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Human beings are not only the funniest monkeys: they are the sexiest ones as well. In many ways we are a species singularly devoted to sex. We talk, write, read, joke and argue about it; we dress and undress for it, and, given favourable circumstances, we perform it regularly. More importantly, and sometimes lamentably, we have innumerable laws and commandments to organise, punish, curb, repress and otherwise influence sexual actions and feelings and have devised psychological penances of guilt and shame which we come to attach to our sexuality.

Because of these and related circumstances, most people are confused and bewildered about sex much of the time, and those who profess not to be thus flummoxed tend to take umbrage under clichés and half truths which they have consciously accepted, but which are not in harmony with either their instinctual or their spiritual natures.

It goes without saying that if the Gnostic worldview is any kind of a worldview at all, it must be able to address itself meaningfully to this predicament and thus to suggest spiritually sound ways in which men and women might successfully extricate themselves from the same. The present essay is an attempt to suggest some Gnostic ways of viewing and dealing with sexuality, and in offering it to the reader, the author is not unmindful of certain hazards.

Psychoanalyst Edward Glover once suggested that writing on psychologically charged subjects should be classified as a dangerous occupation. When in the course of such writing one happens to expose the unconscious motives of some persons, pandemonium is certain to follow. The psychologically exposed individuals frequently relieve their anxiety by attacking the writer who has presumed to disturb their precarious and cherished peace of mind. Martyrdom is surely not an uncommon experience to the Gnostic, and if some form of it befall the author, the risk will hopefully have been worth taking!

The ancient term “Gnosis” has two very useful modern analogues; they are the words “consciousness” and “meaning.” Both of these are vitally important to any useful consideration of sexuality. Without consciousness, in the psychological sense, sexuality is a mere expression of instinct: Useful in its domain, but unrelated to the enhancement of life, to the experience of the fullness of being. With the coming of consciousness, all experiences, including the sexual ones, acquire meaning. As consciousness adds a greatly needed component to experience, so meaning brings us the experience of totality, of the fullness (Pleroma) extolled by the Gnostics.

Between the reality of our lives lived in time and the quality of life’s timelessness, between our personal and mundane experiences and the realm which transcends the tangible world, there exists a creative tensional relationship of opposites. The Apostle Thomas, reporting the words of Jesus, reminds us that the saving, or Christ principle, always comes to us to make the two into one, to unite the above and the below, the left and the right, the inner and the outer, and the male and the female into a single one.

The reconciling agent of all such opposites is meaning. When, on the other hand, the tension between the poles of existence is lacking, then, as C.G. Jung has expressed it, human beings “have the feeling that they are haphazard creatures without meaning, and it is this feeling that prevents them from living their lives with the intensity it demands if it is to be enjoyed to the full. Life becomes stale and is no longer the exponent of the complete human being.” (Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung).

Sexuality is one of the most important tensional relationships of the opposites in life. It is therefore evident that it must have, it does have, great meaning. To leave such a rich mine of meaning, of Gnosis, unexplored would be a grave omission indeed. Let us then proceed with our exploration. As it is useful in such cases, we shall proceed from the ground upwards, as it were, and begin with the evidence of the physical aspect of humankind by reviewing the evidence of biology.

The Gnosis of Biology

The human species is a unique one in many ways, and not the least claim to such uniqueness is to be found in the sexual sphere. The human is the sexiest animal on earth. No other sexually reproducing species makes love with such frequency, and consequently, sexually toned behaviour saturates a large portion of the individual and social life of every man and woman. There is a biological reason for this. Unlike the female of every other species, the human female is capable of constant sexual arousal. She is biologically capable of copulating every single day of her adult life. She can make love during pregnancy, and she can become sexually active shortly after having a child. In fact, she can engage in sex whenever she pleases.

Animals are far less sexy than humans. All female animals have a period of heat (the estrus) during which they copulate, and when this period is over, neither the females nor the males of the species engage regularly in sex. (Among caged baboons and chimpanzees one may observe some sexual activity outside of the period of heat, as one may among free chimps and orangutans, but their sexual activities at “unusual” times are minimal when compared to the human.) Unlike humans, female animals do not accept males while menstruating, they do not initiate sex during pregnancy, and they do not resume their menstrual cycle before their young are weaned.

Due to the so-called “silent ovulation” (the absence of the signs of heat) of the human female, her fertility is never dramatically announced as it is among the animals. The result is that human couples do not know when a woman is ready to conceive. In order to insure the conception of offspring, humans thus must make love regularly, even past the time when conception has occurred. Similarly, especially where breast-feeding is not prolonged, human mothers are capable of resuming their ovulation about six weeks after delivering a child. There seems to be an unmistakable conspiracy of nature directed toward motivating human beings to make love daily, for the human female, alone of all other females, is uniquely designed to do so!

Anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, in her book The Sex Contract (William Morrow and Co., 1982) traces the evolutionary development of the unique human sexual situation. She tells us that the genetic evolutionary process which led to the present condition of humanity in regards to sex began about 8 million years ago, when humans became accustomed to walking upright. Protohominid females who delivered their young in a relatively immature state had a better chance of surviving childbirth, because the smaller birth canal, developed as the result of walking, made the delivery of large, developed infants hazardous. The mothers, now forced to care for their children for a long period, were more prone to engage in sex outside of their limited periods of fertility than they were wont to do earlier in their evolution. Since the most popular females were fed and protected most adequately, they tended to survive in greater numbers and thus passed on their genetic traits to more offspring. Thus our present patterns of biologically unlimited sexual intercourse came into being.

Dr. Fisher writes: “With the stimulus of constantly available sex, protohominids had begun the most fundamental exchange the human race would ever make.” The fundamental exchange consisted in bringing males and females more closely together than hitherto would have been possible. The bond of constant sexual interest kept them together in each other’s company; it made them divide their labours, to exchange food, to share the daily work and joys of living. Men and women became aware of each other emotionally, and eventually mentally and intuitively as the result of the sexual force which tied them together, creating a never abating forcefield of dynamic tension between them. Sex has become the progenitor of affection, love, relatedness, and above all, consciousness. From purely biological data we may thus infer with some justification that the coming of unlimited sexual expression became the fountain and origin of vast achievements of human consciousness which otherwise could and would not have come to pass. The implications of this insight for past, present and future are large indeed, and should be apparent to all.

The Gnosis of Psychohistory

Human biology has its history, and so does the human mind, or psyche. As one might expect, the importance of sexuality and of its influence on various aspects of human life are very much part of this history of the mind. Psychohistorians, whose theories contain elements relevant to the concerns of sexuality, are numerous. Among those inspired by Freud, singular distinction belongs to G. Rattray Taylor (Sex in History), while among C.G. Jung’s followers one needs to refer to Erich Neumann (The Great Mother and The Origin and History of Consciousness) as well as to Esther Harding (Psychic Energy; Its Source and Goal.) The considerations which are to follow here utilise the theories of these authors, and amplify their views by way of certain insights of the ancient Gnostics.

The protopsychology of the ancient Gnostics (as well as of others in the Hellenistic culture) perceived three main divisions of the human person. The first of these is matter, or body (hyle, soma); the second mind, or soul (psyche); and the third spirit (pneuma). The existential point of gravity of a person’s life moves according to certain patterns from one of these three to the others, and an individual’s type (today called psychological type) would be determined by which one of these three principles acts as the primary focus of his or her consciousness. All people are capable of experiences of body, soul and spirit in some measure, but the seat of their principal identity is located within one only. Thus, there are people whose outstanding concerns are invariably material, while others function chiefly from a centre of consciousness lodged in their mind, while yet others look at all things from a point of view that is primarily of a character that we might call spiritual.

The presence of any individual within one or the other of these three categories is not a matter of accident, but rather of a transformational growth and development or consciousness, which begins with the material plane and rises eventually to the spiritual.

When we apply this Gnostic idea to the matter of human sexuality we may find some useful insights. There is, first of all, what we might call a hyletic (matter oriented) type of sexuality. To persons of this type sexuality is primarily a bodily urge, largely unrelated to any feeling or regard for the partner in sex, and originally even quite unaware of the possible results of copulation in reproduction. In a sense, we might say that persons in this stage of development are not participating in a sexual act, but they are identified with it. An interesting phenomenon connected with this is the identification of persons with their sexual organs, as evidenced by works of much primitive art, where men and women are represented with disproportionately large sexual organs. Similarly one may note the use of words denoting sexual organs when describing an individual in the idiom of obscene slang. All of these are evidences of the identification of the entire person with sex. Men are merely phallus bearers and women vagina-carriers; they are not persons, but embodiments of their sexuality. Hyletic sexuality in its later stages also becomes involved in the idea of offspring. Men thus come to look upon their mates not as persons but as the potential or actual mothers of their children, and women look upon men as beings capable of giving them children. In each case we are dealing with a primitive phenomenon, a manifestation of hyletic or biological urges. (It needs to be recognised that the urge to have offspring is just as primitive and unconscious an urge as the one moving to sexual intercourse. The notion that the desire for children is somehow more moral and refined than the desire for sex is nonsense!) Freudian psychohistorians tend to call the hyletic phase of sexuality “matrist,” by identifying it with the archaic domination of children by the Mother. Matrist sexuality is quite permissive, even promiscuous and polymorphous, and leads to the formation of “shame cultures” and the development of the incest taboo. The term “oral” is applied to its quality by Freudian writers.

In the next stage of development, sexuality becomes linked with emotion and thinking. Ego-development having taken place, consciousness now wishes to subdue the unconscious and thus develops numerous devices for the control of impulse. This is the greatest period of sexual repression and the phase when issues of law and commandment take on a great importance. The Gnostic terminology calls this phase the psychic, for it is here that the mind-emotion complex called “psyche” (soul, or mind) becomes dominant. Mythologically and symbolically this ego or mind is frequently connected with the masculine principle, and thus we find that psychic humanity tends to be patriarchal and masculine in its orientation and consequently a negative view of femininity and of female sexuality predominates. Men in their desire for impulse control begin to view women as temptresses, as instinctual creatures who have to be subdued and controlled. Jungian psychology calls this the “patriarchal phase” while Freudian writers refer to it as “patrist” or father-identifying, and its predominant tendency is said to be “anal.” It is obvious that the dominant cultural influences of Western society are predominantly of this variety, and that most of these influences stem from religious roots within the semitic religiosity of Judaism, Islam and non-Gnostic Christianity. This phase of the development of consciousness is greatly attached to the institution of marriage, and its chief taboos are against adultery and homosexuality. Its result is the so-called “guilt culture.”

The third, or pneumatic, phase is the most difficult to discuss, because it denotes a form or state of consciousness that is as rare today as it was in the second and third centuries A.D. There is little doubt, however, that several ancient Gnostic teachers, most notably Valentinus, envisioned this spiritual condition as a union of the masculine and feminine aspects of the human being with a consequent androgynation, which undoubtedly would have its reflection in the sexual sphere also. While the anti-Gnostic church fathers with fierce inconsistency accused the Gnostics of excessive asceticism and licentiousness in the same breath, the more recent discoveries of Gnostic writings indicate that the Gnostics were intent upon a mysterious pneumaticisation of sexuality, which process was embodied in the Valentinian sacrament of the bridal chamber. One of the chief results of the pneumatic state of Gnosis is the ability of the Gnostic to rise above the law (antinomianism) and to be motivated no longer by the external commandment of so-called revelation, but rather by the internal command of the indwelling divine spirit. This might be envisioned as the highest form of situation ethics, inspired by intuition, rather than by any rational considerations. The principle is compatible both with the ethics of existential philosophy and with Jungian psychology. The pneumatic Gnostic can no longer rely on any external commandment but must live by the existential courage of daily moral decisions. In Sartre’ swords, “he is doomed to freedom.” C.G. Jung also envisioned a condition within the individuation process where in the moral laws of society and church are relativated and indeed rendered meaningless by the spiritual growth of the individual. Right and wrong become a matter of personal choice based on spiritual insight, rather than standards derived from a code delivered by god or by society.

The sexual implications of the pneumatic phase of the growth of consciousness are considerable. With the fusion of the masculine and feminine attitudes in the psyche, a fully mature sexuality may be expected to arise. Love becomes the fulfilling of the law, and it goes without saying that this love will have sexual expressions as well. Neither will the expressions of this love be in any way limited by human institutions and prejudices whether they concern marital status, the gender of the beloved or the permanence or impermanence of the love relationship. The spirit bloweth where it listeth; human institutions and earthly considerations must pale before the pneumatic love. The accusation of libertinism hurled against the Gnostics by Irenaeus, Hypolitus and others is thus revealed as the sort of misunderstanding the contemporary Gnostic might face also. The intuitive morality of the pneumatic can be readily confused by the uncomprehending with hyletic, immorality and amorality, while it is nothing of the sort. The pneumatic phase bears, incidentally, all the hallmarks of what Erich Neumann called the “integrative phase,” and its characteristics are to some extent identical with what Freudian psychologists envision as “genital” sexuality.

Different Strokes for Different Gnostic Folks

The above noted psychohistorical considerations raise important issues which might be of concern to contemporary Gnostics. Are all Gnostics obliged to follow the pneumatic ethic at all times? Is psychic morality, especially in the sexual area, still relevant to the Gnostic? Have we all successfully outgrown hyletic modes of behaviour? And how are the answers to these questions likely to affect the sexual behaviour of the contemporary Gnostic?

Our situation might be summed up as follows: We live in a culture which ostensibly follows a psychic system of morality in sexual matters, but which is in practice more often than not composed of persons whose character is hyletic. Pneumatics are far and in between, and usually hidden away in the secret corners of contemporary life. Moreover, all persons possess hyletic, psychic, and pneumatic components in their character, with one or the other predominating. It is thus evident that most persons, including Gnostics, will express their sexuality sometimes in ways that are hyletic, at other times they may be attached to attitudes that are predominantly psychic and in some instances they may be capable of behaviour that may be properly recognised as pneumatic. Most people may also go through these phases in their own lifetimes. It is by no means unusual for early youth to be sexually quite hyletic (a sort of adolescent sexuality, as it were), for young adulthood to be involved in the marital and societal ambiance of a psychic sexual morality, and for the middle-aged person to achieve a matter-of-fact and liberated attitude toward sexuality, without serious inhibitions and guilts; in short, an attitude that approximates that of the pneumatic.

Since it would be reasonable to say that modern Gnostics may thus find persons of all three orientations in their midst, it might be helpful to present here a few brief guidelines for all three types regarding sexuality.

The hyletic needs to be reminded that, while hyletic sexuality is no more sinful or less virtuous than any other kind, it is still limiting and limited. Indiscriminate sexual behaviour is characterised by unconsciousness and this is a condition one ought to outgrow. Still, no one can be equally conscious of all aspects of life at all times, and a relatively high level of consciousness in one area may be accompanied by a relatively low level in another. The key concept must always be authenticity. If our behaviour has adduced to it as much consciousness as we could muster under the circumstances, this should be enough. There should be no judging of anyone for his or her sexual mores. Authenticity by nature is a highly personal issue. One person may be far more authentic and conscious while associating with multiple sexual partners than another locked into a rigid psychic cage of so-called monogamy. Striving for consciousness will inevitably bring its own reward and is far more useful than blind obedience to external rules.

The psychic person may prove more troublesome within a Gnostic context than either the hyletic or the pneumatic. Unlike the happy-go-lucky hyletics, psychics tend to be rigid personalities with a strong proclivity for projecting their own shadows, especially their sexual shadows on others. They tend to be judgmental, intolerant and self-righteous. In short, they are a mess, or at least they appear as such. Psychics ought to remember that goodness, by anyone’s standards, including their own, is never enough. Wholeness, not goodness, is the objective of the Gnostic life. Jung was fond of saying in truly Gnostic fashion: “It is only the fullness of being that counts.” Rules exist in order to be outgrown. We may not always be ready to outgrow them yet, but the desirability of the prospect must always be kept in mind. When following rules after the fashion of the psychic we but see through a glass darkly, and we should aspire to the clear vision face to face with authentic reality. While we must be careful not to judge the hyletic, we must often dissuade the psychic from judging everyone. Psychics may also be reminded that it is the psychic law alone that creates sin. “I had not known sin but by the law” said a Hebrew prophet. The harsher our own standards of judgement the greater will be our own guilt and spiritual impotence and the more our potential for liberation will diminish. Sexual guilt has been the greatest single curse the demiurge and his minions have hurled against humanity; it has been the blight of our culture, the stifler of creativity and the enemy of Gnosis. It must be recognised and its suggestion rejected at all times.

That rare bird known as the pneumatic, must above all, be discreet. Pneumatics have a divine right to their freedom, including their sexual freedom, but they have no right to bad manners. The spiritual nobility of the world must maintain decorum and discretion while exercising its prerogatives. The humourous adage often attributed to the British aristocracy of some time ago may be remembered here: “Do what you wish, but don’t do it in the road and frighten the horses.” Politicised sexuality, such as we have experienced in the era of the various liberation movements often comes under the heading of bad manners. Rigid psychics will not be converted to a pneumatic point of view by being confronted with sexual behaviour inappropriate to their level of consciousness. Ill advised action inevitably creates reaction. Pneumatics need not be apologetic about their liberated state, and they need not dissimulate or be guilty of hypocrisy. At the same time they must extend to the unliberated the same freedoms they demand for themselves. Persons who flaunt their sexual unconventionality and wish to force everyone to bear their sexual foibles without complaint are usually hyletics putting on the mask of pneumatics. “By their manners and their discretion ye shall know them” could be said of the true pneumatics.

Conclusions for Daily – and Nightly – Life

It is a cliché that we live in an era of great sexual confusion. Clichés, however, are not usually untrue, they have merely become clichés by excessive repetition. Can the Gnostic point of view bring some clarity into this confusion? Can the contemporary Gnostic offer meaningful suggestions on the sexual topics and perplexities of our times? We shall answer such questions by stating our Gnostic position regarding individual issues of sexual significance.

Sex in general. Biology, psychology and Gnosticism indicate that sex is a beneficent, consciousness-enhancing factor in human life. Sexually active persons are healthier, more balanced, and generally more pleasant members of society then the sexually inactive. There is every indication that sex is good for you physically, psychologically and spiritually. All sex that is not injurious to anyone and does not violate the sovereignty of any person is good, although some kinds of sex, such as those among loving, concerned, compatible partners are no doubt better than others.

Sex and the Sacred. In many religions, both pre-Christian and contemporary, sexual practices play some part. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the notion that sexual acts and religious acts can converge, one must exercise considerable care when trying to apply such principles within a contemporary context. Such magicosexual practices as one finds in the Hindu Tantras, in the “great rite” of the witches, and in the sex magic of the late Aleister Crowley, all suffer from the shortcoming that they tend to depersonalise the individuals who participate in them. Joseph Campbell in his splendid book Myths To Live By has pointed out that beginning with the mysticism of the Troubadours, the West came to espouse love-magic as against mere sex magic. C.G. Jung’s commentaries on the Rosarium Philosophorum indicate that a similar principle of love-magic was present in the system of Alchemy. The Gnostic tradition indicates that the early communities of knowers, particularly those attached to the teachings of Valentinus, practiced a supreme rite of pneumatic union, sometimes called the “mystery of the bridal chamber” which may have served as the prototype of many later rites of love-magic, symbolising the union of the lower personality with the heavenly pneuma, which may be envisioned as being of a contrasexual nature (female for men and male for women). The development of a conscious personality is one of the great achievements of Western spirituality. Persons love, unconscious beings merely copulate. Both actions are magical, but the former is preferable to the latter. There is no doubt that the magic of the sexes needs to be re-incorporated into religion, but we must take care that in attempting to do this we will not resort to archaic practices which were useful in periods of history when consciousness and personality were minimal compared to contemporary conditions.

Marriage. The Christian sacrament of matrimony was the last to be formally accepted; it did not come to be generally used in the church for hundreds of years. The reason for this may be found in the unacknowledged fact that the early Church, along with the Valentinians, knew only one true marriage: the heavenly marriage of the personality to the spirit. The contractual relationship of two earthly personalities within the context of property, inheritance, and so forth, the church initially left purely to the state. Only when the Church allowed itself to become an agent of the secular power did she uniformly come to practice marriage as a sacrament. Thus the present practice of the sacrament of marriage is a deficient sacrament, a mere shadow of the mystery of the bridal-chamber. There is no reason why the church, even the Gnostic church, should not bless the contractual relationships of men and women when asked to do so, but it must be kept in mind that this is not a mystery of the same order as the Eucharist, or Holy Orders, or the other true mysteries. The notion that sexual congress without the benefit of such a contractual relationship is sinful cannot be accepted within a Gnostic context.

Homosexuality, bisexuality, and androgyny. It is generally understood that at the non-physical level, people are not limited to their bodily gender. Jesus declared in the Gnostic scriptures that he “came to make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female.” We may take this to mean that in order to attain to the Wholeness of the Pleroma, all persons are striving toward a spiritual androgyny. In the hyletic phase of development this often manifests as polymorphous bisexuality, in the psychic phase as homosexuality, and in the pneumatic phase it moves increasingly into the area of a spiritually based androgyny. None of these are sinful or should be condemned in Gnostic thinking. The idea of a “crime against nature” is meaningless to the Gnostic, for our nature is not merely physical nature, such as our gender, but our total nature within which all dualities exist. When asked about homosexuality, the great modern Gnostic C.G. Jung merely said: “Well, they are the only people who are trying doing something against over-population.” The attraction of persons of the same gender toward each other meets with the most powerful taboos of the patriarchal-psychic phases of cultural development and is therefore encumbered by many unnecessary ideas and apprehensions.

Birth control and abortion. Anthropologists have noted that agricultural societies tend to be opposed to the limiting of births, while nomadic-pastoral societies encourage the same. Many great religions came to adopt the mythos of the agricultural societies and have proscribed birth control and abortion. The theological justification brought forth in support of the position of these religions is more or less to the effect that the prevention of birth is a contravention of the will of God. Many religions believe that a distinct soul is attached to every foetus at conception and that therefore the destruction of the foetus is murder. This idea is highly speculative and, like all theological notions, not subject to any evidence. The Gnostic traditions hold that the soul’s connection with the foetus is minimal until the seventh month of pregnancy. The obsessive fury of various religionists in our days against both birth control and abortion ought to elicit no sympathy from Gnostics. It is obvious that the more conscious humanity becomes, the more it will exercise conscious control over the size of families and the less it will be inclined to place innumerable offspring heedlessly onto an overpopulated earth. That people simply ought to become sexually inactive when not desiring offspring is a notion that is as silly as it is unrealistic.

Monogamy, celibacy, and chastity. While often confused, these three terms have very distinct meanings. Monogamy denotes sexual exclusiveness in favour of only one partner; it is an idea that acquired much importance in the psychic phase of psychohistory. Even today it may have merit for some, but it ought not be advocated or enforced generally. As consciousness expands, the affectionate and emotional needs widen also. It may be counterproductive to be attached to rigid ideas of monogamy in such instances. Celibacy is the unmarried state, as is customary among the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. Gnostics make no rules about whether their clergy ought to marry or not, and thus the issue of celibacy is of no great import for us. Chastity implies abstention from sexual activity of any kind; it is a practice that puts a very heavy strain on the psyches of persons, and its benefits are minimal, if any.

Family. Whenever this term is used today, it tends to denote the nuclear family unit of industrial society, which means, really, a phenomenon of the last hundred years. In the time of Jesus or even in that of Louis XIV the concept of family differed radically from the one of today. To go along with the moral reactionaries of our time and to hold up the nuclear family of recent vintage as the divinely decreed paragon of all virtue and goodness and the best possible cornerstone of society is, to say the least, unrealistic. While some sort of family structure is likely to continue to exist in humanity, we must possess an elastic vision regarding its future contours and character. Some modern research indicates that radical changes in the present family image would be highly beneficial to the psychological well-being of people in our society. Dr. David Cooper, existential psychiatrist, and associate of R.D. Laing, in his fine work The Death of the Family (Penguin Books, 1971) has built a convincing case for the need to develop alternatives to the nuclear family of conventional society. Once again it must be remembered that as human consciousness grows, the importance of ties and roots based purely in blood and soil tend to diminish. Relatively primitive, traditional societies are often so constructed that the individual is tyrannised and dwarfed by the family. In contrast with this, modern urban societies are moving more and more in a direction where the family loses its hold over individuals who thus need to develop their own lives and resources. For practical purposes it may be noted that the less closed off, the less insular and nuclear the family is, the less likely it is to destroy the sexual and social independence of the individual. A family ought to act as a springboard to life and to people and not as a fortress wherein a small nucleus of persons shuts itself in, while shutting the greater world out.

Sex and the procreation of offspring. As one may deduce from various foregoing statements, the Gnostic cannot endorse the teaching that sex exists purely for the purpose of procreation. Such a view, even though held by theologians, is utterly un-spiritual and smacks of the worst kind of materialistic myopia. By this we mean that parenthood is but one of life’s functions, and it ought not to obtain ascendancy over all others. Children require “parenting” for only a certain period of their lives, and when parents fail to recognise this, untold unhappiness may result. Women, particularly, have been shunted by culture and religion into the over sentimentalised and inflated role of motherhood, and while starring in this role, have often forgotten how to be women. Monkish prudery being unable to accept the feminine in any other aspect but the maternal, the feminine ideal in Christendom became the mother, which condition in turn limited and constricted the psychic and physical lives of women.

One of the great tasks of modern Gnosticism is to restore the dignity and importance of the feminine within a spiritual context and this task includes liberating the feminine from such confining expressions as “mother” and “virgin” (not to speak of the biological absurdity of “virgin mother.”) As motherhood and fatherhood are but one of the possible by-products of human sexuality, so it is obvious that sexuality has far more and vaster functions in life than merely serving as a vehicle for procreation. Love, affection, relatedness, spiritual bonding; all of these are facilitated and enhanced by sex. Sex, we need to state again, is beneficial to humanity physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Procreation, on the other hand, is assuredly not always beneficial to the human race. Gnostics ought to add their urgent voice to the ever swelling chorus calling for effective programs and concentrated action against the population explosion. It is obvious that what the world needs is not less sex but less offspring.

Sexual Libertarianism

Modern Gnostics are not antiquarians. It is not our purpose to try to resurrect the Gnostic tradition in its ancient form, rather we strive to retranslate the available elements of Gnostic wisdom into forms appropriate for the present. One of the most relevant features of ancient Gnosticism is what might be called the libertarianism of the Gnostics. The available documents authored by or attributed to such lights of the Gnosis as Valentinus, Basilides, Marcion, Carpocrates, Epiphanes and others are all thoroughly libertarian in spirit. All of these Gnostic teachers and leaders would have no difficulty in agreeing with the following example of libertarian reasoning: “You as a person are better able to control your life than I am. Your life is your personal affair, for· better or for worse, except as in the living of your life you may impair or endanger the life and livelihood of others. No person nor set of persons on this earth has any logical right to interfere with you except as you may do injury to them.” (A Libertarian’s Platform by James C. Ingebretsen). Even as the political, economic, and religious lives of people are their personal affair, so are their sexual lives. The talons of the authoritarian demiurges of this world must be made to retract from the bedrooms of free men and women. Sexual relations which do not harm or injure anyone should be of no concern to legislation and to the police. Vague conjectures, based on private prejudice, and masquerading as statements about the “public good” and the “moral health” of the body politic ought never to serve as the basis for laws and ordinances.

It must be kept in mind that Gnostic libertarianism is not a mere matter of political or economic expediency. In reality this libertarianism is rooted in the most fundamental features of the Gnostic mythos, which has as its central theme the liberation of the incarcerated divine spirit from all bonds imposed upon it by the false cosmos of the demiurge. Early Christian leaders, even when not manifestly of the Gnostic fold, have often echoed the libertarian expressions of the Gnostic attitude. St. Paul the Apostle’s bold statement: “All things are permissible unto me,” as well as St. Augustine’s adage: “Love God and then do as you please” indicate that the Christian message was intended to replace the law of Jehovah, with the sovereignty of the individual soul restored by the new covenant of love. The relationship between freedom and love has been noted by many wise souls in many traditions, including in that of India, where we find a formulation of the five degrees of love through which the worshipper receives increase in what in our own tradition we might call Gnosis. The first degree of love, we are told, is the love of servant for the master, the second of comrade for comrade, the third that of parent for child, the fourth that of spouses for each other, and the fifth, or highest degree, is defined as passionate and illicit, that is, not sanctioned by any rule of society or of reason; a love totally unrestrained by any limitation whatsoever.

This fivefold system of varieties of love shows not only an increase of intensity from stage to stage, but also, and most importantly, an increase of freedom. What began as servitude ends in total freedom. As restraint gives way to freedom, the force of love increases, until it becomes the supreme liberating influence of being. Now this concept, or rather reality, is not unknown in Western mysticism. Even as we may rightfully assume that the Gnostic mystery of the bridal chamber was a spiritual rite, which yet was not without the physically sexual concomitant, so we know that from a certain time onward the alternative mystical tradition of the West came to abrogate the dualism of orthodox Christianity regarding love, and came to replace it with a unitary experience which was at once spiritual and physical. Medieval Christian orthodoxy insisted on the duality of eros (fleshly, or sexual love) and agape (spiritual love, or charity). The Gnostic tradition, whether expressed by Valentinus in Alexandria, or by the troubadours in medieval France has as its objective to “make the two into one” by uniting eros with agape and replacing both with the higher synthesis, called by troubadours amor. Amor is neither fleshly nor ghostly, neither sensual nor spiritual, but partaking of both qualities represents a totally new quality. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This whole, or rather wholeness, is none other than the terrestrial epiphany of the Pleroma. Sexual and non-sexual love combine to bring forth the ineffable greatness in human life.

Here then is to be found the royal secret of sexuality. As consciousness frees itself of the thraldom of the unconscious, and with it from the taboos, fears, and guilts inculcated by society and exoteric religion, the liberating force of eros joins the inspiring energy of agape. This mystic union then produces an explosion of freedom, a leap of liberty of unbelievable power. The sexual libertarianism of the Gnostic has now born its aeonial fruit, the great dénouement of the age long process has come. Sex is important because it liberates, and in order to liberate sexuality itself must possess an optimum degree of freedom.

Humans are sexual and spiritual beings at once. When one or the other of these dualities is repressed or neglected, disunity and torment prevail. When both are united in freedom, true liberation and joy manifest. Therefore we must be free: Free to live intellectually, emotionally, and indeed sexually. We must be free to experiment, to fail and to succeed, to be perplexed and to be enlightened. The day of the old law of restriction must be declared defunct and the dawn of the new law of freedom must be ushered in. In stating this we are not proclaiming a novelty. We have the words of St. Paul to the Romans saying: “God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.” Jesus said: “Judge not that you may not be judged.” And Heraclitus the Greek sage wrote: “To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right. Good and evil are one.” The great and terrible truth is: That we must be free, lest we perish; that we are condemned to freedom, that the undying obligation of self-liberation has been imposed upon us before the world began, yea, even before the creator of this world came to be. We were not born to abide by the dark laws, and to wear the blackened chains of the rulers of this world, but to be free, liberated consciously divine children of the light. As a Gnostic hymn put it: “Ours is the voice of awakening in the eternal night.” Due to the design of heaven this voice is uttered not by one, but by two; not by man alone or by woman by herself but by both in unison. The voice of awakening is at least in part a sexual voice; the hymn is not merely one of praise but of passion. Today as ever the words of Goethe remind us of the Gnostic truth:

“Mann und Weib, Weib und Mann,

Reichenandie Gottheit an.”

(Man and Woman, Woman and Man,

Together they reach Divinity.)

The above essay first appeared in Abraxas 84, published by Ecclesia Gnostica, 1984, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

.

STEPHAN A. HOELLER, Ph.D., is an author and lecturer on Gnosticism, Jungian psychology, Theosophy, and other esoteric subjects. He is also presiding bishop of Ecclesia Gnostica (www.gnosis.org) and director of studies of the Gnostic Society in Hollywood, California. His works include Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing and Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society (both published by Quest Books). Dr. Hoeller’s lectures are also available for download from www.bcrecordings.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 121 (July-August 2010).

Read this article with its extensive full colour illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 121 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

It’s 2154, and American Terrorism has been totally privatised. In fact, it has become the undisputed enforcement arm of the criminal plutocracy on Planet Earth. In other words, the future is just like today – except the terrorists have gone off-planet and expanded their field of prey.

In Avatar, the plutocracy of Planet Earth needs more resources, so American ex-military mercenaries are sent to rape-and-pillage a planet called Pandora for its so-called “unobtainium.”

By the way, “unobtainium” is a Real World term for valuable rare-earth metals like neodymium, terbium, dysprosium, lanthanum, yttrium and thulium. They are currently used for weapons, as well as digital cameras, computers, Priuses, and iPhones.

In fact, according to the UK’s Daily Mail, industries that rely on “unobtainium” are estimated to be worth an astonishing 3 trillion pounds (US$4.5 trillion), or 5% of global GDP. Thus, wars and invasions of other planets are completely plausible as a possible Real World future scenario.

Meanwhile, the movie shows that the use of ex-military burn-outs, the de facto storm troopers in Avatar, is a clear signal that the United States has finally become the “Evil Empire” of Star Wars fame, exporting its brand of terrorism to yet-unconquered worlds.

The movie also riffs on past colonial adventurism by the US, as well as British, Spanish, French and Belgian invaders, especially the exploitation of natural resources in Africa and South America and its attendant genocide of indigenous peoples. Avatar then is a realistic dramatisation of the ruthless behaviour of out-of-control sociopaths, hell-bent on destroying a civilisation they have judged to be “inferior” and the inhabitants they have decided are “subhuman.”

Thus, the predatory virus and the agenda of rape-and-pillage technology have been exported from Planet Earth to create more mischief in other parts of the universe.

The characters of Avatar are typically stock figures, bordering on caricature, and the plot is so simple that even a three-year old could follow it, says director, screenwriter and producer Jim Cameron, according to published reports. Cameron steals from himself, combining memes from Terminator, Dark Angel, etc. in a kind of recombinant mythology that has struck a powerful and resonant chord throughout the world.

The protagonist is Jake (Sam Worthington), a gung-ho disabled vet who gets his dead brother’s job. As an “avatar,” he has to navigate a custom-made 10-foot tall body in order to “live” with the indigenous blue-skinned race called the Na’avi. When the locals are called “blue monkeys” by the invaders, contemporary racist jargon gets catapulted off-planet and back to the future.

The word “avatar,” of course, implies an online persona that can navigate the virtual realities and cyberspace, as well as a religious messiah or saviour in Hindu theology.

(Can Jake – the All-American White-Bread Saviour – save the Na’avi from destruction? Of course he can. Where else could a Hollywood formula movie plot go?)

So in his Na’avi blue avatar-body, Jake meets a blue girl called Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) who just like Pocahontas – just imagine – teaches him about living in harmony with nature and the invisible forces that sustain Pandora. And Jake, just like Dances with Wolves, goes “native,” as he bonds with the blue people and falls in love with the blue girl.

Because his crippled body restricts his physical movement in his “waking” life, Jake loves to use his Na’avi body and begins to experience his virtual blue-body life as the “Real Thing,” instead of the other way around.

The question for Jake becomes – which world does he prefer to live in? Then it’s a choice for him – just like the gamers who are so obsessed with online “living” – which reality or virtual reality is better?

At the same time Jake makes a deal to be an informer for Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the head of the privatised military-security and the most zealous practitioner of the rape-and-pillage mindset. Quaritch is the embodiment of the evil corporate-military invader and a ruthless enforcer for the Ruling Corporate Empire which has gone off-planet to exploit other worlds.

In his naïveté, Jake believes he can “save” the Na’avi from the coming slaughter planned by the corporate killers, but finds out that he has been betrayed once again. Just as he was in the Marines. (Does that mean military guys have a slow learning curve?)

After all, the mining company just wants the valuable minerals and doesn’t care about a tribe of primitive “blue monkeys.” As always, brainwashing mind-control must convince its subjects (state-sanctioned military would-be killers) that the so-called “enemy” is “sub-human” and therefore open to slaughter. However, it’s too much for him to endure, so Jake goes “off the reservation,” as they say, switches sides, disobeys his orders and begins fighting on behalf of the Na’avi.

Other stock characters include Sigourney Weaver as a scientist who wants to “study” the Na’avi and communicate with them, but like the intellectual prostitutes who work for the Pentagon-NSA-ETC Complex, she remains just another pawn in their extra-planetary game.

Another character you love to hate is Jonathan Ribisi, who plays the heartless corporate honcho. He tackles his “task” of genocide and ecocide with a “missionary” zeal, just like the gofers (a.k.a. employees) of Blackwater, DynCorp, KBR and other Vulture Capitalist Corporations with government insider deals.

The final battle for Pandora, its natural resources and the metaphysical power-source of the planet centred in a primordial Tree of Life which is the embodiment of their ancestors’ wisdom, takes Avatar to a spectacular finish – and the obligatory third final battle sequence.

The fun continues as Jim-Cameron-as-god creates fantastic creatures like hammer-head buffalos, friendly reptilians and sentient jellyfish who help the local blue people defend their planet from the “alien” humans.

In an archetypal Hollywood happy ending, the local blue people survive and the humans are “the aliens [who] went back to their dying world.” That’s about as happy as it gets – when you’re dealing with real raw issues of genocide, nasty behaviour and other evil.

It should be noted that Jim Cameron’s innate ability to tap into the Deep Subconscious of the planet produced the pop culture remix version of the sinking of Atlantis, a.k.a. the movie Titanic.

The Deeper Significance of Avatar

More insights into this global phenomenon can be gleaned from astrologer Barbara Hand Clow, author of indispensable books like The Mayan Code: Time Acceleration and Awakening the World Mind and Alchemy of Nine Dimensions: Decoding the Vertical Axis, Crop Circles, and the Mayan Calendar.

Ms. Clow sees a deeper significance in the artistic and financial triumph of Avatar, writing, “… I said that spiritual transformations pushing us onto new evolutionary paths would be ‘drawing power from transcending our identity as warriors.’ I had no idea how we would see any of this until I saw Avatar soon after the Winter Solstice.” (www.handclow2010.com)

“This film is helping millions draw nurturing experiences from the past (Pandora as Eden), and it incites people, even militarists, to transcend warrior identity. I predict Avatar will continue to be shown again and again by popular demand because many people will see it two or three times…

“Consistently since last spring, spirituality and healing have been the central forces changing our lives under the influence of the potent Triple Conjunction-Jupiter/Chiron/Neptune in Aquarius. During this New Moon, finally Jupiter is moving past Chiron/ Neptune, the last pass of the Triple Conjunction.

“Under its influence, many of us have grown spiritually and faced a series of healing crises, and now we are like newborn beings. Avatar appeared during the culmination of the Triple Conjunction, which helps us see that our individual healing is actually a collective issue. Now that Jupiter is moving out of the Triple Conjunction, our individual initiations and healing crises will not be so monumental and overwhelming.”

And this impulse for genocide and ecocide – where did it come from?

It might sound like science fiction, but it’s considered to be the Gnostic understanding of the metaphysical realities of Planet Earth. Namely – an ideological off-planet virus morphed into the three ubiquitous religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which have been used to divide, conquer and rule Terra for thousands of years through fear, intimidation and all those other reptilian stimulus-response mechanisms. [See “New (Reptilian) World Order” by Uri Dowbenko, New Dawn Special Issue 7.]

The Gnostics, by the way, were the losers in a war with Roman Christianity, a long-term focus of religious terrorism ensconced in the Vatican. And what was the Gnostics’ biggest mistake – and crime – and why were they annihilated? Because they dared to speak the Unspeakable, namely that the Christian “father-god” was not only an imposter, but also quite insane.

You can call him Yahweh. You can call him Jehovah. But the Gnostics identified him with the demented Archon Yaldabaoth, which they taught was the Judeo-Christian false god. In other words, if this “god” is telling you to do wacky things like kill those who don’t share your religious Belief System (B.S.), then there’s a good chance those “Gods Must Be Crazy.” And they are…

Therefore, it was not a very smart or politically correct move on the part of the Gnostics to point this out to the Christians. Nevertheless the Gnostics’ perspective on life is still worth examining because of its relevance today – namely their unique world-view and their model for the metaphysical realities of Planet Earth.

Religion and the Seeding of Death Culture

According to John Lamb Lash, author of Not in His Name: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology and the Future of Belief, it was this Abrahamic legacy of religion which incorporates the fear of death that carries the virus.

Lash’s brilliant analysis of mythology, religion and power politics is at once self-empowering and enlightening. And just reading his interpretation of Gnostic cosmology and wisdom-science illuminates the heart and mind because it is the counter-program to the prevalent Death Culture on Earth.

Lash’s book is a must read for everyone who is interested in spiritual and metaphysical studies, and it remains the most important reinterpretation of history, mythology and religion from the Gnostic perspective.

So where did this human proclivity for “terrorism” come from? Lash writes that the Gnostics recognised its origin in the wacky philosophy of the apocalyptic cult called the Zaddikim.

“The Zaddikite sect of the Dead Sea presents the larval form of the global terrorist syndrome of today,” writes Lash, referring to the ancient scrolls found at Qumran as evidence, adding that, “the Zaddikite ideology found in the scrolls presents the ideological infrastructure of Christian religion.”

“That Qumran was an outpost for militants fighting to free Judea from Roman occupation and not a haven for hippie-like pacifists called Essenes, was information withheld from the public by a team of scrolls scholars controlled by the Vatican,” writes Lash.

In a story-line much stranger than science fiction, the “virus” would morph many more times until it became recognisable as present day “religion.”

“The core ideology of modern fundamentalist Christianity derives from the Zaddikim of the Dead Sea and not from mainstream Judaic religion,” Lash continues. “Resurrection in a physical form identical to the living body (contrasted to some kind of continuity of soul life), transport to heaven, intervention of God the Father in history, the battle against Cosmic Evil ending in Judgment Day, and divine retribution – all these beliefs reflect Zaddik, the superhuman standard.

“In the cult of righteousness led by Melchizedek, militant and mystical elements combined into a lethal explosive mix. The Zaddikim sect self-destructed by bringing down upon itself and the entire Jewish community the military might of the Roman Empire, but their program survived and mutated into what was to become Roman Christianity. The enemies of the system became the system.”

The irony of this history is deafening, while the apocalyptic theology and its dogma of final retribution rears its ugly head with every terrorist bombing or “preemptive” strike that kills, maims and tortures humanity on earth.

So why have “terrorism” and “religion” become so closely identified in contemporary life?

“In epidemiological terms, Christianity was the pandemic vector for the ideological virus of the Zaddikim belief system,” writes Lash. “…Over centuries patriarchy mutated into a religious system based on the four components of the redeemer complex. The sulfurous pathological core of the system is terror; terror before the father god who creates the world and commands its fate; terror for those who follow the Lord’s plan and those who do not; terror for the innocent victim tormented and dominated by the perpetrator; terror for the perpetrators who will be caught out and punished by God; …terror that drives human society to a final solution, the lethal madness of a species hell-bent on its own destruction… The belief that the world can be saved by destroying it exemplifies annihilation theology.”

The “religious” fervour of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan bespeak of this theology of death that rules and dominates the planet.

Alien Trickster ‘Gods‘

Adding a bit more science (fiction) into his analysis, Lash asks – “Who is willing to consider that salvationist religion is an ideological virus insinuated in the human psyche by an alien species?”

Through first-hand experience and close encounters with UFO-ET tricksters they called Archons, the Gnostics understood the off-planet origin of the three redemptive Abrahamic religions.

So was our “Father Abraham” himself duped by “alien” tricksters?

Gnostics allowed the transmundane origin of redemptive religion – ‘Yaldabaoth himself chose a certain man named Abraham and made a covenant with him’ – but proposed a different way to view it. Yaldabaoth is the Demiurge, a.k.a. Yahweh-Jehovah, a demented pseudo-deity who works against humanity. This is the Lord Archon head of the legion of cyborgs…

“Demiurge” is defined by Lash as the leader of the Archons “who claims to be the creator of the material world and demands slavish obedience from his creatures,” but is actually a demented pretender or impostor who “can originate nothing but must imitate what already exists.” This might be an apt description of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its future manifestations.

And what is the result of this religious Belief System, most notably exemplified by Christianity which awaits an extraplanetary saviour, who will come from the sky and make everybody feel high, to quote the late Bob Marley? “Salvation by superhuman powers, rather than through the divine potential innate to humanity and aligned with Sophia, is the hallmark of extraterrestrial religion,” Lash writes.

“Gnostics explicitly warned that the Archons work through salvationist religion, not to destroy us, however but to deviate us from our proper course of evolution… They do this, Gnostics claimed because they envy us. Archons lack both ennoia (singular intentionality) and epinoia (moral-creative imagination) and they want to have this specific endowment of ours, to assimilate or steal it. The diagnosis of Archontic intrusion conforms in many respects to reports of people who have encountered alien entities, especially the Grays and the Reptilians.”

According to Lash, the Gnostics also taught, “if evil arises from error when error runs beyond the scale of correction, we can nip evil in the bud by deepening our awareness of error. The Gospel of Philip says ‘Ignorance is the mother of all evil.’ In a lucid passage on error theory, the Gnostic master says: ‘So long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognised, it is dissolved. When it is revealed it perishes… As for ourselves, let us dig down after the root of evil which is within each of us and produces its fruit in our hearts. It masters us. We are its slaves. It takes us captive to make us do what we do not want and what we do want we do not do. It is powerful because we have not recognised it’.”

Lash writes that “the root of evil is human error, the mind mistaking itself. To defeat evil, we must unmask it by seeing its origin in the erring operations of our own minds.”

Origins of the Illuminati

The Gnostics also had a very plausible explanation for the origin of the so-called Illuminati, those behind-the-scenes puppet-masters and obsessive control freaks of society, who have been the de facto Ruling Class for thousands of years.

Lash explains that the Gnostics – or telestai as they called themselves – were initiates endowed with special knowledge in cosmological issues, who were actually “sophisticated shamans, past masters of ‘archaic techniques of ecstasy’.”

“As initiates of the Mysteries, behavioural manipulation, psychological programming and mind control were utterly repugnant to the genuine telestai of the ancient Mysteries,” writes Lash.

“Such procedures represented to them a path leading away from consecration to Sophia and the Great Work of co-evolving with nature, toward social engineering and personal power games. The goal of the telestai was to foster a sane and balanced society by helping individuals reach their peak potential, and never to interfere directly in social management.

“Over the course of time some initiates did take the path of social engineering. Dissident members of the Gnostic movement, who came to be known as ‘Illuminati,’ chose to use initiatory knowledge to develop and implement various techniques of behaviour modification. Their predecessors were known as the Magian order, an ancient Persian lineage of shamanism from which the Gnostic movement was derived…”

“Around 4000 BCE, with the rise of urban civilisation in the Near East, some members of the Magian order chose to apply certain secrets of initiation to statecraft and social engineering. They became the advisors to the first theocrats of the patriarchal nation-states, but in fact the advisors were running the show. Their subjects were systematically programmed to believe they were descended from the gods. The Illuminati inaugurated elaborate rites of empowerment or kingship rituals. These rituals were in fact methods of mind control exercised on the general populace through the collective symbology and mystique of royal authority.

“The intention of the dissident Magians to run society by covert controls was based on their assumption that human beings are not innately good enough, or gifted enough to create a human world.”

Even the term Gnostic (gnostokos) is a pejorative term invented by the so-called Church Fathers who ridiculed their rivals by referring to them as “smart ass” and “know it all.” The Gnostics called themselves “The Children of Seth.”

Lash notes that “paradoxically [even the word] ‘Gnostic’ comes down to us tainted by the condemnation of the Roman Church and associated with the very members of the Magian order who were disowned by the guardians of the Mysteries.”

The Illuminati then are the former adepts of the Mystery Schools who perverted and abused the spiritual teachings they had received in order to acquire material wealth and power, subverting their raison d’etre of life on Earth.

“The Illuminati program was (and still is) essential to patriarchy and its covert perpetrator religion,” Lash continues. “While it cannot exactly be said that the deviant adepts known as Illuminati created patriarchy, they certainly controlled it. And still do. The abuse of initiatory knowledge to induce schizophrenic states (‘entrainment’), manipulate multiple personalities in the same person (‘platforming’) and command behaviour through posthypnotic suggestion (the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ technique) continues to this day, with truly evil consequences for the entire world… These behavioural modification tools of the Illuminati were strictly forbidden in the Mysteries overseen by Gnostics.”

Thus the Illuminati were spiritual renegades and deviants who became the dominant controllers of the planet through their manipulation of patriarchal salvationist religion and a theology of terror. These former initiates of the Mystery Schools had seemingly taken the so-called left-handed path of ego-glorification and power games, rather than consecration of their lives to the enlightenment of humanity, whose goal was and always has been spiritual evolution on Earth.

Not In His Image is itself a revelation in the best sense, a meditation and a remarkable work of prose that naturally flows like poetry. Likewise, in his book, Lash has created a remarkable affirmation of spirituality and the metaphysical realities of life on earth.

In addition to his book, there is a wonderful DVD documentary by filmmaker Sharron Rose called Sophia Returning (see review on page 80 of this issue of New Dawn), featuring an in-depth interview with Lash who tells the remarkable story of the Gnostics and their cosmology and metaphysics.

Lash, a compelling storyteller, goes into detail about the story of the Aeon (Goddess) Sophia who came to embody the living being which is our beautiful Planet Earth. It may be a prison planet for those who were sentenced to live here, but for the rest of us, it is the best opportunity for spiritual evolution: to express love, kindness and compassion to all sentient beings, while we are on the screen of life.

In Sophia Returning, Lash also talks about his website MetaHistory.org, which is a magnificent online repository of all things Gnostic and esoteric. Lash refers to the ET phenomenon and the issue of “alien abduction.” He talks about the so-called Gnostic Catechism, which is a survival manual that gives instruction on what to do if accosted by an Archon (ET/UFO/trickster) and how to defend yourself against them since the Gnostics believed that they “steal souls at night.”

In an online article called “Avatar: The Psychedelic Worldview and the 3D Experience,” Ido Hartogsohn writes about the perceived 3D effect of our consensus reality:

“…The Pulfrich Effect, used to create stereoscopic images, relies on the principle that the human eye processes information slower in darker conditions to cause one eye to see reality in delay, thus creating a 3D illusion when watching moving objects. It is as if your two eyes were watching the screen from two different points in time, or from two different points in space.

“Similarly, the new 3D wave allows us to view culture from two distinct points of perspective in space and time: one of a culture completely immersed in consumerist mania, the other of a culture which keeps a strong relation to its mythic roots in nature.

“This multi-dimensional effect, which allows us to view ourselves from two different perspectives at the same time, might hint at the transformations ahead.” (www.realitysandwich.com/avatar_psychedelic_worldview_3d)

Maybe – maybe not. However, not since The Matrix has a “science fiction” movie captured the imagination and enthusiasm of a worldwide audience. Coincidentally The Matrix, like Avatar, was also a dramatisation of many Gnostic concepts and ideas, which also had a transformative effect on its audience.

In one of the most salient appreciations of the movie, Barbara Hand Clow writes that, “Avatar is a great story of heroic change and conquering the dark side. This subtle shift into new hope rings true because the film is galactic and universal, not just solar and earthbound. It is a sign that Earth’s quarantine is lifting, and our hearts are reconnecting with the universe.
“Many individuals have made great strides in their personal work during the Triple Conjunction, and now the collective will be changing rapidly because universal wisdom is flowing into it,” Clow concludes. “Many of you must be doing very good work reaching subtle dimensions, making it possible for a creative work like Avatar to premiere on Earth.”

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Writer and Artist URI DOWBENKO is the author of Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy and Hoodwinked: Watching Movies with Eyes Wide Open. He is also the founder and publisher of www.ConspiracyPlanet.com, www.ConspiracyDigest.com, www.AlMartinRaw.com, and www.InsiderIntelligence.com, as well as the publisher of The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider by Al Martin. You can visit Uri at www.UriDowbenko.com and www.NewImprovedArt.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 120 (May-June 2010).

Read this article with its extensive full colour illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 120 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

I’m six years old, in the car with my parents and brother, travelling back from our annual two week holiday in Conwy, North Wales. It’s dark and the journey seems to take forever. I lie in the back seat, watching the orange streetlights and the houses pass by, and wonder if we’re ever going to get home.

“Are we nearly there yet?” I ask my father.

“Don’t be silly,” he says. “We only set off half an hour ago.”

My mum plays the ‘Yes/No’ game and ‘Twenty questions’ with us to make the time pass faster. We listen to the radio for a while. Then I fall asleep. When I wake up it seems like I’ve been in the car for an eternity and I can’t believe we’re still not home.

“Are we nearly there yet?” I ask again.

“Not far now,” says my father.

We play some more games and finally I recognise the streets of our suburb of Manchester. I feel bored and miserable and tell myself that I’m never going to spend as long in a car ever again.

The journey from Conwy to Manchester took two hours when I was a child and still takes roughly two hours now (although slightly less due to improvements in roads). I made the journey again a few years ago and couldn’t believe how short it seemed now, from my adult perspective. Those two hours – which seemed like an eternity when I was 6 – were nothing. My girlfriend was driving, and we chatted, listened to tapes, watched the Welsh countryside give way to the urban sprawl of north-west England, and we were back in Manchester almost before we knew it. It was a little frightening – what had happened to all the time that two hours contained when I was six years old?

A year or so ago I made another journey which gave me an indication of how much more quickly time is passing to me now. This was a 15 hour plane journey, from Singapore to Manchester, which also seemed to last forever. I’m not a very good flyer and it wasn’t a very good flight: we flew into two typhoons over India and it was rocky almost all the way. I hoped I’d be able to ‘kill’ some of the time by sleeping but it was impossible. Every time I drifted off my anxiety woke me up again. Failing that, I hoped I’d at least be able to make the time pass quickly by distracting myself with the in-flight entertainment or with books and magazines, but my mind stubbornly refused to move from the moment to moment reality of the situation. I was aware of every minute passing, and as a result time seemed to drag horribly. Every time I checked the clock – which was every few minutes or so – less time had gone by than I expected.

My subjective sense of how long that journey took is, I realised recently, very similar to my sense of how long my childhood journey to Conwy took. To me they seemed to involve roughly the same amount of boredom and impatience and to last for roughly the same amount of time. This suggests that what was two hours to me as a child is equivalent to 15 hours to me as an adult – which means, rather frighteningly, that time is now passing around seven times faster than when I was a child.

This story appears to fit with most people’s experience. Most of us feel that time moved very slowly when we were children and is gradually speeding up as we grow older. We’ve all remarked on it: how Christmas seems to come round quicker every year; how you’re just getting used to writing the date of the new year on your cheques and you realise that it’s almost over; how your children are about to finish school when it doesn’t seem long since you were changing their nappies…

Questionnaires by psychologists have shown that almost everyone – including college students – feels that time is passing faster now compared to when they were half or a quarter as old as now. And perhaps most strikingly, a number of experiments have shown that, when older people are asked to guess how long intervals of time are, or to ‘reproduce’ the length of periods of time, they guess a shorter amount than younger people.

We usually become conscious of this speeding up around our late twenties, when most of us have ‘settled down.’ We have steady jobs and marriages and homes and our lives become ordered into routines – the daily routine of working, coming home, having dinner and watching TV; the weekly routine of (for example) going to the gym on Monday night, going to the cinema on Wednesday night, going for a drink with friends on Friday night etc.; and the yearly routine of birthdays, bank holidays and two weeks’ holiday in the summer. After a few years we start to realise that the time it takes us to run through these routines seems to be decreasing, as if we’re on a turntable which is picking up speed with every rotation. As the French philosopher Paul Janet noted more than a hundred years ago:

Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour.1

This speeding up is probably responsible for the phenomenon which psychologists call ‘forward telescoping’: our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. Marriages, deaths, the birth of children – when we look back at these and other significant events, we’re often surprised that they happened so long ago, shocked to find that it’s already four years since a friend died when we thought it was only a couple of years, or that a niece or nephew is already ten years old when it only seems like three or four years since they were born.

As one 83 year old man told me, “I can never guess how long ago things happened. People ask me things like ‘When did so and so get married?’ or ‘When did so and so die?’ and I’m always way out. If I say it was two years it turns out to be 5 years. If I say six months, it’s two years.” The same holds true for national and international events, like the deaths of famous people, natural disasters and wars: studies have shown that people usually date these too recently as well. And perhaps this is because time is speeding up as we get older. Time is moving more quickly than we think. It doesn’t seem like four years since a friend died or a baby was born, or since a famous person died, because during those four years time has been speeding up without you realising, making every month and year shorter than the one before.

The Proportional and Biological Theories

So why do we experience this speeding up of time?

One popular answer is the ‘proportional’ theory, which suggests that the important factor is that, as you get older, each time period constitutes a smaller fraction of your life as a whole. This theory seems to have been first put forward in 1877 by Paul Janet, who suggested the law that, as William James describes it, “the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man’s life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life – a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length.”2 At the age of one month, a week is a quarter of your whole life, so it’s inevitable that it seems to last forever. At the age of 14, one year constitutes around 7% of your life, so that seems to be a large amount of time too. But at the age of 30 a week is only a tiny percentage of your life, and at 50 a year is only 2% of your life, and so your subjective sense is that these are insignificant periods of time which pass very quickly.

There is some sense to this theory – it does offer an explanation for why the speed of time seems to increase so gradually and evenly, with almost mathematical consistency. One problem with it, however, is that it tries to explain present time purely in terms of past time. The assumption behind it is that we continually experience our lives as a whole, and perceive each day, week, month or year becoming more insignificant in relation to the whole. But we don’t live our lives like this. We live in terms of much smaller periods of time, from hour to hour and day to day, dealing with each time period on its own merits, independently of all that has gone before.

There are also biological theories. One of these is that the speeding up of time is linked to how our metabolism gradually slows down as we grow older. Because children’s hearts beat faster than ours, because they breathe more quickly and their blood flows more quickly etc., their body clocks ‘cover’ more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults. Children live through more time simply because they’re moving through time faster. Think of a clock which is set to run 25% faster than normal time – after 12 hours of normal time it has covered 15 hours, after 24 hours of normal time it has covered 30, which means that, from that clock’s point of view, a day has contained more time than usual. On the other hand old people are like clocks which run slower than normal, so that they lag behind, and cover less than 24 hours’ time against a normal clock.

Also from a biological perspective, there is the ‘body temperature’ theory. In the 1930s the psychologist Hudson Hoagland conducted a series of experiments which showed that body temperature causes different perceptions of time. Once, when his wife was ill with the flu and he was looking after her, he noticed that she complained that he’d been away for a long time even if he was only away for a few moments. With admirable scientific detachment, Hoagland tested her perception of time at different temperatures, and found that the higher her temperature, the more time seemed to slow down for her, and the longer she experienced each time period. Hoagland followed this up with several semi-sadistic experiments with students, which involved them enduring temperatures of up to 65C, and wearing heated helmets. These showed that raising a person’s body temperature can slow down their sense of time passing by up to 20%. And the important point here may be that children have a higher body temperature than adults, which may mean that time is ‘expanded’ to them. And in a similar way, our body temperature becomes gradually lower as we grow older, which could explain a gradual ‘constriction’ of time.

The Perceptual Theory

However, in my view, the speeding up of time we experience is mainly related to our perception of the world around us and of our experiences, and how this perception changes as we grow older.

The speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process – the more information there is, the slower time goes. This connection was verified by the psychologist Robert Ornstein in the 1960s. In a series of experiments, Ornstein played tapes to volunteers with various kinds of sound information on them, such as simple clicking sounds and household noises. At the end he asked them to estimate how long they had listened to the tape for, and found that when there was more information on the tape (e.g. when there were double the number of clicking noises), the volunteers estimated the time period to be longer. He found that this applied to the complexity of the information too. When they were asked to examine different drawings and paintings, the participants with the most complex images estimated the time period to be longest.

I have tested this myself with a simple experiment with music. During a course, I asked the participants to listen to two pieces of music. One was a mad, frenetic piano concerto by Rachmaninov, with notes cascading at a rate of about 10 per second. The other was a piece of ambient music by Brian Eno, which floated gently and sedately across the room. We listened to the pieces for different periods of time and I asked the participants to estimate how much time had passed. If time perception is related to information, they should have experienced more time for the Rachmaninov piece. It contains a lot more information than the Brian Eno piece – many times more notes, tones and different instruments. All of this extra information should have stretched time.

And this is what the results showed. We listened to the Rachmaninov piece for 2 mins 20 secs, and the average estimate was 3 mins 25 secs. We listened to the Brian Eno piece for 2 minutes, while the average estimate was 2 mins 32 secs – still an over-estimate, but a lower one.

And if more information slows down time, perhaps part of the reason why time goes so slowly for children is because of the massive amount of ‘perceptual information’ that they take in from the world around them. Young children appear to live in a completely different world to adults – a much more intense, more real and more fascinating and beautiful one. As the psychologist Ernest Becker writes, in childhood we experience a “vision of the primary miraculousness of creation,” and our perceptions of the world are “suffused… in emotion and wonder.” This is one of the reasons why we often recall childhood as a time of bliss – because the world was a much more exciting and beautiful place to us then, and all our experiences were so intense. Children’s heightened perception means that they’re constantly taking in all kinds of details which pass us adults by – tiny cracks in windows, tiny insects crawling across the floor, patterns of sunlight on the carpet etc. And even the larger scale things which we can see as well seem to be more real to them, to be brighter, with more presence and is-ness. All of this information stretches out time for children.

However, as we get older, we lose this intensity of perception, and the world becomes a dreary and familiar place – so dreary and familiar that we stop paying attention to it. After all, why should you pay attention to the buildings or streets you pass on the way to work? You’ve seen these things thousands of times before, and they’re not beautiful or fascinating, they’re just… ordinary. As Becker describes it, we “repress” this intensity of vision. “By the time we leave childhood,” he writes, “we have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience.”3 Or as Wordsworth puts it in his famous poem ‘Intimations of Immortality’, the childhood vision which enabled to all things “apparelled in celestial light,” begins to “fade into the light of common day.”4 And this is why time speeds up for us. As we become adults, we begin to ‘switch off’ to the wonder and is-ness of the world, gradually stop paying conscious attention to our surroundings and experience. As a result we take in less information, which means that time passes more quickly. Time is less ‘stretched’ with information.

Old and New Experience

And once we become adults, there is a process of progressive ‘familiarisation’ which continues throughout our lives. The longer we’re alive, the more familiar the world becomes, so that the amount of perceptual information we absorb decreases with every year, and time seems to pass faster every year.

There are two basic reasons why this happens. On the one hand, as we grow older there is progressively less newness in our lives. The life of a 20 year old woman is still full of new experiences. She’s still discovering new kinds of music, food, literature and other new hobbies and interests. She might be experiencing her first serious romantic relationship, learning to drive, flying and going abroad for the first time, discovering new towns or the countryside close to where she lives and so on. When she has these new experiences she is free of the de-sensitising mechanism; she perceives the ‘raw experience’ of the world and processes a large amount of perceptual information.

The same person at the age of 30 might still be having a few new experiences. She might be having a baby, going abroad to another country she’s never been to before, learning a new language, or starting a new job. But by the time she reaches 40 the world contains much less unfamiliarity. Her life probably consists mainly of the repetition of experiences which she’s had hundreds or thousands of times before. She works at the job she’s had for the last 20 years, goes home to the same house she’s had for the last ten, devotes her free time to the same hobbies and interests she discovered when she was 20, goes away at weekends to the same countryside, to the same foreign country every year, and so on. Because of this the de-sensitising mechanism has a greater hold over her. She’s hardly ever free of it, which means that she absorbs much less perceptual information.

But if this was the only reason why our perceptions become less fresh – and why time speeds up – as we get older, there wouldn’t be much difference between the time perceptions of a 40 and a 60 year old person. Most of us use up almost all of our ‘stock’ of new experience by the time we reach middle-age, and so there would be no real reason why time should appear to move faster for a person at these different ages. However, the second reason why our perceptions become less fresh is probably that as we get older all the experiences we’ve already had become more familiar to us. Not only do we have fewer new experiences, but the experiences which are already familiar to us become progressively less real. In William James’ words, “each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine.”5 As well as experiencing lots of new things, a woman at the age of 20 is still quite ‘fresh’ to the phenomenal world around her – but over the next 20 years, she’ll look at the same street scenes and the same sky and the same trees thousands of times, so that more and more of their realness will fade away.

Incidentally, this link between time and information can explain other aspects of time too. One of the ‘laws’ of psychological time which I set out in my book Making Time is that “time seems to slow down when we’re exposed to new environments and experiences.” This is because the unfamiliarity of new experiences allows us to take in much more information. Another of the laws is that “time goes quickly in states of absorption.” This is because in states of absorption our attention narrows to one small focus and we block out information from our surroundings. At the same time there is very little ‘cognitive information’ in our minds, since the concentration has quietened the normal ‘thought chatter’ of the mind. On the other hand, time goes slowly in states of boredom and discomfort because in these situations our attention isn’t occupied and a massive amount of thought-chatter flows through our minds, bringing a massive amount of cognitive information.

Slowing Down Time

On the positive side though, if we know why time speeds up as we get older we aren’t powerless against it. If we know that this is caused by familiarity, then we make an effort to expose ourselves to as much newness in our lives as possible – not just new environments through travel (although this is very important), but new challenges, new situations, new information, ideas, hobbies and skills. As the expansion of time which we often experience when we go to foreign countries shows, newness and unfamiliarity stretch time. If we regularly expose ourselves to unfamiliarity, we can experience more time in our lives, and so effectively live for ‘longer.’

If you spend all the years of your adult life doing the same job, living in the same house in the same area, doing the same things with the same people in your free time, then it’s inevitable that you experience a swift passage of time. But if you change jobs regularly, regularly travel to new places, keep investigating new ideas and giving yourself new challenges, time will pass more slowly to you. In this way, it’s possible for a person who dies before the age of 40 (like the French poet and explorer Arthur Rimbaud, who I wrote about recently in New Dawn) to live for ‘longer’ than a person who dies at the age of 80.

A second way in which we can slow down time is by making a conscious effort to be ‘mindful’ of our experience. There are some people who seem to be as affected by familiarity than others, and see the world with something of the fresh, first-time vision of children all through their lives. These are the kind of people – sometimes seen as eccentrics by those around them – who often begin sentences with phrases like ‘Isn’t it strange that…?’ or ‘Have you ever wondered…?’ They’re the kind of people who might stop in the street to gaze up at a beautiful scene of the sun breaking through clouds or a silver moon above the rooftops; or they might stare intently at the sea, at flowers or at animals, as if they’ve never seen them before. Poets and artists often have this kind of ‘child-like’ vision – in fact it’s this that usually provides the inspiration for their work. They often have a sense of strangeness and wonder about things which most of us take for granted, and feel a need to capture and frame their more intense perceptions. These people will be less affected by the first time law of psychological time than others; time may well speed up for them, but perhaps not to the same degree.

And in a sense, we can cultivate this attitude simply by making a conscious effort to be ‘mindful.’ Instead of focusing our attention on the ‘thought-chatter’ in our heads or on tasks or distractions like TV or computer games, we should try to live in the present, to give our attention to the experiences we’re having and to our surroundings. When you’re having a shower in the morning, for example – instead of letting your mind chatter away about the things you’ve got to do today or the things you did last night, try to bring your attention to the here and now, to really be aware of the sensation of the water splashing against and running down your body and the sense of warmth and cleanness you feel. Or on the way home from work on the bus or the train – instead of mulling over all the problems you’ve had to deal with at work or daydreaming about the attractive girl you met last night, focus your attention outside you; look at the sky, at the houses and buildings you pass, and be aware of yourself here, walking amongst them.

Mindfulness means stopping thinking and starting to be aware, to live in the here and now of your experience instead of the ‘there and then’ of your thoughts. It stretches time in exactly the same way that new experience does: because we give more attention to our experience, we take in more information from it.

In other words, to some extent we can control time. It doesn’t have to speed up as get older. Some of us try to extend our lives by keeping fit and eating healthy food, which is completely sensible. But it’s also possible for us to expand time from the inside, by changing the way we experience the moment to moment reality of our lives. We can live for longer not just in terms of years, but also in terms of perception.

Footnotes:

1. Quoted in W. James, The Principles of Psychology, (New York: Dover Press, 1950) Chapter XV.

2. Ibid.

3. E. Becker, The Denial of Death, (New York: Free Press, 1973), p.50.

4. W. Wordsworth, Poems, (London: Penguin, 1950), p.71.

5. James, op.cit.

.

STEVE TAYLOR is an author and lecturer who lives in Manchester, England. This article is based on his new book Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It, published in Australia by Allen & Unwin. The book has been described by Dr. Stanley Krippner as “a major landmark in our understanding of how human beings experience time.” Steve is also the author of The Fall: The Evidence for a Golden Age and the Dawning of a New Era, described as “astonishing work” by Colin Wilson. Steve can be contacted at essytaylor@yahoo.com. His website is www.stevenmtaylor.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 104 (Sept-Oct 2007).

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—

In 1984, in Boulder, Colorado, an interviewer asked William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), “What religious persuasion would you consider yourself?” Without hesitating, Burroughs replied, “Gnostic, or a Manichean.”1Upon reading those words, suddenly everything made sense.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the above conversation occurred in 1984. In many ways, Burroughs was a far more lucid and accurate analyst of twentieth century politics than even George Orwell, whose speculative concept of “newspeak” in his 1948 novel 1984 was quickly overshadowed by the real-world machinations of post-WWII Madison Avenue advertising techniques and Washington D.C. public relations firms.

Superior to Aldous Huxley’s brilliant 1958 collection of essays, Brave New World Revisited, Burroughs’s 1974 book The Job is a must-not-live-without essential guide to charting the opaque labyrinth of obfuscation and lies regularly constructed by the Reality Studio to protect itself from the light of scrutiny. Unlike his more naïve contemporaries among the Beat literary movement, Burroughs never took his eye off the twitchy sharpshooter in the corner, the wild card in the deck known as Control.

With the analytical eye of a surgeon (Burroughs studied medicine at Harvard, specialised knowledge that would eventually serve him well in his novels), Burroughs performed an autopsy on the body politic in a multitude of bleak and humorous novels, foremost among them Junky (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), Nova Express (1964), and The Place of Dead Roads (1983).

But Burroughs never limited his vision to merely charting out the intricate connections that make up the system of control. Like Huxley before him, who eventually followed his dystopian novel Brave New World with a Utopian counterpoint titled The Island, Burroughs himself attempted to construct his own vision of a Utopia in such novels as The Wild Boys (1971) and Cities of the Red Night (1981).

In both cases, Burroughs seemed to suggest that a Utopia was not possible except within an isolated oasis, what Hakim Bey would call “a temporary autonomous zone.”2 In the first case, the autonomous zone takes the form of an all-male enclave in the jungles of North Africa; these commandos, trained in combat for defensive purposes, can reproduce without the aid of women and travel through the trees on prehensile hemorrhoids. In Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs’s Utopia is based on historical fact and manifests as an island settlement established by Captain Mission, an actual pirate who lived in the eighteenth century.Mission explored the Madagascar coast and found a bay ten leagues north of Diego-Suarez. It was resolved to establish here the shore quarters of the Republic – erect a town, build docks, and have a place they might call their own. The colony was called Libertatia and was placed under Articles drawn up by Captain Mission. The Articles state, among other things: all decisions with regard to the colony to be submitted to vote by the colonists; the abolition of slavery for any reason including debt; the abolition of the death penalty; and freedom to follow any religious beliefs or practices without sanction or molestation.3

In both Wild Boys and Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs celebrates the notion of an autonomous zone kept separate from the madding hordes through potentially violent defensive measures, where a human being is allowed to pursue life free from the constant surveillance of overly authoritarian social structures. In Burroughs’s hands, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies would no doubt have a very different outcome.

Burroughs’s libertarian brand of morality was based on Jack Black’s notions of the “Johnson family” as chronicled in Black’s 1926 autobiography You Can’t Win. The impact this book had on Burroughs when he was still a young man can’t be overestimated. In Burroughs’s own words, the Johnson creed can be described as follows:

“The Johnson family” was a turn-of-the-century expression to designate good bums and thieves. It was elaborated into a code of conduct. A Johnson honours his obligations. His word is good and he is a good man to do business with. A Johnson minds his own business. He is not a snoopy, self-righteous, troublemaking person. A Johnson will give help when help is needed. He will not stand by while someone is drowning or trapped under a burning car.4

Surely in Burroughs’s world this would be the only mandatory social stricture established for his personal temporary autonomous zone.

Burroughs’s vision of a Utopian autonomous zone could be seen as a metaphor for the Gnostic concept of “the pneuma,” an infinitesimally small fragment of the divine that exists in all human beings.

Gnosticism, an early form of Christianity, flourished in the Middle East until approximately the second century CE when the movement was violently suppressed by Roman Catholic authorities. Dr. Stephan Hoeller, the current bishop of the Gnostic Church in Los Angeles, distinguishes Gnosticism from traditional forms of Christianity in this way:

[Gnosticism is] much more orientated toward the personal, spiritual advancement and transformation of the individual, regarding figures such as Jesus as being helpers rather than sacrificial saviours. It is a form of religion that has […] a much more ecumenical and universal scope in terms of its relationship to spiritual, religious traditions other than the Christian.5

According to literary scholar Gregory Stephenson:

…the attitude that characterises all the Gnostic systems is that the world, the body, and matter are unreal and evil. They are illusions that are the products of malevolent powers called Archons, chief among whom is Sammael (the god of the blind or the blind god), also called Ialdabaoth or the Demiurge. These creator-gods are not the Deity of the Supreme Being, though they make claim to being so. The Deity is completely transcendent – absolutely distinct, apart, and remote from the created universe. However, a portion of the divine substance, called the pneuma, is enclosed in the human body – within the human passions and the human appetites […]. The aim of Gnosticism is to liberate the pneuma from its material, delusional prison and to reunite it with the Deity. The Archons seek to obstruct this liberation and to maintain their dominion.6

This basic theological structure applies to almost all of Burroughs’s work. Burroughs’s strong sense of morality, of the distinct difference between right and wrong, is often lost in the lurid morass of details concerning his personal life. His heroin addiction, his homosexuality, his arrest in Mexico for the accidental death of his wife, his early experimentation with yage in South America and his later fascination with Wilhelm Reich’s unorthodox theories regarding orgone energy – all of these unusual aspects of his life, though admittedly intriguing, are often reduced to gossipy anecdotes that threaten to diminish the importance of the work itself.

Burroughs was never the star of his own novels, not even in his highly autobiographical debut, Junky. The central figure in all his novels is war – a continuous war between Freedom and Control, what Burroughs himself might very well refer to as “good and evil.”

The conflict between good and evil is considered to be a hollow theme by most literary scholars. After all, is this not the purview of Tolkienesque sword and sorcery epics and four-colour superhero comics? Surely no major literary figure of the twentieth century ever bothered to waste his time on such silliness.

But that’s not quite true. In the work of no other American writer do we find this theme explored in as complex and harrowing a manner as in the novels and essays of William Burroughs. At the beginning of this essay Burroughs described himself as a “Manichean.” Burroughs defined this term as follows:

The Manichean believe in an actual struggle between good and evil, which is not an eternal struggle since one of them will win in this particular area, sooner or later. Of course, with the Christians there was this tremendous inversion of values where the most awful people are thrown up as this paragon of virtue for everyone to emulate…7

The Manichean sect of Gnosticism spread across three continents over the course of eleven hundred years beginning, approximately, in CE 240. It was founded by the Persian prophet Mani, who was eventually imprisoned at the age of 61, tortured for 26 days, and assassinated. According to Dr. Hoeller, Mani is among “two of the great luminaries of the Gnostic tradition.”8

Dr. Hoeller sums up Mani’s basic doctrine as follows:

In the beginning, said Mani, the kingdoms of Light and Darkness coexisted in uneasy peace. While Light had no quarrel with the existence of Darkness and would have remained content existing side-by-side with it, Darkness would have it otherwise. Darkness was in a state of agitation and wrath and decided to attack and invade the realm of light.

As the legions of Darkness approached the realm of Light, the primal light needed to defend itself. It called upon the Mother of Life to bring forth the Primal Man (a cosmic figure, not related to Adam or other human beings except in an indirect way). The Primal Man in turn had five sons, and together the six expelled the Dark forces from the kingdom of Light and pursued them onto the battlefield of the lower aeons. Unfortunately, on the battlefield the chief demons of Darkness overpowered the Primal Man and his five sons and devoured them, incorporating their luminous essence into their dark forms. This is how the first terrible intermingling of Light and Darkness occurred […].

In the course of the rescue efforts the Primal Man is freed, and he gloriously ascends to the Godhead. The souls of the human beings, however, have been left behind, along with Light particles that derive from the captivity of the Primal Man and of his sons. It is only at this point that the material world as we know it comes into being. The Earth is created as an alchemical vessel of purification and transformation where the Light can be extracted from dark matter. The Sun and the Moon are both vessels of Light that serve as vehicles to transport Light upwards out of earthly darkness.9

In Burroughs’s world, evil disguises itself as good and good disguises itself as evil. The Archons are Christians and politicians and “jus’ good folk.” The Gnostics are roving bands of criminals and thieves known only to themselves as “the Johnsons.” The visionaries, the ones who have attained genuine gnosis (i.e., “knowledge”) can see through the illusions forged by control, identify the face of the enemy, and from that point begin the quest for true freedom.

These visionaries regularly employ unorthodox and seemingly “insane” methods to overthrow the hypnotic bonds of control: opiates, orgone energy, tape recorders that are used to cut up, analyse, and reconfigure the endless barrage of shallow mass media used to keep the masses docile, astral travel through time and space, hermetic magic, telepathy, etc. These are the tools of the twentieth century Gnostic in Burroughs’s revitalised Libertatia.

The goal of these latter day Gnostics is to establish an autonomous zone, a physical approximation of the pneuma, while having as much fun as possible trying to “wise up the marks,” a paraphrase of a key sentence in the third chapter of his 1964 novel Nova Express: “And you can see the marks are wising up, standing around in sullen groups and that mutter gets louder and louder.”10

The Archons are represented on Earth by parasite-infected control-freaks Burroughs aptly calls “the shits”: “…my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT centre. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right.”11 The shits will use all the power they have on this planet in order to prevent the Johnsons from waking up the marks.

This conflict between good and evil is played out in Burroughs’s fiction over and over again, perhaps most prominently in Nova Express. In this novel the Johnsons are called “The Nova Police” and the shits are called “The Nova Mob,” or simply “The Board”: “All right you board bastards, we’ll by God show you ‘Operation Total Exposure.’ For all to see. In Times Square. In Piccadilly.”12 Operation Total Exposure represents an attempt by the Nova Police to pull back the illusory curtain that protects the parasite-infected Reality Studio from being seen in its true form, to induce gnosis in the madding hordes, to transform the “marks” into “Johnsons.”

In chapter one of Nova Express, Inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police addresses the human race:

What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: ‘the word.’ Alien Word ‘the.’ ‘The’ word of Alien Enemy imprisons ‘thee’ in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open.13

Chapter two, titled “Prisoners, Come Out,” is an open letter addressed to the “peoples of the earth” and is signed by Inspector Lee. In this letter the Inspector explains that the purpose of his novels are

…to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In Naked Lunch, Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to come out. With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly.14

In his 1978 collaboration with Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, Burroughs wrote in reference to Nova Express:

A new mythology is possible in the space age where we will again have heroes and villains with respect to intentions toward this planet.15

The central villain of Inspector Lee and his Nova Police is a Demiurge-like figure named Mr. Bradly-Mr. Martin who leads the extraterrestrial Nova Mob, and through this Mob he has kept the Earth enslaved for thousands of years. In The Third Mind, Burroughs describes Mr. Bradly-Mr. Martin in terms that are overtly Gnostic:

Mr Bradly-Mr Martin, in my mythology, is a God that failed, a God of Conflict in two parts so created to keep a tired old show on the road, The God of Arbitrary Power and Restraint, Of Prison and Pressure, who needs subordinates, who needs what he calls “his human dogs” while treating them with the contempt a con man feels for his victims – But remember the con man needs the Mark – The Mark does not need the con man – Mr Bradly-Mr Martin needs his “dogs” his “errand boys” his “human animals” – He needs them because he is literally blind. They do not need him. In my mythological system he is overthrown in a revolution of his “dogs.”16

Throughout the novel, Inspector Lee explicitly warns the people of Earth about some of the most insidious tools the Mob is using against them:

Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens – Stay out of the Garden of Delights – It is a man-eating trap that ends in green goo – Throw back their ersatz Immortality – It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store – Flush their drug kicks down the drain – They are poisoning and monopolising the hallucinogen drugs – learn to make it without any chemical corn – All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangements so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.17

The succeeding chapters introduce us to members of Mr. Bradly-Mr. Martin’s Archon-like Nova Mob:

‘Sammy the Butcher,’ ‘Green Tony,’ ‘Iron Claws,’ ‘The Brown Artist,’ ‘Jacky Blue Note,’ ‘Limestone John,’ ‘Izzy the Push,’ ‘Hamburger Mary,’ ‘Paddy the Sting,’ ‘The Subliminal Kid,’ ‘The Blue Dinosaur’.18

In a section eerily redolent of current events, a chapter titled “Coordinate Points,” the Inspector does us the favour of outlining the Mob’s plan to bring about global destruction:

The basic nova mechanism is very simple: Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts – This is done by dumping life forms with incompatible conditions of existence on the same planet – There is of course nothing “wrong” about any given life form since “wrong” only has reference to conflicts with other life forms – The point is these forms should not be on the same planet – Their conditions of life are basically incompatible in present time form and it is precisely the work of the Nova Mob to see that they remain in present time form, to create and aggravate the conflicts that lead to the explosion of a planet that is to nova – At any given time recording devices fix the nature of absolute need and dictate the use of total weapons – Like this: Take two opposed pressure groups – Record the most violent and threatening statements of group one with regard to group two and play back to group two – Record the answer and take it back to group one – Back and forth between opposed pressure groups – This process is known as “feed back” – You can see it operating in any bar room quarrel – In any quarrel for that matter – Manipulated on a global scale feeds back nuclear war and nova – These conflicts are deliberately created and aggravated by nova criminals – […] In all my experience as a police officer I have never seen such total fear and degradation on any planet – We intend to arrest these criminals and turn them over to the Biological Department for the indicated alterations.19

Jack Kerouac once wrote, “Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift,” but the truth is that Burroughs never wrote a word of satire in his life. He was writing about life as he saw it, exactly as he experienced it. The Nova Mob and the virus parasites from outer space were not metaphors for him. They were real.

Burroughs, perhaps more so than F. Scott Fitzgerald or even Ernest Hemingway, was the prime mimetic writer of the twentieth century. He never wrote anything other than realistic novels. Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy, might have been the first to catch onto this subtle but significant point when he wrote in 1964,

It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticise the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home.20

Indeed, Burroughs wasn’t trying to satirise modern culture, nor was he trying to create a hypothetical, science fictional representation of it. He was simply explaining his society within the only context that seemed appropriate to him, and that context was undoubtedly a Gnostic one.

Even the so-called science fictional elements of his books were not intended as satire or metaphor. Burroughs could very well have been introduced to the Nova Express model of invading extraterrestrials (and/or intrusions from alternate dimensions) at a very young age. In various interviews, for example, Burroughs has recounted one of his earliest childhood memories.

When he was four, he woke up early in the morning and saw little gray men playing in a block house he had made. “I felt no fear,” he said, “only stillness and wonder.”21 When asked about this incident in 1987, interviewer Larry McCaffery offhandedly referred to such experiences as “hallucinatory.” Burroughs replied, “I wouldn’t call them hallucinatory at all. If you see something, it’s a shift of vision, not a hallucination. You shift your vision. What you see is there, but you have to be in a certain place to see it.”22

This image of “little gray men” evokes more recent, popular conceptions of extraterrestrials as seen on the mass market covers of any number of books by Whitley Strieber, the author of Communion (1987), Transformation (1988) and several others in which his ostensible contacts with alien beings are delineated. Burroughs was so convinced of the reality of invading extraterrestrials that in 1989 he wrote a letter to Strieber asking to visit him and his family in their cabin in upstate New York. The 1996 revised edition of Victor Bockris’s With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker contains an in-depth interview about this meeting:

I was very interested in his first books and I was convinced that he was authentic. I felt he was not a fraud or fake […]. I wrote a letter to Whitley Strieber saying that I would love to contact these visitors […]. His wife, Anne Strieber, wrote back saying, “We, after talking it over, would be glad to invite you to come up to the cabin.” So we spent the weekend there. I had a number of talks with Strieber about his experiences, and I was quite convinced that he was telling the truth […].

Burroughs follows this comment by exploring the idea of “invasion” on all levels. He genuinely believed the human race was, and is, being infected by hostile intelligences on a regular basis:

When I go into my psyche, at a certain point I meet a very hostile, very strong force. It’s as definite as somebody attacking me in a bar. We usually come to a standoff, but I don’t think that I’m necessarily winning or losing […]. Listen, baby, I’ve been coping with this for so many years. I know this invasion gets in. As soon as you get close to something important, that’s when you feel this invasion, and that’s the way you know there’s something there. I’ve felt myself just marched up like a puppy to go and do something that would get me insulted or humiliated. I was not in control […]. There are all degrees of possession. It happens all the time. What you have to do is confront the possession. You can do that only when you’ve wiped out the words. You don’t argue […]. You have to let it wash through. This is difficult, difficult; but I’ll tell you one thing: You detach yourself and allow this to wash through, to go through instead of trying to oppose, which you can’t do […]. The more you pull yourself together the further apart you get. You have to learn to let the thing pass through. I am a man of the world; I understand these things. They happen to all of us. All you have to do is understand them or see them for what they are, that’s all.23

John Lash, co-founder of Metahistory.org, a website that concerns itself with Gnosticism and related topics, has many Burroughs-like perceptions regarding the Gnostic model of spiritual “intrusion.” Lash states:

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 asserted that the capacity for distortion of humanitas, or dehumanisation, is inherent in our minds, but this capacity alone is not potentially deviant. Since we are endowed with nous, a dose of divine intelligence, we are able to detect and correct distorted thinking […]. 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 […] intrusion in both these modes of experience seems to be unique to the finely nuanced noetic science of the [Gnostic] Mysteries.24

And it is this “finely nuanced science” that Burroughs attempted to keep alive in the form of fiction. Burroughs’s many readers were all potential recruits, “marks” who had “wised up” just enough to see a hint of light behind the illusion. His sincerest hope was that at least some of them were paying attention, would pick up the tools he left behind within his books, and use them to storm through the mass of Nova Mobsters whose unenviable job is to surround and protect the ramparts of the fragile Reality Studio until its dying day.

Footnotes:

1. Gregory Corso Interview, “Attack Anything Moving.” Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997, Ed. Sylvere Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e), 2000.

2. Bey, Hakim, T.A.Z., Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991, p. 99.

3. Burroughs, William S., Cities of the Red Night, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981, p. xii.

4. Burroughs, William S., The Place of Dead Roads, New York: Henry Holt, 1983, p. ix.

5. Robert Guffey Interview, “The Suppressed Teachings of Gnosticism.” Paranoia Magazine, www.paranoiamagazine.com/hoeller.html.

6. Stephenson, Gregory, The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation, Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1990, p. 60.

7. Gregory Corso Interview.

8. Hoeller, Stephan A, Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing, Wheaton: Quest, 2002, p. 135.

9. Ibid, pp. 140-41.

10. Burroughs, William S., Three Novels: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Wild Boys, New York: Grove P, 1988, p. 196.

11. Burroughs, William S., The Adding Machine, New York: Seaver, 1986, p. 16.

12. Three Novels, p. 197.

13. Three Novels, p. 186.

14. Three Novels, p. 189.

15. Burroughs, William S. and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, New York: Viking, 1978, p. 97.

16. Ibid.

17. Three Novels, p. 188.

18. Three Novels, p. 236.

19. Three Novels, pp. 235-36.

20. Murphy, Timothy S, Wising Up the Marks: The Modern William Burroughs, Los Angeles: U of California P, 1997, p. 145.

21. Bockris, Victor, With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996, p. xx.

22. Hibbard, Allen, Conversations with William S. Burroughs, Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1999, p. 182.

23. With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker, pp. 242-46.

24. Lash, John, “A Gnostic Catechism: Encounters with Aliens in a Mystery School Text.” www.metahistory.org/GnosticCatechism.php.

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Robert Guffey is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts Program at California State University at Long Beach, USA. He is also a graduate of the Clarion writer’s workshop in Seattle, WA. His first published short story “The Infant Kiss” received an Honorable Mention in the 2001 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (Vol. #14). His short stories, articles and interviews have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as After Shocks, The Chiron Review, Like Water Burning, Mysteries, New Dawn, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paranoia, The Pedestal, Riprap, Steamshovel Press, and The Third Alternative. He is currently teaching English at CSU Long Beach. He can be contacted at rguffey@hotmail.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 99 (Nov-Dec 2006).

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With the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the mid-nineties and the Gnostic Gospels found in Nag Hammadi, a new perspective on the role of Mary Magdalene in the revelation and dissemination of the esoteric teachings of Christ has emerged onto the public stage. With the release of The Da Vinci Code, she has been placed firmly in the public consciousness, her story awakening both excitement and controversy.

It is my contention that Mary Magdalene was the carrier of a tradition of respect and reverence for the Divine Feminine, a secret initiatory tradition that leads back through Jesus, Gnosticism, the esoteric teachings of Judaism, and the Egyptian mysteries of Isis to the ultimate ground or source of all religions. By seeking out the alternative roads to understanding, by looking at the Gnostic texts, legends, symbols, and iconography, one discovers the distinct possibility Mary Magdalene was not only first witness to and herald of the Resurrection, but the chief disciple and recipient of Christ’s’ gnosis, as well as teacher and transmitter of these extraordinary Mysteries to the people of France.

On the shores of the Mediterranean Sea outside Marseilles at Les Saintes Marie de la Mere there is a small chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene and consecrated by Archbishop Roncalli (who later became Pope John XXIII). Given a place of prominence within this chapel are paintings of her arrival from Palestine in a small rudderless boat.According to legend, soon after the crucifixion and Resurrection, Mary Magdalene and her family were expelled from the Holy Land, set adrift on the Mediterranean Sea and made their way to this region, particularly the area around Southern France and Northern Spain. At this time in history, aside from the already established Celts, many Greeks, Arabs, Jews and others lived and travelled in this area. There was even a Jewish city known as Glanum Levi whose ruins can be found today in Provence.

In the midst of this cosmopolitan confluence of cultures, along with the exchange of goods there must have been an exchange of philosophical and religious ideas. It is very possible that during this period many spiritual and symbolic links were discovered between these diverse peoples and their traditional belief systems that stretched back to the temples of Egypt. Before her arrival in Les Saintes Marie Sur Les Mere, France was riddled with Isis cults. The name Paris etymologically can be linked to the pre-Celtic ParIsis, the grove of Isis. Clearly this region was fertile ground for Mary Magdalene’s mission.Following her arrival in France, she was said to have travelled the land, preaching the authentic Gnostic gospel of Jesus, which had been directly transmitted to her during his time on Earth and in mystic visions after his return to the more subtle dimensions of light. French religious literature from the Middle Ages is filled with legends and stories of the life of Mary Magdalene from this period until her death. Tales abound of her miraculous healings, her performance of the ritual of baptism, her aid in fertility and childbearing and even her ability to raise the dead. There are even reports of a secret tradition of the healing arts that exists today in France and traces its roots back to Mary Magdalene.1

After this prophetic mission was accomplished, Mary is reported to have withdrawn to a cave in Ste. Baum, where she spent the remainder of her days in pray and seclusion. She is believed to have been buried at Ste. Maximin where her remains were watched over by Cassianite monks from the fifth century until the Saracen invasion. Then in 1058, in a papal bull, Pope Stephen acknowledged the existence of her relics in the church of Vezeley, which became one of the major places of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages.

But before we look at the evidence for her distinctive role as Apostle of the Apostles and prophetic mission, let us take a look at the hidden history of Gnosticism, the powerful doctrine of Divine grace, healing and illumination that she was said to have transmitted.

The Gnostic Teachings

It was during the Hellenistic period that the mystic knowledge of Egypt, the great symbols, myths, astronomical, scientific and metaphysical teachings passed into the heart of the Mystery Schools of Greece and Rome, which included the region of Gaul where Mary Magdalene is reported to have lived and preached. These secret initiatory teachings of the Egyptians were also retained and transmitted through the inner circles of Judaism to Jesus himself.

At the heart of this lineage of transmission was an extraordinary metaphysical teaching known as Gnosticism. This teaching is believed to be the spiritual basis of his essential message to humanity, a message revealed to Mary Magdalene, his disciples and followers through the vehicles of metaphor, allegory and parable. Unlike the patriarchal, dogmatic, materially based teachings prevalent during this period, Gnosticism placed primary value on the feminine qualities of receptivity, intuitive perception, visionary experience and the art of healing. It was a teaching of love, selflessness, harmony and communion.

The mystic experience of, and communion with, the essential grace and majesty of Divinity, lay at the heart of this Gnostic transmission. The clear and immediate experience of this awakening was known as gnosis or wisdom. Often translated from its Greek root as ‘knowledge’, Gnosticism goes much deeper than mere intellectual understanding. Like a brilliant flash of light arising from the darkness, this understanding arises in the individual as a bright lucid awareness – an intuitive realisation of the pure essence, nature and energy of Divinity as it flows within oneself, the luminous realms and all of creation.

From the Gnostic viewpoint, the answers to all of life’s mysteries can only be found when one “opens oneself to this divine current and allows oneself to be penetrated by it to the point where one is fully transformed and illuminated by it.”2 From the viewpoint of many early Gnostic communities, this divine current was perceived as the feminine, healing and nurturing energy of God’s Holy Spirit.

The fundamental doctrine of the Gnostics relates the dualistic nature of the world in which we reside, the eternal struggle between good and evil. They believed that Jehovah, the wrathful god of the Old Testament was a false god and expression of what they called the demiurge. For how could a fully enlightened divinity contain within him the base emotions of anger, jealousy and vengeance? For them, the real God was a loving deity equally and directly accessible to all. This God taught that love, compassion and the true sacrifice and transformation of the self, or ego, was the highest spiritual path.

The Gnostics believed that the plan of this demiurge, or Satan, was to trap spirit in matter, and the Earth itself was a prison in which souls were exiled from their divine home. For them, the real world was the non-material world of spirit and all of their rituals and practices were designed to purify them and provide them with the means to find their way out of the impure world of matter, darkness and suffering and return to their true home in the Light.

Clearly, these sacred esoteric teachings were revolutionary. Unlike the fixed, restrictive, hierarchical systems prevalent during this period, these teachings were open to all, female, male, rich, poor Jew or Pagan. This all-inclusive transmission of teachings formerly reserved for the elite was at odds with the practices of Orthodox Judaism and the emerging Church of Rome. For once the seeker had been touched by this Gnostic current, she or he came to recognise their own divine nature and perceive their place in the world from a whole new perspective. No longer did they need the intercession of a priest or rabbi to connect them with their spiritual inheritance.

Evidence of Mary Magdalene’s primary role as disciple, visionary, mediatrix and herald of these revolutionary teachings can be found in a number of Gnostic texts. These include The Pistis Sophia, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Mary and more.

Apostle of the Apostles

The Pistis Sophia is a Coptic Gnostic revelatory work composed and/or compiled in Egypt around the middle of the second century CE. It claims to disclose the “secret teachings of the Savior,” reserved for his inner circle of initiates during the eleven years following his Resurrection. Filled with powerful, poetic imagery, this text reveals the intimate connections between this emerging form of Christianity, Paganism and beliefs and rituals founds in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.3 It also clearly recognises and demonstrates Mary Magdalene’s essential role as foremost disciple, seer and prophetess.

It appears the teachings found in the Pistis Sophia were created specifically for the apostles who would go forth and spread his gospel. It takes the form of a dialogue between Jesus and these apostles and consists primarily of questions and answers. It is fascinating to note that in this text, out of the forty-six questions asked of him, thirty-nine of them come from Mary Magdalene. Due to her sincerity, astute level of inquiry and ability to comprehend the essence of his words, time and time again she is praised and recognised by him for her clarity and insight.

For example, after Jesus presents the first part of these mystical teachings concerning the aeons, orders and regions of the “Great Invisible,” he acknowledges Mary Magdalene’s superior capacity for contemplation, insight and revelation.

It came to pass then, when Mary had heard the Savior say these words, that she gazed fixedly into the air for the space of an hour. She said: “My Lord, give commandment to me to speak in openness.” And Jesus, the compassionate, answered and said unto Mary:

“Mary, thou blessed one, whom I will perfect in all mysteries, of those of the height, discourse in openness, thou, whose heart is raised to the Kingdom of Heaven more than all thy brethren.”

Throughout the text, after listening to her interpretation of his teachings, he acknowledges her perceptive abilities,

Well, said, Mary, for thou art blessed before all women on earth, because thou shalt be the fullness of all fullness and the perfection of all perfections.

This is only the first of a number of texts that speak of Mary Magdalene’s gifts and unique relationship with Jesus. According to a group of Gnostic Gospels discovered in 1945 in a cave in Upper Egypt near the village of Nag Hammadi, she was said to be an inspired prophetess who continuously experienced the living presence of her Lord within her.

In The Gospel of Mary, from this collection, Mary Magdalene, the visionary, reveals to the other disciples teachings that were transmitted to her through visionary experience. In this gospel, she clearly takes the lead, not only soothing and reassuring the male apostles who fear capture and death, but relating to them teachings of the Savior that she alone has been privileged to receive. As in the Pistis Sophia, the Savior blesses her for her visionary capacity. When Peter questions her vision, Levi responds with, “If the Teacher held her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the Teacher knew her very well, for he loved her more than us.”4

In The Gospel of Philip, from the same collection, the disciples appear to be jealous of the intimate relationship between the Savior and Mary Magdalene.

The Companion of the savior is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Savior answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.”

Because I have no reason to doubt Philip’s account or the words found in these early texts, I feel that the Christianity brought to France by Mary Magdalene has a different feel about it because it was closer to the authentic teachings of Jesus. If Mary Magdalene truly was the Apostle of the Apostles, then Jesus transmitted more to her or perhaps she understood this transmission better than the rest of the apostles. Through this lens we can begin to perceive and acknowledge the different understanding and practice of Christianity that emerged in Southern France, one that lasted over 1,200 years and in a sense pervades the place to this day.

Magdalene’s Legacy

When one looks at the history of the region one finds evidence that with her arrival, a surge of spiritual awareness, code of ethics and respect for feminine values began, which wove itself into the very fabric of the psychic landscape of Europe. The Order of the Knights Templar was created in this region. The alchemists began their flurry of Cathedral building to preserve the secret metaphysical teachings passed down to them from ancient Egypt. The Crusades and the entire Back to Jerusalem movement began in this area. The mystical Kabbalistic texts the Bahir and Zohar emerged from this region, bringing to the Jewish people knowledge of the Shekhina, or ‘indwelling presence’ and ‘feminine potency of God’. The cults of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and Black Madonna, symbolically representing the three aspects of Isis in her role as Universal Goddess, arose here and spread throughout Europe.

It was here the troubadours and poets such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Robert de Bouron and others sang their songs of devotion to the feminine principle and wrote their fables of the Holy Grail. And it was here in the beautiful mountains and valleys of Provence and Languedoc that the Cathars, as carriers of the Gnostic transmission of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, rebelled against what they considered to be the excesses of the priestly hierarchy, renounced all worldly possessions and fully committed themselves to the path of spirit. Among the Cathars, women as well as men were priests who transmitted divine grace and healing power through the laying on of hands in their sacred initiatory rites that link back to Mary Magdalene, Isis and the healing traditions held by the temple priestess.

As time marched on, the Church of Rome, threatened by the inroads these powerful Gnostic teachings were making among the local populace, labelled them heretical and moved to suppress them. To cement the rule of the Church of Rome, Pope Innocent III called for a Crusade against this Gnostic Cathar heresy. This crusade, which had as its focus the torture, murder and eradication of these loving and compassionate people was the starting point of a wave of fear, suffering and suppression of the feminine in both her divine and worldly aspects that would spread throughout Europe and become known as the Holy Inquisition.

Closer to our time, there are the visions of Saint Bernadette and the healing waters of Lourdes, as well as the mystery of Father Sauniere, Rennes Le Chateau and his strange chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene. Then there is the saga of Otto Rahn searching through the hills and valleys of this region for the Nazis trying to find the Holy Grail for the upper echelon of the SS. There are the legends of the secret alchemists who live in a magical castle somewhere in the Pyrenees recently popularised in the Harry Potter series. Finally, emerging from this region, is the mystery of the Alchemical Cross of Hendaye, the prophetic visions of Nostradamus and the Basque legend that John of the Apocalypse still lives in a cave in the Pyrenees and will leave that cave only at the end of time.5

These events and stories reveal that Mary Magdalene and the Gnostic current may very possibly be the driving force behind the rich history of this region. Whether it is fact or legend that Mary Magdalene actually came to this area is less important than the power and impact her life and teachings had upon the people of France. It is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see, that early in the history of this grace-filled tradition, Mary Magdalene, Apostle of the Apostles entered and has remained at the heart of Christianity.

Footnotes:

1. From a conversation with minister and playwright Lila Sophia Tresemer, co-author of the play and DVD, Re-Discovering Mary Magdalene (written with her husband, David Tresemer), for which I created the choreography. In their travels through France, she discovered a tradition of using the healing oils of Mary Magdalene that was said to have been passed down to healers now living in the south of France.

2. Sharron Rose, The Path of the Priestess; A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine (Inner Traditions, 2002) p.104

3. From the forward by Leslie Shepard to G.R.S. Mead’s, Pistis Sophia (University Books, 1974), p. xvii

4. From the recent translation by Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (Inner Traditions, 2002).

5. For greater insight into these events see Weidner and Bridges, The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time (Destiny Books, 2003) and the Sacred Mysteries DVD, Secrets of Alchemy: The Great Cross and the End of Time.

Top image caption: The “Mother of the World” by mystic and artist Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947). Nicholas and his wife Helena taught that the World Mother has manifested many times over the millennia. (Image courtesy of the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York, www.roerich.org).

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SHARRON ROSE, MA.Ed, is a filmmaker, writer, choreographer and teacher. She is the author of The Path of the Priestess; A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine and the DVD, Yoga of Light. Together with her husband, Jay Weidner, she has produced numerous documentaries and instructional DVDs for their company Sacred Mysteries Productions. Sharron’s web site is www.sharronrose.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 2.

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Tobias Churton is one of today’s most lively and spirited investigators of that underground stream of the Western tradition known as Gnosticism. He first became interested in the Gnostics while reading for a degree in theology at the University of Oxford in the 1970s.

Soon after leaving, he became interested in exploring these ideas for television. “I’d got it into my head that there had never been any religious television – only programmes about religion,” he later recalled. “I had written a paper on the subject which recommended a new kind of television for this most neglected area, something on the lines of television, a kind of programme which would enter into the very nature of the religious experience and not simply observe it.” Churton got his opportunity in the mid-1980s, when he produced a series on the Gnostics for British television. To accompany his series, he wrote his first book, The Gnostics, a history of this elusive esoteric movement from early Christianity to modern manifestations in such figures as Giordano Bruno and William Blake, and even in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

In the years since then, Churton has pursued and deepened his appreciation for the Western esoteric traditions. He was the Founder Editor of Freemasonry Today magazine, and during the last year has published two new books. The Golden Builders: Alchemists, Rosicrucians, and the First Freemasons explores the background of Masonry from its antecedents in the alchemical and Hermetic traditions of antiquity through its modern manifestations. His latest book, Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times, casts an even wider net, tracing the Gnostic heritage from its roots in Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and the Essenes to the 20th century magus Aleister Crowley and manifestations of gnosis in pop culture. Churton currently makes his home in Britain.
– Richard Smoley

How exactly would you describe gnosis? What does it mean to you?

How would I describe gnosis? I should like to describe gnosis as the experience of knowing or having intimacy with what we call God. God, the Bible tells us, wishes to be known. The word ‘Gnostic’ – one who has experienced gnosis – was first used as a nickname by those who opposed the whole idea or thought it was all too much for human beings to claim.

In a way, it really is the most enormous act of cheek to say that one has had experience of God! John’s Gospel for example says that “no man hath seen God at any time.” Hospitals for the mentally sick are full of people who claim the most extraordinary intimacy with powers beyond themselves. In the Gnostic tradition broadly, sanity or peace of mind is a fruit of gnosis. And ‘sanity’ means becoming clean, or ‘whole’ so there is a moral as well as a physical and psychological dimension to be considered. It might be argued that one has got to share in Christ to know God. But clearly there has been gnosis outside of the Christian tradition. So God obviously wants to be known by everyone!

Gnosis to me personally means receiving a gift – a gift that carries with it certain responsibilities. It’s quite a heavy thing to be lightened – or enlightened! There’s a lot we carry that prevents us from rising and growing in divine knowledge. For me, gnosis means a love of truth, a sensitivity to the magical aspects of life, and above all, a permanent struggle with material consciousness. People would rather see a person burnt than their own money burnt. That, we would say, is only natural. Politicians are adept at appealing to us on this level. Being gnostic does involve an unusual attitude to the natural order. The merely human in us does come under scrutiny – the light shows up the shadows and darkness in us, if you like. Obviously, no one likes being ‘shown up’, so we persecute the light-bringers and hide ourselves behind images of who we think we are. Gnosis is light and, if I may say so, “my burden is light.”

Is it possible to experience gnosis for oneself?

I obviously believe it is possible to experience gnosis for oneself. One could hardly experience it for other people! But the experience changes and one might not always be aware that one is experiencing gnosis. It is not a single state. It is not the same as ‘instant satori’. The universe itself is a projection of gnosis, if limited. I should say that if one has no experience of gnosis, one can hardly say one has been truly alive.

Could you explain a little about the Gnostic schools of antiquity, and what happened to them?

There were many Gnostic schools in late antiquity, as far as we can tell, surrounding some particular teacher, or the self-proclaimed followers of such a teacher. They had visions, dreams, statements, stances and orders of followers. Some were probably charlatans and some ‘the real thing’, as one would expect.

The orthodox Christian teachers who made it their business to denigrate and destroy the Gnostic movement in the Church always tended to isolate the teacher. Naming names was a big part of the anti-Gnostic propaganda. Thanks to their efforts, we have some dim records of men like Basilides, Carpocrates, Marcus, Marcion, Valentinus, Simon Magus, Dositheos. The orthodox apologists Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Epiphanius and Tertullian, for example, made it their business to present these Gnostic teachers as demented quacks leading their followers into what Irenaeus called – in about 180 CE – “an abyss of madness and blasphemy.” I don’t know how seriously one can take their presentations of the evidence. It’s a bit like asking George Bush whether he prefers Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Revolver!

The Gnostics represented a kind of counter-culture and therefore exposed themselves to persecution and ridicule. You can’t imagine Gnostics wandering around in suits and ties with briefcases talking about real estate values! Some seem to have met in catacombs and private places. There were Gnostics in the first ever monasteries of Saint Pachom in the Thebaid of Egypt. Indeed, it is arguable that the first monastic movement was chiefly inspired by the desire for a place to get away from the world and experience God, i.e.: a Gnostic inspiration. Clearly the monasteries have always had a special role in promoting authentic spiritual life, if usually in secret. The walls had ears.

Sadly, the British and German Reformations, in attacking the monasteries in the name of the Protestant tendency, tended to throw the baby out with the bath-water, so the position of today’s Gnostic has some kinship with that of the early Christian Gnostics. Where do we go?, they might ask. San Francisco obviously didn’t work for everyone!

However, as we know from the story of the Nag Hammadi Library, even in the desert monasteries the Gnostics were not safe. Official visitations weeded out the offending literature and condemned it to the flames. Soon the offending Gnostics would meet the same fate. The Church hooked up with the State in the 4th century CE and the true Gnosis was exiled. Just one good reason to keep religion out of politics!

How did this Gnostic legacy survive after the end of the old Gnostic schools? What sort of heritage did they bestow on our civilisation?

Thanks be to God, the Gnostic experience and challenge did just survive the end of the Roman eagle’s flight. As one might expect, it survived on the fringes of the old Empire – in Syria, Iraq, Bulgaria, Turkestan and Bosnia – possibly Ireland. Even, for a while, in Mongolia and China. The flame was kept alive through untold numbers of military campaigns, massacres and violent conflicts of kings, sultans, demigods, semi-gods, dictators and emperors. It was carried into the bosom of the Islamic Empire after the 7th century in the form of Hermetic philosophy as an inspiration to science and philosophy – examining God in His works and wonders. The Sabians of Harran – who were not Muslims but Sabians and permitted by the Koran – their role is extraordinarily important in keeping the flame alive.

The appearance of Islamic mysticism – or rather, gnosis – among the so-called Sufis in the ninth and tenth centuries was highly significant. Magic, philosophy, science, mysticism – in short, human progress, were fostered by the enlightened circles of the Islamic world – always playing, it should be noted, a kind of shadow-boxing game with the hard-line authorities who cared as little for personal experience of the divine kingdom as did the Roman Church in the west.

The annihilation of the so-called ‘Cathars’ in southern France and northern Italy in the 13th century showed just how far the authorities were prepared to go in attempting to destroy spiritual existence that was not controlled by the status quo – the ever-present authorities we find in every age: the manifest powers of invisible spiritual opposition, as the Gnostic sees it. The Gnostics have been the light of the world and the leaven in the bread. A world without gnosis would be a very dark place indeed. The Gnostic greets the Sun, the ‘visible god’. He or she is first to see the dawn – first, you might say, in the garden of resurrection.

Some scholars suggest that the term “Gnostic” is too problematic to be valuable, and should be replaced by something else. Do you agree?

Some scholars, you say, suggest the term ‘Gnostic’ is too problematic and should be replaced. Well, I’m sorry for them. Gnosis itself will always be problematic in this world. The day it fits cosily into some scholar’s dictionary will be the day it has ceased to have power. No, ‘Gnostic’ – like ‘Christian’ – began as a nickname and like all such names should be borne with pride in a blind world. Yes, there are problems of definition. In 1966 there was a Colloquium of scholars at Messina intended to define the term ‘Gnosticism’, but it could not hold the term down. So I, without even the benefit of the Italian sun, cannot do it for you in this interview. The subject could fill a book. There is, however, another tack we can follow. That is, Why should it be defined? Definition – like a census – leads to control. Much better that the Gnostic tradition bears the unique quality of resisting definition! There is no doubt that the issue has been muddied by the activities of the Christian churches that dominate thinking in the West to a greater degree than we perhaps realise.

When I was a student at Oxford University for example, it took me a long time to realise the full implications of the fact that the Theology courses were run by church leaders chiefly for their benefit. Admittedly, it would have been odd if they had been run by industrial chemists! But the point was that ‘Gnosticism’ for example dealt with a universal experience in terms only of its presence or exile from the orthodox Christian Church. Theologising it denied its root in authentic experience. If we cannot trust our deepest most personal and absolutely authentic experience, what can we trust? Anyhow, it would have been better, I think, in retrospect, to study the entire field of Gnostic philosophy, religion and so on as a stream of its own that interpenetrates – necessarily – with all of the so-called ‘great religions’ of the world.

One of the interesting things about the orthodox Church – if we may for just a second see the plethora of conflicting bodies as a broad unity – is that it finds it can eventually accommodate everything – everything, that is, except gnosis! By this I mean that Darwin was more or less accepted by the Church of England by the time of World War One. Church leaders – by no means all, I know – made accommodations with Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini and – let’s face it, the Church has pretty well made its peace with the world. Gnostic types do not find themselves in such a comfortable position with regard to the world as it is.

There are many people who are on the road to gnosis who perhaps do not realise it, who out of love of God and fear of God – and fear of themselves and others – find themselves wasting years in very unsatisfactory Church gatherings which – in the name of God – demand their sacrifice and allegiance. I’ve always found that it was the most selfish groups that preached self-abnegation.

But to get back to the point, what other tame word could replace the tattered glory and battered bread of the words Gnostic, Gnosis – even that scholars’ word ‘Gnosticism’? Mysticism is too misty. Magick has been bowdlerised and Disneyfied. Spirituality – well! It used to have meaning, now it means anything and probably nothing. It’s only a matter of time before car manufacturers come up with a car that meets your spiritual needs! I really don’t know what people mean when they talk about ‘spirituality’. It’s so vague as to be useful to every pseudo-religious charlatan and greedy politician in the world! When you say ‘Gnostic’, you always have to explain it. And when you do, people are always fascinated, whether they admit it or not! So that’s what we’ve got and we have to make the best of it. Gnosis means knowledge. Get it?

What do you make of current attempts to revive Gnosticism? What value do they have?

You ask about recent attempts to revive Gnosticism. This is a difficult question for people like myself who prefer authentic experiences with some real history attached. This is the scholar and antiquarian in me speaking. My path is not your path.

I don’t believe ‘Gnosticism’ – that word really refers to the Gnostic groups that came into conflict with Christian orthodox authorities in the first five centuries of the known life of the Christian Church – can or needs to be ‘revived’. The patient is not dead – though the world might well be. “The dead are not alive,” as the Gnostic gospel has it, “and the living will not die.” This is my personal favourite among the many great Gnostic logia. The dead are not alive and the living will not die. How true.

Besides, there are several great authentic Gnostic streams still going strong – though at least one of them is severely persecuted. The Yezidis of northern Iraq, western Iran, Georgian Armenia – that is to say Transcaucasian Kurdestan – have the most unbelievably inspiring tradition. There’s nothing to compare with it in the whole world. It is in a class of its own. The Yezidis have been persecuted cruelly by those in power about them because they are not regarded as “people of a book” as defined – there’s that word again! – in the Koran. They have long been accused of ‘Devil worship’, but that kind of cruelty has been common among oppressors since Jesus was accused of being a devil’s mouthpiece all those years ago. It’s the oldest trick in the book and works because people fear every type of evil – except their own.

Yezidis are today being attacked and killed in and around Mosul and denied police protection in Georgian Armenia. This is fact.

The second tradition I was thinking of was that of the Mandaeans of lower Iraq, who claim John the Baptist as a special prophet and have referred, interestingly, to ‘Christ the Roman’. As far as ‘Gnostics’ go, these people are undoubtedly the ‘real thing’.

When I made the TV series Gnostics in 1985-87, we wrote to the Iraqi Embassy in London, and they denied any knowledge of the Mandaeans. I was worried that they had been wiped out under the last miserable Iraqi regime, but to my delight, I now observe that they have survived – though still having to justify themselves, surrounded as they are by the various Islamic traditions. I think they qualify as Sabians in the Koran and are therefore protected. The wonderful Yezidis, on the other hand, have been persecuted for 1300 years and have no such protection.

An independent Kurdistan would probably offer these unique and admirable people a future that may otherwise be in jeopardy. This would be a very good thing to come out of the current mess in Iraq. The great powers have been screwing up the Middle East since the fall of the Roman Empire, so one may legitimately question whether the mad, bad game of sharing out the property of the vulnerable will end in our lifetimes. We must hope, have faith and love. Spare some love for the Yezidis – even though most people have probably never heard of them.

This, to answer your question, would be a good way to care for the Gnostic tradition – the tradition, I should say, of the authentic spirit of man, enslaved in, and by, the world. The love of money is the root of all evil. The way to revive Gnosis, is to be revived by Gnosis.

Why are people so interested in Gnosticism these days?

I think people are interested in Gnosticism these days because there is clearly a spiritual vacuum at the heart of our culture. Science and mass production have done much for the outside of the cup, but the inside is empty and cannot be sated by drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll. The promised liberation is a brief delight followed by a swift fall. Grace looks away and the victim, must, if he or she be lucky, look within.

Even in countries which have not been so saturated by big business as we have – where washing machines, central heating and personal stereos and computers might be very welcome – there is a now well-articulated complaint that with all the money and the “promise of freedom and liberty for all” comes a great threat.

The threat is to the life of the heart and the delicate, invisible life – the thousand links with God – which have kept people alive for centuries in the face of countless dangers and privations. I don’t wish to romanticise here, but one must ask, ‘Who needs the most help?’ The East or the West? Clearly both suffer from poverty – material poverty and spiritual poverty – and, of course there is plenty of material poverty in the West and doubtless spiritual poverty in the East. But can’t we help each other? And thereby help ourselves? But how do we do this?

Well, Jesus offers a clue: “First clean the inside of the cup.” Clean it? we may cry – most of us don’t even know it’s there! Where is this ‘inside of the cup’? Where is this kingdom of heaven (a kingdom, note, not a democracy!) that is supposed to be “nigh and within” us? Well, the example and uncompromising commitment to spiritual reality is such a strong and powerful river surging through the Gnostic tradition, that it would be extraordinary if our bone-dry world did not desire to take a dip in its life-giving waters!

Until we sort ourselves out, we can only export our own confusion.

Could you say a little bit about the Western esoteric traditions as a whole? What is their situation today? What do they have to contribute to our civilisation?

You have asked me to say a little bit about the Western esoteric traditions as a whole and what they may contribute to our civilisation. The second part of that question is simple. What they have to contribute is civilisation. What is civilisation? It is clearly not power and might or the ability to force change. Otherwise we must rank Attila the Hun and Chingiz Khan as leaders of civilisation! Civilisation really boils down to the ability of a range of people to live in a city, organise themselves and get on with each other without falling into chaos. That which promotes the life of the busy hive may be described as a civilising influence. Civilisation is not then an arbiter of truth but of what works well. However, wise men and women have tended – against the odds – to the ancient conviction that nothing works quite as well as the truth, and that a rotten branch – rotten with corruption – will not even support itself for very long – never mind the burden of civilisation. Truth is good.

When I think of Western civilisation with all its inequalities of ability and social status, its wide variety of racial and religious types, its sheer density of pulsating human existence, its vulnerability to natural forces, disease, despair, hysteria, false expectation, boredom and so on, I can’t help thinking that organisations like Freemasonry and discreet societies of personal development are important. While corrupting forces always aim to work within the carcass, the healing agents must also work within the fabric of the human hive – not in fearful secrecy but with a modesty and love that is suspicious of fame, vainglory and social attention. The cool breeze works well unseen. This is perennial wisdom. I think the best of the masonic tradition has contributed hugely to understanding of tolerance and barrier-breaking social idealism. Occasionally, we even find a spiritual insight occurring in some of the most stubborn mental material!

Whatever good men and women try to achieve with this floppy idiot called man, the sincere busy bee is always up against our biological and moral heritage. This inheritance is surely dark enough to make strong men and women weep and give ample reason to despair or take refuge in a cynical stoicism of the type that Gore Vidal, for example, exemplifies with such taste and class.

There is much to be said for contemporary Rosicrucian societies for introducing people to the world of imaginative spiritual development. Many find insight in the worlds of Theosophy, Thelema and Anthroposophy, for example. This is all well and good, as far as it goes, but human society can be corrosive – even destructive.

Human beings really aren’t very nice – unless they’re in some kind of love with one another – and even then… well! The divorce rates with all their sad tales of acrimony and greed testify to the fragility of oaths built on enthusiasm and a lottery win. The Psalmist was being simply realistic when he uttered the words: “None is righteous. No, not one.” Involving oneself in groups may stifle the creative and divine spirit. But aloneness can be hard, and loneliness is, as Jimi Hendrix sang, “a drag.” Perhaps we need to revive in some adapted way the concept of the monastery – not, may I stress, that sad alternative, the ‘commune’. The hippies were hip to everything but their own depravity. Peter Coyote and the Diggers would doubtless tell me I just never saw the real hippies. He would be right. Maybe I was one of them – and how often do we see ourselves?

I suppose in the life of a person, one will, as one puts one’s hand into the hand of God – as much as we may know of Him – for guidance, one will find oneself encountering all kinds of groups and people. No one way works for all people or all occasions. That is how it must be. Those who require absolute certainties will be prepared to believe anything. The One is always present, if unseen.

Experience shows that there are many hidden veins to the cosmic life of humanity and I – for one – am glad – and have reason to be glad – that they exist. Gnosis is, as I said earlier, a gift. One has to be in the right place to receive it. No organisation can do that for anyone. The Spirit bloweth where it listeth. Heed the Spirit above all – and keep the powder dry!

Could you talk a little bit about your own background, how you came to be interested in this area, and what meaning it has for you personally?

You ask about my background. I am an Englishman born in Birmingham – the English Midlands – in 1960, who grew up to believe that something was seriously ‘out of kilter’ in my own dear country and in the world at large. This was something I found in myself as I grew older and travelled about the busy world. I had no special financial or educational advantages, but my father – a railwayman by choice in his later years – said “Seek and ye shall find.” I loved the past and had great respect for the ancients. I was always suspicious of words like ‘modern’ and ‘new’. No one knows the future and if, as someone once said, “the future is a poor place to store our dreams,” then I should say that a dream stored is a dream over. King Arthur will sleep so long as we do.

I cannot remember when I first became interested in the authentic tradition of spiritual life. It seems to have always been with me. I suppose studying the Gnostics at Oxford in the late 70s made me realise that I was not alone, but there were always shadows and intimations of gnosis in books, films – especially old films (the new stuff is generally too cocksure, superficial and loud to have anything to say worth hearing) – and in music.

I have often tried to ‘get away’ from Gnosis, rather like Jonah sailing to sea to avoid Nineveh, but I keep coming back to port, whether I like it or not. Often, I don’t like it at all. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the cold belly of the whale. The world, however, needs this insight, even if for me it now seems an old story. Somehow, it comes alive afresh again with each telling. And I discover so many new aspects to it, each time I willingly return to its study. It makes us wise and makes fools of us. Gnosis means creation because we do what we know. Creation is the fiery dragon whose scolding breath burns away the void and leaves the golden tree. We pick its fruit and create nothing.

I was lucky (by modern standards) to have both parents and that both parents believed in the individual and believed in the mystery and magick of life, and that they were plain speaking, virtuous and down to earth as well as being receptive to higher influence. That was a gift too. Come to think of it – it’s all been a gift. I’ve done little to deserve such a theatre of sorrow and joy! There’s so much more to do and life is really both too long and too short. We’re here and we’d better make the best of it. Long may She reign over us.

Could you tell us about your recent books, The Golden Builders and Gnostic Philosophy? What are they about?

My books The Golden Builders and Gnostic Philosophy took me ten years to write and were continuations of a work begun in 1986 when I wrote my first book, The Gnostics, at the age of 25. You could say that the new books are the considered works of research and experience – an attempt to bring readers of the first book into deeper acquaintance with the extraordinary Gnostic tradition. I was very aware that some terrible books have appeared in the last 20 years which have exploited the whole subject area and confused people with a lot of journalistic twaddle and conspiracy tales. Some have inspired a recent best-selling novel that suggested Leonardo Da Vinci worked with a code that could be understood by an idiot demented by marijuana.

I wanted to put the record straight. The truth is stranger than fiction and a good deal more interesting. The trouble with fiction is that you can’t live on it; you always want more. Perhaps if you wanted to define the Truth, you might – with tongue in cheek – call it NON FICTION. There is NON FICTION in magick, Gnosis, mysticism and spiritual understanding – but then, I suppose, your readers know this already, or they would not be suffering this interview with a distant star.

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RICHARD SMOLEY has over thirty years of experience studying and practicing the Western esoteric traditions. His latest book is The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. His other works include Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney); Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; and Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity. He is editor of Quest Books and executive editor of Quest magazine, both published by the Theosophical Society in America. His website is www.innerchristianity.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 91 (July-August 2005).

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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 Librarytranslations, 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 ongnosis, 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 the co-author, with Richard Smoley, of Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (Quest Books, Spring 2006) and editor of the anthology, The Inner West(Tarcher/Penguin, 2004). He was publisher and editor in chief ofGnosis magazine from 1985-1999 (www.gnosismagazine.com). His latest book is The Masonic Enigma. You can visit Jay at www.jaykinney.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 85 (July-August 2004).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

It seems hard to imagine that it has been nearly twenty years since Bladerunner was released. That riveting and influential film was the first movie to be inspired by the writings of science-fiction author, Philip K. Dick. Other films, of varying success, have followed, including Total Recall and Screamers, but the until now the most Dickian movies have been those that copped his dystopian and paranoid sensibility without directly basing themselves on one of his books or short stories. The Truman Show, They Live!,Pleasantville, and most notably, The Matrix, were all Dick films at heart, despite his absence from their credits.

The recently released Spielberg film, Minority Report, returns to directly dipping from PKD’s deep well of inspiration, and despite the inevitably Spielbergian ending, succeeds in evoking one of Dick’s favourite themes: how does one elude the suffocation of an encroaching police state? In Minority Report, this trope takes the form of the local Department of Precrime in Washington D.C., which has succeeded in eliminating murders by arresting and incarcerating the perpetrators before they commit their crimes. This is accomplished by drawing on the abilities of three precogs (for precognitives), who have the involuntary talent of seeing into the near future and glimpsing the murders-to-be in progress. As the film unfolds, in the year 2054, a national referendum is about to occur on whether to expand precrime prevention to a national policy.

Given the recent moves by the Bush Administration in the US to indefinitely detain those who have committed no crimes, but who may have planned to, the timeliness of Minority Report is almost uncanny. Dick’s original short story appeared in 1956, and the script for the film was written well in advance of the shock of 9/11. But somehow, Dick’s intuitions of precrime enforcement have been brought to the big screen at just the moment when their analog is being enacted in real life. PKD, who died in 1982, would savour the irony, were he still with us.

Gnosis

Gnosticism is a name commonly applied to numerous early Christian sects who emphasised the necessity of receiving “gnosis” (divine knowledge of true reality) in order to be saved. While they considered themselves to be Christian, the Gnostics diverged from both Judaism and Catholic Christianity in their belief that this world was a flawed and ensnaring creation of a despotic Demiurge who had usurped the position of God. Through the agency of a redeemer Christ and his bride, Sophia (Wisdom), the Gnostics hoped to return, upon death, to the most high realm of the Pleroma (Fullness) to unite with the true Unknown God.

The Penultimate Truth (1964) “Most humans live in tank cities far below the surface of the Earth, believing themselves to be safe from the ongoing nuclear war above their heads. In fact, the war has been over for ten years, and instead of a radioactive ruin, the planet is a vast park, ruled by feudal barons who are playing power politics with the buried masses of their fellow men.”1

That, at least, is the standard potted summary of Gnosticism. If one takes a broader view, there have been many gnosticisms, and many “gnosi” – some predating the Christian Era and some quite independent of Christianity. Gnosis, as a synonym for illumination or mystical union, is equivalent to marifah(Arabic) or irfan (Persian) in esoteric Islam, for example. However, while we might assume that the state of consciousness signified by the term “gnosis” is universally accessible (or at least potentially so), it is not at all certain that those using the term were always referring to the same thing.

For instance, the gnosis of the Sufi mystics of Islam includes no admission of the existence of a Demiurge or false, lower God. Indeed, tawhid, the Unity of God and Creation, is such a fundamental assumption of Islam, that a spiritual realisation pointing to a Higher God than that of the Creator would be immediately rejected as a delusion. On the other hand, Hindu yogis might readily agree with many Gnostics that this world is a veil or delusion (maya in Sanskrit), and that there is an Absolute God behind or above lesser gods. But few yogis would share the Gnostic assessment that this indicates a moral flaw in the universe.

What exactly is the nature of the divine knowledge that the Gnostics and other mystics have sought? It is impossible to describe precisely, because of the non-discursive nature of that knowledge. Frithjof Schuon refers to gnosis as “our participation in the ‘perspective’ of the divine Subject which, in turn, is beyond the separative polarity, ‘subject-object’….”3 G.E.H. Palmer refers to it as “Wisdom made up of Knowledge and Sanctity,” and underscores the distinction “between knowledge acquired by the ordinary discursive mind and the higher Knowledge which comes of intuition by the Intellect, the term Intellect having the same sense as in Plotinus or Eckhart.”4

In other words, gnosis, according to this definition, is an experiential “knowing” that results from the expansion of the Gnostic’s consciousness to the level of the divine Intellect, where the illusion of the separate self (ego) is obliterated – at least temporarily – in the vast perspective of the higher Self. Such a state cannot, of course, be sustained indefinitely. What goes up must come down. But having risen to such heights, the ego that is reassembled upon its descent, is permanently affected. It now “knows” its own place in the cosmic scheme of things.

Such “knowledge” is not easily communicated to others, in part because shared reference points are few, and because any attempt at describing the experience is bound to diminish and reify it. Thus, those who have been blessed with gnosis have used oblique strategies to impart the ineffable: poetry instead of prose; myths instead of clear-cut analysis; paradoxical statements instead of declarations.

There is still another factor contributing to the proliferation of gnosi and gnosticisms: while the experience of gnosis may be ahistorical, i.e., beyond time and place, the gnostic himself is obviously not. A Tibetan Buddhist in the recesses of the Himalayas, who takes reincarnation for granted and believes in numerous gods, is not going to clothe his gnosis in the garments of a Muslim Sufi in Andalucia, who believes in one lifetime and one God. And vice versa.

The Crack in Space (1966) “Frozen sleep seems like a humane way to end unemployment and over-population pressures: Send the excess citizens to the future. The government warehouses are filled with bibs when a political fight erupts over whether or not to dispose of them through a space-warp. Then some unknown outside agency helps the sleepers to awake.”2

A gnostic whose historical era and cultural milieu is one of war and persecution is likely to have his circumstances seep into his post-gnosis explication of reality. There may still be a higher Reality beyond conflict and violence that he experiences in gnosis, but his mythic version of the journey to the Truth may feature a harsher struggle to get there than would otherwise be the case.

Finally, there is the personality and psychological condition of the gnostic to be considered. Contrary to contemporary holistic assumptions that assume that the combination of a good diet, a good life, and a good attitude are most likely to lead one to higher spiritual consciousness, this is not always so. Higher states may also be triggered by asceticism, psychoactive substances, disciplined practice, or sheer happenstance. True, an absence of cravings and obsessions may make meditative practice easier, but gnosis can also erupt in someone who is by no means a saint. In such a case, his post-gnosis understanding of the Real may well be tinged with his neurotic predisposition.

The Divine Invasion

Which brings us back to Philip K. Dick.

In February, 1974, Dick was living in Fullerton, California, an undistinguished city in Orange County. He’d fled his long-time residency in Northern California out of fear for his life and his sanity. He’d been mixed up in long-time illicit drug use, tax refusal in protest against the Vietnam War, and chronic poverty. In 1971, his previous home in San Rafael, north of San Francisco, had been broken into by persons unknown, his safe blasted open, and things taken. He’d attempted suicide, checked himself into drug rehab in Vancouver, and in 1972 had flown from there to Fullerton.5

By 1974, he’d married his fifth wife, Tessa, and had a new child, Christopher. But most immediately, in February, he’d just had two impacted wisdom teeth removed and was awaiting the delivery of prescribed medicine from the drug store.6

The doorbell rang and Dick answered the door. The delivery girl from the drug store stood before him, wearing a delicate necklace from which hung a golden fish, a symbol of Christ often worn by evangelical Christians.

As Dick later recounted it – possibly in mythologised form – a laser-like pink beam shot from the fish to Dick’s third eye. It had an extraordinary effect:

I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis – a Greek word meaning, literally, ‘loss of forgetfulness.’ I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate in cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.7

There was plenty more to follow. For the next year or so, Dick felt his psyche invaded by a “transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life, and suddenly had become sane.”8 He experienced hypnagogic visions, auditions, tutelary dreams, and an eight hour all night vision of thousands of coloured graphics resembling “the nonobjective paintings of Kandinsky and Klee.”9

Dick came to nickname the invasive rational mind as VALIS (for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), which became the name of his 1981 novel recounting his mind-boggling experience in fictional form.

Perhaps most significantly, he perceived that “real time had ceased in 70 C.E. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974 C.E. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind….”10

PKD’s life-long preoccupation with the questions of “what is reality?” and “what is man?” wouldn’t allow him to resolve his 1974 experiences into a single easy explanation. He variously explained them to himself as communications from God or from a satellite orbiting Earth, or most baroquely as psychic invasions courtesy of Soviet Academy of Sciences psychotronic transmitters. They provided fodder for several more novels before his untimely death at age 53 in 1982.

The question might be fairly asked whether Philip K. Dick’s 1974 experiences constituted a form of gnosis. Judging from his many stories and novels, Dick operated throughout his life from a gut feeling that reality, as we commonly perceive it, is a façade. He sensed that there was something morally wrong in a universe where a friend’s innocent cat could walk across the street and be blithely run over by a passing car. His novels returned, time and again, to the theme of the little man caught in the machinations of powers beyond his kin or control. Dick may have nominally been an Episcopalian, but he was constitutionally a gnostic.

VALIS (1981) “A coterie of religious seekers forms to explore the revelatory visions of one Horelover Fat; a semi-autobiographical analogue of PKD. The group’s hermeneutical research leads to a rock musician’s estate where they confront the Messiah; a two-year old named Sophia. She confirms their suspicions that an ancient, mechanical intelligence orbiting the Earth has been guiding their discoveries.”11

But, here’s the paradox: not every gnostic receives complete gnosis. Some Gnostics, such as the Cathars of southern France, recognised this in dividing their members between mere believers and the elect (perfecti), and it is safe to assume that not every perfecti had achieved full mystical awareness.13

The Gnostics taught that there are several planes or spheres between our material world and the purely spiritual realm of the Pleroma, “home” of the Unknown God. These planes were ruled by Archons, and part of the challenge for the Gnostic’s soul, at death, was to navigate past these cosmic authorities without becoming ensnared.

The Gnostic who realised complete gnosis prior to his own death, (an awareness referred to in Sufi terminology as “to die before you die,”) was blessed with the key to safely make that post-death journey. But not every gnosis is complete and some experiences might provide only a partial realisation – perhaps of an intermediate Archonic realm that more resembles our veiled world than it does the Pleroma.

Although incomplete, this Archonic gnosis could still be useful in shedding light on our present predicament – as long as its insights were not taken as the final word or the total picture.

Philip K. Dick’s gnosis, I’d suggest, was of this partial sort: troubling, compelling, ambiguous, and as political as it was spiritual. His predisposition towards paranoia – exacerbated by amphetamine abuse, and the temper of the McCarthy era and the political upheaval of the ’60s – led him to write dozens of novels prior to 1974 that were broadly gnostic in their exploration of hallucinogenic realities, the individual’s struggle with hostile higher authorities, and in their questioning of conventional morality.

Dick’s February-March ’74 gnosis – which he experienced in a dissociated manner as the intrusion of a higher rational mind into his consciousness – came to be understood by him as a revelation of profound political implications. Given his political preoccupations, which were already in place, this is hardly a surprise.

Human history might seem to be an endless series of recurring cycles: power held by the few consolidates itself, corruption ensues, the regime falls and is replaced, and so on. PKD, however, in the thralls of his pink beam gnosis, arrived at an urgently mythic conclusion: real time stopped in 70 C.E., a spurious dream-time was thrust upon us for nineteen centuries, and then, through external intervention, real time was begun again. Beneath the ordinary appearance of our modern world, Dick (and select others) were really early Christians in conflict with the Roman Empire, which was still in power.

Is this really a grand cosmic truth? I think not. Even in the 1970s it had its trivial side, such as Dick’s notion that President Nixon’s resignation after Watergate was an event of cosmic significance.

But in a metaphorical, and even archetypal, manner, PKD’s gnosis did unveil a politico-spiritual reality that is increasingly relevant to us, twenty years after his death. “The Empire never ended,” wrote Dick, and who would argue with that, as we watch the reigning Superpower rattling its sabres at its minions and designated foes. The cultural collossi of the media conglomerates and Hollywood have spun a dreamlike fog that subsumes the past and future into an everlasting present of novelty and distraction. An effort to merely think clearly, free of clichés, cant, and consumables, takes a heroic effort, akin to dodging the Archons at every turn.

The Divine Invasion (1981) “An air collision jeopardized the successful conclusion of the Second Coming. Emmanuel’s Appolonian and Dionysian selves are divided by partial amnesia. Their reintegration is opposed by Belial’s forces of decay, which control the Earth. The Paraclete’s foster father, Herb Asher, faces problems with his own redemption. Herb finds allies in the prophet Elijah, his partner in a retail audio store; and in singer Linda Fox, his own true love, and a construct energized by VALIS.”12

Dick thought that 1974 was a turning point – a time when Truth was beginning anew to penetrate the veil of appearances. One wishes that this were really true, but the shock of 9/11 and the subsequent psyops war, lead one to conclude that there is plenty of veiling still in place – perhaps more than ever.

To the degree that it slightly parts the veil, Minority Report imparts a whiff of Philip K. Dick’s political gnosis. Despite all the hypnotic baffling in place, sometimes a liberating signal makes it through. But no movie – and no book – is a substitute for one’s own rendezvous with the Unknown God.

Any genuine gnosis – whether partial or complete, whether political or spiritual – is more valuable than all the words that have been written about it. Above all, stay alert, and when that knock comes at the door, say a quick prayer that it’s the girl with the fish necklace and not the police from the Department of Precrime.

Recommended Reading:

Gospel of Thomas; The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels.

Footnotes:

1. Summary from Daniel J.H. Levack, PKD: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography (San Francisco, CA: Underwood/Miller, 1981), p. 24.
2. Ibid, p. 53.
3. Frithjof Schuon, Gnosis: Divine Wisdom (Bedfont, Middlesex: Perennial Books, 1990) p. 76.
4. Ibid, G.E.H. Palmer, “Translator’s Forward,” p. 8.
5. For a full account of Dick’s life, see: Larry Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (New York, NY: Harmony Books, 1989).
6. Dick’s own account has him eagerly awaiting pain medicine. His wife’s account suggests he was already on codeine and was awaiting medicine for his blood pressure.
7. From “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” published as an introduction to I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1985.)
8. From interview in Charles Platt, Editor, Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction (New York, NY: Berkeley Books, 1980) p. 155.
9. PKD letter to Peter Fitting, June 1974.
10. Philip K. Dick, VALIS (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1981) p. 228.
11. Levack, p. 70.
12. Ibid, p. 27.
13. Yuri Stoyanov, The Hidden Tradition in Europe (London: Penguin/Arkana, 1994) p. 162.

JAY KINNEY is the co-author, with Richard Smoley, of Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (Quest Books, Spring 2006) and editor of the anthology, The Inner West (Tarcher/Penguin, 2004). He was publisher and editor in chief of Gnosis magazine from 1985-1999 (www.gnosismagazine.com). His latest book is The Masonic Enigma. You can visit Jay at www.jaykinney.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 74 (September-October 2002).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

For our reproduction notice, click here.

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The defining dramatic moment in the film The Matrix occurs just after Morpheus invites Neo to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill promises “the truth, nothing more.” Neo takes the red pill and awakes to reality – something utterly different from anything Neo, or the audience, could have expected. What Neo had assumed to be reality turned out to be only a collective illusion, fabricated by the Matrix and fed to a population that is asleep, cocooned in grotesque embryonic pods. In Plato’s famous parable about the shadows on the walls of the cave, true reality is at least reflected in perceived reality. In the Matrix world, true reality and perceived reality exist on entirely different planes.

The story is intended as metaphor, and the parallels that drew my attention had to do with political reality. This article offers a particular perspective on what’s going on in the world – and how things got to be that way – in this era of globalisation. From that red-pill perspective, everyday media-consensus reality – like the Matrix in the film – is seen to be a fabricated collective illusion. Like Neo, I didn’t know what I was looking for when my investigation began, but I knew that what I was being told didn’t make sense. I read scores of histories and biographies, observing connections between them, and began to develop my own theories about roots of various historical events. I found myself largely in agreement with writers like Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti, but I also perceived important patterns that others seem to have missed.

When I started tracing historical forces, and began to interpret present-day events from a historical perspective, I could see the same old dynamics at work and found a meaning in unfolding events far different from what official pronouncements proclaimed. Such pronouncements are, after all, public relations fare, given out by politicians who want to look good to the voters. Most of us expect rhetoric from politicians, and take what they say with a grain of salt. But as my own picture of present reality came into focus, “grain of salt” no longer worked as a metaphor. I began to see that consensus reality – as generated by official rhetoric and amplified by mass media – bears very little relationship to actual reality. “The matrix” was a metaphor I was ready for.

In consensus reality (the blue-pill perspective) “left” and “right” are the two ends of the political spectrum. Politics is a tug-of-war between competing factions, carried out by political parties and elected representatives. Society gets pulled this way and that within the political spectrum, reflecting the interests of whichever party won the last election. The left and right are therefore political enemies. Each side is convinced that it knows how to make society better; each believes the other enjoys undue influence; and each blames the other for the political stalemate that apparently prevents society from dealing effectively with its problems.This perspective on the political process, and on the roles of left and right, is very far from reality. It is a fabricated collective illusion. Morpheus tells Neo that the Matrix is “the world that was pulled over your eyes to hide you from the truth…. As long as the Matrix exists, humanity cannot be free.” Consensus political reality is precisely such a matrix. Later we will take a fresh look at the role of left and right, and at national politics. But first we must develop our red-pill historical perspective. I’ve had to condense the arguments to bare essentials; please see the annotated sources at the end for more thorough treatments of particular topics.

Imperialism and the Matrix

From the time of Columbus to 1945, world affairs were largely dominated by competition among Western nations seeking to stake out spheres of influence, control sea lanes, and exploit colonial empires. Each Western power became the core of an imperialist economy whose periphery was managed for the benefit of the core nation. Military might determined the scope of an empire; wars were initiated when a core nation felt it had sufficient power to expand its periphery at the expense of a competitor. Economies and societies in the periphery were kept backward – to keep their populations under control, to provide cheap labour, and to guarantee markets for goods manufactured in the core. Imperialism robbed the periphery not only of wealth but also of its ability to develop its own societies, cultures, and economies in a natural way for local benefit.The driving force behind Western imperialism has always been the pursuit of economic gain, ever since Isabella commissioned Columbus on his first entrepreneurial voyage. The rhetoric of empire concerning wars, however, has typically been about other things – the White Man’s Burden, bringing true religion to the heathens, Manifest Destiny, defeating the Yellow Peril or the Hun, seeking lebensraum, or making the world safe for democracy. Any fabricated motivation for war or empire would do, as long as it appealed to the collective consciousness of the population at the time. The propaganda lies of yesterday were recorded and became consensus history – the fabric of the matrix.While the costs of territorial empire (fleets, colonial administrations, etc.) were borne by Western taxpayers generally, the profits of imperialism were enjoyed primarily by private corporations and investors. Government and corporate elites were partners in the business of imperialism: empires gave government leaders power and prestige, and gave corporate leaders power and wealth. Corporations ran the real business of empire while government leaders fabricated noble excuses for the wars that were required to keep that business going. Matrix reality was about patriotism, national honour, and heroic causes; true reality was on another plane altogether: that of economics.Industrialisation, beginning in the late 1700s, created a demand for new markets and increased raw materials; both demands spurred accelerated expansion of empire. Wealthy investors amassed fortunes by setting up large-scale industrial and trading operations, leading to the emergence of an influential capitalist elite. Like any other elite, capitalists used their wealth and influence to further their own interests however they could. And the interests of capitalism always come down to economic growth; investors must reap more than they sow or the whole system comes to a grinding halt.Thus capitalism, industrialisation, nationalism, warfare, imperialism – and the matrix – coevolved. Industrialised weapon production provided the muscle of modern warfare, and capitalism provided the appetite to use that muscle. Government leaders pursued the policies necessary to expand empire while creating a rhetorical matrix, around nationalism, to justify those policies. Capitalist growth depended on empire, which in turn depended on a strong and stable core nation to defend it. National interests and capitalist interests were inextricably linked – or so it seemed for more than two centuries.

World War II and Pax Americana

1945 will be remembered as the year World War II ended and the bond of the atomic nucleus was broken. But 1945 also marked another momentous fission – breaking of the bond between national and capitalist interests. After every previous war, and in many cases after severe devastation, European nations had always picked themselves back up and resumed their competition over empire. But after World War II, a Pax Americana was established. The US began to manage all the Western peripheries on behalf of capitalism generally, while preventing the communist powers from interfering in the game. Capitalist powers no longer needed to fight over investment realms, and competitive imperialism was replaced by collective imperialism (see sidebar below). Opportunities for capital growth were no longer linked to the military power of nations, apart from the power of America. In his Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (see recommended reading), William Blum chronicles hundreds of significant covert and overt interventions, showing exactly how the US carried out its imperial management role.In the postwar years matrix reality diverged ever further from actual reality. In the postwar matrix world, imperialism had been abandoned and the world was being “democratised”; in the real world, imperialism had become better organised and more efficient. In the matrix world the US “restored order,” or “came to the assistance” of nations which were being “undermined by Soviet influence”; in the real world, the periphery was being systematically suppressed and exploited. In the matrix world, the benefit was going to the periphery in the form of countless aid programs; in the real world, immense wealth was being extracted from the periphery.Growing glitches in the matrix weren’t noticed by most people in the West, because the postwar years brought unprecedented levels of Western prosperity and social progress. The rhetoric claimed progress would come to all, and Westerners could see it being realised in their own towns and cities. The West became the collective core of a global empire, and exploitative development led to prosperity for Western populations, while generating immense riches for corporations, banks, and wealthy capital investors.

Glitches in the Matrix, Popular Rebellion, and Neoliberalism

The parallel agenda of Third-World exploitation and Western prosperity worked effectively for the first two postwar decades. But in the 1960s large numbers of Westerners, particularly the young and well educated, began to notice glitches in the matrix. In Vietnam imperialism was too naked to be successfully masked as something else. A major split in American public consciousness occurred, as millions of anti-war protesters and civil-rights activists punctured the fabricated consensus of the 1950s and declared the reality of exploitation and suppression both at home and abroad. The environmental movement arose, challenging even the exploitation of the natural world. In Europe, 1968 joined 1848 as a landmark year of popular protest. These developments disturbed elite planners. The postwar regime’s stability was being challenged from within the core – and the formula of Western prosperity no longer guaranteed public passivity. A report published in 1975, the Report of the Trilateral Task Force on Governability of Democracies, provides a glimpse into the thinking of elite circles. Alan Wolfe discusses this report in Holly Sklar’s eye-opening Trilateralism (see recommended reading). Wolfe focuses especially on the analysis Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington presented in a section of the report entitled “The Crisis of Democracy.” Huntington is an articulate promoter of elite policy shifts, and contributes pivotal articles to publications such as the Council on Foreign Relations’s Foreign Affairs (see recommended reading).Huntington tells us that democratic societies “cannot work” unless the citizenry is “passive.” The “democratic surge of the 1960s” represented an “excess of democracy,” which must be reduced if governments are to carry out their traditional domestic and foreign policies. Huntington’s notion of “traditional policies” is expressed in a passage from the report:To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector’s ‘Establishment’.

In these few words Huntington spells out the reality that electoral democracy has little to do with how America is run, and summarises the kind of people who are included within the elite planning community. Who needs conspiracy theories when elite machinations are clearly described in public documents like these?

Besides failing to deliver popular passivity, the policy of prosperity for Western populations had another downside, having to do with Japan’s economic success. Under the Pax Americana umbrella, Japan had been able to industrialise and become an imperial player – the prohibition on Japanese rearmament had become irrelevant. With Japan’s then-lower living standards, Japanese producers could undercut prevailing prices and steal market share from Western producers. Western capital needed to find a way to become more competitive on world markets, and Western prosperity was standing in the way. Elite strategists, as Huntington showed, were fully capable of understanding these considerations, and the requirements of corporate growth created a strong motivation to make the needed adjustments – in both reality and rhetoric.

If popular prosperity could be sacrificed, there were many obvious ways Western capital could be made more competitive. Production could be moved overseas to low-wage areas, allowing domestic unemployment to rise. Unions could be attacked and wages forced down, and people could be pushed into temporary and part-time jobs without benefits. Regulations governing corporate behaviour could be removed, corporate and capital-gains taxes could be reduced, and the revenue losses could be taken out of public-service budgets. Public infrastructures could be privatised, the services reduced to cut costs, and then they could be milked for easy profits while they deteriorated from neglect.

These are the very policies and programs launched during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the US and Britain. They represent a systematic project of increasing corporate growth at the expense of popular prosperity and welfare. Such a real agenda would have been unpopular, and a corresponding matrix reality was fabricated for public consumption. The matrix reality used real terms like “deregulation,” “reduced taxes,” and “privatisation,” but around them was woven an economic mythology. The old, failed laissez-faire doctrine of the 1800s was reintroduced with the help of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of economics, and “less government” became the proud “modern” theme in America and Britain. Sensible regulations had restored financial stability after the Great Depression, and had broken up anti-competitive monopolies such as the Rockefeller trust and AT&T. But in the new matrix reality, all regulations were considered bureaucratic interference. Reagan and Thatcher preached the virtues of individualism, and promised to “get government off people’s backs.” The implication was that everyday individuals were to get more money and freedom, but in reality the primary benefits would go to corporations and wealthy investors.

The academic term for laissez-faire economics is “economic liberalism,” and hence the Reagan-Thatcher revolution has come to be known as the “neoliberal revolution.” It brought a radical change in actual reality by returning to the economic philosophy that led to sweatshops, corruption, and robber-baron monopolies in the nineteenth century. It brought an equally radical change in matrix reality – a complete reversal in the attitude that was projected regarding government. Government policies had always been criticised in the media, but the institution of government had always been respected – reflecting the traditional bond between capitalism and nationalism. With Reagan, we had a sitting president telling us that government itself was a bad thing. Many of us may have agreed with him, but such a sentiment had never before found official favour. Soon, British and American populations were beginning to applaud the destruction of the very democratic institutions that provided their only hope of participation in the political process.

Globalisation and World Government

The essential bond between capitalism and nationalism was broken in 1945, but it took some time for elite planners to recognise this new condition and to begin bringing the world system into alignment with it. The strong Western nation state had been the bulwark of capitalism for centuries, and initial postwar policies were based on the assumption that this would continue indefinitely. The Bretton Woods financial system (the IMF, World Bank, and a system of fixed exchange rates among major currencies) was set up to stabilise national economies, and popular prosperity was encouraged to provide political stability. Neoliberalism in the US and Britain represented the first serious break with this policy framework – and brought the first visible signs of the fission of the nation-capital bond.The neoliberal project was economically profitable in the US and Britain, and the public accepted the matrix economic mythology. Meanwhile, the integrated global economy gave rise to a new generation of transnational corporations, and corporate leaders began to realise that corporate growth was not dependent on strong core nation-states. Indeed, Western nations – with their environmental laws, consumer-protection measures, and other forms of regulatory “interference” – were a burden on corporate growth. Having been successfully field tested in the two oldest “democracies,” the neoliberal project moved onto the global stage. The Bretton Woods system of fixed rates of currency exchange was weakened, and the international financial system became destabilising, instead of stabilising, for national economies. The radical free-trade project was launched, leading eventually to the World Trade Organisation. The fission that had begun in 1945 was finally manifesting as an explosive change in the world system.The objective of neoliberal free-trade treaties is to remove all political controls over domestic and international trade and commerce. Corporations have free rein to maximise profits, heedless of environmental consequences and safety risks. Instead of governments regulating corporations, the WTO now sets rules for governments, telling them what kind of beef they must import, whether or not they can ban asbestos, and what additives they must permit in petroleum products. So far, in every case where the WTO has been asked to review a health, safety, or environmental regulation, the regulation has been overturned.Most of the world has been turned into a periphery; the imperial core has been boiled down to the capitalist elite themselves, represented by their bureaucratic, unrepresentative, WTO world government. The burden of accelerated imperialism falls hardest outside the West, where loans are used as a lever by the IMF to compel debtor nations such as Rwanda and South Korea to accept suicidal “reform” packages. In the 1800s, genocide was employed to clear North America and Australia of their native populations, creating room for growth. Today, a similar program of genocide has apparently been unleashed against sub-Saharan Africa. The IMF destroys the economies, the CIA trains militias and stirs up tribal conflicts, and the West sells weapons to all sides. Famine and genocidal civil wars are the predictable and inevitable result. Meanwhile, AIDS runs rampant while the WTO and the US government use trade laws to prevent medicines from reaching the victims.

As in the past, Western military force will be required to control the non-Western periphery and make adjustments to local political arrangements when considered necessary by elite planners. The Pentagon continues to provide the primary policing power, with NATO playing an ever-increasing role. Resentment against the West and against neoliberalism is growing in the Third World, and the frequency of military interventions is bound to increase. All of this needs to be made acceptable to Western minds, adding a new dimension to the matrix.

In the latest matrix reality, the West is called the “international community,” whose goal is to serve “humanitarian” causes. Bill Clinton made it explicit with his “Clinton Doctrine,” in which (as quoted in the Washington Post) he solemnly promised, “If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our power stop it, we will stop it.” This matrix fabrication is very effective indeed; who opposes prevention of genocide? Only outside the matrix does one see that genocide is caused by the West in the first place, that the worst cases of genocide are continuing, that “assistance” usually makes things worse (as in the Balkans), and that Clinton’s handy doctrine enables him to intervene when and where he chooses. Since dictators and the stirring of ethnic rivalries are standard tools used in managing the periphery, a US president can always find “innocent civilians” wherever elite plans call for an intervention.

In matrix reality, globalisation is not a project but rather the inevitable result of beneficial market forces. Genocide in Africa is no fault of the West, but is due to ancient tribal rivalries. Every measure demanded by globalisation is referred to as “reform,” (the word is never used with irony). “Democracy” and “reform” are frequently used together, always leaving the subtle impression that one has something to do with the other. The illusion is presented that all economic boats are rising, and if yours isn’t, it must be your own fault: you aren’t “competitive” enough. Economic failures are explained away as “temporary adjustments,” or else the victim (as in South Korea or Russia) is blamed for not being sufficiently neoliberal. “Investor confidence” is referred to with the same awe and reverence that earlier societies might have expressed toward the “will of the gods.”

Western quality of life continues to decline, while the WTO establishes legal precedents ensuring that its authority will not be challenged when its decisions become more draconian. Things will get much worse in the West; this was anticipated in elite circles when the neoliberal project was still on the drawing board, as is illustrated in Samuel Huntington’s “The Crisis of Democracy” report discussed earlier.

Management of Discontented Societies

The postwar years, especially in the United States, were characterised by consensus politics. Most people shared a common understanding of how society worked, and generally approved of how things were going. Prosperity was real and the matrix version of reality was reassuring. Most people believed in it. Those beliefs became a shared consensus, and the government could then carry out its plans as it intended, “responding” to the programmed public will.The “excess democracy” of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that ongoing consensus wasn’t worth paying for. They accepted that segments of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix. Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws. Such means of control were identified and have since been largely implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America sets the pace of globalisation; innovations can often be observed there before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of social-control techniques.The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a strong, semi-militarised police force. Most of the periphery has been managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos – where the adverse consequences of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated – have literally become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified shootings are commonplace.So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions of mass unrest, elite planners also realised that much of the US Bill of Rights would need to be neutralised. (This is not surprising, given that the Bill’s authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking to ensure that future generations would have the means to organise and overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralisation project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise of prison slave labour. The Rubicon has been crossed – the techniques of oppression long common in the empire’s periphery are being imported to the core.

In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to create a reality in which “rights” are a joke, the accused are despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials bolster the construct by declaring “wars” on crime and drugs; the noble cops are fighting a war out there in the streets – and you can’t win a war without using your enemy’s dirty tricks. The CIA plays its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that ghetto drug dealers are well supplied. In this way, the American public has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.

The mechanisms of the police state are in place. They will be used when necessary – as we see in ghettos and skyrocketing prison populations, as we saw on the streets of Seattle and Washington D.C. during recent anti-WTO demonstrations, and as is suggested by executive orders that enable the president to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law whenever he deems it necessary. But raw force is only the last line of defense for the elite regime. Neoliberal planners introduced more subtle defences into the matrix; looking at these will bring us back to our discussion of the left and right.

Divide and rule is one of the oldest means of mass control – standard practice since at least the Roman Empire. This is applied at the level of modern imperialism, where each small nation competes with other for capital investments. Within societies it works this way: If each social group can be convinced that some other group is the source of its discontent, then the population’s energy will be spent on inter-group struggles. The regime can sit on the sidelines, intervening covertly to stir things up or to guide them in desired directions. In this way most discontent can be neutralised, and force can be reserved for exceptional cases. In the prosperous postwar years, consensus politics served to manage the population. Under neoliberalism, programmed factionalism has become the front-line defense – the matrix version of divide and rule.

The covert guiding of various social movements has proven to be one of the most effective means of programming factions and stirring them against one another. Fundamentalist religious movements have been particularly useful. They have been used not only within the US, but also to maximise divisiveness in the Middle East and for other purposes throughout the empire. The collective energy and dedication of “true believers” makes them a potent political weapon that movement leaders can readily aim where needed. In the US that weapon has been used to promote censorship on the Internet, to attack the women’s movement, to support repressive legislation, and generally to bolster the ranks of what is called in the matrix the “right wing.”

In the matrix, the various factions believe that their competition with each other is the process that determines society’s political agenda. Politicians want votes, and hence the biggest and best-organised factions should have the most influence, and their agendas should get the most political attention. In reality there is only one significant political agenda these days: the maximisation of capital growth through the dismantling of society, the continuing implementation of neoliberalism, and the management of empire. Clinton’s liberal rhetoric and his playing around with health care and gay rights are not the result of liberal pressure. They are rather the means by which Clinton is sold to liberal voters, so that he can proceed with real business: getting NAFTA through Congress, promoting the WTO, giving away the public airwaves, justifying military interventions, and so forth. Issues of genuine importance are never raised in campaign politics – this is a major glitch in the matrix for those who have eyes to see it.

Escaping the Matrix

The matrix cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Under the onslaught of globalisation, the glitches are becoming ever more difficult to conceal – as earlier, with the Vietnam War. Last November’s anti-establishment demonstrations in Seattle, the largest in decades, were aimed directly at globalisation and the WTO. Even more important, Seattle saw the coming together of factions that the matrix had programmed to fight one another, such as left-leaning environmentalists and socially conservative union members.Seattle represented the tip of an iceberg. A mass movement against globalisation and elite rule is ready to ignite, like a brush fire on a dry, scorching day. The establishment has been expecting such a movement and has a variety of defences at its command, including those used effectively against the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In order to prevail against what seem like overwhelming odds, the movement must escape entirely from the matrix, and it must bring the rest of society with it. As long as the matrix exists, humanity cannot be free. The whole truth must be faced: Globalisation is centralised tyranny; capitalism has outlasted its sell-by date; matrix “democracy” is elite rule; and “market forces” are imperialism. Left and right are enemies only in the matrix. In reality we are all in this together, and each of us has a contribution to make toward a better world.Marx may have failed as a social visionary, but he had capitalism figured out. It is based not on productivity or social benefit, but on the pursuit of capital growth through exploiting everything in its path. The job of elite planners is to create new spaces for capital to grow in. Competitive imperialism provided growth for centuries; collective imperialism was invented when still more growth was needed; and then neoliberalism took over. Like a cancer, capitalism consumes its host and is never satisfied. The capital pool must always grow, more and more, forever – until the host dies or capitalism is replaced.The matrix equates capitalism with free enterprise, and defines centralised-state-planning socialism as the only alternative to capitalism. In reality, capitalism didn’t amount to much of a force until the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s – and we certainly cannot characterise all prior societies as socialist. Free enterprise, private property, commerce, banking, international trade, economic specialisation – all of these had existed for millennia before capitalism. Capitalism claims credit for modern prosperity, but credit would be better given to developments in science and technology.

Before capitalism, Western nations were generally run by aristocratic classes. The aristocratic attitude toward wealth focused on management and maintenance. With capitalism, the focus is always on growth and development; whatever one has is but the seeds to build a still greater fortune. In fact, there are infinite alternatives to capitalism, and different societies can choose different systems, once they are free to do so. As Morpheus put it: “Outside the matrix everything is possible, and there are no limits.”

The matrix defines “democracy” as competitive party politics, because that is a game wealthy elites have long since learned to corrupt and manipulate. Even in the days of the Roman Republic the techniques were well understood. Real-world democracy is possible only if the people themselves participate in setting society’s direction. An elected official can only truly represent a constituency after that constituency has worked out its positions – from the local to the global – on the issues of the day. For that to happen, the interests of different societal factions must be harmonised through interaction and discussion. Collaboration, not competition, is what leads to effective harmonisation.

In order for the movement to end elite rule and establish livable societies to succeed, it will need to evolve a democratic process, and to use that process to develop a program of consensus reform that harmonises the interests of its constituencies. In order to be politically victorious, it will need to reach out to all segments of society and become a majority movement. By such means, the democratic process of the movement can become the democratic process of a newly empowered civil society. There is no adequate theory of democracy at present, although there is much to be learned from history and from theory. The movement will need to develop a democratic process as it goes along, and that objective must be pursued as diligently as victory itself. Otherwise some new tyranny will eventually replace the old.

It ain’t left or right. It’s up and down.
Here we all are down here struggling while
the Corporate Elite are all up there having a nice day!
– Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt Maine and anti-corporate activist

Footnotes:

1. Primarily Western Europe, later joined by the United States.
2. See “KGB-ing America”, Tony Serra, Whole Earth, Winter, 1998.

Recommended Reading

Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization Of Poverty – Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms, The Third World Network, Penang, Malaysia, 1997.

This detailed study by an economics insider shows the consequences of “reforms” in various parts of the world, revealing a clear pattern of callous neo-colonialism and genocide. Definitely red-pill material.

Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward The Local, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1996.

This fine collection of forty-three chapters by knowledgeable contributors analyses the broad structure of globalisation, and explores locally based and sustainable economic alternatives. An excellent introduction, textbook, and reference work.

Richard Douthwaite, The Growth Illusion, Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1992.

A fascinating and wide-ranging look at growth and capitalism, their historical roots and their consequences. Offers a healthy dose of common sense, and a vision of stability and sustainability.

Frances Moore Lapp?, Joseph Collins, Peter Rosset, World Hunger, Twelve Myths, Grove Press, New York, 1986.

Another red pill. Debunks Malthusian thinking, among other things. Here’s a sample: “During the past twenty-five years food production has outstripped population growth by 16 Percent. India – which for many of us symbolizes over-population and poverty – is one of the top third-world food exporters. If a mere 5.6 percent of India’s food production were re-allocated, hunger would be wiped out in India.”

Hans-Peter Martin & Harald Schumann, The Global Trap, Globalization & the Assault on Democracy & Prosperity, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1997.

A best-selling European perspective on globalisation. Recommended for American audiences in order to understand more about the European context.

William Greider, One World Ready or Not, the Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997.

A tour by a superb journalist showing how the global economy operates in various parts of the world. Not much emphasis on political issues or economic alternatives.

James Goldsmith, The Response, Macmillan, London, 1995.

A critique of neoliberal thinking presented as a debate with those who criticised the author’s previous book, The Trap. It may be pointless for the author to attempt logical debate with matrix apologists, but the book is informative for readers.

Third World Resurgence, a magazine published monthly by the Third World Network, Penang, Malaysia, http://www.twnside.org.sg.

This magazine deserves widespread circulation. It covers a wide range of global issues, presents a strong and sensible third-world perspective, and is a very good source of real-world news. Martin Kohr is managing editor and a frequent contributor.

The New Internationalist, a magazine published monthly by New Internationalist Publications, Ltd, Oxford, UK, http://www.newint.org.

Another good source of real news and commentary, with a global perspective.

Holly Sklar ed., Trilateralism – the Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, South End Press, Boston, 1980.

This well-researched anthology explains the role in global planning played by such elite organisations as the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderbergers. Examples from various parts of the world are used to show what kinds of considerations go into the formation of on-the-ground policies.

Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1989.

One of many red-pill books by a prolific and well-informed author. Here he talks about the reality of imperialism and the matrix of Cold War rhetoric. For an insightful examination of how matrix reality is fabricated, see also his Make-Believe Media, and Inventing Reality, also from St. Martin’s.

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, HarperCollins, New York, 1989.

A superlative and well-researched treatment of American history from 1942 to the present. The material on grass-roots social movements provides valuable lessons for present-day movement organisers.

William Blum, Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, Common Courage Press, Monroe Maine, 1995.

A comprehensive review of how the US government manages world affairs by force and intrigue when persuasion and economic pressure fail to do the job. A red-pill antidote for anyone who feels tempted to trust the “international community” to pursue “humanitarian interventionism.”

Covert Action Quarterly magazine, published quarterly by Covert Action Publications, Inc., Washington D.C. 1994, http://www.covertaction.org.

Keeps you up-to-date on covert activities, cover-ups, military affairs, and current trouble spots. Contributors include many ex-intelligence officers who saw the error of their ways.

William Greider, Who Will Tell the People, the Betrayal of American Democracy, Touchstone – Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993.

This best seller shows in detail how the American democratic process is subverted at every stage by corporate interests. Greider was a highly respected journalist for many years at the Washington Post and his high-level contacts permit him to present an insider’s view of how the influence-peddling system actually operates. A chilling eye-opener.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash Of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster, London, 1997.

Another classic by one of the foremost spinners of matrix illusion. In the guise of historical analysis, Huntington fabricates a worldview designed to justify Western domination under globalisation. According to The Economist, Huntington’s civilisation-clash paradigm has already become the “sea” in which Washington policy makers swim. The book reveals the backbone structure of modern matrix reality, putting day-to-day official rhetoric into an understandable framework. And it clearly reveals the real intentions of elite planners regarding the tactics of global management through selective interventionism.

Foreign Affairs, a journal published quarterly by the Council on Foreign Relations, New York.

The best source I’ve found to track the latest shifts in the matrix and to glean an understanding of current elite thinking. Some reading between the lines is called for, as the journal frames its analysis in terms of US national interests, failing to make the obvious links between geopolitical and economic regimes.

Elite planning for postwar neo-imperialism…

Recommendation P-B23 (July, 1941) stated that worldwide financial institutions were necessary for the purpose of “stabilizing currencies and facilitating programs of capital investment for constructive undertakings in backward and underdeveloped regions.” During the last half of 1941 and in the first months of 1942, the Council developed this idea for the integration of the world…. Isaiah Bowman first suggested a way to solve the problem of maintaining effective control over weaker territories while avoiding overt imperial conquest. At a Council meeting in May 1942, he stated that the United States had to exercise the strength needed to assure “security,” and at the same time “avoid conventional forms of imperialism.” The way to do this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power international in character through a United Nations body.
— Laurence Shoup & William Minter, in Holly Sklar’s Trilateralism (see recommended reading), writing about strategic recommendations developed during World War II by the Council on Foreign Relations.The above article first appeared in Whole Earth Magazine #101, Summer 2000.

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Richard Moore, an expatriate from Silicon Valley, currently lives and writes in Wexford, Ireland. He runs the Cyberjournal “list” on the Internet. Email: richard@cyberjournal.org, http://cyberjournal.org. Address: PO Box 26, Wexford, Ireland.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 62 (September-October 2000).

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