Praise for Andrew Phillip Smith
A Dictionary of Gnosticism
‘A long-awaited and indispensable grammar of classical Gnosticism – essential for any serious student, and a practical gem for the curious.’
—Jordan Stratford, author of Living Gnosticism
‘A Dictionary of Gnosticism is a valuable resource for any student of Gnosis. If you need a helpful translator of the language, or a sympathetic guide to the beliefs of these extraordinary women and men who lived a long time ago, in a world far, far away, then this is the book for you. Think of it as the ‘Lonely Cosmos Guide to Gnosis’, and always pack a copy when you are setting out for that strange and exciting country. Have a great trip!’
—Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, authors of The Jesus Mysteries and The Gospel of the Second Coming
The Gospel of Philip
‘Provides us with a wealth of insightful annotations, and the translation is the most accessible to date. All of those with an interest in Gnostic tradition and its sacraments will be happy to receive this splendid work!’
—Stephan A. Hoeller, author of Jung and The Lost Gospels and The Gnostic Jung
‘How refreshing to move from our contemporary culture of Christian literalism to a spiritual world alive with symbol, metaphor and the poetry of the Divine.’
—Ron Miller, Religion Department chair, Lake Forest College, author of The Gospel of Thomas: A Guidebook for Spiritual Practice
The Lost Sayings of Jesus
‘If the gospels represent the tip [of Jesus’s sayings], Andrew Phillip Smith has provided the rest of the iceberg. Here is proof that [Jesus’s] voice has never fallen silent.’
—Robert M. Price, professor of scriptural studies, Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary
‘Marvellous ... Will provide spiritual seekers, committed Christians, and academic scholars [insight into] sayings attributed to Jesus that they may not know existed. A valuable sourcebook and significant contribution to the study of the history of Christian ideas.’ —Stevan Davies, professor of religious studies, College Misericordia and author of The Gospel of Thomas: Annotated & Explained
Gnostic Writings on the Soul
‘Artful and erudite ... brings these allegories into three-dimensional relief, making them more memorable, accessible, and significant.’
—Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz, author of Does the Soul Survive?
By the same author
The Gospel of Thomas: A New Version Based on its Inner Meaning
The Gospel of Philip: Annotated & Explained
The Lost Sayings Of Jesus: Teachings from Ancient Christian, Jewish, Gnostic and Islamic Sources – Annotated & Explained
Gnostic Writings on the Soul: Annotated & Explained
A Dictionary of Gnosticism
The Gnostics: History Tradition Scriptures Influence
The Lost Teachings of the Cathars
The Gnostic: A Journal of Gnosticism, Western Esotericism and Spirituality, 1-6 (editor)
ANDREW PHILLIP SMITH
THE SECRET
HISTORY OF THE
GNOSTICS
THEIR
SCRIPTURES,
BELIEFS AND
TRADITIONS
For my family
This edition published in the UK and USA 2015 by
Watkins, an imprint of Watkins Media Limited
19 Cecil Court, London WC2N 4EZ
enquiries@watkinspublishing.co.uk
Text copyright © Andrew Phillip Smith 2008, 2015
Design and typography copyright © Watkins Media Limited 2015
Andrew Phillip Smith has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.
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Typeset by Gail Jones
Printed and bound in Finland
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ISBN: 978-1-78028-821-5
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Contents
Preface by Monty Oxymoron
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Story of God: Gnostic Mythology
Chapter 2 Sethians, Valentinians and Others
Chapter 3 As Above So Below: Gnostic Psychology
Chapter 4 Upside Down and Inside Out: The Gnostic Interpretation of the Bible
Chapter 5 Praxis: What Did the Gnostics Actually Do?
Chapter 6 The Birth of Gnosticism
Chapter 7 Light and Darkness: The Manichaeans
Chapter 8 The Variety and Transmission of Gnosis
Chapter 9 The Good Christians: The Cathars
Chapter 10 The Last Gnostics: The Mandaeans
Chapter 11 Revival
Afterword
References
Bibliography
Preface
We appear today, to be living in an age of unprecedented confusion and insecurity: a lyric from John Adam’s opera ‘Nixon in China’ sums up our situation: ‘We live in unsettled times; who are our enemies, who are our friends?’ We seem to be cast adrift on a murky sea of contradictions, trying to cling to slippery concepts, like driftwood from some shattered vessel that was supposed to be an ark of conveyance and safety.
Such cultural turmoil is not new however: we are not the first people to ask the questions: ‘Where do we come from, where are we going, what is the nature of this existence we have been cast into?’ This book introduces us to people much like ourselves, who found themselves living in a time of intense multicultural and philosophical fermentation. As Jewish ideas became known they collided with Greek philosophy as well as mystical interpretations of ancient pagan religions: for those people, like us, there was certainly no shortage of material to draw on. Theirs was a time of uncertainty, complexity and potential confusion that we might find very familiar. Thus a revision and recovery of ‘Gnostic speculation’ is timely in helping us understand our own predicament. As in our age so full of ‘conspiracy theories’ eschatological expectations too were rife, but these were only to be dashed time and again leaving many to question the accepted teachings of the emerging orthodoxy.
Like many people I was brought up with the idea that the collection of texts known as ‘The Bible’ was ‘God’s Word’, and so it was the final authority on life itself. Philosophy and speculation were discouraged or even taboo. I found that while I responded positively to some of its’ content, other parts would worry me deeply, while some sayings seemed mysterious or incomplete as if there might be a hidden subtext I didn’t have access to. The question of ‘authority’ itself was perplexing: who, if anyone, ‘runs’ the universe? Is this power really beneficent given a world that seems to be full of madness?
I came across the Gnostics though the work of C.G. Jung: while training to be a psychiatric nurse I immersed myself in his writings. Their approach seemed so fresh and vibrant to me after the literalist interpretations of the orthodox, and somehow more ‘human friendly’ too! Are we really merely pawns in some cosmic gaming between God and the Devil as the Book of Job describes? If so our purpose would consist in Belief Choice and Service. Yet, within one can sometimes hear a quiet little voice that says ‘We can be more than just that: we can experience, we can understand, and above all we can Know.’ It is this voice that becomes amplified in the writings and teachings Andrew Phillip Smith introduces us to in this book. Here we have a clear and concise an introduction to what can seem a thorny complex and controversial subject: a golden thread though the labyrinth.
Years after I completed my nurse education to my astonishment and delight, I find myself playing keyboards with punk rock band the Damned. One day on tour I was confronted with a real nun, for the first time since my Catholic childhood. Bizarrely she was running the hotel we staying in. Nodding in the direction of the huge crucifix at her waist, I couldn’t resist asking her: ‘Given the name of the band I play in, do you think it may prejudice my post-existential condition?’ She didn’t bat an eyelid but replied: ‘Well, it’s an interesting concept.’ That was not very reassuring! But then I recall the ‘Gnostic Reversal’ whereby the role and nature of those considered bad in traditional biblical exegesis: the serpent in the garden, Cain, the Sodomites and maybe even Judas, are re-evaluated in a positive way. That raises the hope that, maybe we too can be afforded some kind of posthumous cosmic rehabilitation.
There are interesting concepts aplenty in this book, and I hope the reader will be encouraged to investigate Andrew’s many other excellent books and magazines on this fascinating subject.
Monty Oxymoron, 2015
Monty Oxymoron has played keyboards for punk rock band The Damned since 1996. He also works as a nurse with people with dementia and lives with his girlfriend Kirsty in Brighton.
Foreword
‘Are you a Gnostic?’ This is one of the most common questions I receive as an author of books on Gnosticism. In answer: I am not, and have never been, a Gnostic. I must make that clear. I don’t mind if others call me a Gnostic; in fact, I am flattered when this happens. What is more, I am very much on the side of the Gnostics. If in some apocalyptic near future I find myself hauled up in front of some antiheretical equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee I hope I would have the guts to stand in solidarity with the Gnostics, and damn the consequences. But I have never made the claim to be a Gnostic off my own bat.
It is partly a kind of squeamishness at making grandiose claims about myself, and partly because I have never felt that my own approach to the world and to spirituality should be defined primarily in that way. Gnosticism – in the stricter sense of the word, and as I use it in this book – is not quite central enough to my worldview. It is perhaps a hat I wear at particular times, or a glove I slip on when a particular job has to be done. And perhaps I am being too fussy about the term. Some people are happy to define Gnosticism as an approach to religion or spirituality that emphasizes gnosis, personal experience of the divine as primary, and in that sense I could certainly consider myself a Gnostic. (I am happy to label myself as an esotericist, if anyone is wondering which self-designation I prefer.) Yet every single one of my books thus far has been about Gnosticism or has touched on it, and I have edited The Gnostic: A Journal of Gnosticism, Western Esotericism and Spirituality for some years.
In producing this new edition I had expected that I would want to give every chapter a light revision and thoroughly rewrite a couple of chapters. I was surprised when I re-read the book to find that there was little I wanted to change. So I have more or less left the body of the book as it is, preferring to add a few comments to the endnotes. Almost every chapter here could be expanded to fill a separate volume. Indeed, Watkins are publishing an entire book on the Cathars, Lost Teachings of the Cathars, in tandem with Secret History of the Gnostics, and this will be followed by my book on the Mandaeans, John the Baptist and the Last Gnostics. This book is very much intended as an introduction to Gnosticism, but nevertheless there is much here that can’t be found in other introductory works.
When I wrote the first edition of this book there was a good deal of controversy surrounding the Gospel of Judas. As I write this foreword it is the so-called Gospel of Jesus’ Wife that is still causing a stir. The Gospel of Judas is acknowledged to be a genuine ancient Gnostic gospel. The questions that surround it are not those of authenticity, nor of the general dating of the manuscript, nor whether it is Gnostic, but of the correct interpretation of its intent. The initial translation of the Gospel of Judas by the National Geographic team asserted that Judas, who receives secret Gnostic teachings from Jesus, was the hero of the gospel, which tallied with an ancient testimony that Judas was the hero of a heretical gospel. April DeConick, Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University, Texas, then argued just the opposite, that Judas is no more the hero of that gospel than he is in any other gospel, including the four canonicals and all surviving apocryphal gospels. In a particular twist to this interpretation, Judas is the typical disciple, all of whom are portrayed as misunderstanding the teaching of Jesus. Perhaps the best take on it is more nuanced, somewhere between the two extremes, but it is a good illustration of the problems involved in the historical interpretation of ancient material.1 The issues with the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife are quite different.2 This tiny piece of papyrus contains just a few fragmentary sentences, most of which have some overlap with parts of the Gospel of Thomas. One line may be translated, ‘Jesus said to them, “My wife . . . “.’ The name ‘Mary’ is also mentioned in the text. Some scholars were immediately on the alert, suspicious that the fragment was too good to be true. The extensive interest in Mary Magdalene as the wife or partner of Jesus, arguments for which often hinge on the Valentinian Gnostic Gospel of Philip, suggests that a gospel in which Jesus really does have a wife would be high up on the forgery list. Yet the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife (the fragment has no title; it was Karen L. King, the Harvard scholar and expert on Gnosticism, who named it) should not be rejected just because is appealing.
Scientific tests done on the material of the fragment pointed in the direction of it being genuine. Yet there was a troublesome indication that parts of it may have been copied from an online interlinear translation of the Gospel of Thomas, to the extent of reproducing a typographical error in the online text. There is also suggestive evidence that the fragment was produced by whoever forged a scrap of the Gospel of John in Coptic, which has been proved to be fake. Yet the discussion goes back and forth and no judgment is conclusive yet. Should the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife be shown to be a forgery – and I must admit that it seems the likeliest explanation to me – no matter, we have dozens of genuine Gnostic works to explore.
As I write, Gnosticism continues to be credited or blamed, depending on the sympathies of the critic, as an influence on major movies. Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) has been characterized as having Gnostic influence. In the opening sequence Adam and Eve have luminous immaterial bodies until the forbidden fruit is eaten, suggestive of the Gnostic view that the true reality is spiritual and the material world is a fallen place. The majority of humans are descendants of Cain, the murderer of Abel. These people are aided by the Watchers, fallen angels who help them, with only the descendants of Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve and the hero of many Gnostics, to stand against them. Noah’s father Lamech has a skin from the serpent of the Garden of Eden, which has been passed down the generations from their ancestor Seth. In truth many of these elements are more specifically kabbalistic, but that they can even be seen as Gnostic illustrates the large overlap between Gnostic and kabbalistic thought.
Radio Free Albemuth (2014) adapts Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same name. Written in 1976, two years after Dick’s strange mystical experiences, the novel wasn’t published in his lifetime (it appeared in 1985, three years after Dick died.) Dick reworked parts of it into a later novel Valis, the epitome of his Gnostic approach. Dick aficionados have hailed the low-budget film as the most faithful screen adaptation of his work to date. Set in an alternative 1985 with a Nixon-style president, the protagonist Nick Brady, who works at a record store, receives visions from ‘VALIS’, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Dick himself features in the story, as he would in Valis along with Horselover Fat, another cypher for Dick himself.
Snowpiercer (2013) is another recent science fiction film with Gnostic content. Based on a French graphic novel, the remnants of humanity are trapped on a train that endlessly circumnavigates a snowbound apocalyptic world. The film has a demiurge who suppresses the human masses, a messiah figure and other Gnostic features. The Wachowski Brothers, who were behind The Matrix trilogy, returned to Gnostic themes with their space opera film Jupiter Ascending (2015). Jupiter Jones is a cleaner of toilets on a future earth who discovers she is heir to the House of Abrasax, an alien clan that has been ruling the universe for millennia. The film has been poorly received and seems unlikely to rekindle a substantial interest in Gnosticism in the manner of The Matrix.
Gnosticism is also used as a slander against world leaders. Whereas George Bush Jr was called a Manichaean, Barack Obama has been characterized by numerous right-wing commentators as a Gnostic (though he is no more a Gnostic than he is a socialist). But Obama is not alone. According to a columnist in the Russian newspaper Pravda, Vladimir Putin ‘is the last pragmatic and national leader among a group of global Gnostics’.3 This use of the term Gnostic in political discourse stems from the work of Eric Voegelin, who argued that modern left-wing movements were utopian, treating existing society as if it were a grand mistake, and were hence a secular equivalent of ancient Gnosticism. He didn’t mean this in a nice way.
In many ways my researches have been like those of an archaeologist at an archaeological dig. The deeper I dig the hole the wider it gets and the more time I have to spend sifting through the piles of unearthed treasures to understand what I have found. The hole excavated by this book is, I hope, neither too wide nor too deep, yet the artefacts uncovered are varied and fascinating in their own right. Just brush off a little of the earth clinging to them and I hope you will want to dig deeper too.
Introduction
‘Ears to hear and eyes to see,
this is the tragic ability of the Gnostic.’
LUPIERI P.35
A God who lies about himself and is not the ultimate divinity that he claims himself to be; a Church that is ignorant of the nature of its own God; lost gospels that were suppressed by the orthodoxy; a reality that is not what it appears to be, and is controlled by malign authorities; the secret knowledge of the true nature of our world – these are all Gnostic themes that have reappeared in modern novels and films such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and The Matrix. Philip Pullman’s trilogy draws on the ideas of the ancient Gnostics and the writings of William Blake in its vision of a mind-controlling Church and of a diminished false God who is neither the absolute ruler of the universe nor even its fundamental spiritual principle.
The Da Vinci Code uses the Gnostic gospels to present an alternative history of Christianity in which Jesus had been the partner of Mary Magdalene, a history which, according to Brown, was suppressed by the paternalistic, masculine Church. In The Matrix, the protagonist Neo discovers that his reality is in fact an illusion controlled and manipulated by hidden rulers – the Machines – that are opposed to humanity and use the human race for their own purposes.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the archaeological discovery of ancient Gnostic manuscripts has opened a window into the world of the Gnostic sects. Not only are many of these writings available again for the first time since the fourth century, but our culture has proved itself to be well suited to receive the influence of Gnosticism. Our multi-cultural, fragmented, somewhat postreligious world has much in common with the early centuries of the Common Era, during which Gnosticism was born and thrived. The central tenets of Gnosticism – that we humans are somehow asleep to our lives and to the true meaning of reality, and yet can awaken; that there is a higher form of personal religion, in comparison with which organized religion is a travesty; that reality is not what it seems to be – have spread into diverse forms of popular culture. Yet the history and the literature of the Gnostics themselves are still obscure to most people.
What did they write, and how can we understand their writings? What did they believe about essential religious concepts such as God, the soul and the body, or about sexuality? Did they accept the early Catholic Church or were they the sworn enemies of ecclesiastical organization? Were they heretics or an entirely separate movement? Were they completely wiped out by orthodox Christianity, or did Gnosticism survive?
We shall see that even though certain aspects of the origins and history of the Gnostics are obscure, we now have plenty of information on their varied views of the world. Although Gnostic movements have been battered both by the winds of time and the spiritual warfare of Christian orthodoxy, even today there still survives a traditional religious group that is directly descended from the ancient Gnostics. Once the ideas of Gnosticism had been sown into the world, they could never be completely suppressed, and Gnostic concepts keep pushing to the surface in both religious and secular contexts in the Western world.
The Gnostics did not subscribe to a central ecclesiastical authority, and they were relentlessly creative with their mythology, continuing to rework and rewrite it, so there is no single definitive version of the Gnostic myth and there are no official Gnostic scriptures. Gnosticism poses – and perhaps answers – questions that are fundamental to human existence. Who is the real God, and how can we know him (or her) directly? Why is there evil in the world? Does established, organized religion really point to the truth?
The original ancient Gnostics were Christian-related sects who are known mostly through their own writings, which use myth and spiritual metaphor and often turn the stories of the Bible upside down. We also possess the polemics of their enemies, the heresy-hunting Church Fathers who, in their attempts to refute the Gnostics, preserved much information on them.
The Gnostics were distinguished from other early Christians in their emphasis on gnosis, the Greek word for ‘knowledge’, rather than faith; according to the Gnostics, it is gnosis itself that saves, redeems, and provides liberation. Conventional Christianity emphasizes faith in Christ, in his crucifixion and resurrection and his status as the son of God, the saviour and redeemer of humanity, at the centre of its religion. The Gnostics also saw Jesus as a saviour and redeemer, but their Jesus saved and redeemed by bringing knowledge of the universe and man’s true place within it. The knowledge that he brought could teach mankind how to liberate the seed of spiritual light that was hidden within, and enable humanity to know the true God.
Gnosis is a direct kind of knowledge,4 more akin to the way in which one knows another person than to intellectual or factual knowledge, and might be translated alternatively as ‘acquaintance’ or ‘recognition’. True gnosis is a direct knowledge of the Self and the truth about the universe. Knowledge of oneself becomes knowledge of God, because the deepest and highest part of us is akin to the divine. The concept of gnosis may initially seem mysterious, but it is connected to the modern spiritual and psychological concept of consciousness. The word ‘consciousness’ derives from the Latin conscius, ‘sharing knowledge with’, a word that is cognate with the Greek gnosis.
Consciousness is knowledge of oneself, or awareness of oneself, and some spiritual writers have coined terms like selfconsciousness (not in the ordinary English sense of embarrassment), superconsciousness or objective consciousness to clarify the difference between our ordinary everyday consciousness and spiritually higher states of consciousness.
Most people have experienced a waking up or coming to at moments in their lives. Perhaps it occurred in childhood, or perhaps it was experienced as an adult in connection with some unusual or intense situation – a quietness or a strangeness, a different sense of oneself, accompanied by an awareness of one’s surroundings and perhaps a feeling of knowing, however fleetingly, the truth about one’s true self and the world. The experience may be simply a unitive state or may be accompanied by visions. These states of higher consciousness demand explanation, and the Gnostic teachings provide us with a meaningful intellectual structure that explains life on earth, and also provides techniques by which we might experience these moments of illumination once again. This is gnosis – the direct experience of higher reality and of the divine self, accompanied by knowledge of what is being experienced, the importance of the experience, and its relationship to the rest of the universe.
The ancient Gnostics drew a clear line between the material world and the spiritual world of gnosis. Gnosticism is thus dualistic. There is spirit and there is matter. There is the material world and there is the world of the spirit, often called the Pleroma,5 from a Greek word meaning ‘fullness’ or ‘completeness’. To many, this dualism may initially seem to be surprising, being perceived as a quality that belongs more to fundamentalist religion than to true spirituality, reminiscent of the importance that many fundamentalist Churches give to the influence of Satan in this world, which thus turns the world into a moral battleground between Christianity and the forces of evil. But classical Gnostic dualism was a dualism within unity. All and everything springs forth from God, but the material world is a result of a cosmic fall, an error made in the lowest reaches of the spiritual realm.
Matter is the crudest and lowest aspect of the universe, and it is of matter that our bodies are formed. But the creation of mankind could not proceed without a spark of the spiritual realm residing in each human. We humans therefore have a duality of matter and spirit within us. We respond to base matter, but we have divine spirits, in which our true identities reside. Ultimately, everything is contained within the divine, even the base physical world, and it is only in our ignorance (lack of gnosis) that there appears to be duality.
But this world of matter did not come into existence through a mechanical process or by chance. The Gnostics, like the Christians and Jews, thought that the world had been created by God. The Gnostics even agreed that the creator God was the same as the God of the Christians and Jews. However, the Gnostics felt that this God was an arrogant and ignorant abortion, truly a jealous God, a despot who knew nothing of the spiritual realm above him. Thus mainstream religion worshipped the wrong God, and the real God could only be known through gnosis, not through any conventional doctrine or belief.
All of these ideas were expressed through the medium of myth, not through philosophy or strict dogma. Gnostic myths come in several flavours, but the mythic framework usually involves a description of the higher realm and an explanation of the fall that occurred, followed by an account of the possibility of salvation and restoration.
Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, we had only the hostile accounts of the early Church Fathers along with a few original texts which either represented a late stage of Gnosticism or in any case had not received enough scholarly attention.
It was in December 1945 that the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered. Mohammed Ali es-Samman and his brother Khalifah Ali, two Arab camel drivers, were out looking for fertilizer at the bottom of the high chalk cliff of Djebel-el-Tarif. They found a large earthenware jar, which they smashed open, slightly wary of what they might find, only to discover 12 books. (One of the books had another pamphlet bound into it, so the books are now numbered as being 13 in total.)
These are codices,6 not scrolls. Scrolls are continuous sheets rolled up rather like rolls of wallpaper, but a codex is a manuscript book copied by hand before the invention of printing, but bound in essentially the same way as the modern book. The pages of the codices are made from papyrus cut into sheets and bound between covers. The covers of the Nag Hammadi codices are of leather and have a clasp extending from the back to the front, so that they resemble a modern briefcase. All of the Nag Hammadi codices are written in the Coptic language, which was the final form of the ancient Egyptian language, by which stage it was written in Greek letters instead of hieroglyphs or demotic script, with a few extra letters to represent sounds that were lacking in the Greek language. As far as we know the original language of every single text in the collection was Greek.
After their discovery, these codices eventually made their way into the hands of scholars, often through particularly circuitous routes. The journey of the tomes was complicated when the brothers who had found the manuscripts took revenge on the man who had killed their father and had to go into hiding. The books were left with a Coptic priest whose brother, having some notion of their potential sale price, sold a volume to a Cairo antiques dealer. Through a variety of sales, attempted sales and smugglings, the entire collection was ultimately preserved at the Cairo Museum. The 12 (or 13) codices contain a wealth of Gnostic and related literature, including the now well-known Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Philip.
The Gospel of Judas, made famous in 2006 by the promotional efforts of its publishers National Geographic, had a similarly tortured history. The initial discovery of the Gospel of Judas is unknown to us, but it is quite likely that it was discovered in an Egyptian tomb. The subsequent turbulent history of what is now called Codex Tchacos – after Frieda Tchacos, who sold the volume to National Geographic – or, to those who dislike National Geographic’s claim of ownership, Codex Judas, is now fairly well documented, and described in Chapter 3.
Codex Tchacos contains four separate texts, each of which is damaged to a greater or lesser extent, but it is the Gospel of Judas which has taken the limelight. Pride of place in the newly discovered Gnostic gospel is given to Judas Iscariot, but his significance in the gospel is still being debated by academics and others. Judas may be the hero of the story, by means of a revolutionary technique named inverse exegesis, which turned the conventional biblical interpretations upside down and was used by the Gnostics as a new way of reading scripture, or he may simply be portrayed as the archetypal disciple – like the other disciples in the Gospel of Judas, a traitor and a worshipper of the wrong God. However the academic discussion might play out, the Gospel of Judas is full of Gnostic teaching.
The Gnostics first appeared in the first centuries of the Common Era, in the context of eastern Mediterranean Hellenistic civilization. The earliest recorded Gnostics were people like Menander, Satornilos, Basilides and – perhaps the earliest of all, if he was not merely a legend – Simon Magus. At the peak of Gnostic activity, there were many different groups, given outlandish names by the Church Fathers like the Marcosians, Ophites, Cainites, Naasenes, Carpocratians and the Borborites, but modern scholars usually divide them into two categories – Sethians and Valentinians. The Gnostics themselves probably just called themselves Christians. The Sethians were probably the earlier of the two branches and trace themselves back to the mythical Seth in the book of Genesis, whereas the Valentinians take their name from the historical Gnostic teacher Valentinus.
At times, the Gnostics seemed like strong competitors to mainstream Christianity, but they lost out as the stranglehold of Christian orthodoxy tightened its grip. When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and removed the restrictions on Christian worship, Christianity’s dominant sects reacted to its wider acceptance by codifying and standardizing its dogma and forms of worship and stiffening its resolve against heterodox Christian groups like the Gnostics. It is perhaps no accident the Nag Hammadi codices were compiled at roughly the same time that apocryphal literature was being condemned.
But the ancient Sethian and Valentinian Gnostics had their successors and their relatives. There is currently much academic discussion over the definition of Gnosticism, and over which Christian groups qualify as Gnostic and whether the Gnostics even called themselves Gnostic. In the current work I shall not be too concerned about definition, and I shall consider Gnosticism as a loose network of related ideas, texts, groups and individuals. If the religion of the second-century heterodox Christian Marcion lacks reference to gnosis itself (and I do not feel that he is truly a Gnostic as such), his movement is nevertheless strongly dualistic and related to Gnosticism. If the Manichaean religion, now dead but once widespread in Asia and parts of Europe, tended towards belief and practice rather than gnosis, the Manichaeans’ myths, dualism and repeated references to gnosis are nonetheless Gnostic. And so on with the Cathars and Paulicians and Bogomils. A historical chain links all of these to the ancient Gnostics, as is also the case with the Mandaeans, the sole surviving Gnostic religion, now threatened by the current war in Iraq.
Other spiritual systems have Gnostic qualities to them – for instance, Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, Kabbalah, Neoplatonism and certain forms of Islamic mysticism. Not all of these necessarily have any historical relationship to the ancient Christian Gnostics, but may have arrived independently to similar conclusions. The late scholar of Gnosticism Ioan Coulianu proposed that Gnosticism constitutes an intellectual system which, like other systems, has a limited number of options, a limited number of binary switches that may be turned on or off. There are only so many ways in which issues such as life after death, the existence of God, or the relationship of spirit to physical matter can be treated, and thus similar solutions keep recurring.
Once the Gnostic myth and Gnostic concepts had appeared in the world, they existed henceforth as a kind of ideal form. To move beyond a mere academic application of this idea, we might say that once the seeds of a Gnostic viewpoint had been sown into the world (which probably happened in the first or at the latest second century ce) it could then find a multitude of expressions. Even if the historical continuity of Gnostic teachings were to be terminated (and it was when the medieval Cathars were persecuted and slaughtered), the ideas would still exist and could be fanned back into flame. Thus someone like William Blake, who could only have had the slightest exposure to Gnostic ideas, was able to come up with a genuinely Gnostic system by himself. And the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, and other Gnostic literature, made the ideas again available to humanity so they could take root in the human heart and once again produce gnosis.7
So, what can we gain by exploring the Gnostics? We can receive an alternative view of the world and of our place within it. We can explore forms of Christianity that were lost and are perhaps more applicable to our current lives than traditional Christianity. We can revive forgotten traditions, and understand lost myths and teaching. But most importantly, we may experience gnosis ourselves.
Chapter 1
The Story of God: Gnostic Mythology
‘But since they differ so widely among themselves both as respects doctrine and tradition, and since those of them who are recognized as being most modern make it their effort daily to invent some new opinion, and to bring out what no one ever before thought of, it is a difficult matter to describe all their opinions.’
IRENAEUS
The main mode of expression of the Gnostics was literature, and their literature survives in a small number of limited forms. A brief perusal of the Nag Hammadi Library reveals a few concise texts which consist mostly of sayings or dialogues – and it is no accident that those more straightforward texts like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip have had the widest appeal since the rediscovery of the codices – but the majority of the Nag Hammadi texts are complex, sprawling mythical creations.
Despite the popular designation of the Nag Hammadi texts as ‘Gnostic gospels’, the gospel form as an account of the earthly life of Jesus was not generally favoured by Gnostics. They valued Jesus as a redeemer, a revealer of knowledge whose death was not of central importance to his mission.8 Rather, Gnostic texts typically, but not exclusively, describe and utilize the Gnostic myth of the creation of the world and humanity and all that led up to it and proceeded from it. The Gnostics, in all their incarnations (Manichaeans, Mandaeans and Cathars in addition to the ancient Gnostics) have consistently turned to myth as being the best vehicle for expressing their insights into mankind and the universe.
A myth can encapsulate essential meaning in a story, can express archetypal truths about man and the world through the interplay of its characters. Myths are non-dogmatic and can be subject to endless interpretation and reinterpretation. The Gnostics did not invent their own myths from scratch (though there is much that occurs for the first time in Gnostic myth), or use the extensive mythic background of the pagan classical world. Rather, their myths drew on the Bible and particularly, even almost exclusively, on the book of Genesis. Genesis was a rich vein of material with its vivid sketches of creation and fall and its alluring, condensed tales of the patriarchs, and is still the best-known book in the Old Testament.
The only problem that the Gnostics had with the Bible was that they didn’t agree with it. Yet their disagreement led neither to a search for some other source of myth, nor to a simple rejection of God or religion, but to a creative engagement with the Hebrew myths. The Gnostics turned the Bible on its head: they made biblical heroes into tools of the evil demiurge; they made obscure characters into redeemers of humanity; and they made God, the Jewish and Christian deity, into a demon.
Yet the Bible was only one aspect of the cultural background of the Gnostics. They were influenced equally by Plato, but they didn’t accept Plato’s philosophy lying down, any more than they did the Bible. Plato made good use of myth himself, and the metaphysical aspects of his philosophy were often expressed allusively and poetically, leaving plenty of scope for interpretation and expansion. In the third century Plotinus, the leading Neoplatonist, argued against the Gnostics’ adaptation of Plato’s philosophy and in particular against their perceived denigration of the material world, but he recognized that the Gnostics were competitors to Platonists as much as they were to Christians. The Gnostic myths represent a meeting of the Hebrew Bible and Platonism, and a response to the intra-national Hellenistic culture, but they are something more than that too. They are a new creation.
It is common enough for scholars of Gnosticism to refer to the ‘Gnostic myth’ – the central myth of a fall from the spiritual realm that results in the existence of the ignorant creator God who makes this world, the subsequent plight of humanity and the attempts of the spiritual world to enable humans to regain their birthright. And it is tempting to reconstruct an original from which all the later varieties of the Gnostic myth developed. Some of the earliest Gnostic or semi-Gnostic teachers like Satornilos and Basilides had myths that lacked some of the features of what we might call full-blown Gnosticism, but in truth there was never any ideal form of the myth that was later corrupted, or splintered into many forms, never any fundamental expression of an ur-myth; Gnostics were too creative and independent for that.
The variety and diversity of the Gnostic myths show that Gnostics were expected to develop their own personal understandings and to elaborate, reimagine or alter the myths whenever necessary. There are thus many treatments of the Gnostic myth. Some accounts focus on the mythical history of humankind, some on the grand cosmogony that initiates the story. (Cosmology is the study of the universe as it is; cosmogony the study of the creation of the universe.) Some accounts focus on the fall (which is not the fall of Adam and Eve in the usual interpretations of Genesis, but the fall of Sophia), on how we and the world came to be as we are, others on the possibility of liberation and redemption. In some myths, such as the Exegesis on the Soul and the Hymn of the Pearl, the soul is the main character, and the story is told without much of a cosmological framework.
The Gnostic myth may be said to have four stages. Firstly there is the production of the Pleroma, the divine realm of spiritual fullness, and the emanation of the various aeons that inhabit it. Next we have the fall of Sophia, the youngest of the aeons. Then the birth of the demiurge and the creation of the material world, and lastly the story of humanity, the creation and development of mankind, and the redeemers and revealers who brought gnosis to the world to help the trapped seeds of light to escape.
As a whole, the myth describes the process by which God emanates to fill the spiritual realm. At its furthest limits, this accidentally creates the material world, in which shards of spirit are trapped. The on-going story is that of humanity’s attempts to free the imprisoned light which may then rejoin the Pleroma.
In the beginning there was only God. God may be known directly through gnosis, but he cannot be defined. (My use of the masculine gender to describe God is merely traditional, though the ultimate God is very often considered male, particularly as a father, by the Gnostics.) We can only say what God is not, not what he is, and this negative theology is very characteristic of Gnosticism. Any attempt to label or define God limits him, and therefore cannot express his absolute, transcendent qualities. God is immeasurable, ineffable, unknowable, unnameable. These epithets do not limit God because they express what God is not, rather than what he is.
But God is not completely unapproachable. Without compromising his unity and transcendence, he began to emanate9 various qualities of himself, characteristics like Mind, Silence, Depth, Love, which are known as aeons. These qualities were formed in male and female pairs, syzygies, and male and female mated and produced yet younger aeons, which were further aspects of God. The final quality to be emanated was wisdom, which in the Greek is Sophia. God and all of his hypostases or qualities were united together in the fullness of God: the Pleroma.