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Title: The Gnostics Author: Jacques Lacarrière Date: 1973 Language: en Topics: history, proto-anarchism, religion, spirituality Notes: Translated from the French Les gnostiques by Nina Rootes in 1977.
This is a strange and original essay — a sort of poetic meditation on
the vanished Gnostics of Egypt whose total refusal to believe in the
world as outlined by the Christian theologians led to their destruction
both in Egypt and in Bosnia, and lastly at Montségur,[1] that
Thermopylae of the Gnostic soul. I should stress that this is more a
work of literature than of scholarship, though its documentation is
impeccable. It is as convincing a reconstruction of the way the Gnostics
lived and thought as D. H. Lawrence’s intuitive recreation of the
vanished Etruscans.
The documentation we possess on the Gnostics is almost as scanty as that
on the Etruscans and much of it comes from the opposition, so to speak,
from the Church Fathers. Lacarrière has used his sources with skill and
honesty and this essay is of a burning topicality to a world which is
also playing at Gnosticism — the pathetic cockroach world of the
anti-hero with his anti-memoirs, not to mention his anti-poetry. How
noble in comparison with this shallow hippie defeatism is the grand
poetic challenge of the Gnostics. They refused to countenance a world
which was less than perfect, and they affronted the great lie of
Lucifer-Mammon with the hopeless magnificence of the Spartan three
hundred.
All that we need to know about the author is that he is a wanderer and a
poet; he is neither a scholar nor a journalist. The Indians would call
him a ‘searcher’ — and indeed he has spent a considerable time in both
India and Egypt and has studied the languages and landscapes of both; in
the latter country it is impossible not to be struck by the history of
these obliterated sects which clustered around the central idea of
Gnosticism and which were finally scattered to the four winds of heaven
by the ‘true Christians,’ the anthropophagous elect of heaven in whose
mental universe we now live — on the gold-standard of brotherly love.
Lacarrière has given us a Cuvier-like reconstruction of the great
Gnostic refusal of the lie, and their refusal to share the world of that
lie with its religious leaders. The courage of this despair is poetic in
the highest degree and this splendid poem renders it full justice.
Lawrence Durrell
Eighteen centuries separate us from the Gnostics. Eighteen centuries
during the course of which wars, persecutions and massacres, causing the
deaths of thousands, have amply justified the total suspicion in which
they held this world and the creatures that inhabit it. In everything
that contemporary history sets before our eyes — the ever more blatant
contempt for the individual man, the fallacy of ideologies, the wars or
military interventions openly carried on for the profit of the combined
interests of capitalism and socialism, the daily erosion of liberty and
the fascination of violence — in all this, a Gnostic of today would see
nothing more than the magnified image of the dramas which were familiar
to him, and the inevitable outcome of that everlasting outrage, the very
existence of the world and of humanity as they are.
Who then were these people, lucid enough to look at creation with eyes
stripped of all consoling self-deceptions, sensitive enough to feel, in
all its unbearable extremity, the anguish of an eternity forever
promised and forever denied, sincere enough to accept in their own lives
all the implications of this total rejection of the world, and to
behave, everywhere and at all times, as unsubjugated outsiders?
The term Gnostic is vague, encompassing several distinctly different
meanings. But, historically speaking, it acquired a particular meaning
during the early centuries of our era. On the Eastern shores of the
Mediterranean, in Syria, Samaria and Egypt, at the moment when
Christianity was feeling its way, and when so many prophets and messiahs
were traveling the high roads of the Orient, founding short-lived
communities here and there, certain men called Gnostics, that is to say
‘men who know,’ were also setting up important communities, grouped
around various masters and female initiates of a teaching that was
radically different from all the others. For the moment, I can do no
more than sketch in the broad outlines of this complex, fascinating
message, which will be drawn in greater detail throughout the text of
the book. Gnosis is knowledge. And it is on knowledge — not on faith or
belief — that the Gnostics rely in order to construct their image of the
universe and the inferences they drew from it: a knowledge of the origin
of things, of the real nature of matter and flesh, of the destiny of a
world to which man belongs as ineluctably as does the matter from which
he is constituted. Now this knowledge, born out of their own meditations
or from the secret teachings which they claim to have had from Jesus or
from mythical ancestors, leads them to see the whole of material
creation as the product of a god who is the enemy of man. Viscerally,
imperiously, irremissibly, the Gnostic feels life, thought, human and
planetary destiny to be a failed work, limited and vitiated in its most
fundamental structures. Everything, from the distant stars to the nuclei
of our body-cells, carries the materially demonstrable trace of an
original imperfection which only Gnosticism and the means it proposes
can combat.
But this radical censure of all creation is accompanied by an equally
radical certainty which presupposes and upholds it: the conviction that
there exists in man something which escapes the curse of this world, a
fire, a spark, a light issuing from the true God — that distant,
inaccessible stranger to the perverse order of the real universe; and
that man’s task is to regain his lost homeland by wrenching himself free
of the snares and illusions of the real, to rediscover the original
unity, to find again the kingdom of this God who was unknown, or
imperfectly known, to all preceding religions.
These convictions were expressed through a radical teaching which held
almost all the systems and religions of former times to be null and
void. In spite of its links with some philosophies of the time, and
apart from minor reservations — since they borrowed certain beliefs
indiscriminately from various systems, prophets or sacred books — one
can say that Gnosticism is a profoundly original thought, a mutant
thought.
This rejection of all systems, and of a world governed not by men but by
shadows or semblances of men — whom I will call pseudanthropes — forced
them to live on the fringes of all established society, and to preach a
refusal to compromise with false institutions, a refusal to procreate,
to marry, to live in families, or to obey temporal powers, whether pagan
or Christian.
To sum up the essential position of the Gnostics in still simpler terms,
let us say that in their eyes the evil which taints the whole of
creation and alienates man in body, mind, and soul, deprives him of the
awareness necessary for his own salvation. Man, the shadow of man,
possesses only a shadow of consciousness. And it is to this one task
that the Gnostics of the first centuries AD deliberately devoted
themselves, choosing paths which were not only unorthodox but which,
moreover, greatly scandalized their contemporaries: to create in man a
true consciousness, which would permit him to impart to his thoughts and
deeds the permanence and the rigour necessary to cast off the shackles
of this world.
Let us, then, open the first dossier on this monumental undertaking,
launched against the entire universe, against the immensity of the
firmament, against man’s original alienation and the falsity of systems
and institutions, and let us begin at the beginning ... with the sky.
“The death of a bee, assassinated by his queen, is charged with as much
meaning as the massacres of Dachau.”
― R. Abellio, Les yeux d’Ezéchiel sont ouverts
“When all the complicated calculations prove false, when the
philosophers themselves have nothing more to tell us, we may be forgiven
for turning to the meaningless twitter of the birds or to the distant
counterweight of the stars.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
What emotions does the sight of the sky inspire in us, if not praise,
enthusiasm, and admiration? It is vast, infinite, immutable,
omnipresent; it eludes the relative and the measurable; it is a
parameter of the incommensurable. But in this concert, which we consider
natural and which celebrates dawn, zenith, nadir, and twilight with
equal assurance, discordant notes sometimes jar the ear. To be vast is
goad. To be infinite is too much. To possess planets and stars is an
incontestable triumph. But to possess them by the million, to teem with
stars which are so many eyes trained upon the world each night as if
tracking our dreams, is to wield excessive power, to display a very
suspect splendour. Something in this immensity turns and meshes its
gears with a regularity so precise as to be disquieting; and exactly for
whom — or against whom — this mechanism deploys its flaming wheelworks,
we do not know.
So, in this simple look directed at the celestial vault, the Gnostics
find themselves confronted with the ultimate nature of reality: what is
this matter which is by turns full and empty, dense and tenuous,
luminous and dark, of which our sky is made? Is this dark shore, this
tenebrous tissue, this interstitial shadow wherein the stars seem
pricked like incandescent pores, constituted of matter or of space? Is
the ‘real’ sky nothing but its light, these winking eyes on the ocean of
night, or is it at one and the same time that which shines and that
which does not, a fire flaming and dark by turns? Do its shores and its
black abysses comprise a nothingness, an absence of light, or are they
the concrete material which interposes itself between our earth and the
distant fires which it obscures?
No doubt this question will seem absurd, or at least premature, in the
age of the Gnostics. Nevertheless, it is implicit at the very
starting-point of their thought. Since man, in their view, is a fragment
of the universe, and since the body of the one and the space of the
other proceed from a simple material, both must obey the same laws. Man
is a mirror in which one can discover the reduced and condensed image of
the sky, a living universe carrying within him, in his body and in his
psyche, fires and dark shores, zones of shadow and of light. Are these
lights and shadows simply forms split off from a single material, or two
materials of opposing nature? All our existence, all our choices as
thinking hominids are vitally implicated in this simple question. Thus,
the Gnostics searched the splendours and the terrors of the sky to find
an answer to our own duality. Never was there asked a more pertinent
question and never were the stars scanned so earnestly.
And it seems that what struck these men most forcibly, as they watched
throughout the Egyptian nights, is the dark portion of the sky — the
vastness, the omnipresence, the heavy opacity of that blackness. It
hangs over us like a veil, a wall of shadow encircling the earth, a
tenebrous dome through which appear, here and there, through chinks,
faults and gaps, the glittering fires of another world. A gigantic black
lid seals in our universe and encompasses us with its opacity. Dark
wall, black lid, circle of shadow. And beyond that, in a second circle,
the fire of the planets, the stars and all the heavenly bodies. The eye
apprehends this other world by means of the luminous dots cut out of the
fabric of the darkness in the shape of constellations, the sparkling
lace perforating the tissue of the cosmic night. Why did the being — the
god or demiurge — who thus perforated the veil of our sky, trace these
enigmatic stenciled patterns that echo the familiar shapes of our world?
Because, without a doubt, they are the sign of something, the sketch for
some plan; they are messages or symbols scattered across the celestial
vault. For example, one Gnostic sect, the Peratae (an obscure name
meaning Those Who Pass Through), discovered in the constellation of the
Serpent or the Dragon the very meaning of the genesis of the cosmos. It
is a curious constellation, one of the most vast in the boreal sky, yet
one to which little attention is paid. It stretches its sinuous shapes
between Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, its tail lost in the direction of
Gemini, its triangular head pointed towards the pole star. Its outline
lacks the geometric precision of the Bear, the elegance of the Swan
(Cygnus), or the severity of the Scorpion (Scorpio). But coiled as it is
round the northern pole, as if suckling on the navel of the sky, one can
understand why it should quickly become charged with symbolic
importance. The Peratae, who specifically regarded the Serpent as the
first Gnostic in the world, the one who possessed primordial knowledge
and had tried to communicate it to the first man, in Eden, recognized in
this constellation the symbol of the primordial Serpent and his
implication in human destiny:
‘If a person has eyes that know how to see, he will look upward to the
heavens and he will see the beautiful image of the Serpent coiled there,
at the place where the great sky begins. Then he will understand that no
being in heaven or on earth or in hell was formed without the Serpent.’
And so, these constellations relate the earliest segment of the world’s
history and are distinct signs, well worth deciphering since each has
its terrestrial counterpart. Up there, the great Serpent, coiled around
the roots of heaven. On earth, the Serpent of Eden, coiled around the
roots of the Tree of Knowledge. The sky — like the Biblical myths which
the Gnostics often interpreted in the manner of modem mythologists,
seeking to read the hidden meaning (today we would say ‘unconscious
meaning’) that underlies their images, symbols and analogies — the sky,
then, is the first source of knowledge.
If one wished to apply a contemporary idiom to Gnostic cosmology, one
could say that the first circle (the circle of shadow) represents the
strictly solar system, and the second (the fire of the planets) the
galactic system to which we belong. But beyond the second circle the
Gnostics imagined others — varying in number — right up to the ultimate
centre which constitutes the source and the root of the entire universe.
These intermediary worlds, these circles ranged in echelons up to the
navel of the world, are totally invisible to us. It is through
intuition, or rather through revelation, through gnosis, that the
Gnostic knows of their existence. For, judging by all the evidence, the
Gnostics built a pure mental construction — rather strange and
refreshing, like the systems of the physicians of the Ionian school in
Greece — upon an a priori vision of the universe.
One could say that these other worlds, presaged and divined by Gnostic
speculation, in fact represent what modern astronomy calls nebulae,
spirals, and extra-galactic clusters. A Gnostic like Basilides calls
this world beyond the second circle, beyond the plants and the sphere of
fixed stars, ‘the hyper-cosmic world’. Therein resides the Supreme
Being, the God-Nothingness, guardian of all destiny, all becoming,
retainer of all seeds, powers, and potentialities; the purely
intelligible fire which held, and still holds, the seeds of everything
that fell thereafter into the inferior circles (supralunar and
sublunar), and became animate and inanimate matter, forms, incarnations,
stones, trees, and flesh. It can be seen that the distances that
separate all these worlds from each other are measured in terms of
weight. Just as the semen of man, the minute, invisible seed possessing
a scarcely measurable weight, acquires size and weight as it develops,
so do the primordial seeds, the potentialities of a hyper-cosmic world,
acquire weight by falling into the lower world, becoming more and more
dense in substance.
It seems, then, that for the Gnostics there exist several states of
matter: an igneous, superior state which belongs to the hyper-world, and
successive states corresponding to the different circles, graded as the
seeds materialize and take on darkness, opacity, gravity. Our own
matter, that of the earth, plants, and all living creatures, is in some
way the seed of the ethereal particles of the hyper-world, but grown
infinitely heavier. Little by little, these particles have fallen down
to our level as the result of a primordial drama which comprises the
history of our universe, in the same manner that particles of dust and
debris are slowly deposited at the bottom of marine abysses to form
sediment. All the beings of our world are, in the eyes of the Gnostics,
the sediment of a lost heaven. And from the bottom of this dark sea, man
perceives nothing of the luminous surface of the upper world except in
ephemeral forms, fleeting reflections, evanescent phantoms which are
like those phosphorescent fish that alone illuminate the age-old
darkness of the great ocean depths. And our matter, because it is heavy,
because it is dark — the darkest and heaviest of all — is also the least
dynamic, the most immobile, as fixed and as heavy as atoms reduced to
their nuclei. Immobility, the glacial cold of matter and flesh deprived
of primal fire and sinking ineluctably towards that absolute zero which
is the final stage of material death.
The implications of this image of creation, split into several universes
of which the last — ours — is totally separated from the others by a
barrier of dense shadow, are obviously profound. Weight, cold, and
immobility are at once our condition, our destiny, and our death. To
surrender oneself to weight, to increase it in all senses of the term
(by absorbing food, or by procreating, weighing the world down with
successive births), is to collaborate in this unhappy destiny, to ratify
the primordial fall which is the cause of it, to ally oneself with the
work of death undertaken by the being or beings who provoked this tragic
cleavage. In modern terms, it is hastening the trend towards what we
call entropy. Curiously enough, the Gnostics perceived, albeit summarily
and imperfectly, the fact that the destiny of the material world tends
towards inertia. The task of the Gnostic, therefore, is to climb this
fatal slope, in the literal and in the figurative sense, to try to cross
the dividing wall, to regain, by a progressive shedding of the
alienating weight of his body and his psyche, the higher world from
which we should never have fallen. To discard or lighten all the matter
of this world, that is the strange end the Gnostics pursued.
I will say but little for the moment of the reasons for this initial
split, this radical separation between the worlds, which condemns us to
live in the darkest circle, this fall which makes man the prisoner of
alienating matter. I will simply state that, at a certain moment in the
dawn of time, when seeds were in their earliest awakening and all
possibilities virgin, one of the inhabitants of the hyper-world — god,
demiurge, angel or aeon (a term which appears frequently in Gnostic
cosmology and which signifies an immortal, a living and personalized
being) — one of these creatures, through error, pride, or fecklessness,
intervened in the unfolding of the world and provoked disturbances,
vibrations, and fibrillations of igneous matter which brought about its
progressive degradation and its descent towards the lower circles. The
world in which we live is not only opaque, heavy, and given over to
death, but is above all a world born of a monumental machination; a
world that was not foreseen, not desired, flawed in all its parts; a
world in which every thing, every being, is the result of a cosmic
misunderstanding. In this whirlpool of errors, this universal shipwreck
which is the history of matter and of man, we on earth are rather like
survivors condemned to eternal solitude, planetary detainees who are the
victims of injustice on a truly cosmic scale. Stars, ether, aeons,
planets, earth, life, flesh, inanimate matter, psyche — all are
implicated, dragged into this universal disgrace.
Fortunately, the gaps, the perforations which shine in the celestial
wall of our prison show that a possible way of escape exists. In the
star-studded night, the Gnostic knows that not all contact with the
higher circles is irremediably lost, and that perhaps he can conquer his
fate, break the ancient curse which made the world a cheat and a sham,
and cast us down, far from the sparkle and the blazing illumination of
the hyper-world, down to the gloomy circle in which we live, this
‘circle of dark fire.’
“Injustice governs the universe. All that is made and all that is unmade
therein carries the imprint of a corrupt fragility, as if matter were
the fruit of an outrage in the womb of nothingness.”
― Emile Cioran, A Short History of Decay
To know our true condition, to realize that we are condemned to live
under a fantastic mass of darkness, beneath oceans and successive
circles; to know that man, atrophied and infirm, vegetates in submarine
lairs like the proteus, that blind eel-like creature that lives in
subterranean waters, naked and white (or rather albino, since white is
still a colour, after all) ... to know this is the first step in Gnostic
thought.
The same piercing look that the Gnostics cast upward to the sky was also
turned upon the earth. The earth of Egypt, burned by solar fire, made up
of deserts and arid mountains, or, around the Nile, alluvial marshes
which harbour a teeming life among a riot of weeds and wild grasses,
gave rise, perhaps, to the images they formed of our planet. For this
particular earth is moulded out of violent contrasts, implacable
struggles between the blinding light of the days and the icy darkness of
the nights, as if the elements themselves, throughout the cycles of
time, were powerless to do anything but meet in headlong collision.
I remember walking on the outskirts of Alexandria one evening; it was
early autumn. The stars were shining with a fantastic clarity. A
swirling vapour rose from the ground to mingle with the ambergris-like
perfume of the marshes. The crystalline sky, so pure that not a star
winked, and the scalding earth, from which life itself seemed to well up
and overflow, offered two irreconcilable faces of reality: the mineral
austerity of the infinite sky and the confused turbulence compounded of
the sweat of the soil, this quivering veil of odours and the stench of
putrefying matter.
But the truth is that neither the sky nor the earth, nor its odours, nor
even — beyond these primary factors — the confusion of history and the
disarray of systems in the age in which the Gnostics lived, can entirely
explain this inquisitorial stare brought to bear upon our world. One
feels that their vision of man and of the earth was dictated by a global
feeling regarding matter itself, a feeling made up of both repulsion and
fascination. Not that they were insensible to the beauty of the world or
of the sky. A young Alexandrian Gnostic, Epiphanes, who died at the age
of seventeen, wrote one of the most arresting pieces imaginable about
the earth, the sun, justice and love. But what haunts the Gnostics above
all else, when confronted by matter — by its opacity, its density, its
compactness, its weight (and they felt this weight, this materiality, in
those states that seem most subtle: the trembling of water, the wind of
the desert, the shimmering of the stars) — what haunts them is the
intolerable awareness that this inhibiting matter is the result of an
error, a deviation in cosmic order; that it is nothing but a poor
imitation or a caricature of the original matter of the hyper-world. The
heaviness, the sluggishness imparted to everything — from the air to a
stone, from an insect to a man — is an unbearable constraint, an
intolerable curse. And its consequences are multiple. For, added to the
weight of matter and of living bodies, there is the inevitable heaviness
of the spirit. Our thinking is bound by the same constraints as are our
bodies; it collides against the same barriers and is dragged down by the
weight of the same contingencies. The majority of Gnostics expressed
this dullness of the spirit — inherent in the matter of which we are
composed — by a simple and revealing analogy: that of sleep. Sleep is to
consciousness what weight is to the body: a state of death, inertia, a
petrification of the psychic forces. We sleep. We spend our lives
asleep. And only those who are aware of it can hope to break down these
walls of mental inertia, to awaken in themselves the spark which, in
spite of all, still glows within us, like a tear in the veil of
corporeal night.
To awaken, to be alert, to keep vigil, these are the recurring themes in
Gnostic texts. If Hermes is one of the favourite gods in their pantheon,
it is because he is the personification of The Wide-Awake, the god to
whom Homer long ago attributed the power to ‘awaken, with his golden
wand, the eyes of those who sleep.’ Since Hermes was also the god who
acted as what is pompously called a ‘psychopomp’ in ancient mythology
(that is to say, one who accompanies souls through the kingdom of the
dead, guiding them to the tribunal of the three infernal judges), he
became known as the one who keeps his eyes wide open, like a living
being, even in the realm of shadows, and who stays awake in the very
heart of death. In any case, the names and attributes of those whom the
Gnostics elevated to the rank of Initiates do not matter. What does
matter is to perceive, over and above the meanderings of mythological or
of theoretical systems, the existence and the quest for an asceticism
and a specific power: the ability to keep one’s eyes open, to refuse
sleep, to awaken to a true consciousness of oneself.
If the Gnostics thus held sleep to be the most baneful condition of
life, it was not only because it has the appearance of death, but
because it also implies a return to immobility, a surrender to the
tentacular inertia of the world. In the Greek myth of Endymion, this
young and lovely shepherd lay down to sleep one night and was discovered
by Selene, the Moon, who fell so violently in love with him that she
begged Zeus never to let him awaken. She wanted Endymion to keep his
eternal youth, but at the price of eternal sleep — and this same
Endymion, prematurely embalmed, still living, was for the Gnostics an
image of our condition and the proof of the obvious perversion of the
gods, or the false gods, responsible for our world. To condemn a young
and beautiful creature never to wake again, on pain of instant death, is
not this the very apogee of sadism, something only a god could conceive?
This, then, is the fate to which the frightful demiurge, the ignoble
aeon who perverted the world’s history, has condemned us from the very
beginning of time (which he must have called into being together with
weight, for the Gnostics see time as a condition appropriate to damned
matter): to sleep our whole lives away without even knowing it, and
without — like Endymion — being thereby saved from death.
To put it in other terms, our world, the circle of dark fire, is the
domain of evil. This term is to be understood not in the moral but in
the biological sense. The evil lies in the existence of matter itself,
in so far as it is a parody of creation, a fraudulent arrangement of the
first seeds; it lies in the existence of this sleep of the soul which
has beguiled us into taking as reality that which is nothing but the
illusory world of dreams; these are all the given data — today we would
say all the structures — of our daily universe. Our world exudes evil
from every pore, and our thinking being is tied to evil as ineluctably
as our physical being is tied to the carbon in our bodycells. At this
level, certainly, a kind of vertigo seizes us as we catalogue the
ramifications of this cancer that pervades all the horrors of the
contingent world. We bathe in evil as if in the bosom of a polluted sea,
and the waters of the soul are powerless to wash us clean, unless we use
the methods recommended by the Gnostics. Hence the fundamentally corrupt
character of all human enterprises and institutions: time, history,
powers, states, religions, races, nations — all these ideas, all these
systems which man has invented, are tainted with this primary flaw.
In spite of what many historians of Gnosticism may have said, I believe
that certain Gnostics reached these somewhat discouraging conclusions
not so much out of pig-headedness as out of rational observation of the
natural world and human behaviour. The smallest fact prompted them to
think that evil forces are constantly being unleashed upon our heads.
Thus, the simplest phenomenon, and the most elemental to boot — that of
nutrition — would have been for the Gnostics a typical example of this
maleficent interaction, for the very act of nourishing oneself, of
sustaining life, specifically implies the death of other living species.
Each birth, each perpetuation of life, increases the domain of death. It
is a never-ending circle, as vertiginous as the whirlpool of the stars
or the cycle of time.
In this unending circle, the simple fact of living, of breathing,
feeding, sleeping and waking, implies the existence and the growth of
evil. What Darwinians were later to call natural selection and the
survival of the fittest had already been observed by Gnostics and was in
their eyes a flagrant proof of the fundamental depravity of the
universe. But this inherent vice, which the Hebrews and Christians saw
as the stamp of original sin, and therefore wholly the responsibility of
man, appeared to the Gnostics, on the contrary, as a statute imposed on
man. Man has absolutely nothing to do with the curse that is laid upon
him: the one who is truly responsible is the sadistic and perverse
demiurge who dared to dream up such a cruel world in all its minute
detail.
For, in the last analysis, if this world were the work of a good and
just God — and not that of an incompetent and profoundly malevolent
demiurge — one would have to impute to that God the most infamous
thoughts and imaginings, the most ruthless acts of repression. For how
could a supreme God have conceived the incredible sequences, mechanisms,
massacres, and annihilations that constitute the very practice of life
itself ? What warped mind could have invented the procreative act of the
praying mantis, in which the female decapitates and then devours the
male? What immeasurably sadistic being could have thought up the
paralysing sting of the ammophilous wasp, which it sticks into the flesh
of caterpillars, that they may be devoured alive by the larvae of the
winged insect? Who dared to fashion the hideous sex — the cloaca — of
the tortoise, apparently with the sole aim of throwing a spanner into
the works of copulation? What paranoiac demiurge had the idea of
creating bonellia, those marine worms whose male is only one-hundredth
part the size of the female and lives in the oesophagus of his partner,
if one can call the monster on whom he is an unwitting parasite a
‘partner’? Who determined, planned, established all these aberrant
processes, these by-roads, these multiple bifurcations of life? Of
course, at this point I am quite deliberately expressing myself in
contemporary terms. The Gnostics were no doubt ignorant of the habits of
ammophiles, praying mantises and bonellia. But the natural world of
their own time provided other examples, not so subtle, but just as
conclusive as evidence of the universal offence. The very existence of
sex can only be the invention of a being who is himself obsessed, and it
is no mere chance that several psychoanalysts have discovered that
Gnostic attitudes, in so far as creation and procreation are concerned,
are astonishingly similar to their own views.
Later, we shall take up in detail this inventory of the ramifications of
evil, of the planetary cancer which gnaws even at our sky, which
impregnates our cells and insinuates itself into our least thoughts, and
we shall do so in the company of the Gnostics themselves. For the
moment, let us take it as an accepted fact that the circle of dark fire
to which our earth is subject is, above all, the domain of evil, a
subtle, molecular evil that falls from the stars like the dew at night,
to cover and cancel out even our ways of thinking.
Given this fact, that the Gnostic found himself living in a world eroded
by this celestial rust, and literally locked out of the kingdom of light
by cosmic bars and bolts; how, then, could he feel that his condition
was anything but that of a prisoner departed to a doomed planet, an
exile, a stranger lost in the heart of a hostile world?
“But the great black anti-suns, wells of truth in the essential
conspiracy, in the grey veil of the hump-backed sky, come and go and
suck one another in, and men call them.”
― Rene Daumal, Absences
Today when we read the catalogue of the various forms of human
exploitation and alienation, as presented in the most politically
committed publications, one fact immediately becomes apparent: such are
the limitations of ideology (the new mythology of our age) that this
necessary denunciation, this indispensable catalogue of human injustice
is solely concerned with its social and political aspects. In spite of
what half a century of socialist experimentation has shown us, we
persist in believing that a change limited exclusively to the
politico-economic domain and to the means of production can resolve the
problems that confront us.
It seems a simple, obvious, and irrefutable fact that today, as in the
time of the Gnostics, the alienation of man is global; it is also true
that the economic, social, and political causes of alienation should be
removed first. But far from ending there, the problem begins precisely
at the moment when this first hurdle has been cleared. If I try to
imagine people like Basilides, Valentinus or Carpocrates (Gnostics of
whom we shall speak in detail later) living today, I see them as either
totally detached from all political considerations, or, on the contrary,
totally involved in the revolutionary struggle of our times (these two
postures being, for these men, two identical forms of the same
asceticism). I see them on the streets, handing out pamphlets signed The
Proletariat o f the Stars, but also taking the struggle further, to
limits almost inconceivable nowadays (since for them a truly
revolutionary combat could be nothing less than total), waging war
against the very nature of our presence here on earth. Modifying the
means of production, transforming the nature of economic exchanges and
the distribution of wealth, without tying these changes in with an
asceticism operating conjointly on man’s mental structures, could
achieve nothing more in their eyes than changing one master for another,
and therefore one alienating factor for another, all the more dangerous
in that people would believe they had abolished the causes of
alienation.
The Gnostics were no less aware of social injustices than other people,
and I am convinced that they fully recognized how infuriating their
stance must have been to a mind sensitive to the material miseries of
the world. But, despite their detachment from society, they were, after
all, the only ones who had any inkling of the political implications of
their position. For what were the Christians doing during these
centuries? As soon as the Church was accepted and recognized, and the
Roman Empire itself had become Christian, they began to wield their
power through repressive measures (they who had once been martyred
themselves now made martyrs of their old enemies), thus giving still
further credence to the Gnostic contention that all power — whatever
kind it might be — is a source of alienation. Moreover, the Christians
were to ’capitalize’ — to use our contemporary jargon — on the ferment
of revolt against human misery, by persuading the poor and the exploited
that they would take first place in heaven, so that from the perspective
of Christian eschatology heaven appears to be a sort of azure field in
which there will be an almost unimaginable settling of accounts, beside
which the prophetic images of the Apocalypse are but pale shadows.
The Christians, with their mythology of punishment and reward, have
totally evaded the daily problems of their times, and, right down to our
own age, have perpetuated acceptance of social injustices and submission
to established authority (with good reason, since this authority was
vested in them). The Gnostics, however, never ceased to preach
opposition to the powers-that-be, whether Christian or pagan, since for
them there was no difference between the two. Christianity postponed the
solution of immediate problems sine die — and here the expression is
particularly apt, as it conforms to eschatological hopes of abolishing
time. The Gnostics, on the contrary, were the only ones to adopt a
logical attitude — a radical and onerous one, but nevertheless
consistent with their deepest feeling: the conviction that as thinking
hominids they were totally alienated creatures, right down to their very
encephalic cells, and condemned to lifelong enslavement, from which only
a full awareness of man’s inert and slumbering condition could save
them.
So, to have done with this problem and give an exact definition of
Gnostic thought — as I understand it, at least — all institutions, laws,
religions, churches and powers are nothing but a sham and a trap, the
perpetuation of an age-old deception.
Let us sum up: we are exploited on a cosmic scale, we are the
proletariat of the demiurge-executioner, slaves exiled into a world that
is viscerally subjected to violence; we are the dregs and sediment of a
lost heaven, strangers on our own planet.
To be a stranger is, in its basic meaning, to appear as strange to
others. I am not making puns here, for it is the innate strangeness of
man which led the Gnostics to reflect on his origin, and on his
terrestrial status. They used this term to express the disparity between
the nature of the true man of the hyper-world and the abortive creature,
the imitation man, that the demiurge managed to fashion and throw down
into this circle of dark fire. The stranger’s condition is inherently
false. One cannot be a stranger except in relation to a non-stranger.
Now in ancient times, he who was the opposite of a stranger — in
political, civic and human terms — was the autochthon. The autochthon is
the Athenian born in Athens, the Alexandrian born in Alexandria, in
short, the citizen, but he is more than that: he is the man born of the
very soil, bound to his native land by unbreakable biological bonds.
Every stranger is, in some sense, the autochthon of another land. The
fundamental difference that separates the Gnostics from their
contemporaries is that, for them, their native ‘soil’ is not the earth,
but that lost heaven which they keep vividly alive in their memories:
they are the autochthons of another world. Hence their feeling of having
fallen onto our earth like inhabitants from a distant planet, of having
strayed into the wrong galaxy, and their longing to regain their true
cosmic homeland, the luminous hyper-world that shimmers beyond the great
nocturnal barrier. Their uprooting is not merely geographical but
planetary. And to treat them as aliens in the political or civic sense —
which is what happened — could be nothing but an absurd
misunderstanding, like giving a Martian a temporary residence visa. For
the Gnostics, all men were in the same condition, although they were the
only ones who knew it, and the human community as a whole is implicated
in this universal exile, this galactic diversion that has caused us to
be dumped on the mud of planet earth.
The Gnostics must have felt this exile even more acutely in that they
themselves constituted marginal communities, strangers or ‘foreigners’
in the narrow sense of the term, in the heart of a whole humanity of
foreigners. The idea of calling oneself Egyptian, Greek, Roman or Syrian
must have seemed ridiculous to them. Moreover, it is no mere chance that
the Gnostic communities developed in the only cities of that period
which were cosmopolitan in character: Alexandria, Antioch and Rome. One
cannot imagine Gnostics in Gaul or Germania. Their own alien condition
could freely nourish itself in these towns where the most diverse ethnic
groups intermingled, and where the most essential transformations of the
Mediterranean world took place between the first and the fourth
centuries on. Here there was an historical humus which justified the
Gnostic feeling of exile, of being a planetary foreigner:
‘I am in the world but not of the world’
is the most basic Gnostic formula. It summarizes perfectly the feeling
of being relegated to the lower depths of the cosmos, of living on a
planet, and in a fleshly body, made of molecules that have agglomerated
in the most dubious combinations, in complex and inextricable amalgams
which, in some fashion, constitute the material support of our spiritual
reclusion. The sadistic and perverse demiurge responsible for this world
and our existence in it must have racked his brains to find these
incredible combinations of molecules, these indissoluble aggregates of
matter, which make any escape from the carnal and planetary prison
impossible or, at the least, very aleatory. So the problem is simple,
and one begins to understand how the Gnostics saw it: man, then, is a
lifelong exile on a planet which is a prison for all mankind; he lives
in a body which is a prison for the soul; he is the autochthon of a lost
and invisible world.
These images or definitions seem to be constant repetitions. In the
texts describing man’s condition, the Gnostics repeat themselves
endlessly, as if here again they are battering at the walls of a prison
of words. The terms they use to describe the world here below resolve
themselves into a few formulae which reappear over and over again: a
‘hermetically sealed fortress,’ ‘prison,’ ‘cloaca,’ ‘slough,’ ‘desert.’
It is the same for the human body: it is a ‘tomb,’ a ‘gross garment,’ a
‘chain,’ a ‘trespasser,’ a ‘suffocating sea,’ a ‘vampire.’ The point is
that the history of man reproduces very closely the initial drama — and
the farce — of the cosmos. Man, like the universe, is a failed creation,
a lamentable imitation, the mere semblance of a man, a counterfeit man,
or, in anthropological terms, a pseudanthrope. In man, the forgery is
more immediately apparent than it is in the universe, for the human body
is better known, and more accessible to us, than the light of the
distant stars. Let us therefore summarize, as simply as possible, the
precise reason for our being what we are, that is to say, trespassers in
a body which is ill-suited to us.
In the beginning, in the world of possibilities and virtualities, an
image of man was born in the intelligible brain of the true God of the
highest circle: a potential man, the mental matrix of he whom the true
God might one day have made real. This image was perceived by the
demiurges, the archons or angels of the lower circles. How? Why? A
mystery. But perceive it they did and were dazzled, as if by the light,
the force, the beauty, the coherence which emanated from this mentally
conceived Anthropos. They therefore decided to imitate and reproduce
him.
Saturninus, a Gnostic who was teaching at Antioch in the reign of
Hadrian, seems to have had some insight into this crucial instant of the
celestial prehistory of our race. He reports that the angel demiurges,
confronted with this fascinating vision, cried out at once:
‘Let us make a man in the semblance of this image.’
They set to work, took clay and fashioned a man. But can one call the
lamentable creature that took on life under their hands a man — this
naked being, hominoid in appearance but incapable of standing upright on
his atrophied legs, who ‘lay on the ground, wriggling like a worm’?
Today, it must be admitted, this image has lost some of the outrageous
character it must have had in early times for those who were not
Gnostics, those who were steeped in the serenity of Biblical images.
For, presented like this, writhing clumsily in the matrical mud, ‘in the
black waters,’ this man, or this pre-man, had all the characteristics of
some amphibious beast. Anyone who has seen reconstructions of the first
amphibians to leave the domain of water and reach dry land, anyone who
has seen an Ichthyostega, a Seymouria or an Ophiacodon, those creatures
of the Mesozoic era who foreshadowed terrestial reptiles, will realize
that this pre-man must, indeed, have resembled them. This creature,
wailing disconcertingly from a mouth still slimed with matrical clay,
with its limbs sketched in but incapable of supporting its body, bore
only a remote resemblance to the luminous and numinous image which had
called it into being. But the true God, seeing this error, this horror
crawling on the face of the earth and threatening to populate it, took
pity on the ineptitude of the angels. Into this wailing worm, he
breathed the spark of life, which instantly permitted him to stand up
and speak. Homo bipedus and loquens was born. And thus our dual nature
is explained: we are somewhat like a rectified worm, an ex-amphibian set
to rights by the indulgence of the true God and endowed with a spark, a
luminous fragment of the supreme Power.
At this stage of Gnostic anthropology, the consequent moral goes right
back to the source, so to speak. That which weighs us down; makes us
heavy, and sends us to sleep, is this cloacal matrix, this borborian
matter from which we were extracted; above all, it is this basic flaw in
our very structures that renders us incapable of assuming our
predestined mission — we have been odiously sidetracked through the
interference of sorcerer’s apprentices. Only by kindling the spark of
life that lives in our corrupt flesh, and fanning it into a blaze by
means of a fitting asceticism, can we lighten the heavy yoke of our
bodies.
But it seems that one will never come to an end of all the logical
conclusions to be drawn from the simple fact of having been fashioned
from clay. For clay is by nature impermeable to water, and indeed to
air, and the human psyche — which comes from clay just as the body does,
though one could say it is more refined — is also impermeable, or only
very slightly permeable, to the light from above. Like those porcelain
filters used for straining viruses, our psyches, in the finest
instances, filter out certain particles of luminous matter from the
heavenly heights, but man needs a great deal of concentration,
vigilance, and ascetic practice to gather up this primordial light and
isolate it from the stellar mud. Now, on the basis of these
extrapolations (which, obviously, never figure in Gnostic texts in this
form), let us hazard a more exact definition of man: a rectified worm,
endowed with a divine spark which makes of him a biped sapiens and
loquens, and with a psyche, a tenuous filter which strains out the
splendours of the upper heavens. It is man’s aim to collect these
splendours, augment them, concentrate them within himself and thus
acquire a sort of counterweight to overcome the body’s inertia and
regain the salvatory firmament which the wall of darkness conceals from
our sight.
And it is specifically through this struggle against the body’s inertia
and the soul’s slumber, by practicing techniques of physical and mental
awakening, by a sort of ‘long, immense and rational disordering of all
the senses’ — in short, by living a counter-life that we may triumph
over the material and spiritual order of this world.
“Into your womb I come to accomplish the rite The rhythmic return to the
prenatal country The animal symbol of ages-old rapture. Into your womb I
come to lay my offering Of balm and venom. Blind and annihilated in the
grottoes of being...”
― Roger-Gilbert Lecomte, Sacre et massacre de l’amour
Five fingers. Four limbs. Two eyes. A brain. And a name, too: homo
bipedus, sapiens, loquens. It is easy to describe man with the
detachment of an inhabitant of Sirius. But the Gnostics did have this
feeling that they came from Sirius, or rather from a world that was even
farther away, stranger and still more puzzling, a world beyond Sirius.
Perhaps this explains the alien and, above all, contemptuous view they
took of our hominiform appearance, our anthropoid conformation, our
condition as foetuses dropped prematurely into the deserts of the world,
and thereafter crying out unceasingly with the same howl of anguish that
announced our arrival on earth.
The discoveries of Freud and the Freudians would, without question, have
fascinated the Gnostics, for all their cosmology and their anthropology
bears the scars of this cosmic traumatism caused by man’s premature
appearance on earth. The error of the angels, the recklessness and
clumsiness of those who sought to reproduce a model of the luminous
archetype that sprang from the intellect of the true God, resulted in a
veritable abortion being practised upon matter that was still virgin and
in a state of pure gestation. For what they created was not a man but a
shapeless worm, a foetus still unfit for life, and one cannot help
wondering why the true God decided to keep it alive. Beneath the
complexity, the tortuousness of the Gnostic myths lies hidden this
obvious truth: we are all premature births.
I believe that the whole of the Gnostic’s ulterior attitude to man,
society, the human race, and the mechanism of the cosmos, is founded on
this primary vision (one could even say this imago) of the origin of
man, forever scarred by his inherent immaturity. We are chrysalids
snatched prematurely from our protective cocoons. Besides, the very term
Gnosticism — gnosis — is very close, in Greek, to genesis, which means
birth and origin. Gnosticism is, in essence, a genesis, it restores to
man his true birth, and overcomes his genetic and mental immaturity.
To the history of man’s creation, as summarized above, we must add
another version, derived from the Valentinians, a sect who carried on
the teachings of the Gnostic Valentinus in Egypt. It shows how
profoundly Gnostic myths — in spite of widely differing variants — are
haunted by this first moment.
The cosmology of the Valentinians reiterates the systems already
described, but it adds several revealing details. At the summit, or, if
you prefer, at the intelligible centre of the universe, is the good God,
the stranger God. Below, descending in tiers down to our own terrestial
world, are thirty circles, each guarded by an Aeon. All this, according
to Valentinus, constitutes the Pleroma, that is to say, the world of
Plenitude, the reservoir of Essences. The Aeon of the thirtieth circle
was called Sophia (‘Wisdom’). Now one day Sophia desired to contemplate
the splendour of the Pleroma. It was an ill-fated wish. As soon as she
crossed the last circle, light dazzled her, she was seized with vertigo
and fell down to our world.
This myth is not entirely of Gnostic origin. In the legend of Semele,
the Greeks had already expressed the feeling that man is neither ready
nor able to bear the blinding vision of plenitude: Semele, mistress of
Zeus, who visits her incognito at night, begs him one day to reveal
himself, to appear to her in all his glory. Zeus warns her but Semele
will not be put off; the unhappy woman wants to see the ‘real’ visage of
her lover at all casts. Finally Zeus manifests himself in the light of
his divine radiance and Semele, struck by lightning, falls to the earth.
As she is pregnant, Zeus opens her belly, takes out the foetus and
inserts it in his thigh, where he incubates it until the full term. Thus
is born Dionysus, offspring of the Lightning and of a female who was too
inquisitive. As in the case of Semele, Sophia’s brief intrusion into the
splendours of the Pleroma was not without sequel: she was made pregnant
by the Plenitude, the Numinous, and gave birth to a creature. I say
creature, for this being, born of a glimpse of a forbidden world, had
all the characteristics of an inhuman monster — so inhuman, indeed, that
its own mother dared not even look at it or touch it.
It was from this monster that man was born, after certain modifications,
corrections, additions, and retouchings had been carried out with the
help of the Aeons of the Pleroma. In short, here too and in a neater and
more poignant version than in the other myths — the Gnostics have
described the horrific origin of the first man. Happily, something of
that brief contemplation of the glory on high, which set his birth in
motion, survives within him as a reflection of the Invisible, described
in a Gnostic text as ‘something like a colour, a touch of light,’ which
deposited an emulsion of divine light on the dark background of our
psyche.
These fascinating and nightmarish myths tend, therefore, to explain bath
our arrival in the world and the nature of our limitations and
imperfections. One would not exist without the other, for it is
precisely because of this premature or parthenogenetic birth, this
unnatural conception, that we are cursed with a heavy, opaque body and a
slumbering psyche, but also blessed with a spark of the divine light.
And the consequences of this duality, of this refinement carried out at
the last moment on a living abortion of matter, are visible in the body
itself. Everything in man predestines him to be an obstacle to the
expansion of light; a prison in which the desires of the psyche beat
helplessly against the limitations of the being; a tomb in which we
daily celebrate our own funeral rites. It is not only these forms, these
anatomical structures, these organs of sense — ears, eyes, and taste
buds that perceive only a fraction of the sound waves, the light rays,
and the savours of the cosmos it is not only our skeletal, nervous, and
circulatory systems that condition us unjustly (because they limit our
perceptive field), but our whale physiology, the very exercise of the
vital organic and psychic functions which clouds and obscures our lives.
By way of example, let us again take nutrition, the first of the
constraints imposed on man. We know that it extends the field of death
ad infinitum. If man were not obliged to nourish himself by slaughtering
other species; if, like the plants, he could sustain life by purely
chemical exchanges with his environment, by an uninterrupted cycle of
absorptions and restitutions, by metamorphoses instead of destruction
and devouring — who knows whether the entire history of the human race
might not have been altered ? Wars, for example, would become pointless,
or at the most very secondary. No Gnostic seems to have had this idea
(which appears absurd on the surface), or, at any rate, none expressed
it clearly, but I am sure that it is a logical expression of their line
of questioning. The order of evil, which is the inherent order of this
world, affirms itself through the constant necessity of destroying and
devouring, a necessity so widespread, so planetary, that it places war
and nutrition on an identical plane. Seen in this perspective, wars are
nothing but an inescapable means by which communities feed themselves
and survive.
Nutrition has another natural consequence: defecation, the logical
conclusion of corporeal corruption. Defecation is a natural evil of the
heavy, dense body, the plainest symbol of our wallowing in primordial
slime. This, then, is the origin of the curious — but perfectly logical
— notion that the bodies of those who attain a higher state of
consciousness, which may be interpreted as a lightening of their matter,
must be liberated from such scandalous servitude. The Gnostic Valentinus
affirms quite naturally, therefore, that Jesus
‘ate and drank but did not defecate. Such was the strength of his
continence that foods did not become corrupt in him, for in him there
was no corruption.’
And so, our organic portrait is simple: this talking foetus, this
rectified worm that is man, cannot survive without destroying the life
around him (like a worm gnawing the rotten wood of old beams) and
expelling through his anus the corrupted products of this corrupting
massacre. He absorbs filth through one end and rejects it in a still
more corrupt state through the other. What means exist, then, for
breaking this lumbriciform cycle, for wrenching oneself free of the
mentality of a qualified amphibian and shattering the vile mirror that
eternally throws back our own reflection and hides from us the true
splendours of the hyperworld? It is possible to reject the beguiling
trickery of the world by abstaining from procreation, and the majority
of Gnostics did this, refusing to insert the absurd parenthesis of life
between prenatal nothingness and death. It is more difficult to abstain
from feeding oneself. All ascetic disciplines, no matter how austere,
involve a minimum of nourishment. The greatest saints defecated, just
like everyone else. One might, therefore, think of a simpler and more
radical solution: suicide. But this solution is the absolute antithesis
of the Gnostic attitude. Not one of them, at any time, preached suicide.
The aim of the Gnostic is not the conjugate extinction of life and of
consciousness, but the mastering of the one and the other, the
attainment of a hyper-life and a hyper-consciousness. For within man
himself there exists a proof that all is not lost, and that he
possesses, within his very body, evidence of his partially divine
origin. Just as the constellations, those glittering perforations in the
cosmic tissue, prove the existence of another world, so, similarly,
there exists in the tissue of our cells a perforation through which we
can see the spark of life shining. And this perforation is the pupil of
the eye.
The eye. Like the mouth, the anus and the navel, those three bodily
apertures that make man the site of exchanges between the external world
and the internal world of his body — being foci of absorption,
rejection, and genesis — the eye is also an aperture. But it is the only
one in the entire body whose exchanges with the external world escape
corruption, as well as the law of entropy. It is the only one which
lives on light while the rest of the body is sustained entirely by
filth.
Let us examine the eye. It is round, globular; it resembles the universe
as described by the Gnostics. Within this orb are set three successive
circles, the eyeball (in its strict sense), the iris, and the pupil. The
exterior circle is that of the white, where the small arteries and veins
ramify like filamentous nebulae. The intermediary circle is the iris,
speckled with contorted pigments which show configurations, blots, and
patterns. Finally, there is the central circle of the pupil, the abyss
of shadows wherein one may glimpse the depths of the soul and the
reflection of that luminous emulsion which is the matrical trace of the
divine light. Thus the eye very naturally reproduces the pattern of the
universe: the sublunar circle of the pupil, the median circle of the
galactic world, the exterior circle of the extra-galactic world. To look
at the human eye is to grasp the pattern of the entire universe. To
contemplate the eye, and lose oneself in this dark well, as if in the
heart of the great ocean depths shat through with phosphorescent
flashes, is to seize the ultimate nature of our existence in this world,
the magical point at which man and god meet and are united.
Here again, I am doing no more than extrapolating the sentiments, or
rather the presentiments, of the Gnostics. For this meditation which led
them alternately to study the heavenly bodies and sound the mystery of
the eye, this question addressed to the stars in the skies and the stars
in men’s eyes, gave them an inkling of the fundamental unity between the
human finitude and the divine infinitude. Both one and the other are
made of the same matter and contain the same spark. Therein — and only
therein — lies the way, the sign, the message which allows man to
entertain a hope of liberation. And so this investigation, begun in the
nocturnal immensities of the infinite hyper-world, naturally conducts us
back to the infinite smallness of the human eyeball, to man himself,
compound of light and darkness, mud and flame, a microcosm torn between
conflicting entities, a net which has retained, in the form of a spark,
the fragile souvenir of his abortive birth.
“I lived in this world of darkness for myriads of years and no one ever
knew that I was there.”
― Gnostic Hymn
“For me, it is perpetual pain and shadow and the dark night of the soul,
and I have no voice to cry out with.”
― Antonin Artaud, Fragments dun journal d’Enfer
“Thou and I are but one.”
― Simon Magus
No sooner was Gnostic thought born than it began to be disseminated
along the great routes of the Orient, and, during the first two
centuries of our era, its message was expressed by a multitude of sects,
communities and thinkers. Geographically speaking, primitive Gnosticism
developed in the same places as dawning Christianity and the Judaic
religions: Palestine, Syria, Samaria and Anatolia. It was here, in these
lands of apocalypse and revelation, in this crucible of all the
Messianisms, in this cradle of arcane and mystical communities like the
Essenes, that the first Gnostic thinkers appeared. If today we find it
difficult to visualize them clearly, for want of a name, it is because
their history is clouded with the very opacity and injustice they
themselves denounced as inherent flaws in earthly matter. We know the
Gnostics and their teachings mainly through the Fathers of the Church,
whose only concern was to cover them with ridicule and condemn them as
heretics.
Of Gnostic thought or thoughts, of the prodigious systems constructed by
various dedicated and truth-seeking men, nothing remains, therefore, but
fragments.[2] How much authentic and objective knowledge of the
political theories of Trotsky, of Makhno or Rosa Luxemburg would we
possess today if the only surviving records were a few more or less
complete quotations from the official history of the Soviet Communist
Party, under a chapter heading: ‘On renegades and deviationist
traitors’? That is virtually the position we are in with the Gnostics,
but for some very rare texts discovered in the last century and a more
recent collection which came to light in the caves of Upper Egypt after
the last war. Even if the extracts quoted by certain Church Fathers seem
fair, and reveal a sincere desire to understand Gnosticism, the fact
remains that these quotations have been chosen with the specific aim of
denouncing the whole teaching, and so cannot be other than partial and
partisan.
Admittedly, all’s fair in war, but one must add an equally important
fact: the incompatibility — the abyss, even — which separates Gnostic
thought and sensibility from those of Christianity. In spite of the
borrowings from the Gospels which some Gnostics indulged in, and various
‘stale whiffs’ of Christianity discernible in others, they took their
authority from a fundamentally different teaching and culture. Here, it
is no longer a problem of orthodoxy, or of deviation from dogma, but a
simple problem of comprehension or incomprehension. All the Christian
writers feel — and with justice — that the Gnostics are not their
‘brothers,’ that they are adepts of a different religion, and this
feeling only grows stronger with the passage of the centuries. If the
philosophy of a Basilides or a Valentinus could pass, at a pinch, as
being fairly close to that of Christianity, the beliefs which their
latter-day descendants, the Cathars, introduced into Southern France ten
centuries later, no longer had anything in common with Catholic
orthodoxy.
However, in its beginnings, in these first centuries when Christianity
itself was fighting for its survival and seeking its own path,
Gnosticism could still create the illusion that it was a Christian
doctrine. It could do so on two essential counts: first, because of its
content, since it borrowed a number of elements from the teaching of the
Apostles and the texts of the Gospels; second, in its form, for in the
early days it was preached by men who, like the Apostles, traveled the
highroads of Samaria, Palestine, Syria and Anatolia, and, in many
places, came into direct confrontation with the disciples of Jesus.
The most ancient of these wandering Gnostic prophets is known to history
as Simon Magus. Since my purpose here is not to indulge in exegetical
studies of the sources of Gnosticism, I will spare the Palestine,
Samaria and Anatolia. It is the era of prophets, Messiahs, gods
incarnate and celestial envoys. Never has God had so many Sons upon the
planet as at this time. The pagan authors, in astonished and ironic
tones, describe this multitude of envoys suddenly descended upon earth,
all of whom preach along the highways in identical terms:
‘I am God, or I am the Son of God, or I am the Power of the Father or
the Son. The end of Time is at hand. I have come to save you. Those who
listen to me and follow me will gain eternal life. The rest will perish
or burn in the fires of hell.’
Simon Magus is only one prophet among many, but he draws the crowds,
they listen to him, follow him. The Apostles, who preach in the same
squares, in the same villages, also have their listeners and their
followers. But what Simon has to say is radically different from the
Apostolic teaching. He brings with him a remarkable message, but — not
having lived in that epoch — I cannot say whether he himself conceived
it, taking his inspiration solely from previous teachings, or whether he
had it intact from some unknown and now forgotten predecessor. And this
message can be distinguished from all the others, for it is coherent,
rational, and subversive as well — the Gnostic message par excellence.
Here, then, is what Simon Magus taught:
On reading the Bible, and especially Genesis, one learns that Yahweh,
Jehovah, or Elohim, in short the God of the Jews, is the author of this
world. Now how does this God spend his time? Persecuting man and the
human race. He creates Adam, then Eve, sets them down in Paradise, but
immediately forbids them the one essential: knowledge of Good and Evil.
After this, and having chased the first human couple out of Paradise, he
hounds their descendants unremittingly, multiplying the laws of
prohibition, threatening the human species with the lightning of his
wrath until the day when, with the Flood, he will wipe them out. But
still it is not enough, and once again he showers the second humanity,
the children of Noah, with fire, blood and calamity. He is a God of
justice, a cosmic Policeman whose intransigent authoritarianism
antagonizes even the angels, and who never intervenes in earthly matters
except to thwart human evolution.
In arguing thus, Simon does not question or doubt the reasons for this
aggressive behaviour. He does not deny man’s errors or his crimes, but
declares simply that this image of an avenging God, ruthlessly hammering
mankind, is incompatible with the idea of a good God, the friend of man
and creator of life. From this he concludes that since this world and
its humanity, inaugurated in blood and crime, are patently the work of
Jehovah, the latter cannot be the true God, but is a false god or simply
a demiurge, that sadistic and perverse demiurge depicted in the Bible as
a touchy, vindictive, choleric, jealous and evil being.
It goes without saying that such teaching flew in the face of the whole
Apostolic doctrine and the teaching of Jesus. This outright rejection of
the Revelation must have appeared, in its time, not only revolutionary
but scandalous, impious, and inadmissible. Nevertheless, Simon continued
to preach and seek in the Biblical texts themselves clear proofs of the
subversion of the world by the God of Genesis. His cosmology, in so far
as it can be gathered from the extracts quoted by the Fathers of the
Church, reveals a scrupulously rational thinker, equally scrupulous in
seeking a liberating path for mankind. For it seems to him impossible,
too unjust, intolerable, that man should have to pay the price of
Jehovah’s ambition. There must be something within him that enables him
to conceive of, and to rediscover, the true God, the God who is a
stranger to this world. Thus Simon builds up a seductive doctrine, a
framework in which to review the possible nature and destiny of man.
Man, in his eyes, is flawed only in his functioning. His hominid forms,
his mental and organic structures, even his essential being, are not
inherently evil, for in spite of Jehovah’s tampering, man is still a
miniature projection of the universe created in thought by the true God,
and carries within himself the imprint of the real world. Simon sees a
proof of this in the story of man’s creation in Eden, as related in
Genesis. Paradise, the Garden of Eden, is the matrix from which man is
born, the umbilicus of life from which the human species springs. This
term ‘umbilicus’ must be taken here in its proper sense. For if man is
the universe on a reduced scale, it follows that the universe is a man
on an aggrandized scale, a giant Anthropos. Everything that is to be
found in the sky has its double or its reflection in man or on the
earth. Eden is the living matrix that nourishes our earth, and the River
that irrigates it feeds the clay from which man was drawn; this River
divides into four primordial streams which Simon recognizes as the four
arteries — two of air and two of blood — which irrigate and feed man’s
circulatory and respiratory systems. Man carries the rivers of Eden in
his body as he carries the truly divine spark in his psyche. He
contains, in a reduced and potential form, the living forces, the
creative seeds which are also those of the universe, and whose first,
unifying force is fire.
Simon thought a great deal about fire and its multiple forms: igneous,
incandescent, tepid, cooled (he was the first to dream of cold fire, an
idea which so many alchemists came back to later) — and its presence at
the heart of the human body. Two forms of divine fire exist in man: a
psychic form which is desire — notably the desire to beget — and a
physical form which is blood. Blood, like fire, is red and warm, it is a
fire which circulates through the body of man, diminished, to be sure,
but lukewarm and stable (an organicist conception of the Simonian
universe would give a very sound explanation of the temperature and
homothermy of mammals); it subdivides into two complementary fires:
semen in the male and milk in the female. If man possesses the power to
beget, it is because he carries within him the psychic fire of desire
and the physical fire of blood and semen.
For Simon, this image of man as a brazier in which the divine fire
circulates in a cooled and diminished state implies a number of
consequences, one of which seems to me worth noting, for at the time it
opened up a totally different way from that preached in the Gospels. Man
is endowed with a fragment of divine fire. Good. It is this which gives
him a special status among all living beings, and confers on him the
privileges of reason, language, and an upright posture. But these
privileges, although innate, are not eternal. They are more in the
nature of possibilities, or aptitudes, dependant on the individual, and
the conditions in which he lives, for their development or
disappearance.
To make this idea comprehensible, Simon offers us a telling example. Our
psyche, he says, is potentially capable of conceiving and practising
speech, grammar, and geometry. But if these human aptitudes are not
developed — and today we would add developed soon enough — they will be
lost forever and no one will even know that man possesses them. It is
immediately clear that this idea of a certain ‘terrain’ necessary to the
development of aptitudes has implications which go well beyond the
strictly religious and theological domain. Out of all Simon’s listeners
who possessed a congenital aptitude for grammar and geometry, how many
effectively realized them in the course of their lives? And surely the
drama becomes still more crucial when this handicap is also applied to
man’s chances of immortality — particularly for the people of that era,
who believed the end of the world to be imminent. For the psyche
possesses a specific aptitude for immortality, just as it does for
speech, grammar, and geometry. And, like the other aptitudes, its fate
is bound up with the attitude the individual adapts towards it. In other
words, the soul is not immortal by nature, it can only become so if man
feeds and sustains this privileged fire which he carries within him.
Otherwise, ineluctably, he will return to nothingness.
One need hardly underline the extent to which this doctrine contradicted
the preaching of the Apostles. For them, man’s soul is immortal, no
matter what he may do, and his fate condemns him to burnish it or
tarnish it, to know the delights of paradise or the torments of hell,
throughout eternity. For the Gnostic, the die is cast here, before
death. Which is why he feels this sense of anguish in the face of time
and the brevity of the human span, a feeling that is so characteristic
of the Gnostic sensibility, and one which is only remotely related to
the melancholy jeremiads of the poets who lament the passing of the
days: every moment of our lives is counted, for each is a door opening
on to immortality or the void.
Here then, in the very first years of our era, the fundamental
certitudes which will unceasingly sustain Gnostic contemplation are set
out: the world we live in was not created by the true God, it is the
work of an impostor, and man’s task will consist in rejecting the
swindle of this world, together with the Biblical and Christian teaching
which claims to uphold it and all the institutions through which it is
perpetuated. Thus, from the start, the Gnostic identifies himself as a
marginal creature, forced (by the historical evolution of society as
well as by his own inclinations} to form alternative and secret
communities which will transmit the Teaching.
And as the second aspect of this Teaching, consequent upon the first
principle: man is called upon, in this struggle against the generalized
oppressiveness of the real, to create a soul for himself, or if you
prefer, to nourish, fortify, and enrich the luminous spark he carries in
his innermost being. It remains for us to discover how Simon translated
these aspirations into concrete terms, and here again we shall find a
typically Gnostic attitude applied to the options of daily life.
Simon lived with Helen, a woman described by some Christian authors as a
former prostitute. According to Simon (and no doubt to herself, too),
this Helen was the divine Wisdom came down to earth. The Christian
writers, of course, sneer at this claim. To pose as the Father and
Mother of the universe, to pass themselves off as Zeus and Athene, or
the Sun and the Moon, could only be a joke, or a deliberate provocation.
But in fact, it is known that such claims were common at the time, and
Simon by no means had the monopoly. Therefore, what seems more
significant is that he appears to be the only one of all the ‘Gods’ or
‘Envoys’ of his epoch to live openly with a concubine and form a couple.
And it is precisely through this couple, and in this couple, that his
teaching is embodied.
In Simon’s view, semen, which issues from the divine fire in man, and
desire, the psychic fire which causes it to be emitted from his body,
are the chosen means of man’s liberation. In opposition to the Bible’s
truncated image of the couple, where the woman is made out of the man
and not coexistent with him, Simon offers us the image of a primordial
couple with the woman existing at the same time as the man whose destiny
Jehovah foiled and who therefore could not come into being. It is he,
Simon, and she, Helen, who through a mutual desire for the fusion of
their bodies and their souls will re-establish the primary order of the
world, who will fulfil the message of desire ‘intercepted’ by Jehovah.
Make love, says Simon, as a way of combating the world’s confusion, of
restoring desire to its rightful and essential place, and of fuelling
the generative fire which is also blood, milk, and semen.
Here again, one can imagine how this teaching — anodyne to pagans, no
doubt — must have outraged ears already tuned to Christianity. For it
seems that some thirty or so disciples were gathered around Simon and
Helen, all living in freely united couples, and it is even more than
probable that these couples practiced free love among themselves, as
other Gnostic sects were to do later on. What the Christian authors in
every case quite erroneously call the ‘Simonian mysteries,’ boil down,
then, to the practice of free love with no attempt to prevent the
begetting of children. Later Gnostics were to adopt the totally opposite
path of ascetism, or a refusal to procreate. But here we see one of the
features of Gnosticism that singled it out from the very beginning: the
ambivalence of all behaviour. The radical attitude adopted towards the
flesh permits, without prejudice or preference, the exercise of a
rigorous asceticism or an equally rigorous ‘debauchery,’ for both are
roads leading to liberation.
For Simon, at any rate, the fecundation of women is no hindrance to the
salvation of the world, provided that it takes place outside the
framework of the institutions which since time immemorial have aimed at
controlling, regimenting and perverting its true meaning. This practice
of free love must be the means of bursting out of the social
straitjacket specifically invented to stifle its liberating spontaneity.
The Christian author Hippolytus of Rome reports — and was no doubt
scandalized by — this relevant saying of Simon and his disciples: ‘All
soil is but soil, and what matters it where one sows? In the promiscuity
of men and women lies the true communion.’ It would be wrong to read
into this phrase what we call today ‘an incitement to debauchery’ or a
‘perversion of adults.’ For this communion, which intermingles seeds,
desires, and living beings, while breaking all ties of an institutional
and probably also of a sentimental nature, aims at a sort of fusion, a
first victory over this world whose deepest nature is one of separation,
division, dispersal through the weight of matter. To struggle against
all that divides and erodes, to reassemble the scattered sparks in each
one of us, to close up the gulf that separates human beings from one
another as surely as it separates humanity as a whole from the heavens —
in short, to dismantle the circles set up by the demiurge to keep each
of us in helpless solitude — this undoubtedly is what Simon’s phrase
meant in the eyes of the initiated. At this stage, in fact,
individualities disappear along with the first of all prisons, that of
the I. To break down the I, to melt into the Thou, into the He (and
here, one again discovers the particular importance Simon gave to
grammar, whose rigid categories were among thousands of revealing
examples of the alienating splitting-up of the elements that make up the
world), to remove the very categories of I, Thou, He, and to become We,
such must be the meaning of the so-called ‘mysteries of the Simonians’.
‘Thou and I are but one,’ said Simon in a lost work entitled The Great
Relevation of a Voice and a Name.
For the rest, we are left with nothing but legends, the anecdotes
reported by the Christian Fathers regarding the life and death of Simon
Magus. They are legends nevertheless worth telling for they reveal the
concern already felt by Christians, and their efforts to discredit the
Gnostics under the guise of authenticity. Many miracles and prodigies
were attributed to Simon Magus. The Acts of the Apostles, the most
ancient Christian text in which he is mentioned, already reports:
‘But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same
city used sorcery and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that
himself was some great one: To whom they all gave heed, from the least
to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God. And to him
they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with
sorceries.’
This following of Simon’s among the population of Samaria and of Rome,
later on, when he repaired to that city — considerably hampered the
preaching of the Apostles. For Simon competed with them on their own
ground, and Peter himself, according to the apologist Justin, was
several times compelled to follow in his footsteps, to preach against
him and disabuse prospective Christians. This is no doubt the source of
the anecdote in the Acts which relates how Simon, on seeing the Apostles
Peter and John bring down the Holy Spirit upon the faithful by a simple
laying-on of hands, offered them money to purchase the same power. Hence
the term Simony, which has become common usage since then, and which is
defined in the Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique as:
‘The premeditated attempt to buy or sell for a worldly price that which
is intrinsically spiritual.’
The anecdote could be true. But what it implies — and this is why it
originated — is that Simon had only false powers, he was nothing but a
common charlatan. It is this image which the subsequent legends are at
pains to foster, notably on the subject of his death. At the time, two
different versions of his death were in circulation. In one, Simon,
during the course of his sojourn in Rome, was arguing with the Apostle
Peter who denied that he had any real power. Simon declared that he
could fly up to the sky. Peter challenged him; Simon immediately took
flight. But Peter uttered a prayer which caused him to fall to the
ground, where he broke into four pieces and died. Let us record, in
passing, that the Christian writers who reported this tale (in which
they firmly believed), do not appear at any moment to have reproached
Peter for using prayer as a means to commit pure and simple murder. But
we will let that pass. In the other version, Simon’s death occurred
thus: he was sitting under a plane-tree arguing with the Apostles and,
here again, boasting of his powers.
‘I can rise from the dead like Jesus Christ,’
he declared,
‘bury me and I will rise again in three days.’
The Apostles accepted the challenge, shut Simon up in a coffin and
buried him at the foot of the tree. They waited three days: Simon did
not rise again.
So ended — in the air or under the earth — the life of one who had
violently opposed the apostolic teaching and sewn confusion along the
highroads of Samaria. His teaching did not disappear with him. One can
only infer that his contemporaries were not at all convinced by these
tales of a Gnostic Icarus, or a false Christ buried alive, for a certain
number continued to follow his message. The essential paint about
everything concerning Simon Magus is that, with him, Gnosticism declares
its originality, its power to fascinate, from its position on the
fringes of traditional teaching and preaching, and that it presents a
face that will remain uniquely its own during the following centuries.
This face is that of the primordial Couple, it is the face of Desire —
Desire aflame, Desire run wild — exalted as the primary fire of the
world and the source of liberation, and it is the face of Wisdom,
incarnate in the body of Helen, who has fallen from the heights of
heaven into the depths of history to teach men that the way to salvation
is through fecundating that reflection of the divine splendour — the
body of a woman.
“The perpetration of any voluptuous act whatever is a matter of
indifference.”
― Basilides
“Make death die.”
― Valentinus
How does an idea make its ‘way,’ as it is called? By what meandering
channels, what individual tributaries (which do not always return to the
mainstream, although they are fed by it), does it manage to insinuate
itself here and there, disappearing suddenly to spring up again, equally
suddenly, somewhere else? This question may appear trivial or merely
academic, and yet I maintain that as far as Gnosticism is concerned no
historian has given us a serious answer. It is curious to note that,
when it comes to causality, even competent and thoughtful men will
sometimes lull themselves into complacency with superficial and
misleading explanations. For example, Robert Grant, a recent historian
of Gnosticism and author of a remarkable work entitled Gnosticism and
Early Christianity, explains certain analogies between Buddhist
philosophy and that of Basilides the Gnostic as follows:
‘It is certainly possible that at Alexandria Basilides could have
acquired some knowledge of Buddhism from Indian merchants and traders.’
Without underestimating the philosophic knowledge of merchants — Indian
or otherwise — I do not see how a man like Basilides, whose writings
reveal a profound knowledge of the various religions of his time, could
have owed his subsequent borrowings from Buddhism to such men. It is
rather as if, some centuries from now, a historian (if they still exist)
were to explain Teilhard de Chardin’s knowledge of Peking Man
(Sinanthropus) in these words:
‘He would have been able to acquire this information from the members of
some Chinese trade delegation visiting Europe at the time when he was
writing ‘Le Phénomène Humain.’
One must realize that the majority of historical works, including those
of the highest repute, are full of statements of this kind.
The reason I have asked myself this question is because it seems clear,
on one hand, that Simon Magus’s teaching did not die with him (it was
carried on in Samaria, Syria and possibly Egypt), and on the other, that
it was transmitted in a clandestine and underground fashion, which makes
it difficult to trace by irrefutable documentation. We shall find the
same thing when we come to the other leading figures of Gnosticism,
whose works — lost to us today — were secret even during their own
lifetimes, because of their content (which was reserved for certain
initiates) and also because of the need to elude prosecution and the
harassment of the Christians. This is why we are relatively ignorant
about the Gnostics except for the period in which they found themselves,
along with the Christians, in the position of outlaws or rebels against
the Roman authority, that is to say, throughout the second century. The
internal dissensions between true and false Christians could not at that
time lead to the outright extermination or excommunication of one sect
by the other. The presence and the power of the common enemy forced them
to postpone this ‘settling’ of differences till a later date. It is true
that the history of the Russian revolution and, still more, the recent
history of revolutionary parties in Europe, has taught us that even when
faced by a common and powerful enemy — Tsarism or Capitalism —
revolutionary groups or splintergroups will not give up their internal
quarrels. But this is for a very simple reason: the liberalism of
Western societies tolerates these divisions and, indeed, makes use of
them. If a successful revolution were to take place tomorrow and one of
these groups seized power, we know quite well that such tolerance would
no longer be the order of the day; the only recourse for the ousted
party would be exile or a clandestine existence. And just as it is
impossible to imagine Trotskyite or Maoist groups being officially
recognized in a People’s Democracy, so the Christian accession to power
rendered the survival of the Gnostics extremely precarious. In fact, it
is precisely at this period, during the fourth century, that they vanish
from the pages of history — which does not mean they ceased to exist —
and the teachings and writings of the Gnostic masters become wholly
illicit. And so we see superimposed on the tragedy of human fate,
another which nourishes and confirms it: the tragedy of history itself,
that terrestrial measure of cosmic time — time, which, for the Gnostics,
was always the most significant sign of our alienation.
This is why a history of the Gnostic movement cannot possibly be written
like a traditional history. It is in a sense a shadow-history, a
counter-history whose successive pages make a desperate attempt to deny
history itself, to rescue man from the treadmill of time’s passing. From
the earliest decades of our era, the most farsighted, or the most
convinced Christians had the feeling that they were founding a new era —
albeit one that would be constantly threatened by the end of time —
overthrowing the old ways of the world and constructing a new man,
whereas the Gnostics never at any time, either in their writings or in
their silences, showed the least concern to leave lasting traces on this
earth. We can see that this is obvious, a logical consequence of their
entire outlook. They laugh at posterity, perenniality, the future, and
all those snares and pitfalls of time in which man allows himself to be
caught. What the Gnostics preach is immediate flight, a desertion of the
world and the demarcations of time. How then can one write the history
of those who specifically rejected it, how can one capture the likeness
of constantly fleeing shadows? One can pursue the Gnostics, but one
cannot seize hold of them.
And, in any case, the very act of seizing them would be a violation.
What would a Basilides, a Valentinus, or a Carpocrates say if he were to
look down from the lofty heights of the hyper-world (where no doubt he
now resides) and read this book today? That I myself have fallen into
the trap of time, I am caught in the talons of history, and that — no
matter how laudable my intentions or sympathetic my attitude — I am but
adding a useless and deceptive book to the density of time. I could
offer only one hypothesis which might, at a pinch, mitigate their
verdict: that I am a Gnostic, reincarnated after two thousand years. But
even this hypothesis does not entirely absolve me from blame, for if I
am living on this earth in the 1970s, it means that I am still subject
to the cycle of reincarnation — in which many of them believed — and
have not purged myself of material servitude nor liberated the spark of
life from its bodily prison. In short, I have not totally received
gnosis. If I had, I would be in the splendour of the Pleroma, freed from
matter, speech, mental and psychic categories, from history, time and,
above all, from the trouble of thinking anything at all about them. From
the pure and austere Gnostic viewpoint, then, this book is absurd. For
it claims to intervene in a world of non-intervention. It violates
non-violence. It operates like those crude means of observation employed
by physicists to study the structures of the atom and which, since they
are inevitably made of natural matter themselves (light, rays, bundles
of particles), disturb and even destroy the object they are seeking to
observe. Studying Gnosticism with the mental means at our disposal
involves, to some extent, disturbing and destroying it.
Logic demands, therefore, that I stop here and now. But, apart from my
contractual obligations to my publisher, something deeper urges me to
continue. The fact is, I feel a love for these men and for the silence
they longed to melt into; moreover, I delight in the knowledge that
today there is a sensibility, an attitude, an underground current
characteristic of our time that seeks them out again and perpetuates
them. The paradox of fate wills that non-history always follows history,
that anti-societies presuppose societies. We are still haunted by the
question: why, century after century, have men gathered together to say
No to something? This something has taken an ever-changing forms —
predominantly political in the last fifty years — but, by the same
token, even our awareness, and our protest, are fragmented. This is the
first unwritten law of alienation, and we need to be conscious of it:
the something we say NO to is never the real enemy, but only the shadow
it casts over us and within us.
After the death of Simon Magus, a certain number of disciples carried on
his teaching. The names of two of these are known to us: Menander and
Saturninus. Disciples, however, is too strong a term. Each in fact
followed his own way, taking inspiration from the guide-lines laid down
by Simon but pushing them further towards completion or even deviating
from them. For Gnosticism itself teaches us not to hold on to those
false criteria by which the history of ideas is ultimately written.
Having possessed neither churches nor dogma nor ecclesiastical councils,
Gnosticism was able to develop along multiple paths, all of which form
part of the whole. Unlike the history of Christianity, which is always
the story of dogma triumphing over heresy, Gnostic history must take
account of all the different currents and guard against favouring one to
the detriment of others. There is no such thing as a heresy in
Gnosticism, it is unthinkable for Gnosticism is essentially an embodying
and not a dividing force.
And so Menander and Saturninus continued Simon’s work but added their
own meditations to it. Saturninus, who taught at Antioch nearly a
century after the death of the master, seems to have gained a
considerable following. It is to him that we owe among other things the
detailed description of the creation of man given above, and it was he
who applied the name of ‘unknown Father’ to the true God, stranger to
this world. It seems that we also owe him the idea that the evil
demiurges, the ignoble Aeons responsible for the world — and he named
them the Archons — are none other than the seven planets.
Hebraic cosmology had already described the planets not as dead stars
but as living beings, as archangels whose brilliance was supposedly a
celebration of the glory of the All-Powerful. Gnosticism retains this
vision but reverses its meaning: these living planets, these blazing
archangels shine forth above us in celebration of their own glory. It is
as usurpers that they occupy their domain of the lower heavens and rule
over their damned creation. There is not a glimmer of admiration, of
beatitude, in his eye as Saturninus turns his gaze upon the perversity
of this absurdly starspangled heaven, habitat of those nocturnal
malefactors and thieves of the soul which are the heavenly bodies. In
the teeming multiplicity of the stars he saw the flaming grid that bars
our terrestrial prison, and in the oppressive orbs of the planets the
gaolers of our planetary detention.
But it is in Egypt, rather than in Syria, Palestine or Samaria, that
Gnosticism comes to its fullest flowering. There we see it developing
with prodigious speed from the beginning of the second century, that
strange, confused century in which the great pulsations of history seem
to throb like muffled drums, spawning gods, cults, conversions and
recantations, especially in that city which was the geographical centre
of all the confusion, but also the great wellspring of ideas:
Alexandria. Crucible, burning-glass, mortar and blast-furnace; the still
wherein all heavens, all gods, all visions are mixed, distilled, infused
and transfused: such was Alexandria in the second century. Look wherever
you will, interrogate history from any standpoint or level whatever, and
you will find all races represented there (except the Chinese, who have
not yet arrived), all continents (Africa, Asia, Europe) and all ages
(Ancient Egypt, whose sanctuaries are preserved there, the ages of
Athens and Rome, of Judea, Palestine, and Babylon); all these elements
are gathered together in this knot of the Delta, this city which is to
the river what lungs are to men and branches to a tree: the place
through which they breathe and the source of their inspiration.
Admittedly, this image only takes shape with hindsight. Strangers who
journeyed to Alexandria at that time saw nothing at first but confusion,
an indescribable mixture of beliefs and religious rites, anarchy, and
the dissolution of all certainties. They felt that they were lost in
some wasteland of history, entangled in the web of all these
contradictions, engulfed by the whirlpool of these incompatible creeds.
‘... Here one can see Bishops, who claim to be Christians, paying homage
to Serapis. There is not a single priest — Samaritan, Christian or Jew —
who is not a mathematician, a haruspex or alypte. When the Patriarch
himself comes to Egypt, he worships both Christ and Serapis to keep
everybody happy... ,’
writes the Emperor Hadrian to his friend, the Consul Servianus.
At just about the time of Hadrian’s visit to the city — approximately
130 AD — we find several of the most renowned Gnostics teaching in
Alexandria: Basilides, Carpocrates, Valentinus. Let us note one fact at
the outset: although they travel from time to time, to Rome, Greece or
Cyprus, they are no longer itinerant prophets. Henceforth, Gnosticism is
established in the cities, above all in the City, Alexandria, where it
finds a rich and fertile soil. For here all systems meet, rub shoulders
or conflict with one another: Egyptian, Greek and Roman paganism, Coptic
Christianity, Judaism, Neo-Platonic philosophies, Hermetism, and still
others, some of which mingle in ephemeral syncretisms, while others,
notably the Christian sects, tend to split, break up, and separate. To
the Gnostics, separation, division, and scattering are specifically
terrestrial signs of alienation. Basilides, Carpocrates and Valentinus
take whatever they find good from wherever they may find it. But it is
not my intention here to look for the various sources and origins of
Gnosticism. What matters in my eyes is not the source but the estuary,
the outflow, the particular teaching of the great Gnostics. A doctrine
like Gnosticism cannot be created, cannot be vivified simply by
portioning out several ingredients borrowed from earlier systems, adding
some excipient, mashing it up, and firing the whole mixture in the great
kiln or crucible of Alexandria. All the research, all the books written
on the question of the sources of Gnosticism have shed light on only one
aspect of the problem: they have shown that Christianity, Judaism,
Neo-Platonic philosophy, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Hermetism
have all served Gnosticism. But the point is: Gnosticism is not just a
hastily put-together amalgam of systems.
Once these first constituents are combined and fused together,
Gnosticism itself is a new substance, a mutant thought, a creation which
as soon as it is born outstrips and denies its origins. In fact, it does
not hesitate to push its history to a logical conclusion and deny
itself. Thus Basilides, one of the first Alexandrian masters of
Gnosticism, places Illusion at the origin and centre of the world, and
at the heart of our own psyche, and proposes total Ignorance as a means
of vanquishing it. We are dealing with a thought, a system, that goes so
far in search of the No, the not, the non-being, the nonexistent and the
non-real that language itself is powerless to interpret it. For
Basilides tells us
‘there was a time when nothing was. When I say nothing, I do not mean
that there was nothing, but simply, crudely, totally that nothingness
itself did not exist.’
This dizzying nothingness — which one must nevertheless think of and
write in order to say that nothing was, since by saying that I pose the
existence of a something that was nothing — this dizzying nothingness of
words in which thought immediately founders and sinks, waterlogged by
these imperfect syllables, these omnipotent letters N-O-T-H-I-N-G,
becomes still more bewildering when Basilides sets out to analyse the
negative implications of this nothing.
‘Nothing, then, existed, neither matter nor substance nor beings without
substance, nor simple beings nor compound beings, nor intelligible
beings, nor sentient nor non-sentient beings, neither angel, nor man,
nor god, nor absolutely any of the beings one can name or whom one
perceives through the senses or through the intelligence.’
To the point where God himself is called — curiously but with impeccable
logic — He who is not.
But if God is He who is not and if nothing existed, how was the world
made? Here again, one comes up against the prison-bars of words.
‘He who is not,’
Basilides goes on,
‘wanted to make the world. I use the word “wanted” to make myself
intelligible, but in fact there was no thought, no desire, no feeling.
And the God who is not made the world of that which is not.’
At this stage, where thought struggles so incessantly against the
treachery of language that a word is no sooner written than it is
challenged and rejected, the world-process takes on unsuspected forms.
How can one set oneself against that which is not? How can one live in
the heart of a misunderstanding so total that everything which surrounds
us is in reality non-real, a reflection, an illusion, a distorting
mirror, a phantom? Here Basilides lifts the totality of the world to the
level of a cosmic fantasy engendered by the planetary sleep of
pseudo-living creatures. For only sleep can induce us to accept the
dream for the reality. When Basilides says that the world is an
illusion, he does not mean (I presume) that the world we live in does
not exist — since it is — but that it exists in the form of an illusion.
It is the mirage of another world as yet uncreated, unengendered,
although it exists in a latent state in the non-brain of the non-God,
and one asks oneself whether it is perhaps the appointed task of the
Gnostics to bring it into being, to materialize this world by awakening
the total consciousness of mankind, by fleeing from the mirage and
stepping through the illusory looking-glass which is at once our earth
and our sky. Elsewhere, in a still more precise example, one can see how
far Basilides’ radicalism leads him. Certain ancient philosophers —
Greeks and Christians — said that God is by nature ineffable. Not so,
says Basilides, for to say that something is ineffable is to confer upon
it an existence and a condition.
‘There exist,’
he explains,
‘things which are not even ineffable and are therefore beyond any
possible name.’
And so, at the extreme limit of Basilides’ thought, one quite naturally
comes up , against not the un-nameable but the impossibility of even
envisaging it, in short, one encounters Silence.
Silence. Here we are at the very heart of Gnostic teaching. We know,
through the testimony of Basilides’ Christian adversaries, that he
followed the example of Pythagoras by imposing a five-year silence on
his disciples. Perhaps this silence was not limited to the disciples but
included the master as well. Very little is known about Basilides and
his school, and it is impossible to imagine exactly how he taught. But
even if he was the only teacher to impose the ascetic discipline of
silence, this fact is still revealing. Silence is one of the purest and
most difficult ways of combating the illusion of the world. For this
silence is not merely the absence of sound, the cessation of words; it
must be the means of awakening within the disciple — through the state
of constant watchfulness that it implies — a heightened awareness, a
firing-up of thought to strengthen the soul. Denial of speech leads to
the triumph of hyper-consciousness.
Abstention, like non-violence, becomes a weapon. One can already discern
the practical paths Basilides’ teaching is leading us to: since this
world is made up of that which is not, we must fight against it by
denying it, notably through silence. We will oppose the noises of this
world, the ephemeral sound-waves of speech, the sonorous and falsely
beguiling matter of the universe by our silence, which then becomes a
kind of anti-matter.
And there is another weapon we shall use. The desire to know, to seek
beyond the false and evanescent forms of the world and discover the true
mechanisms which move them, is suspect. For surely knowledge itself, in
a world of illusions, can only be illusory? The things we are enquiring
into are mere reflections, day-dreams, wraiths. Logic itself becomes
ineffectual, since it is the logic of vacuity. In most cases, it is
nothing more than an idling motor, rotating pointlessly in that
labyrinth of mirages which we call the human brain. It is only
Ignorance, in conjunction with Silence, that can lead us down the royal
road to liberation.
Admittedly, Basilides had to temper this total rejection of knowledge to
some extent. Caught in the snare of these successive negations which
reverberate within us, repeatedly echoing our doubts, he had to
compromise. He is said to have written twenty-four books of commentaries
on the Gospels, as well as some Odes, and to have initiated a mystical
cult for his disciples — which obviously presupposes a knowledge of the
mysteries. But he did not neglect what we may call ‘practical advice.’
It is not difficult to imagine the form this would have taken.
Confronted with the deceptions of reality, the imposture of all Churches
and institutions, the mummery of laws, creeds, and taboos, he proposes a
very simple morality: non-morality. Thus, at the moment when the first
persecutions are beginning against both Christians and Gnostics (the
Romans seeing not the slightest difference between the two), Basilides
declares that it is natural and necessary to abjure one’s faith in order
to escape them. In the same way, sexual desire should not be shackled by
the conventions, which are aimed at channeling it into
socially-acceptable patterns, but must be freely satisfied for its own
sake, without sentimental or matrimonial attachments. Which does not
mean that Basilides preached free sexual union as the sole remedy for
man’s sufferings. As far as he personally is concerned, he does not
appear to have been a satyr intoxicated with women, those ‘chosen
vessels’ as they are called in a Gnostic text. To the initiates, those
who had undergone the ordeal of silence, he probably counseled
asceticism. To others, ordinary disciples or simply listeners, he left
the freedom to choose the path they judged best. Unlike almost all
esoteric groups and mystical communities throughout the ages, the
Gnostics did not, at first, lay down any ethical precepts or
prohibitions.
It seems that they aimed, rather, at leaving each man free to join the
teaching while carrying on his own way of life, without being committed
to either asceticism or non-asceticism. It is with Basilides, then, that
we see the declaration of that lordly indifference to rules of conduct,
that radical liberation from all institutionalized systems which so
scandalized his contemporaries.
When one reads the Gnostic texts and their cosmologies peopled with
Aeons, Archons, Gods who are not, the Unengendered, primordial Couples,
divisive circles, castrating planets, and ravaging fires, one comes
across an apparent contradiction: on the one hand, these writings
traverse familiar territory (that of mythology) and, like so many other
texts, can always be reduced to a number of archetypes and all the
psychoanalytical interpretations. But on the other hand, these fantastic
systems, these organized hallucinations, these ingenious constructions
which are often barely intelligible, have served as engine-bed and
motivation for a coherent teaching and a remarkably homogenous morality
— or non-morality, if you prefer. It is quite obvious that compared to
Gnostic cogitations Genesis and the Gospels are dazzlingly clear and
simple. What then is concealed behind this complexity, these perpetual
subtleties which transform the history of the world into a chain of
absurd tragedies, a series of obscure causes and effects, amid a vast
array of Archons and Powers, Entities without number? Was it necessary
to stage so many coups de théatre, to indulge in so much weeping and
gnashing of teeth, so many falls and so much repentance, such
contrivance and perversity on the part of the Archons and the Aeons, in
order to make this eminently simple statement: real life is elsewhere? I
admit I am uncertain how to answer this formidable question. However, I
will make an attempt, for the sympathy and loyalty I owe to these men
and their ideas spurs me an. I wish that my loyalty was total, or at
least that it did not come to grief on those sibylline texts, which are
often specious and always very tedious. But let us take a passage from
Basilides’ cosmology, quoted by Hippolytus of Rome and drawn from the
essay on the creation of the world:
“Then did the Son of the great Archon illuminate the light of the Son of
the Archon of the Hebdomad, as he himself had lit his own on high
through contact with the Filiality; then was the Son of the Archon of
the Hebdomad enlightened and straightway, at the first ward, he was
affrighted and confessed his fault.”
What is immediately apparent in this passage (an extract, as I recall,
from a much longer quotation), is the complexity, the rigmarole of
sequences and successive causalities supposed to explain why and how a
deviation, an error, slipped into the process of creation. The terms
Basilides uses: Hebdomad (the totality of the seven lower circles), the
Filiality (an emanation of the God who is not, consisting of three
parts: one subtle, one dense, the third impure), are obscure nowadays
but were relatively common in his day, and many thinkers, Gnostic or
otherwise, used them at that time when speculating, for example, upon
the human and divine nature of Christ. But here one is entitled to ask
oneself whether this system — totally arbitrary as it may appear, or
even the ravings of a delirious mind — is not, in fact, the reflection
of those very mysteries, complex in themselves, which it claims to
elucidate: the genesis of the world, the material structure of life, the
existence of consciousness, and the relation between these and the
intelligible world of the true God. There was nothing simple about these
problems and even the most reasonable of the Church Fathers often
plunged into highly abstruse explanations of them. After all, what we
are concerned with here is nothing less than an effort to broach the
unknown, to apprehend a world whose laws, structures, and governing
forces elude our understanding. And it is not by accident that whenever
a problem of this nature is presented to human reason the attempt to
clarify it, to unify complex and contradictory given data, is couched in
terms which a layman finds difficult to grasp. Let me give another
example, still more to the point in that it was revealed to me
fortuitously in the course of reading for this book. In The Universe in
the Light of Modern Physics, a work which appeared a few years ago, Max
Planck takes into account the new vision of the world proposed as a
result of research done by physicists, and writes the following lines:
“The Quantum Theory postulates that an equation subsists between energy
and frequency. If this postulate is to have an unambiguous meaning, that
is, a meaning independent of the particular system to which it is
referred, then the principle of relativity demands that a momentum
vector shall be equivalent to a wave-member vector; in other words, the
absolute quantity of the momentum must be equivalent to the reciprocal
of the length of a wave whose normal coincides with the direction of
momentum.”
A theoretical comprehension of this text requires not only a previous
initiation into the jargon and given data of the new physics, as will
readily be believed, but also and above all else an attitude of mind,
the attitude of contemporary physics, in which an innovatory hypothesis
demands a total rethinking of earlier systems, and in which the
questions addressed to the mystery of the material universe are changed
both in character and in meaning.
Without wishing to draw an exact parallel between the studies, the men
and the texts, for they can scarcely be said to have plausible links
between them, I still believe that one must interpret the innovative
vision of the Gnostics in the same fashion, without looking at it only
in terms of its structure. To arrive at a consciousness of the nature,
the behaviour, and the celestial trajectory of an Aeon, one must have a
particular attitude, one which tends to overthrow preceding systems and
offers a probability rather than a certainty; moreover, the very word
‘Aeon’ suggests to the layman that we are talking about some kind of
ancestor to the Electron, the Neutron or the great Positron.
Paradoxically, it is through a very real need to understand and to
explain the nature and destiny of the world we live in in rational terms
that the Gnostics, using the hypotheses of their era as a springboard,
came to stray into the realm of mythological systems.
I have taken this momentary dip into the world of modern physics only to
illustrate how easy it is to sneer at the laboriously constructed
systems of the Gnostic masters, which is just what a contemporary layman
is inclined to do when faced with any text by those Gnostics of the
present day, Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg.
St. Irenaeus, the Christian author, is doing precisely that when he
gives us a witty and inspired parody of a text by the Gnostic
Valentinus, whose cosmology was peculiarly abstruse:
‘... There exists an intelligible pro-principle, pro-denuded of
substance, a prorotundity. In this principle resides a property which I
call Cucurbitacy. In this Cucurbitacy is a property which I call
Absolutelyvoid. This Cucurbitacy and this Absolutely-void have emitted
without emitting a fruit which is visible in all its parts, edible and
tasty: the Marrow. In this Marrow resides a virtue of the same power:
the Melon. Cucurbitacy and Absolutely-void, Marrow and Melon have
emitted the multitude of Valentinus’ hallucinatory melons.’
So, let us pass on to Valentinus and his hallucinatory melons. For this
purpose we return to Alexandria. In this city of feverish activity, the
Gnostics appear in effect as inactive aliens, preoccupied with Aeons,
Filialities, and more or less hallucinatory ‘melons.’ It is a pity that
the Christian authors were too prudish to give us the information which
some of them possessed concerning the life and day-to-day conduct of the
Gnostics. We have no idea how strong a following a Basilides or a
Valentinus was able to command in Alexandrian circles. Certainly they
could have had little influence with any but the city’s Greek, or
Hellenized milieux, for at that period the great Gnostic masters, like
Basilides and Valentinus, taught in Greek.
The latter, educated in Alexandria, later went to Rome where he resided
for many years.
Unlike the other Gnostic teachers, Valentinus began as a Christian and,
indeed, narrowly missed entering the priesthood. But his highly
unorthodox ideas aroused first distrust and then hostility. Driven out
of the Church, he left Rome and journeyed to Cyprus where he founded a
community of disciples.
The simple thing to say about his system and his teaching is that, like
those of his predecessors, they are very nebulous and extremely hard to
grasp. But one must not overlook the hypothesis that this springs from
the failure or inadequacy of the Christian authors to understand what
they were writing about. The one certain and immediately discernible
fact is that the fundamental themes of Gnostic thought reappear in the
Gospel o f Truth which is attributed to him. In Valentinus’ text, the
dominant factor in the origin of the world is no longer Illusion but
Error, an Error emanating from the unknown and alien Father and in its
turn engendering Oblivion, Anguish and Terror in the immense void of the
universe in gestation. It is from Them that we originate, we carry Them
within us, and that is why Valentinus calls this world, which is the
fruit of Error, Oblivion, Anguish, and Terror, the world of Deficiency.
Our feeling of solitude and perdition, the planetary malaise which is
man’s lot, stems from this original Error that threw imperfect seeds and
premature beings into an immature world. We live under the signs of
corruption and want. We are lacking in everything: divine oxygen,
hyper-cosmic fire and, above all, truth, which has remained in solitary
splendour in the upper regions of the hyper-world. We live in the world
of death, a death that is both material and cosmic, and of which inert
matter is the most tangible sign. And it is only by parceling it out,
scattering it, dissolving it little by little, by consuming all the
substance of this world one way or another that man will succeed in
wrenching himself free of the circles of Error.
‘You must share death amongst you in order to exhaust it and cause its
dissolution,’
says Valentinus to his disciples,
‘so that in you and through you death may die.’
This idea reappears in the beliefs of most of the Gnostic sects, and it
justifies the frenzied ‘consumption’ of matter, in the guise of sperm
and desire, indulged in by the most liberated among them. It is in any
case the idea which dictates the behaviour of Valentinus’ disciples. By
consuming the hostile matter of this world — by using up love, flesh,
the most sensual and voluptuous pleasures, and by profoundly disordering
the human senses (points of junction between matter and life), we will
exhaust matter and thus accede to a superior condition which will permit
us to rediscover the truth and our lost immortality, to become, in
Valentinus’ own terms, indestructible beings.
For this world, crucible of corruption, excrement of Error though it is,
possesses the seeds of immortality and a faint resemblance to the
distant God, the living Aeon, the veracious Model of all things.
Valentinus gives us a revealing comparison:
‘Inasmuch as the portrait is inferior to the living model, so is this
world inferior to the living Aeon.’
It is he, this model with the true features of God, whom we must
rediscover through the tangled images of this world. Moreover,
Valentinus is among those who have traced the different stages of this
liberating ‘consumption,’ working from the Platonic schema. Right at the
bottom, in the abyss where the refuse engendered by Error accumulates,
is our world of flesh and matter. Men who identify with it all their
lives and cannot tear themselves free, who participate in its existence
without in any way lightening its matter, will forever remain hylics, or
material men. For them, there is no salvation. Their destiny is
definitive corruption, the ineluctable end of all that is flesh. Above
this are the two circles of Air and Ether, composed of matter but
lightened and refined, the first step in the climb towards salvation.
These circles may be reached by those who have been able to transform
matter into psyche by consuming it — that is to say by lightening and
filtering it, transmuting it sufficiently to create a soul for
themselves. This is the second category of human beings: the psychics.
But simply to possess a soul is not enough, if this soul is cut off from
truth. To perfect oneself, to throw off the ultimate shackles forever,
one must know where Truth lies. One must possess gnosis. And here we
have the third and certainly the rarest category of human beings: the
spirituals or pneumatics, in other words, the Gnostics. They will gain
the highest circle, the circle of the Pneuma or the Spirit.
Perhaps this hierarchy also corresponded to the different stages of
initiation reached by Valentinus’ disciples. It is difficult to say. One
only knows that for Valentinus all three states of man could be
identified in the everyday world: the hylics were the pagans, steeped in
matter through ignorance of the true religion; the psychics were the
Christians who through the grace of Jesus Christ had received a first
revelation but were still ignorant of his secret teaching and the
profound nature of Truth, accessible only through gnosis. The pneumatics
were the Gnostics, who thus placed themselves above the Christians.
One thing is certain — and we know this through the teaching of Ptolemy,
who was a follower of Valentinus and author of a Letter to Flora — and
that is that anyone who had attained the pneumatic state was, in the
eyes of the disciples, totally freed from the fetters and corruptions of
material nature. To him, all things might be permitted, since his soul
had henceforth cut the umbilical cord which tied it to the world of
here-below. This is clearly stated in one of Ptolemy’s texts, quoted by
St. Irenaeus:
‘Just as it is impossible for the material man (hylic) to be saved,
since matter itself cannot be saved, so it is impossible for the
pneumatic man to be damned, no matter what his deeds. And just as gold
retains its beauty in the depths of the blackest mud and is not sullied
by it, so the Gnostic cannot be sullied by anything whatever, nor lose
his pneumatic essence, for the events of this world can no longer have
any effect on him.’
And here St. Irenaeus specifies, in some detail, the nature of the
Gnostic’s enfranchisement with respect to his material deeds:
“... The most perfect amongst them also commit forbidden acts without
the slightest shame. They do not hesitate to eat the food offered up to
idols. They attend all the pagan festivals. Many of them even attend
those fights between beast and beast which are abhorrent to man and God
alike, and those single combats wherein men fight one another to the
death. Others indulge unreservedly in the pleasures of the flesh,
declaring that flesh should be rendered unto flesh and spirit unto
spirit. Others again secretly despoil the women they seek to initiate.
Others, having fallen in love with a married woman, openly and without
scruple abduct her and make her their concubine. Finally some of these,
who at first pretend to live with her honourably, as with a sister, are
unmasked, for the sister becomes pregnant by the works of the brother.
And all the while they are committing these bestialities and impieties,
they treat us as imbeciles and idiots because we abstain from such acts
out of our fear of God. They proclaim themselves to be the perfect ones,
the chosen seeds. They pretend to have received a particular grace from
on high, as a result of an ineffable union. And this is why, they tell
us, they must apply themselves ceaselessly to the mystery of sexual
union.”
Thus, in this single example, we see the Gnostics who followed Ptolemy,
emulator of Valentinus, consciously and deliberately practicing free
love, seduction, incest, and all the violations of convention that one
could wish for. However, in spite of the acrimony of the witness, and
the visible horror these practices inspire in him, something emerges
from his accusation: first, the Gnostic’s absolute conviction —
Luciferian without a shadow of doubt — that he is indestructible,
invulnerable to the corruptions of the world; and second, this blatant
cult of woman, of sex and Eros, which is the essential part of their
lives, the royal road which conquers death and all his undertakings.
“The most absurd of all earthly laws is the one that has the temerity to
say: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife,” for it repudiates
community and deliberately chooses separation.”
― Epiphanes
In his book on Gnosticism, Leisegang has this to say about the
Alexandrian sects and the general Gnostic attitude to the world:
“... Aversion to love and its consequences, justification of a
counter-nature which they elevate to the level of nature, elimination of
effort, a feeling that only one person in a thousand can understand
them, megalomania, asocial behaviour, traits characteristic of
decadence.”
On re-reading this sentence, I become aware of a patently obvious fact
which until today had nevertheless totally escaped me: I myself am a
decadent. Apart from megalomania — for I do not believe I have succumbed
to this temptation — I lay claim to all the attitudes indicated in this
text. I do not know whether they have quite the same meaning and the
same implications today as they had formerly, but I cannot help feeling
a sense of familiarity, of solidarity even, with the tendencies quoted
above and all that they imply in life. If decadence really consists in
posing to one’s contemporaries the crucial questions that the Gnostics
asked, if it means seeing all systems, laws, and institutions as
products of an alienating mechanism, if ultimately it implies an
attitude of doubt, rejection, and insubordination towards organized
authority, then long live decadence! Far, far from being an outcome of
surrender or resignation in the face of the inevitable, it appears on
the contrary as an intellectual lucidity, a searching inquiry that will
leave no stone unturned, and an ambition — arrogant, no doubt — to
question all the philosophical or religious solutions that man has
hitherto proposed. In a sense, this radicalism and intransigence,
together with the shocking behaviour which was their practical, everyday
expression, are at the roots of the failure of Gnosticism. This failure
— at least on an historical and institutional level — was written into
the very nature of Gnosticism. For the counter-nature the Gnostics
preached, the counter-life they attempted to lead on all possible
levels, implied in turn a system, or an anti-system, which ran out of
steam precisely because of its own refusal to “exist” and to set itself
up as an institution. In attempting to break down existing institutions
without proposing any alternative other than a kind of manic outburst of
desire, the Gnostics were very soon bound to collide with a fact that is
obvious enough (though they undoubtedly failed to foresee it), and that
is this: even anti-societies must reinvent their own laws if they hope
to endure. The Gnostics, however, caring little for the foundation of
lasting schools and having no other aim than to throw off the heavy
shackles of this world, accorded no importance to organization and
devoted themselves to the ephemeral. This visceral distaste for any
attempt to organize and regulate their own revolution, this refusal to
guard against the consequences which, in worldly affairs, were
inevitable, explains why these sects had such a brief life-span, and why
they were suddenly effaced from history like those clouds which suddenly
form in a saturated atmosphere, only to vanish again with equal
suddenness ... passing clouds in the mystical sky. Without much risk of
error, we may imagine that Alexandria — that city saturated with
experience, with gnosis, with messages, schools, and sects — housed
swarms of miniscule Gnostic sects, each springing up and disappearing in
the course of one generation, each bearing a brief and intense history,
an inspired message, and an inevitable death. This is one of the curious
but not surprising features of their history: that it endlessly makes
itself over anew, like an invisible chain in which, in order that a new
link may be born, another must die.
In my view, nothing better exemplifies this inevitability than the
bizarre history of the Carpocratians. This sect was active in Alexandria
at the same time as Basilides and Valentinus, but unfortunately this
does not mean we can say much more about them, for the figures of these
Gnostic masters are so vague, so uncertain, so sketchily outlined by
contemporary writers — whose primary object was to describe their
teaching and not the men themselves — that it is impossible to imagine
their features. No doubt, in their outward appearance they resembled the
Greek philosophers whose teaching they sometimes adopted. But how
exactly did they dress? What did they eat? Where did they live? How did
they teach? No author, pagan or Christian, has concerned himself with
these matters. We only know through indirect witnesses that they
recruited their following from the same milieux as the Christian
preachers, and that, in the second century, could only mean the cultured
and Hellenized circles of Alexandria. The one certain fact, as far as
their schools are concerned, is that women played an important role in
them, not only as ‘partners,’ but as initiates and initiators.
Of the three great Gnostic masters of Alexandria, the most engaging and
the most remarkable seems to have been Carpocrates. He was Greek, a
native of the island of Cephalonia; his mate was named Alexandria and
his son Epiphanes. From his earliest youth, Epiphanes was brought up an
Platonic 57 philosophy and the teachings of the Gnostics, and he very
soon became a veritable master. His precocity was astounding. He died,
in fact, at the age of seventeen, leaving behind him a treatise On
Justice, which Clement of Alexandria quotes from at some length. His
body was taken to his native island, where he was interred with divine
honours. These, then, are the only historical images of the sect’s
founders conjured up for us by their contemporaries: we see an eminently
enlightened and well-informed couple, and their son, an adolescent
possessing encyclopedic knowledge and a precocious genius ... a Gnostic
Rimbaud.
If one leaves aside the somewhat singular doctrine they professed
regarding metempsychosis and the transmigration of souls, the teaching
of the Carpocratians is not particularly different from that of other
Gnostics. Nevertheless, the Christian authors tear them apart with a
fury for which we must be grateful, since we owe to it our knowledge of
certain details of their practices. The point is that the Carpocratians
pushed the essential principles of Gnosticism to their logical
conclusion — theoretical and practical — and applied, stricto sensu, the
teaching of Carpocrates and Epiphanes. In their eyes, this world is the
work of inferior angels who turned the will and the intentions of the
true God entirely to their own advantage. And this ‘perversion of
intent’ had two notable consequences: first, it denaturalized the desire
for coitus, which God had put into man and all living creatures, and
made it a slave to the conventions of society; second, it destroyed
divine Law by setting up the fragmentary laws of this world. The logical
outcome of this teaching is clear: in order to rediscover the pure
source of desire and of the true Law, the Carpocratians had to violate
the false laws of this vile world everywhere and on all possible
occasions. Here, immorality is raised to the status of a rational
system, total insubordination is lauded as the road to liberation; a
Christian author of the time expressed it in these words:
‘According to them, man must perpetrate every possible infamy in order
to be saved.’
Yet the most interesting aspect of this subversive thinking is that the
Carpocratians seized primarily upon the social forms of this perversion.
They had a particular hatred for injustice and its major expression:
property. For Epiphanes, divine Law was a law of justice and Equality.
God did not want the good things of this world to be parcelled out among
men. Epiphanes demanded the abolition of all property, a return to the
absolutely communal possession of goods and chattels, that is to say, of
worldly wealth and of women. And here I must quote the admirable text
(written when he was only fifteen or sixteen years old) in which he
denounces the injustice of this world and the perpetual iniquity of
human laws; it is a naive but impressive vision:
Where does justice lie? In a community of equalities. A common sky
stretches above our heads and covers the entire earth with its
immensity, the same night reveals its stars to all without
discrimination, the same sun, father of night and begetter of day,
shines in the sky for all men equally. It is common to all, rich men and
beggars, kings and subjects, wise men and fools, free men and slaves.
God made it to pour out its light for all the beings on this earth in
order that it would be of common benefit to all: who would dare to
appropriate the light of the sun to himself alone? Does he not cause the
plants to grow for the common good of all the beasts? Does he not
administer his justice equally to all men? He does not make the plants
to grow for such and such an ox, but for the whole species of oxen, for
such and such a pig, but for all pigs, for such and such a goat, but for
all goats. Justice, for the animals, is a benefit they own in common.
And everything that exists, everything that lives, is subject to this
law of justice and equality. Nourishment was provided for all living
beings without singling out or favouring one species. The same is true
of procreation. There is no written law concerning it, for such a law
would inevitably be false. The animals procreate, couple and beget
according to the laws of community which were inculcated into them by
justice. The Father of All gave us eyes to see with, and his only law is
that of justice, without distinction between male and female, man and
woman, reasoning and unreasoning creature. As for the laws of this
world, it is they and they alone which have taught us to act against the
law. Individual laws fragment and destroy communion with divine law. The
prophet said: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law,’ and how are we to
interpret his meaning, if it be not that the words ‘mine’ and ‘thine’
have entered into this world through the laws, and that this made an end
of all community? Nevertheless, that which God created, he created for
all to hold in common possession: vines, grains and all the fruits of
the earth. Has the vine ever been seen to chase away a thief, or a
thievish passeriform? But when man forgot that community means equality,
and deformed it by his laws, on that day, the thief was born.
In the same way, God created the pleasure of love equally for all
mankind and he made the male and the female to couple together and
manifest his justice through the community and equality of their
pleasures. But men have repudiated the very thing which is the source of
their existence, and they say: ‘Let he who has taken a wife keep her for
himself alone,’ whereas all should share in her.... God instilled into
every man the powerful and impetuous desire to propagate the species,
and no law, no custom, would be able to banish this desire from the
world, because it was God himself who established it. Moreover the
dictum:‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods’ is absurd. How could
this same God who gave man desire wish to take it away from him again?
But the most absurd of all earthly laws is the one that has the temerity
to say: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife,’ for it repudiates
community and deliberately chooses separation.
These words have a familiar ring. We have been hearing them and reading
them for a long time now. They express an urgent need proclaimed, long
before Epiphanes, by Antigone, Epicure, and Diogenes and, after him, by
many Utopian thinkers and philosophers. But it is not so much the
naivete and ideological illusion of this thinking — this Rousseauist
attitude that all appropriation is robbery and injustice — that matters
here, as the practical conclusions drawn from it by Epiphanes’
disciples. For without a shadow of doubt they applied these principles,
practising a free and common ownership of women and chattels. The awe of
the Christian writers, the horror one reads between the lines of their
testimonies, suffice to confirm it. No doubt the Carpocratians also
opposed all institutions: marriage, family, Church, Authority in all its
guises. A total refusal accompanied by sovereign contempt.
For the Carpocratians, the Gnostic’s first task was therefore to use up
the substance of evil by combatting it with its own weapons, by
practising what one might call a homeopathic asceticism. Since we are
surrounded and — pulverized by evil, let us exhaust it by committing it;
let us stoke up the forbidden fires in order to burn them out and reduce
them to ashes; let us consummate by consuming (and there is only one
step, or three letters, between ‘consuming’ and ‘consummating’) the
inherent corruption of the material world. This ‘homeopathic’ doctrine
of salvation explains one of the most curious aspects of Carpocratian
teaching: the belief in metempsychosis. If the soul during the course of
this life has not succeeded in experiencing everything before death, if
there still remain certain forbidden areas it has not penetrated, some
part of evil it has yet to consume, then it must live again in another
body until ‘it has acquitted its duty to all the masters of the cosmos.’
This threat — which is virtually a curse — hanging over the future lives
of the disciple must certainly have incited him to take the plunge
straight away, to ‘have done with’ these masters of the cosmos in his
present life, to ‘wipe out’ his debts to evil at a single stroke — that
is to say, in a single existence. Contrary to what one might be tempted
to make of this idea, it is a question of asceticism and not of
indulgence in pleasure. Nowhere in their teachings did the Carpocratians
suggest that man was evil, only that this world had been perverted by
inferior angels; it therefore follows that the disciple must have
experienced the same feelings as Epiphanes when confronted with earthly
injustice and heavenly justice, and that it must have pained him to
commit evil. If free love and communal ‘orgies’ — a term used by
Christian authors — were surely a rather agreeable form of asceticism,
and no doubt eagerly pursued, it was not necessarily the same with all
other forms of ‘consummation,’ about which, in any case, we know almost
nothing. Did they systematically practise incest, abortion, even
infanticide (as did certain other sects of whom we shall have more to
say later) ? St. Irenaeus tells us that one of Carpocrates’ disciples,
prettily named Marcellina, came to Rome to spread his teaching there
‘with painted icons, illuminated with gold, representing Jesus,
Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle.’
While it is true that the Gnostics had a propensity for distorting the
texts of the Gospels — and even rewriting them when necessary — they
could hardly have quoted Jesus as saying:
‘Suffer little children to come unto me that I may murder them.’
The legends that were rife in pagan circles regarding the ‘abominable
rites of the Christians,’ by which were meant the eating of foetuses and
other banquets of this kind, were, in fact, based on a misunderstanding.
What seems certain is that in the case of an unwanted pregnancy the
Carpocratians did not hesitate to practise abortion. Numerous Gnostic
documents are quite clear on this matter. But their teaching, in its
very nature, advised against procreation: why bring a creature into the
world only to teach him later on that his sole task is to escape from it
as swiftly as possible? These ‘accidents’ must certainly have occurred
in the communities that practised communal love. But nowhere in the
Carpocratian texts can one find the slightest encouragement either for
procreation or for infanticide.
There is, however, one interesting detail to be found in the Christian
authors’ testimonies concerning the Carpocratians; it is mentioned
especially by St. Irenaeus and later by Eusebius of Caesarea. It is the
use of drugs and various ingredients during communal orgies and
banquets.
‘They also practice magic,’
St. Irenaeus tells us,
‘incantations, love philtres and agapes, the evocation of the spirits of
the dead and the spirits of dreams, as well as other forms of necromancy
for, so they say, they have power over the princes and over the creators
of this world and over all other creatures. They have, indeed, given
free rein to all their aberrations by claiming that they are totally at
liberty to perpetrate any act they feel like, for it is human law (they
say) which makes a distinction between that which is good and that which
is evil. Also, by passing on from one body to another, the human soul
must exhaust every kind of experience. I dare not say or hear or even
think what things have been going on in our cities. But their writings
declare it: The soul must have experienced everything before death.’
And St. Irenaeus states a little farther on:
‘That done, the soul will no longer have need of a body. And they add
that Jesus taught his Apostles a secret doctrine and charged them to
transmit it to those who would be capable of understanding it. It is
faith and love which save. All the rest is a matter of indifference.’
One clear fact emerges from these texts: the Carpocratian orgies were
definitely based on ritual. This ritual involved magic, love potions,
and necromancy. Here we are a long way from Basilides and Valentinus.
But on the other hand we are coming closer to Simon Magus, who used
‘sorceries’ and accomplished ‘many prodigious feats.’ Of course, one
must remind oneself that the Christian authors — with one exception, of
whom we shall speak later — had access only to indirect evidence, and
they could have been mistaken as to the meaning and nature of these
rites; they could even have confused the Carpocratians with some other
Hermetist, non-Gnostic group.
Nevertheless, the use of philtres — probably aphrodisiacs — is an
interesting pointer, for one finds it again in other sects. Apart from
the use of aphrodisiacs, incense, and various potions or philtres, it
does not seem that the Carpocratians made use of drugs, in the proper
meaning of the term.
And in any case these magical practices were certainly no more than
accessory to the Carpocratian doctrine. What singles it out — over and
above the ritual and the teaching itself — is this overt, persistent
call to carnal and social insurrection, this absolute contempt for all
the laws and conventions of this world, and it is through this attitude
that we may discern, struggling to decipher words weighed down with
darkness and with time, the figures of these eminent men, and the
radiant message of Epiphanes.
“I am the voice of awakening in the eternal night.”
― Gnostic Hymn
It is to St. Epiphanius that we owe the only first-hand account we have
of a Gnostic community. In his work, Panarion or Remedies Against the
Heresies, he lists the sects known to him in his own day, that is to
say, in the fourth century: there are sixty of them. This list is
probably not exhaustive but in any case the exact number of Gnostic
sects scattered throughout the Near East from the third century on is
unimportant. The reader will not be surprised by their number and wide
distribution since the reasons for this have already been shown.
In spite of their multiplicity and the often confusing nature of their
mythology, these sects retain a common feature: they are all Gnostic,
that is to say, they propound the same overall scheme to explain the
genesis and history of the world; one finds the same archetypes, the
same primordial tragedy, the same partition of the universe into an
inferior world of darkness and a superior world of light. The only
distinctions between one cosmology and another lie in the processes
which brought about this alienating separation and the celestial
personages who are involved in it — Aeons, Archons, Mother, Father,
Sophia, Barbelo.
It is not the purpose of this book to make an inventory of these
differences, nor to examine in detail the tangled undergrowth of Gnostic
sects, in the manner of a naturalist of souls. It is my preferred aim to
try to seize upon the common points which distinguish them as a whole
from all other religious systems of their time, and to do this through
an examination of the archetypal visions which are at the roots of
Gnosticism and through the rites and everyday attitudes which proceed
from them. For the essential bond between all these groups certainly
seems to be this radical rejection of the world, this existential
agonizing over man’s fate, this urgent need to create a soul for
oneself, and the feeling, so typical of the Gnostics, that everything is
given to man at birth, but that he gains nothing thereby. The rites,
practices, and initiations to which they submitted were not gratuitous
games designed to fill up their leisure time and justify their 63
theories, but genuinely ascetic exercises, techniques of a vital and
singular nature designed to overcome the pitfalls of nothingness and
force open the gates of immortality. Amongst all these sects, there are
three which immediately strike one as being very close neighbours: the
Ophites, the Sethians, and the Peratae. No doubt specialists in
Gnosticism will cavil at my linking them together, but I do so here, and
even identify them with one another, because all three offer an almost
identical vision of the alienating mechanisms of this world, starting
from the same archetypal image: the Serpent.
Moreover, the Ophites take their name from the Greek word ophis, meaning
snake. For them, the whole history of the world begins and ends with the
Serpent. They choose the most unified and the most universal symbol —
that of the snake biting its own tail — to represent the destiny of the
universe and the continual cycle that goes from the One to the All and
comes back from the All to the One. This formula may well appear to be
an abstract and arbitrary statement, but, in fact, it is an expression
of the most concrete thinking, common to many of the earth’s peoples:
the coils and writhings of the snake are symbolic of the laws inherent
to this world, being at once their sign and their image. Every snake
biting its tail becomes a circle, a circle which the Gnostics discover
over and over again at all levels: the cosmic level, where it is called
Leviathan and its rings encircle the whole of the Hebdomad (the seven
planetary circles ranging from the Earth to Saturn), thus constituting
the ring that divides the domain of darkness from the domain of light;
the terrestrial level where, under the name of Ocean, its complex
windings encircle our planet like a gigantic river (and the analogy
between water, river, and snake is a familiar one); at the human level,
where its coils constitute the intestines, wherein foodstuffs undergo
metamorphosis and life is nourished and sustained.
Thus, the snake resides everywhere, at all levels of the created
universe, in the body of man, at the extremities of the earth, and at
the confines of the sky. He surrounds, separates, protects, and assumes
all the life-processes. Naturally, this image is also to be found, in an
objectified form, in the Gnostic myths and theories. Where else would
one find the snake, if not at the sources (in the literal and in the
figurative meaning of the word) of all youth and all knowledge, at the
roots (where snakes like to nest) of the trees of Life? It is precisely
because of his two powers: the ability to overcome death (by his
successive metamorphoses), and the possession of primordial knowledge
regarding the true nature of the world, that the Gnostics see the snake
as man’s first Initiator and also as the first Rebel in history. In
Eden, it is he who sets himself against the authoritarian order of
Jehovah, the false God, and reveals to man the secrets of his birth and
destiny.
In Gnostic cosmology, this reflection is taken even further. It is
interesting to note how the sects mentioned above imagined the means the
snake employed to ‘liberate’ Adam and Eve. He did this, quite simply, by
‘seducing’ Eve in the Garden of Eden, that is, by penetrating her. But,
say the Sethians, the serpent also ‘seduced’ Adam in the same way. In
other words, he deflowered, through the appropriate apertures, both the
ancestors of humanity, thus providing them with a double revelation:
pleasure and knowledge. For the Gnostics, this act evidently had the
force of example and no doubt certain of them did also practice sodomy
in the name of the serpent, as a ritual repetition of his first act, a
way of opening up the ‘passages’ of knowledge and thereby unsealing the
blind eyes of the flesh. One can well imagine how horrified the
Christians were at this individual interpretation of Genesis and the
Gnostic’s practical application of it! But it is also beyond question
that this practice of sodomy, whether by way of exploration,
consumption, or consummation of Eros in all his forms, was nothing more
than one among many techniques of erotic asceticism: normal coitus,
lesbianism and no doubt fellatio (a strict enactment of the image of the
snake biting its tail). The term inversions, so oddly used by
sexologists to designate these heteromorphous erotic practices, would
certainly have delighted the Gnostics: was it not their aim, in this
domain as in all others, to bring about a total inversion of the values
and the relationships between man, his fellow-creatures, and the world?
The Peratae take their name from the Greek peran, which means to
overcome, to pass beyond. Moreover, they explained themselves in these
terms:
‘We are the only ones who know the laws of generation and the path by
which man entered into this world, therefore we are the only ones who
know how to walk this path and overcome corruption.’
No doubt the Peratae achieved this ‘overcoming’ through the same
heteromorphous erotic techniques, re-enacting the Serpent’s first act
which remained the essential symbol of their cosmology and their
soteriology:
‘Just as a magnet will attract only iron to itself, and amber only
scraps of paper, so the Serpent, to the exclusion of all others,
attracts from this world only that perfect race formed in the image of
the Father, made of the same essence as He Himself is made and which He
sent down here below.’
As for the Sethians, who took their name from the third son of Adam,
born after the death of Abel (and not of Eve but of the demon Lilith,
according to Hermetist traditions), they developed a cosmology very
similar to that of the Ophites and the Peratae, but insisted still more
strongly on the sexual element. Throughout their texts, the entire
history of the world reads like an erotic novel, a cosmic fornication
between the original powers and the Aeons of the universe.
If one were to analyse the erotic vision of the Sethians in greater
depth, one could say that they especially favoured the feminine sex —
largely through the importance they accorded to the eye, which is a
reflection of the divine pneuma and the place in which the luminous
emulsion of the true God is deposited like a seed from on high — whereas
the Ophites and the Peratae, through their exaltation of the snake,
favoured the masculine sex. This predominance of the female sex is
evident again in the Sethians’ image of the world, for the entire
universe is visualized as a matrix carrying the virtualities of all
creatures in the form of imprints, just as, according to them, one can
see the imprints of the life-to-be in the striae which mark the belly of
a pregnant woman. They find this image of the pregnant belly reflected
yet again in both earth and sky — in the rotundity of the one and the
domed shape of the other. To look at the abdomen of a pregnant woman is
to see the universe in miniature. Moreover, everything is so closely
bound together, so interwoven and imbricated in these revealing
analogies, that the woman’s labour, the efforts she must make to expel
the child, is, according to the sayings of the Sethians, an exact
reproduction of the contractions and the obstetric process through which
the world itself came into being. They use the image of the sea to evoke
this process — swelling, subsiding, heaving, as wave follows wave
beneath the fury of the wind, for it was from a wave that man was born,
a wave that, impelled by the fecundating wind, by the divine Breath,
rose up to the sky, where it received the seed of the Spirit and then,
pregnant with all our destinies, fell back upon the shores of this
world. Foam, winds, whirlpools, the uterine cries of waves big with the
seeds of heaven, a torrential childbirth brought forth in the midst of
the cyclones of the Pneuma, the Wind which, once again, is based on the
image of the Serpent:
‘... for the impetuous and terrible Wind unleashes its whirlwinds like a
winged serpent unwinding its coils. And it was through this wind,
through this winged Serpent that creation began. The light and the
Pneuma were received into the chaotic womb of the waters and the
Serpent, the wind of darkness, the first-born of the waters, penetrated
therein and the womb conceived and engendered man.’
And so we see repeated everywhere — on land (at the foot of the tree of
life), or in the water (close to the shores of the first world) — the
reptilian coitus to which we owe our existence.
It does not require much imagination to see that this ophidian
cosmology, this vision of the snake as begetter, initiator, and
deflowerer, would have found its expression in the ritual practices of
these sects. In fact, St. Epiphanius describes an ophidian rite in an
account which seems to refer to the Ophites. The ceremony unfolds as
follows:
Bread is brought in and piled up on a table in the centre of the hall of
initiation. Then a coffer is brought in containing a tame snake. The
creature is taken out and put on the loaves while the customary prayers
are being recited. The snake uncoils itself, slithers over the bread and
the mere fact of this contact, together with the power of the prayers,
suffices to consecrate the loaves. They are gathered up and each man or
woman present takes communion by kissing the snake on the mouth and then
eating a piece of bread.
The serpent is therefore credited with the same power as the
consecratory words in the Christian liturgy: the power to transform
bread into the eucharist.
This simple rite — and all the mythology it implies — is a clear
indication of the gulf that already separated the Gnostics from the
Christians. For the latter, the snake is, par excellence, the utterly
damned beast. For the Gnostics, he is the chosen one. Here, then, we see
the working of that mechanism, that inversion o f values and symbols,
which was an aspect of the counter-life led by the Gnostics, a mechanism
which tended to favour, to invest with power, light, and efficacy all
those whom the orthodox tradition looks upon as the damned: Seth, the
Serpent, Cain. It is these first Rebels in the history of the world whom
the Gnostics were to raise to the highest dignity, to claim as the
founders of their sect and the authors of their esoteric books. Their
mythical history thus transmutes itself into a counter-history which
places the great rebels in the foreground. There existed, for example, a
sect of Cainites who venerated Cain because he had killed his brother,
denied the bond of blood, and thus had become the first to oppose one of
the primary alienating laws of this world: the law of the family. It
would be wrong to conclude from this, however, that the Cainites
preached and practiced fratricide. What they undoubtedly venerated in
Cain — and, similarly, what the Ophites, the Sethians, and the Peratae
venerated in the snake — was an image, a mythical model, an act of
rejection whose import was positive for them because it set itself
against the order of an evil world at a time when all things were still
possible. Later, the situation was no longer the same, and the Cainites
had no recourse other than a refusal to procreate and found families, a
refusal to submit to the alienating order of legally constituted
communities. But in each case this refusal has the same purpose: it is
an attempt to reconstitute the original unity of the world, to
rediscover that time when nothing was yet divided, to regain once more
the innocence of Eden. This explains the varied and perplexing nature of
the grounds on which each sect chose to do battle against the
fragmentation of this world. Some of these grounds were purely symbolic.
For instance, in the case of the Adamites, of whom St. Augustine tells
us that they practiced ritual nudity and
‘assemble naked, both men and women; naked, they listen to sermons,
naked they pray, naked they celebrate the sacraments and say that,
because of this, their church is paradise.’
Or those Saccophores, that is to say, the wearers of sackcloth, who took
against alienating clothes and dressed in sacks or in cast-offs, in
anything that would express a rejection of the gulf dividing the rich
from the poor.
In this way, each sect chose its own field of action — no matter how
humble it might appear — and some of them confined themselves to this
partial insubordination. But the most significant battlefield, the most
highly-charged in terms of outrage, revolt and liberation, is still the
domain of sex. It is the one deliberately chosen by several curious
sects whose adherents are called — most improperly — the licentious
Gnostics.
In about the year 335 AD, St. Epiphanius went to Egypt to study the
teachings of the Desert Fathers. He stayed first in Alexandria, and it
was there that a unique experience befell him, an experience he
deplored, but to which we owe our only eye-witness account of a Gnostic
sect. Epiphanius was then twenty years old and, it seems, still naïvely
innocent. This explains why he saw not the slightest malice in the
proposals of several young and pretty Gnostic women who persuaded him
that they alone held the key to his salvation. He followed them, was
introduced to members of the sect, became familiar with some of their
works which he was given to read, and — probably once only — attended a
group ritual. The experience was shattering, and the horrified
Epiphanius recovered from it with some difficulty, whereupon he ran to
the Bishop of Alexandria to denounce the outrageous scenes he had
witnessed. As a result of his action, twenty-four Gnostics were
excommunicated. Let us note, incidentally, that this shows the size and
importance of this sect. Membership was confined to the ‘chosen
Vessels,’ the ‘urns of felicity,’ which meant the prettiest Gnostic
women, and recruiting must have been highly successful, for this
particular sect alone boasted at least a hundred members. Let us also
note that these Gnostics called themselves Christians and formed part of
the Church up until the day when, through Epiphanius’ intervention, they
were driven out.
The sect in question was one of those grouped together under the generic
name of Barbelognostics. I will give a brief summary of their doctrine
since it is essential to an understanding of the scenes that follow.
They took their name from Barbelo, the female power who lived in the
eighth heaven (the upper circle of the Ogdoad), whence she commanded the
Archons. She herself was the offspring of the unknown Father, the real
God. She bore a son called Sabaoth who reigned over the seventh heaven.
And it was here that everything went wrong. For, instead of recognizing
the authority of his Mother and submitting to the true God, Sabaoth
believed himself to be the true God and claimed dominion over all
creation. Moreover, he was quite explicit on this point:
‘I am,’
he said,
‘the Eternal One. There is no other God but me.’
Faced with this usurpation, Barbelo realized that the fate of the world
had gone awry and she must remedy the consequences of her son’s
insubordination. But how? By seducing the Archons one by one so as to
lure them away from Sabaoth’s influence. The Barbelognostic text says:
‘She showed herself to them in an impressive form, seduced them and
collected their sperm with the aim of absorbing back into herself the
Power that had become scattered in several different beings.’
Such is the first act through which the salvation of the world is
inaugurated: Barbelo’s power, fragmented in each being in the form of
sperm, must be ‘recovered,’ the primary unity must be reconstituted.
It is not difficult, therefore, to imagine the formula for the
Barbelognostic ritual: it is a reenactment of Barbelo’s deed, in other
words, a gathering-up of the sperm of each male present. It was this
ritual that the horrified Epiphanius attended.
They own their women communally and, in case a stranger should arrive,
they have a sign of recognition which is exchanged between the sexes: on
shaking hands, each tickles the other’s palm, a sign that the newcomer
belongs to their religion. As soon as they have thus acknowledged one
another, they fall to feasting. Exotic dishes are served and everyone —
even the poor — partakes of meat and drinks wine. When they are
completely sated and, if I may so express it, have filled their veins
with a super-abundance of energy, they fall to debauchery. The man
leaves his place beside his wife, saying to her: ‘Get up and perform the
agape (love-union) with our brother.’ Then the wretches set to
fornicating, all together, and although I blush at the very idea of
describing their unclean practices, I will not hesitate to disclose
them, for they themselves have no shame in their performance. Once they
are coupled together, and as if this crime of prostitution were not bad
enough for them, they offer their infamy to the heavens: the man and the
woman gather the man’s sperm in their hands, raise their eyes to heaven,
and with their hands full of their uncleanness, offer it to the Father,
saying: ‘We offer you this gift, the body of Christ.’ Then they eat of
it and take communion with their own sperm, saying: ‘Here is the body of
Christ, here is the Paschal Lamb for which our bodies suffer, for which
they confess the passion of Christ.’ They do exactly the same with the
woman’s menstruation. They collect the blood of her impurity and take
communion with it in the same manner, saying, ‘Here is the blood of
Christ.’ But, whilst they practise these obscenities, they preach that
one must not beget children, for it is purely out of sensuality that
they indulge in these shameful acts. They perform the voluptuous act and
stop just at the point of satisfaction, collecting their sperm to
prevent it from penetrating any farther, and then they eat the fruit of
their shame.
Let us pause for a moment and summarize this ritual in less outraged
tones: we note the practice of owning their women in total community;
agapes or orgies during which transient couples make love
indiscriminately (it goes without saying that no sentimental choice is
involved in these acts which are, let us repeat, conceived of as an
ascetic discipline); the practice of coitus interruptus to avoid
impregnation and in order to collect the sperm; finally, the
consecration of the sperm which is transsubstantiated into the body of
Christ and the Eucharist, in other words, spermatophagy. Further, let us
observe that this ritual is strictly heterosexual and involves no act of
sodomy. The latter might, of course, seem to be the simplest means of
diverting the sperm from the path of fecundation, but the archetypal
model forbids it, indeed, it implies quite the contrary — participation
and probably initiative on the part of the female, following Barbelo’s
example, and from this one can infer the probable custom of fellatio. No
doubt Epiphanius turned his shocked eyes away from this act. But let us
go on:
When one of them accidentally allows his sperm to penetrate too far and
the woman becomes pregnant, listen to the still more abominable things
that they do. They extirpate the embryo as soon as they can take hold of
it with their fingers, take this abortion, pound it in a kind of mortar,
mix it with honey, pepper and various revolting condiments including
perfumed oils, then they assemble together — a veritable herd of swine
and curs — and each one takes communion, dipping his fingers into this
pate of abortion. The ‘meal’ concluded, they end the ceremony with this
prayer: ‘We have not allowed the Archon of Voluptuous Pleasure to make
fools of us. We have remedied our brother’s error.’ This, in their eyes,
is the perfect Communion. They practise other abominations of all kinds.
During their meetings, when they enter into a state of ecstasy, they
smear their hands with the filth of their sperm, spread it everywhere
and, with their hands thus sullied and their bodies stark naked, they
pray that through this action they may obtain free access to the
presence of God.
There is apparently no reason to doubt Epiphanius’ testimony. If we
possessed eye-witness accounts of other sects, they would surely
describe scenes that varied only in their minor details. These
variations — implicit in the creation-myths which differ from sect to
sect — could include sodomy, incest between brother and sister, fellatio
and foetophagy. This last ‘variation’ is mentioned only in connection
with the Barbelognostics, but it is most unlikely that they had an
exclusive monopoly of the practice, and the rumours — current amongst
the Romans — of the secret abominations of Christian ritual, find their
explanation here: they refer only to certain Gnostic sects. Since the
latter frequently called themselves Christians, the Romans made no
distinctions between true and false devotees of Christ, which accounts
for the confusion and misunderstanding.
But, in spite of all this, one cannot give absolute credence to
Epiphanius’ report. There is something untenable about the scenes he
describes — at least in so far as the eating of the foetus is concerned,
for the Gnostics were not innovators in any other respect — and one must
also remind oneself that the prudishness, naivete, innocence and
inhibitions of many of the Christian authors prevented them from
tackling these problems as we can today, by taking them out of their
ethical context, stripping them of their emotional connotations, and
looking at them as known forms of sexual deviation.
However, the Gnostic deviations are different in kind from those the
sexologists study in that they are perfectly conscious and deliberate,
and are carried to their uttermost limit as a form of liberating and
ascensional ascetism. If they fly in the face of conventional taboos,
then it is a problem only for the consciences of others, not for the
Gnostics themselves. Of course someone is bound to hurl back the
accusation that the myths and delirious fantasies which are pleaded as
the authority for these practices are nothing but the sublimated
projection of their own cravings, and so one can argue round and round
in circles. This is what inevitably happens whenever one is confronted
by a deviation or perversion that is consciously justified and
deliberately acted out by an individual: how does one find the exact
point of departure in this cycle, this game of mirrors in which the
unconscious urge and its conscious assertion are reflected back and
forth? If we look once more at that very revealing image of the serpent
biting its own tail, we can see quite clearly where this crucial point,
the site of fusion between the impulse, its mystical translation, and
its ritual reflection lies: it is there, where the mouth joins the anus,
the point of junction between the fragmentary unconscious and the
totalizing conscious mind. I make no claim to justify these singular
practices at any level whatever, and I must admit that some of them have
only a very limited appeal for me. I have never eaten a foetus and I
must say that, until the day when I read Epiphanius’ account, the idea
had never occurred to me, not even in an oneirocritical form. But it is
conceivable that, once the mythological context of these practices was
lost and the soteriological system that produced them totally forgotten,
they simply degenerated into black magic rituals and Luciferean
practices. The Black Mass is not far removed from the Barbelognostic
ritual — certainly no farther than Sabaoth is from Lucifer — and it is
no mere chance that certain aspects of these rites are to be found,
right down to the present day, among the Luciferean sects, where they
are spiced with cabbalistic demonology. The ambivalence of the whole
Gnostic attitude, the perpetual temptation that oscillates between
rigorous asceticism and rigorous debauch (since both have the same
sateriolagical value) is to be found there and, in the historical
evolution of Gnosticism, was translated into the opposing paths of
mystic Catharism (for the first) and magic Luciferism (for the second).
As I have already noted, the term ‘Barbelognostic’ designates a number
of sects who must have based themselves on more or less the same
archetypal systems and practised the same rites. These sects, enumerated
by Epiphanius, comprised the Nicolaites, the Phibionites, the
Stratiotici, the Levitici, the Borborians, the Coddians, the Zacchaeans,
and the Barbelites. I would like to linger over two of these, the
Borborians and the Phibionites, whom certain Christian authors
considered as identical. The mistrust, horror, and sense of outrage
aroused by these sects did not die with them. To this very day, many
Christian commentators continue to be struck by the same shudder of
horror and repulsion that Epiphanius experienced when he had to speak of
them and study them. Let us take, for example, the venerable
Dictionnaire de Theologie Catholique and open it at the word Borborians:
Gnostics particularized as men of revolting immorality. Tertullian
reproaches them for their deplorable obscenity and for other
sacrilegious misdeeds. Clement of Alexandria says ‘they wallow in
voluptuous pleasures like billy-goats and plunge their souls into the
mud.’ It is the word mud — borboros — which serves to describe these
heretics on account of the obscenity of their customs. Hence their name,
which means they are unclean, like mud. Did they really wallow in mud,
or is this just a metaphor? ... They are also called Coddians (from the
Syrian codda: a dish or tray), for none can eat with them. They are
served separately, as unclean creatures, and no one can break bread with
them, on account of their infamous way of life.
One fact stands out immediately: these words do not give any definition
of the sects in question but use invective, contempt, and insult. But
they pose another and more important question regarding the names by
which the Gnostic sects were known. Generally, these names came not so
much from the Gnostics themselves as from their adversaries. It is a
phenomenon which still exists today — we see it in the history of
political sects and political heresies. It is a well-known fact that the
terms ‘deviationists, revisionists, class-traitors,’ do not define any
group , as such but simply opponents whose ‘deviationism’ may take the
most varied forms. Working from this premise, a detailed study of the
terms employed by orthodox Communist parties over the last half-century
to describe heretics of all kinds would throw a most unexpected light on
the history of the first centuries of the Church, for there one finds
exactly the same attitudes. I mention this fact only in order to point
out that a historian, several centuries hence, who set out to write a
history of the Deviationist Group during the first fifty years of
Communism (using only the orthodox political texts) could not but write
a false history, for the very good reason that such a group never
existed. We find ourselves faced with an analogous problem regarding the
Gnostics, as the names they have been given are often quite arbitrary.
Let us take the specific case of the
Borborians. Their name could be a matter of an insulting appellation of
purely Christian origin — meaning the Muddy or Dirty Ones — or a name
that the Gnostics applied to themselves, but in a different sense, of
course, to designate man’s first and congenital condition, the hylic
condition already referred to in our discussion of the Valentinians. The
word can therefore indicate any human being whatever, or, in a more
limited sense, the condition of a disciple who has joined a Gnostic
group but is not yet an initiate.
This seems still more likely with the Coddians. The isolation mentioned
in the Dictionnaire de Theologie Catholique is surely not some degrading
punishment but a ritual practice. It could refer to the first stage of
initiation, a collective retreat on the part of all the candidates,
which like all known examples of its kind would involve a temporary
withdrawal from the community. In this case, it would be a term used by
the Gnostics to designate a particular group, a term which the Christian
writers wrongly took to be the name of a separate sect. The names quoted
by Epiphanius give several interesting pointers on this subject. Thus,
the Stratiotici (meaning Soldiers), the Phibionites (meaning the Humble
Ones), and perhaps the Zacchaeans, would be terms referring to different
stages of initiation. From what we know of their customs and practices,
we can deduce that the two latter states, the Phibionites and
Zacchaeans, would be equivalent to the Perfect Ones, the Elect, the
ultimate stage of initiation through which the Gnostic gains
immortality, indestructibility, and the definitive impossibility of
being touched by any defilement.
What we do know for certain is that the Phibionites — whether they were
a separately constituted sect or the Perfect Ones within a group bearing
another name — had a fashion all their own for proving that they were
henceforth invulnerable to any sullying of the flesh. In their
cosmology, the circles which separate the earth from the Luminous World
number 365. Each of them is governed by an Aeon. To consume the
substance of evil, the Phibionite must therefore pay his dues to each
Aeon and collect his seed, 365 times during the course of 365 sexual
unions with 365 different women. In fact, this is extremely logical; it
is only the number of ‘consummations’ that is startling. But it is
dictated by the archetypal myth which, moreover, some commentators
believe to be at the origin of the daily Saint’s names on our calendar.
Be that as it may, here we have the ultimate stage of Gnostic ‘licence’:
the attempt to consume this world of dispersion in which the divine
sparks and the Pneuma are fragmented and scattered by consuming the
seeds of man and the days of the Aeons, by exhausting and using up, day
after day, the maleficent substance of time.
The practices revealed in these lines and in the commentaries they gave
rise to in their own day have provoked the greatest anger from
Christians. It is because they touch on that forbidden domain of sex,
which was always — as Freud amply demonstrated — a Pandora’s box which
nobody, whether conservative, reformer, or revolutionary, dared to open.
Only the Gnostics were bold enough to put a match to the hypothetical
gunpowder and postulate that all rebellion, all protest against the
world, all claim to spiritual or social liberation must, in order to be
effective, begin with a liberation of sex. I do not think I need repeat
here a point which I have already stressed several times: namely, that
the Gnostics do not necessarily translate this attitude into a frenetic
debauch and the daily consumption of sperm. Many Gnostics, beginning
with the greatest, Basilides and Valentinus, adhered to asceticism pure
and simple, but it was a matter of total indifference to them whether or
not their disciples followed this path.
One consequence of this attitude which was particularly innovatory in
its day was the importance accorded to women in these salvatory
asceticisms. In the rites, the cults, and the mythological speculations,
woman played a major role, as the receptacle of light and as an
initiator. The terms by which the Gnostics called her: chosen vessel,
urn of felicity, not only placed her on an equal footing with the male
but recognized her as the possessor of a favoured particle of the
original Power. One must not make the mistake of deducing from the
Gnostic orgies that woman is treated as an object here, an instrument of
pleasure, as was to be the case later on in the works of the Marquis de
Sade and in contemporary debauches, where erotism is reduced to the
level of a sensual pleasure without myth or salvation. We are
confronting one of the rare examples in history where woman appears
invested with a regenerative power and a salvatory mission. But she was
there by virtue of her sex and not as an individual. Each was a fragment
of original Woman — of Sophia or Barbelo — and during the course of
these orgies each man coupled not with a woman but with Woman. The
difference is crucial, and if the Gnostics were able to magnify sex and
at the same time reject love as a sentiment, if they achieved a total
and radical dissociation between these two domains, it was because all
the force of their love, their sense of fusion and identification, was
turned towards the true God, the distant kingdom which they could reach
only with the help of woman, through her and with her.
And so we see that in the very depths of corporeal darkness, in the
world of ash and mud that is each human body, only an all-embracing
asceticism or only the effusion of erotic desire and the ecstatic cult
of woman can revive the flickering spark we keep within us. Just as the
ash at the heart of a dying fire glows red, being the burned-out stars
of matter which has been consumed and, by the same token, ultimately
saved, so, for the Gnostic, the mental embers that glow red in the ashes
of the body, when liberated and saved through gnosis, are the sure sign
that his path will one day lead him to the circle of the stars.
“When Jesus descended into Hell, the sinners listened to his words and
were all saved. But the saints, believing as usual that they were being
put to the test, rejected his words and were all damned.”
― Marcion, Antitheses
The deviations and inversions, the spermatic and magic rites, the
mythologies and hallucinations which are attributes of the Gnostic sects
of Alexandria must not mislead us into overlooking a fundamental fact:
studied only in terms of the rites which were their practical
expression, these Gnostic attitudes seem aberrant, naive, and even
perverse. But as soon as one turns one’s attention to the masters, the
teachers and sages of Gnosticism, one encounters men of great culture
and erudition, men who scrutinized the universe, the world, and their
contemporaries with exceptional lucidity and penetration. In spite of
their relentless intolerance of the Gnostic sects and their ‘shameful’
practices, Christian authors could not but recognize the human
worthiness and the spiritual radiance of men such as Basilides,
Valentinus, Carpocrates, and many others. Such are the contradictions
and, at the same time, the riches of Gnosticism: while it satisfies all
the demands of the intellect through the lucidity and radicality of its
outlook, it sometimes dampens the ardour of sympathizers because the
application of its theories has such strange results in daily life. One
cannot with impunity play with the fire of heaven or the divine spark of
the psyche, and many Gnostics must have burned themselves at the
braziers they had deliberately set ablaze. In attempting to delve deeply
into the aggressive and destructive impulses of desire, and to liberate
and thereby exhaust them, they often played sorcerer’s apprentices of
the soul, and did so at a time when the realm of the unconscious was as
yet unknown. It is indisputable, however, that they had a presentiment
of the existence of this realm and clamoured loudly for man’s right to
burn himself in his own delirious fire. In the entire history of Western
thought — although Gnosticism is also of oriental origin and does not
wholly belong to our world — I know of no attempt that aimed so high and
was so charged with lightning flashes of insight and seeds of intuition,
no endeavour that was so fruitful in producing positive revelations. And
this is why I say again that one cannot write a history of Gnosticism as
one would write a history of the Knights Templar, the Camisards or the
Reformation. As this book progresses, as page follows page, I become
increasingly aware that Gnosticism is insidiously affecting me and
drawing my whole being into the questions that I put to it. In all that
I have written so far, where does my personal interpretation of
Gnosticism begin, where does it end? It constantly brings me back to
myself, for, throughout a history which it denied, a future destiny
which it fought against, Gnosticism never ceased to ask itself, and to
ask those who enquired into it: Who are you? Who am I to take up this
shadowy history of rejections and secrets, to retrace these deliberately
concealed paths, to try to pierce these Hermetic revelations whose very
Hermetism exasperates me but which, I am totally convinced, are not
gratuitous?
My conviction goes still further: I believe that these paths show us the
only possible way, the only way of acting in the face of the mysteries
of the world. One must try everything, experience everything, unveil
everything, in order to strip man down to his naked condition; to
‘defrock’ him of his organic, psychic, social, and historic trappings;
to decondition him entirely so that he may regain what is called by some
his choice, by others his destiny. As I write this word, decondition, I
perceive that I am reaching the very heart of Gnostic doctrine. No
knowledge, no serious contemplation, no valid choice is possible until
man has shaken himself free of everything that effects his conditioning,
at every level of his existence. And these techniques which so
scandalize the uninitiated, whether they be licentious or ascetic, this
consumption and consummation of organic and psychic fires — sperm and
desire — these violations of all the rules and social conventions exist
for one single, solitary purpose: to be the brutal and radical means of
stripping man of his mental and bodily habits, awakening in him his
sleeping being and shaking off the alienating torpor of the soul.
For my part, I find it strange that all the books written about
Gnosticism leave their authors untouched, as if it were a matter of
writing a chapter about some interesting but slightly cracked and
utterly depraved historical people. Moreover, the questions posed by the
Gnostics remain posed for all time, yet I cannot see that those who
studied them ever realized that these questions were addressed to them,
too.
I am well aware that one never writes a book that is not about oneself,
and, if the problem of the Gnostics has long interested and preoccupied
me, it can only be because it concerns me at a level of which I myself
am unaware, and of which this work can give only a superficial — and
more or less consciously veiled — analysis. Why am I particularly
attached to those who are known as the licentious Gnostics, since
historically, numerically, and philosophically speaking, they represent
only one sect among others? Am I the unwitting victim of a phenomenon
born in my own time, one which leads us to interrogate ourselves more
deeply than ever before on sexual questions? Is my need to give it
preference due to the fact that I am not sufficiently deconditioned? Or
does this Gnostic revolt against sexual taboos express a preoccupation
which is fundamental to all periods of history, because it is truly at
the roots of all liberation, but which they alone expressed, without
reticence and without inhibition?
At this stage, I find it difficult to make up my mind. However, one
aspect of this book, its options and orientations is quite deliberate
and conscious: it is not meant to be a history of Gnosticism, but rather
a meditation, an attempt to define all that remains alive, tangible, and
significant in the Gnostic movement, and still concerns us today. I
confess to a feeling that I am tackling problems that are difficult to
pin down, and chasing shadowy figures who might well challenge the
portrait I have tried to draw of them. This is not a ploy to justify the
inadequacies of this book. It is simply that I believe it is
presumptuous — and even anti-Gnostic — to violate silence and force it
to speak, and to reinstate in history (with all its inevitable
ambiguity), those who spent their whole lives vilifying it and running
away from it.
There is one aspect of Gnostic teaching that has barely been mentioned
so far, although it concerns it closely, and that is dualism. Dualism
can be understood as any vision of the universe which divides it into
two opposing, coeternal, and independent entities: Light and Darkness,
Spirit and Flesh, Good and Evil, etc. Defined in this way, dualism
appears in many ancient religions and philosophies as well as in certain
Gnostic doctrines. For Simon Magus, for instance, there certainly
existed two different worlds, two irreconcilable Gods. But this vision,
which one finds in its clearest and most fully-developed form among the
Manicheans, was not systematically adopted by all Gnostics. For many of
them — including some of those we have already discussed — the world of
evil did not appear as an autonomous entity, coeternal and coexistent
with that of good, but rather as a creation issuing from the
hyper-world, arising through error or imitation. Incidentally, it is
this distinction which explains the morality or non-morality of the
Gnostics: born of a misunderstanding, of a fall or a split, this failed
world still preserves something of the substance of the true world, and
it is on this that the Gnostic relies when taking on the monumental task
of purifying the maleficent substance. In a world where Evil was
coexistent and coeternal with Good, one cannot see how man could
‘reascend the slope,’ cross the abyss — which, in this case, would be
uncrossable — and rediscover the essence that is his salvation.
Therefore, dualism in the strict sense is not always to be found in
Gnosticism, but rather duality, a duality that is based on the genesis,
not the essence, of the universe. But it must be pointed out that this
duality evolved over the course of centuries and was expressed in forms
that came closer to true dualism by Gnostics such as the Bogomils of
Bosnia and the Cathars of Languedoc. It was also expressed by a Gnostic
of whom I have not yet spoken, who lived some time after Simon Magus and
whose work — some-what singular and marginal to the history of
Gnosticism — is worth noting. His name was Marcion.
With Marcion, Gnosticism rediscovers what it was in its very beginnings:
an effort of the rational mind, an attempt to reach a logical
understanding and, in the light of the Gospels, to rethink the problem
of the world’s existence and the destiny of man. But this thinking led
him to such radical and unforeseen conclusions that, like others of his
kind, he found himself excommunicated and driven out of the Church.
Marcion was a native of Sinop, in Pontus, on the northern shores of
Anatolia, where he was born in 85 AD. He belongs, therefore, to the same
generation as the disciples of Simon Magus.
His father was the Bishop of Sinop and Marcion was brought up entirely
in the Christian teaching. He acquired such a profound knowledge of the
Bible and the Gospels that St. Jerome describes him as a ‘veritable
sage.’ But his ideas on Christianity must have appeared very unorthodox
for his own father banned him from his community. So Marcion chartered a
boat and, like St. Paul, launched himself upon the waters, there to
preach his doctrine. Several years later, we find him in Rome, where he
settles down, frequents the Christian community and, for many a long
year, shrouds himself in silence in order to set down his ideas in
writing. The fruit of this labour is the publication, starting in 140
AD, of those Antitheses in which he expounds his theory of the world,
his interpretation of the Bible and the Gospels, and the principles
which, in his view, should govern the founding of a new Church.
I can do no more than summarize these principles here, but I must
immediately underline one outstanding fact: contrary to all other
Gnostics, Marcion wanted above all to establish a Church, to found
secure and settled communities whose Gospel would be his Antitheses.
This in itself was sufficient to get him barred from the Church, but he
continued to teach, and with considerable success it seems, for he had
thousands of disciples. Tertullian says that ‘they fill the whole
universe’ to such an extent that, for some time, they constituted a real
threat to the official Church. Three centuries later, Marcionist
churches are still to be found in Rome, Cyprus, Egypt, Palestine, and
Syria.
For Marcion, the basic problem is eminently simple. A reading of the Old
and New Testaments (it is to Marcion himself that we owe these terms,
which are common currency today) shows two universes, two incompatible
orders. The Gospels reveal a God of love and goodness, whose Son has
come down to earth for the express purpose of saving men and teaching
them fraternity, mercy and love for their neighbours. The Old Testament,
on the other hand, shows a God of justice and chastisement who
persecutes humanity and always appears surrounded by thunder and
lightning. He knows nothing of generosity, clemency, or tolerance. The
history of the world and of man, as they appear in the Bible, are made
up of crimes, massacres, and blood. They manifest a world which is
intrinsically evil and corrupt, a universe that is indisputably a
failure, and a mankind that has miscarried. Something is sadly amiss
with this creation that Jehovah is constantly forced to punish, and
wherein man lives under the permanent threat of taboos, fulminations,
and terrorization by the Creator. Therefore, says Marcion, it is
impossible that Jesus, who is the Son of God, should be the Son of
Jehovah the exterminator, or that the latter could be the Father whom
Jesus claims. Marcion arrives at the same logical conclusion as Simon
Magus: Jehovah is not the true God — The latter is the Unknown God, a
stranger to this world, the true Father whose Son is Jesus Christ.
The merit of Marcion’s system — in comparison with Simon Magus’ — is
that it is infinitely more rational and its exposition is based on a
scrupulous interpretation and a minutely-detailed philological knowledge
of Biblical and evangelic documents. He does not need to enliven this
doctrine and this vision of the world by calling upon prodigies,
sorceries, and all the magic paraphernalia with which Simon larded his
teaching. The implication of Marcion’s ideas is thus seen to be simple
but revolutionary: the Bible is not and could not be a work of
revelation, nor a Holy Scripture. The opposition between the Old
Testament and the New is total and it is expressed at all levels: in the
genesis of the universe and in the texts which narrate this event. What
the Bible describes is not the immense and grandiose work of God, but
the stultifying creation of Evil.
It would be pointless to pursue in detail all the evidence which Marcion
amasses, through quotations from the Pentateuch, to support his
Antitheses. What is significant is the specific inference Marcion draws
from them: faced with the evidence of two worlds and two messages, it is
clear that only the Gospels convey the teachings of the true God. The
Old Testament must be relegated to everlasting oblivion.
All the same, the message of the Gospels has not survived intact, it is
not entirely free of additions, interpolations, ‘revisions’ of all sorts
introduced by the Judaists and the earliest disciples of Jesus. In order
to be certain of attaining the truly divine word, Marcion purifies the
Gospels and sifts through the distortions to which they have been
submitted to find the authentic text, the only canonical work, which
will serve as a foundation for his entire doctrine. This text, beginning
with the Gospel according to St. Luke, is the one he proposes in his
Antitheses.
Without wishing to draw too many implausible and in any case debatable
parallels, I would suggest that, in its day, this original and
revolutionary attempt must have had the same impact that, in our day,
the publication of some socialist Thesis or Antithesis, repudiating the
Marxist doctrine and relying exclusively on a corrected edition of
Lenin’s speeches, would have. I know that this notion is absurd and
inadmissible since Lenin himself constantly quoted Marx as his
authority. But what interests Marcion is not solely the textual message
of Jesus — which must be reclaimed from the dense fog of distortions to
which it has already been subjected — but also the necessary work of
adaptation that he himself must do so as to render it effective and
vital in a world which is not, and has not been for a long time, the
Biblical world of nomadic shepherds. Today, we can see clearly that the
problem is not so far removed from the one faced by Socialist
interpreters of Marxism; and when the most recent and authoritative
commentators on Marx speak of ‘a rereading of Marx,’ and write essays
entitled Rereading Marx, they are using almost word for word the same
terms as Marcion himself, whose teaching could in fact be summed up in
the formula: Rereading the Bible. This was why his endeavour was so
innovatory, the reason he was judged a heretic and condemned to silence
or, at the very least, to retirement: that he sought to snatch
adolescent Christianity from its Biblical shell, to break with a
dogmatic tradition which was believed to be indispensable to its
evolution; to open up new paths; to rethink and re-evaluate the schemata
proposed by the Bible and decide whether they were valid or null and
void. In so doing, he claimed to re-orient Christianity and the new man
whom he called into being towards the future, a future still to be
fashioned, improvised, built up day by day on the basis of the Gospels
alone and thus to destroy forever the image of the false God.
It is impossible to imagine how the history of the Church might have
developed had it adapted Marcion’s theses. Obviously, its evolution
would have been utterly different, and from the second century on, it
would have taken up certain positions which, eighteen centuries later,
it is slowly beginning to make its own. However, incapable of wrenching
itself free of a tradition and a mythology which furnished it with both
an ethical framework for its message and the emotional visions without
which it would have had nothing but abstract principles, the Church was
forced for centuries to drag in its wake images, geneses, and
apocalypses which in fact were alien to it. Marcion came too early into
a world that was not yet ready to accept the liberating rupture, to
undergo the ‘harrowing revision’ which would have broken the
mooring-ropes that tied it to the Bible. Nevertheless, this far-sighted
and courageous effort did not completely die out with Marcion. The
longing for an adult Christianity, boldly confronting the problems of
its time, liberated from the everlasting references to Genesis and the
Mosaic commandments, is not altogether dead. But it is not easy to tear
oneself free of the mirages, of the factious and factitious mirror of
the Bible, wherein man has never ceased to read his own false image and
to follow his false destiny, and wherein the Church for such a long time
managed to lose its way and wander like Alice in Wonderland.
“Against whom shall we do battle, where shall we direct our attack, when
the very breath in our lungs is impregnated with the same injustice that
haunts our thinking and holds the stars in stupefaction?”
― Emile Cioran
“They spend their time doing nothing and sleeping.”
― Timothy, On the Messalians
From the fourth century onward, the history of Gnosticism changes its
locale, its nature, and its meaning. It is no longer written in the
cities but, as in its beginnings, all along the highroads of the Orient.
After leaving Egypt and dispersing throughout Mesopotamia, Armenia,
Cappadocia, Greece, Bulgaria, and later Bosnia, Gnosticism takes on very
different forms from those which we have seen hitherto. It is as if, by
a sort of cyclical return to their earliest aspirations, the Gnostics
flee the cities to take up their wanderings once more along the roads,
on the plains, and in the mountains. With only a few rare exceptions, it
is there that we shall henceforth discover the new Gnostic communities —
communities whose way of life, principles, and techniques (ascetic or
licentious) retain their autonomy and their strangeness, and whose
excesses and insubordination will once again bring down upon their heads
the thunderbolts and excommunications of the Christians. Simultaneous
with this return to the earlier wandering life, this nomadic existence
without hearth or home, this rejection of towns and all permanent
settlements, is another significant fact: the doctrine itself loses its
coherence, or at the very least its systematic character, the mythology
becomes etiolated and the written Gnostic works rarer. Nevertheless,
these groups were numerous and active and I would like to dwell on one
of them, the most spectacular, known as the Messalian sect.
Their real name — by which I mean the name they called themselves — was
the Euchites, meaning the Praying Men (‘Messalians’ is the Syrian
translation). Their beliefs recall the fundamental Gnostic themes
regarding a lower world of darkness and a higher world of light, but
they are orientated in a somewhat unusual direction, calling upon
mystical effusion rather than the demands of reason.
For the Euchites this world was the devil’s handiwork, and everything —
matter, flesh, the human soul — was impregnated with diabolical
substance. So much so that the devil was physically and psychically
present in each man, bound consubstantially to his soul. Similarly, the
history of the world — that perpetual struggle between darkness and
light — was re-enacted in the history of each individual. It is,
therefore, the task of every human being to eradicate the demon that
lives parasitically within him, and to do this by special and particular
‘shock techniques.’ Since from birth every man finds himself thrown into
a world which is subjected to the violence of the devil, he must
liberate himself through a campaign of equal violence, a ruthless combat
against the devil. Seen in this perspective, it is self-evident that
neither asceticism nor licence would be sufficient to overcome so
powerful and cunning an adversary. Those techniques are double-edged
weapons; they are, among other things, cumbrously slow and uncertain.
The daily erosion, the grinding down of evil and sin as preached by the
Gnostics of Egypt — and which in the case of the Phibionites required at
least 365 successive sexual unions — appears to the Euchites outdated
and inefficient. For them, the only sure and immediately effective
weapon is prayer. But not the traditional Christian prayer. The Euchites
practised perpetual prayer, an outpouring of the spirit every moment of
the day which plunged them into a second state, opened their souls to
the influx of the Holy Spirit, and liberated them forever from the
devil. Thus through the medium of incantatory prayer a physical and
spiritual battle was waged against the intruding demon, who was
eventually expelled by what amounted to exorcism. For this purpose the
Euchites chose the Lord’s Prayer, which they recited ceaselessly to the
point of vertigo and even unconsciousness, stimulating themselves by
dancing and by imbibing various concoctions. In this way they attained a
state of ecstasy, and possibly convulsion, during the course of which
the ‘ablation’ of the devil took place. This is why they were also known
as the Enthusiasts (a word whose etymological meaning is: possessed by
God) or the Dancers.
This is the dominant trait of the Euchites, but other interesting
aspects of their lives are known as well. Totally preoccupied with
carrying on this merciless struggle against the devil, they took little
heed of the contingencies of daily life. They refused all forms of work,
whether manual or intellectual (which led to their sometimes being
called the Lazy Men) and subsisted solely by begging. Men and women
lived together in itinerant tribes who wandered along the roads at
random (notably in the province of Osrhoëne, around Edessa), slept in
the open air and practised communal ownership of women and chattels.
They also rejected all obedience and submission to authority — whether
ecclesiastical or temporal — which made them not only vagabonds and
beggars but outlaws, too. What made it so difficult to constrain and
convert them, or even to render them harmless, was the fact that, once
they had driven out the demon, they considered themselves, like the
Pneumatics, untouched by any defilement and invulnerable to the
compromises of this satanic world. Everything became a matter of
indifference to them and one can detect a certain embarrassment, and a
no less certain irritation, on the part of the Christian authors when
writing of these libertarians of Gnosticism who accepted and performed
no matter what act of contrition and would admit to anything that was
asked of them. In the seventh century, the Christian Bishop Timothy
published a work on the heresies of his time; he writes of the Euchites
as follows:
‘In summertime, when night falls, they lie down to sleep in the open
air, men and women together in total promiscuity, and they say that this
is a matter of no consequence. They can indulge themselves with the most
delectable foods and lead the most voluptuous or the most debauched
lives for, according to them, none of this matters in the slightest.’
But what shocks the good bishop most of all is the deliberately
rebellious attitude of these vagabonds, their insolent refusal to work
and their evident propensity for doing nothing:
‘They know how to eat of the best without ever having to work for it.
And they eat whenever they feel hungry, drink when they are thirsty, at
any hour of the day, without regard to the prescribed fasts, and they
spend their time doing nothing and sleeping.’
This is why the existence and behaviour of these sects, whose numerical
importance in certain regions of the Orient was considerable from the
fifth century on (let us say, some tens of thousands of the faithful),
created a problem for the temporal powers responsible for maintaining
law and order. And they were not the only ones — on many occasions the
ecclesiastical authorities tried to disperse these groups or force them
to return to the bosom of the Church. But, in order to thwart all these
efforts, the Euchites had perfected certain techniques which totally
disconcerted their Christian interrogators. They did not hesitate to
follow the advice which Basilides had long ago given to the Gnostics of
Alexandria, that is: to abjure meekly whatever they were asked to
abjure, to submit to baptism, take communion, make the act of contrition
and, once they were allowed to go free after this proof of submission,
to return immediately to their nomadic life and their habitual
practices. Timothy never ceased to bemoan this attitude, whose real
motives he did not grasp and which he saw only as the most arrant
hypocrisy (which explains why the Euchites were also known as the
Liars). St. Epiphanius, who devotes a few lines to them while confessing
himself defeated in advance by their strange conduct, declares that it
was their habit to reply ‘Yes’ systematically to all questions put to
them. And he quotes a revealing example of Messalian response:
‘Are you patriarchs?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you prophets?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you
angels?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Are you Jesus Christ?’ ‘Yes.’
No interrogation, no excommunication could make sense under these
conditions. Let them be excommunicated, let them be forced to take
communion, the result was all the same. But since the bishops, in their
perverse obstinacy, were determined to formulate an act of accusation
against them at all costs, one with precise and justifiable charges,
they themselves were driven to use lies and hypocrisy to achieve their
ends. For example, Timothy reports that the Bishop of Edessa, on an
occasion when three of these villains had been hauled up before him,
pretended that he wanted to become a convert to their religion. The
three Euchites (evidently not so cunning as the Christians had alleged)
fell into the trap and revealed their beliefs: man is possessed by the
devil and nothing — neither baptism nor communion nor the sacraments of
the Church — can deliver him from the fiend. Only prayer, perpetual
prayer can cause the Holy Spirit to enter into him and rid him of his
demon. Now, for once, the Church had knowledge of the exact propositions
which she hastened to condemn. The three rascals were excommunicated and
returned to their life on the open road.
In this history, one point remains obscure and it seems to me an
interesting one: what was the exact nature of these prayers, these
exorcizing dances which delivered the Euchite from his demon? Obviously
the dances must have called for music. In this respect it is worth
noting that another and more ancient heresy, Montanism, had been
prevalent in the neighbouring regions two centuries earlier. It was a
mixture of Messianism, predictions as to the imminent end of the world,
and practices of an ecstatic character which were designed to procure
for the disciple an immediate vision of the Paraclete. Now this heresy
developed in Phrygia, a region known since antiquity for its frenetic,
effusive music. The Phrygian mode, played on wind instruments, was used
for orgiastic dances, Dionysian cults, and the mysteries of Cybele. It
is possible that the Euchites used analogous instruments and musical
modes which, in addition to the drinks consumed before the prayers,
provoked trances and collective possession. As to the style of their
dance, Theodoret of Cyrrhus speaks of it, in passing, thus:
‘they had ridiculous dances consisting of jumping into the air, while
they made puerile boasts that they were jumping over demons.’
The whole thing came to an end
‘in horrible bacchanales in which men and women mingled.’
Another of their beliefs, pointed out in one of the acts of accusation
which, to their very great harm, were set up against them, seems to me
still more significant. The expulsion of the demon and the presence of
the Holy Ghost permitted the Euchite to accede instantly to the world of
light. The splendours of the Pleroma were unveiled before him and
‘they claim,’
says the Act,
‘to see God with the eyes of the body.’
This was a dangerous affirmation which in other times would have led the
seer straight to the stake. For by entering into the state of ecstasy,
of indifference, of apatheia, to use the hallowed term (that is to say,
of impassivity with regard to all worldly concerns), and by acceeding to
hyper-consciousness, the Euchites crossed — or claimed that they had
crossed — the forbidden frontier which all theologies have drawn between
the intelligible (or divine) and the manifest (or human). Evagrius
Ponticus, an Anchorite in the deserts of Egypt, says:
‘Do not aspire to see either the Angels or the Powers or Christ with the
eyes of the body, on pain of falling into madness.’
The Euchites, it seems, crossed the great divide. Nothing else in their
disorderly, vagabond lives, neither their refusal to submit to any
social constraint nor their ecstatic dances, had the sacrilegious force
of this simple phrase. More than anything else, it cast them out of the
Christian — indeed, out of the human — world.
“They denounce wealth, they have a horror of the Tsar, they ridicule
their superiors, condemn the nobles and forbid all slaves to obey their
masters.”
― Oosmas the Priest, Against the Bogomils
In the mountains and forests of Bosnia and on the plateaux of
Herzegovina — and sometimes lost in the wilderness — are thousands of
sculptured tombs and dozens of necropoli that have posed an enigma to
history and archaeology for the past two centuries. Their number, their
arrangement, their sculptures, the inscriptions on certain of them
attest to the existence of important communities with a hierarchy and
precise customs, whose history is still very largely unknown. The
regions where they predominate indicate that they were peasant
communities, grouped around several fiefs, at the heart of secluded
areas which long escaped the jurisdiction of the Orthodox and Catholic
Churches of Serbia. The mystery appeared to be solved when these curious
constructions were attributed to the Bogomil heretics. The Bogomils,
whose name means the Loved Ones or the Friends of God, were a
Gnostic-like sect, the heirs to neo-Manichean traditions which emerged
in Bulgaria from the ninth century onward. The sect split into several
groups, one of which took root in Bosnia and in Herzegovina, in the
heart of present-day Yugoslavia, over a period of several centuries.
These villages, castle-fortresses, and whole provinces acquired by the
Bogomils are a far cry from the miniscule Alexandrian groups. Gnosticism
enters history, implants itself in the bosom of national communities,
founds its own churches with priests and deacons and becomes a veritable
temporal power in itself. By the time of the Paulicians, another Gnostic
sect contemporary with the Messalians, Gnosticism had already ceased to
be a clandestine doctrine taught in secret or in the solitude of the
desert; as a hotbed of revolt against all the temporal powers,
Gnosticism inevitably found itself confronted with the movement of
history, and the repressive measures to which it was subjected compelled
it to forge a social and political body, an autonomy, a destiny all its
own. Wherever it sets foot, wherever the word is spread, it creates
pockets of rebellion — religious or political — against the official
Church and the secular authority which is its expression. One therefore
finds the new Gnostics rising up by turns against Byzantium, the Slav
invaders of the Balkans, the Orthodox noblemen of Serbia. Gnosticism now
recruits its devotees from essentially rural areas. Moreover, the
peasants will be more sensitive to its political and social implications
than its religious ones. But, through this bias, the Gnostic groups
become virtually communities of insurgents, gathering together thousands
of peasants and artisans, and obliged henceforth to establish their own
laws, their own organization, and even their own army. Clearly there is
something paradoxical about this destiny. Born out of a radical
rejection of history and society, Gnosticism by its very success gives
birth in its turn to a history and to societies, ephemeral no doubt but
whose very existence and tragic fate will nevertheless long remain
exemplary.
If the Bosnian tombs and necropoli are indeed of Bogomil origin, then
they show the extent to which Gnosticism has changed its face and its
history although its doctrine in itself always remains the same. For the
first time, one finds oneself in the presence of historically and
geographically stable communities, and also of carved monuments,
material vestiges — in short, a Gnostic art. On its own, this simple
fact would tend to make one doubt whether these sculptured tombs and
ornamental monuments could really be the work of groups professing
Gnosticism, for nothing up until this point has been more alien to the
Gnostic mentality than a concern to leave material traces, especially
works of art, behind them. Art, like history, nourishes time and
presupposes its existence. It is inevitably written into a time-span
which the Gnostic rejects. It is not so much the absurdity or the
futility of aesthetic feeling which is in question here as that of its
expression. If one could imagine men such as Basilides, Valentinus and
Carpocrates showing a concern for matters of this nature (an unthinkable
supposition in my opinion), they would have created nothing but a purely
symbolic art, didactic perhaps and, in any case, outside of time. But
the art of the Bosnian tombs and necropoli is specifically an expression
of the rites, games and combats, the daily or religious life of the
communities concerned. It is the deliberate reflection, affirmed and
repeated everywhere, of the principal moments of their earthly life.
What does one see on these tombs? Scenes of rural and feudal life —
women dancing, men engaged in chivalrous combats or archery contests,
people standing either with both arms raised or the right hand only,
fingers spread, deliberately enlarged, in the posture of swearing an
oath, perhaps, and around and above them the same cosmic symbols: the
sun and the moon.
Some years ago, I visited the sites where the most important of these
tombs are to be found, at Radimjle, Cicevac, Hodovo and Boljuni. Most of
them are covered in moss and lichen which is gradually effacing and
eroding the carved scenes. Rain has gnawed into the stone and sometimes
it is only by tracing the outline with the finger that one can recognize
a form, a human figure, an animal running, a crumbling planet, the curve
of a bow on this granite which, little by little, is returning to its
original blankness. An atmosphere of intense mystery emanates from these
hundreds of monoliths lost in the forests or on the deserted plateaux,
but also one of fear and insecurity in the face of death. These
inscriptions aimed at protecting the deceased from profanation of his
tomb, these symbols which accompany him everywhere like guardians
keeping vigil over his soul, are bearers of an ambiguous message made up
of certainty and apprehension, wherein the very gestures of the dead
man, his rigid and ritual posture attempt, perhaps, to conjure up the
mysteries of the invisible world. Nothing of all this appears to be
truly Gnostic and I am doubtful to this day about the religious
adherence of these thousands of dead souls. What is certain is that
these necropoli are the only vestiges of a society which must have been
long-lived and intense: nothing remains of the villages and castles
where so many beings, now forgotten, must once have lived. Not the
smallest ruin, the faintest trace in these mountains where trees and
grasses have covered over the soil and often uprooted the monuments
themselves.
Be that as it may, one thing at least emerges from this: the fact that,
henceforth, the war against Gnosticism has also changed. Excommunication
and imprisonment are no longer enough.
Religious and political rebellion by these organized communities entails
measures of repression, on the part of the powers-that-be, which will
consist of purely and simply annihilating all those who refuse to
submit, burning their churches, setting fire to their villages, razing
their fortresses to the ground and setting up stakes where the Bogomils,
by the hundreds, will throw themselves into the flames. What was it
about this heresy that provoked such ruthlessness, such repression? It
preached the stand we have long known: a total refusal to compromise
with a damned world contaminated by evil and the devil. But this
refusal, in the context of this particular epoch, turned principally
against the official Churches, against their flaunted wealth and their
abhorrent symbols. The Bogomils detested the cross because Christ had
died on it and it became, in their eyes, the symbol of his torment. They
rejected the whole of the Old Testament, the essential dogma, the
Virgin, and all the Christian mythology. They practised a stern
asceticism — henceforth no more debauchery or licence, for the
historical struggle implies another and equally pitiless struggle,
against the temptations of the body. They rejected procreation and
marriage; they despised work, riches, honours, social distinctions.
Among themselves, each considered all others as his equals. One single
distinction — an important one, however — marked their relationships.
Since Bogomilism developed above all in a rural milieu where it was
vital to work, to cultivate the soil, and to make clothes to ensure the
survival of the communities, the rule provided for two states, two
separate functions: the Perfect Ones led a totally Gnostic life, that is
to say they lived as ascetic mendicants, taught in the provinces,
initiated novices, and administered the sacraments.
The others, the Auditors or Disciples, constituted the masses who were
permitted to marry, procreate, work, and thus ensure the material
survival of the group. But this two-fold revolt against the Church and
the Authorities — the rejection of the cross, the dogma and the Orthodox
sacraments, as well as the refusal to obey the secular powers — soon
drew a reaction from the authorities. Now we see thousands of soldiers
and Christian priests invading these provinces and indulging to their
heart’s content in pillage and plunder, burning everything and
massacring everybody in their path. All this bloodshed testifies not
only to the odious intransigence of the Church and its Orthodox rulers,
but also to that of the Bogomils who, faithful to their oaths and their
convictions, refuse to abjure, preferring to hurl themselves into the
flames. And it is this suicidal course which will henceforth follow
Gnosticism where-ever it goes. Faced with the shame of compromise, of
submission to the Church and to the army of Satan, Gnostics will uphold
the sovereign purity of their own faith, and proclaim it even on the
threshold of death.
This attitude will win a halo for the heretics, one that their martyrs
will wear for a long time to come. Henceforth nothing but war, the
stake, and genocide will succeed in quelling the rebels of God. And even
then Gnosticism will not be entirely vanquished. It will be reborn
elsewhere, further afield, in the silence and solitude of other
mountains, in the heart of the Pyrenees and of the Corbières, where its
history will repeat itself, with the same cycle of grandeur and tragedy,
up until the funeral pyre of Montségur.
“Most contemporary philosophers postulate the existence of a sentient
and more or less conscious Anima Mundi to which all things belong; I
myself have dreamed of the deaf cogitations of stones.... And yet, the
only known facts seem to indicate that suffering and consequently joy
and, by the same token, good and what we call evil, justice and that
which, to us, is injustice and, finally, in one form or another, the
understanding necessary to distinguish between these opposites, exist
solely in the world of blood and possibly that of sap.... All the rest,
by which I mean the mineral kingdom and the realm of spirits, if it
exists, is perhaps passive and insentient, beyond our pleasures and our
pains, or this side of them. It is possible that our tribulations are
nothing but an infinitesimal exception in the universal pattern and this
could explain the indifference of that immutable substance we piously
call God.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss
We have nothing to learn from evil. The world in which the Gnostics
lived, whether Alexandrian, Slav, or Provençal, was everywhere and at
all times a world of injustice, violence, massacre, slavery, poverty,
famine, and horrors patiently borne or savagely resisted. And the
Gnostics spoke truly when they said that to experience misery, to let
oneself be eaten away by this corrosive rust, is a futile experience. It
needs — or needed — all the barefaced hypocrisy of Christian morality to
convince the robbed, starved, and exploited masses that their trials
were a blessing and would open the gates of a better world to them.
It will be clear to the reader that the word evil is used here in a
sense which is outside any ethical or religious context. Evil is simply
all that which contributes to the world’s entropy. And obviously this
evil cannot open any gates nor enrich or awaken any part of man
whatsoever since it is, in its very essence, that which alienates all
consciousness, that which consolidates the false order of the universe.
Pseudo-knowledge, believed to be gained through suffering, the
fallacious redemption gained through ordeal, is nothing then but a lie,
a lie that fails to recognize — or pretends not to recognize — the
absurd and alienating nature of evil. Gnostic soteriology is quite
explicit on this point: evil is never at any moment the outcome of a
divine plan; it is not a natural or inherent necessity but the product
of an error or misunderstanding. It is a material cancer which has
grafted itself on to the ethereal particles of the hyper-world, a
spiritual chancre which we must extirpate from our psyche instead of
nurturing it on the pretext that it will bring about our redemption.
But the nature of the Gnostic’s struggle against evil obviously sprang
from the times in which they lived. Their mode of speculation and the
specific feeling that here and now, during this life, they must forge a
soul capable of escaping from the visceral and cosmic corrosion, meant
that they took up arms above all on the spiritual plane. It was in man’s
very consciousness, at the thinking source of his being that they
confronted the enemy. And they did this by trying to achieve gnosis, a
true awareness of themselves, of man’s place in the universe and of his
role in its destiny.
The Gnostic paths which we have traced briefly in these pages are not
the only ones. I would even say that, in a sense, they all led into a
blind alley. The war that the Christian Church waged against the
Gnostic’s attitudes from the very beginning compelled them, little by
little, to do battle on the Christian’s own terrain by establishing
counter-Churches or, if you prefer, heretical movements which limited
the field of action and thought to the purely religious domain. Since
its earliest origins, with men such as Valentinus, Carpocrates and
Basilides, Gnosticism had sought above all a non-religious or an
a-religious attitude, for it was anxious to bypass the absurd antinomy
of faith versus knowledge, the sacred versus the profane. They knew that
the sacred, like the profane, is vitiated by evil and that the solution
could not consist in opposing the first to the second, but in overcoming
both one and the other and liberating oneself from the false dilemmas
into which they drive us.
This position clearly implied a total questioning of the very existence
of the sacred, and therefore of the usefulness of religions and, a
fortiori, of Churches. This tended to throw the most rational of the
Gnostics into a solitary position where few came to join them, but which
prefigured the attitudes of certain thinkers, philosophers, writers, and
mystics of our own time. I would define this position as a return to the
fundamental, virginal interrogation of man faced with the problems of
his life, with his need to escape from the yoke of systems and to
arrive, in every instance, at a point of absolute zero in knowledge. If
the Gnostics proposed a dualistic image of the world, it was not
because, when faced with an entity, they were temperamentally
predisposed to see its opposite, but because, confronted with the
agonizing and omnipresent evidence of evil, it was necessary to oppose
something to it. But their aim was quite patently to overcome this
antinomy which did nothing but reflect the schism, the inherent rending
in two of the world. By doing this — we cannot say it too often — they
found themselves obliged to reject practically all the religious
ideologies of their time and to live on the fringes of all accepted
conventions, since, for them, the demands of truth were paramount, even
if they were to lead them to the stake.
When one undertakes such a purging and uprooting of the human
consciousness, when one snatches away from man the mythological and
ideological illusions which justify his choices and, more often, his
fantasies, it is perfectly obvious that one is exposing oneself, first
of all, to every kind of misunderstanding and, still more surely, to
every kind of retaliation. Idols cannot be cast down with impunity, and
we can see quite clearly where the task of a contemporary Gnostic would
lie: in attacking the new idols, the new Churches of our time, in short,
the new faces which evil is forever putting on and which today we call
ideology.
Ideology has merely set up new graven images in place of the old. For
example, in Marxism (one of the dominant idols of our time) one can see
an analogous phenomenon, on the scale of the history of men and ideas,
to that which the Gnostics denounced on a universal scale: the
misapplication, the deflection of a thought — that of Marx — which
revolutionary and mutant in itself and its time, has often ended up in
fact as a caricature of a society, a mutilated Socialism. Very briefly,
one can define this ideology according to the three terms proposed by
Marx — to understand, to control, to change the world. Each of these
terms is imperatively tied to the preceding one. In order to change the
world, one must be able to control its mechanisms, and one cannot
control them without first understanding them. It is the last of these
three terms that has very rapidly been taken up as the most potent
rallying cry, for it is the one that is most highly charged with
irrational content. It is, in fact, the only one which appears on Marx’s
tomb:
‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The
point, however, is to change it.’
What is most striking in almost all political and social experiments
undertaken up to now is that they have effectively changed certain of
the material conditions of existence while forgetting, somewhere along
the way, why they had to be changed. Who remembers that Marx wrote,
somewhere near the end of Das Kapital:
‘Socialism must not become the end but the means through which we change
the world we live in’?
However, this is not the sphere that I would choose to define the
possible attitude of a Gnostic confronted by the modern world. I have
taken it as an example because the birth and progressive triumph of
Socialism offer us precise evidence of a phenomenon analogous to that
which the Gnostics experienced with the historical victory of
Christianity. But just as the latter did nothing but reinforce the power
of the Priest — a return to the pagan systems which, in other respects,
it sought to abolish — so Socialism has reinforced the power of that
latter-day priest of our time, the Policeman. Whatever name he is given,
according to the political system in force, he remains the great victor
in all revolutions, the one who survives all upheavals. No revolution —
except for very brief periods such as the first three years of the
French Revolution or the first five years of the Russian — has led to
man’s achieving an increased libertarian awareness any more than it has
ever asked itself what is the meaning and nature of the major cause of
alienation: work and the productive effort, regarding which the same
general outlook has been preached — and very often in the self-same
words — by all the existing systems. To keep our questioning on Gnostic
lines, we may therefore ask ourselves: why must we, at all costs,
produce more and more goods every day?
I do not want to appear naive here and suggest that the solution to the
problem lies in a total refusal to produce (any more than a refusal to
procreate is a realistic solution to the problems of the birth-rate).
There will always be a handful of men — some rational, others Illumined
— who will preach such a refusal and live on the borderline of the laws
and conventions of their time, under whatever regime that may be. But
one is well aware that, on one hand, production cannot go on expanding
indefinitely and, on the other, that the mode of this production (or, in
other words, the relation between the worker and his work) is just as
vital and as central to a society as its quantitative results. By way of
illustration, I will ask but a single question: why has no Western
Socialist system abolished the practice of working on an assembly-line,
or at least tried to reduce it substantially? Why preserve (and in some
cases even augment) this most alienating of all methods of production,
as if the mere fact of nationalizing the means of production and
suppressing monopolies sufficed to transform it suddenly into a means of
liberation? It will be argued that this problem is so complex and would
involve such profound reorganization of the techniques of production
that it cannot be envisaged except on the time-scale of a whole
generation. Very well, but it should still be done. And it is not being
done anywhere, least of all in the places where the power is supposed to
be in the hands of the workers.
I do not believe that a rejection of the world in its modern form, a
return to communal life, abandoning factory production in favour of
cottage crafts and industries, has a future in the world we live in. Not
because it is a rejection of the principle of efficiency (the only real
efficiency being that which gives meaning to our lives), nor even
because it cuts itself off from the solidarity which, in our general
misery, is necessary (it is always better to fight alongside the workers
than without them), but above all because its motivations are more
unconscious and irrational than truly critical. Moreover, this attitude
is almost always accompanied by a return or a correlative recourse to
religious doctrines, to the teachings of Oriental philosophers, to Zen,
to Tantrism, to Sufism, and soon it will be the turn of Gnosticism (the
last teaching still to await its adepts and its Enlightened Ones).
A retreat from the world has no meaning unless it implies remaining, in
fact, in the world while belonging to it at another level; it must not
mean abdicating in face of its complexity or its malevolence, but
elucidating its innate laws. This is why the path of absolute withdrawal
chosen by a man such as René Guénon, author of The Crisis of the Modern
World (London: Luzac, 1962; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1962),
The Reign of Quantity (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1972) and
Symbolism of the Cross (London: Luzac, 1958; Tatowa, N.J.: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1958) — who became a convert to Islam and left France to
live and die in Egypt under the name of Abdel Wahed Yahia — seems to me
sterile in this day and age. First because it involves a step which is
essentially solitary and, second and more important, because his
constant search for an original Tradition meant dedicating himself
exclusively to a cult of the past.
Gnosticism, on the other hand, has always denied to the past, as to the
future, any didactic value. No total light can come from an earlier
religion or tradition. The tendency to delve into an immemorial past or
to project the knowledge-that-will-save into a Messianic future can only
distract man from his true quest: the quest for a new consciousness,
springing from his immediate experience and contingent on the present.
It is no mere chance that the only work by René Guénon which I find
fruitful — The Crisis of the Modern World — dates from 1927, and was
conceived and edited at a time when he himself still belonged to his own
epoch. The book contains a violent and exhaustive indictment of the
contemporary world. But Guénon’s aristocratism, his exclusive attachment
to esoterism, his arbitrary rejection — and at times, indeed, his faulty
knowledge — of contemporary philosophies, plus his ferocious
intellectualism prevent his being a true creator.
Moreover, his attitude and his radical choices pose a fundamental
question which is linked to our preoccupations here: in postulating a
primordial and sacred Tradition, Guénon proposes as a source of
contemplation and knowledge the teachings of men who lived centuries
ago, indeed thousands of years ago, in a context totally different from
our own. But can such teaching really help us? Is it relevant today? All
the masters, schools, and sacred texts to which the traditionalists
refer lived or were conceived in a world separated from our own by a
major difference: it was a world not yet expropriated by man. The
earth’s matter, animate and inanimate, remained neutral and available,
as it were.
But the matter of the modern world lost its virginity some two hundred
years ago. The components of the universe — atoms, the chromosomes in
our cells, the elements of the natural environment — are henceforth
submitted to the actions of man, in a fashion which, for the moment,
remains limited and anarchic but which one can well see has transformed
evolution into revolution. Now this primordial fact does not lead only
to a progressive modification of the material or organic supports of our
own evolution, it also modifies, and in a radical manner, the conditions
and the nature of knowledge. This last, too, must undergo an identical
revolution which renders Tradition, if not out-of-date, then at least
very relative. The Tradition cannot reply to all the questions posed by
the modern world for the sole and simple reason that it was born into a
different world, one which never even suspected such a revolution. I
think, then, that true knowledge cannot be sought in the past but only
in the future. It is not in any way a question of rediscovering, but of
discovering. It resides in that intense and virgin future, whose shape
depends far more upon ourselves than Guénon believed. Guénon remains
well this side of the Gnostic positions, for he appears to believe that
the given data, the structures of knowledge exist — or existed — whereas
they have yet to be invented.
Among contemporary writers whose sensibility, modes of thought and
references to men and experiences of other ages seem to me very close to
those of the Gnostics, I would cite, before all others, Emile Cioran and
Marguerite Yourcenar. A Short History of Decay (New York: Viking Press,
1975), The Temptation to Exist (New York: Quadrangle, 1970) and The New
Gods (New York: Quadrangle, 1974) by Emile Cioran are texts which match
the loftiest flashes of Gnostic thought. I have quoted a few lines from
these works as an epitaph to certain chapters in this book, but I would
need to quote many more to do them justice. A Short History of Decay
has, since its publication, been a constant bedside book for me. It
dissects our decadence more exactly and incisively than the shrewdest
political analyses of the period, in prose nobler and more brilliant
than many of the surrealist texts to which it might invite comparison.
The radical nature of the questions the author sets before the world —
and he makes his presence felt on every page — makes the book both
disturbing and trenchant; indeed, it appears to me to be one of the most
illuminating of our time, providing, of course, that one can harden
one’s heart to bear the apocalypses and abysses, the depths of
nothingness and non-being which he opens before our eyes. But, then
again, its lucidity, its intransigence perforate this existential night
with a light as dense and as permanent as that of the stars.
L’Oeuvre au noir (The Abyss, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976)
by Marguerite Yourcenar is also illuminated by a Gnostic light on every
one of its pages. The voice of Zeno, her principal character, even when
he expresses himself in veiled words (for sixteenth-century Bruges is
not identical with second-century Alexandria), reveals again the
forgotten accents and gestures of the Gnostics. All that the passing of
the centuries has given rise to in the meantime — the need to
interrogate the very mechanisms of life, to dissect bodies and explore
consciousness — in no way deflects Zeno from the path of his Alexandrian
predecessors. Simon Magus had already pondered on the role of blood.
Epiphanes had discovered in the sun the radiant source of our life and
the secrets of justice. In the entrails of man, the Peratae had
rediscovered the serpent coiled at the roots of heaven. Like them, Zeno
brings a reconciling eye to bear on our world, together with the same
demand for sternness, the same courage in face of a possible
nothingness. Like them, he will know how to ‘enter into death with his
eyes open.’
One could find many other examples, more readable from our point of view
because they are to be found in a context which is our own. I am
thinking in particular of L’homme imaginant by Henri Laborit, where once
again the problem of the change in our mental structures through
knowledge is posed in clear terms. Through these examples one sees that
all Gnostic paths pass through a double itinerary: the existentialist
certainty (let us say, even, the instinctive certainty) of our own
incompleteness and the necessity — in order to save ourselves from it or
at least attenuate it — of setting out on the road to knowledge. This
knowledge implies the biological determinisms, psychic impulses, and
economic constraints which govern and manipulate us, in addition to a
total participation in the problems and miseries of one’s own time. The
Gnostic of today could no longer be a preacher of salvation, a holy man
living a solitary existence on his mountain-top, nor some illuminated
spirit living in a great city and devoting himself to his beloved
ancient texts, but rather a perceptive man, his eyes turned towards the
present and the future in the intuitive conviction that he possesses
above all within himself the keys to this future, a conviction he must
hold steadfastly against all the reassuring mythologies, the so-called
salvatory religions and disalienating ideologies which serve only to
hinder his presence in the true reality. For the important thing today
is not so much to discover new stars as to break down the new frontiers
that constantly arise before us, or which are delineated within
ourselves, so that we may cross over them, as into death, with our eyes
wide open.
In the course of this essay, I have deliberately avoided expatiating
upon the texts and quotations used in its composition. I will therefore
complete this study by adding here a detailed note on the textual
sources of Gnosticism and on the works of reference I have consulted.
Our knowledge of Gnosticism and its history rests on two kinds of
document: the actual Gnostic texts, that it to say, the surviving works
that are considered to be of Gnostic origin, and secondly, the
quotations and commentaries found in the Church Father’s studies of the
heresies.
Up until 1945, authentic Gnostic texts were very limited in number. The
best known, the Pistis Sophia (Faith and Knowledge), was discovered in
Egypt in the eighteenth century. It was written in the Coptic language
and first appeared in a German translation in 1851. In 1896, in Egypt, a
codex was discovered which contained several Gnostic writings: the
Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphon or Secret Teaching of John and the Sophia
of Jesus Christ. To this, one may add an important fragment of a text
entitled The Book of Ieu, two prayers and a fragment relating to the
soul’s journey through the circles of the Archons. This lost collection
was published in Leipzig in 1905. [An English translation, by G. R.
Mead, is available: Pistis Sophia: A Gnostic Miscellany, Blauvelt, N.Y.:
Multimedia Publishing, 1973.]
Of all these texts, the Pistis Sophia is by far the most complete and
the most important. I would like to give a brief account of its content,
for, aside from the minutely detailed and wearisome descriptions of the
multiple circles of the Pleroma, it contains passages of very great
beauty. The whole work comprises four books narrating the fall of Sophia
(the Aeon whose avatars we have related in ‘The Workings of the World’),
her lamentations, her redemption through the intervention of the
Saviour, that is to say Christ, and the astonishing journey through the
splendours of the upper heavens which Jesus accomplishes after his
ascension. On his return to earth, He relates the details of this
ascension to His disciples and, in the course of dialogues and
interviews lasting twelve years, reveals to them the secrets of the
universe.
The Ascension of Christ takes place before the terrified eyes of the
disciples and is accompanied by a cosmic upheaval that shakes heaven and
earth. Jesus rises through the different circles of heaven and reaches
the heart of the Pleroma. He reappears to His disciples in a light so
dazzling that they cannot look at Him, then He takes on His human form
once more and replies to all their questions. A veritable cosmology is
thus unfolded, a gigantic fresco describing the totality of the worlds.
From it one can learn the whole history and genesis of the universe, the
nature and role of the Aeons, each in his own circle, the why and the
wherefore of each and every thing. In this work, therefore, we see yet
again — in spite of its obviously mythological structure — that need for
rational comprehension which was one of the essential aspects of
Gnosticism. The existence of evil, of injustice, of all kinds of
violence, the why and the how of the light and the darkness, day and
night, riches and poverty, the existence of the different animal
species, different plants, all this is explained, commented upon,
rehearsed. It is, then, one of the fundamental texts of Gnosticism, even
though its precise origin has never been determined. Tradition
attributes it to Valentinus, but H. Leisegang, in his book La Gnose,
sees it more as the work of a sect akin to the Ophites or the
Barbelognostics.
In 1945, some peasants discovered a large earthenware jar in a cliff
near Nag-Hammadi, Upper Egypt; it contained a great many Coptic scripts.
Jean Doresse, historian, archaeologist and specialist in Coptic Egypt,
made an inventory of them, classified them, studied them and drew up the
first balance-sheet of this discovery. It was, indeed, a particularly
lucky find, for these texts unquestionably constituted the complete
library used by a Gnostic sect of Upper Egypt in about the fifth
century. Regarding these texts, I shall use the nomenclature adapted by
Jean Doresse in his book (of which more below).
The collection consists of fifty-one treatises which Doresse divided
into three groups: writings of entirely Gnostic origin, apocrypha of
Christian origin and treatises of a Hermetic nature. Here is the list of
authentically Gnostic works:
Paraphrase of Seth; Allogenes Supreme; The Secret Book of John (Gospel
of John); Epistle of the Blessed Eugnostus; The Sophia of Jesus; The
Hypostasis of the Archons; The Book of the Great Invisible Spirit or
Gospel of the Egyptians; The Apocalypse of Zostrian; The Apocalypse of
Messos; The Revelation of Adam to his son Seth.
From the very beginnings of Gnosticism, with Simon Magus, the Christian
authors never ceased to pursue it, study it and, above all, refute it,
right up to the last moment of its Near Eastern history. This work of
refutation concerned not only Gnosticism but all the heresies of the
time. However, the radical nature of the questions posed by the Gnostics
compelled the Church Fathers to define their own theological position
minutely and thus to formulate for Christianity its first fundamental
dogmas. The list of these authors is therefore considerable, but since
many of them copied or took their inspiration from one another, I will
mention here only those who provided the most complete information or
carried out the most searching studies.
The most ancient is St. Justin Martyr, who published his Apologies
between 150 and 160 AD in Rome, as well as a work entitled Against
Marcion, which has since been lost. We have extracts from this, however,
in the works of St. Irenaeus, who is next on our list; he came from
Lyons and it was in that city that he wrote his Revelation and
Refutation of False Gnosis, better known by its abridged Latin title
Adversus Haereses, in about 180 AD. Then St. Hippolytus of Rome, who
published the ten books of his Philosophumena, or Refutation of All
Heresies in about 230 AD, and St. Epiphanius of Cyprus, who wrote his
Panarion, or Remedies Against the Heresies, in about 375 AD. Further
interesting quotations are to be found in other authors, notably the
Church historians such as Eusebius of Caesarea, Theodoret, Bishop of
Cyrrhus, and Timothy, who were writing at a later date, between the
fifth and seventh centuries. Taken in their entirety, these works
furnish very substantial information about the Gnostics, their works,
their systems, and sometimes their rites. Some of them, such as St.
Hippolytus, St. Irenaeus and St. Epiphanius even quote important
extracts from Gnostic writings.
It seems they were in possession of a certain number of documents, but
one must emphasize that, with the exception of St. Epiphanius, none of
them had any direct experience of Gnosticism. The works they quoted in
order to refute Gnosticism must have been those which were given to new
followers, not the secret books which were presented only to
fully-fledged initiates. Nevertheless, the information they provide
enables us to add a certain number of titles to the preceding list of
works written by Gnostics.
For example, a work entitled the Revelation of a Voice and of a Name was
attributed to Simon Magus, and he himself had this to say of it:
‘This writing comes from the Great Power, the Infinite Power. That is
why it will be, sealed, hidden, veiled and deposited in the dwelling
where the Root of All Things has its beginnings.’
Basilides appears to have written twenty-four books or Exegetics on the
Gospels and composed his own gospel, the Odes, destined to be recited or
sung during the liturgies he had instituted. Valentinus composed the
Gospel of Truth, which was unknown, except through quotations in the
works of the Church Fathers, until 1945, when a copy was found in the
Gnostic library of Nag-Hammadi. Today, it is part of the collection in
the Jung Institute in Zurich. A translation was published in 1956. Let
us add the treatise On Justice, by Epiphanes, son of Carpocrates, whom
we have mentioned in ‘Absolute Experience’.
These were the works of the principal Gnostic masters. But the
innumerable sects in Egypt and Syria drew upon a very large number of
works, attributed to venerable authors such as Seth (son of Adam), Jesus
Christ, the Virgin Mary, or the Invisible Spirit, all of which contained
their secret teachings or revelations. A fabulous history was apparently
accorded to all these books, such as this one ascribed to the Sacred
Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, used by the Sethian sect:
‘This is the book written by the great Seth. He deposited it in the
highest mountains, where the sun never rises. Since the days of the
prophets, the apostles and the preachers, his name has not resounded in
men’s hearts. Their ears have never heard it. The great Seth took one
hundred and thirty years to write this book. He deposited it in the
mountain called Charax in order that, in due time and in the last
moments, it would become manifest.’
Finally, other works, like The Rulers of the Cities up to the Ether,
must be manuals of initiation, inspired by magic, designed to show the
disciple how, after his death, he can traverse the different circles by
pronouncing the name of each Aeon or guardian in turn. Here again, one
finds an eschatology reminiscent of that of Ancient Egypt, and the
themes of the Book of the Dead and the Book of Am-Douat. It is to be
noted that this tendency towards a soteriology of magical character
becomes more marked as Gnosticism evolves, and that certain treatises
enumerated the innumerable and mysterious names of the guardian entities
of the intermediary circles. It is a strange litany — mixing up Barbelo,
Sophia and Sabaoth (whom we have already met) with beings such as
Prunicos, Harmozel, Eleleth, Ialdabaoth, Astaphaeus, Aberamen — thus,
Agrammakarei (which means literally: the Indescribable Vault),
Anthropos, Athoth, and Adamas.... The Book of Ieu, a Gnostic text
discovered in the nineteenth century, even tells us the magic formula
one must not fail to pronounce if one wishes to gain direct access to
the heart of the Pleroma. Here it is, commit it well to memory:
aaa ooo zezophazazzzaïeozaza eee iii zaieozoakoe ooo uuu thoezaozaez eee
zzeezaozakozakeude tuxuaalethukh.
Gnosticism, considered as a heresy, forms part of the history of
Christianity. It eludes this history, of course, because of its content,
its implications and its philosophical or esoteric overtones, but in
practice those who took an interest in it were almost all historians of
Christianity. The majority, obviously, show no mercy to the Gnostics.
After an interval of eighteen centuries, it is easy to laugh at their
hallucinatory mythology and to veil one’s face from their erotic rites.
Rare indeed are those who, denying themselves the easy path of hasty
judgements and religious or theological a priori, sought to grasp the
profound meaning of the questions posed by the Gnostics. Rarer still are
those who, on approaching their subject, accepted the necessary
deconditioning and the notion that these questions are equally addressed
to them, equally relevant in spite of the gap of centuries. Amongst the
latter is Henri-Charles Puech, author of several works on the Gnostics
and the Manicheans. His two essential texts on Gnosticism are: La gnose
et le temps (Zurich: Eranos Jahrbuch, Vol. XX, 1952) and the resume of
the course he gave at the College de France, published in the Almanac of
that establishment for the years 1953 to 1957. These lectures are due to
appear in their entirety in two volumes under the title Phénoménologie
de la gnose. The title clearly indicates Puech’s angle of approach to
the study of Gnosticism, and it is the only one which seems to me
fertile in this day and age. His lectures represent the most sensitive
and the most pertinent approach to Gnostic achievements and attitudes we
have yet seen.
In the field of textual knowledge and the history of Gnosticism, the
most complete and detailed work, the richest in information of all kinds
— and the most up-to-date — is the book published by Jean Doresse under
the title The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics (London: Hollis &
Carter, 1960; New York: AMS Press, 1960, reprinted 1972). It consists of
two volumes, the first containing a detailed expose of all the Gnostic
systems, such as they were known up until the discovery at Nag-Hammadi,
and the second, subtitled The Gospel according to Thomas, a detailed
account of this discovery, an inventory of the manuscripts found and a
translation of the above-named Gospel according to Thomas. It was from
the first volume of this collection that I borrowed the translation of
St. Irenaeus’ humorous piece on Valentinus and his ‘hallucinatory
melons’, quoted in the chapter ‘The Masters of Gnosis’. I must also
mention Serge Hutin’s essay Les gnostiques published in the ‘Que
sais-je?’ series. In this work, the author goes beyond a general outline
of Gnosticism: with great skill and clarity, he introduces us into the
labyrinth of Gnostic thought, following it right down to the present day
through its various esoterical, philosophical, and literary aspects. One
of the book’s most original contributions is that it examines Gnosticism
not only as a thing in itself, but also in relation to our own times.
Among the other works, many are available today only in libraries. Most
of the historical research into Gnosticism over the past half-century
has been done in Germany, and the number of studies is impressive. I
will mention here only those which are available in English or in French
translation, such as La gnose by H. Leisegang (Paris: Payot, 1951, is
the latest edition), most ably and sensitively translated by Jean
Gouillard (who is also the presenter and translator of the Petite
Philocalie de la Priere du Coeur, a book which, although not directly
concerned with Gnosticism, is an aid to an understanding of many of its
aspects). Leisegang’s book tackles Gnosticism primarily from a
philosophical and theological point of view. It is relatively old (first
edition in 1924), but it presents detailed insights into the different
Gnostic systems, debatable no doubt but extremely erudite. Finally, a
recent work offers new and original perceptions as to the origins of
Gnosticism and its links with Christianity. This is Gnosticism and Early
Christianity by Robert M. Grant (New York: Columbia University Press,
2^(nd) ed. 1966). The same author has also compiled Gnosticism: An
Anthology (London: Callins, 1961), which consists of a collection of
almost all the Gnostic texts known to us today, and is indispensable.
Of course there are other works which, directly or indirectly, are
concerned with Gnosticism. The majority of these broach the subject from
a partial or specific angle — some of which are crucial, nevertheless,
such as the problem of dualism or the relationship between Gnosticism
and Manichaeism. I could not mention them all here, but I will single
out those which have been useful to me or which are essential reading
for anyone interested in the influence of Gnosticism. First of all, the
essay by Simone Pétrement: Le dualisme chez Platon, les gnostiques et
les manichéens (P.U.F., 1947), Steven Runciman’s work: Medieval Manichee
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1947), which deals
especially with the Messalians, the Paulicians, the Bogomils and the
Cathars, and the ‘bible’ of this genre, Love in the Western World by
Denis de Rougemont (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
It goes without saying that the last part of this book, ‘Towards a New
Gnosticism’, involves no bibliography. In any case, the term is
inappropriate, for here it would no longer be a question of a
bibliography but of a guide-book to several essential books of our time,
and the universes they envisage and reveal, since the eclecticisms,
analogies and parallelisms they propound are all entirely personal. They
have no other aim than to define the point — omnipresent and impossible
to grasp — where antinomies, contradictions, and opposites cease to be
such, the point at which several contemporary Gnostics find themselves
today — sometimes, without even realizing it.
[1] On 16 March, 1244 some two hundred Cathar heretics were burnt on a
huge communal pyre after the capitulation of the fortress of Montségur.
[2] See the Bibliographical Notes at the end of this book for the
textual sources of Gnosticism.