: and so many inscriptions survive, from so many towns and villages in so many provinces, that we can be sure that many, if not most of the population could read and write... It is not always understood nowadays how noble and widespread Greco-Roman civilization was, how it kept Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa peaceful, cultured, prosperous, and happy for centuries, and how much was lost... It was, in many respects, a better thing than our civilization until a few generation ago, and it may well prove to have been a better thing all in all. (The Classical Tradition, p. 3)
If it is really true that the world of Pagan antiquity was educated and cultivated to a high degree and a wise extent, we must wonder, Who were the educators? Scholars of religion who pronounce on the Mysteries do not consider this question because the problem of education in antiquity does not fall into their sandbox. Consequently it never occurs to them to associate the Mystery Schools with education.
The extraordinary nexus between education and spirituality in antiquity might be understood by comparison to the monastic system of the European Middle Ages. It is well known that a network of monasteries existed across Europe, and the purpose of the network was twofold: to induct and train monks for the service of the Church, and to preserve manuscripts. Through the Dark Ages, books were preserved in the scriptoria of the monasteries and the monks themselves sometimes assumed the role of educators in the secular zone, although in a limited way. All in all, monastically centered education was a paltry affair compared to the grand scale of education in the Mystery Schools. And monastic literacy was largely confined to dogmatic and doctrinal texts, a far cry from the eclecticism of Pagan learning. Finally, the monastic system was a men-only club, an extension of the patriarchal dominator program run by the Catholic Church. The Mysteries, by contrast, were completely egalitarian. Both sexes were initiated and both men and women taught in the guilds and schools associated with the regional cults. In fact, the last of the known Mystery School teachers was a woman, Hypatia of Alexandria, whose murder by Christian fanatics in 415 CE is often taken to mark the onset of the Dark Ages.