Gnosticism

Gnosticism (from Greek gnōsis, "knowledge") is a modern umbrella term for a family of religious movements and writings from the early centuries CE, most of them Christian or Jewish-Christian. They taught that salvation comes through direct, experiential knowledge (Gnosis) of a hidden, perfect God and of the divine spark within the self. Many of them told a myth in which the visible world was made not by that highest God but by a lesser, ignorant creator (the Demiurge).^[1] Since the 1990s, scholars have argued vigorously over whether "Gnosticism" names a real historical religion at all, or only a category built by ancient heresy-hunters and modern historians.^[2] This wiki uses the word in the practical sense of the myths and texts summarized below. They supply the "Gnostic perspective" on the beings of the Alien Archive.

The word

Gnosis is an ordinary Greek noun for knowledge, especially personal acquaintance rather than intellectual knowledge. The adjective gnostikos meant "learned" or "intellectual" in classical Greek. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 180) used it of the school of Valentinus, and the English word "Gnosticism" was coined only in the 17th century by Henry More, in a commentary on the Book of Revelation.^[1] No ancient group is known to have called its religion "Gnosticism".

The classic myth

Texts differ enormously, but the "classic" Gnostic myth, told most fully in the Apocryphon of John, runs roughly as follows:^[1][3]

1. Beyond all being is the Monad or invisible Spirit, a God so perfect that "it is not right to think of him as a god, or something similar".^[4]
2. The Monad's first Thought, Barbelo, and a series of further emanations, the Aeons, together make up the Pleroma ("Fullness").
3. The youngest aeon, Sophia (Wisdom), acts without her partner's consent and brings forth a malformed being, Yaldabaoth, who steals some of her light.
4. Ignorant of the realm above, Yaldabaoth creates the lower cosmos with his Archons ("rulers") and declares himself the only God.
5. The archons fashion Adam. Tricked into breathing Sophia's stolen power into him, they find that the human being is brighter than they are, and they try to imprison him in a body, in forgetfulness and in fate. The Apocryphon of John calls their tool the Counterfeit Spirit.
6. Revealers from above (Sophia's Epinoia, the heavenly Seth, Christ) awaken the hidden spark. Those who receive gnosis ascend back to the light.

The myth is a bold rereading of Genesis. Scholars place its roots in Hellenistic Judaism, Middle Platonism (with its craftsman-god, the demiurgos of Plato's Timaeus) and early Christianity.^[1]

Main currents

• Sethianism: Named after Seth, the third son of Adam. Its main text is the Apocryphon of John, and it includes the Gospel of the Egyptians, Trimorphic Protennoia, Zostrianos and Allogenes. Bentley Layton called this "classical Gnosticism". It is the group to which Irenaeus most clearly applied the name.^[1]
• Valentinianism: The school of the Alexandrian teacher Valentinus (c. 100 – c. 165), who taught in Rome. It told a more philosophical, comparatively monistic version of the myth with thirty aeons and a double Sophia.^[5]
• Basilideans, Thomasine Christianity (the Gospel of Thomas), and figures such as Marcion, who is often grouped with the Gnostics though his system differs.
• Later movements with a family resemblance: Manichaeism in the 3rd century, the still-living Mandaean religion of Iraq and Iran, and medieval dualists such as the Bogomils and Cathars.^[1]

Sources

Until the 20th century, Gnosticism was known mostly through its opponents. These included Irenaeus's Against Heresies (c. 180), Hippolytus's Refutation of All Heresies, Tertullian's Against the Valentinians and Epiphanius's Panarion. The heresiologists wrote to refute, and scholars treat their reports with caution.^[1] A few Coptic books survived independently: the Askew Codex (the Pistis Sophia), the Bruce Codex and the Berlin Codex.^[6] Everything changed in 1945, when a local farmer near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt found a sealed jar containing twelve leather-bound papyrus codices. These held some fifty-two tractates in Coptic, translated from Greek originals. The manuscripts date from the 3rd and 4th centuries, and the codices may have been buried after Bishop Athanasius condemned non-canonical books in 367.^[1] See Nag Hammadi Library.

History

The origins of Gnosticism are disputed. Some scholars (Simone Pétrement, David Brakke) see it as a movement within early Christianity. Others trace it to speculation within Second Temple Judaism that later absorbed stories about Jesus. James M. Robinson noted that no Gnostic text clearly predates Christianity.^[1] The great teachers (Basilides, Valentinus, Ptolemy, Heracleon) flourished from the mid-2nd to the early 3rd century. Valentinus is said to have been considered for bishop of Rome.^[7] Condemnation by the emerging orthodox church, and later imperial law, drove the movements into decline in the West. Sethian thinkers also clashed with Neoplatonists such as Plotinus in the 3rd century.^[1]

Scholarly debate: is there such a thing?

Twentieth-century scholars tried several definitions. Adolf von Harnack called it "the acute Hellenization of Christianity". The history-of-religions school looked for pre-Christian Persian roots. Hans Jonas read it existentially, as the religion of cosmic alienation. The 1966 Messina conference proposed a formal definition that has since been abandoned.^[1]

In 1996 Michael Allen Williams published Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. He argued that the usual features ascribed to "Gnostics", including hatred of the body, asceticism or libertinism, and elitism, do not hold across the texts. He proposed replacing the term with "biblical demiurgical traditions".^[8] In What Is Gnosticism? (2003), Karen L. King argued that "Gnosticism" is a modern reification "deriving ultimately from an early Christian discourse of orthodoxy and heresy". She held that modern scholarship had "simultaneously reinscribed, elaborated, and deviated from this discourse".^[2] Others, following Bentley Layton, keep a narrower term. David Brakke's The Gnostics (2010) identifies a specific "Gnostic school" of Sethian texts united by a shared myth and ritual.^[9] April DeConick, by contrast, treats Gnosticism as a real "countercultural spirituality" and traces its afterlife through Theosophy into today's New Age.^[10]

Modern revival

Gnostic ideas influenced 19th- and 20th-century esotericism, including Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy, Carl Jung, Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick and Harold Bloom. Several modern churches, such as the Ecclesia Gnostica, describe themselves as Gnostic.^[1] Much contemporary "starseed", "ascension" and extraterrestrial spirituality draws, knowingly or not, on this Theosophical inheritance, as DeConick's history makes clear.^[10]

In the Alien Archive

The ancient Gnostic texts do not mention extraterrestrials. What they offer the Alien Archive is a mythic grammar for thinking about beings above and around humanity, some benevolent and some controlling. They also share the Archive's premise that awakening is a matter of inner knowing, freely chosen. The Archive's "Proceed with Playfulness" page asks readers to "shift your fear of the unknown into playful curiosity", and reminds them: "YOU have the free will to choose what you accept as truth." That is close in spirit to Gnostic teachers who wanted people to test revelation against their own inner experience. Useful points of contact:

• The Pleroma of cooperating light-beings and the Archive's Galactic Federation, Celestials and Arcturians.
• Sophia and Barbelo and the Archive's Lady of Light.
• The lion-faced serpent Yaldabaoth and his Archons and the Archive's hierarchical Reptilians and Draconians. Modern writers such as John Lamb Lash have recast the archons as soulless, non-earthly intruders on human consciousness.^[11]
• The Counterfeit Spirit of the Apocryphon of John and the Archive's Mimic Entities. The archons' fabrication of Adam's body and the Archive's Clones and Hybrids.
• The Gnostic division of humanity into spiritual, soulish and material natures and the Archive's Star Family, whose members "cover the full spectrum" of intentions.
• The Ogdoad and Hebdomad, eight spheres above seven, and the Archive's language of "5D–12D frequency bands" and 5D+ Celestial Beings.

See also

• Gnosis
• Sethianism
• Valentinianism
• Nag Hammadi Library
• Apocryphon of John
• Sophia
• Pleroma
• Demiurge
• Archons
• Proceed with Playfulness
• About the Alien Archive

References