By
Jay Kinney
Every
dog has its day, so they say, and it looks like
Gnosticism, an ancient approach to spiritual experience,
may be having its day, once again. Of course, despite
the best efforts of the early Catholic Church, Gnosticism
never really disappeared, but its reappearance over
the centuries has been fleeting and sporadic. Why,
as we march into a new millennium, is this hidden
stream of quasi-Christian mysticism triggering a
fresh interest among both spiritual seekers and
readers of popular novels?
Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller, The Da Vinci Code,
surely shares part of the credit. This publishing
phenomenon, which sold over 6 million copies, took
a simmering interest in the Knights Templar, the
Divine Feminine, alleged secret societies such as
the Priory of Sion, the Holy Grail, and the question
of the historical Jesus, and stirred these ingredients
together with a generous dollop of Gnosticism.
The result was a blockbuster thriller that unexpectedly
caught the popular imagination. Despite the fact
that at least two other previous thrillers, The
Da Vinci Legacy by Lewis Perdue (1983), and
Kingdom Come (2000) by Jim Hougan, had overlapped
much of the same territory, lightning struck Brown’s
novel and sparked innumerable dinner-table discussions
of heretofore-arcane topics such as Mary Magdalene’s
real relationship to Jesus.
But the success of The Da Vinci Code is just
the culminating phase of a gradual public awareness
of Gnostic matters that extends back at least a
century to the great Occult Revival of the late
19th century. At that time, Gnosticism slowly re-emerged
from the shadows, nudged by the French occultist
Eliphas Lévi, and propelled along by Madame Blavatsky’s
Theosophical Society, French neo-gnostics such as
Papus and Jean Bricaud, and researchers such as
G.R.S. Mead (whose pioneering discussion of the
Gnostics, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten,
was for many decades one of the few sourcebooks
on the subject for general readers).
However, it was the discovery of a cache of ancient
Gnostic scriptures at Nag Hammadi in the Egyptian
desert in 1945 that really set off the modern phase
of the Gnostic revival. Although their translation
into English was not complete until the late 1970s,
early access to some of the writings inspired the
great psychologist Carl Jung to draw parallels between
the ancient Gnostics and modern depth psychology.
The publication in 1977 of the Nag Hammadi Library
translations, followed in 1978 by religious scholar
Elaine Pagels’ best-selling exposition, The Gnostic
Gospels, guaranteed that Gnosticism would not
go away anytime soon. But before we take a further
look at the burgeoning phenomenon of modern Gnosticism,
a review of the ancient Gnostic teachings is in
order.
Gnosis
and the Church
Though scholars argue there were Gnostic teachings
that predated the early Christian era, what is most
commonly thought of as Gnosticism consisted of numerous
Christian sects that thrived in the immediate centuries
after the ministry of Jesus. These sects, often
gathered around charismatic mystics, certainly thought
of themselves as Christian, and it was only their
emphasis on gnosis, or divine knowledge,
that later earned them the sweeping label of Gnostic.
As Christianity spread outside the confines of a
specifically Jewish faith, it was perhaps inevitable
that some gentile Christians would reinterpret their
conception of God to distinguish Him from the tribal
“G-d of Israel” Whose Covenant with
His people seemed anchored to their particular identity
as Jews. Christian aspirations to a universal faith,
applicable to anyone with ears to hear, led many
Gnostics to posit that God the Father, of whom Jesus
spoke, must be a different God altogether: a hitherto
Unknown God Who existed far above the earthly realm
and was free of ethnic contracts or favouritism.
Christ functioned as the messenger from this remote
and impartial God, and some Gnostic scriptures downgraded
the Jealous God of the Old Testament to the role
of Demiurge, a lesser creator-god who brought a
flawed Creation into existence and mistakenly ruled
it with a heavy hand as if he were the True God.1
Thus, in the Gnostic view, salvation from this diminished
material realm of suffering and injustice depended
less on one’s mere beliefs or on the following of
religious laws that the Demiurge put in place, than
on the individual’s inner experience of gnosis –
a divine knowledge of the cosmic order and one’s
true identity. The Gnostic scriptures alluded to
Christ’s secret teachings, which would aid the Gnostic
to embrace gnosis, and armed with this knowledge,
to escape the illusory realm of the Demiurge at
the time of death.
There are any number of reasons why Gnosticism was
bound to come into conflict with that portion of
the Church which was consolidating into an institutional
monolith. Gnosis, by its very nature, was an individual
experience that eluded systematisation. While the
Gnostics had priests and even bishops, their leadership
derived from their mystical bonafides, not from
a bureaucratic position of authority. Furthermore,
the canonical Gospels portrayed Jesus as the fulfillment
of Old Testament prophecy and the Messiah promised
to the Hebrews. The Gnostics’ break with what they
considered the Demiurge was at cross purposes with
this historical reading and undermined the working
mythos of the institutional Church.
In another example of scriptural reversal, some
Gnostic versions of the Creation story of Adam and
Eve portrayed the Serpent as Liberator, offering
the apple as a means to knowledge unfairly denied
to humankind by the despotic Demiurge. There was
obviously no way to accept this counter-version
and the traditional version at the same time.
Divine
Feminine
The most common Gnostic revision of the Creation
story spoke of Sophia (Wisdom), an extension of
the True God, venturing forth from the Pleroma (the
fullness of the ineffable divine realm), producing
an aborted spiritual being, Ialdobaoth (the Demiurge),
who in turn created the flawed material world. Sophia,
seeing sparks of the divine entrapped in matter,
descended to try and free them and was herself entrapped.
It took the efforts of the Christ (pre-existing
in the Pleroma) to extricate her and return her,
past the Archons presiding over intermediate planes,
to her rightful place beside Him: a tale symbolic
of the plight of the soul enmeshed in illusion.
Finally, the indications in Gnostic scriptures,
such as the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary,
that Mary Magdalene was closer to Jesus than the
other disciples and received secret teachings denied
to them, undercut both St. Paul’s misogynist version
of Christianity and the Catholic Church’s claim
to legitimacy based on St. Peter’s supposed selection
as the “rock” on which the Church would be built.
The prominent role given to the Divine Feminine
via the Gnostic veneration of the Magdalene and
Sophia was partly recuperated by the Roman Church
through the significance it later afforded the Virgin
Mary, but this status was subsumed within the overall
supremacy of a Church run by celibate males.
Whatever Gnosticism’s virtues as an effective path
to gnosis and to unconditioned consciousness, it
was simply too idiosyncratic and contrarian to make
the grade as a stabilising component of Roman power.
Its subversive counter-myths stood little chance
of being integrated into a social order based on
top-down power relations emanating from Rome
and Constantinople. The prevailing
Church absorbed those elements of the Gnostic worldview
that best served its own ends and scuttled the rest,
consigning the Gnostics to the oblivion of heresy
and their scriptures to the bonfires of proscribed
texts.
Of course attempts to obliterate ideas or spiritual
currents that remain attractive to some are never
wholly successful. Pockets of Gnostic alienation
persisted among the Eastern European Bogomils, and
eventually influenced the Cathars of Languedoc (southern
France). The scourge of the Inquisition originated
as a response to the growing influence of the Cathars,
whose 12th century challenge to the Catholic Church
could no longer be tolerated. The Albigensian Crusade
in the 13th century effectively wiped out the Cathars.2
Subsequent Gnostic impulses and teachings survived
as heavily-cloaked myths and symbol systems within
marginal esoteric currents of the West.
It was only once the religious and social hegemony
of the Church was diminished by the succeeding blows
of the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance,
and the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment,
that there was sufficient elbow room for Gnosticism
to re-emerge into the light of day.
Yet, the question remains why Gnosticism should
prove of special interest to increasing numbers
today. Are there particular characteristics of today’s
society that resonate with the Gnostic worldview?
One answer is provided if we consider the popularity
of “The Matrix” movies and the influential ideas
of science fiction author Philip K. Dick.
The
Illusion of Daily Life
Central to both the Matrix and to Dick is the creeping
perception that things are not as they seem: our
perception of reality, both individual and collective,
is an artificial construct masking the unnerving
truth. In ripping away the façade of normality,
we come face to face with our true dilemma – we
live in a maze of illusions and self-delusions from
which we must extricate ourselves. This is, of course,
a fundamentally Gnostic worldview.
The ancient Gnostics were aware that material existence
is, at its root, a beguiling and temporary illusion.
(Hindus called this “Maya.”) Modern physics has
confirmed this at the sub-molecular level, where
one can see that apparently solid objects are, in
fact, composed of moving bits of energy that are
neither wholly particle nor wave. The closer one
looks, the less there is to see. The vast emptiness
of outer space is mirrored by the vast emptiness
within matter itself.
Esoteric traditions around the world teach that
consciousness can exist independent of the body,
and that the ability to deliver our consciousness
from its addiction to sensory input and compulsive
thought patterns can lead to an experience of divine
consciousness (gnosis). The message of the Christ
of the Gnostics was not that he considered himself
the unique and only Son of God, but that each person
has the potential to expand their consciousness
across the vast emptiness to the level of godhood
or Self-realisation.
If the illusoriness of daily life was self-evident
in the relatively simple world of two millennia
ago, it is becoming even more so, for those with
the eyes to see, in the present world of cybernetic
virtual realities, Hollywood dream-worlds, instant
messaging, corporate branding campaigns, and information
warfare. The ancient Gnostics were resigned to the
fact that the majority of humans were fatally caught
in the illusion, and for this they were called elitists.
Similarly, modern Gnostics perceive that most people
around them are inextricably locked into a delusory
existence in which their potential consciousness
is siphoned off in exchange for corporate profit
and material survival. This, too, is a minority
perception, but it is steadily growing.
The Gnostic rush many of us felt upon first seeing
the Wachowski Brothers’ “The Matrix” was the heady
sensation that somehow a deprogramming meme had
made it through the corporate maze of AOL-Time-Warner,
and that the dream factory itself had been tricked
into promulgating a flash of gnosis. Millions responded
and suddenly there was much more money on the table.
All too predictably, the second and third Matrix
films smothered the first film’s spark of insight
under tons of ever more dazzling special effects,
violence, and pretentious symbolism. The still small
voice of the wake-up call embedded in film one was
drowned out by the din of its own success. The series’
degeneration was an uncanny recapitulation of the
suppression of ancient Gnosticism by the early Church.
In the end, the Matrix – like the Church before
it – emerged triumphant.
Of course, it is a bit of a leap from perceiving
daily life as delusory to embracing an ancient cosmology
that specifies a false god, a True God, a malevolent
pantheon of Archons, and a hieros gamos
(divine marriage) of Christ and Sophia. Unless one
is in the market for a ready-made dramatic cast
of spiritual entities to believe in, the Gnostic
myths best serve as metaphors for one’s dilemma
– and, in fact, that may have been the role they
played for the early Gnostics, as well.
There are two ways to view the Gnostic myths as
potent metaphors: one inner and one outer. The inner
way is to see the Gnostic cosmology as a visionary
description of the hurdles one must leap in meditation.
In trying to ascend to a contemplative state of
pure consciousness, one must move beyond the incessant
activity of the mind (the Demiurge), and past one’s
fears and compulsions (the Archons), before one
can arrive at a consciousness beyond time and space
(the Pleroma). The successful achievement of this
gnosis while still “in the body” prepares one for
the similar passage that one’s consciousness must
take after death.
An outer reading of the Gnostic cosmology, on the
other hand, might consider the Demiurge to be anyone’s
flawed and limited image of God, which must be seen
through and surpassed on the way to true spiritual
insight. The Archons would be the many social laws,
institutions, and corporate entities that hamstring
one’s existence. On this level, a kind of external
gnosis would be one’s realisation of the ultimate
inability of these earthly captors to imprison our
higher self. In this reading, Christ’s crucifixion
and resurrection serve as metaphors for our own
daily immolation and extrication. In this instance,
a Gnostic motto might be: “Don’t let the bastards
get you down!”
Wandering
Bishops
Reading The Da Vinci Code or The Gnostic
Gospels or watching “The Matrix” are all very
well, but such books and movies do not by themselves
constitute a Gnostic revival. Revivals or movements
require actual social vehicles to engage and embody
people’s interests. One place this is happening
– albeit on a small scale – is in the low-profile
milieu of small independent Gnostic churches. An
examination of this phenomenon leads us to the quirky
turf of “wandering bishops” – a curious subculture
of purported Catholic, Orthodox, and Gnostic bishops
who usually (and painstakingly) trace their lines
of apostolic succession back to (wait for it) St.
Peter or one of the other apostles. This requires
some explaining.
The mainstream Roman Catholic Church hangs its legitimacy
on unbroken lines of consecration from bishop to
bishop, extending all the way back to St. Peter.
Only bishops (or higher clergy) can ordain priests
or consecrate other bishops – a form of organisational
quality-control, as well as a narrow conduit for
the divine grace that is said to be conveyed in
the sacrament of ordination. Since an ordination
or a consecration makes the recipient “a priest
forever unto the order of Melchizadek,” a
priest or bishop who later turns heretic, or otherwise
runs afoul of the Church’s hierarchy, retains legitimate
Orders – even if forbidden to celebrate Mass or
excommunicated from the Church.
Employing a liberal interpretation of this curious
rule, schismatic churches such as the Jansenist Dutch Church, which broke with Rome
in 1723, could claim legitimate apostolic succession
despite their status outside the Roman Church’s
umbrella. Taking this logic one step further, some
bishops consecrated by bishops of the Dutch
Church (later the Old Catholic Church, following an alignment with
other “national” churches in 1889) claimed the right
to start their own churches and pass on the line
of “valid” consecration. For instance, Bishop James
Ingall Wedgewood was consecrated a bishop in the
Old Catholic Church in 1916 and within two years
had founded the Liberal Catholic Church, which became
a kind of esoteric house church for the Theosophical
Society.3
One of the most influential of these independent
bishops was Joseph René Vilatte, an Old Catholic
missionary in Wisconsin, who
sought and received consecration as bishop from
the Syrian Jacobite
Church in 1892 in Ceylon
and subsequently consecrated several other bishops
in North America and France who consecrated numerous
other bishops in turn.
Needless to say, notions of doctrinal fidelity or
consistency – which were understandably a key concern
of Rome – were lost in the shuffle, with the result
that independent bishops, who were often “more Catholic
than the Pope,” sometimes shared the same apostolic
lines as esoterically inclined bishops with Gnostic
leanings. Over time, this led to a new generation
of Gnostic bishops who could now claim apostolic
succession. Exactly why apostolic succession
would matter to latter-day Gnostics is something
of a mystery, particularly since whatever legitimacy
the original Gnostics claimed derived from gnosis
itself, not from institutional standing. One suspects
that even heretics desire approval, and in the absence
of Gnostic lines of succession, most latter-day
Gnostic bishops are quite happy to gain succession
from St. Peter, illicit though it may be – especially
if it tweaks the nose of the Vatican.4
One Gnostic “Patriarch” in France, Jules Doinel
(Tau Valentin II), sidestepped the issue altogether
by receiving “a double spiritual consecration; the
first by Jesus in person, the second during a spiritualist
séance by two Bogomile bishops.”5
Doinel, who founded the Universal Gnostic Church,
went on to consecrate the noted French occultists
Papus and Sédir, thus empowering further Gnostic
lines, some of which have continued to the present.
Another Gnostic group of French origin, the elusive
Holy Order of Miriam of Magdala, has cited traditions
of a female apostolic line extending back to Mary
Magdalene, but has attached no importance to providing
verification of such traditions. The spurious Priory
of Sion, celebrated in The Da Vinci Code
and hyped in Holy Blood, Holy Grail – and
likely of no earlier origin than 1956 – avoided
ecclesiastical trappings altogether, preferring
to concoct a lineage based on the supposed bloodline
of Jesus and Mary Magdalene which the Priory claimed
to guard.6
Perhaps representative of the Gnostic branch of
bishops in the English-speaking world was one Richard
Duc de Palatine, an Australian originally named
Ronald Powell, who was initially ordained in the
Liberal Catholic Church and, in 1953, consecrated
a bishop by Mar Georgius I (Hugh George de Willmott
Newman), Patriarch of Glastonbury, one of the most
fecund independent bishops. Palatine
then founded his own Pre-Nicene Gnostic Catholic
Church. Palatine, whose penchant
for organising esoteric orders was second to none,
also founded the Order of the Pleroma, the Brotherhood
of the Pleroma, the Disciplina Arcani, and the Hermetic
Brotherhood of Light. These appear to have led a
largely mail-order existence.7
Palatine’s episcopal concerns
were intermingled with esoteric, magical, and even
Freemasonic preoccupations, but in spite of this
– or perhaps due to it – some serious modern Gnostics
became associated with him. The most notable is
Bishop Stephan Hoeller, arguably the foremost proponent
of a contemporary Gnosticism.
Hoeller was consecrated by Palatine
in 1967 and for a number of years worked within
the fold of his Church and other groups. His Los
Angeles-based Ecclesia Gnostica (Church of Gnosis)
grew out of his work with the Pre-Nicene Church,
and Hoeller has been an indefatigable author and
synthesizer, drawing upon ancient Gnostic sources,
Jungian psychology, and esoteric Christian concepts,
in an effort to construct a modern Gnostic presence.
Secret
Teachings of Jesus
As a diligent search of the Web will show, there
are an ever increasing number of fledgling Gnostic
churches, most of them situated in, or derived from,
the “wandering bishop” milieu. Many of them consist
of little more than a bishop and a local congregation,
if that. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.
After all, the ancient Gnostic sects amounted to
the same thing: scattered groups with little uniformity
between them. But it also presents the would-be
seeker of gnosis with a certain dilemma: Can gnosis
be taught? And if it can, who is qualified to teach
it?
The ancient Gnostics claimed to be guardians of
the secret teachings of Jesus, teachings that were
lost when Gnosticism was defeated. Formal issues
of apostolic succession aside, no modern Gnostics
can claim to perpetuate those teachings in unaltered
form, because the chains of transmission have been
lost. Even the scriptures that have been recovered
– as fascinating as they may be – retain an opaque
quality, because the original interpretive keys
are absent.
Thus, any modern Gnostic group or teacher must be
carefully evaluated, based on subtle qualities that
evidence real spiritual depth and understanding.
Impressive lists of titles, degrees, and credentials
mean little if there is no indication of a voice
that speaks from the experience of gnosis. While
it may be too much to expect that any given Gnostic
teacher is going to be the embodiment of divine
illumination, one still has the right to expect
that those who talk the talk can walk the walk.
Divine knowledge may be gained in a variety of ways
– after all, it was not the exclusive possession
of the Gnostics, any more than the True God is the
possession of any single religion. If teachers of
real attainment choose to use the metaphors of ancient
Gnosticism to encourage self-discovery, then the
Gnostic revival may fulfill its promise. But if
the rekindled interest in Gnosticism is going to
amount to anything besides a few books and movies
and an unsatisfied hunger for enlightenment, we
need to see a growing indication of the true discovery
of inner godhood, not a fruitless scramble to decipher
a few fragments of someone else’s gnosis.
Footnotes:
1.
Some scholars have suggested that this reframing
of G-d was first done by Jewish intellectuals who
were themselves dissatisfied with the Torah’s portrayal
of the deity. Thus early Christian Gnosticism may
have been influenced by, or may have been an extension
of, a Jewish Gnosticism intent on reinterpreting
the Jewish religious traditions. See: Birger A.
Pearson, “The Problem of ‘Jewish Gnostic’ Literature,”
in Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early Christianity,
edited by Charles W. Hedrick and Robert Hodgson,
Jr. (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Publishers, 1986),
pp. 15-35.
2.
Yuri Stoyanov, The Hidden Tradition in
Europe (London: Penguin/Arkana,
1994).
3.
The premiere exposition of this milieu is Peter
F. Anson’s Bishops at Large (London: Faber
& Faber, 1964), which is both droll and exhaustively
detailed. It is, sadly, long out of print. A more
recent (and apologetic) discussion of the phenomenon
can be found in Lewis Keizer’s The Wandering
Bishops: Apostles of a New Spirituality (2000),
available in PDF format at: www.hometemple.org/WanBishWeb%20Complete.pdf.
4.
The Vatican,
for its part, seems to have nothing encouraging
to say about independent bishops. One of the more
common claims of Vatican recognition
for the sacraments and orders of the Liberal Catholic
Church, for instance – a supposed positive ruling
by the Roman Congregation of Rites – has been exposed
as a hoax. (See: “Rome
and Liberal Catholic Orders,” by Rev. L. K. Langley
at: www.lcc.cc/tlc/lxvi1/rome.htm) The Vatican’s stance appears to be that so-called
valid orders are worthless without the Church’s
recognition.
5.
Anson, p. 307.
6.
See: Robert Richardson, “The Priory of Sion Hoax,”
GNOSIS Magazine #51, pp. 49-55, (www.gnosismagazine.com).
Reprinted in New Dawn No. 61 (July-August
2000).
7.
Anson, pp. 492-495, and J. Gordon Melton, The
Encyclopedia of American Religions, Second Edition
(Detroit, Mich: Gale Research, 1987), pp. 612, 618.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Jay
Kinney is co-author of Hidden Wisdom:
A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (Penguin/Arkana,
1999), editor of The Inner West (Tarcher/Penguin,
2004), and was publisher and editor in chief of
Gnosis Magazine, 1985-1999. (www.gnosismagazine.com).
His writings and art have appeared in Wired, Whole
Earth Review, and many alternative publications.
He is a long time contributor to New Dawn magazine.
Jay currently resides in San
Francisco, USA.
