THE

GNOSTICS

TOBIAS CH
 THE

Gnostics

T
HE GREEK WORD GNOSIS
means knowledge; the Gnostics
themselves used it to refer to the
spiritual knowledge they believed would
redeem them from what they regarded as
the inherent evil of the material universe.
As a mystical alternative tradition within
Christianity, Gnosticism suffered the hosti¬
lity of the official church and, as a result,
remains largely unknown or misunderstood
to this day
Writing for the interested layperson,
Tobias Churton hopes to return Gnosticism
to the center of its own story, rather than
relegating it to the heretical chapters of
orthodox history. Beginning with the
“Gnostic Gospels,” buried at Nag
Hammadi, Egypt in the fourth century and
unearthed in 1945, Churton takes the reader
on a spiritual journey through two millennia
and across Europe. He pays particular atten¬
tion to southern France of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, for it was there that
Gnosticism, driven to the verge of extinction,
burst into new life as Catharism, a heresy so

(continued on back flap)

 THE
ONOSTICS
 THE
GNOSTICS
TOBIAS CHURTON

Barnes
S^Noble
BOOKS
NEW YORK
 To the memory of Canon Aleric Rose
This Book is Dedicated with Love

Copyright © 1987 by Tobias Churton

This edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.,

by arrangement with Curtis Brown, Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher.

1997 Barnes &c Noble Books

ISBN 0-76070-478-3

Printed and bound in the United States of America

98 99 00 01 M 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

RRDH
 Contents

INTRODUCTION vu
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS *

PART ONE Gross Bodies

CHAPTER ONE Gross Bodies 3

The Burial 6
The Discovery 8
What happened to the Texts? 12
The Texts 18
Did God write the Nag Hammadi Library? 24

CHAPTER TWO The Higher Reason 33

The Second Century - A conversation with Hans Jonas 35
Alexandria 39
The Hermetists 42

CHAPTER THREE Madness and Blasphemy 47

What was wrong with the Gnostics? 52
The Valentinian System 53
The End of the first great Gnostic Movement 60

PART TWO The Good Men

CHAPTER FOUR The Good Men 67

Introduction 67
The Sources 68
The Arrival of the Cathars in twelfth century Lan- 69
guedoc - The Buggers
Were the Cathars Gnostics? 73

CHAPTER FIVE A Mystery Tour 76

Laurac 76
Fanjeaux 79
Enter Dominic Guzman 82
Guilhabert de Castres (circa 1150-1240) 83
The Debates 85

v
 THE GNOSTICS

Minerve 87
Vais 89
The Inquisition 90
Montsegur 92
The Siege of Montsegur (1243-44) 92
The Treasure of Montsegur 93
The Tragedy of Montsegur 94
CHAPTER SIX What happened to the Cathars? 95
Were the Cathars a menace to society? 95
So why were the Cathars persecuted? 96
Why then did the Cathars disappear? 96

PART THREE The Hermetic Philosophy

CHAPTER SEVEN Hermes comes to Florence 101
Florence 1460 101
CHAPTER EIGHT Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) 109
and the Dignity of Man
The Dignity of Man no
CHAPTER NINE An eternal God clothed in an infinite 117
Nature
CHAPTER TEN One symbol, many worlds 122
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) 123

CONCLUSION The Everlasting Gospel

CHAPTER ELEVEN From muddy waters to the
River of Life 131
A Universe drained of god 131
Man the Monster 133
William Blake 146
Eternity in an Flour 145
CHAPTER TWELVE Thou also dwellest in Eternity 146
The Rosicrucians 146
The New Age: the origins of the Fraternity 151
Tubingen - The Truth will make you Free 1J4
Gnostalgia 158
The Masonic Phase 158
Cosmic Man! 161
APPENDIX ONE Chronology 164
APPENDIX TWO The Nag Hammadi Library 169
BIBLIOGRAPHY i77
INDEX !8i

vi
 Introduction

Way back in March 1982 in the year of the ra-ra skirt and the Falklands
war, I went for an interview with Diana Potter, Executive Producer at
Thames TV. I was trying to be as fresh and enthusiastic as I could be
after nine months on the dole. I’d got it into my head that there had
never been any religious television - only programmes about religion. I
had written a paper on the subject which recommended a new kind of
television for this most neglected area, something on the lines of
television, a kind of programme which would enter into the very nature
of the religious experience and not simply observe it. At the same time
the paper suggested different forms of analysis of religious questions.
Anyhow, in the course of the conversation I happened to mention
Blake’s famous ‘Ancient of Days’ painting - the one with the crouching
bearded figure whose fingers reach downwards to the depths and divide
it all up, erroneously regarded as Blake’s picture of ‘God’ whereas it is
only the Demiurge described by Plato as the creator, and by Blake as
the builder of abstractions. I asserted ‘Blake was a Gnostic’ to which
Diana Potter replied, ‘Oh, are you interested in the Gnostics? John
Ranelagh at Channel 4 is also interested in them. I’m having lunch with
John on Monday and I’ll tell him about you.’ And so the long haul
began.
On 6 April I entered the still unfinished Channel 4 building on
Charlotte Street in London’s West End and met John Ranelagh, then
Commissioning Editor for Religious Programmes. John had had the
idea of doing something based on Elaine Pagels’ book The Gnostic
Gospels which dealt with the discovery of a Gnostic library in Upper
Egypt in 1945 and which promoted questions about the origins of the
Christian Church and the validity of traditional expressions of Christian
doctrine. I had had it in my mind that ‘Gnosis’ (Greek for ‘knowledge’
in the sense of interior certainty or insight) was a philosophy in its own
right which somehow got tangled up in the growth of the early Church.
Furthermore, it had occurred to me in the previous three and a half
years that the Gnostics were entitled to a history of their own rather
than as being seen as heretical or as esoteric Christians.
I had heard the music of the Gnostics in all sorts of unexpected places.

vii
 INTRODUCTION

I had heard strains in romantic poetry, I had heard it in Rimbaud, I had

heard it in the music of Debussy. I felt the presence of a ‘golden string’
which I followed through the occult philosophies of the Renaissance,
and among the Cathars of the twelfth century - I had seen it in the
visionary paintings and engravings of William Blake, in the music and
sayings of John Lennon, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix - so many
scattered sounds and voices resonating through the centuries. Searching
for Gnosis was like searching for myself. I knew this melody from
somewhere far away. I had been born deaf and remained so for nearly
three years and yet, somehow I think that I had heard it even then. I
had heard it all my life but I did not know where to place it. Nobody
knew anything about it at school and for years this incoherence felt
threatening, but an experience of love would always chase the fears
away. Then at college I heard the word Gnosticism and my ears pricked
up. From them on I had a ‘tree’ on which to hang the scattered know¬
ledge - but the form of the tree was rather misshapen until John
Ranelagh gave me the opportunity to think about it all in the context
of a television programme.
I left Channel 4 that sunny morning with one intent: to write the
story of ‘The Gnostics’ for television. By the end of the spring I had a
format entitled ‘The Search for the Gnostics’ which consisted of five
programmes which would take the viewer from the second century ad
to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century, on to the
Age of Revolutions and finally to our own times. This was going to be
somewhat bigger and more expensive a programme than one about the
‘Gnostic Gospels’ of Nag Hammadi. Indeed, this was the case and I was
sad to find that money would not be available yet, maybe not until 1985.
That seemed a long way off. Perhaps it was all for the best because I
spent the next three years not only in deepening my understanding
about the subject matter but also in gaining experience as a television
researcher and writer.
In the early summer of 1985, the thread was joined again and I heard
that the project could now be funded and would be produced by Border
Television. In the November of that year I was brought in to research
the project which began filming in Egypt at the end of the winter of
1986.
I would rather not say any more about the programmes for fear of
giving the game away before people have a chance to see the results of
a year-and-a-half’s televisual labour.
This book is intended to accompany the series, of course, but I also
hope that it will be read in its own right for as long as it is right to do

viii
 THE GNOSTICS

so. The story of Gnosis will doubtless occupy scholars and students for
many years to come and all sorts of things will be discovered which will
change our perspective of the matter. So much that is exciting often
takes far too long to reach the general public for whom this book is
primarily intended. For once the meal is not cold, the study of Gnosis
is still in a crude state and so I hope readers feel free to indulge in their
own speculations on the subject and add to what we know about it all.
So much remains to be done.
Naturally I would never have embarked upon the project of bringing
the Gnostic experience to a hungry public if I was not convinced that
an understanding of the subject could ‘change the world’. All it takes
to do so is to imagine the world differently. That will certainly change
your world. The integrity of your vision of the world is worth living
for. Television and films and things may seem important but they are
not minds. That’s what you’ve got that no work of art can reproduce.
I hope this book is good food for the mind. As the dormouse said, ‘Feed
your head’.
Just one last word. I wrote the section called ‘A Mystery Tour’ in
Part Two with the idea in mind that readers may wish to visit the
places mentioned within and perhaps relive the events described, in the
imagination - the true home of reality. This you knew when you were
children. Know it again.

Tobias Churton
4 November 1986
Oxford

IX
 Acknowledgments

I should first like to express my indebtedness to Border Television and

Channel 4 Television without whose courage this book would be only
a shadow of what I hope it is. In particular, the Producer of the series,
Steve Segaller, Border’s Programme Controller Paul Corley, Border’s
Managing Director Jim Graham, the cameramen Tom Ritchie and Eric
Scott Parker and all of the splendid crew' and administrative staff. At
Channel 4, John Ranelagh and Peter Flood whose encouragement in
times of despair has been invaluable.
Secondly, I acknowledge indebtedness to all those people who gave
time and energy in interviews, discussions and hospitality. They are
Professor R. McLachlan Wilson of St Andrews, Professor Hans Jonas
of New Rochelle, Newr York, Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton,
Professor Gilles Quispel of Bilthoven in Holland, Professor R. I. Moore
of Sheffield University, Professor Alexander Murray of New College
Oxford; Deputy Librarian of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Julian
Roberts; Anne Brenon, Director of the Centre Nationale d’etudes
Cathares in Villegly, France; Patrick Clanet also of the Cathar Study
Centre; Gerard Zuchetto and Patrice Briant — living troubadours of
Languedoc; Basil Wilby, Dr Kathleen Raine whose feeling for Blake is
unparalleled; Professor Sidney Alexander of Florence and Professor
Michel Rocquebert of Montsegur.
Thirdly, a special acknowledgment must go to the staff of the Bibli¬
otheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam: the Curator, Dr Frans
Janssen, Frank Van Lamoen - brilliant scholar of Hermetism, Jose
Bauman, and especially to Joseph Ritman, founder of this unique and
wonderful library and who has made it possible for me to travel to
Amsterdam to study there in perfect surroundings. Mr Ritman, a Gnostic
if ever there was, believes that in gnosis, all limitations can be overcome -
and his generosity has certainly helped me to overcome many. I should
like to add here that the achievement of the Hermetic Philosophy Library
is itself unique and deeply encouraging.
Lastly, I would like to thank all those who have made my difficult
journey through the experience of this subject more bearable. In
Germany: Gerhard Fitzthum, philosopher and friend; Heinz Reinhoffer,
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Bernhard Antony, Gila Ohrenburg, Peter Damm. In England, the late

and much loved Canon Aleric Rose - the kind of man the Church of
England cannot replace; my mother and father, Victor and Patricia
Churton; Jan Harris, who compiled the index; Michael Curtis, Dave
Scott, Belinda Parsons, Caroline Hewitt, Belona, Mike Shaw, Graham
Whitlock, Cathy Palmer, Christian Wangler, Sarah Miller, Roger Stott,
Dalia Johananoff, Roger Hooker, Caroline Sherwood, George Simey,
Jackie Hill and the love and inspiration I have received from the artist,
Louise Ford.
I should also like to acknowledge my ready appreciation of the actors
who brought spirit to the dead letters of drama scripts: Ian Brooker,
Brian Blessed, Paul Dixie, Raymond Ross, James Tillett and the ‘Gnostic
Jesus’, Nigel Harrison.
All quotations from the Nag Hammadi Library are taken from The
Nag Hammadi Library translated into English under the Editorship of
James M. Robinson, published by E. J. Brill of Leiden (1977).
To all the above and all those visible and invisible unnamed, a heart-
filled Thank you.

I trod the rounded tiny debris

of past and new construction,
And wondered,‘Who could build
‘this basilica of eternity?’
Turning back, as one, the few who shun
Modernity.
(From The Rock. Carcassonne 1979)

Illustration Acknowledgments

The photographs in this book are reproduced by kind permission of the

Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam. The maps on pages
10 and 77 are by Richard Natkiel Associates, and the illustration on
page 11 appeared in Rivista di Archeologia Christiana XXI (1944/5),
164-221, p. 185.

xi
<
 PART ONE

Gross Bodies
 Chapter One

Gross Bodies

Their natures fiery are, and from above,

And from gross bodies freed, divinely move.
(Vergil on the Celestial Virtues
quoted in 1651 translation of
Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s
Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1531)

The world was still at war with itself when in the year ad 367 an
instruction came to the monastic community at Tabinnisi. The head of
the community, Theodore, was instructed to read the 39th Festal Letter
of the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius. Perhaps the instruction had
come from Alexandria. Such a thing would be expected from a senior
bishop who had already struck fear and hatred into the deviant hearts
of the unorthodox, the heretics, on many occasions. Tabinnisi was some
500 miles down the Nile from Alexandria. It was remote from the full
weight of authority and Big Trouble often starts in the remote places.
It is unlikely that the instruction was for the ears of the community
alone. Its pioneering founder, Pachomius, had within living memory set
up a rule to unite disparate and solitary people within a community
whose practice of strenuous labour involved a strict, almost military
discipline. The Christian life was not to be for the elevation of the
individual soul alone. The Church had found that the message of
love for one’s neighbour, promulgated by Christ himself, could blend
with and yet further ennoble that civic responsibility and state-duty
which was so dear and necessary to the Roman Imperium. Faraway
places, even in upper Egypt were never too far away from the voice of
authority.
The members of this rather new community were ascetics, that is,
they held that the needs and sensations of the body interrupted the
essential communion with God for which the human community existed.
Pleasure, leisure, food, sex and property were, therefore, thoroughly

3
 THE GNOSTICS

suspect. One may even say that they were feared. That modern psy¬
chology which deals with liberation from repression can find words to
express the condition of Pachomius’s more famous contemporary,
Antony (250-356). Leaving behind both family ties and attendant prop¬
erty, Antony ventured outside of society and into the desert of Upper
Egypt: the Thebaid. There he became prey to demonic visitations of an
intensely suggestive nature, particularly with regard to sexual arousal.
The more he tried to beat off the attack, the more strongly did Satan,’s
agents return with the fire of lust. Thus, the threatening power of the
body was for him and his spiritual descendents confirmed. Each rebuff
of the body’s call was felt as a victory for Christ and as an advance on
the solitary path to holiness. Men were at war with themselves in the
desert because the world was at war with itself. Saint Paul had made
this clear enough:

For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of
the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own
will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope. That the creation
itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty
of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation
groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
(Epistle to the Romans VIII. 19-22.)

The Peace of God, experienced on the retreat of the demonic enemy,

was proof positive of the power of Christ. The attainment of that peace
was a matter of the greatest urgency. The community life, withdrawing
from the world into a simplicity, could give support to those engaged
in this war. Furthermore, this new society, the monastic community
with its visible head, provided doctrinal regulation so as to prevent the
monk from being misled by the exercise of his solitary mind. Antony,
in his solitude was deemed an exceptional case and Athanasius, who
wrote a biography of Antony, was most keen to stress that the saint,
for so he was to be remembered, had not departed from orthodoxy.
Indeed, orthodoxy had enabled Antony to resist those Temptations with
which his name has been most associated. Any man alone in the desert
risked madness - and it was held that madness was an attribute of
heresy which would threaten not only the salvation of the individual
but also the existence of the Church. Orthodoxy means right opinion
and it was a function of the bishop to keep his flock on the straight and
narrow.
Thus it was that the instruction to translate, copy and distribute the

4
 GROSS BODIES

39th Festal Letter of Athanasius came to Theodore, head of the mon¬

astery at Tabinnisi. Theodore’s responsibilities were not of course
confined to the monastery proper but extended as far as his name and
authority were known to the Christians of the Thebaid. In his ‘patch’
were many ascetics who were not interested in community life. They
might assert that had they been in need of community, they would better
have stayed in Luxor or Alexandria or Ephesus or wherever they came
from. The attraction of the area lay surely in its distance from what
appeared to be the main currents of civilization. Distance from the
world was their aim. These outsiders might be static solitaries or wan¬
derers alone or in groups. Anyhow, they resisted regulation and therefore
identification and were doubtless regarded by those of orthodox incli¬
nations with a sense of disturbance or suspicion. We may presume then
that they were occasionally visible in towns and villages, sometimes
among the ordered monks, often disappearing. As the organization of
the monastery progressed they would doubtless become more visible in
both the eye and mind.
What then was in the letter? To whom was it really addressed?

But since we have made mention of heretics as dead, but of ourselves as

possessing the Divine Scriptures for salvation; and since I fear lest, as
Paul wrote to the Corinthians, some few of the simple should be beguiled
from their simplicity and purity, by the subtlety of certain men, and
should afterwards read other books - those called apocryphal - led astray
by the similarity of their names with the true books; I beseech you to
bear patiently, if I also write, by way of remembrance, of matters with
which you are acquainted, influenced by the need and advantage of the
Church. In proceeding to make mention of these things, I shall adopt, to
commend my undertaking, the pattern of Luke the evangelist, saying,
Forasmuch as some have taken in hand, to reduce into order for them¬
selves the books termed apocryphal, and to mix them up with the divinely
inspired Scripture, concerning which we have been fully persuaded, as
they who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the
word, delivered to the fathers; it hath seemed good to me also, having been
urged thereto by the brethren, and having learned from the beginning, to
bring before you the books included in the Canon, and handed down,
and accredited as Divine; to the end that any one who has fallen into,
error may correct those who have led him astray; and that he who
continues steadfast in purity, may again rejoice, having those things
brought to his remembrance.
Athanasius goes on to list the Canon of literature which is to be accepted
as authoritative and divine. We know this list as our Bible. For the
Bishop of Alexandria,

5
 THE GNOSTICS

These are the fountains of salvation, that he who thirsteth may be satisfied
with the words they contain. In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of
godliness. Let no man add to them, neither let him take aught from them.
For on this point the Lord put to shame the Sadducees, saying ‘Ye do err,
not knowing the Scriptures.’ And He reproved the Jews, saying, ‘Search
the Scriptures, for they testify of Me.’

Athanasius asserts that none of the canonical or official scriptures refers

to the apocryphal or unofficial writings, ‘But this is an intention of
heretics, writing them to favour their own views, bestowing upon them
their approbation, and assigning to them a date, and producing them
as ancient writings, that thereby they might find occasion to lead astray
the simple.’
There we have it. The heixr.ics.,e&plojjed-the^Jinp 1 e. This will become
a familiar pattern of accusation. It is strange to read the accusation
today when many would argue thatTffs the Church which has and does
exploit ‘the simple’ with gratifying fantasies and simplistic sermonizing.
I suppose'that” it is a tendency of all those who regard themselves
as authorities to regard the ‘others’ as either simple or dangerously
pernicious. Indeed, a Church which makes peace with its enemies has
already lost authority. The simple need to be protected from the per¬
nicious - is this not the noble purpose of authority? But did not Jesus
enjoin his apostles to feed his sheep - and not to put them on a diet?
Athanasius is suggesting I think that there may be some decent, that
is simple people who may hold the works of pernicious men but the
guilt and shame lies with the passer-on of the corrupt substance, and
not with the receiver. They have been beguiled by the clever ones.
Subtlety was the art of the serpent when he beguiled Eve with the fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. Thus was mankind banished
from simple communion with God. Athanasius says quite clearly that
he is ‘influenced by the need and advantage of the Church’. It was the
work of the Church as the body of Christ to undo the damage done in
Eden. But Eden was never called Heaven and a man must forever be
beholden to Christ’s Church for his salvation. He was not going back
to Eden but somewhere else. The Church held the Keys to the Kingdom
and the heretics, Athanasius says, are already dead.

The Burial
When Athanasius refers to the heretics as ‘already dead’, he means that
they are outside that eternal life which is offered to the baptized Christian

6
 GROSS BODIES

within the Catholic Church. The holders of apocryphal writings might

not themselves be in this position but the authors and transmitters of
the material most certainly are. Now it was about the time of the
instruction to broadcast the 39th Festal Letter of Athanasius that
someone or, what is more likely, a coterie decided to bury a large jar
made of red slipware and of about 60 cm in height. Sealed by bitumen,
the jar was probably to be the last home for 12 or 13 leather-bound
books. The books contained 46 different texts together with duplicates
of six of these. They were buried at the foot of a cliff eight kilometres
west of the Pachomian monastery. Who buried them?
Athanasius we know was in hiding among the monks of Upper Egypt
in ad 356 during a temporary ‘turn-about’ in his episcopal career. It
was perhaps his observations while hiding there that furnished him with
a view that ‘some few of the simple should be beguiled from their
simplicity and purity, by the subtlety of certain men, and should after¬
wards read other books - those called apocryphal’. Now, if these
texts were buried in response to a heresy ‘clearout’ at the time of the
broadcasting of the letter, then it was almost certainly the work of
monks, in particular those monks who had most to lose from being
associated with the condemned literature. If condemned as heretics,
such people would suffer excommunication and the accompanying
divorce from Christ’s interests. Furthermore, the books would, accord¬
ing to practice, be burned. We are observing a stiffening in the regime
governing the Coptic (that is, Egyptian) Church. Before this difficult
period, it seems that in this area at least, orthodoxy coexisted with other
types and tendencies of Christianity such as Jewish Christianity, a
solitary and mystical ascetic Christianity and a now minority type
of Christianity called Gnostic. If the buriers were from an orthodox
monastery, fully coming to terms with the exclusive rigours of the Creed
of Nicaea of ad 325 - which had been framed with the blessing of
Athanasius - how is it that they would hold such books and where did
they get them from?
In an interview with the current head of the Coptic Church, His
Holiness Pope Shenouda gave a possible answer: ‘As knowledge is
spread everywhere, people try to have many books of knowledge.
Whether from the Holy Bible or from philosophy or from any source
of knowledge. And people had such books in their own libraries. Not
because they were genuine gospels, but as books of knowledge. They
may be considered books of literature, Coptic literature, not Coptic
gospels.’
The careful burial of the books in the sand demonstrates a love and

7
 THE GNOSTICS

respect for their contents. It also indicates a tide of change sweeping

through the monasteries towards a harder or more defined line on what
the Christian must believe to be a Christian. Above all, it suggests a
sadness at the passing of an era, from the time when a monk could truly
escape from the world: a world where politics involved religion and
religion would have to be shaped to fit in with political challenges.
Athanasius would see this last phrase as inversely and perversely expres¬
sed: the Creed was for everyone. As we shall see, the books buried in
the middle of the fourth century would not fit in with the Creed. They
had to go.
As for those from whom the books originated, the books themselves
show that they had already chosen not to ‘fit in’. They were Gnostics —
and they would have to go too.
This would not surprise them. They saw themselves as those who
had both found and as those who sought a hidden truth, the very spirit
of mystery. Rejecting all they had left behind, they and they alone were
the advance guard of Humanity.

The Discovery
Beneath the sand, the jar was a kind of still womb. Inside the jar a small
moment of history was silently hidden - unknown to the whole world.
Empires will arise and decline, kings and queens will come and go,
fashions will change, earth is ploughed and seeds are sown a thousand,
thousand times. Blood is spilt, the sun shines, hopes appear and die
again, an advance here, a retreat there. The texts lie silent in the
unmoved air. Visions and prophets and sweat and toil. Struggles ensue:
gunpowder, printing, voyages of discovery, genocide, inflation and fire;
ages of reason, ages of faith, ages of magic, ages of war and ages of
peace. The grains of sand are transplaced a million times. Far, far away:
steam engines, electricity, blood and glory, monarchy and republic;
riches and poverty, penicillin and gas; a million joys, a trillion tears; the
telephone, the aeroplane and then, in August 1945 two atomic bombs
fall on two cities in Japan.
How many times was it said that year that the ‘sea shall give up her
dead’? She does not always surrender to archaeologists, assorted salvage
teams and bounty-hunters. Sometime in the December of 1945, three
sons of c=Ali and =>Umm-Ahmad of the al-Samman clan, Muhammad,
Khalifa and Abu al-Majd were out digging for sabakh with four camel-
drivers not far from their home in al-Qasr, a village six kilometres from
the town of Nag Hammadi on the main line to Cairo. Sabakh is bird-

8
 GROSS BODIES

lime and a good place to find it is beneath the high cliffs of the Jabal al-
Tarif, a kilometre away from the village of Hamra Dum. It was near a
large boulder, long since fallen from the cliff that the youngest brother,
Abu, unearthed the jar. Muhammad, who was ten years older, assumed
the responsibility for dealing with the discovery.
Just over forty years later, Border Television’s filmcrew were in the
neighbourhood with Gilles Quispel, Professor of New Testament studies
at the University of Utrecht, in order to film the location of the discovery.
Our Production Manager, Valerie Kaye, was walking down the main
street of al-Qasr with a copy of Biblical Archaeologist (Fall 1979) which
featured a colour photograph of Muhammad eAli al-Samman on its
cover. A rather serene-looking man in his mid-sixties walked up to her
and, seeing the picture, pointed to it and then himself. He was the man
responsible for discovering the Nag Hammadi Library.
This is how he tells the story:

I found it at the Hamra Dum mountain in the December of 1945. By

6 o’clock in the morning when I started my work ... all of a sudden I
found this pot. And after I found it I had the feeling that there was
something inside it. So I kept it, and because it was cold this morning ...
I decided that I would leave it and would come back again for it to find
out what’s inside. I came back in the same day in fact, and I broke this
pot. But I was afraid at the beginning because there might be something
inside it - a jinn, a bad spirit. I was by myself when I broke the pot. I
wanted my friends to be with me. After I broke it I found that it was a
story book. I decided to bring my friends to tell them about the story.
We were seven and we realized immediately that this has something to
do with the Christian people. And we said that we don’t really need it at
all - it was just useless to us. So I took it to the ministry over here and he
told me, well we really don’t need it. It was just rubbish for us, So I took
it back home. Some of them were burned and I tried to sell some of them.

Seven months before the discovery, Muhammad cAli’s father had been
murdered. Suspicion in al-Qasr fell upon the son of the local sheriff:
Ahmadlsmacil of Hamra Dum because the body of Muhammad’s father
had been found near his home. Muhammad’s father, cAli Muhammad
Khalifa had been found shot in the head next to the decapitated body
of what he, as a guard of irrigation machinery, had taken to be a thief
from Hamra Dum, the hamlet at the foot of the cliff where the discovery
of the Nag Hammadi Library was to be made. It was Muhammad cAli
who had found his father’s body and had thereupon, as is customary in
these parts, sworn to avenge the murder of his beloved father.
Sometime between a few days and a month after the discovery of the

9
 GROSS BODIES

mmmmmim'
k t^GJNe C7t€ YCACA0F|
$ C^JAUPOCWfiAIt
RoVA'HCTHCMerA AHCMefAl
L AvjreAQWYIpNAAHBR,^: {lAmimuma-
' CONAftOAOYCAKAri i!@«W
MOPOVeA '
KOYCKj

All that survives in stone which testifies to the gnostic presence in Rome: a memorial
erected by the husband to his wife Flavia Sophe (see page 58). (From the National
Museum of Rome)

jar, Ahmad was seen sitting asleep by the road near Muhammad eAli’s
home. On learning of this, Ali Muhammad Khalifa’s widow, armed
her sons with sharpened mattocks and sent them to execute blood
vengeance. They fell upon the victim and hacked Ahmad to pieces, ‘I
took my knife and cut out his heart and ate most of his pieces.’ A police
investigation followed but none of the villagers of al-Qasr would come
forward as witnesses because of widespread hatred of the sheriff from
Hamra Dum and fear of <=Ali’s family. A short detention ensued for
Muhammad and his brothers but the crime went officially unsolved.
The blood feud continues to this day.
‘When I got out from the jail I found my mother had burned a lot of
it and the only one which I really sold was for Mr Raghib. I got eleven
[Egyptian] pounds for it.’
Did Muhammad <= Ali know where the books were now?
‘No, 1 have no idea.’
Did he have any regrets about the business?
‘I don’t care about it at all.’
Professor Quispel told him that he was a famous man and would be
more famous still when the film of the proceedings was shown. Quispel
continued, ‘It is the first time that I come to Nag Hammadi, but I bought
 THE GNOSTICS

one of these books that you found. That was seven years since you
discovered it. And ever since I have been working on it, and many other
scholars have done too - owing to you. And your discovery will change
the minds of millions. Well, so I’m very pleased to meet you.’

What happened to the Texts?

Had Muhammad cAli been able to read Coptic (that is, the ancient
Egyptian language written in Greek letters), his eye might have strayed
on to this passage in Codex (Book) 11:

I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and
what no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human
mind.

Or this one:

If they say to you, ‘Where did you come from?’, say to them, ‘We came
from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own
accord and established [itself] and became manifest through their image.’
If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’, say, ‘We are its children, and we are the
elect of the Living Father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the sign of your
Father in you?’, say to them, ‘It is movement and repose.’

Or:

Jesus said, ‘Many times have you desired to hear these words which I am
saying to you, and you have no one else to hear them from. There will
be days when you will look for Me and will not find Me.’
Jesus said, ‘It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who
am the All. From Me did the All come forth, and unto Me did the All
extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you
will find Me there.’
And what is all this? ‘These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus
spoke and which Didymos Thomas wrote down.’ And he said, ‘Whoever
finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.’

Had Muhammad <= Ali not broken open the jar, we would not be able
to hear these things. In the truest sense of the word, these things are
dynamite. One might have imagined headlines throughout the world.
Alas, these were only words, not gold. Publication of the Library did
take a considerable amount of time. The above quotations (all from
The Gospel of Thomas - the complete work unique to the library) were
not published in English until 1959, while the entire library was _not

12
 GROSS BODIES

available in English until 1977, 32 years after the discovery. Whgt^ook

thenTsClong?
For a start, the Library was very soon separated among Muhammad
cAli’s friends and acquaintances in al-Qasr. Slowly, the papyrus codices
began to turn up in Cairo having been obtained by various middle-men
and antiquities dealers amid a certain amount of secrecy and rather
shady deals with the original holders of the papyri.
On 4 October 1946, Togo Mina, the curator of the Coptic Museum
in Cairo bought what is now Codex III for 250 Egyptian pounds from
a Coptic (that is, Egyptian Christian) teacher from Nag Hammadi:
Raghib Andarawus ‘al Quss’ Abd as-Sajjid - the bfother-in-law of the
priest of al-Qasr and the man who claims to have been the first to
recognize the antiquity of the library. Codex III contains the following
works: The Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John, The Gospel of the
Egyptians, Eugnostos the Blessed, The Sophia of Jesus Christ and The
Dialogue of the Saviour.
Togo Mina alerted two French orientalists, Daumas and Corbin to
the discovery, and they confirmed the Gnostic character of the Codex
on the basis of a reading of The Apocryphon of John. Daumas returned
to Paris and planned an edition for the following year. In September
1947, a young French scholar, Jean Doresse, went to Egypt and was
there informed by Togo Mina of the discovery. He recognized the
great importance of the Codex for our understanding of the origins of
Christianity and he passed on the information to Etienne Drioton,
Director of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities and to Henri-
Charles Puech, an historian of religion based in Paris. It was about this
time that business surrounding the texts began to take on an atmosphere
that one might not expect from the apparently temperate world of
international scholarship. Professor Elaine Pagels - a relatively late¬
comer to the field - has spoken of the ‘dirty linen’ of her profession,
while Jean Doresse in his book The Secret Books of the Egyptian
Gnostics (1958) wrote: ‘If it were all to be gone through again, I confess
that - although for my own part I received every possible assistance
from the able scientific persons concerned, to whom I am profoundly
grateful - I would probably think twice before I would again embroil
myself for the sake of a discovery liable to arouse so many envies and
jealousies.’
In December 1947, Codex III was put under glass for security. The
announcement by Doresse to Togo Mina, that the discovery of the texts
marked a new era in the study of Christian origins, encouraged Mina
to show Doresse some papyrus leaves in the possession of Albert Eid, a

13
 THE GNOSTICS

Belgian antiquities dealer. Togo Mina with his authority as curator of

the Coptic Museum paid another visit to Eid in order to inform him
that the papyri must never leave Egypt and must be sold to the Coptic
Museum for a nominal price.
In 1948 the majority of the texts were still in private hands. Bahi[
<=Ali, the one-eyed contact in al-Qasr of the main middle-man, Zaki
Basta, had obtained many texts. He went to Cairo to sell them. Phocion
Tano, a Cypriot antiquities dealer, bought all that he had (nine codices).
Due to the uncertainty of laws regarding antiquity ownership, Tano
was represented by the daughter of a noted Italian numismatist, Maria
Dattari.
In October 1948, she, as ‘owner’ of the codices, contacted Doresse
who made a survey of their contents. These included the jewel of the
Library: The Gospel of Thomas. Doresse informed Drioton of what he
had seen and advised purchase of the codices by the Coptic Museum.
On reading in a French newspaper in Cairo that the Egyptian govern¬
ment was intervening to acquire the codices, Miss Dattari began a
lawsuit which delayed research on the contents for three years. She
eventually lost the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, Albert Eid, the Belgian antiquities dealer had been trying
to elicit interest from the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, several uni¬
versity collections in the USA and the New York Bollingen Foundation.
It appears that he met with almost total indifference. They did not want
to know about Gnostic papyri. Having flown to the United States, and
fearing a backlash should he return to Egypt, Albert Eid went directly
to Belgium where he placed the Codex in a safe-deposit box, secured
by a secret password. The year was 1949. On 17 June that year, Doresse
gave a report on the Tano texts and Codex III to the Academie des
Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres of the Institut de France in Paris. This was
followed in 1950 by the first comprehensive survey of the discovery.
Much credit therefore went to its author Henri-Charles Puech, Doresse’s
senior.
Enter Gilles Quispel: ‘Well at that time I was a very young professor
at the University of Utrecht, and I had already been trying to get hold
of one of these manuscripts because I was especially interested in the
gnostic Valentinus [more of him later]. And then I had the opportunity.’
The Egyptian government had indicted Eid for smuggling antiquities
but he died before a conviction could be made. Mrs Eid incurred a
£6,000 fine on her husband’s estate. The offending text was now in a
Brussels bank and it was feared, by Quispel in particular, that the text
might ‘disappear’ forever. Quispel had known of the attempt to sell the

14
 GROSS BODIES

Codex (now Codex l of the library) since the late 1940s and was now
in a position, due to his scholarly interests and his friendship with the
great Swiss psychologist Qarl Gustav Jung, to take on the role of
mediator in the purchase negotiatToTRTpressing Jung as to the value of
the Codex. Jung, at various times in his long career hadj>hown a
pronounced interest in what was then jmoWTTof tHeGnostics. Jung put
his agent and associate, Doctor Meier, onto the matter. Meier located
the owner and whereabouts of the text. Jung had some time since set
up a foundation for the continuity and development of his analytical
practice and psychological studies. This was the Bollingen Foundation,
named after the lake by which Jung had personally built his home. In
August 1951, the Bollingen Foundation agreed to purchase the Codex
during the proceedings of the Jungian ‘Eranos Conference’ in Geneva.
Gilles Quispel fills in the story:
Mr Meier had found out the address of the widow of the antiquity dealer
who had brought it to the United States and there he went to the University
of Michigan where they had a very famous collection of papyri. But there
in America they said they had no money which meant that they despised
gnosticism [a general term given by scholars to the beliefs and philosophy
of, chiefly, the early ‘Gnostics’] and didn’t attach any importance to this
collection. And the same happened to me, when I contacted the President
of the Society for Scholarly Research in Holland, he said he had no time,
which again (he was a theologian) meant that he didn’t attach any
importance to gnostic manuscripts. Jung, however, knew from his pre¬
vious studies that gnosticism was very important and therefore contacted
the Bollingen Foundation and asked them to finance the whole enterprise.
At the last moment, the Bollingen Foundation couldn’t do it because they
were financing excavations in Egypt and therefore we were at a loss
again - and at that decisive moment, Professor Meier contacted the
American citizen Georgie Page, who lived in the neighbourhood of Zurich
and he gave us 35,000 Swiss Francs and with this 35,000 Swiss Francs I
went to Brussels on May 10th, 1952 and there I acquired the Codex you
know, I gave a cheque of 35,000 francs, he [an unnamed agent of Mrs
Eid] gave me the codex and with this codex under my arm, I returned
home.
Codex / (the ‘Jung Codex’) remained in Quispel’s study for a year
and a half while he translated and studied it. When he had completed
his first translation, he took it to show Jung at Lake Bollingen where
Jung is quoted as having said: ‘I have worked all my life to know the
psyche - anet these people knew already.4 Quispel says, ‘And it is true
that The Gospel of Truth [the most important and most beautiful
document in the Jung Codex] is such a vivid illustration of what man’s

15
 THE GNOSTICS

predicament is according to Jung, that it could have been a falsification

by a Jungian, which it is not!’
On 23 July 1952 the Egyptian monarchy collapsed in the Egyptian
revolution. The texts in Egypt lay in the sealed box until autumn 1956.
In the same year, the Coptic Gnostic Library was declared State property
following the reorganization of the Department of Antiquities and the
Coptic Museum under the direction of Pahor Labib. On 15 November
1953 there finally appeared a report on the purchase of the ‘Jung Codex’
by Puech and Quispel.
In 1955 came the first major description and more detailed account
of The Jung Codex. A Newly Recovered Gnostic Papyrus. In the same
year, Quispel was in Cairo negotiating the eventual return of the Codex
to Egypt. (It was finally returned in 1975.) When Quispel arrived he was
dismayed to find a proportion of the library - that which had been
confiscated from Tano - still in a suitcase in the Director’s office at the
Coptic Museum. Quispel and Labib agreed that there should be an
international committee of scholars established to undertake the com¬
plete translation and study of the library. The first result of this decision
was a photographic copy of The Gospel of Thomas published by Pahor
Labib. The year 1956 began well but ended badly for the project. Labib
began with an inventory and glazing, aided by the Egyptian Coptologist
Victor Girgis and the German, Martin Krause. It was discovered that
there wrere only 11 complete codices out of a total of 12 or 13.
The Suez Crisis that year scuppered the progress of the international
committee invited to Cairo for publication preparation. It was especially
difficult for French scholars to gain access to Egypt due to the French
political involvement with the attempted take-over of the Suez Canal.
Gilles Quispel himself was happy to get out in time with the photo¬
graphic copy of The Gospel of Thomas and his wife. He recalled, ‘The
American warship Toban, brought me from Alexandria to Naples. And
I remember that there was a band playing on the quay that “Happy
Days are Here Again!”.’
Back in Europe The Gospel of Truth (published as Evangelium Ver-
itatis) appeared in a sumptuous edition.
There was now something like a race going on as to who would put
The Gospel of Thomas before the public first. For the English-speaking
world the honours went to the editors and translators A. Guillaumont,
Henri-Charles Puech, Gilles Quispel, W. Till and Y. ’Abd al Masih who
published The Gospel according to Thomas in 1959. Doresse’s book
The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics which included a translation
of The Gospel of Thomas appeared in French in 1958.
 GROSS BODIES

Also in that year appeared the ripe fruits of over thirty years
specialized scholarship, The Gnostic Religion by Professor Hans Jonas.
Professor Jonas had completed his amazing survey of the Gnostic
religion in 1954 without the benefit of the Nag Hammadi Library.
Nevertheless, he could still assert in his Preface that, ‘Our art and
literature and much else would be different, had the gnostic message
prevailed.’
So by the early 1960s there was sufficient heat in the academic air to
promote a feeling, with some justification, that the world of scholarship
was not only ‘missing out’ on something important but while being fed
on what may perhaps have been morsels, a greater feast yet lay in store,
indeed, was being denied to them. There was talk of a monopoly.
In 1961, the Director-General of UNESCO was alerted to the dis¬
covery by French scholars who urged publication of the entire find. They
proposed another international committee. ‘International’ committees
were now very much the order of the day. The Scandinavian archae¬
ologist Torgny Savy-Soderberg wrote to UNESCO speaking for himself
and other scholars in urging the organization to intervene in order to
prepare a complete edition of photographs of the texts so that the
discovery might be placed at the disposal of disgruntled scholars interna¬
tionally. This work was begun but was bogged down by incompetent pre¬
paration and various obstructions or scholars already working in Cairo.
In 1966 the Colloquium on the Origins of Gnosticism held at Messina
took up an initiative to press ahead with the publication which had
reached a standstill. On behalf of the Colloquium, Professor James M.
Robinson, an American theologian took up the contact with UNESCO
and his enthusiastic efforts, notwithstanding the six-day Arab-Israeli
War, produced, in 1970, the Third International UNESCO Committee
along with the Department of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt.
This led directly to the inception of the publication of the Facsimile Edi¬
tion of the Nag Hammadi Codices. In 1972 the first photographic edition
was published, followed by nine other volumes and completed in 1977.
Robinson and his team had privately circulated the material to scholars
throughout the world and their combined efforts also gave the public
The Nag Hammadi Library in English published by E. J. Brill of Leiden
under the editorship of James M. Robinson. In the Introduction, Robin¬
son wrote that,‘Now the time has come fora concentrated effort, with the
whole Nag Hammadi Library accessible, to rewrite the history of Gnosti¬
cism, to understand what it was really all about, and of course to pose new
questions. Rarely has a generation of students had such an opportunity!’
Quite so - and neither has the general public!

17
 THE GNOSTICS

The Texts
In 1977, when the Nag Hammadi Library was first published, I took my
entrance examinations for Oxford University where I intended to study
Theology. It was also in that year that I made a design for a poster
which featured the words, ‘Creation is the Product of Pain’ - over which
I placed a crucifix. The constant refrain of my thoughts before sleep
was ‘Time must stop. I must transcend time.’ I did not then know that
such thoughts belong to a long but frequently broken ‘tradition’ which
I have now come to term gnostic.
My sources, insofar as I was aware of them, were those strains of
Platonist philosophy as expressed by the English poets, George Herbert,
William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It would be some years
before I discovered their sources and describe them as a diluted gnosis,
moulded to an English experience.
Eighteen months later I read of the Nag Hammadi Discovery while
studying for a routine Oxford essay on ‘Gnosticism’. The ‘official’ view
held that Gnosticism was a Christian heresy based upon a travesty of
Christian doctrine, corrupted by magic, loaded by an impossible weight
of mythology and crazy thinking which would lead to an abyss where
‘salvation’ was lost. I remember writing that the Gnostic myths could
be seen as a kind of ‘map’ of the mind’s experience as it searches for
the root of itself and its meaning - those things which could only be
expressed in richly imaginative terms, those things for which the heart
has reasons the reason knows not of. But what of the texts themselves?
What are they really about? Why did scholars get so excited about
them?
Firstly, one must say that they were new texts. Of the 51 texts 41
were previously unknown. Here was an opportunity to make a scholar’s
reputation. If one looks at the Bible, there are thousands of books
available on any single component. The work has become more and
more refined and it is unlikely that any new work on the Bible will be
greeted with amazement. However, a first work on a new text will
become, no matter how the study develops and contradicts the original
study, a standard reference point: a place in the history books. Having
said this, one must consider that these were ‘Gnostic’ works and this
suggests a secret Knowledge demanding a high attainment of intellect
together with an irresistible aura of mystery. There is a strong romantic
pull at work here.
Thirdly, there is the lure of the Unknown. Gnostic thought was
markedly different to orthodox thought - one might discover genuinely

18
 GROSS BODIES

new insights into the human condition. After all, who knows what
answers to perennial questions still lie beneath the sea or sand? Answers
given at the time the questions were put. One might contact the original,
untarnished thought-processes of a portion of mankind. One might
penetrate the haze of twentieth-century know-all ennui and reach out
to a brighter era enlightened by ancient clarity. There already existed a
precedent. The Renaissance had largely consisted of just this process:
ancient learning giving birth to a fresh creative impulse. One might live
again.
The 51 texts were bound in books which contained between two and
eight works. They were made of papyrus, that is to say that strips of
the fibrous pith which the stalks of the papyrus plant contained were
peeled off and placed side by side. These were then covered with a
second layer at right angles to the first. The result was then pressed and
dried, making for a long-lasting, smooth writing surface. These strips
were usually about 20 cm in length but some of those used in the Nag
Hammadi Library were over a metre in length. This has been considered
to be something of a technological feat for the time and might evince
to the importance of the text for those who had them made. These
surfaces were in turn placed next to each other and pasted together to
form a papyrus roll of about 3 metres in length. This roll was then
divided into strips of between 20 and 40 cm in width. When one had
between twenty and forty of these, they were gathered together and
folded down the middle. The result was a book. You could write on
both sides of the paper and you were saved the inconvenience and wear
and tear which went with the ‘roll’ or ‘scroll’ format. The book format
was an innovation of the first centuries of our era and the Nag Hammadi
Library is the largest early collection of such books or codices - from
the latin codex: the forerunner of the book being a set of waxed wooden
tablets tied together. The papyri were held together in leather stiffened
with ‘used’ papyrus while the tail of the animal skin was attached to a
thong which was wrapped around the finished codex. The covers were
tooled in a simple way and some of them include crosses. In Codex 111
there is a note made by the scribe which says that ‘in the flesh my name
is Gongessos’. He also had a spiritual name, Eugnostos, and refers to
his ‘fellow lights in incorruptibility’. He describes the text as ‘God-
written’.
Concerning the date of composition (of the Codices - not their
sources), fragments of letters and receipts used to reinforce the bindings
give us some clues. Two receipts bear the dates 333, 341, 346 and 348.
We can use this information together with a study of the kind of writing

19
 THE GNOSTICS

employed to arrive at a date of about ad 350. The compouhd of the

ink employed contained soot and the contrast between this and the
sometimes light golden hue of the papyrus has produced some texts of
great beauty -The Gospel of Truth can be especially cited. But what
does the writing say?
First of all the language employed is Coptic which was the spoken
language of the Egyptians written mainly in Greek letters. A study of
the language has shown that many of the works are translations from
the Greek. So what we do not find in the main are writings about
Egyptian religion - although there are some notable exceptions. What
we do find, however, is a collection of writings which, though differing
widely in content and understanding, share a pervading feeling, a philo¬
sophical feeling concerned chiefly with certain kinds of religious experi¬
ence. In Codex II there is a work entitled The Gospel of Philip in
which a reference is made to an independent tradition about Jesus -
independent that is from the Catholic tradition which informs the
structure and content of the New Testament:

He said on that day in the Thanksgiving, ‘You have joined the perfect,
the light, with the Holy Spirit, unite the angels with us also, the images.’

In the same gospel it is said:

When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they
are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who
sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.

We have all heard of, and probably used the expression ‘He or she has
seen the light’. We may say this in a banal way or we may say it with
seriousness and, not uncommonly, with a good deal of relief as well!
We don’t mean that the person has seen something, ‘a light’, with their
eyes, outside of themselves. We mean that, perhaps quite suddenly, a
person sees more of his or her situation than before, as though the
shutters in a room one thought was small and perpetually dark were
opened, without our having done anything, and then one sees that it is
a large room and quite beautiful too - a little cleaning here and there
might be required - but, well, what a room! How could I have been so
blind? We all know the story of Scrooge on Christmas morning. He has
seen, really seen in a visionary way what had always been before his
eyes, namely, that he was a greedy selfish old man. He was transformed
and he transformed all those who saw him on that Christmas morning.
‘There is light within a man of light, and he lights up the whole world.
If he does not shine, he is darkness,’ says the Jesus of The Gospel of

10
 GROSS BODIES

Thomas. Now what marks the authors of these works apart is precisely
this: that they all hold the vision of the ‘light’ to be the central principle
of life. It must have been a very special experience of the light which
made them think in the ways they did:

Do not make the kingdom of heaven a desert within you. Do not be

proud because of the light that illumines, but be to yourselves as I myself
am to you. For your sakes I have placed myself under the curse, that you
may be saved.
(from The Apocryphon of James)

For when they had seen him and had heard him, he granted them to taste
him and to smell him and to touch the beloved Son. When he had
appeared instructing them about the Father, the incomprehensible one,
when he had breathed into them what is in the mind, doing his will, when
many had received the light, they turned to him. For the material ones
were strangers and did not see his likeness and had not known him.
Again, speaking new things, still speaking about what is in the heart of
the Father, he brought forth the flawless word.
(from The Gospel of Truth)

What is this ‘light’?

I am the light which exists in the light, I am the remembrance of the
Providence - that I might enter into the middle of darkness and the inside
of Hades.
(from The Apocryphon of John)

The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not
see it.
(from The Gospel of Thomas)

Men do not see it. A Gnostic however had most definitely seen the
‘Light’. If we return for a moment to the analogy of the darkened room.
For the Gnostic, the darkened room is the world - the ‘world’ of man’s
experience without the ‘Light’. The nature of this world is dark and
heavy. It changes and is full of uncertainty. It is a world of gross matter,
subject to decay and death. It is a theatre of war, of domination and
destruction. It is a world full of illusions, of false promises and pain. It
is a world where men and women go hungry while animals consume
each other. It is a world in which movement is forced. It is characterized
by fatigue and distress. It is, in short, a material world.
Now we can come to the root of the matter/What the Gnostic knows
(and the word gnostic means a^kndwePfTs that this world, as I have
described it, is not his or her true homeTAWhile the world sleeps the
Gnostic awakes: J

21
 THE GNOSTICS

He who hears, let him get up from the deep sleep. Arise and remember
that it is you who hearkened, and follow your root, which is I, the
merciful one.
(from The Apocryphon of John)

I tell you this that you may know yourself.

(from The Apocryphon of James)

At the very heart, at the ‘root’ of the Gnostic is the ‘living Jesus’. This
is what it means to ‘know yourself’. The Gnostic knows that he or she
is a spiritual being, ‘of one substance with the Father’; for what the
orthodox say of Christ, the Gnostic is free to say of himself. They do
not believe they have denigrated Jesus but that they have discovered the
proper dignity of Man: to be an elevated being is what being a Gnostic
is all about. He will ‘be like a tree growing by a meandering stream’.
He will be in the ‘Light’ and in his spiritual being he will have wings:

Everyone who seeks the truth from true wisdom will make himself wings
so as to fly, fleeing the lust that scorches the spirits of men.
(from The Book of Thomas the Contender)

The Gnostic feels intensely his freedom from the world:

Whoever has come to understand the world has found a corpse, and
whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.
(from The Gospel of Thomas)

The Gnostic clearly distinguished himself from the great mass of human
beings who did not share this experience: ‘They have always been
attracted downwards’ (Book of Thomas the Contender). Such people
were described as ‘hylic’, that is ‘material’. This means that there is
none of that divine light within them which longs for union with the
Father. It is the guiding dynamic of gnostic thought that divine light has
become imprisoned within the material world and must be returned:

Hasten to be saved without being urged. And, if possible arrive even

before me - for thus the Father will love you.
(from The Apocryphon of James)
*

|jTo have the gnosis (knowledge of where one comes from, into what
one has been thrown and where one is going) is to become part of the
great cosmic rescue plan. The aim of the rescue plan is to^ heal the
original divine being [called the Pleroma, thaF~isTFullness) which has
tragicatly“gfven Birth to a deficient creation?^

22
 GROSS BODIES

For the knowledge of the things which are ordained is truly the healing
of the passions of matter.
(from Asclepius)

In the Apocryphon of John the Gnostic Jesus says, ‘I am the remem¬

brance of the Pleroma.’ Remembrance. There has occurred a kind of
cosmic amnesia. People do not know where they come from. Most of
mankind does not seem to care. For those who do, they begin to yearn;
they begin to suffer and then, if they listen to their deepest heart, from
out of the Fullness of Being (the Pleroma) their cry is heard by the Father
who sends his Son, the saviour Jesus to rescue the lonely soul. The voice
of the saviour is familiar. It is a remembrance, an awakening. There is
joy and a profound knowing:

Blessed are the solitary and elect, for you will find the kingdom. For you
are from it, and to it you will return.
(from The Gospel of Thomas)

The gnostic Jesus comes from the spiritual world within and above,
appearing to those who are awake. To those who are not, who do not
have the gnosis, He is merely an image made of flesh. Flesh of itself is
without life. It is part of the world. To the Gnostic, the world of material
perception has become an image and is no longer subject to its control:

You walked in mud,

and your garments were not soiled,
and you have not been buried in their filth,
and you have not been caught.
(from the First Apocalypse of James)

Before leaving the world of matter, Jesus says this to his disciples:

Watch and pray that you not come to be in the flesh, but rather that you
come forth from the bondage of the bitterness of this life. And as you
pray, you will find rest, for you have left behind the suffering and the
disgrace. For when you come forth from the sufferings and passion of the
body, you will receive rest from the Good one, and you will reign with
the King, you joined with him and he with you, from now on, for ever
and ever. Amen.
(from The Book of Thomas the Contender)

I hope that what has preceded gives the reader some idea of the world
of feeling, thought and experience which informs a good deal of the
Nag Hammadi Library. To talk of the ‘message’ of the Library would
be unwise. The Library is not to be seen, as some see the Bible, as a big

23
 THE GNOSTICS

homogenous lump of Truth. There are books in the Library which seem
to be exclusively concerned with exclusivity - identifying the authors
and those ‘in the know’ to which they are addressed as the only wise,
and all others as fools fit for grinding. Some of the works take a radical
view which holds that the world we live in is wholly evil and who seem
to be ignorant of those lines of thought and understanding which see
the kingdom of heaven spread out upon the world but yet unseen. I
think the reader today is in a position to take in what appears to make
sense and reject what is apparently silly or incomprehensible. It was
surely the practice of the original holders of the texts to keep books
which in the main may have been disagreeable in the knowledge that
some kernel of insight here or there mediated on their behalf and so
made the text worthy of preservation. It accords with what we know
of the gnostic mind to think that they may have realized that what
appeared to be insensible may in time yield an understanding for which
they were not yet ready.
This necessary reserve brings us to the last major question which
needs to be addressed on the subject of the Library and one which may
be of most significance to some readers.

Did God write the Nag Hammadi Library?

We have seen from the preceding discourse that the Gnostic felt removed
from ordinary perception. These books were the records of outsiders,
of aliens. Indeed, oneoFthe books is entitled Allogenes which is trans¬
lated as ‘of another race’ or ‘stranger’ or ‘alien’. Their experience of the
world as they thought_aod felt. it, w asj;un daxnenta-1-1y-different- to the
rest of humanity. Insofar as the world which exists for each one of us
is the world as we perceive it in our minds, the Gnostic lived in a
different world. They believed that their perception and experience was
timeless - outside of the conditions of time and space. They sometimes
refer to themselves as the ‘immovable ones’. They felt that they were
not, in their essential being, subject to the laws and conditions which
govern life on earth. This being, this self beyond the world, was only
temporarily attached to the gross body: ‘The Living are not affected by
anything except the state of being in the flesh alone, which they bear
while looking expectantly for the time when they will be met by the
receivers’ (from the Apocryphon of John).
This extraordinary awareness, this gnosis, this ability to move from
terra firma to the source of that ‘Light’ which they believed illumined
them, this familiarity with the ‘Living Jesus’ gave them, we might say

24
 GROSS BODIES

naturally gave them, a privileged access to the outflow of the divine

mind. Thus, our scribe, Gongessos can say that his work is ‘God-
written’. It has been written by one who has, as it were, broken through
the images that are visible in the material world to the invisible, spiritual
world that the Gnostic might believe to be ‘behind’ them. For the
Gnostic, this constituted authority enough. On the other hand, there
was a tolerance within the Gnosis of the value of the subjective experi¬
ence. This is to say that the Gnostic could say, well, that is your vision
of things but it is not the same as mine and I cannot believe your vision
has any authority over mine unless I experience it for myself. This
view was also taken with regard to the New Testament, that ‘Canon,
accredited as Divine’ which Athanasius says in the 39th Festal Letter is
the yardstick and substance of authoritative Catholic scripture. By
‘Catholic’ I mean ‘what is held universally in the universal church’. The
Gnostic asks, ‘What does it mean when Christ says in The Gospel of
John, “I am the Door”?’ He might then meditate upon this and achieve
what he is convinced is a communication from the ‘Living Jesus’ who
tells him that it means, ‘Knock on yourself as upon a door.’ Which, one
may ask, is the truly and divinely inspired scripture? The orthodox
answer is ‘that which is held universally by the Church and is in
accordance with the tradition of the teaching of the apostles’. But the
Gnostic is not concerned wfith the universal Church - he has a universe
within himself. He believes he is going right to the source and is wary
that the Church is becoming or has become a middle-man with special
interests of its own, namely, the continuity of the Church structure.
Again, we see a clash of world experiences. Of course, we are in a
position today to justifiably question or disbelieve in any such thing as
‘divinely inspired scripture’.
The use of the predicate ‘Living’ when attached to Jesus does suggest
that the authors are aware of a distinction between the Jesus who
walked around Palestine and the eternal figure of Jesus who is able to
appear as ‘Light’ before Paul on his way to Damascus. Many Christians
today say that they talk with Jesus and that he gives them verbal
guidance. But they do not print up their dialogues. I think this is
important. It tells us something about the way Jesus is regarded. For
the person referred to, such communication with Christ is personal,
concerning matters of this life and not really communicable to another.
It is a private matter, the substance of prayer. The Gnostic, however,
regarded Jesus as being unconcerned with the affairs of this world unless
they had a directly spiritual bearing. So what Jesus - and it is not always
Jesus who is the communicator from the divine world in the Nag
 THE GNOSTICS

Hammadi Library - what the spiritual being has to offer is information

about the spiritual world and what those principles are which provide
access to it: frequently occult or ‘hidden’ knowledge. This information
was of interest to some Gnostics. Having begun with an experience of
gnosis, of knowledge, the Gnostic would soon become aware that there
was yet more to know. In fact, there was no end to knowledge and no
limits to the fathoming of the divine being - the inner being of the
Gnostic. Each new item of information would thus make the previous
one obsolete - but it might still be useful for another Gnostic who was
on the road to ‘home’. Hence, we find many of the books in the Library
listing now (and possibly then) incomprehensible names of the spiritual
beings one might encounter on the inner journey to the Pleroma. The
books Allogenes, The Nature of the Archons. On the Origin of the
World, The Book of Thomas the Contender, The Gospel of the Egyp¬
tians, Eugnostos, the Blessed, The Apocalyspe of Adam, The Thunder:
Perfect Mind, The Concept of Our Great Power, The Dialogue on the
Eighth and Ninth, The Paraphrase of Shem, The Three Steles of Seth,
Zostrianos, Marsanes and Trimorphic Protennoia all share elements of
these features. Indeed, one might say of the Library that the more
eccentric sounding the title is to English ears the more the work is likely
to be concerned with this gnostic attitude of getting information about
‘realities behind appearances’ from inner contemplation in those states
of mind to which a gnostic experience might have provided entry. As
to the origin of the ideas, language and message of such works, one is,
as the Gnostic was, at liberty to speculate. Speculation is not, however,
what most people want from a religion which is offering salvation. The
Catholic Church felt acutely the necessity of establishing a body of
scripture which, while providing for the philosophers a basis for specu¬
lation, was stable and universally accepted - and accessible to a body
of worshippers and not only to an individual.
What we really want to know is of course the answer to the question:
did Jesus of Nazareth ever say, in his lifetime on earth, any of the things
put into his mouth in the gnostic texts? Is there a reliable tradition here
of Jesus’s sayings while in the flesh? Was Jesus’s ‘real’ message a gnostic
one? With regard to the question about the nature of Jesus’s message -
was it a gnostic one? - I think that an incident in my life may provide
a clue. I know a Sikh Rajinder Nijjhar, who, with characteristic Indian
boldness, informed me that, ‘You cannot read the New Testament
unless you are gnostic.’ He means that the words of the New Testament
will not yield their full meaning unless one gains access to the spirit in
which the words were formed, unless one had the gnosis in fact. It is a
 GROSS BODIES

characteristic of the gnostic attitude to an inspired text to believe that

it has an outer sense - for ordinary ‘faithful’ people - and an inner sense
whose dimensions of meaning may be endless. This experience is, of
course, akin to that of many people who would deny that their attitude
was gnostic. The genuine Gnostic would believe that he had broken
into or rather had been permitted to enter the secret world of spirit from
which the words came and, most importantly, that same world from
which he derived. This gave the Gnostic ‘pneumatic’ (that is, spiritual
one) the power to interpret scripture according to his own experience
of the divine and, furthermore, to add to scripture by virtue of the divine
origins he shared with the revealer of gnosis. For Christian gnostics,
Jesus existed within the Gnostic’s own being while his own being existed
within the ‘Light’. He was a child of the ‘Light’, and consequently in
potential or in fact was divine. The Christian Gnostic believed that Jesus
had revealed the Gnostic’s true self and that was ‘the root, which is I,
the merciful one’L In short, in answer to the question, ‘Was Jesus’s
message gnostic?’ The answer is, ‘Yes, if you are a Gnostic?*)
Some of the most interesting examples of this gnostic approach to
scripture can be found in the way two documents of the ‘Nag Hammadi
Library’ deal with the crucifixion.
In the work The Second Treatise to the Great Seth, Jesus Christ in a
revelation to a group of gnostic disciples tells them the real story,

For my death which they think happened, happened to them in their error
and blindness, since they nailed their man unto their death.
It was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns. But I was
rejoicing in the height over all the wealth of the archons and the offspring
of their error, of their empty glory. And I was laughing at their ignorance.

The author is saying that the spiritual Jesus has appeared to him in his
‘real’ form - as a spiritual being in order to explain the ‘appearance’ of
the crucifixion. He is saying in effect, ‘You have read how in the New
Testament that I was beaten and humiliated and then crucified. Well, it
only looked that way - and the writers of the New Testament, to them
it was given in the material sense. But to you, who have come to
understand and see the spiritual world, the real world beyond the
appearances, I can tell you what was really happening. The body, what
appeared to be my body belongs to the world of flesh. The world of
flesh and matter is governed by the archons (that is rulers, invisible to
men and ignorant of the true Father, dedicated to keeping man on the
material plain, subjecting man to law and bondage) and they tried to
have power over me as they have power over the rest of the world. But

2-7
 THE GNOSTICS

at the moment when they thought they had triumphed over me, I was
released from the body and watched them from above. And I could
really see what was going on and they couldn’t see me - you should
have seen them in their blindness! So while it looked to you that it was
a wicked day, it was really a day a triumph! You too can laugh at the
archons because they can only get your body. They cannot kill the real
you!’
This reality behind appearance is the gospel, the ‘good news’ for the
Gnostic. Another gnostic author, this time of The Apocalypse of Peter,
tells the story rather differently. This the Gnostic felt at liberty to do -
originality was the sign that the Gnostic had the special creative insight
of gnosis. History, as we understand it, was of no interest to them. It
was not a question of, ‘what was the event?’ but of ‘what does this mean
to me?’ In The Apocalypse of Peter the identity of the author is subsumed
beneath the identity of Peter. The author imagines himself as Peter.
For the author, Peter is not an historical person here but expresses a
relationship of closeness to the Saviour. He puts Peter in the Temple in
Jerusalem, that is, he puts himself there, talking to the Saviour, trying
to understand how Jesus would respond to the developments of the
Church and the Church’s understanding of him. There, in the imagin¬
ative freedom of the spirit, Peter has a vision:
I saw him seemingly being seized by them. And I said, ‘What do I see, O
Lord, that it is you yourself whom they take, and that you are grasping
me? Or who is this one, glad and laughing on the tree? And is it another
one those feet and hands they are striking?’
The Saviour said to me, ‘He whom you saw on the tree, glad and
laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet
they drive the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute being put to
shame, the one who came into being in his likeness. But look at him and
me.’
But I, when I had looked, said, ‘Lord, no one is looking at you. Let us
flee this place.’
But he said to me, ‘I have told you, “Leave the blind alone!” And you,
see how they do not know what they are saying. For the son of their
glory instead of my servant they have put to shame.’
And I saw someone about to approach us resembling him, even him
who was laughing on the tree. And he was (filled) with a Holy Spirit, and
he is the Saviour. And there was a great, ineffable light around them, and
the multitude of ineffable and invisible angels blessing them. And when
I looked at him, the one who gives praise was revealed.

Through this vision the author saw himself. Who is to say that he was
misled? Were the Gnostics of the Nag Hammadi Library then what we

28
 GROSS BODIES

might call ‘dreamers’, offering imagined solutions to perennial ques¬

tions?
Was the Gnosis a collection of ‘fantasies’? 1 do not believe it is possible
to give definitive answers to these questions. Much lies in the ‘eyes of
the beholder’. Much has been learned in the twentieth century about
the importance of dream. Some go to a modern art gallery and see riches
glorious while others see an incomprehensible mess; others still desire
to apply rules to what they see in order to subdivide the artwork and
provide solace for the two sides - and themselvesQsfow while it may be
that the vast majority of books in the Nag Hammadi collection are
specialized and rebellious offshoots of early Christianity, post-dating
the composition of books of the New Testament from between about
fifty to 280 years, there are reasons to believe that the Gnosis, as a
religious concept of it^dfTgoesTack in less developed forms to the time
oFChrrst^ah<Tpossibly earlier thajn thak. Several works sharing the titles
ofTlToSen-fE^-the"^ Nag Hammadi Library are referred to in the second
century. In about ad 180, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon, mentions a Gospel
of Truth and a Secret Book of John, while in the third century, the great
philosopher Plotinus’s pupil Porphyry mentions (with some disgust)
works called Allogenes and Zostrianos. Several of the works bear the
imprints of the ‘mind’ of the followers of Valentinus, the greatest gnostic
teacher who was active in Rome (and nearly became bishop) around ad
160 and whose influence and fame lasted for at least 300 years after that.
It is thought that the remarkable Gospel of Truth may very well have
come from his pen.
However, the one book which has the greatest claim to primacy (if
we accept that what is earliest is also most likely to be most pure and
possibly true) in the matter of its date of composition is without doubt
The Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel begins:

These are the hidden words which the living Jesus spoke and Didymos,
Judas Thomas wrote down and he said, ‘Whoever will find the interpret¬
ation of these sayings will not experience death.’

Here Gilles Quispel describes the first time he read these words:

... in the fall of 1956. When I was sitting here [in Cairo] in a hotel in the
evening near the Metropolitan Museum, and trying to translate them
from a photocopy. And it was an experience to have before you a text
that you don’t understand at all, and bring these characters together and
relay them to history. And every time there was ‘Jesus said’, ‘Jesus said’.
Then in the back of your mind you have always the idea; can that be an
 THE GNOSTICS

unknown and yet authentic word of Jesus. Because in almost 2,000 years
of Christian tradition, never a collection of unknown sayings has been
discovered. So it was an enormous experience. Very exciting, and well,
it took me the rest of my years to prove that my original intuition was
right. That we had here an independent tradition of the sayings of Jesus.

Do these sayings belong in the Bible?

Well, I’m not a prince of the Church, I’m not a bishop or a Pope,
and these are the people that determine the Canon. But according to a
considered opinion of scholars that have seriously studied The Gospel of
Thomas, some of these sayings are nearer to the source than the sayings
of Jesus transmitted in the canonical gospels.

In a book published in 1962 Thomas and the Evangelists by H.E.W.

Turner and Hugh Montefiore (formerly the Bishop of Birmingham) it
is concluded:

It is therefore fair to conclude that despite the form in which it is cast

and for all its impressive indebtedness to the canonical tradition, the
thought climate of the document is alien to the world of the New
Testament. The Gospel of Thomas may have appeared to its compiler
‘the secret words which Jesus the Living One spake’; despite the claims
of the rest of the Preamble they are not, for those who take the New
Testament as their guide, the words of eternal life.

So it was a thumbs-down from the Church of England anyway.

The Gospel of Thomas does contain sayings of Jesus which appear
in the canonical gospels, Luke and Matthew. This was of interest to
scholars who have long held a sayings-source called ‘Q’ (from the
German Quelle meaning Source) to have been employed~By*those gospel
writers in conjuction with Mark. It is possible that The Gospel of
Thomas was another sayings-source circulating in the Jewish Christian
church in Syria before the composition of Luke and Matthew (circa AD
70-90). Luke, who represents much of the New Testament ‘thought
climate’ begins his gospel with the statement: ‘Forasmuch as many have
taken in hand to draw up a narrative of those matters which have been
fulfilled among us ... ’. Luke does not say that these other narratives,
of which he says there are many, were ‘apocryphal’ and unacceptable
to the Church. By the time of Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter, it was
long established that there were only four gospels which revealed div¬
inely inspired truth. Athanasius even paraphrases Luke’s form of words
saying, ‘Forasmuch as some have taken in hand, to reduce into order
for themselves the books termed apocryphal ... ’.

30
 GROSS BODIES

Having said this, it is important to recall those passages in the New

Testament which speak of things which are not written within it.
The most obvious passage is that of Mark IV. 10-12 which has often
perplexed readers but perhaps makes more sense from a gnostic per¬
spective:

And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked
of him the parables.
And he said unto them, Unto you is given the mystery of the kingdom
of God: but unto them that are without, all things are done in parables:
That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear,
and not understand; lest haply they should turn again, and it should be
forgiven them.

A very mysterious passage indeed and in all my reading 1 have never

found a satisfactory explanation of it. It is this .yery mystery which
appeals to the gnostic mind, drawing him in as a fish in a net ... Saint
Paul too is aware of the mysteries but he is also aware, deeply aware of
the spiritual pride, the inflation of the ejgo which experience of the
mysteries may lead to. He speaks about this in his second letter to the
Corinthians. Many scholars believe that Paul came up against a gnostic
tendency in Corinth which threatened to split the young church on the
familiar basis of the gnostic distinction between the simple faithful and
the more ‘enlightened’ spiritual consciousness. Paul saw the issue as one
of pride and says in the wonderful passage in I Corinthians XIII that it
is Love that matters most of all, that the loving heart is dearer to God
than the wisest of wise sayings. Nevertheless, one senses that Paul has
been deeply disquietened by the experience of a gnosis of Christ which
has the power to divide the followers of Christ. He writes in II Corin¬
thians XII. 1-7:

I must needs glory, though it is not expedient; but I will come to visions
and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ [usually thought to
be Paul himself] fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or
whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught
up even to the third heaven. And I know such a man (whether in the
body, or apart from the body, I know not; God knoweth), How that he
was caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is
not lawful for a man to utter. On behalf of such a one will I glory: but
on mine own behalf I will not glory, save in my weaknesses. For if I
should desire to glory, I shall not be foolish; for I shall speak the truth:
but I forbear, lest any man should account of me above that which he
seeth me to be, or heareth from me. And by reason of the exceeding
greatness of the revelations - wherefore, that I should not be exalted

3i
 THE GNOSTICS

overmuch, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of

Satan to buffet me, that I should not be exalted overmuch.

Paul is saying, ‘I know what you people are talking about. I’ve been
there and I know the temptation to glorify myself. But the experience
has humbled me and I would rather glorify the vision of another.’ lit
would not be long before the visionary would become suspect in tne
Church and a substantial part of the spiritual gifts which Paul’s churches
enjoyed would be downgraded, and, in the case of the Gnosis, excluded
altogether*
Just how and why this happened will be set forth in the next two
chapters. But before we leave the Nag Hammadi Library for a while,
look again at the mysterious (to me at least) Chapter IV of Mark’s
gospel, verses 19 and 21-22:
And the cares of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts
of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful.
And he said unto them, Is the lamp brought to be put under the bushel,
or under the bed, and not to be put on the stand?
For there is nothing hid, save that it should be manifested; neither was
anything made secret, but that it should come to light.

and see what the Gnostic makes of this theme in The Gospel of Thomas:
Businessmen and merchants will not enter the Places of my Father.

Recognise what is in your sight and that which is hidden from you will
become plain to you. For there is nothing hidden which will not become
manifest.

The images are manifest to men, but the light in them remains concealed
in the image of the light of the Father. He will become manifest, but his
image will remain concealed by his light.

I think that modern man can only accept what he experiences and he
can see, he can learn from the Gnostics that he can experience much more
than he is aware of. And therefore I think that for both true believers and
unbelievers, gnosis is very important, because it will reveal to them an
unknown dimension within themselves.
(Professor Gilles Quispel. Cairo, Spring 1986).

32
 Chapter Two

The Higher Reason

BaoiXevq 6 Now;
The Higher Reason is king
(Plotinus, b. ad 204)

Rome circa ad 150. An Egyptian poet is writing a book. He gazes into

the dark heart of the Empire and sees:

terror and disturbance and instability and doubt and division, there were
many illusions at work by means of these, and there were empty fictions,
as if they were sunk in sleep and found themselves in disturbing dreams.
Either there is a place to which they are fleeing, or without strength they
come from having chased after others, or they are involved in striking
blows, or they are receiving blows themselves, or they have fallen from
high places, or they take off into the air though they do not even have
wings. Again, sometimes it is as if people were murdering them, though
there is no one even pursuing them, or they themselves are killing their
neighbours, for they have been stained with their blood. When those who
are going through all these things wake up, they see nothing, they who
were in the midst of all these disturbances, for they are nothing. Such is
the way of those who have cast ignorance aside from them like sleep, not
esteeming it as anything, nor do they esteem its works as solid things
either, but they leave them behind like a dream in the night. The know¬
ledge of the Father they value as the dawn. This is the way each one has
acted, as though asleep at the time when he was ignorant. And this is the
way he has come to knowledge, as if he had awakened.

The poet is almost certainly the Christian^Bosete-Walentinus who we

know was in Rome from ad 135-160, during the heyday oLGnosis.
At about the same time as the poet was writing this terrifying and
perhaps familiar account of the rootless soul coming to consciousness,
another writer, Apuleius, a pagan from Madaura (a Roman colony in
North Africa), was writing a work on the philosophy of Plato. In it, the

33
 THE GNOSTICS

writer is keen to stress the sense of stability and permanence of ultimate

realities. The reader is to distinguish between that which changes and
is sensible to touch and that which is intelligible, that is, perceived
consistently by the ‘noetic’, the nous, the intuitiveJagulty - the higher
reason.

There are also two natures [or essences] of things. And of these, one
pertains to things which may be seen by the eyes, and touched by the
hand, and which Plato calls doxastic [or the subject of opinion]; but the
other is the object of intellect and is dianoetic and intelligible. For pardon
must be granted to novelty of words, when it serves to illustrate the
obscurity of things. And the former nature is indeed mutable and easily
to be perceived; but the latter, which is seen by the piercing eye of intellect,
and is known and conceived by the acute energy of the reasoning power,
is incorruptible, immutable, stable, and invariably and perpetually the
same.
Hence, also, he says, That there is a twofold method of interpretation
[pertaining to them]. For that visible nature is known by a fortuitous
suspicion, and which is of no long duration; but this intelligible essence
is demonstrated to exist, by true, perpetual, and stable reasoning. But
time is the image of eternity; since time is moved, but the nature of
eternity is firm and immovable.

Both Valentinus and Apuleius are deeply concerned with finding a point
of stability in an uncertain and changing world. For Valentinus, that
point emerges as the gnosis (knowledge) of who one is, where one comes
from and into what one has appeared and awakened to. The Gnostic,
while before gnosis felt alienated, now after gnosis, knows he is alien
but the knowledge no longer causes anguish and misery but a sense of
freedom and peace or ‘movement and repose’: ‘The knowledge of the
Father they value as the dawn’ (Gospel of Truth). The Gnostic has
emerged from the nightmare of unconscious existence as a profoundly
changed person: he knows that at the very ground of his being, at his
root, is the Father - ‘the primal-incomprehensible’. Incomprehensible
no doubt, but when we have faith in a person and we say we ‘know’
them - that does not mean that we understand them intellectually. Many
in our times, following an intellectual psychology as a path to self-
knowledge have often found that it fails to make them really understand
the people they are living with and does not really help those other people
to understand them. The Gnostic has made contact with eternity - the
fullness and love of the eternal Father of All - what more could there
possibly be to worry about?
What to some extent, the Gnostic has attained to by the experience

34
 THE HIGHER REASON

of gnosis, the philosopher sees by the ‘piercing eye of intellect’. By

intellect, Apuleius does not mean what passes for the intellect^tpday,
that is, the abstract binding power of reason - that which binds ideas
in coherent patterns and assigns measure and proportion to them.
Apuleius means something operating by the energy of intelligence - it
is a light one sometimes sees in the gardener’s or craftsman’s eye when
he or she comes to approach the very substance of their labours - the
meaning of their contact with nature. It is a natural power and begins
with the observation of nature, then extends to a communication with
nature and then to the ‘nature of nature’ herself. An abstracted, opaque
and concrete world is well suited to blocking out this faculty altogether.
The rational man of today tends to despise the very supposition of such
an energy of perception or may begin to speak of the paranormal. What
is normal? Freud was perhaps not far wrong when he described normalcy
as neurosis!
Now it seems to me that the Gnostic and the philosopher need each
other’s contrasting approaches. Sadly, there came in this period a gradual
split between them, just as thve Gnostic was to be split apart from the
Church. I think that this was a tragedy of long-lasting effect. }n order
to understand how it occurred we need to look at the epoch which both
disturbed and inspired both Valentinus and Apuleiusf What was wrong
with a world which made them so, we may say so desperately interested
in finding a point of stability in the strange world of the second century,
that period when gnosis emerged in full flower - only to be pruned by
the Church Catholic?)
Now the moment we begin to hear of a changing, uncertain and
perhaps strange world, a little bell may ring in our minds as we think of
our time, the late twentieth century. Indeed, there are several important
parallels and I think we can learn about our own time by looking at
them.

The Second Century - A conversation with Hans Jonas

Professor Hans Jonas has been described as the ‘old master’ of Gnostic
Studies, beginning his studies long before the Nag Hammadi Library
had ever been heard of, in the late 1920s in fact - as a student of Martin
Heidegger and Rudolph Bultmann in Germany a few years before Hitler
came to power. His first major work on the subject appeared in 1934, >
Gnosis und spatantiker Geist (Gnosis and the Spirit of late antiquity)
but German scholars risked a great deal if they wanted to review it
because the author was a Jew. The influence of the book was thus
restricted until after World War II.

35
 THE GNOSTICS

Professor Jonas, who, I should add, is emphatically not a gnostic,

maintains that the appearance of the Gnostics was a ‘w.cudd^^historical
eyeatVHe wrote in The Gnostic Religion (1958):

It is the first time in history that the radical ontological [of the nature
of essence] difference of man and nature has been discovered and the
powerfully moving experience of it given expression in teachings strange
and suggestive. This rift between man and nature was never to close
again, and protesting his hidden but essential otherness became in many
variations an abiding theme in the quest for truth concerning man.

In January 1986 at his home in New Rochelle, New York, I discussed

with Hans Jonas this point about the significance of the Gnostics in
terms of parallels between our time and that of the second century.
Professor Jonas began by saying that gnosis:

is one of the great alternatives in looking at the whole scheme of things

and our place in it and, well, do we belong? Or are we aliens? - And if
aliens, where do we come from? Where would home be? What would
home be? The very fact that they [the Gnostics] probably were the first
who saw the theme of the stranger in the world. That makes them, the
Gnostics, a world historical event. That theme never disappeared again.
It can then re-emerge again and again and if we speak of alienation
nowadays, there we are. It has become a perennial theme.

The discussion continued:

author: I have been putting forth the thesis that we live in times with
remarkable parallels with this period and, let’s look at how these particular
groups of people dealt with them - do they have anything to teach us?
The fear of cosmic catastrophe, apocalyptic expectation, boredom with
institutional religion and alienation from the business of running the Empire
and being part of that. Would you say that those were the main parallels? •

jonas: Oh yes. Certainly they are the main ones. The climate of rebelliousness
is there [in the second century] and leads to very strange intellectual responses
and also philosophical responses, as existentialism in our time in this century
shows-in .s.Qine_iifJtS-.thinking some^paratfefc with'Te^pect^ro so'me gnostic
thinking and feeling. Certainly there are affinities to the modern situation.
We Jiear these voices from the beginning of the Christian Era. A certain
affinity. These things speak to us in a way they wouldn’t to, let’s say
eighteenth-century people. But there is a part that does not strike particular
affinities - the whole conception of something otherworldly. We are today
very immanentist: everything in the world is - all there is. Their idea that
this world is only, that there’s something beyond this world which is the true
reality and which we find in the tradition of Plato - that is not to do with
our thing. So probably the term alienation is a good term to hang up, to

36
 THE HIGHER REASON

hook. There is certainly a widespread unease in the modern mind concerning

this age-old question of what is it all about? Are we, are the concerns of the
day, the pressing needs of day-to-day existence, is that all there is to it? In
perhaps the general disruption in which we live there is a kind of nihilism
with which we are confronted - not knowing what the standards are, to
what, what way to go in the world, what to expect, what to fear, where to
belong, what to guard against and so on. Isn’t this the general disorientation?
Isn’t the feeling that ‘everything goes’ a sign that something is out of joint?
And then we hear these old voices which tell us that the out-of-jointness is
not just the accident of a particular situation but somehow belongs to man’s
being in the world, that we are, though we are part of the world, we are not
wholly part of the world, but that our roots may be somewhere else - that
we may^be exiles^That strikes a chord in us.
author: That we’re outsiders.
JONAS: Exactly yes. And that we have to chaiTja way in the world from sources
of insight which are not derived from our worldly knowledge alone. Not
from what science tells us about causes and effect, or politics or what
sociology says about laws of society - the determination theme. That there
is a remainder in the equations of our being that is not dissolved into
these different forces and determinations. And what is this? This feeling of
homelessness points to something. Natural science tells us of an entirely
value-free system of forces of which wea7elfp~a Fraud this neutrality - value-
free, neither hostile nor friendly nor hospitable but it’s just plain fact. Brutal
fact in which with the forces of our reason and of our, mventiveriess and so
on, we try to carve out as comfortable or acceptable existence for ourselves
as wffcan manage.
author: Then a nihilist is a person who has become invaded by the value-
free quality of tTuTworM?
jonas: Exactly. The mere indifference of fact, the indifference around-us
somehow invades~ourselyes, that nothing ultimately matters and we make
things matter for our own purposes.
author: "What was there in the historical situation of the second-century
Empire which might have promoted this feeling? What had been going on in
the previous centuries to promote such a feeling of crisis among sensitive
people?
jonas: Well certainly major dislocations of national cultures. From the con¬
quest of Alexander the Great on (334-323 bc), the establishment of cosmo¬
politan Hellenistic (Greek-influenced) civilization. There the national tra¬
ditions were somehow driven underground, but in their subterranean survival
they then underwent certain changes which, among other things, bred also
the spirit of rebelliousness. The official dominant culture which was then
taken over in some way by the Roman Empire, especially in its eastern part,

37
 THE GNOSTICS

did not express the indigenous spirit of the conquered peoples in its new
urban civilization.

author: Had there been a decline in responsibility to the polis [self governing
city]?

jonas: Very good question, yes. This was a major factor, that, as far as the
classical civilization is concerned, it itself had lost its original foundations,
namely the life of the polis: the self-governing, autonomous cities. They were
now part of an empire in which they had at best become administrative
entities but no longer the home for a political self-realization, and this is one
factor in the estrangement which people were bound to feel at that time.

author^So the individual had become part of a machine)

JONAS: Yes.

One does not have to have read Kafka’s The Trial or to have seen
television’s Patrick McGoohan as ‘The Prisoner’ to find this picture a
familiar one. All over the Empire, people were going beyond the received
culture in search of a penetrating vision of life which made sense to
them. In his Florida, Apuleius writes of a certain dissatisfaction with
the scope of his education:

The first cup of knowledge which we receive from our preceptors removes
entire ignorance; the second furnishes us with grammatical learning, the
third arms us with the eloquence of the rhetorician. Thus far many drink.
But I drank of other cups besides these at Athens; of poetry, the fabulous;
of geometry, the limpid; of music, the sweet; of dialect, the rough and
unpleasant; and of universal philosophy, the never-satiating and nec-
tarious cup.

Ultimately, Apuleius found satisfaction, as many did, by entering into

the mystery religion centred about the cult of the Queen of Heaven: Isis.
The neophyte, if pure in body and mind, was guaranteed a personal
spiritual experience. In Apuleius’s moving - and often hilarious -
account of his search for spiritual solace, the bestselling The Golden
Ass, he describes his feelings on beholding a vision of the ‘Mother of
AH’:

... but my spirit is not able to give thee sufficient praise, my patrimony
is unable to satisfy thy sacrifices; my voice hath no power to utter that
which I think of thy majesty, no, not if I had a thousand mouths and so
many tongues and were able to continue forever.

This kind of initiatory religious experience, especially expressed in a

desire to unite with a feminine divine power, was much sought after. It
could get quite expensive too. In the melting-pot of the Empire, in which

38
 THE HIGHER REASON

ail religions were tolerated - so long as they gave due reverence to the
divinity of the Emperor - there was ample opportunity for making
acquaintance with oriental cults. Above all, it was the Egyptians who
were revered in this age. Egyptian temples were still functioning and
devout seekers after religious truth and revelation in the Graeco-Roman
world would make pilgrimages to some remotely situated Egyptian
temple, passing the night in its vicinity. The hope was that of stimulating
dreams in order to receive some vision of divine mysteries. In short,
gnosis was on offer in Egypt and many took that offer up as the years
passed. They still do. You did not have to go to Bombay. You went to
Alexandria. That’s where the source was.
I wonder how many parents grieved for lost sons who went off to the
great metropolis and then, perhaps, having got the message disappeared
off to the desert?
I should say at this point that although the experience of the mystery-
religion (whether of Isis, Mithras or Attis) was doubtless akin to that
of gnosis, the mystery-religion had a strong natural core involving life-
as-a-whole in all its facets. You might feel somewhat alienated before
you entered a cult but you came out of it a new man without having
lost contact with nature. In the gnosis experience, there is a strong
tendency - stronger in some forms than others - to feel apart from
nature, to have transcended its laws and obligations. For the Gnostic,
broadly speaking, nature was either a swamp or a launching-pad. Or
both. In no sense does the essential being the ‘pneuma’ (spirit) of the
Gnostic belong to the earth. He had, as the Nag Hammadi Library’s
First Apocalypse of James puts it: ‘not been caught'. In short, the world
for the GnostiC-jft'as_a fraud.

Alexandria
Alexandria was a thriving city, a truly cosmopolitan centre for trade -
it was the main grain supply for the Imperial armies - for the exchange
of ideas, for the development of culture and was in so many respects,
the seed-bed for all that was new in the life of the Empire. The old
empire of Persia and the remnants of Babylon which had fallen to
Alexander the Great, had left many shadows, cultural lines which had
never quite disappeared and which began to seep through Alexandria
into the West, eroding that sense of the obvious, of the opacity of a
confident culture: waves from the past, memories, hopes of release. A
curious atmosphere of radical pessimism and an equally radical opti-
misim filled Alexandria’s many learning institutions: its museums, its

39
 THE GNOSTICS

libraries, its schools, its tutors and their pupils. Whatever ‘disease’ might
have been affecting the heart of the Empire, its symptoms would be
most surely visible in Alexandria. Perhaps it was akin to the Berlin of
the 1980s or more particularly the 1920s. It was somehow apart from
the rest of Egypt. The Romans called it Alexandria ad Egyptum -
Alexandria-by-Egypt we might say. This sense of separateness no doubt
left its thinkers and poets in an ambience of freedom, freedom, that is,
to speculate, to invent, to challenge received ideas. When you are at the
centre, perhaps the only way to go is upwards - the mind is free to
wander. A good deal of the literature coming from Alexandria was
concerned with the elevation of the higher mind, the making of wings
of the spirit. The concerns of the philosophy schools were timeless.
Perhaps, spending a golden spring in Alexandria, the willing pupil could
forget about the future with its sense of peril. He could not forget the
past. Alexandria was a great centre for the production of books, on
history, medicine, natural science, geometry and especially philosophy
and religion.\ For many readers philosophy was religion and religion
was philosophy This conflation could quite often lead to writings which
were incomprehensible to non-Alexandrians or were misrepresented
by critical readers in say, Rome, where speculation was not so well
appreciated. Alexandria was the perfect place for the would-be and real
gnostic teacher, philosopher or poet. Even in Rome there would be
coteries of the avant-garde who would pay for works from Alexandria,
doctors from Alexandria, astrologers from Alexandria or religious
teachers from Alexandria. From Alexandria came a specialized philo¬
sophical theology which would later lead to critical divergencies of
thought and expression between the eastern Church centred in Alex¬
andria and Antioch, and the Church in Rome. Even the Bishop of
Alexandria, Clement, would write of a Christian gnosis which would
make the chief enemy of the Gnostics in the second century, Irenaeus.
Bishop of the diocese of Lyon, refer to the gnosis of Valentinus and
other gnostic teachers as ‘the gnosis falsely so-called’. jHe was implying
thereby that there was a true gnosis. Even this would eventually disap¬
pear.^ Clement in his Stromateis (Miscellanies) maintains that gnosis is
a special advanced Christianity for the philosophically inclined. In Book
VII he writes:
Faith then is a compendious knowledge of the essentials, but gnosis is a
sure and firm demonstration of the things received through faith, being
itself built up by the Lord’s teaching on the foundation of the faith, and
carrying us on to unshaken conviction and scientific certainty. As I
mentioned before, there seems to me to be a first kind of saving change

40
 THE HIGHER REASON

from heathenism to faith, a second from faith to gnosis; and this latter,
as it passes on into love, begins at once to establish a mutual friendship
between that which knows and that which is known. And perhaps he
who has arrived at this stage has already attained equality with the angels.
At any rate, after he has reached the final ascent in the flesh, he still
continues to advance, as is fit, and presses on through the holy Hebdomad
into the Father’s house, to that which is indeed the Lord’s abode, being
destined there to be, as it were, a light standing and abiding forever,
absolutely secure from all vicissitude.

When Clement speaks about ‘attaining equality with angels’, he is

referring to Luke XX. 34-36:

And Jesus said unto them, The sons of this world marry, and are given
in marriage: But they that are accounted to attain to that world, and the
resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: For
neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are
sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.

In Alexandria then, the Christian and non-Christian was exposed to all

manner of influences and lines of thought.
There were Jewish schools, much given to speculation on the nature
of God and the constituent beings which constituted his emanation or
projection of being. Some of them appear to have been profoundly
disappointed with the God of the Old Testament and wrote com¬
mentaries on the Jewish scriptures, asserting that the God described
there was a lower being, who had tried to blind Man from seeing his
true nature and destiny. We hear their echoes in some books of the
Nag Hammadi Library, namely, The Apocryphon of John and The
Apocalypse of Adam. They believed in a figure, the ‘Eternal Man’ or
‘Adam Kadmon’, who was the glorious reflection of the true God and
who had been duped into an involvement with the lower creation, with
earthy matter, ruled by an inferior deity who, with his angels made
human bodies. They could quote Genesis I. 26: ‘Let us make man in our
own image.’ They believed that the original image of Man, sometimes
called Anthropos (Greek for Man in the generic sense) had been copied
by jealous angels to make the miserable being who was bound to earth.
In Ezekiel I. 26 the ‘appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord’
was a ‘figure like that of a man’. Man belongs with the divine being -
not on earth. The Law, which governed life on earth, was considered
to have been the work of a lower deity. These Jewish and Jewish-
influenced rebels, so far in thought from their ‘countrymen’ - though it
was probably a long time since their descendants had occupied the same

4i
 THE GNOSTICS

territory - were the intellectual precursors of today’s Kabbalists who

maintain the tradition that Moses, at Sinai received in addition to the
Ten Commandments, a secret understanding of the Divine mind. Some
of these people were also Christian to the extent that they believed that
the divine figure Jesus had come down to bring back the Gnostic to his
true identity within the divine Man, after having robbed the ‘Lord of
this world’ of the hollow victory of the Crucifixion. To some of these
rebels, Jesus represented the restoration of the original form of Man:
the Glory of God - not His servant. Perhaps some of them were
renegades from the Jewish wars of revolt against the Romans, those
who may have surrendered the kinds of apocalyptic ‘end of the world’
hopes that had frequently accompanied these wars. Perhaps they were
descendants of the sectaries of Khirbet Qumran who had believed in a
final war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness - but who
had internalized this cosmic struggle^ in short, they were men who had
given up on the world. Some scholars think that gnosis began with these
disparate types of Jewish spiritual rebellion and heresy. Not all Gnostics
active in Alexandria in this period, believed in the necessity of a redeemer
figure, whether Jesus or another./

The Hermetists
In the discovery at Nag Hammadi appeared three works which are
described as Hermetic. They are The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth,
Asklepios and the Prayer of Thanksgiving from which I quote:

We give thanks to Thee! Every soul and heart is lifted up to Thee, O

undisturbed name, honoured with the name ‘God’ and praised with the
name ‘Father’, for to everyone and everything (comes) the fatherly kind¬
ness and affection and love and any teaching there may be that is sweet
and plain, giving us mind, speech, (and) knowledge: mind, so that we
may understand Thee, speech, so that we may expound Thee, knowledge,
so that we may know Thee. We rejoice, having been illumined by Thy
knowledge. We rejoice because thou hast shown us Thyself. We rejoice
because while we were in (the) body, Thou hast made us divine through
Thy knowledge.

The first thing one notices when one reads this prayer is its evident
sincerity, poetry and piety. These are the characteristics of a good deal
of Hermetic writing. Why are these writing^called Hermetic? They are
called so because many oFmarTare written as dialogues between a
teacher, Hermes, ajnd his pupils with names such as Tat, Ammon and
Asklepios. The names are revealing because they show the syncretistic
 THE HIGHER REASON

nature of the discourses, that is, the adaption of Greek and Egyptian
thought which inspires them (Asklepios is a Greek name while Tat
and Ammon are Egyptian). Some work shows knowledge of Jewish
scriptures and this is precisely what we would expect from writings
emanating from Alexandria, the city where East and West met. The
teachings are guided by one, Hermes Trismegistos, that is, Thnce-
Greatest Hermes. The appellation ‘Thrice-Greatest’ is a dignity of
Egyptian origin but Hermes is, of Course, a Greek name, properly
pronounced asJHair-mess’ who was the Greek god j&Iio, with wings on
jfget and wings on head (the mind) communicated between earth and
heaveo^JWe have heard his melody in Holst’s ‘Planet Suite’ where, as
the messenger of the gods, his quick-footed movement is most ably
expressed. His is the world of quick-thinking, the flashing insight of the
nous, the higher reason, and his medium is spirit. This is the condition
of mind in which the Hermetic philosopher wishes to operate. It (was >
believed that there was a real man of this name who, according to the
Christian poet Lactantius (circa ad 400) dwelt in Egypt as a con¬
temporary or even precedent of Moses. His thought was regarded as
having existed earlier than all thinkers, coming from an ‘Atlantean’
Antiquity. Furthermore, he was held to be the fount from which inspired
prophets and philosophers, including Plato, had drunk. He was thought
to have been a kind of incarnation of the god Hermes, or the Egyptian
equivalent, Thoth - god of writing and magic - and all that stemmed
from the quick and inspired wit. Hermes, in short, knew everything
there was to know. There are at least 21 books attributed to him and a
host of dialogue excerpts. They come from a number of anonymous
authors and differ in attitude and often in philosophical content. For
example, while some Hermetic writings are written in a pessimistic vein
and disparage the world of nature, there is yet a strong and somewhat
attractive strain in other Hermetic writings which sees ‘God’ in every¬
thing, to the extent that the Hermetic student can enter into that ‘mind’
of which the universe is an expression:
The world is the image of God

A great miracle, O Asklepios, is man.

These are two remarkable Hermetic phrases which, as we shall see,

were to have a major impact on the first scientific achievements of the
Renaissance as well as the philosophy, now called pantheism (God is
All and All is God) which to a great extent has informed what we know
as romanticism. The home of the Hermetic gnostic is in the projected
mind of God.'

43
 THE GNOSTICS

The Mind in the Ail is reflected in the nous of the subject:

For man is a being of divine nature; he is comparable, not to the other

living creatures on earth, but to the gods in heaven, or at any rate he
equals them in power. None of the gods in the heaven will ever quit
heaven, and pass its boundary, and come down to earth; but man ascends
even to heaven, and measures it; and what is more than all beside, he
mounts to heaven without quitting the earth; to so vast a distance can he
put forth his power. We must not shrink then from saying that a man on
earth is a mortal god, and that a god in heaven is an immortal man
(Libellus X. 2^-25)

This makes interesting reading in the era of the space shuttle and of the
return of magic to the movies. For this is the essence of magic: the
transformation of the mind and imagination to enable the subject to
work changes in nature in conformity with will. Hans Jonas writes, in
a comment on the Hermetic doctrines of the Ascent of the Soul that:

In a later stage of ‘gnostic’ development (though no longer passing under

the name of Gnosticism) the external topology of the ascent through the
sphere, with the successive divesting of the soul of its worldly envel¬
opments and the regaining of its original acosmic [that is, not belonging
to the cosmos] nature, could be ‘internalized’ and find its analogue in a
psychological technique of inner transformations by which the self, while
still in the body, might attain the Absolute as an immanent, if temporary,
condition: an ascending scale of mental states replaces the stations of the
mythical itinerary: the dynamics of progressive spiritual self-trans¬
formation, the spatial thrust through the heavenly sphere.
(■Gnostic Religion, page 165)

The Gnostic believed that at death, his soul would ascend beyond the
eartlT^53^mir^ough occasionally obstructed by archons or starry
‘governors’, to the source of ‘Lightljfldthin theJHeroma of-the Father.
In Alexandria, this possibility was seen as one which might be enjoyed
before death. The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth in the Nag
Hammadi Library describes such an ascent and the wonder of revelation
that accompanied it:

For already from them the power, which is light, is coming to us. For I
see! I see indescribable depths, How shall I tell you, O, my son? How
[shall I describe] the universe? I [am mind and] I see another mind, the
one that moves the soul! I see the one that moves me from pure forget¬
fulness. You give me power! I see myself! I want to speak! Fear restrains
me. I have found the beginning of the power that is above all powers, the
one that has no beginning. I see a fountain bubbling with life. I have said,

44
 THE HIGHER REASON

O my son, that I am Mind. I have seen! Language is not able to reveal

this. For the entire eighth (sphere), O my son, and the souls that are in
it, and the angels, sing a hymn in silence. And I, Mind, understand.

With the Hermetic writings, you got it all!

(The body of Hermetic works, the Corpus Hermeticum, was written
between the seconds njdjkmrth centurie^. They freely interweave con¬
genial Platonist and^StoLc_philosophy with many concepts circulating in
the Alexandria of those centuries. All in all, they make stimulating,
inspiring, sometimes dull and occasionally amazing reading for the
modern reader unfamiliar with them. At the time they were written,
they were intended to be ‘teaching-pieces’ for small groups - or in one-
to-one teaching sessions, and were intended to take the pupil from the
position of the disciple ‘Tat’ or ‘Ammon’ to the level of insight initiated
by the questions and answers of ‘Hermes’. If a good pupil, he might
come upon an experience of the illuminated mind for the purpose of
which the writings were composed. The teacher and pupii would work
through the discourses, unveiling layers of meaning in the text to the
purpose of unveiling the inner dimensions of the pupil. As the quoted
Prayer of Thanksgiving implies, it was customary to thank, not Hermes
but ‘God’ for any revelations enjoyed. In all of them, the pupil is
‘saved’ (from ignorance, from preoccupation with worldly thought and
obsession) by the power of his own nous. The nous was thought to
contain the spiritual life-energy which enabled it to ascend the spheres
of creation and so behold the incomprehensible One. The nous was the
faculty of gnostic perception. We might describe Hermetism as practical
or applied philosophy. The Hermetic student was enjoined to avoid
contamination with worldly folk: ‘And the downward-tending elements
of nature were left devoid of reason, so as to be mere matter.’ The
responsiblity for making matter is sometimes put on the shoulders of
‘Mind the Maker’. The first Man was not enmired in such stuff:

But Mind the Father of all, he who is Life and Light, gave birth to Man,
a Being like to Himself. And He took delight in Man, as being His own
offspring; for Man was very goodly to look on, bearing the likeness of
his Father. With good reason then did God take delight in Man; for it
was God’s own form that God took delight in. And God delivered over
to Man all things that had been made.
(Libellus I. iz-13)

At this point, something like a tragedy is said to occur. Man in his

ceaseless quest for knowledge breaks through the spheres apportioned
to the governors of the lower cosmos (generated by Mind the Maker, a

45
 THE GNOSTICS

projection of the Father) and proceeds to gaze down to the material

waters below. In these he sees his image and, as God delights in Him,
He delights in Himself and begins to be attracted downwards. Thus
the transmundane (extra-worldly) ‘Light’ of God becomes trapped in
matter.
Now it is highly unlikely that the Hermetic student was meant to
take this myth of man’s predicament as historical information. It was
intended to serve as the text for discussion. For if the attraction in the
myth is downwards, it only serves to show that the attraction of the
‘Light’ in the nous works the other way - back to God, back to full
consciousness of Man. This whole mood of thought and feeling has
doubtless informed the words put into the ‘Saviour’s’ mouth in some of
the Nag Hammadi writings. For example in The Book of Thomas the
Contender, ‘Everyone who seeks the truth from true wisdom will make
himself wings so as to fly, fleeing the lust that scorches the spirits of
men’ would not look at all out of place in the Hermetic writings while
The Gospel of Philip's ‘Saviour’ virtually quotes word for word the
Smaragdine Table of Hermes Trismegistus when he says: ‘I came to
make [the things below] like the things [above, and the things] outside
like those [inside. I came to unite] them in that place.’ Hermes might
have wished to add: ‘So to work the miracle of the one thing.’
There was clearly a good deal of cross-fertilization going on in
Alexandria. There were some minds in the Church who regretted this -
surely the job of the Church was to bring pagans into the Church and
not to convince them that they had enough for salvation already.
But what was Christianity? To a Hermetist, Christ could never be
more than a revelation of Mind. This, to a bishop trying to plant the
seed of faith in Gaul, for example, was just not enough. The martyrs
had not died for this - nor would they die for anything but the Jesus
Christ who had died on the Cross ‘because God so loved the world that
he gave His Only Begotten Son’. ‘Mind’ does not die on crosses. Of
course, for some Gnostics, this was precisely the point. The point was
going to get a lot sharper than that before the second century was out.
Things were moving within the Church. It was the Gnostics who were
indeed going to have to wake up - if they intended staying in the One
Church of Christ crucified.

46
 Chapter Three

Madness and Blasphemy

I do this, in order that thou, obtaining an acquaintance with these things,

mayest in turn explain them to all those with whom thou art connected,
and exhort them to avoid such an abyss of madness and blasphemy
against Christ.

Thus Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon writes in the Preface to his mammoth

■■ ^

literary achievement, A Refutation and Subversion of Knowledge Falsely

So Called in five volumes. It is usually known simply as Adversus
Flaeres£S--~-Against-Heresies, and was written in about AD 180. Tne
‘Heresies’ are of course ‘gnostic’ heresies. Of all the works on gnostic
‘heresy,’, this one has been the most influential.
In order to understand how the gnostic movement and its adherents
were to become personae non gratae, we need to look at Irenaeus and
his work. Irenaeus first came to Gaul as presbyter to the missionary
Bishop Pothinus. There was a brisk trade between Marseille and Smyrna
in Asia Minor and it was Polycarp of Smyrna who instigated the
foundation of the See of Lyon. Polycarp was to become one of the most
famous martyrs to the Christian cause and stirring accounts of his
martyrdom were spread among the churches of East and West. Polycarp
had known the Apostle John and it was a harmony of ‘Johannine’ and
‘Pauline’ Christianity which held sway in the churches of Asia Minor.
Alexandria was on the other side of the world. John had seen the
Lord.
So when Pothinus and Irenaeus arrived in Gaul, their position carried
the full weight of apostolic authority and commitment. Irenaeus was in
a position to put pressure on the Bishop of Rome should it become
necessary.
Now in ad 177, the terrible persecution of Marcus Aurelius Caesar
was instigated in Lyon, resulting in abiding memories of the ‘martyrs
of Lyon and Vienne’. Readers are doubtless familiar with the nature of
Christian martyrdom in this period - still a popular spectacle for some

47
 THE GNOSTICS

film producers. During this persecution, Irenaeus was sent to Rome with
letters of remonstrance against rising heresy there. The nature of such
heresy consisted most visibly in the establishment of extra-church meet¬
ings for the cognoscenti, the pneumatics, the spiritual aristocracy. These
exclusive gatherings were established without authorization of the
bishop and, indeed, the Gnostics might well feel that they were outside
his jurisidiction as well. The Bishop of Rome himself Eleutherus was
patronizing the Montanist heresy which had begun in Phrygia and which
held that one, Montanus was the returned Paraclete (Holy Spirit) and
that the women, Priscilla and Maximilla, were his prophetesses. Such
charismatic fervour is a feature of some churches throughout the world
today. The result of such movements for the whole chuch was division
and confusion - and this was why all specialist movements had to be
brought into line. The only way of accomplishing that was to tighten
up the church organization and doctrine centred around the bishop.
Since there were prophecies in the New Testament about false prophets
and an Antichrist withering away the faithful, it is not surprising that
reaction to such movements might become quite hard. In this period,
excommunication was the worst that could be done. By the time the
Nag Hammadi Library was buried, troublesome (and not troublesome)
heretics might suffer death at the hands of an enraged mob or by a local
prefect’s decision, (k would seem that the visit of Irenaeus to Rome
marked something of a watershed in his caree). Heresy was taking in
the missionary’s harvest. It should be noted that Rome was a mission
of the Greeks, Gaul of Asia Minor while Lyon checks the heretical
tendencies of the Bishop of Rome. (Rome was not at this point the
‘mother and mistress’ of the Church.
Returning to Lyon, Irenaeus found Pothinus had died a martyr’s
death. Irenaeus succeeded him. He was followed it seems by the Valen-
tinians - ‘followers’ of the now dead Egyptian poet Valentinus who we
briefly encountered in the previous chapter. It is likely that Valentinus’s
followers were rather more loose and adventurous and probably quite
outrageous in their reworkings of Valentinus’s subtle, imaginative and
mythic Christian gnosis.
While in Rome, Irenaeus had also discovered that an old friend from
Polycarp’s school had also succumbed to a Valentinian-type exposition
of the gnosis. This discovery doubtless increased Irenaeus’s deter¬
mination in his life’s work. No Christian was to die in the name of vain
doctrine, only for the Apostolic Truth as delivered by the Lord to His
Apostles and supported by the Jewish scriptures and the four gospels.
‘Martyr’ meajos.‘witness’ and those who had observed and sympathized

48
 MADNESS AND BLASPHEMY

with the martyrs must know the exact truth to which the deaths bore
witness. Valentinians, furthermore, were famous for slipping out of
martyrdom by their linguistic subtleties - they shared enough pagan
philosophical presuppositions to become indistinguishable from many
another eccentric philosophical mystery school. While some Christians
even went so far as to see martyrdom as a sacred duty - that is, by
imitating Jesus and his demand to ‘take up your cross and follow me’ -
most Gnostics saw no religious value in the destruction of the body.
Perhaps some did feel it might assist them on their way, unless, of
course, they had not quite achieved a full gnosis, in which case they
might have trouble getting past some of the archontic guardians on their
way to the Pleroma - so crude had certain gnostic concepts become
when in circulation.
Irenaeus, who was himself to die a martyr’s death in ad 202, realized
that he would have to study the heresies directly. He was confident in
the truth for which his brethren had died and there was no need in his
mind to exaggerate the doctrines he researched and discussed. His
immense and difficult work helped materially to develop and define a
catholic doctrine which a century and a half later would without a
shadow of doubt exclude the gnosis from the Catholic Church^Up to
this time Christian gnosis had been able to develop alongside and within
the Christian ChurcTpTrenaeus saw his task as threefold:

1. Render it impossible for anyone to confound the Knowledge with

Christianity. (A fairly novel objective - especially in Egypt.)
2. To make it impossible for the gnostic system to survive within the
Church.
3. To demonstrate that gnosis (falsely so-called) was of the ‘old myth¬
ology’ and owed its central concepts to pagan philosophy which
Christianity came to banish.

It appears he was most successful in this, for after him, there is very
little mention of gnostic heresies (certainly as seen as a critical threat)
in catholic writing. Then again, Irenaeus had already ‘done the business’.
A reading of Irenaeus’s work might leave one with the impression
that the reasons why gnosis would have to go were principally doctrinal
ones, basic disagreements about concepts of God, Christ and the nature
of redemption. Professor Elaine Pagels, currently lecturing to theological
students at Princeton University, USA, and author of The Gnostic
Gospels, sees the issue as primarily a political one. She says that it is
important to realize that ‘every religious tradition except for western
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Greek and

49
 THE GNOSTICS

Russian, Coptic and Ethiopic Christianity all had esoteric traditions.

Only in the western Christian movement do we see a suppression of
that kind of mystical tradition. And I think to find the reason for it -
one can look at the time in which it happened. It happened at a time
when the Christians were under enormous stress, persecution, potential
arrest, public execution; it was important for leaders of Christian groups
under that enormous stress to consolidate, to be able to identify who
was in the movement and who wasn’t. It seems to me that the historical
situation, in which public identification, willingness to give one’s life in
martyrdom, confession of the creeds - identification with that church
has a specific political meaning and I think that it was enormously
threatening to the leaders of that Church, like Irenaeus, who had suffered
terribly under persecution, to see the Church destroyed and fifty or sixty
people tortured to death in the Arena of Lyon - an extraordinary thing
to live through.’

author: And the Gnostics have an ambivalence -

pagels: Right, and they say, ‘Well, I’m not really!’ and suddenly they wouldn’t
be there. So identifying with the suffering was something Irenaeus felt was
essential for the survival of the Church - without that, these groups would
simply disappear and be scattered. And so I think it’s in that context that
the elusive slipperiness of the Gnostics, the willingness to entertain different
symBols'and”diffefent ideas became deeply threatening to the continuity of
the Church at that point - and impossible to tolerate. At the same time,
historically, Jews were, although ‘atheist’ from the Roman point of view,
they were legal atheists and they could develop a wide range of beliefs
including esoteric mystical views. Christians could not tolerate that am¬
biguity. I think it’s because of the kind of stress in which they were living.

\jTere is, 1 think, another important dimension to consider^

In the previous chapter, we looked at the curious spiritual and political
conditions which fostered a feeling of urgency in the second century
and which in turn stimulated the attraction of gnosis. Gnosis appeared
in times of social, political and religious dislocation, promoting for a
minority of the population, an alienation from the world and, for the
Gnostic, a withdrawal into pneuma (the spirit): the divine aspect of the
self was not at home in the world, and neither was it intended to be so.
The realization of this gave the gnostic cause for tears and laughter.
There was no hope in the world. Now while some Gnostics may not
have been so extreme as this, seeing the world as a defective rather than
evil product of an inferior being, ignorant of the Incomprehensible
Father, and possibly, as the Hermetic writings imply, ‘going in’ for a

5°
 MADNESS AND BLASPHEMY

degree of pneuma-projection-giving value and meaning to an otherwise

sadly material world, there is no doubt that most Gnostics believed in
an essential antagonism to the material world which was attended to
begin with by a good deal of distress and ultimately perhaps a resigned
sense of tragedy. Now this feeling was just not the kind of feeling that
a catholic Christian could surrender to. The extremity of it is, in this
form, simply alien to the kind of atmosphere which prevailed within
the Church as Irenaeus knew it. The Church of Irenaeus was a body of
hope - hope for the world - and it was precisely the hope expressed in
the sufferings of many a martyred Christian that would bring thousands
to its cause. When a catholic Christian looked at the world, its sufferings,
its capriciousness, its viciousness, he or she knew that it still all made
sense. The Christian hope of these people still had a large chunk of
apocalyptic consciousness within it. Jesus was expected to return. This
was never a gnostic expectation; Christ had ascended - and so must
Man. Jesus had worked miracles - bringing nature into accord with
the divine will. There are no miracles forthcoming from the gnostic
‘Saviour’. Jesus had truly come to earth. He had become, not simply ap¬
peared in flesh, as many Gnostics believed. Indeed, he would return to
earth and redeem matter while the faithful Christian could expect to be
resurrected in the body, no longer subject to corruption. For the Gnostic,
the body was a disposable ‘tunic’, prison or tomb. The dynamics of
salvation lay not in the determination of the Gnostic but within an
historical event prefigured by the resurrection of Christ and controlled
by Him. In short, Irenaeus and the Gnostics were aeons apart and the
split between them would surely have come whether the Church of
Irenaeus had been persecuted or not.(Cnosis as it was developed in the
time of Irenaeus could never be ‘esoteric Christianity’ - a concept wholly
alien to the mainstream of catholic and orthodox Christianity?)
There is a strong possibility that the Gnostic was consciously in
opposition to the apocalyptic hope, which is, as Irenaeus expresses it,
at the very end of his Against Heresies:
the resurrection of the just, and the inheritance in the kingdom of the
earth; and what the prophets have prophesied concerning it harmonize....
The apostle [Paul] too, has confessed that the creation shall be free
from the bondage of corruption, into the liberty of the sons of God....
Subsequently bestowing in a paternal manner those things which neither
the eye has seen, nor the ear has heard, nor has [thought concerning
them] arisen within the heart of man.

The last sentence here, a quotation from I Corinthians II. 9 is most

instructive. Firstly, the words are apparently put into the mouth of the

5i
 THE GNOSTICS

Living Jesus of The Gospel of Thomas: ‘I shall give you what no eye
has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and
what has never occurred to the human mind.’ There are some subtle
changes - for ‘mind’ read ‘heart’ - in the Pauline version.
Secondly, the chapter of I Corinthians, from which it is taken,
describes how the Church in Corinth - not an e: ric church - has
come to know the meaning of the presence of Christ in the world: ‘But
unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth
all things, yea, the deep things of God’ (verse io). Paul rounds off his
description of the blessedness of the spiritual gift by saying: ‘For who
hath known the-mind of the Lord, that he should instruct him? But we
have the mind of Christ’ (verse 16).
Where Irenaeus sees such revelations as coming to the faithful Chris¬
tian after the ‘resurrection of the just’, Paul himself speaks of them as
the shared experience of the Corinthian Church. The Gnostics saw them
as the province of an elite. Between the two most extreme poles, only
Paul perhaps could have found a reconciliation. Both the Catholic and
the Gnostic were perhaps now two extreme conditions of a once more
temperate climate. Then again, as Blake begs us to consider, does not
the.‘Road of Excess^ leadJto_the palace of wisdom’. In the political
world, a reckoning was inevitable.

What was wrong with the Gnostics?

We have seen that the Gnostic did not really share in the ‘ambience’ of
main stream catholic Christianity - particularly in the western churches.
Now being somewhat alien from the world, if not from the unknown
God of the gnostic heart, the individual Gnostic would be more likely
to feel the necessity of finding answers to those ultimate questions that
many of us, as we grow older, prefer to leave unanswered as we are
more and more drawn into the necessities of day-to-day living. If you
ask a nun, for example, working in a refugee camp, ‘Where does evil
come from?’, she might ask you to look around for a while and then
say that she hasn’t the time - she’s too busy dealing with its effects. In
our demanding world it is attractive to say simply, ‘I don’t know.’
A-gnosis makes for a kind of pragmatic clarity: ‘We’re living in a
material world. And I am a material girl!’ took the pop star Madonna
to the top of the charts. Many a student leaves philosophy behind when
he or she heads for the top of his or her profession. (The Gnostic, less
involved, and with a desire to extricate himself from the bindings of the
world, had a positive yearning for experiential knowledge^The second-

52-
 MADNESS AND BLASPHEMY

century Latin apologist (for Christianity), Tertullian, wrote that, ‘th£.

questions^tjyat rnake^people here11 cslare‘. Wkcre does humanity come
from andjiaw? Where does evil come from and why?’ This was a typical
no-nonsense, ncTgnosis approach from the mind of a Latin legalist who
would later join the Mjmr.arusts (enthusiast-charismatics). The moment
we talk of experiential knowledge, we are coming closer to the kind of
approach that so baffled and enraged such men as Irenaeus. For the
gnosis was thought to be best expressed in the manner of imaginative
myths - in a similar manner to the understanding that many people
have gained from watching the fictional episodes of TV’s ‘Star Trek’ or
in the realm of the science-fiction novel. Whether we like it or not, this
was the way that many Gnostics came to understand their predicament.
There were many variations in these gnostic accounts of how the world
came to be fatally flawed and of how the Gnostic came to feel a stranger
in the world. Indeed, Irenaeus complains that the Gnostics make it their
business to invent some new opinion every day. For the Gnostic, who
felt himself to be dealing with the unknown this was quite permissible -
the system had to fit in the experience (a very different attitude from
philosophy in general) and anyway( it was a sign of the Gnostics having
the gift of creative insight: the hallmark of being a gnostic was to be an
‘original’.]
In the gnostic ‘systems’ that Irenaeus analysed, there was a para¬
dox from the start. They were systems to explain the unfathomable.
Although philosophical or scientific knowledge was not expected to
proceed from the system, an inner sense of knowing was.

The Valentinian System

Irenaeus devotes a lot of time to undermining this system. It is quite
complicated and I hope I shall be forgiven for simplifying it. Before
doing so, it might be helpful to know something of the man who is
thought to have conceived it.
Valentinus-was born in about ad iio in Egypt. There he distinguished
himself as a poet and a man of considerable talents in the field of
philosophical theology. He was^ an eloquent man pf great personal
magnetism and his reputation was such that as late as the beginning of
tTie fiTtFT century St Jerome would say of him: ‘No one can bring an
influential heresy into being unless he is possessed by nature of an
outstanding-intellect and has gifts provided by God. Such a man was
Valentinus.’ He was apparently a visionary, saying that when young he
had a dream of the Logos (briefly, the energy which created the universe)

53
 THE GNOSTICS

appearing to him in the form of a child. This man took his dreams
seriously and perhaps today we are better placed to recognize the value
of dreams than say, Irenaeus was.(Valentinus was in Rome in the middle
of the second century and nearly became bishop - which must say
something about the nature of the Church in Rome at that time. His
opponents said that it was failure to become a bishop that led to his
secession from the Church?''}
The Valentinian system begins like this: let us say that at the very
Beginning there was already an eternity of being, a Pleroma, a Fullness,
a Harmony. At the ‘centre’ was always the Father, perfect and immeasur¬
ably profound - a being of whom nothing could be said which would
share in the character of the eternity of which he was. Now it is of the
nature of the Father to project a series of archetypes. They are Intel¬
ligence (Nous), Truth, the Word (Logos), Life, Humanity and Church
(an invisible, eternal body). These archetypes hold a potential energy
and they in turn project a series of archetypes. With each projection,
the archetype finds itself to be at a ‘distance’ from the Father - but there
is no real distance for there is no space and time. All this is happening
in a dimension so removed from the one we know that there is no real
way of describing it. The whole thing is an intuition - the activity of
the nous within the Gnostic’s own experience - philosophical poetry.
(jNfow it is of the nature of wisdom, when active, to question and strive
to understand] One of the projections, Sophia (Wisdom) begins to be
unbalanced within the Pleroma because ‘she’ wishes to know the Father -
a privilege granted only to Nous who is closer to the Father. The
archetypes contain, as I said, a potential which though the Father is
ultimately responsible for, he does not choose to control. The dis¬
turbance within Sophia leads to her conceiving ‘substance without form’.
It has come from guilty yearning and so is flawed. It is of a lesser
substance. The Pleroma is shaken but the ‘Limit’ of the Pleroma con¬
vinces Sophia that the Father is incomprehensible. The product of her
passion is discarded from the Pleroma into the All, a void. The Father
sees a necessity to project two more archetypes: Christ and the Holy
Spirit who teach the contents of the Pleroma their true relation to the
Father. The Pleroma sings the praises of the Father and the ‘perfect
fruit’ of their joy comes into being: the saviour Jesus. All is not well,
however. ‘Substance without form’, exiled from the Pleroma brings
matter to birth out of her anguish and yearning for Christ as well as a
psychic or ‘soul’ element. ‘Christ’ has pity for her and descends to put
form on her formlessness which in turn brings about pneuma: spirit.
Out of these three elements: soul, matter and spirit the ‘world’ is created.

54
 MADNESS AND BLASPHEMY

So solid things owe their source to ‘broken’ Ideas.

Sophia forms a ‘demiurge’ - a creator - to make something out of
the mess that has come about. He organizes heaven, earth and the
creatures which live on it. Most importantly, we can see that this
^demiurge’ is a rather poor copy of the eternal archetypes, and is
identified with the God of the Old Testament - a deficient being who
seems unaware of his deficiency and is determinecTthat Kis'treatures
shall remain unaware of their source. Three types of men are said to
exist: carnal types (material beings who have no chance of saving gnosis),
psychic types (who can achieve a salvation by the knowledge and
imitation of Christ) and of course, pneumatic types, who since they
have the divine pneuma within them only have to make the connection
between their pneuma and ‘Jesus’ and they are saved. The pneumatic
on awakening can make a swift return to the Pleroma. Furthermore, the
pneumatic-gnostic is superior to the demiurge.
(^Needless to say, Irenaeus, when encountering this myth, was horrified.
He proceeded in Against Heresies to tear it to pieces^The basis on which
he did so was to have momentous effectsjfor thehistory t)TGhristfanity.
The one^Jc£y__qnesiipn that Irenaeus asks is: vyhere did alLthis come
from? The system follows neither scripture nor apostolic tradition.
There is a perpetual succession of bishops from the apostles and none
of them has ever taught like this. Thus, the position of the bishop,
his authority in matters of doctrine was strengthened. He says the
Valentinians ‘maintain that they have attained to a height beyond every
power, and that therefore they are free in every respect to act as they
please, having no one to fear in anything. For they claim that because
of the redemption ... they cannot be apprehended, or even perceived
by the judge.’ As Professor Pagels puts it: (Gnosis offers nothing less
than a theological justification for refusing to obey the bishops and
priests!’ Irenaeus obviously did not like the Gnostics he came across/)
They seemed somewhat ‘unchristian’ in their attitudes and rather
unnatural as well: ‘If anyone yields himself to them like a little sheep,
and follows out their practice and their redemption, such a person
becomes so puffed up that ... he walks with a strutting gait and a
supercilious countenance, possessing the pompous air of a cock!’
The ‘redemption’ appears to have been a gnostic initiation rite,
‘freeing’ the Gnostic from the grip of the demiurge and his ‘hit-beings’,
the archons. ‘What price freedom?’ Irenaeus asks. As for the ‘cock’,
gnostic charms and statuettes have been found featuring the body of a
man and the head of a cock, laughing at, presumably, the world and its
cares. The figures are sometimes called ‘Abraxas’, a ‘being of light’ in

55
 THE GNOSTICS

which opposites of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are transcended in the morally

neutral realm of Spirit. The symbol of the cock presumably derives from
the observation that the cock is the first animal to greet the morn. Some
Gnostics liked to think of themselves this way, as an avant garde of
the human race. Today, we still call some people ‘cocky’ and some
misinformed writers today translate gnostic as ‘know-all’ and apply the
type to Marxist ‘philosophers’ who claim a superior insight into the
workings of the world and its ‘true’ destiny.
Irenaeus asserts that the Truth is only to be found in the Catholic
Church ‘for prior to Valentinus, those who follow Valentinus had no
existence’ - that is to say that Valentinus has no authority to talk of
Christ because his teachings are original^ Valentinus himself is thought
to have claiiped that he obtained his higher gnosis from Theodas, a
pupil of Paul.^Irenaeus explicitly asserts that the Gnostics ‘possess more
gospels than there really are’ but his reasons for holding to the key
number of four are perhaps less than convincing today. There are four
zones of the world, there are four winds, the Cherubim of Psalm lxxx
have four faces, there were four covenants with God; ‘the pillar and
ground of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life'. It is, therefore,
fitting that there are four pillars ‘vivifying man afresh’. Irenaeus goes
through a whole host of accusations based, it must be stressed, on the
Valentinian ‘creation myth’. He says that Divine wisdom cannot have
‘guilty yearnings’ - how could Divine wisdom go wrong? He also says
that souls continue to exist in the body-form which is therefore not a
prison; that ‘no man hath seen God at any time’ (John I. 18) - only the
Son can declare what is invisible and so Valentinus cannot therefore
speak of the content of the Godhead (the Pleroma). Above all, the most
damning belief that the Gnostics share is thatjheJE^ther of Jesus is not
fhe sameTeing as the creator of the heavens and the earth. This was a
o^a^lynSenous matter. The belief in a demiurge, a great architect of the
universe as being distinguishable from the incomprehensible ‘God’ in
his essential being was not an invention of the Gnostics. Plato speculated
on the existence of the demiurge and some concept of ‘him’ was wide¬
spread in the philosophy schools at the time. What was so terribly
disturbing, what, in fact, put the sting into gnosis was the notion of an
opposition between the eternal Father and the architect. This would
cause sparks in the philosophy schools of the Neoplatonists which were
developing in Alexandria and which cared nothing for Christianity. So
Irenaeus could, if he wanted, find a rational concensus in the intellectual
world around him which would be equally horrified at the stress on the
perversity and inferiority of the creator.

56
 MADNESS AND BLASPHEMY

But what did Gnostics really think about the demiurge?

If for a moment we imagine an impossible image. Across the expanse
of space flies a being of tremendous size, nine times the size of this
planet. He hovers about earth, darkening the skies and proceeds to
implant an image of his face in the minds of the entire population of
earth who are, naturally, thunderstruck. Then he speaks so all can
understand him. He says, ‘For a long time you have heard of me. For a
long time you have waited for me. Here I am. I have decided to take
away the pain of childbirth from women; I have planted trees in your
gardens and parks whose fruit will be gold and silver. There will be so
much that no one can ever have more than another. Poverty will vanish.
I have removed all dangerous bacteria and everyone will live to a
hundred without ever knowing pain. All I ask is that you do as I say ...’
The Gnostic turns away and says, ‘Not likely!’ He turns to the crowds
and says, ‘I bet you think this is God. Come on, surely, the thought has
crossed your mind. You’re not sure, some of you, and those that are
not sure, come with me a while.’ A little later, those who had gone with
the Gnostic return to the city and, dodging all those who are busily
collecting their gold and silver and rushing to their banks - just in case -
stand in a line and shout together, ‘Hey you up there!’ The being looks
down at them. And they all put their tongues out. At that moment, the
being disappears and the Gnostics have to run very fast to escape all
those who hate them. This is pretty much how a gnostic might see the
demiurge. The demiurge is an image, an image of ‘God’ which we have
conjured in our minds, or an image which exists in the being of this
tragic creation - a part of the fabric of suffering that goes with it.
(The Valentinian Gnostics in particular were very suspicious of words,
even their own) Elaine Pagels has studied the way that these Gnostics
thought about religious language. They seem to have thought that words
could become part of the ‘bindings’, part of the great irreality which
produces intoxication in us, drunkenness or sleep. The Gnostic has to
break through this dullness of sense, to look through this whole fraud
of the world, this Deception which struts around in so many forms and
under so many names:

The Valentinian Gnostics, like others, pointed out that most Jews and
Christians think of God the creator in certain ways. They think of God
as creator, father, judge, lord. They had these pictures in their minds of
Him. They expressed a lot of interest in the way that we use words to
talk about reality. And that when we use words - I’m thinking of
The Gospel of Philip - that says that when we use the word ‘God’ or
‘resurrection’ or ‘Jesus’ or whatever, we’re not talking about the realities

57
 THE GNOSTICS

that those words express, but we’re talking about our mental image of
whatever those realities conjure up. And I think that is an effort to remind
us that all of language is a purely symbolic system, especially religious
, language, ancftKaFTF onTy~comFs toTifFwhen there’s some kind of inner
experience that transforms us from which our language emerges. And
they also wanted to point out that the story of creation as they saw it
was not to be taken literally. That they believed all things had come from
a divine source that was much deeper and stranger than the picture of
the creator as the book of Genesis portrays him.
(.Elaine Pagels, 1986)

If this is the case, then Irenaeus has taken the Valentinian myth much
too literally. Valentinus thought mythologically. Irenaeus did not. This
whole spiritualized vision of reality is foreign to Irenaeus and the bulk
of the apostolic tradition - certainly as he understood it.
Qvlow this all sounds as if the Gnostics were subtle thinkers to a man
and woman, but this is most unlikejy. For many Gnostics, this experience
of gnosis was essentially a simple and intuitive one. In the National
Museum of Rome, there exists an inscription to the memory of one
Flavia Sophe. It is about 15 inches high and comes from Rome in the
third century. It is a very touching memorial of a man to his deceased
wife. It is all that remains inscribed in stone testifying to the gnostic
presence in Rome. It reads:
Longing for the light of the Father, my relation and companion of my
bed Sophie, anointed in the bath of Christ, with imperishable unction,
you went to see the faces of the aeons, the angel of the Great Council,
the true Son.

Professor Gilles Quispel has said that it should be seen as ‘a symbol of

the love of Christ and His Church that didn’t see marriage for the
progeny of children, but that there’s something religious in sexual
intercourse itself, longing for God...’. Since the Holy Spirit was regarded
as feminine, sex for those Gnostics who were not ascetics, could have
a sacramental aspect. This understanding was confused by orthodox
writers with those gnostic extremists who held that those who had been
freed from the ‘god of the Law’ were free to behave how they chose and
among whom the cultic orgy was practised. Namely the followers of the
gnostic teacher Carpocrates who coined the proto-communist dictum:
‘Property is theft’. The idea was that by consciously sinning one would
thereby uncoil oneself from the grip of the unconscipus power of sin; a
corollary of the gnostic demand, ‘know thyself’J Consequently, the
Gnostics in generalT'Wefe Tong Tegarded as infamous sexual deviants
and moral libertines. Today too, groups in Europe and America dignify

58
 MADNESS AND BLASPHEMY

their ‘love-cults’ with the name ‘gnostic’. Whenever there is a deviation

from the societal norm there appears to be a mechanism within the
detractors’ minds which immediately conjures up images of sexual
perversion - especially when those movements are particularly favour¬
able to women, as the Valentinian gnosis certainly was, and which give
women places of authority or equality. As Kurt Rudolph writes in
Gnosis:

The percentage of women was evidently very high and reveals that gnosis
held out prospects otherwise barred to them, especially in the official
Church. They frequently occupied leading positions either as teachers,
prophetesses, missionaries or played a leading role in cultic ceremonies
(baptism, eucharist) and magical practices (exorcisms).

Quispel has said that gnosis gave women the right to, and experience
of, the Self.
In the ‘Berlin Codex’ (4th~5th centuries), there exists a fragment of
The Gospel of Mary in which Mary Magdalene rebukes Peter (and by
extension the exclusively male bishops) for being too dominant and says
that Jesus held her in a special esteem, granting her a gnosis of the divine
world. In The Gospel of Philip, there is the record of how Jesus used
to kiss Mary on the mouth, provoking the disciples to ask why Jesus
loves her more than them, to which he cryptically replies, ‘Why do I
not love you like her?’ and proceeds to relate an allegory to the effect
that Mary has seen the ‘Light’ while others remain blind. It should be
remembered that Mary was the first to witness the Resurrection and it
seems that Gnostics took the trouble to consider what this might have
meant. Of course, today we tend to think of women as having a better
developed intuitive faculty and many a man has been indebted to a
woman’s wisdom. The Valentinian Gnostics certainly seem to have had
a more balanced view of the sexes than that which many of us have
inherited. They said that intercourse is good for your spiritual develop¬
ment. ‘It’s completely unique in the whole history of Christianity and
Judaism. And that was founded in that idea of polarity (male and female
forming a whole, equally) which is essential for gnosticism,’ says Gilles
Quispel. Other texts, however, speak of androgyny as the nature of the
perfect or original Man while others tend to think that females should
become males but that this male identity lies within themselves - and
likewise, that men have also an inner feminine identity. These par¬
ticularly are strands of thought which were taken up with alacrity by
medieval and Renaissance alchemists who were also fascinated by the
many unexplored aspects of the human-being, and of whom Jung has

59
 THE GNOSTICS

written so convincingly in his book Psychology and Alchemy (1943).

Lastly, Irenaeus writes with particular distaste of the association of
gnostic ideas with magical practice. The essence of such activity has
been dealt with in the section on the Hermetists. It is quite obvious
that Irenaeus does not really know much about this. Nevertheless, he
continues the almost certainly erroneous tradition that the Gnosis began
with magicians; in particular, with Sirnon Magus, a figure who appears
in the canonical Acts of the Apostles as one who tried to buy the spiritual
power of the apostles and whose vain efforts have given us the word
‘simony’ to describe those who try to buy their way to power - now
very much an approved past-time. The point being here that the spirit
of the Gnostic was essentially a counterfeit one — a plastic spirit.
It was an amazing experience to find, in the Bibliotheca Philosophica
Hermetica in Amsterdam, recently how this tradition had reached the
German scholar-magician Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), author
of the widely influential (in his day) Three Books of Occult Philosophy.
In his Of the Vanitie and Uncertainty of Artes and Sciences (English
translation 1569), Agrippa writes in the 48th chapter:

Of the Magitiens also is sprung in the Church a great route of heretickes,

which as Iamnes and Mambres have rebelled against Moses, so they
have resisted the Apostolicke truth: the chief of these was Simon the
Samaritaine, who for this Arte had an image erected at Rome in the time
of Claudius Caesar with this inscription, to Simon the holy GOD. His
blasphemies be written at large by Clement, Eusebius and Irenaeus. Out
of this Simon as out of a seed plot of all heresies, have proceeded by many
successions the monstrous Ophites, the filthy Gnostickes, the wicked
Valentinians, the Cerdonians, the Marcionites, the Montamans, and
many other hereticks, for gain and vaine glory speaking lies against God,
availing nor profiting men, but deceiving and bringing them to rum and
destruction, and they which believe in them shall be confounded in God’s
judgement.

Agrippa had read, with approval and as an authority, the Hermetic

writings. I wonder what he would have made of the Nag Hammadi
Library? Would he have found the ‘filthy gnostickes’ there?
Irenaeus rested his case.

The End of the first great Gnostic Movement

We do not really know how it was that a movement which had clearly
Been seen as a threat by Irenaeus and which appears to have been in
every sense a challenge to incipient Catholicism came to virtually dis-

60
 MADNESS AND BLASPHEMY

appear from the history of the Christian Church) It is certain that after
Transmission of Irenaeus’s work and the work of other authorities
in the Church, individual churches had much stronger grounds for
expelling the unrepentant Gnostic from the congregation. They also had
the approval of the bishops and the principle was firmly established:
‘when in doubt, refer to the bishop’. It is presumed that bishops may
have welcomed this. Gnosis has been described as ‘the shadow of the
Church’ and it is likely that when it no longer operated within an
existing system, it did not have the capacity to produce an alternative
long-lasting structure. Principally, this must have been because it was
not ideologically suited to making an institution with the power of
longevity. Gnostics were not very interested in the argument: ‘we have
been here for two or three hundred years, therefore we have solid and
attestable foundations’. They did not require the sealed approval that
we find on many products today - ‘By Appointment’.... For this reason,
it is likely that Gnosis, as a movement, was self-defeating. Furthermore,
its appeal to the ‘elect’ who by definition must be few, would see it
whittle down to a virtual ‘club-membership’f Again, it must be stressed
that the Gnostics were not interested in ‘seeing it all out’ until Jesus
returned with angels and trumpets sounding. When you had received
the ‘Light’, you were effectively out of history. We should, therefore,
not condemn the-Gnostics because they did not have the equivalent of
an English Constitution guaranteed to absorb dissent and centralize
itseljf about unimpeachable authority - ‘the people’. Indeed, from a
gnostic point of view, the ‘snccess’ of thp Catholic Church reailV-XtnLv
demonstrated its failure to hold to a truly spiritual message -.going for
outwardlv duraRTeToundaTTons^atjhe^expense of inner growthy
We know from the burial and discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library
that small coteries continued to espouse the Christian and non-Christian
gnosis but were more and more ‘driven to the hills’ or, rather, the sands
of the desert. This place was perhaps especially suitable for them
as they reflected upon what a desert existed within the mind of the
‘world’.
In David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence is asked by a
Chicago reporter as to why he likes the desert. Lawrence looks him up
and down and says, ‘Because it’s clean' Appearing and disappearing in
and through history would prove to be the Gnostic’s only way of staying
free.
I asked the ‘old master’ of Gnostic studies, Hans Jonas, what the
Church, jrnght have lost by excluding the Gnostics. He replied, ‘Well
perhaps a spirit of daring, individual daring, and thinking about the

61
 THE GNOSTICS

mysteries of being and the godhead. Every orthodoxy somehow becomes

rigid, but this is probably one of the conditions of its being long-lived.
Their inventiveness could not be tolerated. There would not have been
a consolidated church with its dogma if that would go on, and the
suppression of it meant of course a loss. A loss of a vividness which
however from time to time rose again in the Church itself, in the heretical
movements of the Middle Ages.’
Before we move on in time and space some 800 years to look at those
heretical movements of the Middle Ages, and in particular the Cathars,
there are perhaps two other factors we should consider.
Firstly, many Gnostics may have become absorbed in the attempt of
the prophet Mam’s construction of a universal religion on Gnostic and
dualist lines. By dualist 1 mean the thought which sees all reality for
man as being a conflict between opposing principles of ‘Light’ and
‘Darkness’, Spirit and Matter. Mani, who came from the region of
Baghdad in modern-day Iraq had his first vision in about AD 240 where
he saw himself as ‘Apostle of Light’. The religion he founded, which
containedJZoroastrian, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Gnostic thought
was to become enormously successful, to the extent that under Theo¬
dosius I, being a Manichee carried the death penalty (375-395). St
Augustine became a Manichee between 373-382 but later turned against
them. It was perhaps his Manichee experience that enabled Augustine
to describe mankind as a ‘lump of sin’ but this is disputed. Some would
argue that main-stream Christianity could easily have furnished him
with such thoughts. Manicheism resisted persecution and by the ninth
century Central Asia was Manichean. In 719 there was a Manichean
church in Peking and the Manichees were strong in central and western
Asia until the thirteenth century when it would appear that they were
wiped out during the Mongol conquests. Mani, who called himself, the
‘seal of the prophets’ would, of course, lose the dignity to the founder
of Islam.
Secondly, there was a great movement in the third and fourth centuries
away from paganism and toward Christianity and the Gnostics seem to
have suffered in this movement too. The easy way between being a
pagan and a Christian enjoyed (by some) in the second century seemed
to have vanished. A hardening in the arteries of the Empire seems to
have taken place and this culminated in the fourth century with the
closure of many pagan institutions and places of worship. Egypt seems
to have suffered particularly in this ‘wind of change’ and it is perhaps
from this period that some lone voice composed the lament for vanished
times which appears in the Nag Hammadi version of the Hermetic

62
 MADNESS AND BLASPHEMY

dialogue Asklepios and which was to return in the late fifteenth century
as a herald for a new current in what has been described as the rebirth
the Renaissance.

And Egypt will be made a desert by the gods and the Egyptians. And as
for you, O River, there will be a day when you will flow with blood more
than water. And dead bodies will be (stacked) higher than the dams. And
he who is dead will not be mourned as much as he who is alive. Indeed
the latter will be known as an Egyptian on account of his language in the
second period (of time). O Asklepios, why are you weeping? He will seem
like (a) foreigner in regard to his customs. Divine Egypt will suffer evils
greater than these. Egypt, lover of God, and the dwelling place of the
gods, school of religion, will become an example of impiousness.
And in that day the world will not be marvelled at.... It has become
neither a single thing nor a vision. But it is in danger of becoming a
burden to all men. Therefore, it will be despised - the beautiful world of
God, the incomparable work, the energy which possesses goodness, the
many-formed vision, the abundance that does not envy, that is full of
every vision. Darkness will be preferred to light and death will be preferred
to life. No one will gaze into heaven. And the pious man will be counted
as insane, and the impious man will be honoured as wise. The man who
is afraid will be considered as strong. And the good man will be punished
like a criminal.

63
 PART TWO

The Good Men

 Chapter Four

The Good Men

And the good man will be punished like a criminal

(From Hermetic Dialogue between
Hermes Trismegistos and Asklepios.
circa 3rd century)

Introduction

An awful lot of rubbishjias been..written about the subject of Catharism.

The Cathars have been seen as mysterious transmitters of an esoteric
doctrine with powerful magical and mystical implications. They have
been seen as being in some way connected to the myths surrounding the
Holy Grail, King Arthur, primordial and pagan ‘gnosis’ and quite
recently have been tied to one of the most florid of modern conspiracy
theories involving everything from Christ’s alleged descendants, the
Merovingian dynasty, the Knights Templar, the House of Lorraine,
nineteenth- and twentieth-century theosophy and occultism, the Nazi
Party, Rosicrucianism, Symbolist poetry, the painter Nicolas Poussin,
the Ark of the Covenant to the now familiar melange of inter-galactic
UFOlogy, ‘Holism’, cosmogonic speculation, Ancient Egyptian Myth¬
ology, quests for Atlantis and prehistoric astronomy. These strains of
anti-rational and quasi-religious investigations are part of the weakness
of our times. They are witnesses to an alienation from a scientific
movement which seems to leave Man helpless among physical deter¬
minations which make us feel that we are unnecessary. It is a pity that
the historical Cathars have, as it were, got mixed up in all of this.
Deceased members of our species have, of course, no ‘will’ in the matter
of how later generations will use them. It is sometimes left to the
laborious business of historians to quietly keep as true as possible a
record of what really happened. Not all historians have ‘clean hands’
in this process but we have been fortunate that post-war historians,
palaeographers and archivists have exercised their duties with con-

67
 THE GNOSTICS

siderable thought and care. Part Two of this book ‘The Good Men’
owes its substance to their work - a work, it should be added, that is
still in progress and therefore future readers may well be in a position
to disagree with the formulations and understandings which constitute
the following description.

The Sources
The facts a bo utCatharism are considerably more interesting than the
mythsT^What are those Facts based on? In the year 1163 an assembly
of Catholic bishops took place in Tours, the administrative centre for
the Loire Valley in northwestern France. The assembly decided that
stern measures should be taken against a new heresy that had appeared
in Gascony and Provence and which was spreading like a cancer. That
is the first certain reference to the arrival in France of the Cathar ‘heresy’
which had appeared in Cologne, Bonn and Liege some twenty years
earlier. The heresy was also to be called^ ‘Manjchean’. These ‘heretics’
were not Manichean. They never refer to Mani, the prophet of the
Manichees and although they shared certain characteristics of Maniche-
ism, the heretics themselves thought of themselves not as representatives
of a new revelation, as the Manichees did, but as true or good Christians.
Their chief source of doctrine was the New Testament, holding par¬
ticular attention to The Gospel of John and the other three gospels. The
word ‘Cathar’ comes from the Greek word KaOapog (katharos) meaning
^uripoiLuted’ and although this was not a word which they applied to
themselves with great readiness, it is still nat, a.s_^busive a term as
‘Manichean’ had become and it does tell us something about their
attitude to Christianity - they were devoted to the pure spiritual light
whose true home is with the Good God in heaven.
During the years that followed the assembly at Tours, the Cathars
rapidly gained supporters and sympathizers in very well defined areas.
There were no Cathars to be found in Languedoc to the east of the
Rhone valley and very few west of the Garonne. They were to be found
in the counties of Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne, Beziers and the county
of Foix. There are good reasons for this as we shall see. The Cathars
were to play a central role in a series of dramatic and, indeed, traumatic
events which formed one of the turning-points in the history of the
kingdom of France and of western Europe. Those events and the Cathar
beliefs are extremely well documented. There is a large amount of
chronicle evidence. There is vernacular poetry which includes the epic
Le Chanson de la Croisade largely written by the troubadour Guillaume

68
 THE GOOD MEN

de Tudele. The Chanson (Song) describes the Crusade mounted against

the ‘Albigenses’ as the Cathars were often called by their enemies.
(‘Albigenses’ because an enclave of heretics had early on been exposed
in Albi). Above all there are the records of the Inquisition. The Inquisi¬
tors were active in the Languedoc by order of the Pope so as to secure
confessions and, sometimes, to discover the nature of the heresy itself.
Thousands of these interrogations still survive in the archives of the
Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, in the Vatican Library and in the city
archives of Carcassonne and Toulouse. These reveal not only a great
deal about the beliefs of the Cathars but also, as Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie’s book Montaillou has demonstrated, about the details of their
way of life.
(In a similar manner to that by which our knowledge of the first
Gnostics was much improved by the Nag Hammadi discovery, our
knowledge of Catharism has greatly benefited from discoveries made
in the twentieth century^ A short time before World War II, Father
Dondaine discovered the"Liber de duobus Principiis (Book of the Two
Principles) in Florence. An anonymous treatise contained in the Liber
contra Manicheos was found in two versions in Prague and in Paris. This
material along with the works Les Questions de jean (The Questions of
John) which describes St John in heaven asking questions of Christ as
to the origin of the world (which is held to be a tragedy), a Cathar
prayer incorporated in the inquisition records of the Bishop of Pamiers,
Jacques Fournier, and a Cathar Church ‘Ritual’ (in Latin and Occitan -
the langue [language] d'oc which gave this region its name) are all from
the thirteenth century when many Cathars, it seems, fled to their spiritual
brethren in the region of Concorezzo in Italy. These works were com¬
posed by the bons hommes (good men) themselves.

The Arrival of the Cathars in twelfth-century

Languedoc - The Buggers
The exactjorigins of the Cathars are quitejabscure. Nevertheless, there
is a pattern of movement that can be discerned from the time of the
ninth century in Armenia. It was in the marginal and mountainous
regions of those parts that Gnostics and other heretics of various per¬
suasions had taken refuge from those edicts of the emperors of Con¬
stantinople which had made heresy a capital crime. Among these outlaws
were the so-called Paulicians, a sometimes warlike sect of an apparently
mixed ‘Manichean’-gnostic origin but whose beliefs may have served
better to dissociate themselves from the political control of

69
 THE GNOSTICS

the emperors. In 872 a military victory was won over the Paulicians and
some of them were deported to the Balkans. It became the practice
following this victory to try and convert the heretics. Those who with¬
stood conversion to Catholicism may well have hot-footed it to the
Balkans in the north and northwest where heresy seems to have been
more easily tolerated.
In the tenth century we first hear of the Bogomil Church in Bulgaria.
Bogomil is Bulgarian for ‘beloved of God’ and it may be that their
founder took this name. Among their beliefs was that characteristically
gnostic one which held that the Father of Jesus Christ was not the
creator of the world. The Catholic Church had long held that the origin
of evil for men lay in the human being’s surrender to the power of the
Devil. For the Bogomils and later for the Cathars, the power of the
Devil worked through the nature and constraints of the material world.
Since God the Father, it was believed could not have created such an
evil instrument (the world, that is), it was logical to suppose that the
Devil (Satanael) not only frustrated the intentions of God the Father
but had constructed the stage of the world for that very purpose. It was
indeed a ‘wicked world’. To be bound to the world then was evil and
the realization of the source of evil, coupled with the fervent desire to
extricate oneself from it by virtuous practice in a religion of love and
goodness, was salvation. One was redeemed to heaven by knowledge
of the Good God. In short, matter and spirit were never meant to
cohabit. This division and its corresponding principles of good and evil,
light and darkness is broadly called dualism - the doctrine of two
opposing principles between which Man is pulled.
During the early twelfth century, Bogomil missionaries began the
journey up the Danube to the west, possibly as a result of the persecution
of Bogomils in Constantinople. What remains a mystery is whether these
Bulgarian missionaries were, in fact, the direct founders of Catharism in
the Languedoc. Bogomils were burnt in Cologne in 1142 and Cologne
would become a centre for Cathars in Germany. However, there were
other indigenous heretics in France and it may be that Catharism
developed in some sort of association with movements such as those
initiated by Henry of Lausanne in the early twelfth century. Henry was
profoundly moved to condemn the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the vices
which went hand in hand with it, namely, wealth, power and the
distance which separated that hierarchy, and thereby the knowledge of
Christ, from thp ordinary believer. He and others like him were branded
as heretics. fAheretic was somebody who felt or thought or preached
that he could have a relationship with God without the authority of the

70
 THE GOOD MEN

Catholic Church) What was so utterly damnable about the message of

the Cathars was that not only was the Church held to be irrelevant in
the matter of the soul’s redemption but that the Church of Rome was
positively the temple of Satan, a false church, a counterfeit produced by
the Devil to outwit men and women from a true knowledge of themselves
and of the work of Christ. The Church had involved itself with political
power and worldly vice. Christ had said that a man cannot serve two
masters: God and Money. There was among many of the nobles of
Languedoc something of a consensus which held that the Church of
Rome was not the kind of master worth serving - or, perhaps more
importantly, worth paying for. The Catholic Church was not felt to be
on their side in the ‘life and death issues’ of Life and Death. To those
nobles and their peasants, as well as to a rising middle-class hampered
by the Catholic Church’s condemnation of usury, the gospel of the
‘Good Men’ was an alternative. The rejection of the Church of Rome
by the Cathars can perhaps be seen as a response, long delayed, to the
expulsion of the gnosis by the Catholics. Yet again, accusation and
suspicion of licentious sexual practices was levelled at the heretics. It
was quite common to hear of Cathars being described as Bulgarians or
Bulgars and in England, a corruption of this word led to our word
‘bugger’ due to the fact that the Cathar preachers, the parfaits (French
for ‘perfects’ or ‘perfected ones’) frequently travelled in groups of two
and perhaps the popular imagination then was not so different at root
from that of today.
What kind of world had Catharism entered into?
It would appear that the Bogomil missionaries arrived at just the right
time. Ijhere were several major conditions operating in Languedoc
which enabled Catharism to flourish.^Firstly, there was a good deal of
internecine strife. Land tenure was divided among a vast number of
independent nobles and their families. The key word here is independent.
The most powerful nobles, the Counts of Toulouse were involved in
continual struggles both to annex disputed property and defend their
lands and had little time to devote to interfering in the business of the
territories of their allies. The Church offered a frequently poorly or non-
educated, profligate clergy. Nor do the clergy seem to have been able
to maintain the moral standards of their religion. At the same time,
evangelism was virtually unheard of. Ignorance of the major tenets
of the Catholic gospel was widespread. Meanwhile, the area gave
passage to several major trade routes and there was money to be made.
There were books to be bought. There was a receptivity to new ideas.
Furthermore, compared to northern France, this was a good place to be

71
 THE GNOSTICS

a woman\Women were respected in the Languedoc and, if they were

landowners or were related to the nobility, they enjoyed not only an
equality but a romantic aura as well. For this was the era of the
troubadourjs. A small Renaissance was occurring in the Languedoc and
in northern Spain, a cultural effervescence at all levels with a particular
regard to poetry, writing and music. Gerard Zuchetto who today lectures
on the Troubadours and who sings in Occitan, the ‘langue d’oc’ with
his acclaimed group ‘Rosamonda’ explains the substance of this fertile
culture:

For the first time people wrote extensively about love; courtly love, fine
love, adulterous love, the love of the troubadours, and they went a long
way into things. The troubadours for example were people who wrote
about ‘tremendous’, ‘inaccessible’ love and respect for the lady. For the
first time the ladv is elevated to the level of the man and this is the most
j

important thing in the culture and is perhaps the most symbolic thing
about the cultural effervescence of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Gerard believes that the Cathar parfaite (a woman who had passed
through the Cathar ‘baptism of fire’ or spiritual baptism, the Con-
solamentum) may have been a romantic subject for the enamoured
troubadour. The parfaite was chaste, was good, was spiritually pure
and her heart was fixed on the divine world. In the castles of the
Languedoc could be heard music from the Arab world with delicately
woven words, loosening the bonds of the body and leading a fortunate
nobility to love. As well as the perennial violence and threat to security,
there was a ‘liberal’ spirit in the air. At a time when it was forbidden
to write in old Provencal, when it was forbidden to think in any way
other than that of the Church of Rome, ‘things were written, they were
sung, they were said and it was said that people needed to be free. They
needed to free themselves from the tutelage of the Church, they needed
to free themselves from the constraint of writing in Latin, and that was
important’ (Gerard Zuchetto). Dante was to write in thirteenth-century
Florence that, ‘It is in the Occitan language (la langue d’oc) that the
exponents of the living language have made themselves the firsts (or
masters) of Poesy’ (De vulgari Eloquentia). It is highly significant that
the Cathar perfecti made the gospels available in Occitan. This was the
world in which the Cathars emerged with a message of simple spiri¬
tuality. They were welcomed by many into a world which longed for
purity and independence.
To those who listened, a whole world of imagination was opened
and somehow, a sense of that world has come down to us. Perhaps it
 THE GOOD MEN

was ‘When we were very young’, when A. A. Milne wrote in Knights

and Ladies:
There is in my old picture book
A page at which I like to look,
Where knights and squires come riding down
The cobbles of some steep old town,
And ladies from beneath the eaves
Flutter their bravest handkerchiefs,
Or, smiling proudly, toss down gages ...
But that was in the Middle Ages.
It wouldn’t happen now; but still,
Whenever I look up the hill
Where, dark against the green and blue,
The firs come marching, two by two,
I wonder if perhaps I might
See suddenly a shining knight
Winding his way from blue to green -
Exactly as it would have been
Those many, many years ago ...
Perhaps I might. You never know.

We should not forget that all those persons of whom we shall hear in
the following chapters were also children once - or twice.

Were the Cathars Gnostics?

In about 1172 there was held a council of Cathar perfecti (those who had
become full or ‘clothed’ Cathars, having received the Consolamentum:
baptism in the spirit by the laying on of hands). It took place at a house
in S. Felix-de-Caraman about 30 kilometres from Toulouse. Presided
over by a Bogomil bishop from Constantinople, Nicetas, it planned
the strategy for presenting the ‘true’ Christianity to the people of the
Languedoc. It represented a major bid for a revised organization of the
Cathar Church and for the supplanting of the Catholic Church by the
power of the Holy Spirit and by the oratory of its leaders. We may
ask, ‘Was Languedoc in the process of receiving gnosticism?’ Professor
Bernard Hamilton of Nottingham University in his paper The Albig-
ensian Crusade (page 6. The Historical Association. G.85) has written
that;

Catharism was not a form of gnosticism, teaching salvation by know¬

ledge: like Catholicism, it was a profoundly sacramental faith. The
Cathars taught that Christ had given his Church a single sacrament, the
consolamentum, baptism in the spirit by the laying-on of hands. This

73
 THE GNOSTICS

differed from the Catholic sacrament of confirmation, for the spirit which
was conferred by the Cathar rite was not God the Holy Spirit but the
recipient’s own spirit.

Professor Hamilton is obviously mistaken as to the multi-faceted nature

of gnosticism. If gnosticism was truly a religion ‘teaching salvation by
knowledge’ then it would be pertinent to ask of the nature of such
knowledge. A classic definition of gnostic ‘knowledge’ has long been
furnished in Clement of Alexandria’s Excerpta ex Theodoto (second
century): ‘the knowledge of who we were, and what we have become,
where we were or into what we have been thrown, whither we hasten,
from what we are redeemed’.
This was precisely what the Cathar perfecti did teach. They taught
that the souls of angelic beings had been stolen by ‘Sathanas’ and put
into the bodies of men which he had made in his own likeness, whence
came the yearning for the realm of pure spirit enjoyed prior to the
rebellious acts of Sathanas. As it is written in the Cathar Les Questions
de Jean:

And he [Satan] imagined in order to make man for his service, and took
the lime of the earth and made man in his resemblance. And he ordered
the angel of the second heaven to enter into the body of lime; and he took
another part and made another body in the form of woman, and he
ordered the angel of the first heaven to enter therein. The angels cried
exceedingly on seeing themselves covered in distinct forms by this mortal
envelopment.

The author of the work goes on to recount how Sathanas made Paradise
for the purpose of making the ‘man’ and ‘woman’ sin. He accomplished
his malicious purpose and so further held the angelic souls in bondage.
The rite of consolamentum, the ‘enspiriting’ of the Cathar effectively
released the soul from the grip of the Devil’s material bondage and
united it with the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, which until the rite
exists, as it were, in a dormant state attending the delivery made possible
by the love of Christ. The perfectus could now, in all truth call God
‘Father’. As Hamilton rightly says, it is the recipient’s own spirit that is
released from the hell or further incarnations or embodiments. The
perfectus is thus able to love without fear and, as attachment to the
material world (governed by Satan the Rex Mundi or King of the World)
declines, the spirit of the Cathar is able to reach in love for the final
departure from the body and the reception into heaven. Since the world,
being an inferior and unspiritual creation, had a limited duration; since
it was in a profound sense an unreal world, the perfected Cathar thus

74
 THE GOOD MEN

passed from non-being into the realm of Being. The Cathar was in the
Light. The Consolamentum was, like the Valentinian anoXvzpcooic,
(apolytrosis meaning redemption) a liberation sacrament. The perfected
one knew.
I asked the respected French historian of Catharism, Michel Roc-
quebert, who himself now lives in the village of Montsegur in the Ariege,
whether there was a gnosis in Catharism. His reply was clear enough:

Undeniably. The idea that there are two creations and therefore two creators;
one good creation and one bad creation; the idea that the soul which belongs
to the good creation is an exile and prisoner of the world, that is to say, of
the bad creation; the idea that salvation can only be achieved by illuminative
knowledge, all that is gnostic. But it should not be forgotten that Catharism
is a form of Christianity, and has always presented itself as being a form of
Christianity, even as being true Christianity. So we are dealing with an
undeniably gnostic form of Christianity, and that is why, moreover, I am
personally convinced that Catharism did not appear by a miracle right in the
middle of the Middle Ages in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but that
in actual fact the origins of Catharism should be sought in primitive
Christianity.

Prior to moving on to the next chapter which reveals aspects of the so-
called Albigensian Crusade we should consider the following. The
Cathars believed that the Church of Rome was of the nature of the Rex
Mundi, the Lord of this world. To the Cathar Gnostic, the incidence
and nature of the Albigensian Crusade shows precisely what he meant.

75
 Chapter Five

A Mystery Tour

It might be a good idea to explore the world of the Cathars and their
eventual fate in the manner of a tour, a kind of mystery tour. We shall
take a trip into the heartlands of Catharism as it existed from the late
twelfth century to the mid-thirteenth century. So let us cast our minds
and imaginations back some 800 years.

Laurac
We begin our journey high up in the rugged hills of Laurac, some 25
kilometres to the west of Carcassonne, our central reference point.
We are standing on a promontory just above a squat and simple
church. The promontory is a defensive position and it commands a
spectacular view of undulating green hills and golden strips of corn
which take our eyes across the vast plain before us to the misty horizons
of the northwest, north and northeast. The wood and stone town
huddles together on the hillside all about us. Behind us, in extreme
contrast, the hills have the character of moorland and scrub, casting
dark shadows about a dull green and brown. Beyond those hills, far to
the south exists a powerful threat to the Counts of Toulouse who claim
this place and its surrounding country as their own. For beyond the
Pyrenees the kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona also claim
this land. Between these two powers are the counts of Foix, vassals of
the king of Aragon, and the viscounts of Carcassonne and Beziers, the
Trencavel family who are fiercely attempting to maintain control of
their lands. Laurac is a Trencavel outpost.
Sometime in the middle of the twelfth century the Cathars began to
appear. In spite of spectacular landscapes, which doubtless please us
more than the population of the time, it would not be so difficult to
think these lands to be the work of the Devil. A Papal Legate, Stephen
of Tournai came to these parts in 1181 and wrote of ‘vast deserts ruled
by the fury of brigands and the image of death; of burned houses and

76
 THE GNOSTICS

ruined villages where there is no order, no tranquillity, nothing that

does not threaten security and menace life itself’. At the same time as
punitive raids were conducted by a ferocious array of mercenary soldiers
there was a good deal of trade passing through these lands, for if we
could see far enough to the east we should see the Mediterranean and,
to the northwest, the trading centre of Bordeaux and the Atlantic. The
lords of Laurac, of which there were many, wanted their share of this
trade and indeed, if you were working in the fields of the plain below
or travelling through the country laden with goods and money, you
might well look up at Laurac and feel a sense of menace.
To this situation the Cathar.s-.came with a message which held that
not only was the world of matter evil but that the worst form of
expression of that evil could be seen in the exercise of power and above
all, the violent exercise of power. The Cathars held out the possibility
of another way of life which would be characterized by freedom from
fear. The discovery of the spiritual light within the believing Cathar
removed him or her from the grip of the Devil and of the Devil’s servants.
In order to purify oneself and so prepare for the eternal realm of spirit
from which one had come, it was necessary to abstain from sex because
you thereby risked dragging down another immortal soul into this hell,
and from meat, because meat was the Devil’s matter and was the product
of procreation - as was milk, and from all those sins or temptations
whereby the Devil could get a hold on you. You must not lie or kill
people or animals because, well, who knew whether there was in that
animal a pained soul working through successive incarnations in order
to return to heaven? You must not hate. In short, you must love as
Christ had loved. Not all Cathars had to adhere to these ‘rules’. There
were credentes, believers who revered the Cathar perfecti but who
preferred to leave the final break with the world - the Consolamentum -
to their deathbeds, or, in the case of women, until after they had raised
families when the pain was almost over and they could embrace that
holy life which was to win the parfaite almost universal respect in this
region.
The English historian R. I. Moore has shed further light on the
vegetarianism of the Cathars:

I think another thing about not eating meat which gave it a social power
as a spiritual message, and it was a message which was preached not only
by Cathars but by other religions which opposed Catholic orthodoxy in
this period, was that meat was the food of the hunters, of the dominators,
of the people who rode horses, the people who exploited the cultivators
of the land, most of whose life was singularly meatless.

78
 A MYSTERY TOUR

Listening to the Cathar perfecti no doubt gave the lords of Laurac

release from the pressing demands on their arms and pockets. For a
moment they might begin to believe there was a way out of all the
troubles. Most importantly, anyone who has travelled about Europe
and marvelled at the immense grandeur of her churches, abbeys and
cathedrals can be in no doubt that concern for the fate of the soul was
intense. To those who had become cynical of the Catholic Church or
who had never been convinced, to those who sought answers which
spoke of their experience of life and their dreams of heaven, to these
people the Cathars spoke. They were rewarded with patronage and,
eventually, by a loyalty unto death.
Soon the Cathars had houses in Laurac where the perfecti lived and
which served as centres and refuges as they went about the country
consoling the willing believer and helping out with the day’s toil.

Fanjeaux
Imagine a wintry afternoon in February 1190. You have been invited to
stay at a weaver’s house in Fanjeaux about two hours’ walk away. You
descend the hill from Laurac down to the soft hills below and head
southeast. These hills weave among each other and bind your world as
the illuminations of a manuscript enclose the daily prayer. There are no
labourers in the fields now and the tops of the hills turn from a brilliant
wet turquoise to a pink glow and then, as it becomes colder and the
wind scurries from hedge to hedge, the world becomes grey. Soon it will
be almost black. A crescent moon hovers behind some dark cloud and
you are in starlight with only the stars and the approaching fires of
Fanjeaux to guide you. You struggle up the hill to the town. A bell
booms out from the depths of the high church tower and echoes about
the narrow streets. You walk through the empty market-place, avoiding
the standing rough-hewn beams which support its roof and come to a
stone house. The thick wooden door creaks open and you are welcomed
into the flickering fire-light. There about the fire are the silhouettes of
men and women quietly talking. These are the parfaits and the parfaites
engaging in talk about the week’s events. The atmosphere is very good.
You are among the good spirits now and you can relax with a mug of
wine and listen ...
This weaver’s shop is one of several in Fanjeaux, tlie heart of Cathar-
ism. In 1246, a man called Pierre Gramazie told the Inquisitors that he
had grown up as a boy in Fanjeaux and worked in a weaver’s shop
which was kept by perfecti. These houses were often given for their use

79
 THE GNOSTICS

by local lords who were themselves not very removed from the ordinary
townsfolk. They did not have much money. We know that the Cathars
also set up cobblers shops and potteries in the area. We know of two
Cathar doctors who practised in Fanjeaux. jhe Cathars did not worship
in churches. The place of prayer, worship and discussion was not
important. They said: ‘The church of God is not made of stone or wood;
it is the community of the faithful.’
This view is characteristic of the gnostic belief in an invisible ‘ekklesia’
or ‘assembly’ of souls who know one another ‘by heart’. Madame Anne
Brenon, director of the Centre Nationale d’etudes Cathares in Villegly
near to Carcassonne told me that, ‘In the days when followers of
Catharism were not persecuted, their place of worship might have been
a room in a chateau or a room in an inn. When they came to be
persecuted, their place of worship might have been a clearing in a wood,
or in a cave or cellar.’ In Fanjeaux, where there were at least fifty lords,
one of them, Dame Cavaers, presided over a Cathar house and this was
not at all unusual. Blanche de Tonneins we know also held a Cathar
house near Fanjeaux at the Motte de Tonneins. In 1206, Esclarmonde
of Foix, the sister of the Count of Foix received the Consolamentum
here at a ceremony attended also by a great lord of Fanjeaux, her brother
Raymond-Roger and which was conducted by the most famous Cathar
parfait, Guilhabert de Castres. Indeed, the role of women was of primary
importance in Catharism. Perhaps it is that women become more inter¬
ested in a spiritual religion than men, at least to begin with. That was
the case in the Languedoc. The noble women were the first to be touched
by the Cathar message and, according to Anne Brenon:

One has the impression that there was a whole generation of Cathar
matriarchs who directed the thought of three or four generations of their
lineage. I am thinking of ladies like Blanche de Laurac, like the lady of
Le Mas Saintes Fuelles, Garsyne, and this is explained by the fact that
the Cathar religion gave women just as important a role to play in the
spiritual movement, whereas the Catholic religion [and the northern
barons] relegated women to the level of simple enclosed nuns when they
were allowed to take holy orders. In Catharism, on the other hand, female
perfecti were the equal of male perfecti. They were entitled to preach,
like men; they were also entitled to confer the sacrament which they had
received (the Consolamentum)-, they had an important spiritual role. And
when one thinks that women in the Languedoc at this time in history -
at least women who belonged to the nobility - also had their say in
matters of relations between men and women, matters of love. There is
a certain logic to be found in all that.

80
 A MYSTERY TOUR

Dame Cavaers provided for a parfait to teach her daughter and it seems
that many of the parfaites came from noble families with high spiritual
intent. The holiness and perfection to which the Cathars aspired existed
beyond sexual differences. According to the theory, the Consolamentum
ensured that further sinfulness, whether connected with sex or another
kind, was out of the' question. If, however, the prohibitions which
ensured sanctity were broken, the Consolamentum ceased to operate
and might only be performed again in extraordinary circumstances.
Furthermore, if a parfait sinned, all those who had received the Con¬
solamentum from him or her would also have to be reconsoled. It is
little wonder that many Cathars waited until they were dying before
entering the full redemption. As the Jesus of the Nag Hammadi Library
says, ‘This is the doctrine for the perfect.’(Catharism was unlikely then
to be a real threat to the social order of tne Languedoc. Nevertheless,
it was very much seen that way\
In 1179 Pope A1 exagderJIIpronouneed the Cathars to be anathema,
that is, to put it bluntly, burnable. From then on the Cathars of the
Languedoc were a priority target for the Catholic authorities. Never¬
theless, the Catholic bishops who initially attempted to deal with
Catharism were unable to muster a concerted effort due to conflicting
diocesan initiatives and the unwillingness of the Languedoc nobility to
persecute their own countrymen. In 1203, Peter of Castelnau became a
Papal Legate and he together with the ruthlessly authoritarian Arnaud
Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux and founder of the Cistercian order of which
Peter of Castelnau was a monk, took to the roads of the region to
convince Cathars of their folly and to persuade the nobility of their
responsibilities to the Church of Christ. In 1204, there was a con¬
frontation between Cathar leaders and the Papal Legates in Carcassonne.
The contrasting postures of the protagonists led one observer to exclaim
that^Here was a God who always went on foot - yet today his servants
ride in comfort. Here was a God of poverty - yet today his missionaries
are wealthy. Here was a God humble and scorned of men - yet today
his envoys are loaded with honours^
It was in perhaps the same year as this abortive attempt at winning
the Cathars over by oratory that Raymond de Pereille, seigneur of
Puivert, began the reconstruction of the fortress of Montsegur at the
request of local Cathars. It would serve as an administrative centre, as
a refuge and as a treasury for the funds that were being donated by the
seigneurial class. Perhaps, somehow, they knew what was coming.

81
 THE GNOSTICS

Enter Dominic Guzman

Dominic Guzman (circa 1172-1221) was on his way back from a mission
to^IJenmarlc with Diego, Bishop of Osma in Castile in i204=-5. Today
we know him as St Dominic, founder of the Dominican Order. In many
places Roman CatKoTTc*cBiTJren learn of this man’s holiness. What was
he like in those days?
Dominic Guzman was born in Caleruaga in Castile to an aristocratic
family. His mother was of the d’Aza family and she is known to have
been deeply religious and very charitable. The d’Aza family had served
the Church by its military exploits against the Moorish infidel. The
family had good connections and Dominic joined the cathedral chapter
of Osma as an Augustinian canon. He showed himself to be a deeply
compassionate man, a highly effective orator and good in argument. He
tried to relieve the lot of the poor. He sold his books and manuscripts
declaring, ‘I will not study on dead skins while men are dying of hunger’.
He was given to the mortification of the flesh and fkjgged^himself - a
not uncommon practice among Catholic mystics and serious clerics. His
thin stature and uncertain health were not assisted by his frequently
staying up all night weeping for those he tried so hard to convert. His
successor as Head of the Dominicans (founded in 1215) Jordan of
Saxony wrote of him: ‘God had given him a special grace to weep for
sinners and for the afflicted and oppressed. He bore their distress in the
inmost shrine of his compassion.’(Dominic wanted to give himself
totally to the end of winning souls for Christ: ‘his heart was full ofan
extraordinary, almost incredible yearning for the salvation of everyond’.
His attitude to heretics in general was, however, ^severe. They were
worse than the infidel. This conviction was doubtless an influence of
hisliavdng beenTrought up in a part of Castile but recently reconquered
from the Moorish empire of Almohad. The territory gained for Christ
was insecurely held. Christianity was under attack from without.
Perhaps there is a parallel here with the situation of Bishop Irenaeus in
the second century who also experienced Christianity under attack from
without and who would give the gnostic threat from within short shrift.
For Dominic, the heretics were a kind of ‘fifth column’ attacking the
very foundations of Catholic life. For him, heresy attacked God (it
denied He was Creator), Truth (it denied the Catholic Church) and so
the whole structure of Catholic society was undermined by it. Heresy
hit Church and State. In the Languedoc neither Church nor State was
yet particularly strong. One would be mistaken if one thought that
Dominic was interested in a witch-hunt for the sake of it. Heresy he

82
 A MYSTERY TOUR

detested, but the treatment of individual heretics was another matter.

He longed to convert them. However, given the choice, he preferred the
full challenge of converting the heathen^In 1204, on his way to Rome,
he encountered heresy in Toulouse. The host of the inn in which he
stayed was a Cathar. Dominic stayed up all night in argument with him
and won him round. He could still think of a heretic as a Christian who
had gone astra^ In 1205, he and Diego went to Rome and asked
permission of the Pope, Innocent III, for the Bishop of Osma to resign
his episcopal duties so that he and Dominic might return northwards
in order to convert the pagans recently made visible by the expansion
of the Teutonic knights of Prussia and the Nordic countries.CPominic
was a born evangelist.) Nevertheless, the Pope refused the request.
Innocent III had recently been alerted to the Dualist heresies of Bosnia
anckBulgaria over which he was now Pope and he feared the international
dimensions of the heresy. The Albigensian problem had to be dealt with
first, and quickly. In 1206 Dominic was put under the authority of the
Legates"AFnaud Amaury and Peter of Castelnau so as to accomplish
what they had failed to do. Dominic was, in a sense, the Pope’s last
card. While Dominic went around the Languedoc with a new strategy -
renouncing the accoutrements of wealth and power, wearing simple
clothes, walking barefoot, sleeping by the roadside and in many things
playing the perfecti at their own game - a greater game continued above
him. Peter of Castlenau was putting great pressure on Raymond VI,
Count of Toulouse, to invade the Trencavel territories to destroy the
Cathar heresy. In retrospect,(the mission of Dominic makes him appear
as a political stooge.)
Dominic came to Fanjeaux where, taking in the scope of his task
while gazing from the heights of this fair town, he experienced a
revelation and decided to make the nearby village of Prouille his base. By
doing so Dominic was to become party to a truly historic confrontation.
Fanjeaux, at this time, was the base of the greatest Cathar preacher of
thje era, a man both famous and highly respected, GuirhaberTde Castres.
We~know a good deal about his long career but, sadly, not much about
the man.

Guilhabert de Castres (circa njo—1240)

I asked Anne Brenon to provide a portrait of the man. It is tantalizingly
incomplete.
Guilhabert de Castres was one of the most famous Cathar doctors in the
polite society of the Lauragais and Carcasses (region of Carcassonne).
He certainly originated from Castres (northeast of Toulouse), no doubt

83
 THE GNOSTICS

from the noble family of de Castres. He was certainly someone of good

birth and having attained his majority, he very soon attracted the attention
of the Cathar ‘Bishop’ (called so by the Catholic enemy) of Toulouse and
as filius major (the bishop’s ‘elder son’) he chose to take up residence in
Fanjeaux which was, in fact, the town which the troubadour Peire Vidal
portrayed as the centre of courtoisie (courtly love) in this region, but
which was also the centre of the heresy. Fanjeaux was a nobility town
where people conversed a great deal. Guilhabert de Castres exercised a
ministry there for twenty years before taking up residence at Montsegur;
at a time, moreover, when there was persecution and virtually the whole
of the polite society of Fanjeaux had also emigrated to Montsegur.
Although of noble birth and a formidable Cathar intellectual jouster
against Catholic jousters, Guilhabert de Castres nevertheless had a fervent
apostolate among all the ordinary Cathar people.
This man sounds fascinating. What else do we know about him? Suzanne
Nelli, (widow of the late historian and philosopher of Catharism,
R.ene Nelli) believes that it is likely that this man was the same abbot
Guilhabert de Castres who was sent by Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse
as Ambassador to Richard I of England, the Lion Heart. Already in
1178 the Pope had sent a mission to the region of Castres, the latter
place having the reputation for being ‘a receptacle of heretics’ and it is
there that we first hear of a Bonus Homo de Castris - a Good Man of
Castres.
In 1219, Guilhabert ‘held house’ at Dun with Raimond Mercier the
Cathar deacon of Mirepoix, in the same chateau in which Philippa de
Foix ran a house of parfaites in 1206 and to which Guilhabert would
return several years later with Bernard de Lamothe and Guiraud de
Gourdon in order to ‘console’ Raymond d’Avigna, the seigneur (lord)
of Dun. All of them just names to us now.
In the same year, Guilhabert was again seen at Montsegur where he
consoled Guillaume de Latour de Laurac. From 1220 he was the leader
of the Cathar diocese of Toulouse and his tireless ministry extended
from there to as far south as Usson and Sabarthes in the lower Ariege
some 80 kilometres south of Fanjeaux. In those years he visited the
houses of parfaits and parfaites, preaching, blessing, consoling - in
Fanjeaux, Laurac, Montreal, Blesplas, Castelnaudary, Labecede-
Lauragais, Villeneuve-la-Comptal, Le Mas Saintes Puelles, Toulouse,
Saint-Paul-Cap-de-Joux, Lanta, Castres, Mirepoix, Foix, Miramont
de Sabarthes, le Bezu, Dourne, Rocquefeuil, Usson and in the castles
and houses of the Cathar aristocrats, and then, perhaps finally, at
Montsegur.
Suzanne Nelli writes that: ‘He appears to us as a man of destiny, the

84
 ‘The gospel of truth is a joy for those who
have received from the Father of truth the gift
of knowing him . . The Gospel of Truth,
found beneath the earth near Nag
>-At coy tmr‘.Bn Hammadi, Upper Egypt,
n Y4' C«= A*om December 1945.
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M crcunus Trifmefiftus above: The chateau of Mon-
segur in the Ariege: powerful
symbol for the Cathars - a
vessel for the Holy Spirit;
surrendered in March 1244.

left: Thrice-greatest Hermes;

mystagogue of the Hermetic
revelation, the pristine
theology.

right: Man the Microcosm,

in touch with realms beyond
space, centre of Gnosis, child
of God. From Robert Fludd’s
History of the Macrocosm and
Microcosm, volume II. Pub¬
lished at Oppenheim in 1619.
 mmm\

TOM VS S ECVNDVS
D K

SVPERNATVR ALI, NA
TURALI, PMTERNAT U RA
LI ET CONTRANATU RALI
Microcofmi hiiloria, in
TraCtlatus tresdislnbuta
Authore
Roberto flud alias dcFlucti^
bus Armigero 6c Medic mat Doc =
tore Qxonienfi .
Offcnkcmij Imvenfis Iohanms Tfieotlorj
deBry, typu Huronymj Galien ?Gij.

W///M

BP»

<■ a
grtciui

Aa&£k
above: Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola, Conte di Con¬
cordia Shining Star of the
Hermetic Philosophy, author
of the epoch-marking Oration
on the Dignity of Man (1486).

Theophrastus von Hohenheim

called himselt Paxacelsus. The
Fama Fraternitatisrias been
described as the ‘Gospel accord¬
ing to Paracelsus’. He wrote:
‘Because men do not perfectly
believe and imagine, the result
is, that arts are uncertain when
they might be wholly certain.
‘There is in mercury whatever
wise men seek.’
 GIORDAN
NO BR.VNO

De 1* infinite vniuerfo
et <sj"Aiondi.

Alt illufirifsimo Signor di

Mauuifsicro.

Stampato in Venena.
>)no. M, D. LXXXIIII,

Giordano Bruno: On the

Infinite Universe and worlds
(1584). His vision cost him
his life.
The Quintessence of the Hermetic Art: John Dee’s
Monas Hieroglyphica published in Antwerp in 1564.
‘One of the greatest publi¬
The Latin inscription on the portal tells the reader
city stunts of all time’
that if he does not comprehend the contents he
(McIntosh). The first
should seek understanding or keep his mouth shut.
printed edition of the first
below: Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654), best Rosicrucian Manifesto. The
candidate for authorship of the Fama Fraternitatis. furore starts here.
Note the family crest on the top right: the cross
and the roses. OI0gfitKi»tfls>nt> Getter*1
REFORMATION,
SQtr
Q&fntfcm C»fr

FAMA FRA*
TERNITATIS,
loblicixn Ortifliebc6’;X<y
fenfrro(?<#/ an alle ©elefirte t>«&
•£4tipeer E*ry* g(fd)ricben:
5tucf> anrr fur^cti RESPONSION,
*>on t>«m Acrrn -Oafdmtya gtftdltt / trelct^cs;
tx(ln>c<5<n ton bm i|I cn>
gcjO(j<n/ tnbauffdnc@uU«n
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 ‘The rose gives honey to the bees.’ Illustration of the fecund Rose-Cross
from Summum Bonum (1629) by Rosicrucian apologist Dr Robert Fludd.

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left: The Door to the Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom, published in Prague in 1598.
Heinrich Khunrath’s meisterwerk goes to the heart ol Christian-Hermetic alchemy,
ascending through nature to the light. The Door is an inner mountain, there to
climb.

above: The Invisible College of the Rosicrucian Fraternity; Frontispiece to Speculum

Sophicum Rhodo-Stauroticum (1618) by Daniel Mogling. Rooted in the Name ol
God, it assists men from out of the earth-gaol of materialist vision, phenomenally
ubiquitous and utterly immune to assailants; Under the wings oj Jehovah.
 Emblema XXXVI. Defecret'uNatura. ijj
Lapis proje&us eft in terras,8c inmontibusexaltatus,&in
aere habicatAinfluminepafcituHd eft,Mercurius.
The Stone is everywhere! The
Lapis is depicted in all its in¬
visible glory in this extra¬
ordinary emblem from Atalanta
Fugietis (1618), a classic book of
alchemico-spiritual emblems by
Michael Maier, greatest apolo¬
gist for the Rose-Cross and
physician to the Emperor
Rudolphus of Bohemia,
Augustus von Anhalt and Land¬
grave Moritz von Hessen.

EPIGRAMMA XXXVI.
xtque jacercs
T7llerecrementumfertur Lapis xtqi
V Forte viis,Jibt ut kmc dives wops, osqve parent.
CMontibtu infummis a!itjlatuere,per auras
\_Xens ,atpafa perfluviosalii.
Omni* verafuo funtfenfu, pofi ulo fed
CMnnera montan is quareretanta lot is. V Ab

Humankind, longing for the Divine.

This illustration from a work by Jacob
Boehme (1575-1624) shows the inter¬
penetration of spirit and matter,
heaven and earth in the light and fire
of the Gnosis. The serpent reaching
for its tail symbolises the unity of the
cosmos; the triangle, the trinity of
earth, soul and spirit, manifest in the
four elemental rays, converging on
the cosmic Christ, centre of Light . . .
‘My kingdom is not of this earth.’
 A MYSTERY TOUR

man chosen and protected by destiny, the kind of man that history
sometimes presents us with.’
We do not know when he died. Some have thought he died during
the siege of Montsegur but there is no evidence to support this. He
might have died a natural death there but, bearing in mind his fame, it
is surprising that there is no reference to this within the copious records
of the Inquisition. Perhaps he was removed, notwithstanding his great
age, from Montsegur, to be hidden away in the castle of a sympathetic
noble| Perhaps it is right that such a mysterious man shouldjeave us
guessing as to the nature of his final departure from this world./

The Debates
In the year 1207 Guilhabert de Castres and Dominic Guzman faced each
other at Montreal, a small town about two hours’ walk in a northeasterly
direction from Fanjeaux. They did so before a local audience who were
doubtless given to cheering-on their ‘favourite’. On the other hand these
were very serious affairs and debate could become hard and bitter. We
do not know what passed between Dominic and Guilhabert. That is a
great pity. We only need look at their respective careers to know that
this must have been one of the great moments or ‘happenings’ before
the troops came carrying the torch and the cross. In the Channel 4 series
‘The Gnostics’ there is a dramatic encounter set in Fanjeaux which I
wrote to give some imaginary idea of what such a debate might have
consisted of. The protagonists get off to a fine start:
guilhabert: Welcome Dominic to Fanjeaux! You have good news for us?

DOMINIC: That is a matter entirely in your hands - your having repeatedly

rejected the gracious hand of God.
guilhabert: Are you the hand of God Dominic? Or the hand of the Pope?

Dominic: The sword of God is sharp and has two sides, Guilhabert de Castres.
But it is one sword.
guilhabert: You speak of the sword of God, Papal Envoy. For men it is
different. He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword - so speaks the
Master - not in Rome but in Heaven!

As played by the actors Brian Blessed and Ian Brooker it was a fine
contest. But what were these debates really all about?^It was common
practice in this region to hold a public debate in order to expose and
contest disputed positions of theology and philosophy j This was what
politics was thought to be all about. For the Catholic Legates they were
something of a shock. In 1178 a Papal Legate had been outraged to find

85
 Emblema XXXVI. Dejecretu Natura. IJ3
Lapis proje&us eft in terras,8c inmontibusexaltatus,8c in
aere habitat,6cinflumine pafcitur.id eft,Mercurius.
The Stone is everywhere! The
Lapis is depicted in all its in¬
visible glory in this extra¬
ordinary emblem from Atalanta
Fugiens (1618), a classic book of
alchemico-spiritual emblems by
Michael Maier, greatest apolo¬
gist for the Rose-Cross and
physician to the Emperor
Rudolphus of Bohemia,
Augustus von Anhalt and Land¬
grave Moritz von Hessen.

EPIGRAMMA XXXVI.
\ 7ilerecrementumfertur Lapis atque jaceres
V Forte viisfibt ut hinc dives mopsque parent.
CMontibtu infummis alii fiat uere,per auras
y^ferU,atpafii perfluvios alii.
Omnia verafuo funt fenfu. pofi ulo fed t
CMttnera merit an is quarere ttnta lee is. V Ab

Wcgzu Chr. ix cl

Humankind, longing for the Divine.

This illustration from a work by Jacob
Boehme (1575-1624) shows the inter¬
penetration of spirit and matter,
heaven and earth in the light and fire
of the Gnosis. The serpent reaching
for its tail symbolises the unity of the
cosmos; the triangle, the trinity of
earth, soul and spirit, manifest in the
four elemental rays, converging on
the cosmic Christ, centre of Light . . .
‘My kingdom is not of this earth.’
 A MYSTERY TOUR

man chosen and protected by destiny, the kind of man that history
sometimes presents us with.’
We do not know when he died. Some have thought he died during
the siege of Montsegur but there is no evidence to support this. He
might have died a natural death there but, bearing in mind his fame, it
is surprising that there is no reference to this within the copious records
of the Inquisition. Perhaps he was removed, notwithstanding his great
age, from Montsegur, to be hidden away in the castle of a sympathetic
noblejHPerhaps it is right that such a mysterious man shouldjeave us
guessing as to the nature of his final departure from this world.)

The Debates
In the year 1207 Guilhabert de Castres and Dominic Guzman faced each
other at Montreal, a small town about two hours’ walk in a northeasterly
direction from Fanjeaux. They did so before a local audience who were
doubtless given to cheering-on their ‘favourite’. On the other hand these
were very serious affairs and debate could become hard and bitter. We
do not know what passed between Dominic and Guilhabert. That is a
great pity. We only need look at their respective careers to know that
this must have been one of the great moments or ‘happenings’ before
the troops came carrying the torch and the cross. In the Channel 4 series
‘The Gnostics’ there is a dramatic encounter set in Fanjeaux which I
wrote to give some imaginary idea of what such a debate might have
consisted of. The protagonists get off to a fine start:
guilhabert: Welcome Dominic to Fanjeaux! You have good news for us?
DOMINIC: That is a matter entirely in your hands - your having repeatedly
rejected the gracious hand of God.
guilhabert: Are you the hand of God Dominic? Or the hand of the Pope?

Dominic: The sword of God is sharp and has two sides, Guilhabert de Castres.
But it is one sword.

guilhabert: You speak of the sword of God, Papal Envoy. For men it is
different. He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword - so speaks the
Master - not in Rome but in Heaven!

As played by the actors Brian Blessed and Ian Brooker it was a fine
contest. But what were these debates really all about?’^It was common
practice in this region to hold a public debate in order to expose and
contest disputed positions of theology and philosophy] This was what
politics was thought to be all about. For the Catholic Legates they were
something of a shock. In 1178 a Papal Legate had been outraged to find

85
 THE GNOSTICS

himself granting passes of safe-conduct so that self-confessed heretics

might come to Toulouse and debate openly with him. The nobility in
particular must have enjoyed the spectacle immensely - the sight of
priests having to prove the ‘truth’ of the Catholic position. And publicly
at that. The Cathars were formidable opponents because they appealed
less to the mysteries of The Church and more to commonsense and
experience of life. In one debate the Cathar parfait said that if the hosts
used in the Mass were truly the Body of Christ, then if all the hosts were
gathered together, it would be found that Christ had a body as big as a
mountain! The Cathars believed that Christ was a wholly spiritual being
and he was not to be identified with the body he appeared in. Thus,
they were sickened by the sight of the bleeding Jesus nailed to a cross,
especially when this was used as a religious image, (The Resurrection
and the Ascension of Jesus were the critical events of his life because
they were seen as events of the spirit, not of the flesh) The Crucifixion
only served to demonstrate the blindness and cruelty of Rex Mundi and
his servants. There was a debate in Pamiers where, during a heated
moment, Esclarmonde of Foix (consoled as you remember by Guilhabert
de Castres amid the great gathering of lords in Fanjeaux in 1206) got
up to make a point only to be ‘put down’ by Brother Etienne de la
Misericorde with the words: ‘Madame, go back to your distaff - it does
not become you to speak at such gatherings.’
This shocking remark scandalized the assembled throng. Was it
because she was a woman wanting to speak - a perfectly acceptable
thing for the public, or, was it because the remark implied that the sister
of the Count of Foix, a holy lady, worked for a living?
The historian R. I. Moore of Sheffield has put this matter of outrage
at public debate in a nutshell: ‘... that openness and that lack of
hierarchy and structure here was something which was particularly
appalling for men who had spent their lives in England, in France and
in the Roman Church constructing a hierarchical, authoritarian world
which gave them security.’
Failing as he did to convert the Cathars in any but the smallest
numbers, Dominic must have felt a great burden of sadness. He carried
on. His most important tactic was to found a convent at Prouille which
offered a direct alternative to the houses where the parfaites lived,
worked and prayed. It became a centre for a Catholic mission for
evangelical and pastoral labour and it exists to this day. Guilhabert
watched on. Perhaps he laughed. Perhaps he was melancholy to find
such a good man as Dominic on the ‘other side’. What, he may have
pondered, had kept them apart?

86
 A MYSTERY TOUR

It was at Prouille that Dominic was reported as having made the

following speech to an assembly of Cathars:

For several years now I have spoken words of peace to you. I have
preached to you; I have besought you with tears. But as the common
saying goes in Spain: where a blessing fails, a good thick stick will succeed.
Now we shall rouse princes and prelates against you; and they, alas, will
in their turn assemble whole nations and peoples, and a mighty number
will perish by the sword. Towers will fall, and walls will be razed to the
ground, and you will all of you be reduced to servitude. Thus force will
prevail where gentle persuasion has failed to do so.

By 1208, Dominic’s mission had, in its grandest aspects, ended. It was

left for others to bear the ‘thick stick’. During the previous year,
Peter of Castelnau had clashed with Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse.
Raymond had refused to join a projected league of southern barons
dedicated to the task of hunting for the heretics. Peter of Castelnau
excommunicated him. On 15 January 1208, Peter of Castelnau was,
following the Becket precedent, cut down by officers of Raymond’s army
while crossing the Rhone at St. Gilles in Provence. Pope Innocent III
seized this opportunity to issue a call to arms.
The weaving days were almost over.

Minerve
In the summer of 1209 an army was assembled in Lyon consisting of
about 10,000 men and as many camp followers. The army had been
collected from all over northern Europe and included Bretons, Flemings,
Lorrainers, people from Cologne, from the coast of the Baltic and
doubtless some from England too. Its commanders included the Bishops
of Chartres and of Beauvais. In supreme command apart from Christ -
for whom the Crusade was officially undertaken - was Simon de
Montfort, either an extremely fervent Catholic and defender of Mother
Church or an avaricious religious bigot, depending on your point of
view. At his right hand, or rather before him, administering the sac¬
raments and the policy of Rome was the Papal Legate Arnaud Amaury.
The army quickly moved upon the city of Beziers and i^s citizens. In a
legendary remark, Amaury responded to the question: \How shall we
tell who are the heretics?’ with the answer, ‘Kill them all, the Lord will
know his own.’ The remark, legendary as it undoubtedly is expresses
the ‘spirit’ of the Albigensian Crusade)
About 40 kilometres northeast of Carcassonne, in the region of the
Causse exists an extraordinary natural feature. After travelling through

87
 THE GNOSTICS

acre after acre of vineyard you are aware of reaching a high plateau.
Holmoak trees are dotted about here and there but mostly the land is
bare and rather rough. Stones and rocks are strewn about and a slight
breeze blows little clouds of chalky substance into the air. All of a
sudden the plateau opens out into a deep gorge which becomes wider
and wider as you pass along it. Taking a bend in the gorge you may be
astonished to see it divide. The channels of the gorge have twisted
around a hard rock ‘island’ which, if you could see it from the air is
shaped like a long apostrophe and on it is the fortified town of Minerve.
Had you seen the place in the summer of 1210 as the Crusaders did, you
would have seen the sides of the ‘island’ encrusted with battlements and
breach defences. Behind these were the layers of houses, sandy brown
dwellings with those familiar mottled and ruddy roofs. Near the centre
of the town is the church, of such a simplicity, size and shape that we
might call it a chapel. At the narrow end of the apostrophe and then
opening out to form something of an ‘exclamation mark’ stood the
castle. Of this castle only a single supporting buttress now remains. In
the June of 1210 there was no water in the gorge and so the defenders,
led by Guillaume, Viscount of Minerve, were totally dependent on the
town well. Since the chances of taking the town by scaling the sides of
the gorges (about five thick layers of sediment climbing to about 70
metres) were poor, Simon de Montfort took advantage instead of the
latest siege technology. The queen of this technology went by the jocular
name oT MalevoTsine (bad neighbour) and had been designed specially
for the Crusade by the engineer William of Paris. De Montfort had her
set up at the edge of the plateau nearest to the town from where she
commenced the medieval equivalent of massive aerial bombardment. In
spite of a setback when ‘commandos’ from the town set her alight, the
alarm was sounded and the trebuchet, the great missile-throwing engine,
continued the attack. The well was sealed and as the parching summer
continued, the defence of Minerve began to take a downward turn. Five
weeks after the commencement of the siege, Guillaume de Minerve had
to sue for peace.
An arrangement was come to whereby all those who were Catholic
or who surrendered the Cathar faith would be set free. At this, many
of the soldiers baulked. They had not come all that way, they said, to
watch heretics go free. They had come to exterminate them. Arnaud
Amaury felt himself to be in a cleft stick. As a chronicler put it: ‘He
passionately desired to see God’s enemies die. But as a priest and monk
he must not dare to strike the blow himself.’ Anyhow, he replied to the
disgruntled officers, ‘Don’t worry. They won’t recant.’

88
 A MYSTERY TOUR

He was quite right. Simon de Montfort and Arnaud Amaury led the
way into the town behind a cross which was borne as far as the church.
De Montfort and Amaury then went knocking on the doors of the town
inviting the Cathar inhabitants to recant. The parfaits replied simply:
‘Why preach at us? We have our own faith and care nothing for the
Cfujrch of Rome!’
vQn 22 July 1210 a huge stake was erected in Minerve. This was to be
the location of the first of the really great holocausts in which Christians
incinerated Christians in the name of Chris^ Some 140 perfecti - and
not one of them had ‘fired a shot in anger’ - went to the flames on that
day. A chronicler wrote: ‘Our men were not put to the trouble of
throwing them into the fire, so joyfully did they embrace their heresy
that they hurled themselves into the flames.’
If you go to Minerve today, you will see adjacent to the church a
small memorial stone to these Cathars. At the top of the stone the shape
of a dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, has been carved out so that
you can look right through the stone, and what you see on the other
side is framed by the head and wings of this dove.

Vais
Some 35 kilometres southwest of Fanjeaux there is a village called Vais.
Its church hugs closely to the ascending slopes of the beautiful valley of
1’Hers. Vais is well off the main road between Pamiers and Mirepoix
and the traveller today might well never see this place. That would be
a sad omission for the church of Vais is a rare sight. It is constructed
both within and above a barrow-like rock which was once the site of a
prehistoric temple. Carved into the rock is the oldest part of the church,
the nave, and it was built in the tenth century. The chancel was added
a century later. Then, from out of the rock ascends a rectangular tower
like a lighthouse on which a simple enclosure houses a single bell. The
tower was constructed in the twelfth century. Entry to the church is
made through what appears to be a cave in the side of the rock. There
is another chapel on a second level while the third level leads to the
tower stairs.
From 1209 to about 1227 we know that the seigneur of Vais, Guil¬
laume Ademar, knight, assisted Cathar preachers in their house at
Mirepoix. His sister, Berangere was a parfaite. He received the Con-
solamentum at his death. But when we look above the altar we see
something which raises a question in our minds. Painted within the
steep curve of the ceiling we can see quite clearly the remains of a series

89
 THE GNOSTICS

of frescoes probably executed by Catalan artists for Ademar’s ancestors

in about noo. They depict scenes from the gospels and include the
Annunciation of the Virgin, the Baptism of Christ and the Adoration
of the Magi in a richly emblematic rather than ‘realistic’ manner. In one
of the frescoes, Christ is seen giving the ‘keys of the kingdom’ to St
Peter. Since this was one of the chief doctrinal foundations for the claims
to primacy of the Church of Rome - for Peter is held to have founded
that church, one can see that such a representation would have been
anathema to a Cathar. How is it that Guillaume Ademar, knight, could
reject the form of piety observed by his ancestors?
Perhaps we can begin to understand the reason if we consider that in
the hundred years since the painting of the frescoes, a good deal of
money was being made in the towns of the Languedoc, particularly by
merchants. The lords, however, depended for their income on the
collection of revenues from the people they protected. Furthermore, it
was the custom in these parts for land to be divided among all the
children of a deceased lord with the inevitable result that takings became
smaller and smaller. Meanwhile the church depended on the nobles for
patronage. Bearing in mind the inevitable disputes over ownership of
parcels of land, some of which were claimed by the Church, this was
clearly not a situation destined to reveal the Catholic clergy in their best
light as exemplars of spirituality and self-denial. At the same time,
Cathars arrived and, in the words of R. I. Moore, they offered ‘a
high standard of spiritual performance in return for very low material
demands or none at all whereas the Catholic clergy are known to
have made rather high material demands in return for low spiritual
performance’.
If the local seigneur was a Cathar then he could expect his peasants
to follow suit. I wonder how many continued to use the splendid church?

The Inquisition
The first Albigensian Crusade petered out in 1217. A brief crusade was
led by the king of France, Louis VIII, in 1226. But in 1229 Raymond
Vi’s son, Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse was granted the rights back
to large parcels of his former territories - on the condition that he make
serious efforts to persecute heretics. There were rather lacklustre efforts
to pursue this end but it was not until April 1233 when the Dominican
Order of Friar Preachers (Dominic himself had died 12 years earlier)
were granted the right to inquisition by the Pope that the business really
got going. This was the founding proper of that institution which has

90
 A MYSTERY TOUR

abided in popular memory to this day. Languedoc was at the sharp end
of their work for about a century. Their method was straightforward.
First they arrived in town and declared that if anyone came forward
admitting heresy with the desire to recant they could do so without
penance. If nobody came forward they continued on. If somebody did
come forward, the person was then required to name all those other
heretics he or she knew. These people were then called before the
Inquisition and questioned. If they recanted they were given penances
which ran the gamut from fasting, having to go on pilgrimage (which
could be very expensive) to flogging. Probably the most hated form of
penance was that of the imposition of two large and distinctive crosses
which had to be sewn to the outer garments of the ex-heretic. As one
might expect, people were afraid of fraternizing with such a person for
fear that he might report them to the Inquisition. When before the
Inquisition you could not call witnesses and you were not entitled to
debate any point. You were there simply to answer questions. If a person
went back to heresy or if he or she refused to recant, then that person
was delivered to the secular power for burning. A heretic’s property
became forfeit and it has been said that the Dominican Inquisition
became the largest-pmpprry brokers in the reg i on.
Since the Inquisition could take no money for themselves, it could be
advantageous for local authorities and others to help the Inquisition. It
would appear that the fundamental attitude of the Inquisition allowed
for intensification and development. In the early sixteenth century,
Henry Cornelius Agrippa wrote of the Inquisition in his De vanitate
scientiarum (On the vanity of the sciences):
But if the person for whom Inquisition is made, do then go about to
defend his opinion with testimonies of the Scripture, or with other reasons,
they interrupt him with great noise and angry checks. They say that he
hath not to do with bachelors [of Arts], scholars in the chair, but with
Judges, in the judgement seat, that there he may not strive and dispute,
but must answer plainly, if he will stand to the decree of the Church of
Rome, and to revoke his opinion, if not, they show him faggots and fire,
saying, that with heretickes they may not contend with argument with
Scripture, but with faggots and fire.

Th is is from a chapter called ‘On the Inquisitor’s art’ and in the 300
years since the persecution of the Cathars, that Art had no doubt been
perfected. The Inquisition was despised in the Languedoc. Its operators
were mostly strangers to the region and had effectively assumed the role
of the state police of the Church of Rome. In May 1242, the son of
Guillaume Ademar, seigneur of Vais, also called Guillaume, took part

91
 THE GNOSTICS

in a fateful mission. As companion-in-arms to Pierre-Roger of Mirepoix,

he joined a party of knights (not perfecti) who descended from the still
unmolested fortress of Montsegur (about 40 kilometres to the southeast
of Vais) to ride to Avignonet, a town between Carcassonne and
Toulouse, to execute vengeance upon a party of inquisitors who had
arrived there. They cut down four inquisitors and their retainers. The
incident has gone down in history as a massacre.
This outrage led to the climax of our tour. A council was held in
Beziers in 1243 and it was there decided to take once and for all the last
important citadel of Catharism: Montsegur.

Montsegur
Although not perhaps the most spectacular site connected with the
Cathars - the ruined castle of Termes (captured in November 1210)
situated on a mountain peak among the dense forests of the Corbieres
provides perhaps a more romantic setting for the active imagination -
Montsegur is certainly the most terrifyingly grim and most significant
location with which to end our tour.
The mountain, some 1,207 metres high, rises amid the highest of the
Ariege. The castle, somewhat restored so that one can at least discern
its strange shape - rather like a long tapering shoe box - stands upon
a 4pog’ or rocky pillar at the top of the mountain. From the eastern
approach it presents a relentless series of forbidding crags which rise up
to the castle battlements. On the western side is a steep forested approach
at the foot of which clings the village of Montsegur.
It has been conjectured that in prehistoric times the site was a temple
to the sun, but no evidence for this has been brought forward. However,
it is true that there are four apertures in the walls carved in twos and
which are aligned to the rising sun of the summer solstice. This has
provided food for rich speculations.

The Siege of Montsegur (1243-44)

Although Raymond de Pereille rebuilt the castle in about 1204, Mont¬
segur did not become the official centre of Catharism until the eve of
the inquisitors’ operations in 1232 when Guilhabert de Castres asked
Raymond de Pereille to further ensure the safety of the chateau and its
growing number of inhabitants. Raymond called upon his cousin, Pierre-
Roger of Mirepoix, a professional knight, for assistance. He provided
about 100 knights and sergeants for the protection of the now 400 to
500 Cathars living within and about the castle. Between 1232 and 1243

9Z
 A MYSTERY TOUR

Montsegur was the magnet drawing in not only those escaping from the
Inquisition but also the knights and their ladies who came to visit and
assist the perfecti. Scattered about the castle, parfaits and parfaites lived
a life of contemplation and meditation in small enclosures - so perhaps
the atmosphere may be said to have resembled a Tibetan monastery for
Buddhist monks.
After the council of Beziers’ decision to put an end to Montsegur, a
huge army was assembled under the leadership of the Archbishop
of Narbonne and the king’s seneschal of Carcassonne, Pierre Amiel.
Montsegur proved for ten months to be the impregnable fortress it very
much appears to be. Inside the castle there were about 205 perfecti (of
whom it is possible to identify 58 by name), a garrison of about 100 (65
of whom we know by name) and a population of women and children
of whom we know the names of 131. They were being supplied by
villagers of Montsegur who knew the terrain perfectly. The siege
appeared vain until just before Christmas 1243 when a party of Gascon
climbers gained access to a look-out post on the crest opposite the castle,
slit the throats of the defenders and so created a passageway for the
troops who were thus able to steadily seize the castle approaches.

The Treasure of Montsegur

At this point the now legendary treasure of Montsegur was removed
from the castle. Some have thought that this treasure included the Holy
Grail or the lost treasure of the Jerusalem temple. Such speculations
are unnecessary. We know from Inquisition records that Montsegur
was the Cathars’ ‘bank’. The treasury included gold, silver and a lot
of money which had been donated to the cause of maintaining the
‘true’ Christianity through the worst of the persecution. The money
was needed to support those Cathars in hiding in the forests and grot¬
toes of the Ariege and the Corbieres. We know the names of two of
the male perfecti who removed the treasure. They later turned up in
Lombardy (north Italy) where Cathar emigres from the Languedoc
fled.
It seems that the legend surrounding the treasure can be accounted
for by the confluence of firstly, the simple fact of the treasure’s existence
and secret removal before the fall of Montsegur; secondly, by the
symbolic meaning of Catharism itself - as a doctrine which would be
to gnostic perception a treasure of the spirit, akin to Christ’s symbolism
and allegory of the ‘pearl of great price’ and of the treasure buried
or disregarded, and, thirdly, from the act or event of the ‘collective

93
 THE GNOSTICS

imagination’, seizing upon the implication of a pure spiritual message

amidst an emotionally intense series of violent historical events.

The Tragedy of Montsegur

What follows is not the stuff of legend but of fact. Around 21 February
1244, bombardment of the castle by catapult commenced. Massive shells
weighing 80 kg are still being discovered in the forests below the castle.
This fierce attack was repulsed, but by 2 March 1244, Pierre-Roger of
Mirepoix was compelled to sue for a 15-day truce. In that time the
perfecti distributed their food and clothes and prepared themselves for
a ‘death’ they did not believe in.
On the Sunday before the final capitulation (13 March) something
extraordinary happened, which, for the historian Michael Rocquebert,
‘represents the true secret of Montsegur’. Twenty credentes asked the
leading parfait Bertrand Marty to be ‘consoled’. As ordinary Cathar
believers they could survive the capitulation. As parfaits and parfaites
they knew that they would be burned alive.
On 16 March 1244, the castle of Montsegur was surrendered to the
Archbishop of Narbonne and the seneschal of Carcassonne. On that
day, 225 male and female perfecti were led to a stake on a plateau below
the ‘pog’ and summarily burned.
Armed resistance to the Catholic armies was at an end. The survivors
were interrogated by the Inquisition. Nineteen documents of interrog¬
ation have come down to us and from these records comes our principal
information for the siege and collapse of Montsegur.
Standing on a mountain opposite the pyramidal aspect of Montsegur
in July 1986, the historian Robert Moore asked Michael Rocquebert
what the significance is for us of this terrible event:

It was certainly a great tragedy brought about by intolerance and I think

that if the world today is turning its attention to Catharism and its history
with so much curiosity and so much emotion, it is because people see in
Montsegur the symbol, the sign, of eternal intolerance. There is also in
Catharism food for very deep spiritual and religious reflection, of that I
am absolutely convinced.

As is the author.

94
 Chapter Six

What happened to the Cathars?

Without doubt, the Albigensian Crusade and the siege of Montsegur

confirmed the Cathar in his knowledge of what kind of power controlled
the world. Nevertheless, the horror of Montsegur, the fall of the citadel
of the spirit, must have traumatized the credentes if not the surviving
perfecti. Although the loss of Montsegur threw the organization of
the Cathar Church into confusion, the Cathars were not finished but
persisted clandestinely in forests, mountains, caves and in the more
remote villages of the Pyrenees. The Inquisition was still occupied in
the area about Pamiers in the early fourteenth century where the Bishop
Jacques Fournier’s Inquisition would one day furnish Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie with the source material for his book Montaillou. The last
Cathar to be burned was a popular inhabitant of Villerouge-Termenes,
Belibaste in 1321. The village honours Belibaste today in an equally
popular festival held in August.
Three major questions remain to be answered.

Were the Cathars a menace to society?

This is highly unlikely. In the first place, it should be noticed that
although the great counts of the region supported and tolerated the
Cathars - while members of their families did become perfecti, there is
no evidence that the great powers themselves were credentes.
Inquisition records of 1246, soon after Montsegur, reveal very few
Cathars — in Fanjeaux 28; in Laurac 30 - and these numbers are
exceptional. Elsewhere, no more than handfuls could be detected. Fur¬
thermore, there is no evidence to suggest that Catholics and Cathars did
any more than peacefully coexist. When at Albi in 1234 the inquisitor
Arnaud Cathala authorized the exhumation of dead heretics for post¬
mortem condemnation and burning, he was roughly handled by a ‘mob’
enraged at an action repugnant to all. There is an account of how when
one knight was asked why he did not pursue the heretics, he replied:

95
 THE GNOSTICS

‘How couid we do that? We have seen them brought up. We have been
brought up side by side with them - our closest kinsmen are among
their number. Every day we see them living worthy and honourable lives
in our midst.’
On another occasion a priest secured a recantation from a Cathar on
condition that they play chess for the penance - the priest lost! Lax as
this may appear, none the less the priest should have been commended
for obtaining a recantation without violence - no common occurrence.
In short, there was peaceful coexistence until outsiders moved in.

So why were the Cathars persecuted?

Firstly, the Cathar church did threaten the power and influence of the
Church of Rome. That is clear enough. The Church of Rome has never
enjoyed competition.
Secondly, the concerted persecution of Cathars offered great oppor¬
tunities to those unscrupulous men who could muster an army against
them. The Counts of Toulouse wanted the counties of Carcassonne and
Beziers, the kings of Aragon wanted the county of Toulouse and Simon
de Montfort (father, by the way, of the man who compelled England’s
King John to sign Magna Carta) wanted whatever he could get. It has
been said in the latter’s defence that he was a deeply religious man. Is
that an excuse?
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, observers of humanity have
often been dismayed at the phenomenon of a special horror and hatred
reserved by the powerful for those who renounce the world. A deep
consideration of this may lead us to the conclusion that the bons
hommes - the good men were burned because they were good men. It
is significant that one of the things which a suspected Cathar had to
deny before the Inquisition was the conviction that the Cathars were
good men. Furthermore, their reputations were subjected to further
degradation, as their influence declined, by their being called ‘buggers’
or worse. This was the price to be exacted from those who took Christ
seriously when before the judgement-seat of Pilate He said: ‘My kingdom
is not of this world.'

Why then did the Cathars disappear?

It may have crossed readers’ minds that a religion under persecution is
as likely to grow in numbers as it is to decline. Some explanation then
is required for the eventual disappearance of authentic Catharism from
history.
 WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CATHARS?

Firstly, one must consider the effect of the loss of noble support. After
1232 a lord who patronized Cathars was in danger of losing his estate -
if he or she had not done so already. Since the peasants tended to follow
the creed of the lord, that would account for a significant loss of
Cathars. Furthermore, it is unlikely that many ordinary people were fully
cognisant of the strict differences between Cathar and Catholic and so
would tend to ‘go with the tide’. After 1244, the tide was definitely
flowing in a Catholic direction.
Secondly, after 1232 and more so after the fall of Montsegur, it
became extremely hazardous for the perfecti to operate and remuster
support from a possibly despairing following. Since the perfecti were
the crux and the heights of the religion, the credentes were doubtless
left without guiding examples. A corollary of this situation is that
perennial gnostic problem of presenting a religion of perfection. This
in itself is not conducive to continuity over a prolonged period. To quote
the English historian Bernard Hamilton in The Albigensian Crusade: ‘It
should not be forgotten that they [the perfecti] did not succeed in
imposing their ethic of non-violent other-worldliness on the mass of
their believers.’ While Professor Hamilton’s words are ill-chosen - it
was not for the perfecti to ‘impose’ anything; also they were fully aware
of Christ’s dictum that, ‘narrow is the way and few be they that find
it’ - it is doubtless a significant point if, that is, continuity as a ‘church’
is seen as having a high value.
Thirdly, new Catholic Orders were put into practice, for example the
Franciscan Order and, in the Languedoc region, the ‘mendicant friars’
adopted many of the habits of the perfecti and brought an attainable
spirituality within reach of the ‘grass roots’ while remaining a part of
the whole society. Spirituality with security in this world proved to be
a winning incentive. The Cathars paid a high price for bringing the best
out of the mendicant friars. Catholicism thus started to become a strong
force for social cohesion, especially after the de facto union of Church
and State following the passing of the Languedoc into the control of the
French crown in 1271.
Nevertheless, anti-clericalism grew in some parts into a tradition
which, denied an organized alternative continues to this day as a con¬
tributing factor to a secularized and ‘liberal’ consciousness.
Fourthly, there developed divergences of opinion within the Cathar
tradition, particularly with regard to the nature of the operative dualism,
that is, whether reality was sundered by equally opposing principles of
good and evil or whether evil represented a rebellion against a primary
principle of Good. Sadly, the essential dualism of matter and spirit began

97
 THE GNOSTICS

to take second place to an impossible metaphysics. Over-commitment to

speculation is guaranteed to see the end of any organization no matter
how non-hierarchical it may be.
The fifth and last explanation is perhaps not an explanation at all.
By virtue of this, it may yet be found to be fundamental. It brings us to
a mystery, that mystery which becomes apparent when we ask about a
familiar event or place - ‘Why here?’, ‘Why there?’ or ‘Why at all?’
In short, the success of the Cathar gnosis can be put down to an
ingredient in the ‘pot’ so to speak, which is unknown - something in
the ‘times’. The Germans, agile at creating new words as ever have given
us the much-abused term Zeitgeist - ‘time ghost’, ‘time spirit’, ‘spirit of
the times’. There is a familiar feeling that occurs to those who have
studied the story of the Gnosis when one begins to ponder unknown
quantities, undetermined factors, even unseen agencies.
There are discernible eras (‘aeons’ the gnostic calls them) when there
is an awakening of the spirit. It awakes hand in hand with favourable
social, political and religious conditions and determinations. In the story
of the Cathars we have cited several of them, including warfare and
power-struggle set amid a ‘liberal’ atmosphere and cultural renaissance
expressed in the romance and poetry of the troubadours - and then, the
tradition subsides for a while into an invisible unconscious mind from
which the gnostic impulse derives. ‘... for you are from it and to it you
will return’ (The Gospel of Thomas).
The spiritual energy within man himself must contend with those
energies outside his self. If the Gnostic does not withdraw into that
shrine, he or she is likely, during inclement conditions, to be overcome
by those forces (whether called demiurge, archon or Rex Mundi) which
make up the fabric of the organism and of the outer spectral world.
/The amazing attempt to penetrate the Tragedy of life and so to unify
the inner and the outer worlds is the subject of Part Three of this boo^..
It is about those who wished to bring the ‘Devil’s Creation’ into harmony
with the spiritual realm of the Absolute Godhead - the next mani¬
festation of the gnostic impulse in our history: the Hermetic philosophy.

98
 PART THREE

The Hermetic Philosophy

 Chapter Seven

Hermes comes to Florence

It is perhaps strange that amid the intensity of technological events,

people feel a compulsion to employ the language not of reason but of
imagination to express themselves. ‘That’s one small step for man, one
giant leap for mankind’, is one of the host of fine phrases uttered when
greeting the unknown. What if Neil Armstrong had then proceeded to
step into a hidden trench and so disappeared from view? Would that
have rendered his words vain? Were the words valid anyway? The
astronaut spoke as if he had succeeded in uniting the event of stepping
onto the lunar surface to the main ‘body’ of human history. We believed
him.
Part Three of this_book deals with an analogous attempt to unite the
imaginative and the real. ,The embracing of the Hermetic philosophy
By~certain men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries represents an
emboldened leap of creative imagination, from a ‘lower’ or ‘inner’ world
of non-rational and unconscious strivings, to a principle of Unity which
would itself unify human concerns and reorient them towards a new
sense of the possible and the real. As we shall see, it began to be seen
that the scope of the rational mind, fused in a gnostic manner to the
divine mind, was practically infinite. Unlike the Cathar who had felt the
earth to be the Devil’s creation and a prison, the Hermetic imagination
held, it was thought, the keys to Man’s eternal freedom. If nothing else
I hope that the ensuing chapters show the value, and pitfalls, of the
creative imagination - the very ‘window’, as it were, of gnostic per¬
ception - in the human being’s unfinished and perhaps tragic struggle
for the security of Knowledge.

Florence 1460
The learned men of Florence in the late fifteenth century appear to
have moved amid a great sense of nostalgia, a yearning for the past
characterized by what we may truthfully describe as wishful thinking,

101
 THE GNOSTICS

the power to imagine. Any person who has visited Florence cannot help
but be amazed or even overcome by the artistic legacy of this period.
Florence and Renaissance Art have become almost synonymous terms.
From Michelangelo’s David to Botticelli’s Primavera, from the Duomo
to the Church of Santa Maria Novella, from the villas of Fiesole to the
cloisters of San Marco this astonishing city continues to cast a spell
upon the visitor. The outpouring of the visual imagination, this we can
see in abundance, but the philosophical imagination, if we may use such
a term, is not always so visible although there is no doubt that many
great works of painting and sculpture have been inspired by it. The
beauty of Florence is a testimony to a living world of imagination and
it was such a world that provided a welcome new home to the Hermetic
philosophy. So when we speak of wishful thinking and of a profound
nostalgia we can say that such impulses are likely to precipitate very
real effects when close to a given philosophy. The philosophy that was
attracting most attention in the Florence of our period was that of
Plato. As you may remember, Plato received a similar welcome and
development in second-century Alexandra when and where the Her-
metists operated, as described in Part One. Fifteenth-century Florentines
with a taste for Plato were apt to read him not only in his own works
such as the Timaeus (which was such an inspiration to Valentinian
Gnostics), the Symposium and the Phaedo, but also in conjunction with
the works of neoplatonists who developed or indeed perverted their
masters’ philosophy. The world of neoPlatonism is that of the hey-day
of the Gnosis in the second and third centuries and there is kinship
between them. This kinship can particularly be seen in the use of the
concept of the ‘great chain of being’ which sets the world a great distance
from the pure realm of divine spirit. Such a view would give justification
to a person who felt that this world was somehow ‘out of touch’ with
realitv and he himself ‘out of touch’ with the world. The Platonism of
✓

the time then was a rather mixed bag and this doubtless caused a certain
amount of confusion, especially for those who were attempting to
reconcile the attractions of Platonic philosophy to the rigours of Catholic
theology. One of the chief ways to show the divine inspiration of Plato -
and therefore his suitability to be described as a ‘Theologian’ was to
point out the correspondence between the Christian Heaven where all
things exist in perfection, with God the Father enthroned at its centre
and His angels round about Him singing His praises, and Plato’s phil¬
osophy of a formal and intelligible world where all terrestrial and
material things find their perfection, their ‘Forms’ and their ‘Ideas’. In
Plato’s intelligible world, that is to say the real world, there is neither

ioz
 HERMES COMES TO FLORENCE

corruption nor change. This world exists simultaneously with the world
of ordinary perceptions - ‘our’ world. Our world is a kind of shadow
of the real and to become aware of this is to become dissatisfied, or, in
other words, to become a philosopher, concerned only with the real.
This material world is an image derived from or reflecting an eternal
idea, thus, for example, Time is ‘the moving image of eternity’. Now it
might be deduced from this statement that what binds us to the image
of Time and its associated'change and decay, is our ignorance of eternity.
Here lies a seed for the desire for gnosis as knowledge-of-the-eternal.
What if one could penetrate the image and gain knowledge of the
eternal? This was the substance of much wishful thinking going on in
fifteenth-century Florence. Within the power of the Imagination, the
Platonic world can exist and has power to inspire the soul. This principle
of correspondence was known to those learned who had encountered
magical and alchemical literature. A key alchemical formula known
throughout the Middle Ages was that contained within the Emerald
Table and attributed to none other than Hermes Trismegistos, Thrice-
great Hermes who we encountered in Part One. The principle in question
is a key to understanding the transforming power of Hermetism: ‘It is
true and no lie, certain and without deception. What is above is like
that which is below, and what is below is like that which is above, to
effect a wonderful work.’
The formula can well be adapted to the Platonic theory of the
intelligible world, that world which the great neoplatonist philosopher
Plotinus (third century) held could only be apprehended by the nous,
the higher intellect or reason, containing intuitive power - the gnostic
faculty par excellence. It should be noted here that Plotinus castigated
certain Gnostics in Alexandria and Rome precisely for their not employ¬
ing this faculty.
The result of this reasoning is that as the ‘higher’ world is like the
‘lower’ world which we inhabit, so the ‘inner’ world, enlightened by
the penetrating nous which can perceive the ‘higher’ world, has the
power to transform the outer world according to the gnosis attained. If
not to transform, then certainly enter into. In this act of enlightened
entry into the world of sense, and then behind the world of appearances
into the intelligible world, we find the harmonious progression of
incarnate souls through the world and on to God which fifteenth-century
Florentine Platonists held to be the purest account of the Christian life.
In the purely Christian understanding of this type of redemption, the
motive force or force of attraction is Love - Love is moved by Love into
Love. This was the theme of a good deal of poetry composed in Florence

103
 THE GNOSTICS

at this time. But what if the ‘motive power’, so to speak, became or was
seen to be, not the Love of God but the desire for gnosis and its attendant
promise of knowledge of things and therefore power over them? This
conflict, inherent within the mixed-bag of Renaissance philosophies,
was yet invisible but would emerge as time moved on.
Let’s return to our theme of wishful thinking. We have seen that there
was some awareness of the principle that what is conceived in the mind
is as likely to become objectively real as what was once held to come
from the will and counsels of God. Slowly, but perceptibly, Man was
taking a greater role in the running of the universe. But before we feel
too much forboding let us remember that we are still in the honeymoon
period of Man’s assumption of responsibility - and one of the chief
benefactors of that honeymoon was Hermes Trismegistus.
Our mothers tell us we must be careful about what we wish for - it
might come true! What was the wish of some of our learned friends in
Florence? We may say that the wish of the Renaissance Platonist and
unwitting gnostic was for a divinized world, harmonious and true in
which Man could resume his place among the celestials and walk - and
indeed ‘fly’ - in freedom towards the still centre of God. The wish was
to return to the One, the source from which the power derived enabling
the philosopher-magician to work the ‘miracle of creation’. Christ had
opened the way, the ‘veil of the temple’ had been rent and the true
followers of Christ could ascend. ‘Hermes’, he of ancient wisdom,
mediator between spirit and matter, with winged feet and winged mind
was both prophet and symbol of this possibility.
But what would the gnostic imagine he was ascending into? It was
the custom among the Platonist philosophers of this time to employ the
system of ‘Celestial Hierarchies’ written, it was thought, by Saint Paul’s
Athenian convert, Dionysius the Areopagite. It was not the work of this
man but of a neoplatonist philosopher of about the fifth century. In its
essentials, the Celestial Hierarchies describes three worlds of which ours
is the lowest. This is the elemental world of nature and is subject to
influences from above. Above this ‘sublunary’ world, is what is called
the ‘celestial’ world wherein are found the stars and their ‘spirits’ or
‘guardians’ (analogous to the Gnostic archons). Even higher is the sphere
of the ‘supercelestial’ world, the world of nous, the ‘intellectual’ or
‘intelligible’ world of angelic spirits, of superior knowledge of reality
because closer to the One, the divine source of creation, who is beyond
the three worlds. Hand in hand with this concept of worlds, of which
ours is the lowest projection, goes its essential counterpart: the concept
of microcosm. It is important to grasp this concept if one is going to

104
 HERMES COMES TO FLORENCE

have any understanding of what the Hermetist is talking about. The

whole system which was seen as going beyond this planet to the distant
perfection of the One also exists within the fabric of the human mind.
Going deeper and deeper into the mind of Man, illuminated by nous,
Man could travel farther and farther into the universe - and back again.
The possibilities, once one had established correspondence between the
inner and the outer worlds, seemed positively infinite - and any new
information which would deepen such understanding was eagerly
sought.
So we can see that this enthusiasm for the ‘return to the One’ was a
corollary of that desire to revivify the world of Antiquity by obtaining
the most ancient sources of wisdom. One returned to the source of
things by going back to the times when it was thought our world was
young, a world of heroes and of magic, of wise men and faithful women -
back to the morning when Adam named the animals, when the lion and
the lamb played together. If one could recover more of this world, why,
one would be gazing at the dawn of a new age.
This taste for antiquity was fuelled in the late fifteenth century by the
arrival of new texts from Greece. Greek was older than Latin, Greek was
the language of Plato. What new glories awaited the eager aficionado?
In 1460, a certain Brother Leonardo of Pistoia, returning from Mace¬
donia, brought a Greek manuscript to Florence. He came to Florence
because it was well known that the ruler of Florence, the old Cosimo
de Medici was a serious collector of Greek manuscripts. His buying
agents travelled all over the Mediterranean gathering the works of
Antiquity. Cosimo had heard in various church councils of the existence
in Greek of the complete works of Hermes Trismegistus. At this time,
Hermes had a great and mysterious reputation. Saint Augustine himself
had written of him:

as for morality, it stirred not in Egypt until Trismegistus’s time, who

was indeed long before the sages and philosophers of Greece, but after
Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, yea and Moses also; for at the time when Moses
was born, was Atlas, brother of Prometheus, a great astronomer, living,
and he was grandfather by the mother’s side to the elder Mercury, who
begat the father of this Trismegistus.
(■Civitas Dei, xvm. 29)

The Christian poet Lactantius writing in about ad 400 wrote of Hermes

Trismegistus as a veritable prophet of Christ. In his Institutes he wrote
that ‘Trismegistus, who by some means or other searched into almost
all truth, often described the excellence and the majesty of the Word.’

105
 THE GNOSTICS

This general approval of Hermes by great Christian authorities from

the past was tremendously encouraging to those who wished to combine
Greek philosophy and the wisdom of the ancients with Christianity into
one universal system of knowledge.
Cosimo was delighted by the new manuscript, for it consisted of
nothing less than 14 libelli attributed to Hermes, yermes, the fount
from which Plato had drunkJ Hermes, a near contemporary of Moses,
an inspired prophet, a profound philosopher. Hermes had arrived in
Florence and Cosimo had ‘got him’! The arrival can be compared to the
discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library or of the Dead Sea Scrolls -
possibly more so because Cosimo and the Platonist circle about him
were believers. Indeed, in spite of the near worship of Plato, Cosimo
insisted that his court scholar Marsilio Ficino leave aside the complete
works of Plato and get straight on with translating what came to be
called the Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus. Pymander was the title
given to the Greek Poimandres, possibly meaning, ‘Shepherd of Men’ -
the title of the first book of the Corpus Hermeticum. Cosimo wanted
to read the work before he died. Ficino completed the translation in a
few months and Cosimo’s wish came true before his death in 1464.
Ficino’s original translation is now in the Medici Library in Florence.
The stunningly beautiful manuscript begins with an introduction by
Ficino himself. It is like reading ‘Alice in Egypt’ so charming is its fairy¬
tale, child-like understanding of remote Antiquity, now brought to light:
‘In that time in which Moses was born flourished Atlas the astrologer,
brother of Prometheus the physicist and maternal uncle of the elder
Mercury whose nephew was Hermes Trismegistus.’
The Corpus Hermeticum, inspirer of Plato the Theologian and of all
philosophy, spoke in a pristine simplicity of Man’s original nature
within the supercelestial realms where he consorted with angels and was
privy to the mind of God, indeed was part of that mind. This all chimed
in with the nostalgia we have mentioned and its corollary: the yearning
for a prisca theologia, the original theology, the pure untainted divine
wisdom. Ficino writes:
He is called the first author of theology: he was succeeded by Orpheus,
who came second amongst ancient theologians: Aglaophemus, who had
been initiated into the sacred teaching of Orpheus, was succeeded in
theology by Pythagoras, whose disciple was Philolaus, the teacher of our
Divine Plato. Hence there is one ancient theology ... taking its origin in
Mercurius [Latin form of Hermes] and culminating in the Divine Plato.

This pristine wisdom was being recovered at the same time as theo¬
logians in the north of Europe, in the Netherlands and in England were

106
 HERMES COMES TO FLORENCE

giving much attention to the study of the New Testament in its original
Greek. Of course, one can see in all this seeds of conflicts to come.
Men were discovering to their delight and dismay that the inherited
philosophy and doctrines of the Catholic Church would not always
stand comparison with the presumed older and, therefore, ‘truer’ texts.
Renaissance and reform went hand in hand in these matters. Most
readers will have some knowledge of the split of Catholic Christendom
effected by Luther and the intensification of reforming movements
within the Church which hurtled Europe into long and bloody conflicts
for some 200 years, and which find some faint echo in today’s Ireland.
Few, however, are aware of another reformation of thought which
continued during the same period, though we might feel compelled to
say that the protagonists were not living in quite the same ‘world’ as
one another.
This other philosophical and religious development was partly
inspired by the writings attributed to Hermes or Mercurius Trismegistus
when ‘his’ writings were placed as the fons for the gathering of neo-
platonist philosophy, Pseudo-Dionysius (Celestial Hierarchies), Pythag¬
oras, Zoroaster, Hebrew Cabala and, of course, Plato.
This development was carried on in the studies of scholars and artists
and as such contributed to the imaginative world of sixteenth-century
Europe rather than initiating a social movement. This may well be
because the Hermetic impulse did not seek the kind of power over men’s
minds and actions through state or institutional control as that which
was sought by the protagonists and servants of the Protestant Refor¬
mation and Catholic counter-Reformation. The very philosophies
embodied in Hermetism did not encourage worldly, thought. Never¬
theless, and paradoxically, the world would be subtly affected by the
‘new’ imaginative context of the Hermetic gnosis.
The willing initiate into the ancient theology could now enter the
world of Hermes himself:

Once on a time, when I had begun to think about the things that are,
and my thoughts had soared high aloft, while my bodily senses had been
put under restraint by sleep - yet not such sleep as that of men weighed
down by fullness of food or by bodily weariness - methought there came
to me a Being of vast and boundless magnitude, who called me by my
name, and said to me, ‘What do you wish to see and hear, and to learn
and come to know by thought?’ ‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘I,’ said he, ‘am
Poimandres, the sovereign mind {nous)' ‘I wish to learn,’ said I, ‘the
things that are, and understand their nature, and get knowledge [gnonai]
of God. These,’ I said, ‘are the things of which I wish to hear.’ He

107
 THE GNOSTICS

answered, i know what you wish, for indeed I am with you everywhere;
keep in mind all that you desire to learn, and I will teach you.’

This is how the reader first enters the Corpus Hermeticum.

 Chapter Eight

Pico della Mirandola (1463-94)

and the Dignity of Man

We have seen then that the Corpus Hermeticum was appreciated as an

invaluable aid to the task of restoring the original image of Man: Man
as mercurial being, moving from one world to another, or, in Hermetic
terms, moving through the image of the world to the source of that
image, God Himself.
Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola was one of the first Renaissance
philosophers to seize upon the full range of possibilities inherent in the
new body of Greek sources entering Florence and circulating about the
‘brains trust’ around the court of Cosimo’s successor, Lorenzo de
Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent. To these sources he added his vast
and perhaps wildly eclectic knowledge of Hebrew Cabala (theosophical
and gnostic writings based on the supposition of a hidden meaning
within the books of the Old Testament, revealed by inner contemplation
and the manipulation of Hebrew letters: the Language of God), his
knowledge of Arabic sources on algebra, geometry, astrology, medicine
and astronomy. Pico has been dubbed the ‘Phoenix of the wits’ by virtue
of his fantastic erudition on all the subjects of his day. He was a man
of great, almost feminine beauty as his portrait reveals in a fresco by
Cosimo Roselli still preserved in the Church of San Ambrogio in
Florence. He stands piously and dreamily gazing on a celebration of the
Mass, his long blond hair and angelic features shining in the sun. He
was only 31 when he died. Already at 24 he had composed 900 theses
issued as a challenge to every intellectual knight-errant in Europe to
come and debate, before a Florentine public on the feast after Epiphany,
1487.
Nine hundred theses - what an age! Should a challenger be short of
funds, Pico offered to pay their expenses. It could have been an amazing
event with all the great minds of Europe assembled so that Pico couid
take them on an intellectual journey from the purest Antiquity to

109
 THE GNOSTICS

the gates of the future and even beyond there.... The debate never
happened.
Several of the propositions came before the eyes of Pope Innocent
VIII and he smelt heresy. In a Bull dated 4 August 1487, 13 were selected
from the bulk of 900 and were pronounced heretical. Pico, undeterred,
hastily put together an ‘Apology’ defending the 13 contested theses with
a severe and dry style, a tour de force of the old scholastic style of
argument. He dedicated the Apologia to his patron and friend Lorenzo
de Medici, ‘a trifling gift indeed, but as far as possible from being a
slight token of my loyalty, nay, of my devotion to you’. The obnoxious
theses were themselves not Hermetic in origin but there is a confidence
present in the assertions that seems to belong to a new world, and, from
the Church’s point of view, a dangerous world. Proposition number
five, for example, must have caused a few raised eyebrows. It declares
that no science affords a better assurance of the divinity of Christ than
magical and cabalistic science. Pico further declared that what was
relevant for the religious man in the nature of Christ’s miracles was not
the miracles themselves but the manner in which they were done. Pico
is struck by St John xix. 12: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that
believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works
than these shall he do; because I go to my Father.’
Pico has perhaps wondered why it has taken mankind so long to
discover his full capacities, his full dignity. He knows that such know¬
ledge was familiar to Antiquity but somehow seems to have been lost.
In spite of the melancholy sight of an ignorant humanity and a Church
‘all too human’, Pico is ready to pick up the pieces and announce a new
dawn. The substance of this new dawn can be found in the Preface to
his 900 theses and which, after his death, enjoyed a wide and appreciative
circulation as the Oratio, commonly known as the Oration on the
Dignity of Man.

The Dignity of Man

Many of us have heard of this phrase. It has in modern times been
associated with another concept, the ‘rights of man’ as well as with the
myth of Prometheus, he who stole the fire of the gods to liberate
mankind, the very type for a nineteenth-century revolutionary and
Byronic romanticism. What Pico had in mind was something far less
mundane. The dignity of man consisted in the knowledge of his spiritual
origins; his knowledge of the divine; his freedom to determine for
himself whether he be brute or god. In the Oratio Pico takes a phrase
of Hermes Trismegistus from the dialogue with Asclepius (available in

no
 PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA (1463-94)

a Latin translation and attributed to Apuleius of Madaura, before the

arrival of the Greek Pymander) as his text for what would, in the
sixteenth century, be understood as the Hermetic programme for a
project of no less a scope than the regeneration of the world.
Hermetic Man is not the ‘worm of sixty winters’, the sad, decaying
creature dependent upon graces transmitted by the Church but is, to
quote Hermes, a ‘mortal god’. This is without doubt a gnostic con¬
ception of Man, akin to the Valentinian Anthropos\ the Cabalists’ Adam
Kadmon; primal man, as he was before his descent into matter, as he
could be if he awakens to his true identity - this is what is known when
the Gnostic saviour begs his hearers to know themselves. It will I hope
be both exciting and useful to examine Pico’s Oratio by taking some
key extracts and commenting briefly on them - briefly because a com¬
prehensive commentary on the work could fill several more books.
Pico della Mirandola begins his ungiven oration of 500 years ago with
the following words:

I have read in the records of the Arabians, reverend Fathers, that Abdala
the Saracen, when questioned as to what on this stage of the world, as it
were, could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied: ‘There is nothing
to be seen more wonderful than man.’ In agreement with this opinion is
the saying of Hermes Trismegistus: ‘O Asclepius man is a great miracle.’

The quotation is from the Latin Asclepius - substantially the same work
as that of which a large fragment was found in a Coptic version at Nag
Hammadi in 1945. TherejLS„.no~dil^ that the Gnostic
Gospels and other Christian gnostic literature can be better understood
when approached from a Hermetic direction. For, putting the matter
simply, while the Hermetic work has no neecl of a redeemer figure since
the revelation is guaranteed only to the elect initiate, by virtue of his
own Nous, the Christian Gnostics saw the Christ figure as offering a
gnostic redemption to all those who had ‘ears to hear’ and preserved a
complete gnosis to a few. That is to say that in terms of the philosophy
of the Nag Hammadi gospels we are not going too far if we think of it
as being essentially ‘Hermetic’ of varying shades with the absence of
Hermes and the addition of Christ or rather the ‘Living Jesus’ of gnostic
revelation. What Pico, and Ficino to a lesser degree, wanted to do was
to unite the hermetic revelation with that of Christ, Plato, Artistotle,
the Cabala, Pseudo-Dionysus, Plotinus and the other Neoplatonists
Porphyry, Proclus and Iamblichus. By a neat twist, this kind of com¬
pendiousness also seems to have motivated the assemblers of the ‘Her¬
metic’ tractates in the first place. We know that the second century

hi
 THE GNOSTICS

Carpocratian Gnostics (followers of the antinomian Carpocrates) also

wished to assemble all the enlightened minds of the past, for we read
in Irenaeus (Against Heresies) of them decking the images of Plato,
Pythagoras, and Jesus with garlands. This tells us something about the
gnostic tendency to attempt an integration of all inspired utterances
within grand systems - in the probable hope that there is in all of them
some unifying principle which will lead man to the ground of all being.
As Yoko Ono sings, ‘We’re all one’. Of course, by referring to Yoko
Ono, I too am adding to the mythology. For Pico, the unifying principle
is in the very existence of Man: ‘a living dignity of reverence and
honour’. Hermes continues in the Asclepius:

Because he takes in the nature of a god as if he were himself a god; he

has familiarity with the demon-kind, knowing that he issues from the
same origin; he despises this part of his nature which is but human,
because he puts his hope in the divinity of the other part. O what a
privileged blend makes up the nature of man! He is united to the gods
because he has the divinity pertaining to gods; the part of himself which
is of the earth he despises in himself; all those other living things which
he knows himself to be tied in the virtue of the celestial plan, he binds
them by the tie of love. He raises his sights towards heaven. Such therefore
is his privileged role as intermediary, loving the beings who are inferior
to him and is loved by those above him. He takes the earth as his own,
he blends himself with the elements by the speed of thought, by the
sharpness of spirit he descends to the depths of the sea. Everything is
accessible to him; heaven is not too high for him, for he measures it as if
he were in his grasp by his ingenuity. What sight the spirit shows to him,
no mist of the air can obscure; the earth is never so dense as to impede
his work; the immensity of the sea’s depths do not trouble his plunging
view. He is at the same time everything as he is everywhere.

Five years after Pico quoted from this passage, it might have already
begun to look like prophecy, for in 1492 Columbus would sail west to
find the east.
Having announced the guiding text for his oration, Pico continues:

At last it seems to me I have come to understand why Man is the most

fortunate of creatures and consequently worthy of all admiration and
what precisely is that rank which is his lot in the universal chain of being -
a rank to be envied not only by brutes but even by the stars and by minds
beyond this world.

We note here that ‘universal chain of being’ so familiar to Neoplatonists

and so congenial to the Hermetic imagination.

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 PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA (1463-94)

The best of artisans addressed man thus: ‘The nature of all other beings
is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us.
Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will,
in whose hand we have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of
thy nature.’
Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life,
which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgement,
to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.’ Whatever seeds
each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own
fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant. If of the senses he will
become brutish. If rational he will grow into a heavenly being. If intel¬
lectual [of the nous], he will be an angel and a son of God. And if, happy
in the lot of no created thing, he withdraws into the centre of his own
unity, his spirit, made one with God, in the solitary darkness of God,
who is set above all things, he shall surpass them all ...

Now, perhaps we come to the heart of the matter:

Exalted to the lofty height, we shall measure therefrom all things that are
and shall be and have been in indivisible eternity; and, admiring their
original beauty, full of divine power we shall no longer be ourselves but
shall become He Himself Who made us.

This is a most remarkable, even ecstatic declaration of Man’s potential,

truly amazing. With this phrase we may say that man - or at least Pico -
has ‘recovered’ his sense of lost worth; has risen above sinfulness to
become a co-creator, the primary active agent in a living universe. Not
only is it ‘all in the mind’ but it is all in the mind. Man can choose
whether or not he commits sins or whether he ‘pants after the highest’.
Original sin, Pico implies, can be overcome. To a person living in Italy
in the fifteenth century this is possibly equivalent to saying that if we
choose to be guided by holy ambition, to mount the spheres to the
Godhead, then the threat of nuclear annihilation will cease to be. Gone
in a second. Man can now stand with his feet on the ground and his
head in the stars:

For he who knows himself in himself knows all things, as Zoroaster first
wrote. When we are finally lighted in this knowledge, we shall in bliss be
addressing the true Apollo on intimate terms ... And, restored to health,
Gabriel ‘the strength of God’, shall abide in us, leading us through the
miracles of nature and showing us on every side the merit and the might
of God.

Man can now enter into the very fibre of nature for he has come to
know and share in that divine nature which is thereby revealed to be
 THE GNOSTICS

both present in nature and ‘behind’ or ‘above’ it. As the Jesus of The
Gospel of Thomas says, ‘Rather the kingdom is spread over the earth,
but men do not see it.’ What a spur this gives to the natural scientist as
well as the alchemist who had long thought on these lines. Man is not
only a co-operator with God, he is an operator in the Divine Creation.
He can, of course, only regain these powers on being ‘restored to health’.
But Pico makes it clear that this too is within the human grasp.
For those who were wondering how all these things may be
accomplished, Pico offers an introduction to method. His first port of
call is the science of number, which, Pico admits, ‘I have introduced as
new, but which is in fact old, and was observed by the first theologians
and by the first Platonists, but which in this present era, like many other
illustrious things, has perished through the carelessness of posterity, so
that hardly any traces of it can be found.’ Pico quotes an obscure
‘authority’ to the effect that ‘he knows all things who knows how to
count’. Numbers are going to open up the whole universe and, in the
process, man is going to know himself and his Creator.
The next method he proposes is Mageia or magic, not he stresses, to
be confused with that ‘which depends entirely on the work and authority
of demons, a thing to be abhorred, so help me the God of truth, and a
monstrous thing’. This latter he informs us was called goetia by the
Greeks and has nothing to do with the ‘perfect and most high wisdom’
of Mageia. This magic is going to be of great service in the matter of
taking command of the creative process; it is going to give Man power
over the inner workings of nature and grant the insight and invisible
power to subvert chaotic and destructive powers, and, ‘abounding in
the loftiest mysteries, embraces the deepest contemplation of the most
secret things, and at last the knowledge of all nature’. The magician is
to find the essential structure, the principle of a thing, its ‘living’ idea
by a powerful imaginative sympathy with that thing and to transform
the behaviour of that thing - so long as the magician also attains
further enlightenment of the divine mind, reflected in himself through
contemplation of nature. What precisely was involved here it is difficult
to say but there is no denying the imaginative force of Pico’s programme:
‘The mageia, in calling forth into the light as if from their hiding places
the powers scattered and sown in the world by the loving-kindness of
God does not so much work wonders as diligently serve a wonder¬
working nature.’
Within the magical conception of the universe, there is within all
things the essence of a universal power, a living power and not
infrequently called ‘spirit’ in the Stoic sense. That is, spirit is seen as
 PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA (1463-94)

substantial, as the most refined substance surely but substance still.

Matter according to the theory cannot enter spirit but spirit can enter
matter. Spirit is the medium of Hermes as the winged messenger; the
Hermetic magus has something to ‘work with’. And what is that work?
Pico puts it succinctly: ‘As the farmer weds his elms to vines, even so
does the magus wed earth to heaven, that is, he weds lower things to
the endowments and powers of higher things.’
The magus is to be devoted to the raising of earth (matter) to heaven
(spirit). The method, or secret of working lies within the gnosis or
knowledge of Man as he is and can be - he knows he has access to the
divine world. In a process of contemplation or alchemy he rises through
an inner imagination of ascending principles until he feels he is full of
‘light’. In such a condition, the magus sets to work. That work might
be artistic, turning paint into vision, stone into form; mechanical,
turning wood and brass into machinery; religious, turning ill thoughts
and bitterness into love and brotherhood; landscaping, building, singing,
travelling, loving, cooking, writing, capitalizing - the possibilities are
endless. In a holy mind the world may be transformed. As ‘Jesus’ says
in the Valentinian Gospel of Philip: ‘I came to make (the things below)
like the things (above, and the things) outside like those (inside, I came
to unite) them in that place.’ The whole universe awaits transformation
and Man, the great miracle, is the one to do the job. ‘For the earnest
expectation of the creation,’ Saint Paul wrote, ‘waiteth for the revealing
of the sons of God.’ ‘Wait no more’ says Pico, ‘We’re here!’
If one should ask how it is that men have been formerly ignorant of
such dynamic knowledge, Pico gives a clue: ‘Think on how Origen the
theologian [third century], asserts that Jesus Christ, the Teacher of Life,
made many revelations to his disciples, which they were unwilling to
write down lest they should become commonplaces to the rabble. This
is in the highest degree confirmed by Dionysius the Areopagite who says
that the occult mysteries were conveyed by the founders of religion,
from mind to mind, without writing, through the medium of speech.’
In what could have been a shattering climax to a debate that never
was, Pico speaks of the end of the adventure:

We shall fly up with winged feet, like earthly Mercuries, to the embraces
of our blessed mother and enjoy that wished-for peace, most holy peace,
indivisible bond, of one accord in the friendship through which all rational
souls not only shall come into harmony in the one mind which is above
all minds, but shall in some ineffable way become altogether one. This is
that friendship which the Pythagoreans say is the end of all philosophy.
This is that peace which God creates in his heavens, which the angels
 THE GNOSTICS

descending to earth proclaimed to men of good will, that through it men

might ascend to heaven and become angels. Let us wish this peace for
our friends, for our century.

That was written almost precisely 500 years ago - and we are still trying.
Perhaps it is as Hermes asserts to Tat in Libellus XIII of the Corpus
Hermeticum - that we need new eyes:

hermes: Even so it is my son, when a man is born again; it is no longer a

body of three dimensions that he perceives but the incorporeal.
tat: Father, now that I see in mind [nous], I see myself to be the All. I am in
heaven and in earth, in water and in air; I am in beasts and plants; I am a
babe in the womb, and one that is not yet conceived, and one that has been
born; I am present everywhere.
hermes: Now, my son, you know what the rebirth is.

Do we?

116
 Chapter Nine

An eternal God clothed in an

infinite Nature

Man as magus is the end of Renaissance philosophy, the true glory of

the age, perhaps its greatest discovery. But the tempests of the following
century would dull the glow surrounding the hermetic concept and force
its adherents into melancholy or into the shadows. Some of those who
espoused the philosophy would be prey to ridicule in their own time
and condemnation after their deaths. Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Net-
tesheim (1486-1535) whom we have had cause to quote in previous
chapters was branded as a black magician who skulked about Germany
accompanied by a ‘familiar spirit’ in the form of a dog. He was, in fact,
a counsellor to Charles V, Emperor of Germany and was a judge of the
Prerogative court. It was this experience which gave him an insight into
the affairs of the Dominican Inquisition which he recounts in his On
the vanity of the arts and sciences. This latter work denies the value of
all the sciences and arts of his time, including the magic with which his
name has been most associated. All that matters he says, is the knowledge
of Jesus Christ - and in this we can hear the voice of the Protestant
reform movement of which he seems to have approved. Although the
conclusion of the de vanitate scientiarum appears to be positively evan¬
gelical, there is yet a twist. It speaks of the kind of intense disorder of
thought which underlay the meeting of renaissance ‘Man the Magus’
philosophy and the reforming zeal of the ‘new’ Christian - happily facing
Judgment Day in the belief that his simple untarnished, unexplainable,
unsophisticated faith will preserve him. 1 think the conclusion is worth
quoting in full because it signifies most clearly a clash of mentalities
which persists to this day - for it is certain that some readers will
consider this book to be a vanity:

Whither then run you headlong, which seek knowledge of them, which
have spent all their lifetime in searching it, and have lost time and labour,
and could not find any truth? O ye fools and wicked ones, which setting
 THE GNOSTICS

apart the gifts of the Holy Ghost, endeavour to learn those things of
faithless Philosophers, and matters of errors, which ye ought to receive
of God, and the Holy Ghost. Will you believe that we can get knowledge
out of the ignorance of Socrates? Light out of the darkness of Anaxagoras?
Virtue out of the pit of Democritus? Prudence out of the madness of
Empedocles? Piety out of the tune of Diogenes, sense out of the peevishness
of Carneades and Archesilaus, wisdom out of wicked Aristotle and faith¬
less Averroes? Belief out of the superstition of the Platonics? You err
very much, and be deceived by these which have been deceived. But
descend into your selves you which are desirous of the truth, depart from
the clouds of man’s traditions, and cleave to the true light: behold a voice
of Heaven, a voice that teacheth from above, and showeth you more
clearly than the Sun, why are you your own enemies, and prolong time
to receive wisdom; hear the oracle of Baruch: God is as he was and no
other shall be esteemed with him, he hath found out all manner of
learning, and hath given to Jacob his child, and Israel his beloved, giving
Laws and commandments, and ordaining sacrifices: after this he was seen
on the earth, and was conversant with men, that is to say, taking flesh, and
with an open mouth teaching those things, which under dark questions he
hath taught in the Law and the Prophets. And to the end that you may
not think, that these things be referred to divine things only, and not to
natural, hear what the wise man witnesseth of himself: It is he that hath
given me the true knowledge of those things which are, that I might know
the dispositions of the compass of the earth, the virtue of the Elements,
the beginning, consummation, middle, and revolutions of times, the
course of the year, the dispositions of the Stars, the natures of living
Creatures, the anger of beasts, the force of the winds, the thoughts of
men, the differences of plants, the virtues of roots, and finally I have
learned all the things which be hidden and unknown, for the Artificer of
all things hath taught me wisdom. The Divine wisdom never faileth,
nothing escapeth it, nothing augmenteth it, but comprehendeth all things.
Understand you therefore now, that there needeth not much labour in
this place, but Faith and Prayer: not the study of long time, but humbleness
of spirit and cleanness of heart: not the sumptuous furniture of many
books, but a pure understanding, and made fit for the truth as the key is
for the lock: for the great number of books chargeth the learner, instruc¬
ted him not, and he that followed many authors erreth with many. All
things are contained and taught in the only volume of the Holy Bible,
but under this condition - they be not perceived but by them which are
made clear: to others they be parables, and dark made fast with many
seals. Pray then to the Lord God in faith doubting nothing, that the Lamb
of the tribe of Juda may come, and open to you the sealed book, which
Lamb alone is holy and true, which alone hath the key of knowledge and
discretion, which opened and no man shutteth, which shutteth and no

118
 AN ETERNAL GOD CLOTHED IN AN INFINITE NATURE

man can open.This is Jesus Christ, the word and son of God the father
and blessed wisdom, the true Master made man as we are, that he might
make us the children of God as he is, which is blessed forever. But lest
that through using more words I should declaim as it is said, beyond the
hour, let this be the end of our Oration.

There is no denying the wisdom of this conclusion. It is especially wise

because a few years later, in 1533, Agrippa published his Three Books
de occulta philosopbia - of occult philosophy. ‘Occult’ here simply
means what is hidden; for example, in Agrippa’s day, sub-atomic physics
or genetic engineering would have been seen as occult practices. It is
fairly safe to say that the Vanity of the Sciences was published as a kind
of ‘Apology’ for the sms of youth, with the added bonus of serving as
a defence for the soundness of his Christian faith should he be, as indeed
he was, accused of being a sorcerer. On the other hand, the Vanity also
represents a minimalist compendium of knowledge according to the via
negativa - that approach to religious awareness which starts by affirming
what God is not - God is undefinable, the world cannot be known to
the degree of certainty. It is a thoroughly sceptical attitude - not a bad
attitude for a magician - brought upon all things but the ‘word and son
of God’ who shows knowledge only to those who have not expected to
find it in any other place but with the ‘true master’. The approach of
the Occult Philosophy, on the other hand, is considerably more direct -
positive knowledge of God’s creation and the manipulation of that
power is the programme of the three books. They take us from the
natural magic of this world through to the celestial world of Book II
and on to the supercelestial world of angelic intellect, the home of nous.
It is in the celestial world that we find Agrippa coming to terms with
man, Hermetic Man, in the chapter entitled, ‘Of man, how he was
created after the Image of God’ we meet the Thrice great Hermes once
more:

The most abundant god (as Trismegistus saith) hath framed two Images
like himself, viz. the world and man, that in one of these he might sport
himself with certain wonderful operations: but in the other, that he might
enjoy his delights, who seeing he is one, hath created the world one ...

Trismegistus was a safe authority at this time because he was held in

esteem by ancient Christian authorities. He is even seen as one who had
glimpsed the Holy Trinity of orthodoxy. Thus, Agrippa is able to say
that ‘especially he (Man) shall know God, according to whose image he
was made’. The same justification is given for putting the Trinity not
above man but within him:

119
 THE GNOSTICS

Also Mercurius Trismegistus confessing the divine Trinity, describeth it

as understanding, life and brightness, which elsewhere he calleth the
word, the mind and the spirit, and saith that man made after the image of
God, doth represent the same Trinity; for there is in him an understanding
mind, a verifying word, and a spirit, as it were a Divine brightness
diffusing itself on every side, replenishing all things, moving and knitting
them together: but this is not to be understood of the natural spirit [the
materia pnma of the Hermetic vision] which is the medium by which the
soul is united with the flesh and the body, by which the body liveth and
acteth, and one member worketh on another.... But we here speak of the
natural spirit, which yet in some sort is also corporeal, notwithstanding it
hath not a gross body, tangible and visible, but a most subtle body and
easy to be united with the mind viz. that superior and Divine one which
is in us; neither let any one wonder, if we say that the rational soul is
that spirit, and a corporeal thing.

/
^he above translation was made by an unknown translator ‘J.F.’ in
London in 1651 at the height of Oliver Cromwell’s government. It
testifies to the persistence of the Hermetic philosophy and legend. I say
persistence because in 1614 the brilliant scholar of Greek, Isaac Casau-
bon had shown in his de rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitiones XVI
that the Corpus Hermeticum could not possibly have been written by
an ancient Egyptian sage - be he Hermes Trismegistus or anyone else.
The Greek style was of the period of Plotinus (second and third century)
and, furthermore, it had clearly escaped the attention of former com¬
mentators that neither Plato nor Moses nor Aristotle nor indeed any pre-
Christian writer had ever made reference to this Hermes Trismegistus.
Nevertheless, this new information was largely ignored by committed
Hermetists and continued in a more muted form as an underground
fantasy of determined occultists well into the eighteenth century, and
even beyond?)
At almost precisely the same time as Casaubon was quietly demol¬
ishing the myth of Hermes Trismegistus, William Shakespeare was
composing one of his last great plays, namely, The Tempest. There can
be no doubt that the character of the magician Prospero is a dramatic
presentation of the Hermetic magus; controlling nature, destiny, spirits
of sea and air and, finally, bringing the starry plot to a harmonious
denouement in an enchanted atmosphere of love and magic. Shakespeare
is clearly on the side of Prospero - as we ourselves feel to be also.
Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare if he had been unable to grasp
the imaginative nature and power of the Hermetic vision. The way to
overcoming religious and racial differences lay all about us; within

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 AN ETERNAL GOD CLOTHED IN AN INFINITE NATURE

nature around us; within the rasor-magic of the stars above us, and
within the mind of God manifested everywhere: .. the beautiful world
of God, the incomparable work, the energy that possesses goodness, the
many-formed vision, the abundance that does not envy, that is full of
every vision’, as the Asklepios of the Nag Hammadi Library puts it so
very well. This is the vision of the world that permits a Prospero to
enter and do his work of transformation and reconciliation:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves

And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green, sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrumps, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew, by whose aid -
Weak masters though ye be - I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar; graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art.
(The Tempest. Act IV. 33-50)

But the tide had turned against this dimension of Renaissance philosophy
and experience. The English, or rather, Welsh scholar-magician-
astrologer-mathematician-mechanician-antiquarian-cartographer some¬
time diplomat and above all, magus, Dr John Dee, on whom the
character of Prospero has been thought to have been based, had died in
great poverty at Mortlake in 1608. Although favoured by Queen Eliza¬
beth I and her more advanced courtiers - the circle about the profound
personage of Sir Philip Sydney - Dee was cast aside by James I. Various
‘new brooms’ were sweeping across Europe in a frenzy of Catholic
counter-Reformation and Protestant (and Catholic) ‘witch-hunting’.
James I, proud author of the book Demonologie, a believer in the reality
of active demons was certainly not going to give any assistance or ear
to a man who was known to have attempted to make contact with the
angels of the supercelestial sphere in the vain search for profound
knowledge and enlightenment. The fear of vision was at hand.

IZI
 Chapter Ten

One symbol, many worlds

We have seen how the sixteenth-century magus sought knowledge (sci-

entia) through gnosis, or rather the philosophy upon which such an
undertaking might rest. The brilliant work of Dame Frances Yates (d.
1981) has led some historians to think that the impetus gained therefrom
contributed to or was instrumental in the development of modern
science, because it encouraged certain inquisitive minds to explore
nature with the promise of not only enlightenment but power. It is
difficult to see, however, that Hermetism gave much direction in the
way of scientific method.(However, in the sixteenth-century sciences
there was not that distinction which we employ today between imagin¬
ation and objective rationality, that is, the material structure of things)
The magus wished to enter into the ‘spirit’ or Idea of a natural thing.
He had to penetrate the appearance of nature through imaginative
sympathy. He was not so concerned with isolating rational structure as
he was with integrating man and nature, angels and intelligence into a
single harmonious whole he could command. I think that the magus
was ‘turned on’ by the imaginative and visionary sense of his work, we
might say the romance of his task, the broad sweep of matter and spirit
caught up in a moving and divine body. We can see this confusion of
divine idea and material structure in Dee’s most Hermetic work, the
Monas Hieroglyphica, (One Hieroglyph), published in Antwerp in 1564.
Dee believed he had found a ‘hieroglyph’, a hitherto hidden ‘symbol’
which contained in its form the very unifying principle of reality. It is
a kind of micro-chip which contains within it all the most elementary
principles of the universe. It is to be contemplated upon and fixed in
memory as an archetype applicable to all studies. But what is it? If one
can imagine a great ocean of prima materia which we may call in
this context ‘spirit’, a pure unformed, undirected, unmoving, unmoved
homogenous world, then we see the beginnings of the universe. If a
hand were to, as it were, drop the Monas Hieroglyphica into that ocean
of potentials, the materia prima would immediately start forming itself

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 ONE SYMBOL, MANY WORLDS

into the universe we imagine we know. Dee had found, he believed, the
structure of structures and the idea of ideas. In Theorem XVlll, John
Dee writes:

Before we raise our eyes to heaven, kabbalistically illuminated by the

contemplation of these mysteries, we should perceive very exactly the
constitution of our Monad as it is shown to us not only in the LIGHT
but also in life and nature, for it discloses explicitly, by its inner movement,
the most secret mysteries of this physical analysis.

There we have it, the ‘best of both worlds’ - secret mysteries and
physical analysis.
‘He who devotes himself sincerely to these mysteries will see clearly
that nothing is able to exist without the virtue of our hieroglyphic
Monad.’ Monad. The One - Dee had found the principle of the universe.
He had, he believed, fulfilled the promise of the neoplatonist-gnostic
challenge. He had returned to the One! This is what it had all been
about, the Dignity of Man, the Divinity of the world. In Dee’s copy of
Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, he is shown to have
made but few annotations on the text. Perhaps he felt there was nothing
to add. But of the few notes he has made, there appears with particular
force the phrase: mundus imago dei - the world is the image of God.
Dee is convinced that he has penetrated the image of the world and
found its essential unity, the Platonic Idea of the world. What more
could the divinely enlightened mind achieve in cooperation with God
now that the Monad had been revealed? In Theorem XX, Dee is ecstatic:

O Omnipotent Divine Majesty, how we mortals are constrained to confess

what great Wisdom and what ineffable mysteries reside in the Law which
thou hast made! Through all these points and these letters the most
sublime secrets, and terrestrial arcane mysteries, as well as the multiple
revelations of this unique point, now placed in the Light and examined
by me, can be faithfully demonstrated and explained.

If one inverts the great Hermetic phrase, ‘the world is the image of
God’, one approaches the two possibilities. Firstly, the ‘pantheism’ of
eighteenth-century German idealist philosophy and romantic poetry and
expressed as, ‘God is the image of the world’; and secondly, a more
familiar gnostic concept, namely, that ‘God is the image of the world’.
That is, we form a God from our own image. For the Gnostic this is
the great error and deception. A Valentinian Gnostic writes about this
error in The Gospel of Philip, found at Nag Hammadi: ‘Men make gods
and worship their creation. It would be better for the gods to worship
human beings.’ For the classic Gnostic, seeking God in the image of the

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 THE GNOSTICS

world is likely only to result in the forming or discovery of a demiurge,

a false God. Some kind of intuition of this makes the sixteenth-century
magus anxious about what kinds of Powers he is dealing with - hence
the need to penetrate the ‘elemental’ sphere to achieve enlightenment
from the supercelestial. It is also intuited by those who sought to
identify Hermetic philosophy with black magic and necromancy. Meric
Casaubon, son of the debunker of the Trismegistus legend, released
Dee’s spiritual diaries in 1659 to support his belief in the existence of
demons. Dee’s invoked ‘angels’ were less than they might seem, Casau¬
bon argues. Indeed, they were. They came from the conflation of old
magical texts and Anglican liturgy within the diseased mind of Dee’s
scurrilous scryer, Edward Kelley.
But I think there is a more serious side to this issue. The Hermetist
puts out as it were, an historical warning to those who are trying to
attain mastery over nature. It is particularly apposite in our age. The
magus warns the inquirer into nature not to be obsessed with structure
but indeed to penetrate this world to a more spiritual gnosis which
will give form and understanding to the work. The eternal forms are
‘reflected’ but do not exist in the elemental world. That is, a magus
would be disturbed at the modern scientific dependence on law and
formulae. The more you go into matter in search of the forms, seeing the
ideas as elemental structures, the more materialistic do your conceptions
become. The terrifying result of this is that the human agent will come
to operate as a demiurgical or archontic figure, an ‘archon’, blindly
dedicated to power over matter. Surely this intuition is familiar to us in
the concept of the ‘Mad Scientist’ and its accompanying fear of science,
which nineteenth-century positivists put down to superstition, offering
the example of John Dee as a ridiculous representative of that super¬
stition, so fervently did Dee pray before commencing any Hermetic task.
Plotinus and the whole Platonist tradition has asserted that matter is
infinite because it is unbounded by ‘form’. Against the Aristotelian
concept which puts the eternal forms ‘within’ the world, as it were, the
Platonist does not permit this. Intelligibility and matter cannot exist in
the same ‘space’. Following this line to its possible conclusion, the
scientist who believes he or she is arriving at ‘reality’ on discovering
law, proportion and formula in the material world, is simply mistaken,
indeed, he has become bound to those laws - his or her life is now de¬
termined and freedom has been lost. Sub-atomic physics since Heisen¬
berg’s assertion of the ‘uncertainty principle’ seems to be approaching
something like an understanding of this ancient concept - you do not
‘get to the bottom’ of Matter. Physicists can look forward to a possibly

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 ONE SYMBOL, MANY WORLDS

infinite future of formulizing the phenomena of nature with perhaps

little creative result. This is how an ‘up-to-date’ Hermetist might see
the matter of matter.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)

This concept of the never-ending series or projecting of relatively valid
formulae, expressed as mathematical or geometrical configurations can
be seen as having a descendent in the cosmological theories of Giordano
Bruno of Nola by Vesuvius in Italy. In particular, in his extraordinary
concept of the Infinite Universe. Bruno was an out and out Hermetist,
his concepts were primarily religiouTana notT as we think of the word,
analytical. For ‘the Nolan’ as he liked to call himself, the mind of
God expresses itself in the cosmos and can be approached through
mathematical and geometrical diagrams. I should say continually expres¬
sed because Bruno’s universe is a living universe. It is also an infinite
universe, for several reasons. Firstly, what eternity is to God, infinitude
is to matter. Infinity is the only possible expression of eternity - that is,
being which is absolutely unconditioned by time. Furthermore, matter
cannot be bound because it is not form - the forms, the ideas which are
the source of material shapes exist in the intelligible world. As Dorothea
Singer puts it in her excellent book on Bruno:

The infinite universe of Bruno’s conception was inevitably regarded by

him as what we may call a synthesis of infinite relativity. All things and
all thoughts and all individual souls have for him their individual and
absolute value, yet each can be appraised only in relationship to the
others, and the absolute value of each is merged in its relationship to the
infinite whole.

Bruno wrote in De la causa, principio et uno\ ‘These philosophers

(Pythagoras and Solomon) discovered their friend Wisdom when they
discovered this Unity. For Wisdom, Truth and Unity are one and the
same.' God is the essence by which everything has its being. Access to
this knowledge is still seen in gnostic terms: ‘He who has found this
Unity has discovered the indispensable key for the true contemplation
of Nature.... Thus you will understand that all is in all but all is not
totally and in every mode within each other.’
The primal being is the unity and the unity is the universe. That does
not mean that every thing is God but that they are relative appearances
within as it were, the Divine Being: ‘Thus everything which maketh
diversity of kinds, species, differences, properties, everything which
dependeth on generation, corruption, alteration and change is not being

I25
 THE GNOSTICS

or existence but is a condition and circumstance of being or existence

which one, infinite, immobile, subject, matter, life, soul, truth and
good.’ Ifkuno’s vision of an infinite universe pervaded by an eternal
spirit is truly astonishing,
Giordano Bruno was one of the first scholars to publicly defend and
promulgate the ‘new’ universe of Copernicus and he was for a long time
considered to be a ‘rnartvr for modern science’ chiefly on the strength
of^isr^WirartlTferested Bruno about the concept was not so much its
being scientifically true, as its being symbolically and religiously true.
Copernicus in his work on the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs,
published in 1543 had laid waste the Ptolemaic conception of the
universe which put the earth at its centre. Copernicus puts the sun at
the centre of our solar system. The proposition was declared to be
anathema by the Catholic Church. On the printed page of the first
edition of this book, beneath a drawing of the new system, Qogernicus
de]jheratelv quotes Hermes Trismegistus who has declared that the ‘sun
is the visible Cod’. This conception of God in his dynamic unity shedding
light to life, being expressed in a relatively stable and living object
fascinated Bruno and the solar symbolism derived from it was to be the
symbol of cosmic unity in Hermetic science and art for a long time. Bruno
believed that the sun symbolized the living principle which animates the
universe, and that a mysticism or rather gnosticism built around this
image would give mankind enormous powers: ‘If the corporeal quality
perceptible to our sense is endowed with infinite active power, then
what will be the absolute totality of active and passive power inherent
in the totality of things?’ So Bruno wrote in his book On the Infinite
Universe and worlds.
Such a gnosis Bruno believes to have existed in Ancient Egyptian
times - and that its progenitor was Hermes Trismegistus. He takes the
Lament in the Asclepius for a world, or rather Egypt, which had been
raped of its temples, barbarized and ridiculed for its belief in the ‘many-
formed vision of God’ as being, not a prophecy of Christianity, as
Christian Hermetists understood it, but as a genuine lament for a lost
culture of perfect knowledge and purity which, he, Giordano Bruno is
going to bring back. Hermetic-Egyptianism, the ‘religion of the world’
was the message that Bruno would take with him around Europe as he
continued undeterred by fairly predictable responses. His deepest
wounds seems to have been inflicted upon himself when he considered
how he had been greeted with sarcastic derision by the ‘grammarians
and pedants’, as he calls them, of Oxford University in 1584.
Perhaps he would not have found much difference today. Bruno’s

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 ONE SYMBOL, MANY WORLDS

gnostic experience was simply too big for most bounded scholars of the
time to contain. Bruno’s animated, infinite universe did not only put the
sun in the centre of our solar system, it also, having removed the
centrality of our planet, posited the existence of innumerable worlds,
countless suns and solar systems. He approached a concept of relativity
with boldness. The apparent movement of the planets and stellar bodies
is, he asserts, an illusion brought on by sense perception, that is, we see
from ‘here’ and we think we are looking at ‘there’ in a fixed relationship -
but, in fact, we are also in motion and so a fixed law of universal
movement is, for Bruno, impossible to establish absolutely from a fixed
point. It is a living universe. Relations of distance are relative; time is
an image of eternity, not an absolute within the context of the infinite
universe.
Bruno has, as it were, taken the gnostic dualism - matter and spirit,
God and the world, light and darkness and exploded it into a new
world, imperceptible to sense. Contemplating the infinite One which
lies behind all phenomena, we recognize according to Bruno that:

even in the two extremes of the scale of nature, we contemplate two

principles which are one; two beings which are one; two contraries which
are harmonious and the same. Therefore Light is depth, the abyss is light
unvisited, darkness is brilliant, the large is small, the confused is distinct,
dispute is friendship, the divided is united, the atom is immensity....
Here are the signs and proofs whereby we see that contraries do truly
concur; they are from a single origin and are in truth and substance one.
This, having been seen mathematically is accepted physically.... Here as
in a seed are contained and enfolded the manifold conclusions of natural
science; here is the mosaic, the disposition and order of the speculative
sciences.

The universe is not really a tragic place. It only appears to be because

we cannot see the whole movement. ‘It is well,’ Bruno insists, that this
world exists - therefore also that an infinity of other worlds exists -
only an infinite universe can comprehend all perfection. All things
eventually appear in their proper place:

Thus on our earth the particle of fire seeking to escape and mount toward
the sun, carry ever with them some particles of earth and of water with
which they are conjoined; and these becoming increased do thus by their
own natural impulse return to their own place.

All things are moving and changing, all things proceed and return, all
is relative in the divine and infinite universe. All sorrow is of the moment,
all principles which can unite will unite. Every invisible point or centre

127
 THE GNOSTICS

of the universe is an infinite Pieroma - like a fragment of an holographic

image - projecting and receiving being, an infinite number of points of
plenitude ‘rising from the lowest grade of nature to the supreme highest
thereof, from the physical universe known to philosophers to the height
of the archetype in whom all theologians believe ... until we reach an
original and universal substance, identical throughout the whole, which
is Being, the foundation of all kinds and all forms.’
A scientific formula can only ever be an approximation to eternal
form. What matters for Bruno, however, it not the ‘analysis’ or breaking
up of the universe by approximate abstraction but the intuition and
experience of the One: gnosis in fact.
Rationalist science would go on to approach the universe as if the
formulae and laws of matter were identifiable with intelligibility - in
Einstein’s terms, towards a ‘unified field theory’ which would give
mankind an absolute Knowledge of natural law. When Einstein said,
‘God does not play dice’, the Gnostic replies, ‘You can never know!
And if He does, why not play dice with Him?’ From the Hermetic point
of view, ‘knowledge’ if gained by analysis of matter only, can only ever
be a ‘copy’ or approximation to the Whole - it is in pure gnostic terms,
the limited knowledge of the demiurge, to seize this knowledge as
knowledge of the ‘All’ is fatal - man will find himself living under the
tyranny of his own abstractions.
The doctrine that every living thing is the centre of the universe
can never be truly acceptable to orthodox Christian doctrine because,
essentially that doctrine holds that since the world is fallen, the world
is sick and mankind is too ill to be able to find God by his own
effort. The Gnostic responds by saying that a leap of consciousness will
overcome the sense of conflict in the universe. Christ is truly the healer -
how can He be a healer if no one and nothing is healed? The orthodox
replies that the universe has not reached that stage yet - we do not yet
see the new heaven and the new earth. The Gnostic says, ‘I have seen
this world and to it 1 belong.’ The orthodox says, ‘Then You are outside
of the Church for we are a Church of sinners.’ ‘None is righteous. No
not one’, as the psalm says - if you think you have overcome human
nature which is by definition sinful, you are deluding yourself. No
amount of knowledge or even gnosis can save us from our nature. The
Gnostic damns himself by his own presumptions.’
Giordano Bruno was burned alive as an ‘impenitent heretic’ in Rome
in 1600.

128
 THE CONCLUSION

The Everlasting Gospel

 Chapter Eleven

From muddy waters to the River of Life

A Universe drained of God
The universe of Giordano Bruno is a divine and living universe, an
infinite universe whose source is the divine intelligible world which
eternally projects itself into material space. The living ‘forms’ of God,
the essential ideas of the universe can be glimpsed through abstract
figures which, when firmly placed in the memory, enable the mind to
see the true nature of the infinite universe.
But what if we limit perception from the divine nous of the gnostic
to the ‘mind of the ratio’ - the rational mind observing objects in the
universe? Then we may take the formulae of cosmic proportion as the
real rather than as gateways to physical reality. The laws and formulae
discernible through observation of matter enable man to predict and
therefore to have power over nature. Is this not enough? Why bother
with all that mystical trash? And what if we say that reality is out ‘there’
and that our minds are simply screens onto which the world projects
itself; that the world exists to us only as sense impressions.
Then we would have objective knowledge - knowledge of objects.
This became in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the aim of
science. The result was a universe drained of God. Since God is invisible
there is neither need nor possibility of examining Him. One would
better content oneself with looking at matter. Any gnosis that may be
is thrust to the ‘outer limits’ (to return perhaps as the ‘Alien’ of science
fiction) - it cannot exist in the mind because the mind simply receives
sense impressions. If we have a soul or conscience, it must be essentially
separate from perception. If the universe is ‘divine’, then God can only
be seen in the laws and mechanics which he has presumably created.
These deductions from scientific observation (quantifiable and repeat-
able demonstration) were held in the eighteenth century to have brought
clarity to a confused world. They are the origins of ‘Deism’. ‘Deism’
holds that there is a God, He is a ‘great architect’, a designer, a
mechanician. Everything can be shown as a mechanism. ‘God’ has long
ago ‘flicked a switch’ and set the whole celestial machine in motion,
 THE GNOSTICS

sitting back to watch the process or perhaps He has departed to work

on other projects. This view of God as ‘creator’ or in Isaac Newton’s
terms ‘Pantocrator’ is remarkably akin to the early Gnostic’s view of
the demiurge ‘whose word is Law’. Isaac Newton’s knowledge of the
Gnostics is, however, slight. In an exceptionally rare work, Observations
upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of Saint John. In two
parts. 1733, Isaac Newton, the father of gravity, writes:

It (apostasy) began to work in the disciples of Simon, Menander, Car-

pocrates, Cerinthus, and such sorts of men as had imbibed the meta¬
physical philosophy of the Gentiles and Cabalistical Jews, and were
thence called Gnosticks. John calls them Antichrists, saying that in his
days there were many Antichrists.

Now they might be called ‘anti-rationalists’ - with reason! In the ‘deist’

view, God is held to be rational and rationality is held to be the proper
road to understanding Man and his creator. But let us take another step.
Since the universe runs itself and Man is the passive observer of it,
imitating the mechanics of the universe, there is no real need for God
at all - belief in God is simply a matter of taste, or of aesthetics. It is
much simpler this way.
Let us take another view, that of Natural Religion. This view is the
reaction of some theologians to the threats of a cosmology which has
no need of God. The essence of this view is that God can be deduced
from observing nature and, as such, is really a corollary of Deism. In
William Paley’s famous parable, we pick up a watch, it shows design,
it shows rational structure - it must have a designer, likewise then the
universe. The theologian thinks that he is saved from the abyss of
atheism - God is good because nature is ‘beautiful’.
William Blake attacked all of the above. He did not believe a word
of it. For him, this whole movement which externalized nature ‘sep¬
arated the stars from the mountains, the mountains from Man And left
Man, a little grovelling Root outside of Himself.’ He held the culprits
to be Bacon, Newton and Locke. These were, for Blake, the servants of
materialism. When we hear the word ‘materialism’, we might think that
it implies a critique of our civilization, in that people are acquisitive;
they want things, they value things, they study things, they produce
things, they exchange things, they work for things, they die for things,
they kill for things, they dominate things - a man is a thing with a
personality which may have greater or lesser material value - and the
blood which keeps all the things in motion is money. The word is
sometimes tied to ‘capitalism’ - the exchange of things for profit.

132
 FROM MUDDY WATERS TO THE RIVER OF LIFE

In fact, materialism is much more fundamental a concept, and all the

above are in a sense only symptoms or rather effects of it. Materialism
means that the source of all things is matter and should we go back far
enough to when matter ‘was not’, then there would be nothing, absol¬
utely nothing - because there can be no thing without matter. And Man
has evolved from this nothing.
Our civilisation may not actually believe in materialism but it cer¬
tainly acts as if it did. There is a further point to consider before we
approach the subject of Blake’s vision. One may call it the ‘myth of
Frankenstein’.

Man the Monster

In Chapter 2 of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, written when Blake
was 59, we hear of the beginnings of Victor Frankenstein’s quest
to attain the powers of a god. Victor confesses that during a trip to
Thonon, a town near the French Alps situated by the shores of Lake
Leman:

I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened

it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate [from the
Asclepius - that of Hermetic Man bringing life into inanimate objects],
and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into
enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind; and, bounding
with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father. My father looked
carelessly at the title page of my book, and said ‘Ah! Cornelius Agrippa!
My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.’
If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to
me, that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that
a modern system of science had been introduced, which possessed much
greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were
chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical; under such
circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and having
contented my imagination, warmed as it was, by returning with greater
ardour to my former studies. It is even possible, that the train of my ideas
would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. But the
cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured
me that he was acquainted with its contents; and I continued to read with
the greatest avidity.

At Ingolstadt University, Frankenstein met the ‘uncouth’ Professor

Krempe who echoed his father’s disapprobation: ‘Every instant that you
have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely lost.... I little
expected, in this enlightened and scientific age, to find a disciple of

133
 THE GNOSTICS

Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus.’ The latter men were alchemists of

noetic character - men of the nous. Frankenstein was upset and com¬
plained, ‘I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless magnitude
for realities of little worth.’ Nevertheless, on encountering the more
kindly Professor Waldman, he saw new possibilities. Waldman is more
positive about Hermetic alchemy:

‘The ancient teachers of this science,’ said he, ‘promised impossibilities,

and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they
know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a
chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble
in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed
performed miracles.’

At this point, paradoxically, Waldman proceeds to paraphrase from

Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio:

They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in
her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered
how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have
acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the
thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible
world with its own shadows.

As for Cornelius Agrippa and his type:

... these were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were
indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. They had left
to us, as an easier task, to give new names, and arrange in connected
classifications, the facts which they in a great degree had been the instru¬
ments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however
erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid
advantage of mankind.

Two points can be deduced from these rather pompous speeches. The
first is inherent to the text, that is, that the ‘old sixteenth-century
Hermetic vision’ is reported in the novel to have inspired the work of
natural scientists - and this accords with what we have understood in
the last section of the imaginative power of Hermetism.
The second point is that which leads to the central tragedy of the
book - Frankenstein’s creation of the ‘monster’. Frankenstein is encour¬
aged by Waldman - although Waldman is ignorant that this is what he
has done - to fuse the visionary scape of the Agrippan magus with
the methods of natural science. The result of this powerful drive in
Frankenstein’s mind is to attempt the ultimate act of science as he sees
it - to create life itself, to do the work of the Creator. In gnostic terms,

134
 FROM MUDDY WATERS TO THE RIVER OF LIFE

Frankenstein has become a demiurge, an ‘archon’, a ruler over nature,

heedless to Nature’s spiritual source. We may say that he has taken the
knowledge of nature and confused this knowledge with that of the
eternal or ‘occult’, hidden nature of which Agrippa wrote. All that can
come from this is hideous deformity, and on realizing his colossal error
of hubris Frankenstein finds himself to be ‘a grovelling Root, outside
of himself’. Filled with unspeakable remorse, Frankenstein laments
that:
Now all was blasted: instead of that serenity of conscience, which allowed
me to look back upon the past with self-satisfaction, and from thence to
gather promise of new hopes, I was seized by remorse and the sense of
guilt, which hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures such as no
language can describe.

Later he will declare, ‘I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul;
and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease
to be - a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others,
and intolerable to myself.’ Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Ancient
Mariner’, who is condemned because he has broken the invisible laws
of nature by shooting the ‘albatross’, Frankenstein too must survive
awhile to show us the horror of man’s ‘new’ predicament. Frankenstein
and the Mariner have become outsiders, alone - and Mary Shelley
employs the lurid language of the ‘romantic hell’ to emphasize the sense
of foreboding for a future in which, stalking across a Godless landscape
in an empty universe, it is Man that will be shown to be more monstrous
than his creations.
Coleridge in his poetic tour de force, ‘The Ryme of the Ancient
Mariner’ paints the picture of a possible future for mankind, blinded
by power:
Alone, alone, all all alone
Alone on the wide wide Sea;
And Christ would take no pity on
My soul in agony.

The many men so beautiful,

And they all dead did lie!
And a million million slimy things
Lived on - and so did I.

I looked upon the rotting Sea,

And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the ghastly deck,
And there the dead men lay.

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 THE GNOSTICS

I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;

But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came and made
My heart as dry as dust.

Today, we should not be far from the author’s understanding if we saw

the above as a vision of the effects of ecological holocaust. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), genius of prose and poetry, is reported
to have met William Blake by the critic Crabb Robinson in 1826, and
by an anonymous writer in the London University Magazine for 1830,
three years after Blake’s death. In a footnote, the writer describes how:
‘Blake and Coleridge, when in company, seemed like congenial beings
of another sphere, breathing for a while on our earth; which may be
easily perceived from the similarity of thought pervading their works.’
‘Like congenial beings of another sphere.’ Both men had seen the
‘monster’ on the horizon of their own hearts and both men had seen
how the monster might yet be redeemed.

William Blake
God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes
(William Blake)

I spoke to the distinguished biographer of Blake, Dr Kathleen Raine, in

the spring of 1986 and she began by saying that: ‘If you start from mind
or spirit being the basic, fundamental reality, you have a whole field
illuminated which is totally closed if you assume matter to be the basic
reality.’ That field was illuminated by the vision of William Blake (1757-
1827).
William Blake was born over the hosiery shop of his father, James
Blake at 28, Broad Street, Golden Square in London, in 1757. Young
William very early on distinguished himself by his strong character, a
character which seemed to have a full sense of its own integrity. In
Infant Sorrow from his Songs of Experience, he wrote of his birth, as if
already a conscious being:

My mother groaned, my father wept:

Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

His birth was in his own eyes an ‘incarnation’. He had come from
eternity, from immortal form into a world of generation. He would go

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 FROM MUDDY WATERS TO THE RIVER OF LIFE

on to cavil at the confusion of reality with appearance, spirit with

matter: ‘Truly,’ he declared to the Devil of Selfhood (Ego), ‘thou art a
dunce who does not know the garment from the man.’ Coming into the
world was a most unpleasant experience:

Striving against my swaddling bands,

Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

He would come to see that the world of generation was not without its
purpose but served to effect the ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ - to
rebuild the fallen citadel of the ‘Divine Humanity’. In the book Jerusalem
(1804) he employed the Smaragdine Table of Hermes Trismegistus:
‘What is above is like that which is below. To work the miracle of the
one thing.’ Heaven and Hell, between which the world is poised, will
be united.
When he was four, Blake screamed at seeing ‘God put his forehead
to the window’. He would recall straying into the fields of Peckham Rye
where he passed a tree full of angels, their bright wings shining in the
boughs. On one summer’s day his mother found cause to beat him
because he related how he had seen the prophet Ezekiel sitting in the
open fields. His father, noticing William’s anger at being beaten, wisely
saw that school was no place for him and so William educated himself-
as he continued to do for the rest of his seventy years.
Throughout his life he kept himself and later his beloved wife
Catherine by the exercise of his engraving skills which he learned as an
apprentice to James Basire at 31, Great Queen Street. He lived in London
for almost all of his life and he never left the country. Blake seems, in
the main, to have found London to be an agreeable place and in his day
it was a very much smaller place than it is today. The phrase Greater
London would only have implied the wealth of intellectual, pecuniary
and artistic ferment which existed there in those days. You could see a
kingfisher where Euston Station now stands.
Blake was gifted with an exceptional!y strong yisionarv iacultv and
when we talk of vision, let us be in no doubt as to what it means. Vision
means to see, really see - not ‘with the eye’, the ‘vegetable eye’, but
through it. To see reality is vision. It is the visual counterpart of
‘intellect’; nous. The mind TTcfHatlve of reality - the mind is not a blank
screen. The individual can share in the vision of the eternal form of
humanity - humanity itself. Individuals share their source in the divine
being. So when Blake wanders down the streets of London, he does not
see simply the passing shades and images of people. It is not objects he

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 THE GNOSTICS

sees but:

In every cry of every man,

In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

How the chimney-sweeper’s cry

Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood from palace-walls.

Blake sees the inner reality — he cannot avoid it because he knows that
the outer world is created within our Imagination, and for Blake, the
‘Divine Imagination’ is all. If our minds are shackled, we show ourselves
to be downcast and unhappy, miserable and given to mistreatment,
perverse in thought and action - we shut out the divine vision and all
about us we ‘see’ only objects separated by dismal space/ Blake believed
the science ^nd religion of his time encouraged the appearance of the
‘mind-forged manacles’. They trusted appearances^
Blake diagnosed and understood the mental imprisonment of Eng¬
lishmen and women. He may have remained in London, but as a creative
artist, his range of vision was, like Bruno’s, infinite:

I travelled through a land of men

A land of men and women too,
And heard and saw such dreadful things
As cold earth wanderers never knew.

£ Blake knew. He understood those principles of microcosm and mac¬

rocosm and of nous and matter which he gleaned from his deep reading
of Plato, the NeoPlatonists, the Hermetica, Dante, the Bible and it is
likely he knew about a Gnostic papyrus from the fourth or fifth century,
discovered by James Bruce in Upper Egypt and deposited in the British
Museum in 1785. It was called Pistis Sophia, ‘Faith-Wisdom’, the name
given to the revealer of gnostic vision to Christ’s disciples on the Mount
of Olives after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Blake attended the
lectures of Thomas Taylor ‘the Platonist’ which took place in the home
of his friend, the sculptor Flaxman. Taylor translated Plato, Proclus,
Plotinus, lamblichus and other Neoplatonists. Blake loved these works.
Above all, it C£mj2£_seenj^ Blake was gnostic. *)

The Vision of Christ that thou dost see,

Is my vision’s greatest ..enemy.

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 FROM MUDDY WATERS TO THE RIVER OF LIFE

Thine is the Friend of all Mankind,

Mine speaks in Parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy heaven-doors are my hell gates.

I asked Kathleen Raine about his being gnostic and she replied:

People thought - and W. B. Yeats gave currency to the idea - that Blake
had made it all up; that he was a mystic, whatever that is - he wasn’t.
He was a gnostic. You’re quite right. It was gnosis. It wasn’t mysticism.
He was a gnostic and he. was enormously deeply read. I thought I’d start
out by reading everything he is kjaQwmuamavExeaE - twenty years later
I’m stilL-rea-d+ngM followed that golden string to a whole excluded
knowledge.

Of that ‘golden string’, Blake wrote in his consummate poetic achieve¬

ment, ‘Jerusalem’:

I give you the end of a golden string:

Only wind it into a ball, -
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jersualem’s wall.

Kathleen Raine comments:

... it is the same thread. It proved not to be a whole lot of dubious occult
writers but proved essentially to be the NeoPlatonists, the Gnostics,
the Alchemical tradition - Goethe and Jung picked up the alchemical
tradition - Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) - as Blake did in England, the
Neoplatonic tradition. Blake had also read the Hermetica, Thomas Taylor
the Platonist - the translator of Plato and Plotinus. All Blake’s so-called •
system was built up on very well grounded, and usually very respectable
knowledge of the excluded tradition.

Blake was confident that he stood on solid ground, a long tradition

which had proved its worth - the deists and rationalists could never
defeat the Divine Imagination - for we come from it, that is to say, the
eternal forms create us, not the reverse. So:

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,

Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain;
You throw the dust against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again

We all know the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ which exclaims, ‘And did those
feet in ancient time...’. In fact it comes from Blake’s ‘Milton’ but no
matter. When we sing the second verse:

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 THE GNOSTICS

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem budded here
Among those dark Satanic mills?

perhaps we have been accustomed to imagine that the ‘dark satanic

mills’ represent those rows upon rows of Coronation Streets; always
black and white and condemned by funnels of hellish smoke. Perhaps
we see shaky images of Jarrow marchers and the hollow cheeks of the
‘urban poor’. Blake was, in fact, referring to his time spent at Felpham
as the guest of a popular poet of the day, William Hayley. Here Blake
was encouraged to paint screens and fans and the kind of ‘sound’
engraving that was accessible to Hayley’s mind. For Blake, the ‘dark
Satanic mills’ are symbols of confined and meaningless labour, the
repressed vision of man, so haunted by propriety. But those who see the
industrial landscape are really quite right. The intuition is good because
the dark world of industrial mechanism is in Blake’s thought nothing less
than the outflow of the repressed vision wreaking a kind of vengeance on
Nature. ‘What is above is like that which is below.’ An empty head will
produce empty works. An abstracted architect will produce abstracted,
angular, lifeless buildings - mental prisons for people. As Christ said,
‘First clean the inside of the cup.’ The cup of the mind of the new
Industrial Revolution was already shattered to Blake’s vision. Listen to
how Blake describes the effect of industrial capitalism - so much more
profound than the Marxian critique; for it penetrates the soul of Man,
bound, torn and stretched about the mechanistic creations of Reason:

All the Arts of Life they chang’d into the Arts of Death in Albion.
The hour-glass contemn’d because its simple workmanship
Was like the workmanship of the plowman, and the water wheel
That raises water into cisterns, broken and burn’d with fire
Because its workmanship was like the workmanship of the shepherd;
And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel,
To perplex youth in their outgoings and to bind to labours in Albion
Of day and night the myriads of eternity; that they may grind
and polish brass and iron hour after hour, laborious task,
Kept ignorant of its use: that they might spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery to obtain a scanty pittance of bread,
In ignorance to view a small portion and think that All,
And call it Demonstration, blind to all the simple rules of life.

Is it so very different today? In 1983 I wrote that:

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 FROM MUDDY WATERS TO THE RIVER OF LIFE

The Computer Cottage is an electric prison

Welded
In the Fear of Vision.

But how was hell made so well on earth?

In Blake’s series of astonishing myths - imaginative representations
of inner psycho-spiritual activity - laid out in a series of ‘Prophetic
Books’, Blake told the story of the fall of Divine Humanity. These are
timeless myths in their essentials but we can place the dynamics of the
tragedy within the context of the previous chapter: ‘The Universe
drained of God’, or as Blake described it: ‘The soul-shuddering vacuum
of Newtonian space’ - the development of materialism. As for ‘Space’,
Blake wrote in ‘Milton’:

Every space larger than a red globule of man’s blood

Is visionary, and is created by the hammer of Los.
And every space smaller than a globule of man’s blood opens
Into eternity, of which the vegetable earth is but a shadow.

Space is a creation of Imagination. Of course, like time it is relative. I

discussed Blake’s response to materialism with Kathleen Raine:

He held materialism to be totally false. Not in its conclusions but in its

premisses. He believed man to be a spiritual being in a spiritual universe,
which was a living universe, not a mechanism as the Newtonians
supposed. He held the whole universe to be alive and to be also living
within the spiritual unity of the being, the person he called the Divine
Humanity - named Albion. He saw the spiritual universe to be a person -
he said of Pythagoras: ‘God is not a spiritual diagram.’ God is a person,
He is the Divine Humanity, he is Jesus the Imagination. W. B. Yeats took
off where Blake left off and identified this figure with the ‘Self’ of the
Upanishads.

In the Book ofUrizen (1793), the drama takes place within. The unus
mundus - the ‘one world’ contains both the inner and the outer worlds
in a single life. Blake says quite distinctly that although it appears
‘without’, it is within - in the Imagination. I mention the Book ofUrizen
and readers may be perplexed. Who or what is ‘Urizen’? Urizen is Blake’s
mythic figure representing ‘Reason’, abstract, cold and blind - the ‘mind
of the ratio’ as a living principle.
The drama of fall and redemption which Blake expresses in a series
of Prophetic Books occurs within the mind of Albion. ‘Albion’ is the
‘Ancient Man’ who contained in himself all things: ‘The primeval state
of man was wisdom, art, and science.’ He is certainly akin to the
Valentinian Anthropos - the projection of eternity, and to the Cabalist’s
 THE GNOSTICS

‘Adam Kadmon’. He is the original form of Man, Divine Humanity.

Albion’s body we may see as ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ for
Albion is the spiritual form of England. One must try to imagine
‘England’ as a single being - in whom all the events of the body of
England are but events deriving from the inner life. ‘Albion’ is the being
to whom Jerusalem - spiritual liberty calls:

England! awake! awake! awake!

Jerusalem thy sister calls!
Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death,
And close her from thy ancient walls.

Albion is a fallen being. How did this happen?

Within the ‘ancient Man’ there existed, prior to the tragedy, four
principles, four eternal projections called ‘Zoas’, living within har¬
monious mind. They are Reason (Urizen), Feeling (called ‘Luvah’ which
is Love), Sensation (which is called ‘Tharmas’, or the body) and Intuition
(who is called ‘Los’ who did not fall but kept the Divine Vision in time
of doubt as ‘Poetry, Painting and Music, the three powers in man of
conversing with Pardise which the flood [of Time and Space] did not
sweep away.’).
In English civilization the one of the four faculties which has really
led us astray has been fallen Reason who by usurping the harmony of
mind, declaring as does the gnostic demiurge in the Apocryphon of
John, ‘There is no god before me’, is responsible for cutting us off from
our spiritual source. Within the spiritual being, Urizen is responsible
for the fall of the West. It should be noted that Blake lived to hear of
how the goddess ‘Reason’ was erected in Notre Dame during the wicked
events of the French Revolution. Blake does identify Urizen as the
essential nature of the ‘second God’ of Plato and the Gnostics. He is
recognizably the ‘Elohim’ of the Old Testament in his ‘aged ignorance’,
carrying the books of the Law. Yet, and yet Blake’s creator is not wholly
evil; for as the ‘Ancient of Days’ on the frontispiece to Europe (1793)
we see the Creator with his golden compasses, who, though in part
fallen, ‘derived his birth from the supreme God; this being fell, by
degrees, from his native virtue, and his primitive dignity’ (W. B. Yeats).
But whatever the grandeur of his work, Blake called the^creator of the
temporal world ‘a very cruel being’. Who can deny this, waking from a
nightmare which convinced us a loved one was dead, that emptiness,
emptiness...

A murderer of its own body, but also a murderer

Of every Divine Member. It is the reasoning power,

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 FROM MUDDY WATERS TO THE RIVER OF LIFE

An abstract objecting power that negatives every-thing.

This is the spectre of man, the holy reasoning power,
And in its holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation.
(from ‘Jerusalem’)

Urizen is responsible for the crushing laws of both science and religion.
For in Blake’s day, the Church had become rationalized showing a
slavish adherence to the fantasies of ‘enlightened’ science, unaware of
the spiritual treasure within it, the Glory of God. It is Urizen who says
‘Thou shalt not’:

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen,
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
(‘The Garden of Love’)

Urizen is the God of the deists and ‘natural religionists’ and Blake calls
him ‘Old Nobodaddy’ to whom he addresses these lines:
Why art thou silent and invisible,
Father of Jealousy?
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
From every searching eye?
Why darkness and obscurity
In all thy words and laws,

The fall of Reason is, within the living mind, responsible for the mech¬
anical abstract consciousness that analyses, that is, ‘loosens’ or ‘breaks
apart’. What happens when this consciousness is brought to bear on the
natural world? Then the world is seen as a kind of cake or diagram - 5
per cent uranium, 30 per cent copper, 20 per cent oil, 45 per cent iron-
ore and so on - there to be divided; the consciousness of Man ripped
to pieces on the analyst’s couch of a confused world. The poet cannot
speak, or paint, or write, make films, debate or be without the question,
‘But what does it mean?’ In ‘Jerusalem’ Blake gets to the heart of the
matter:

M3
 THE GNOSTICS

Why wilt thou number every little fibre of my soul,

Spreading them out before the sun like stalks of flax to dry?
The infant joy is beautiful, but its anatomy
Horrible, ghast, and deadly. Nought shalt thou find in it
But dark despair and everlasting brooding melancholy.

Within the general disorder of Albion’s mind, Feeling, ‘Luvah’ also falls
and in the fallen state is called ‘Ore’, child of freedom and rebellion,
chained to the rock of the Law, Promethean Love on fire! Ore is
frustrated Love and love frustrated falls into violence, being blood¬
thirsty, destructive and warlike: ‘when thought is closed in chains then
Love shall show its roots in deepest hell’. Within the Divine Being, there
is darkness too. Evil has its part to play - but not for Man. Ore is much
in evidence today, from bloody terror to, in Kathleen Raine’s eyes, ‘Ore
manifesting himself in football hooliganism and in the poor little punk
children on the King’s Road.’
Within Blake’s triumphant poetic synthesis ‘Jerusalem’ (1804) the
four faculities or Zoas are reunited. Jung might call this ‘individuation’
but Blake saw it in more cosmic terms and images than that. Urizen is
redeemed and reincorporated into the true body of ‘Jesus the Imag¬
ination’ and Albion, Humanity, expansive and divine is revealed once
more. When Reason is obedient to his true but hitherto unknown source
in the Divine Imagination, he appears in his proper form, not as false
god but as the ‘sower and reaper of eternity’, the mental binding power
which ensures coherence within the Mind. Albion may again dwell in
Jerusalem which is nothing less than what this present world cannot
bear - spiritual liberty!

In Great Eternity every particular form gives forth or emanates

Its own peculiar light, and the form is the Divine Vision,
And the light is His garment. This is Jerusalem in every man,
A tent and tabernacle of mutual forgiveness, male and female clothings.
And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the children of Albion.

All of this came to Blake as spiritual knowledge; heart and intellect, all
nature’s vision combined in mind and synthesized in sight. If any should
condemn this knowledge, Blake speaks thus:

He who despises and mocks a mental gift in another, calling it pride, and
selfishness, and sin, mocks Jesus, the giver of every mental gift, which
always appear to the ignorance-loving hypocrite as sins. But that which
is a sin in the sight of cruel man is not so in the sight of our kind God.
Let every Christian as much as in him lies, engage himself openly and

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 FROM MUDDY WATERS TO THE RIVER OF LIFE

publicly before all the world in some mental pursuit for the building of
Jerusalem.

Eternity in an Hour
As in Bruno we see the full dimensions of the outer world of gnostic
perception, so in Blake we are reunited with the inner world.
In 1827, Blake wrote to a friend:

I have been very near the gates of death, and have returned very weak,
and an old man, feeble and tottering, but not in spirit and life, not in the
real man, the imagination which liveth forever. In that I grow stronger
and stronger as this foolish body decays.

‘The death of a saint’ said a poor woman who came to help Mrs Blake.
Surrounded on his bed by his unfinished work on Dante’s Paradiso, he
composed songs to his Maker so sweetly to the ear of his wife that she
drew nearer to him. He looked at her with great affection and said: ‘My
beloved! They are not mine. No! They are not mine.’ He told her that
they would not be parted, that ‘the ruins of time build mansions in
eternity’. He died in Fountain Court in 1827.
In his ‘Everlasting Gospel’ William Blake had God speak thus to
Christ:

If thou humblest thyself, thou humblest Me.

Thou also dwellest in eternity.
Thou art a man. God is no more.
Thine own humanity learn to adore;
For that is my spirit of life.

145
 Chapter Twelve

Thou also dwellest in Eternity

The Rosicrucians
There shall be a door opened to Europe
(when the wall is removed) which already
doth begin to appear and with great desire
is expected of many.
(.Fama Fratermtatis, Cassel, 1614)

Idave you ever felt on reading a passage of writing that your whole
being welled up inside with a feeling of clarity and warm understanding,
of recognition and elation — only to find that when you tried to com¬
municate this to the external world you failed to project the heart of
the experience with anything like precision or faithfulness, that words
proved so very inadequate, that the spirit spoke louder than words^
So often when I have read the writings of the first Rosicrucian
apologists I have felt this intensely and come close to despair in failing
to communicate the truth and wonder of Truth herself. This kind of
writing, original and inspired, transcends time and leaves us here in the
twentieth century feeling like plastic gulls beating vainly against an
edifice built of a substance of which we have become almost totally
ignorant. Perhaps the ‘reason’ for this weakness can be discerned in the
words of a writer beloved of the Rosicrucians, Valentin Weigel (1533—
1588). In a pamphlet on astrology, he wrote that ‘Everything which is
without is as that which is within, but the internal always excels the
external in essence, virtue and operation, so we bear God within us,
and God bears us in Himself. God hath us with Himself, and is nearer
to us, than we are to ourselves. We have God everywhere with us,
whether we know it, or know it not.’
The ubiquity of the divine, the unexpected encounter with the Har-
monia Mundi are central themes of three works which first appeared
in print in Germany between 1614 and 1616. The Manifestos of the
Rosicrucians, in seeking to communicate their truth through words,
employed a stunning use of drama, aware that the world is indeed (as

146
 THOU ALSO DWELLEST IN ETERNITY

Pico said) a stage and prescient of Brecht’s maxim that ‘realism does
not consist in reproducing reality, but in showing how things really are.’
The plot of the drama was beautifully set out in the first manifesto:
the Fama Fraternitatis which was published in Cassel in 1614. ‘Fama’
means Fame and one must conceive of a female figure blasting forth
with a trumpet so as to announce the Fame of the Rosicrucian Fraternity
and its spiritual power to inaugurate a New Age of Vision.
The Fama told of how a German nobleman, Christian Rosenkreuz,
Christian Rose-Cross, born in 1378, the year of the Great Schism (when
Christendom found herself divided between rival Popes), had left a
monastery with a fellow brother in order to go on a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem, the centre of the Christian dynamic. However, on reaching
Cyprus, the last Christian stronghold before entering the lands of Islam,
Christian’s companion dies and so the youth decides to head south-east
to the land of Arabia Felix, the land of the Sabaeans, to Damcar in the
land of the phoenix: symbol of regeneration. It would seem that Chris¬
tian has realised that reaching Jerusalem would require more of a
disciple of Christ than a ship or an army. Being an open-minded and
open-hearted boy of sixteen, Christian is received by the wise of Damcar
as one long expected and they teach him their mathematics, their physics
and their magic. He is astonished to find how the wise share their
discoveries, how they have created a fraternity of knowledge, without
the oppression of popular mania or state interference. He wishes such
a state existed in Germany. He travels on to Fez, a centre for alchemical
practice and astronomy. He listens and he learns. Perhaps he studies the
Zairagia, for we know that in the sixteenth century Fez contained a
temple where the savants used a method of this name, making a circular
drawing of the universe to ascertain the nature of the invisible, celestial
and elemental spiritual beings who might be communicated with by
an Arabic Cabala. (Today’s equivalent device might be an electron
spectroscope.) The Fama states that Christian made contact with the
‘Elementary Inhabitants’ of Fez: the spirits of the four known elements
with superior knowledge of Nature. The communion of matter and
spirit becomes the inner temple of Christian Rosenkreuz. A deeper
knowledge of Nature will assist in the regeneration of the Christian
Idea, Science and Society. He returns to Europe full of knowledge,
wisdom and the desire to share his discoveries. He finds only rejection,
indifference and hostility. But a few hear his word and form with him
a secret Fraternity with its own special rules. They are to heal the sick,
and, like the Good Samaritan, they are to do so gratis. They must meet
in a special building called The House of the Holy Spirit which none

147
 THE GNOSTICS

but they can see. They are to be transformed so that the world may be
transformed through their knowledge - there, in Wisdom’s ‘seven pil¬
lared worthy house’.
In 1484, at the age of 106 years, Christian dies, but the whereabouts
of his tomb are forgotten. We are informed later that Rosenkreuz is to
be found in ‘a compendium of the universe’. Seekers must look to the
stars. And so it transpires that his tomb is a compendium of the universe.
During a building programme, one of the brothers of the Rose-Cross,
‘a good architect’, comes across a false wall. Breaking it down ‘with joy
and longing’, he and his fellows come across a door on which is written
‘Post annos 120 patebo’. The year is 1604. Much has happened since
the burial of Christian Rosenkreuz. The Christian-Hermetic Gnosis has
been announced and promulgated widely - but it is under attack. It is
time for a new beginning, a second reformation. The following morning
the brothers enter a chamber. It has seven sides and is illuminated by a
source which cannot be seen. The chamber, like the Hermetic Christian,
is lit by an inner sun. About the walls and ceiling are mathematical signs
and inscriptions. It is like a time-capsule, an heptagonal computer
containing the coded knowledge of the Brotherhood, much of which
has been forgotten since the Founder’s death. On a circular altar is a
brass plaque, on which is written in Latin:

This compendium of the universe I made in my lifetime to be my tomb.

Jesus, all things to me.

The lid of the altar is removed to reveal the body of Christian

Rosenkreuz, whole, fair and unconsumed ... ‘he was hidden here by
his disciples for 120 years ... We are born of God, we die in Jesus, we
live again through the holy spirit.’
The author of the Fama is clear about the import of this discovery:
‘we know after a time there will now be a general reformation, both of
divine and human things, according to our desire, and the expectation
of others. For it is fitting, that before the rising of the sun, there should
appear and break forth Aurora, or some clearness, or divine light in the
sky.’
In 1604, such a sign of the times had indeed appeared. The astronomer
Kepler had written a book about it, published in Prague in 1606. Two
new stars had appeared in the constellations of Serpentarius and Cygnus
and had given form to a trigonus igneus, a fiery triangle, taken by the
wise of the time to be a divine signal, for something. Kepler thought the
phenomenon boded war or the appearance of a new sect. He was moved
to poetry:

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 THOU ALSO DWELLEST IN ETERNITY

It was in March when the red orbs appeared

A birth of unparalleled redness
When the matchless ruby stars were brought forth
The wife a matchless golden girl. ...
(De Stella nova in pede Serpentarii: De Stella incognita Cygni)

The second Rosicrucian manifesto, the Confessio Fraternitatis, the

Confession of the Fraternity (1615), is in no doubt as to the meaning of
this fiery triangle. It is the completion of a series of seven and signifies
a time of revelation of the secrets of heaven and earth before the scroll
of time is finally wound up.
The impact of the Fama Fraternitatis in its printed form was tremen¬
dous. There was a furore. This was not surprising, for the Fama had
wound up with a call to all the pure-hearted and learned men of
Europe to rally about the banner of Fame and seek admission to this
extraordinary Fraternity. It was an act of genius. Thousands believed
the Time had really come. This was it\ The Fraternity claimed to have
more treasure than any European state. They claimed that the making
of gold (materialist alchemy) was as nothing to them compared to the
full visionary scope of their knowledge: the secret of spiritual alchemy,
of transformation, of regeneration. The Fraternity had rediscovered the
Dignity of Man and they were ready to share the discovery with the pure-
hearted (if any could be found). It was only necessary to demonstrate that
pure heart and the Fraternity would know. Soon Germany was awash
with books about the Rose-Cross, pamphlets defending the Fraternity,
examinations opposing it, letters seeking admission to it, considerations
of its import, dire warnings, great hopes. The Manifestos crystallised
the hopes of a generation, heralding a new dawn of brotherhood,
spiritual knowledge, scientific advance. The movement spread to France,
Holland, England, Poland, Bohemia and Italy. Even Rene Descartes, the
prophet of mechanistic rationalism, went in search of the Rosicrucian
Brotherhood.
1616 saw the appearance of another document stemming from the
same mysterious source: the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosen-
kreuz, printed in Strasbourg by Lazarus Zetzner. The Chemical Wedding
was the icing on the cake, a fabulous conception. It described in the
richest possible terms the journey of Christian Rosenkreuz to an
alchemical wedding, a process of purification and transformation in a
secret castle, a magic journey of unforgettable dimensions: the ultimate
revelation of nature and the release of the spirit. The Gnostic credentials
of the Brotherhood were revealed to those with the eyes to see and the

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 THE GNOSTICS

wings to fly. One great apologist for the Rosicrucians, Daniel Mogling
from Ulm, illustrated his Wise Speculation on the Rose Cross (1618)
with a picture of the Invisible College of the Rosicrucians as a kind of
time machine, calling forth the fortunate from the prison of the world
(matter) into an eternal region where Noah’s vessel still stands upon a
mountain, a peak not unlike that of Montsegur. The House of the
Holy Spirit has both wings and wheels. The Rosicrucians could be
anywhere and everywhere. Mogling recommended that those in search
of the community should consult the Imitation of Christ attributed to
the medieval mystic Thomas a Kempis. Seekers sought everywhere
but found the true brothers nowhere. What confusion! What dis¬
appointment. No-one could find the Brothers. Had they fled the earth?
Were they invisible? Had they, like Sebastian Franck’s ecclesia spiri¬
tuals,, been assumed to the supercelestial sphere? What would the
seekers have made of the Gospel of Thomas’s assertion that 'The
kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, but men do not see
it’? Had they not understood the statement of Cusanus (1401-1464) that
‘God is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, circumference
nowhere’? It seemed that the Hermetic Christian had become invisible.
Certainly, this was a Gnostic movement and one of the greatest
Christian jokes of all time - possibly the greatest. A joke, a ludibrium,
theatre with a serious intent. Its creator was a man in touch with his
soul, a brilliant intellect, a practical dreamer, a man who understood
the power and centrality of the creative Imagination. And yet, his theatre
was perhaps too good, too true. We do not know who really understood
it. And many today can still not see the sheer magnificent beauty of it.
But there it is, a parable for those who have not penetrated the mystery
of the kingdom of God, we who are too involved with the theatre of
the world. Its creator laughed and laughed until he was sick of it, his
sense of Truth, the daughter of God, outraged by the acrimony, the
hostility, the absurdity, the danger posed by those who took it all
literally - for even invisibility, as normally understood, is a materialist
concept, and those who were devoted to the spiritual, who did take it
all literally, should have known better. But some people did wake up.
Where did they find the Fraternity?
Meanwhile the Rosicrucian movement is still alive and people are
still finding; Rosicrucianism being a significant part in the quest of the
many and few. The Brothers are everywhere, and nowhere. You can’t
teach consciousness, can you?

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 THOU ALSO DWELLEST IN ETERNITY

The New Age: the origins of the Fraternity

Rosicrucianism represents the confluence of four sjgmiic-ant-ftt reams
which had flowed through the Europe of the sixteenth century. Some¬
times these streams flowed upon the surface, sometimes underground.
They are, firstly, the tradition of medieval mysticism as represented
principally by Ramon Lull (1232-c. 1316), John Ruysbroeck (1293-
1381). Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328), John Tauler {c. 1300-1361) and
Henry Suso (c. 1295—1366). These Platonist mystics looked deeply into
the spiritual nature of man, the inner Christ, and the relations between
the Divine Wisdom (Sophia), Goodness, Power, Light and Love and the
created order.
The second stream was that of Renaissance science and philosophy
(including the Hebrew Qabalah, Magic and Astrology) as represented
principally by Pico, Ficino, Bruno, Dee, Francesco Giorgi (1466-1540)
and the Hermetic tradition in general, including Alchemy whose most
important proto-scientific exponent was undoubtedly Parayelsus (1493-
1541), the first man to systematically introduce chemistry into medicine,
and a Gnostic giant.
The third stream has been described as the ‘Radical Reformation’.
This refers to those Christian reformers who aimed to purify and
spiritualise the Church through a stress on the inner experience of Christ
and the direct communication between the believer and God. They
suffered persecution at the hands not only of the Roman Church but
also at the hands of Lutherans and Calvinists as well. They believed in
the Invisible Church or ecclesia spiritualise in essence independent of
any institutional churches whatsoever: a spiritual fraternity. Among
these radical reformers were Caspar Schwenkfeld (1489-1556), Sebastian
Franck (1499-1542) and their follower Valentin Weigel.
The fourth stream was that of the ongoing Apocalyptic tradition
represente^Tyi host of authors and which directly affected to greater
and lesser degrees all of the above. Apocalyptic means for us the
revelation of the hidden (the kingdom of God), the closed {as in books),
the secret (the occult philosophy). Thus it can apply to the first stream
as the revealing of the nature of man and the spiritual cosmos; to the
second stream as the revelation of the secrets of Nature: the recovery of
the Divine Light from matter; and to the third as the revelation of the
Will of God in history, that is to say, the end of a world and the
beginning of a new one. This is the prophetic stream: the pouring forth of
the poetic mind which sees all time - past, present and future - as one.
Two prophecies which are of especial interest to us are those of
 THE GNOSTICS

Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202) and the two apocryphal books of Esdras
(also called III and IV Ezra). The Joachite historical order has been a
perennial theme of New Age enthusiasm, neatly breaking down Time
into three periods: that of the Father (the rule of Law), the Son (Faith
and the Gospel) and finally the Age of the Holy Spirit (spiritual liberty -
sometimes called social freedom - love and joy). The scheme has many
variants (for example, successive Aeons of Father, Mother, Child) and
can be seen in psychological terms as the coming to awareness of the
individual within the whole (holy) life of Anthropos, the Cos¬
mic Humanity. As such, the Apocalypse is an inner experience which
prophets of all time have attempted to project into Time, causing great
ructions within the fabric of history. It is really all about growing up. It
is this universal characteristic which enables the scheme to be constantly
repeated. It is by no means a stranger to our own times. But we must
also be aware that Time is a kind of trick, in Platonic terms: an image
of eternity, relative and not absolute. Beware of the determined ‘end of
the worlder’ for we are children of eternity, not of time. God is a spirit
and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and in Truth.
The books of Esdras were used with great frequency in the sixteenth
century to supply a sacred authority for the coming New Age and its
political ramifications: the defeat of the double-headed eagle (a feature
of Esdras and taken to be an allegory for the Catholic Habsburg Empire)
by the lion of righteousness (the reformed Christian):

As for faith, it shall flourish, corruption shall be overcome, and the truth,
which hath been so long without fruit, shall be declared. {11 Esdras VI.28)

This was precisely the message which John Dee ‘sanctified as a prophet
of the Lord’ (as his diary records) brought to Germany, Poland and
Bohemia and preached before the Emperor Rudolphus II at Prague in
the feverish 1580s. His guide, he believed, was the angel Uriel, the
principal angel of the Books of Esdras. It has been thought that Dee
was on a secret mission for Queen Elizabeth I. There was nothing secret
about it in the political sense. The secrecy surrounded Dee’s entertaining
of supernatural agencies which he believed appeared in a shewstone,
admission to which was limited to influential persons of court. It should
be said that Dee did prophesy heavy judgements against Bohemia should
the Christian message of salvation be ignored, and of course Prague was
to become the ignition-point for the Thirty Years War some thirty-five
years later. Elizabeth and the Emperor were predictably more interested
in Dee’s scryer, Edward Kelley’s claim to have the power to generate
gold through alchemy. Inflation was rife. While Dee returned home to

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 THOU ALSO DWELLEST IN ETERNITY

obscurity, Kelley was knighted by Rudolphus in the hope of gaining

enormous wealth. He had better listened to Dee alone. Rudolphus
eventually went mad and Kelley was killed trying to escape the gaol
where his patron had placed him.

Then shall they be known, who are my chosen; and they shall be tried as
the gold in the fire. {11 Esdras XV/.73)

In the books of Esdras the New Age is seen as a cosmic birth:

Go thy way to a woman with child, and ask of her when she hath fulfilled
her nine months, if her womb may keep the birth any longer within her.

These two passages can be usefully compared to the famous line of

the Fanta Fraternitatis:

Also we do promise more gold than both the Indies bring to the King of
Spain; for Europe is with child and will bring forth a strong child, who
shall stand in need of a great godfather’s gift.

It would take a genius of a peculiar kind to bring all of this together.

Who was he?
It is a feature of great minds that they desire synthesis, unity; that
they can bring together what has long been scattered and demonstrate
co-inherence. The doctrine of trinitas is an obvious example (3 = 1
explicated), the Hieroglyphic Monad of John Dee another. The concept
of the infinite universe as a projection of the Divine Mind had received
a tremendous impulse from the Hermetic Philosophy as we have seen
in previous chapters, giving form to Giordano Bruno’s immanent and
eternal Monad and to hopes for its necessary corollary: a new social
order such as that expressed by Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639)
while in prison in Naples c. 1602. Campanella’s ideal society was ex¬
pressed in his Utopian classic The City of the Sun: a Golden Age
Hermetic Republic of Solarians ruled over by benevolent Hermetic
priests according to magia naturalis (natural law together with Christian
sacraments).
Social idealists joined with alchemists in the search for the lapis
philosophorum, the philosopher’s stone: the unifying transformative
principle of Nature, that mercurial spirit which brings forth gold from
matter, the essence of being itself. It was supposed by the alchemists to
be found everywhere but remained secret simply because it was almost
universally unseen. ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by
him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own
received him not.' {John 1. 10-11) The Nag Hammadi gospels identify
this principle with the ‘living Jesus’, Blake with the Imagination. The

153
 THE GNOSTICS

German alchemist Heinrich Khunrath (1520—1605), a disciple of Para¬

celsus, went in search of the Stone where his master bade him - into the
great open Book of Nature, the liber mundi, the Book of the Universe
‘written with the finger of God.’
Khunrath saw himself as a man apart, communing only with fellows
of an inner brotherhood. He wrote: ‘when ye my contemporaries were
idly dozing, I was watching and at work, meditating earnestly day and
night on what I had seen and learned; sitting, standing, recumbent, by
sunshine, by moonshine, by banks, in meadows, streams, woods and
mountains.’ In such places he found that ‘the Divine Breath is still
operative, the divine and unfailing promise of Christ has not been
broken. Even to those who cannot read and write, so cannot study from
books, is this grace still given.’
Khunrath aimed to find Christ, the living principle of communication
between, and the potential unity of God and man, through the natural
revelation. The discovery for him was apocalyptic, an opening of heaven
on earth. Christ for Khunrath is the Lapis Philosophorum, the rejected
stone of the spiritual Temple of inner transformation. The hidden stone
is God, the missing link, rejected of men, blind to the knowledge that
through and in Him the leaden vision of matter is transformed into the
pure gold of divine light: 7 am the light which is in the light’ declares
the Master of the Nag Hammadi library, found in a jar in the earth.
Man himself is the buried jar awaiting resurrection. He is the alchemical
vessel of transmutation. In him sleeps the gold, encircled by a dragon
who clings to his tail, awaiting the purification of spiritual fire. Khunrath
and his fellows could see how Christ brought fire out of the cosmos,
flames about the heads of the truly inspired, the eternal coming of the
wholly Spirit.
I have cast fire upon the world and see, l am guarding it until it blazes!
Hear the cry of the world, perpetually burned by Fire ... purified,
catharized, transformed, liberated.

Tubingen - The Truth will make you Free

There was a group of men in Tubingen in the German duchy of
Wiirttemberg who saw the kind of society necessary to encourage the
illuminated mind to go forth into Nature, the explicate Mind. They
were aware that the science of the sixteenth century everywhere dem¬
onstrated the principle of Unity, of cosmic Harmony. The Stone lay, as
it were, all about them, everywhere — everywhere that is, but in the
hearts of men. There they could see bitterness, hatred, religious conflict,

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 THOU ALSO DWELLEST IN ETERNITY

social snobbery, blind provincialism, pettiness, wilful prejudice, gross

stupidity, corruption, rottennness, indolence, superficiality, duplicity,
envy, strife of every kind. If the coming One was to come from the being
of Man, a new society would be necessary which could encourage the
regeneration of the human being. The author of the Fama believed that
such a society already existed in its ideal form but that the full and
deeper implications of its existence remained unseen. That society was
nothing less than the Fraternitas Christie the true followers of Christ.
Only the spiritual church welcomed Truth whereso’er they encountered
her.
For the author of the Fama writing in 1617, Truth, the beautiful
daughter of God, had been mutilated, scarred and her body dumped in
a tomb tragically unlike that of Christian Rosenkreuz, laid to rest and
ignored by self-proclaimed Christians for a hundred years. He now
believed her time had come. It was time for an exhumation.
Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654) was the grandson of Jacob
Andreae, a pioneer of the Lutheran Reformation whose seventh son,
Johann, became a Lutheran pastor with a strong interest in alchemy -
an interest which Martin Luther himself had advocated. The family
crest consisted of a red ‘St Andrew’s’ cross with roses between the cross’s
arms. Johann’s son, Johann Valentin, was a dreamy, humorous and
sensitive child who would himself follow his father into the theological
ministry. It would take a strong sense of humour to look squarely into
the face of a century of Lutheran reformation only to realise that it
had been betrayed by factionalism and doctrines which had failed to
regenerate the hearts of ‘Christians’. Andreae realised that significant
changes cannot be administered externally unless there is an inward
transformation which enables man to receive them. This was where
ecclesiastical law had let the Christian Gospel down. A second Refor¬
mation was necessary. This time all knowledge would come into its
purview and this time the change would have to come from within. The
House of the Holy Spirit was about to open her doors. Sophia the lady
of the stars, the divine wisdom, the Fame of the Fraternity was about
to blow a fanfare which would shake the continent.
Thanks to the recent brilliant research of European scholars such as
Carlos Gilly and Roland Edighoffer, we can now be almost certain that
Johann Valentin Andreae wrote a document called the Fama Fraterni-
tatis in the first months of 1610. It was to be circulated in manuscript
form to a select number of seekers after the philosopher’s stone and
those concerned with spiritual unity in terms of the Christo-Hermetic
revelation. The Fraternity of the Rose-Cross was a dream shared also

155
 THE GNOSTICS

in the hearts and minds of Andreae’s closest friends among whom were
the spiritual giant Tobias Hess (1568-1614) - very likely the model for
Christian Rosenkreuz - and Christoph Besold (1577-1649), another
senior member of Tubingen of exceptionally wide learning.
One of the first to receive a copy of the Fama (from the house of ‘a
doctor of Tubingen’ - without any doubt Tobias Hess) was Prince
Augustus von Anhalt whose castle was at Plotzkau near Magdeburg in
north-eastern Germany. Augustus was in touch with a great under¬
ground movement of alchemists, Hermetic scholars and spiritual Christ¬
ians (torch-carriers for the endangered Renaissance) as well as fellow
nobles such as the Landgrave Moritz von Hessen and Duke Frederick
of Wiirttemberg. The full extent of this network is only now coming to
light. It is creating an extraordinary picture. In the castle of Augustus
von Anhalt was a secret printing-press - secret because he was supposed
to be an orthodox Calvinist and the works printed at Plotzkau were
not. He thus contributed to the underground transmission of such
condemned authors as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Franck and their followers
who had begun to seek alchemico-magical expressions of the earlier
radical spiritual movements. Dr Carlos Gilly has discovered in Hannover
a folio of over 1,000 pages with notes by Anhalt’s agent Carl Widemann
(formerly secretary to the Prague-based Edward Kelley, before the lat¬
ter’s fall in 1595) covering the years 1610-1630. There are many letters
from Augustus von Anhalt to Carl Widemann covering the years 1611-
1614. In one of these letters Augustus writes to Widemann that he has
received a copy of the Fama and might be interested in printing it but
is still unsure of its veracity. He asks Widemann or Widemann’s friend,
the alchemist and notary-public to the Archduke Maximilian, Adam
Haslmayr, to write an answer to it. It is hoped by Augustus that a pure-
hearted response will elicit the appearance of a genuine Rose-Cross
brother. Prince Augustus von Anhalt is hooked.
The scene changes to Heilegenkreuz in the Tyrol. The year is 1612.
Adam Haslmayr writes the first known response to the manuscript Fama
(1612). He compares the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross to the Jesuits,
declaring that the Rosicrucians are the true Society of Jesus and that
their ‘appearance’ is a sign that the old world has come to an end. The
Jesuit Guarinoni tricks Haslmayr into arrest at Innsbruck and he is led
in chains to Genoa where he is made a galley-slave on the run between
Genoa and Messina. He will be released in 1616 in a deal involving
Augustus von Anhalt and Antonio dei’ Medici. While in the galley Adam
Haslmayr writes a commentary on John Dee’s Monas Flieroglyphica
which he accidentally drops into the sea ...

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 THOU ALSO DWELLEST IN ETERNITY

Before his arrest, Haslmayr had given his papers (including, doubtless,
the manuscript of the Fama) to Benedictus Figulus, Paracelsian alchemist
and editor of the second edition of Khunrath’s Ampbitheatrum Sapi-
entiae Aeternae (first published in 1598), a man described by Andreae
as ‘an adventurer and a charlatan’ and a friend or acquaintance of
Tobias Hess, the great Paracelsus-influenced doctor, lawyer, theologian
and co-author of the Confessio Fraternitatis. Figulus himself was made
subject to an arrest warrant at Freiburg. (It should be noted that there
were influential persons who believed that followers of Paracelsus should
be executed.) He fled to Marburg where he deposited his manuscripts
with Raphael Eglin, a favourite alchemist of the Landgrave Moritz von
Hessen who was based at Cassel. Haslmayr’s manuscripts are now with
those of Eglin at Cassel. Cassel’s printer, Wilhelm Wessel, printed the
Fama Fraternitatis in 1614. A professor from Giessen was probably the
publisher. We do not yet know why this was done. We do know that
by this singular act, the Tubingen circle lost control of the movement
and the furore began.*
Andreae’s outspokenness on the failure (as he saw it) of the Refor¬
mation, the perversion of learning in a corrupt university system, his
ostracism by many of his old friends and academic colleagues, gross
misunderstanding of the Fama and the identification of him with the
‘scandal’ of a Brotherhood which many would choose to see as somehow
Satanic, led him to many statements which disassociated himself from
the fictitious Rosicrucian brotherhood. It was widely thought that the
Rosicrucians were invisible. In the eyes of the world they always would
be - for what are the eyes of the world?
Andreae did not give up the effort of making men see. After his
Rosicrucian period he went on to make explicit his spiritual Christianity
in a series of works which, while not of course having the mystique of
the Fama, did express the most profound and liberating theology. We
are losing a great deal by not having translations of them from the
Latin. The twentieth century has not equalled them in power, let alone
surpassed them in insight. In his own day, most readers preferred the
obscure works of pseudo-Rosicrucian commentators for which there
was a great vogue. Thus, paradoxically, Andreae proved the wisdom of
Christian Rosenkreuz: the learned are perverted; the Truth lies before
them but they do not wish to know; novelty excites while true science
is ignored; the Fraternity remains invisible to the world: blind to the

* Those wishing to know the detailed story should consult Dr Carlos Gilly’s forth¬
coming definitive Bibliography on the original Rosicrucians.

157
 THE GNOSTICS

House of the Holy Spirit and contemptuous of its simple rules of love.
Here was Andreae’s ludibrium, his Joke and the folly of the world: to
go in search of a fictitious Brotherhood and to ignore the infinitely
wealthy fraternity within them. My kingdom is not of this world indeed!

Gnostalgia
It was no doubt inevitable that Andreae’s original idea should at some
time spawn an actual ‘Rosicrucian Brotherhood’. It would be a long
time before it did so. In the meantime, England became a new centre for
‘Rosicrucian’ activity. Robert Fludd (1574-1637), an English Paracelsian
doctor with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Hermetic tradition,
defended the ‘Rosicrucians’ against their enemies between 1616 and
1633 and was joined by the mystic Thomas Vaughan (1622-1695) wk°
published English translations of the Fama and Confessio in 1652.
The author of the Czech prose masterpiece The Labyrinth of the
World and the Paradise of the Heart (1623), Johann Amos Comensky
(Comenius, 1592-1671), enthusiast for the ideal Rose-Cross, encyclo¬
paedist and pedagogue, was welcomed in England in 1641 as a phil¬
osopher who was capable of leading a reform of education and religion
there. While John Milton (1608-1674), Neo-Platonist^and^Hermetic-
C^balist enthusiast, waxed lyrical over the possibility of universal reform
and revolution before the outbreak of Civil War, Comenius wrote the
magnificent Way of Light, full of ideas shared among his friends John
Dury, the Pole Samuel Hartlib and their heroes Sir Francis Bacon
and Johann Valentin Andreae. The Way of Light was published in
Amsterdam in 1668 and was dedicated to the Illuminati of the Royal
Society (founded in 1660) which owed much of its original inspiration
to the ideal of the first non-existent Rosicrucian Fraternity. Comenius
warned the Society, one of the very first exclusively scientific societies
in Europe, that should they use knowledge ofjmind over matter’ for
material ends only and ignore the primary spiritual aspiration and
angelic realms, their work would turn out to be ‘a Babylon turned
upside down, building not towards Heaven but towards Earth.’
Alas!

The Masonic Phase

In 1710, in Breslau in Germany, a work was published which sparked
off new interest in the Rosicrucians: Die wahrhaffte und volkommene
Bereitung des philosophischen Steins der Bruderschaft aus dem Orden

158
 THOU ALSO DWELLEST IN ETERNITY

des Gulden und Rosen Kreutzes. Its author was Samuel Richter, a
Protestant pastor from Silesia and follower of Paracelsus and Jacob
Boehme (1575-1624), the great German gnostic theosopher from Gorlitz.
The work outlined the structure of an organisation, the Gold und
Rosenkreuz which claimed to be in direct lineage from the Fraternity of
Christian Rosenkreuz. It was not the last organisation to do so. In spite
of the claim, the neo-Rosicrucians were quite different in spirit from the
original movement. Alchemy and the secret of transmutation of metals
were now central. A rigorous puritannical Pietism also played a more
significant role. Above all, while Andreae and his followers had seen no
conflict between science and religion, the new movements regarded
themselves as preserving an ancient tradition to which the new mech¬
anical philosophy and growing Aufklarung (Enlightenment so-called)
movement was frequently deemed to be inimical. Many (but by no
means all) of its members were consciously reactionary and would see
the Gold und Rosenkreuz as a weapon to be used, politically if necessary,
against what were, with reason, considered to be dangerous new ideas.
It is highly significant that one of the very first known initiates to
Freemasonry was Elias Ashmole of Lichfield (1617-1692), founder-
member of the Royal Society, Dee enthusiast and would-be Rosicrucian
(he copied out the Fama by hand and penned a fervent prayer of request
to be admitted to the Fraternity). The great Ashmole was initiated at a
country house at Warrington, Lancashire, in 1646. This is significant
because in spite of much research little that is solid can be maintained
as to the history of speculative masonry before the advent of Rosi-
crucianism.(Equally, it cannot yet be established whether Freemasonry
owes its origins to the Rosicrucian movement) What is certain is that
many of Freemasonry’s foremost members have shown great interest in
Rosicrucianism, to the extent of establishing specifically Rosicrucian
grades within the lodge system, particularly on the continent. Obviously
the idea of a fraternity existing beyond racial, and to an extent ideo¬
logical, boundaries is implicit in Rosicrucianism (being Christian), as is
the concept of initiation, spiritual illumination and practical social
idealism. An organisation promoted in secrecy was bound to engender
confusion as to its original history and fundamental intentions, and this
confusion is still shared among many. Christ’s own teaching on the
subject can be seen as ambiguous, while one is enjoined not to ‘hide
one’s light under a bushel’ some activities (such as prayer) are thought
of as best done in private while Jesus reserved some teaching to his
closest disciples. There is of course a difference between privacy and
secrecy. Secrecy can become a cloak for simple fear of persecution and

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 THE GNOSTICS

may become obsessional. The matter is not as simple as some hostile

writers suggest. It must be said that Masonry (in its higher grades) has
not only attempted a revolution within the human-being but in doing
so has kept alive much of the esoteric tradition as well as traditions of
the liberty of man-the-microcosm which might otherwise have perished
through the prejudices of sects (the largest, according to Christoph
Besold, being the world itself) and the raisons d’etat of fearful states
which have failed to see what is sovereign in a sovereignty. Another
Masonry has fallen foul of the rationalist ‘Great Architect’ image of
God (the demiurge). Power corrupts and the Fraternitas Christi has no
truck with the ‘values’ of the world. The risks of using spiritual energies
for worldly gain are plain to see for all but those who so lose their souls
in attempting to save themselves. Be warned!
The first solid evidence for a working Gold und Rosenkreuz organ¬
isation was discovered in Hungary among the archives of the Festetics
family by Ludwig Abafi in 1893. This is a document entitled Aureum
Vellus seu lunoratus Fratrum Rosae Crucis (1761). It shows an hier¬
archical system founded in 1757, influenced by Freemasonry and linked
with the same. 1757 was also the year in which William Blake was born
and the year of inauguration of what the Swedish prophet Emmanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772) thought would be the New Age of spirituality
and the beginning of the end of materialism. Blake’s principal mentors
(other than his own Innocence and Experience) were Boehme, Paracelsus
and in earlier years, Swedenborg.
The aforesaid document outlined the nine grades of Junior, Theor-
eticus, Practicus, Philosophus, Adeptus Minor, Adeptus Major, Adeptus
Exemptus, Magister and Magus. These grades were to form the basis
of grade systems of Masonic or quasi-Masonic Rosicrucian systems
which have continued to the present day. The system presented inherent
problems which have beset such organisations ever since - the greatest
being that of Authority. Much of the mystique relies upon the supposed
existence of secret ‘masters’, or unknown ‘Superiors’ who have separated
themselves from the ties of earth and dwell, if not in the Himalayas, in
other realms of being accessible only to the highest initiates. These
Superiors, later called ‘Secret Chiefs’ seem to be a conflation of the
Gnostic archon theory (and may therefore be demonic), supercelestial
angelic theory and of course those ‘absent’ Brothers of the Rose-Cross
and take the place of the ‘Saints’ of orthodoxy who may be sought for
guidance. The whole picture is clearly adumbrated in The Cloud upon
the Sanctuary by Karl von Eckartshausen (1752-1813), a seminal work
in the development of neo-Gnosticism: ‘Worldly intelligence seeks this

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 THOU ALSO DWELLEST IN ETERNITY

Sanctuary in vain; in vain also do the efforts of malice strive to penetrate

these great mysteries; all is undecipherable to him who is not prepared;
he can see nothing, read nothing in the interior...’
All goes well until there is a scandal or a dispute about the direction
of the Order. At such a time, the Superiors are sought - always in vain -
when, frequently, a mystagogue appears who claims that he or she has
opened a direct line to the new archon and is to be obeyed thereon. This
type of circumstance, coupled with the harrassment of rationalist and
politically radical rivals (Adam Weishaupt of Ingolstadt’s Order of
Illuminati), is what led to the effective dissolution of the German Gold
und Rosenkreuz on 7 April 1792. Similar problems would beset Mme
H. P. Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society (founded in 1875) and the famous
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded from out of the Masonic
Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia in 1888 by Dr William Wynn Westcott,
Dr W. R. Woodman and Samuel Liddell Mathers). Strange perhaps that
a conception intended to eradicate the sectarian mentality should be so
frequently haunted by it.

Cosmic Man!
{One can get so bogged down in history that one misses the point. The
point is to show that the Gnosis is with us always and if it is evidence
you require, then there is no shortage of it) The shortcomings of
the Gnostic organisations as organisations should not blind us to the
incalculable wealth of insight which people have gained therefrom. It is
rather like looking at a list of names on a war-memorial: Who were
they? Where did they come from? Where did they go? Suffice to say,
they were there.
Martines de Pasqually, founder of the Elect Cohens, flourished in the
1760s and 1770s - he was there. His disciple (as in discipline): Louis-
Claude de Saint Martin (1743-1803), ‘le Philosophe Inconnu’ - he was
there too. Saint Martin, much influenced by Jacob Boehme, taught that
the ideal society would be a theocracy governed by men chosen by God.
Where is ‘God’? Saint Martin wrote a book, Des Erreurs et de la verite
(1775), which was read from Moscow to the Atlantic. He saw how man
languishes in misery, cut off from ‘the one source of light and the only
aid for living beings.’ He decried materialists whose system ‘reduces
human beings to a lower level than the beasts.’ Plus fa change.
Alphonse-Louis Constant (1810-1875) wrote many popular books
under the name Eliphas Levi which attempted to redefine gnostic magic
in terms acceptable both to science and romanticism (the philosophical
 THE GNOSTICS

essence of which is plainly gnostic: redemption through penetrating

nature by Primary Imagination - the meeting of mind and Mind). Levi
had many followers, which is to say, he inspired many.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), neo-Rosicrucian adept and founder of
Anthroposophy brought the Gnosis to agriculture (as eco-awareness
pioneer), education, banking, sculpture, architecture and drama. He
was there too.
The roll is growing all the time - not a memorial at all, but a living
tradition.
As our century reaches its climax, we can see how the Gnostic
tradition has come rolling into our own times.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) applies gnosis to psychology and finds
Freud’s attic-unconscious is rather an infinite pregnant universe of life-
giving symbol. His work has saved the faith of many in a century of
unparalleled horrors and hopes.
John Lennon (1940-1980), garlanded thunderbird of a more optimistic
post-war generation came to cast aside his worldly crown and identify
himself with the Gnostic tradition. It explains a good deal about him,
his magic, his genuine inspiration and the rejection and perplexity which
he endured and caused. In his brilliantly funny surrealist collection,
Skywriting by Word of Mouth (published in 1986), he wrote in a chapter
entitled The Mysterious Smell of Roses:
It’s the same with the Christians (so called). They’re so busy condemning
themselves and others, or preaching at people, or worse, still killing for
Christ. None of them (sic) understanding, or trying in the least, to behave
like a Christ. It seems to me that the only true Christians were (are?) the
Gnostics, who believe in self-knowledge, i.e., becoming Christ themselves,
reaching the Christ within. The Light is the Truth. All any of us are
trying to do is precisely that: Turn on the Light. All the better to see you
with, my dear.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), a sort of unwitting Fama
of the eighties (one suspects the wit and wisdom of continental Masons
was behind it all) has introduced, by a somewhat tortuous route,
thousands to some kind of knowledge or acquaintance with the Gnosis.
It is a pity about the authors’ final interpretation - sensational certainly
but delightfully ludicrous. The ‘Holy Blood’ is the Gnosis, running
through the veins of history. The ‘Holy Grail’ in this context is, as any
serious alchemist might tell you, Man himself: the vessel of trans¬
mutation. Easy. Easy? It needed the ‘mystery’ element to attract people.
(Poussin’s tomb.) Plain truth is, like the philosopher’s stone, (Et in
Arcadia Ego ...) too ‘common’ to be picked up. I am sad to say that

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 THOU ALSO BWELLEST IN ETERNITY

the tomb identified with Poussin’s Arcadian shepherds painting was

demolished in April 1988. By whom? Thus does the legend continue!
All that glitters is not Gold ...
Where is the Gold?

‘I can say to you that perhaps I found the key that you find also in the
Bible: Look for the kingdom of God, and you will receive everything. I
found the kingdom of God everywhere: in human beings, in nature,
looking up on the stars - and I found it also in ... myself.’

These are the words of Dutch businessman and Gnostic, Joost

Ritman. Here in the nineties, as I write, Mr Ritman (a member of
the Dutch Lectoriurn Rosicrucianum), is bringing together the written
records of the Gnosis from the last 2,000 years in a great venture, the
Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam. The Gnostic Library
is now finally out of the Jar! Now it can enjoy the open day once
more. The Hermetic Philosophy Library is opening up the tradition to
thousands in the east and west through the media of exhibitions, books,
symposia and films. It is an amazing achievement - and this is just the
beginning!
In the beginning was the Word - still here, there and, like the true
Rosicrucian Fraternity, everywhere.

163
 Appendix One

Chronology
C.417-347 BC Lifetime of Plato.
C. AD 30 Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
c. 30-60 Activity of Paul.
c. 50 Simon Magus in Samaria.
c. 70-80 Composition of Gospels of Luke and Matthew.
c. 90-100 Composition of Gospel of John.
C. IOO? Original form of Apocryphon of John.
Jewish Esotericism - Merkabah (Throne) Mysticism.
c. 120-130 Carpocrates in Alexandria(P) Basic elements of some Nag
Hammadi works: Exegesis on the soul; Sophia of Jesus
Christ; Apocalypse of Adam; Hypostasis of the Archons;
Gospel of Thomas-, Apocryphon of James; Apocalypses of
James.
c. 130 Gnostics in Rome.
143 Expulsion of Valentinus from Church in Rome.
c. 150? Formulation of Poimandres (Corpus Hermeticum I).
c. 150-115 Clement of Alexandria.
c. 150-225 Tertullian
c. 150 The Golden Ass - autobiographical novel of Apuleius of
Madaura; describes mystical initiation into cult of Isis.
c. 160 Death of Valentinus.
177 Persecution of Christians instigated by Marcus Aurelius
Caesar. Martyrs of Lyon and Vienne.
180 Composition of Refutation and Subversion of knowledge
falsely so-called, by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons.
205-270 Plotinus, Neoplatonist philosopher. In his Enneads he
writes against Gnostics who condemn the world. Being
distant from the source of divine being, we should not be
surprised at imperfection of world, argues Plotinus. Some
Gnostic Hermetists in basic agreement with this.
216 Mani born in Babylonia.
c. 228 First vision of Mani.

164
 APPENDIX ONE

240 Mam receives call to be ‘Apostle of Light’.

c. 320 Founding of Coptic monasteries by Pachomius.
32-5 Creed of Nicaea defines orthodox belief at instigation of
Emperor Constantine I.
c. 350 Nag Hammadi Codices collected.
356 Athanasius in hiding among monks of Upper Egypt.
361-363 Reign of Emperor Julian the Apostate, who attempted to
revive paganism with solar symbolism as a unifying factor.
367 Theodore, head of Pachomian monastery at Tabinnisi near
Nag Hammadi, instructed to read 39th Festal letter of
Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria which condemns her¬
etical books. Possible time of burial of Nag Hammadi
Codices.
373-382 Augustine of Hippo a Manichee ‘hearer’.
375-395 Under Emperor Theodosius I, being a Manichee carries the
death penalty.
719 A Manichee church is built in Peking.
762-840 Manicheism is the state religion of the Uigurs (Chotsko).
834-844 Persecution of Manichees in China.
872 Military victory over Paulicians of Armenia; many of them
move to Balkans.
c. 950 Activity of the Bogomil (Beloved of God) in Bulgaria.
1120 Anti-Manichean edict in China.
1163 Assembly of Catholic bishops at Tours recommends stern
measures against the Cathars of Gascony and Provence.
c. 1172 Cathar council of St. Felix de Caraman, headed by Nicetas
from Constantinople.
Dominic Guzman born at Caleruaga in Castile.
1190 Pope Alexander III pronounces Cathars to be anathema.
1203 Arnold Amaury and Peter of Castelnau, Papal Legates on
mission to convert Cathars and to ensure nobles take action
against them.
c. 1204 Raymond de Pereille rebuilds chateau of Montsegur at
request of local Cathars.
1206 Dominic begins conversion mission, based at Prouille.
Esclarmonde of Foix receives Consolamentum from Guil-
habert de Castres at great gathering of lords at Fanjeaux.
1207 Dominic Guzman and Guilhabert de Castres debate in
Montreal.
1208 15 January - Papal Legate, Peter of Castelnau cut down by
troops of Raymond VI of Toulouse at St. Gilles.
Pope Innocent III issues call to arms.
End of Dominic’s main conversion mission.
1209 Army commanded by Simon de Montfort assembles at
Lyon.

165
 THE GNOSTICS

1210 Siege of Minerve, 22 July. 140 Cathar perfecti burned at

stake.
1215 The Dominican Order of Friar Preachers founded.
1217 First ‘Albigensian Crusade’ ends.
I217-I258 Mongol conquests in Central and Western Asia; end of
Manichean communities.
1220 Guilhabert de Castres ‘Bishop’ of Cathar diocese of
Toulouse.
1221 Dominic Guzman dies.
1226 Crusade against Cathars led by King of France, Louis VIII.
(Saint Louis).
1233 Dominican Order granted right to inquisition by Pope.
I243-44 Siege of Montsegur.
12-44 16 March, 225 Cathar perfecti burned at stake at Mont¬
segur.
1271 Languedoc passes under French crown.
1321 Belibaste - last Cathar to be burned at Villerouge-
Termenes.
I460 Leonardo of Pistoia brings Greek manuscript of Corpus
Hermeticum to Florence from Macedonia.
I463 Giovanni Pico, count of Mirandola, is born.
I47I First printed edition of Ficino’s Latin translation of Divine
Pymander appears.
i486 Pico writes his Oratio as introduction to 900 Theses to be
debated in Florence.
Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim is born.
I487 4 August, Pope Innocent VIII pronounces 13 of these theses
to be heretical. Pico flees.
1494 Pico dies. He is thirty-one.
1533 Agrippa publishes his Three Books of Occult Philosophy.
1535 Henry Cornelius Agrippa dies.
1543 Publication of On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs by
Copernicus.
I548 Giordano Bruno born at Nola by Vesuvius.
1564 John Dee publishes his Monas Hieroglyphica at Antwerp.
I583 Giordano Bruno publishes his On the Infinite Universe and
Worlds.
1600 Bruno burnt at the stake in Rome as an ‘impenitent heretic’.
1608 John Dee dies at Mortlake.
1614 Isaac Casaubon proves that the Corpus Hermeticum was
written in late antiquity and is not therefore pre-Christian.
Rosicrucian Manifestos begin to appear with the Fama
Fraternitatis. Attracts widespread interest.
1615 Confessto Fraternitatis, Rosicrucian Manifesto appears.
1616 The Chemical Wedding, another Rosicrucian manifesto

166
 APPENDIX ONE

appears. Intimations in manifestos of scientific enlighten¬

ment to come of gnostic character.
1618-1624 Jacob Boehme, German shoemaker writing vast array of
intuitively Gnostic works with strong affinities to Jewish
Kabbalah.
I7~i8th Formation in Europe of Lodges of ‘Freemasons’ promising
centuries illumination of cosmic mysteries. Runs underground of
main movements of rationalist ‘enlightenment’. Speedy
developments of mechanical and chemical science.
1757 William Blake born in London.
1785 Gnostic manuscript Pistis Sophia deposited in British
Museum, from fourth or fifth century, discovered by James
Bruce in Luxor. Likely that Blake knew of the discovery.
1793 Blake issues The Book ofUrizen.
1804 Blake issues his epic poem Jerusalem.
1816 Mary Shelley writes first draft of Frankenstein.
1827 William Blake dies.
1875 Theosophical Society founded by Madame H. P. Blavatsky
and others.
Edward Alexander (Aleister) Crowley born in Leamington.
1890s Formation of Hermetic Order of Golden Dawn, headed by
L. MacGregor Mathers.
1934 Hans Jonas completes Vol. I of Gnosis und spatantiker geist
(Gnosis and the spirit of late antiquity).
1945 MuhammadcAli al-Samman and his brothers discover the
‘Nag Hammadi Library’ at Hamra Dum in Upper Egypt
(December).
1952. Gilles Quispel obtains Codex I (Jung Codex) from a middle¬
man in Brussels for 35,000 Swiss francs.
195 5 First major description of discovery: The Jung Codex. A
newly recovered Gnostic papyrus by G. Quispel and H. C.
Puech.
1958 Jean Doresse publishes The Secret Books of the Egyptian
Gnostics with the first published translation of The Gospel
of Thomas, in French.
The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas published.
1959 The Gospel of Thomas published in English.
1966 Colloquium on Origins of Gnosticism held at Messina takes
up initiative of Professor James M. Robinson and others
to press ahead with publication of entire Nag Hammadi
Library.
1970 James Marshall Hendrix, musician and composer dies in
London. A few hours before dying he writes in a last lyric:
‘The story is written/by so many people who dared,/to lay
down the truth/to so very many who cared/to carry the

167
 THE GNOSTICS

cross/of Jesus and beyond/We will gild the light/this time

with a woman/in our arms.’
1971 James Douglas Morrison, composer and poet, dies in Paris.
1972 First photographic edition of Nag Hammadi Library avail¬
able.
1975 ‘Jung Codex’ (Codex I) ‘returned’ to the Coptic Museum,
Cairo, where lies the Nag Hammadi Library.
1977 E. J. Brill of Leiden publish the Nag Hammadi Library in
English which is edited by Professor James M. Robinson
and translated by a ‘group’ of international scholars.
1980 John Lennon shot to death in New York City.
1984 Library of J. R. Ritman institutionalized in Amsterdam,
the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica which contains the
story of the Gnosis in first editions and modern works.
1987 Television series on the subject of the Gnosis is made for
Channel 4 Television in UK, 1,620 years after the order
to read the 39th Festal Letter of Bishop Athanasius of
Alexandria, condemning heretical books.

168
 Appendix Two

The Nag Hammadi Library

Contains 13 codices (books), the first eleven of which were bound in leather
covers. Codex 13 contains only sixteen pages which were slipped into another
codex before the discovery. Codex 12 is also very thin and it would seem that
Muhammade Ali’s mother may have burned the remainder if it had not already
been lost at the time of the discovery. Readers who wish to examine the contents
in their fullness are advised to gain access to a copy of The Nag Hammadi
Library, translated into English under the Editorship of James M. Robinson,
published by E. J. Brill of Leiden.
There follows a list of the contents of the library with a very brief note as
to their contents. Those texts quoted in this book are marked by an asterisk.

Codex One (The (Jung Codex')

1. Prayer of the Apostle Paul
A pseudonymous prayer attributed to Paul employing echoes of New Test¬
ament language. Paul asks Jesus Christ to ‘redeem my eternal light-soul and
spirit’.
2. The Apocryphon of James*
Apocryphon means a secret book and this one conveys secret teaching given
by the Saviour to the Apostle James after the Resurrection.
3. The Gospel of Truth*
A beautiful and poetic work by an unnamed Gnostic teacher, thought to be
Valentinus by some scholars. The writer expounds the meaning of Jesus’
life and death. The work contains the famous ‘nightmare passage’ which is
quoted at the beginning of Chapter Two of this book. The Gnostic emerges
from a world of paranoiac illusion into the pure realm of spirit and con¬
sciousness.
4. The Treatise on the Resurrection
A Valentinian work also known as the ‘Letter to Rheginos’ expounds the
spiritual meaning of the resurrection: ‘What, then, is the resurrection ... it
is more fitting to say that the world is an illusion, rather than the resurrection
which has come into being through Our Lord the Saviour.’

169
 THE GNOSTICS

5. The Tripartite Tractate

Contents show some kinship to the thought of the Valentinian school. A
difficult work which attempts to incorporate thought on the creation of
human beings, spiritual reality and the three-fold division of men into hylic
(material), psychic (unperfected soul) and pneumatic (spiritual) types.

Codex Two
1. The Apocryphon of John*
A work of this name was known to Irenaeus. It is in a sense a Gnostic
commentary on the first chapters of Genesis and it rejects the ‘Elohim’ (a
name given to God(s) in Genesis) as being a deceiver of men who with his
archons has blinded man from knowledge of his true identity. Man was
made to ‘drink water of forgetfulness’. The Saviour wakes people up and is
able to defeat the amnesia-inducing operation of ‘Yaltabaoth’ (God of
Genesis). Things are ‘not as Moses said’ (Moses was thought to have written
Genesis).
2. The Gospel of Thomas*
An important collection of sayings attributed to the ‘living Jesus’, some of
which are very like sayings of Jesus in the New Testament and it may be
that some of* them are contemporaneous with canonical gospel sources.
3. The Gospel of Philip*
Like the other ‘gospels’ in the collection, they convey ‘good news’ for the
Gnostic but do not convey information about the life of Jesus prior to the
Resurrection. This gospel contains much philosophy and many pleasing or
interesting aphorisms suggesting a highly tuned mind on the part of the
author who is also blessed with humour. Some might say it is a clever work
by a know-all - and perhaps the author would be flattered. ‘Adam came
into being from two virgins, from the Spirit and from the virgin earth.
Christ, therefore, was born from a virgin to rectify the fall which occurred
in the beginning.’ Only when the light flows forth from all shall the slaves
be free.
4. The Hypostasis of the Archons (Reality of the Rulers)
The Gnostics were in no doubt as to ‘who was running the show’. The
Archons want to keep the Light to themselves or stamp it out altogether -
which they cannot do. The Archons, ruled by ‘Samael’ or ‘Sakla’ (Lool) are
held to be very real and their existence casts a pall over temporal life - but
they will not last. The Children of the Light will be set free.
5. On the Origin of the World
Originally untitled, this work conforms to the title given to it. The Gnostic
world-view is laid out in essay form.
6. The Exegesis on the Soul
A mythology of the journey via degradation of the soul. ‘Wise men of old
gave the soul a feminine name.’ The soul is made prostitute to the world
but can be redeemed. The treatise contains quotations from the Old and
New Testaments and from the Odyssey of Homer.
 APPENDIX TWO

7. The Book of Thomas the Contender*

An uncompromising work which pits Gnosis against the ‘bit’ of the world
which leads men on down the stream of unconsciousness until ‘it has fettered
them’. We are to have wings to fly above the shame and degradation of
worldly death-life.

Codex Three
1. The Apocryphon of John
A shorter version of the aforementioned work.
2. The Gospel of the Egyptians
A most esoteric work which employs now undecipherable symbolism and
imagery. A sense of incomprehensible ecstasy pervades.
3. Eugnostos, the Blessed
A description of the unknown God and the primal ‘Son of Man’ who is
androgynous. This is not a Christian work and testifies thereby to the
existence of non-Christian Gnosis which is, in the following work, seen to
interpenetrate the thought of Christian Gnostics.
4. The Sophia of Jesus Christ
‘Sophia’ means Wisdom, and the Christian Gnostic feels able to claim Christ
as the origin of non-Christian Gnosis, though this is not explicit in the text.
The disciples pose questions and the Wisdom of Jesus in the flesh answers -
perhaps not to our satisfaction.
5. The Dialogue of the Saviour
Fragmentary account of Jesus answering the big questions which the disciples
now feel able to ask him following the resurrection. Jesus talks about the
origin of the universe, the nature of the heavenly world and material per¬
taining to salvation. The disciples now exclaim their delight at understanding
the real meaning behind some of the canonical parables.

Codex Four
1. The Apocryphon of John
Another copy. This work must have been very popular among
Gnostics.
2. The Gospel of the Egyptians
Again, another copy - with some textual variants.

Codex Five
1. Eugnostos the Blessed
Very similar to the aforementioned text.
2. The Apocalypse of Paul
Rather fragmentary account of Paul’s journey to the ‘tenth heaven’. Clearly
inspired by Paul’s account of a journey to the third heaven in II Corinthians,
 THE GNOSTICS

this text takes him and the reader all the way. He is led by a small child (the
Logos?) through the heavens. At the seventh, he has to talk his way on by
answering correctly a question put to him by an old man clothed in white.
Paul says, ‘I am going to the place from which I came.’ On passing to the
tenth heaven, ‘I greeted my fellow spirits,’ says ‘Paul’.
3. The First Apocalypse of James*
Describes a discussion between Jesus and James the Just, both before and
after the Crucifixion. James says he has been concerned for Jesus but Jesus
says the Crucifixion was in reality, only an appearance and that he is glorified
by it, not degraded. ‘James’ says of Jesus:

You have come with knowledge,

that you might rebuke their forgetfulness.
You have come with recollection,
that you might rebuke their ignorance.

4. The Second Apocalypse of James

A collection of poetic and hymnic words delivered by the redeemer who is
Jesus via James to the Gnostic community.
5. The Apocalypse of Adam
‘Seth’ is the bearer of redemptive gnosis in this non-Christian work which
describes the paradise of Adam and Eve and the fall into ignorance and
illusion. They are rescued by three men who reveal the fate that awaits the
children of Seth in the future. This work can be used to illustrate the
argument that early Gnosticism develops out of Jewish Apocalyptic gnosis
prevalent at the time of Jesus and for two or three hundred years before
Him. Apocalyptic revelatory gnosis demands that the author be taken up or
that he makes an ascent to the source of the divine will where the future is,
as it were, made.

Codex Six
1. The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles
An account of a sea voyage by Peter and his fellow disciples relates a meeting
with a pearl peddler who, it transpires, is Jesus. As a peddler, Jesus was not
recognized by the rich men of the city but is ‘glorified in the churches’.
2. The Thunder: Perfect Mind
In a state of ‘perfect mind’ which erupts into the cosmos of the author, he
writes a series of paradoxical statements made by and about the person of
a female figure, presumably a projection of the divine Spirit. Much food for
thought here. Strangely akin to Jung’s work of self-therapy in a period of
dislocation: ‘Seven Sermons to the Dead’, which was written under the
pseudonym of ‘Basilides’ a Gnostic teacher in second century Alexandria.
3. Authoritative Teaching
The plight of the soul in a hostile world is here adumbrated in image and
symbol.
172
 APPENDIX TWO

4. The concept of Our Great Power

A series of catastrophes are described from which the redeemed souls shall
be preserved; while ‘we have acted according to our birth in the flesh, in the
creation of the archons, which gives law’. ‘We have also come to be in the
unchangeable aeon.’
5. Plato’s Republic
Extremely fragmentary, appallingly translated extract from Plato’s dark
masterpiece (588b - 589b).
6. On the Eighth and Ninth*
A dialogue whereby Hermes Trismegistos guides his ‘son’ (pupil) in the
ascent to heavenly spheres of perception and understanding, and knowledge:
‘For thy love has reached us.’ ‘Right, O my son.’
7. The Prayer of Thanksgiving*
Hermetic prayer of thanksgiving for illuminations gratefully received. Also
known in Greek and Latin versions. Part of the cultic liturgy of Hermetic
coteries?
8. Asklepios*
This extract from the Dialogue of Hermes &c Asklepios is very important.
Formerly, it was known only in a corrupt Latin version (translation attri¬
buted to Apuleius of Madaura). This extract contains the extraordinary
lament for a barbarized world where formerly men delighted in the ‘many
formed vision of God’. This was to deeply touch a fifteenth-century Florence
where men attempted to rebuild the antiquity referred to, as they saw it.
Furthermore, the appearance of the Hermetic works in the Nag Hammadi
Library reinforces the conviction that Hermetism is gnostic and cannot be
excluded from that study.

Codex Seven
1. The Paraphrase of Shem
According to Frederick Wisse, this work can greatly contribute to an under¬
standing of New Testament Christology (the nature of Christ’s person and
work). It is non-Christian and possibly pre-Christian in origins and describes
saving gnosis being given to the children of Shem by one Derdekeas who
descends from the Light having taken pity on the entrapped light within the
spiritual descendants of Shem. Shem is the narrator and describes the conflict
between Light and Darkness and Spirit. Derdekeas experiences the hostility
of the world of Darkness but goes unrecognised because he puts on the
‘beast’, doubtless the body. The elect are saved.
2. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth*
A Christian Gnostic text which amongst other things has Jesus explaining
that it was not He who was put to death on the cross, but another. It only
seemed that he suffered to the hylic (material) eye. Spiritual vision would
have beheld the true nature of the event - a victory over the archons. Jesus
was ‘rejoicing over all the wealth of the archons’. Within the work is a
description of true Gnostic fellowship which begs repetition here:

173
 THE GNOSTICS

‘I was among those who are united in the friendship of friends forever, who
neither know hostility at all, nor evil, but who are united by my Knowledge in
word and peace which exists in perfection with everyone and in them all. And
those who assumed the form of my type will assume the form of my word.
Indeed, these will come forth in light forever, and (in) friendship with each other
in the spirit, since they have known in every respect (and) indivisibly that what
is is One.

3. The Apocalypse of Peter*

Here we find the ‘laughing Saviour’ explaining to Peter what really happened
at the crucifixion. The work suggests the existence of a Gnostic church
having difficulty in surviving, opposed by orthodox bishops. The writer
envisions Jesus who says, encouragingly: ‘And there shall be others of those
who are outside our number who name themselves bishop and also deacons,
as if they have received their authority from God. They bend themselves
under the judgement of the leaders. Those people are dry canals.’ Dry canals.
One can imagine what this term would mean to a thirsty man dwelling in
a parched Egypt. I suppose today’s equivalent expression would be empty
banks.
4. The Teachings of Silvanus
A philosophical work, acceptable to Gnostics but not for them in particular,
it gives recommendations on how to subdue the senses of the body and to
find guidance from a teacher of light, Christ. God is difficult to know except
through his ‘image’ and one is reminded of the Hermetic master-phrase:
‘The world is the image of God.’
5. The Three Steles of Seth
Non-Christian Sethian Gnostic work contains hymns presumably employed
by the sect as aids to meditation.

Codex Eight
1. Zostrianos
A work of this name was known to Porphyry in the third century. This text
is extremely fragmentary but if one ‘reads between the spaces’ one can detect
a revelatory journey to Zostrianos by an angel of knowledge and others.
1. The Letter of Peter to Philip
Pseudonymous ‘letter’ introduction soon reveals itself as typical Gnostic
revelation discourse.

Codex Nine
1. Melchizedek
Gnostics and apocalyptic writers always loved the shadowy and mysterious
persons who appear in ancient religious writing. Melchizedek, king of Salem
(Peace), played host to Abraham. According to Psalm cx.4 he was a ‘priest
forever’, and such an eternal type was sure to give rise to speculation, some
of which is to be found in the canonical Epistle to the Hebrews where Christ

174
 APPENDIX TWO

is seen as the absolute high-priest who has effected the ultimate sacrifice. In
this Gnostic work, Melchizedek is privy to heavenly messages which cul¬
minate in him seeing himself in the role of Jesus Christ as triumphant victor
over ‘Death’. The author seems to identify the Gnostic with Melchizedek:
‘When the brethren who belong to the generations of life had said these
things, they were taken up to (the regions) above all the heavens.’
2. The Thought ofNorea
A short poetic work describing a female entity, Norea, within the Pleroma,
among Logos and Nous.
3. The Testimony of Truth
The ‘true testimony’ that is as against other groups both Gnostic and
orthodox. Only for those who ‘hear not with the ears of the body but with
the ears of the mind.’

Codex Ten
1. Marsanes
Very badly damaged. This work was also known to Porphyry, follower of
Plotinus, or at least a work of this name. It contains or did contain a grand
description of the heavenly world - the kind of thing a magician in particular
might wish to know. Birger A. Pearson sees it as having affinities to Neo¬
platonism and thinks it might represent a shift away from a rigidly dualist
position to the projecting monism of Neoplatonism.

Codex Eleven
1. The Interpretation of Knowledge
A sermon with a Valentinian colouring. According to Elaine Pagels: ‘Strik¬
ingly, this teacher develops an interpretation of knowledge rather similar to
that of Paul in I Corinthians XIII or even of I John. Unlike Paul or the author
of I John, however, this teacher offers a specifically Gnostic interpretation,
implying that those who show jealousy and hatred betray their resemblance
to the jealous and ignorant demiurge, while those who show love dem¬
onstrate the love of God the Father and of his Word.’
2. A Valentinian Exposition
This work contains detailed exposition of Valentinian thought regarding
the eucharist, anointing and baptism and gives us an insiders-look into
Valentinian church prayer practice. The sacraments are vehicles for coming
to understand the mystery of Christ and Life itself.
3. Allogenes
The title means ‘alien’ or ‘stranger’ and thereby expresses the fundamental
attitude of the Gnostic to the material world as material. Allogenes gives
his pupil Messos an esoteric disclosure of the Unknown.
4. Hypsiphrone
This is too fragmentary to say anything about it other than that it is a
revelation discourse given by ‘She of High Mind’.

175
 THE GNOSTICS

Codex Twelve
i. The Sentences of Sextus
This a Greek work here translated into Coptic which offers wisdom sayings
chiefly aimed at mastering the passions. Much would be music to the ear of
the Gnostic: ‘Do not wish to speak in a crowd about God ... Know who
God is, and know who is the one who thinks in you; a good man is the good
work of God.’
z. The Gospel of Truth
A short fragment of the aforementioned work.
3. Unidentified fragments

Codex Thirteen
1. Trimorphic Protennoia
The Protennoia, the ‘First Thought’ of the Father speaks in the first-person
to describe his/her (Protennoia being androgynous), descents into the world
where he/she speaks to the ‘sons of the Thought’. Protennoia describes
him/herself as ‘the Unchanging Sound’. In my opinion, there is something
distasteful if not sinister in this work.
2. On the Origin of the World
A short section from the beginning of the aforementioned treatise of this
name.

176
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 THE GNOSTICS

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179
->

'
 Index

Abdala the Saracen, hi Apocryphon of James, 21, 22

Abd al Masih, Y, 16 Apocryphon of John, 21-4, 41, 142
Abraxus, 55 Apollo, 113
abstinence: in Catharism, 78 Apuleius, 33-5, 38, hi
Adam Kadmon, 41, 111, 142 Archesilaus, 118
Ademar, Berangere and Guillaume, Archons, 27, 28, 44, 49, 55, 98, 124,
89, 90, 91 134
Adversus Haereses, 47, 51 Aristotle, 111, 118, 124
Aglaophemus, 106 Armstrong, Neil, 101
Agrippa, Henry Cornelius (1486- Arthur, King, 67
1535), 3, 60, 91, 119, 133-5 Asclepius, 23, 42, 43, 62, 63, 67, no,
Albigenses, 69 112, 121, 126, 133
Albigensian Crusade, 73, 75, 83, 87, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria,
95 3-6, 25, 30; on heretics, 6; on the
Albion, 140-5 Creed, 8
Alchemists, 139, 153, 156 Atlantis, 67
alchemy, Hermetic, 134 Atlas, 105, 106
Alexander III, Pope, 81 Attis, cult of, 39
Alexander the Great, 37, 39 Augustine, 62, 105
Alexandria, 39-46 Averroes, 118
Ali, al-Samman, Muhammad, 8-13
alienation, 34, 36-8, 50, 52 Bacon, Francis, 132
Allogenes, 24, 29 Bahij Ali, 14
Amaury, Arnaud, 81, 83, 87-9 Baruch, 118
Amiel, Pierre, 93 Basire, James, 137
Anaxagoras, 118 Basta, Zaki, 14
Ancient Mariner, The, 135 Belibaste, 95
Andreae, Johann Valentin, 155, 157, Besold, Christoph, 156, 160
158, 159 Bible: as authoritative work, 5, 30
Anthropos, 41, m, 141 Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica,
Antichrists, 132 Amsterdam, 60, 163
Apocalypse of Adam, 26, 41 Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, 14
Apocalypse of Peter, 28 Blake, Catherine, 137, 145

181
 INDEX

Blake, James, 136 Cerinthus, 132

Blake, William (1757-1827), 18, 42, Charles V, Emperor of Germany,
132, 133, 136-45, 160 117
Blavatsky, Madame Helena, 161 Christianity: Coptic, 50; Ethiopic,
Blessed, Brian, 85 50; Greek, 49; Johannine, 47;
Boehme, Jacob, 139, 159, 160, 161 Pauline, 47; Russian, 50
Bogomil church, 70 Clement, Bishop of Alexandria, 40,
Bollingen Foundation, New York, 60, 74
,
14 15
Book of Thomas the Contender, 22,
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 18, 135,
136
23, 26, 46 Columbus, Christopher, 112
Books of Esdras, 152, 153 Comensky, Johann Amos, 158
Botticelli, 102 Concept of Our Great Power, 26
Brenon, Madame Anne, 80, 83 Confessio Fraternitatis, 149, 157,
Brill, E. J., 17 158
Brooker, Ian, 85 Consol amentum, 72-4, 78, 81
Bruno, Giordano, 125-8, 131, 138, Constant, Alphonse-Louis, 161
145, 151, 153 Copernicus, 126
Buddhism, 49 Coptic Church, 7
buggers, 71 Coptic Gnostic Library, 16
Bultmann, Rudolph, 35 Coptic Museum, Cairo, 13, 14
Corbin, 13
Cabala, Hebrew, 107, 109, 111, 147 Corinthians, Paul’s letters to, 5, 31,
Cabalists, 41 5T 52
Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, 47 Corpus Hermeticum, 45, 106, 108
Campanella, Tommaso, 153 Cosimo de Medici, 105, 106, 109
Carneades, 118 courtoisie, 72, 84
Carpocrates, 58, 112, 132 Covenant, Ark of the, 67
Casaubon, Isaac, 120 Crabb Robinson, 136
Casaubon, Meric, 124
Cathala, Arnaud, 95 Dante, 72, 138, 145
Catharism: and Church of Rome, Dattari, Maria, 14
71; creation myth, 74; Daumas, 13
development of, 68-72; d’Avigna, Raymond, 84
disappearance of, 96; and de Castres, Guilhabert, 34, 35, 80,
gnosticism, 75; message, 78; 83, 86
places of worship, 79-80; de Gourdon, Guiraud, 84
principles, 72-5; redemption, 75; Dee, Dr John, 121-4, 151, 152, 153,
women in, 80 156,159
Cathars; works by, 69 Deism, 131
Cavaers, Dame, 80, 81 de Lamothe, Bernard, 84
Centre Nationale d’etudes Cathares, de Latour, Guillaume, 84
80 de Minerve, Guillaume, 88
Cerdonians, 60 Demiurge, 5, 124, 132; gnostic image
 INDEX

of, 57; inferior creator, 56, 70, 98, Festal Letter, 39th, of Athanasius, 3,
134, 142; Platonic, 56; 5*2-5, 30
Valentinian, 55 Ficino, Marsilio, 106, in, 151
Democritus, 118 Figulus, Benedictus, 157
de Montfort, Simon, 87, 89, 96 First Apocalypse of James, 23,
de Pereille, Raymond, 81, 92 39
Descartes, Rene, 149 Flaxman, James, 138
de Tonneins, Blanche, 80 Florence, Hermeticism in, 101-7
de Tudele, Guillaume, 69 Fludd, Robert, 158
Dialogue of the Saviour, 13 Fournier, Jacques, Bishop of
Diego, Bishop of Osma, 82, 83 Pamiers, 69, 95
Dignity of Man, 110-13, 123 Franck, Sebastian, 151, 156
Diogenes, 118 Frankenstein, Victor, 133-5
Dionysius the Areopagite, 104, 115 Freemasonry, 159-60
Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth,
26, 42-, 44 Gabriel, 113
Dondaine, Father, 69 Garsyne de Puelles, 80
Doresse, Jean, 13, 14 Gilly, Dr Carlos, 155, 156
Drioton, Etienne, 13, 14 Giorgi, Francesco, 151
dualism, 62, 70, 83, 127; in Bogomil Girgis, Victor, 16
church, 70, 97 Gnosis, 59, 161, 162
Gnostic Gospels, 49
Eckhart, Meister, 151 Gnostic Religion, 36, 44
Eden, banishment from, 6 Gnostics, 60, 139
Edighoffer, Roland, 155 gnosticism: alienation, 36-8, 50;
Egyptianism, Hermetic, 126 and Christianity, 40, 49;
Eid, Albert, 13, 14 disappearance from Christian
Einstein, Albert, 128 Church, 60-3; ‘heresy’, 47, 49;
Eleutherus, Bishop of Rome, 48 mysteries, 29-32; origins of, 29,
Elizabeth I, 121 36, 42; originality of thought, 53,
Elohim, 142 62; redemption, 55, in
Empedocles, 118 Goethe, 139
Epistle to the Romans, 4 Gongessos, 19, 25
Eranos Conference, Geneva, 15 Good men, 67-75, 9^
Esclarmonde of Foix, 80, 86 Gospel of John, 25
Etienne de la Misericorde, 86 Gospel of Mary, 59
Eugnostos (Gongessos), 19 Gospel of Philip, 20, 46, 57, 59, 115,
Eugnostos the Blessed, 13, 26 IZ3
Eusebius, 60 Gospel of the F.gyptians, 13, 26
Experience, religious, 29, 38, 62 Gospel of Thomas, 12, 14, 16, 21,
Ezekiel, 137 22, 29, 32, 52, 114
Gospel of Truth, 15, 19, 21, 29, 34
Fama Fraternitatis, 146, 147, 149, Grail, Holy, 67
i53> *55* 156, 157, 158, 159 Gramazie, Pierre, 79

183
 INDEX

Guillaumont, A., 16 James I, 121

Guzman, Dominic, 82-3, 35-87 Jerome, 53
Jesus Christ, 20, 96, 97, in, 114,
Hamilton, Professor B., 73, 97 115, 119, 128, 138, 139, 145;
Haslmayr, Adam, 156-7 meaning of his death in
Hayley, William, 140 Catharism, 86
Heidegger, Martin, 35 Jewish traditions, 41, 42
Heisenberg, 124 John, 47, 56, 68, no
Henry of Lausanne, 70 Jonas, Professor Hans, 17, 35-8, 61
Herbert, George, 18 Jordan of Saxony, 82
heresy, 47, 49, 53, 82; a capital crime, Judaism, 49
69 Jung, Carl Gustav, 15, 59, 139, 162
heretics, Catholic definition, 70;
Athanasius on, 6
Kafka, Franz, 38
Hermes, 42, 45, 101, 104, 115
Kaye, Valerie, 9
Hermes Trismegistos, 43, 46, 103-7,
Kelley, Edward, 124, 152-3, 156
no, 119, 120, 126, 137, 138
Khirbet Qumran, 42
Hermetic Philosophy Library, 163
Khunrath, Heinrich, 154, 157
Hermetists, 42-6, 101, 115, 122, 124
Knights, 73; Templar, 67
Hess, Tobias, 156, 157
Krause, Martin, 16
higher reason, 33-46
Krempe, Professor, 133
Hinduism, 49
Holism, 67
Holst, Gustav, 43 Labib, Pahor, 16
Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The, Lactantius, 43, 105
162 Lean, David, 61
Humanity, Divine, 141 Lennon,John, 162
Leonardo of Pistoia, 105
Iamblichus, 138 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 69, 95
Iamnes, 60 Liber contra Manicheos, 69
images, 28, 32-46, 103, 119, 123 Liber de Duobus Principtis, 69
Imagination, divine, 138, 139, 141, Light, divine, 20-2, 32, 44, 123, 144
144 ‘Living’ Jesus, 25, 27, 52
imprisonment: of spirit in matter, Locke, 132
22-3, 39, 45, 51, 70, 75 Logos, 53, 54
Innocent III, Pope, 83, 87 Lorenzo de Medici, 109, no
Innocent VIII, Pope, no Lorraine, House of, 67
Inquisition, records of, 69; tactics, Los, 141, 142
90-1 Louis VIII of France, 90
Institut de France, Paris, 14 Love, Promethean, 144
Iranaeus, Bishop of Lyon, 29, 47-50, Luke, 5, 30, 41
53-6, 58, 60, 82, 112 Lull, Ramon, 151
Isis, cult of, 38 Luther, 107, 155
Islam, 49 Luvah, 142, 143

184
 INDEX

McGoohan, Patrick, 38 mysteries: Hermetic, 123; New

Madonna, 52 Testament, 31, 32
magical literature, 103 mythology, Ancient Egyptian, 67
magical practice, 60
Magnus, Albert, 133 Nag Hammadi Library: authorship,
Malevoisine, La, 88 24-32; burial of, 7; Codex I, 15;
Manicheism, 62 Codex II, 12, 20; Codex III, 13;
Marcionites, 60 Berlin Codex, 59; Jung Codex,
Mark, 31, 32 16; discovery of, 8-9; date of
marriage, 41 composition, 19; gnostic
Marsanes, 26 character of, 13; hermetic
martyrdom, 46-50, 89 character of, in; publication of,
Marx, Karl, 140 12, 18; study of, 16; texts, 18-24
Mary Magdalen, esteemed by Jesus, Nature of the Archons, 26
59; as gnostic, 59; witness of Nazi Party, 67
resurrection, 59 Neoplatonists, 138, 139
materialism, 132-3 Nelli, Rene and Suzanne, 84
Matthew, 30 Newton, Isaac, 132, 141
Maximilla, 48 Nicaea, Creed of, 7
Meier, Dr, 15 Nicetas, Bishop, 73
Menander, 132 Nijjhar, Rajinder, 26
Mercier, Raimond, deacon of Nobodaddy, Old, 143
Mirepoix, 84
Mercury, 105, 106 Occitan, 72
Merovingian Dynasty, 67 Ono, Yoko, 112
Milne, A. A., 73 On the Origin of the World, 26
Milton, John, 158 Ophites, 60
Mina, Togo, 13, 14 Oratio, no, 134
Minerve, martyrs of, 89; siege of, Ore, 144
88 Origen, 115
Mithras, cult of, 39 Orpheus, 106
Mogling, Daniel, 150 orthodoxy: Catholic versus
Monas Hieroglyphica, 123 gnostic/heretical belief, 25, 32, 48-
Montaillou, 69 9-> 56
Montanists, 48, 53, 60
Montefiore, Hugh, Bishop of Pachomius, 3
Birmingham, 30 Page, George, 15
Montsegur, 81; Cathar refuge, 92-3; Pagels, Professor Elaine, 13, 49, 55,
martyrs of, 94; siege of, 92-4; 57
treasure, 93 Paley, William, 132
Moore, R. I., 78, 86, 90, 94, 95 Pantocrator, 132
Moses, 41, 60, 105, 106 pantheism, 43, 123
Muhammad, Ali al-Samman, 8, 9, Paracelsus, 133, 151, 154, 157, 159,
n-13 160

185
 INDEX

Paraclete, 48 Renaissance: philosophy, 63, 109,

Paradise: in gnosticism, 74 117; gnostic and Platonist, 104
Paraphrase of Shem, 26 resurrection, 51; in Catharism, 86
perfecti, 71-4, 78, 81 revelation, 44, 45; of Guzman, 83
Peter: vision of, 28, 29 Revolution, Industrial, 140
Peter of Castelnau, 81, 83, 87 Rex Mundi, 86, 98
Philippa de Foix, 84 Richter, Samuel, 159
Philolaus, 106 Ritman, Joost, 163
Pierre-Roger of Mirepoix, 92 Robinson, Professor James M., 17
Pico, Giovanni, della Mirandola Rocquebert, Michel, 75, 94
(1463-94), 109-16, 134, 151 Rome, Church of: primacy of, 90; as
Pistis Sophia, 138 Rex Mundi, 75; threatened by
Plato, 33, 34, 43, 56, 102, 107, hi, Catharism, 96
124, 138, 139, 142 Roselli, Cosimo, 109
Platonism, 118 Rosenkreuz, Christian (1378-1484),
Plotinus, 29, 33, 103, hi, 120, 124, 147-8, 155, 156, 157, 159
138, 139 Rosicrucianism, 67, 146, 147, 150,
Polycarp, 47, 48 151, 156, 157, 158, 159
Porphyry, 29, 111 Rousseau, 139
Pothinus, Bishop of Gaul, 47, 48 Rudolph, Kurt, 59
Poussin, Nicolas, 67 Ruysbroeck, John, 151
Prayer of Thanksgiving, 42, 44, 45,
116 Saint Antony (250-356), 4
Priscilla, 48 Satanael, 70
Proclus, 138 Savy-Soderberg, Torgny, 17
Prometheus, 105, 106, no Schwenkfeld, Caspar, 151, 156
Prospero, 120, 121 Second Treatise of the Great Seth,
Psalm lxxx, 56 *7
Puech, Henri-Charles, 13, 14, 16 Secret Book of John, 29
Pymander, 106 Secret Books of the Egyptian
Pythagoras, 106, 107, 115, 125, 141 Gnostics, 13, 16
sex: abstinence from, 78; deviance -
Questions de Jean, 69, 74 Catholics accuse Cathars, 71;
Quispel, Professor Gilles, 9, 14, 29, polarity, 59; as sacrament, 58;
30, 32, 58; purchased Codex I, Valentinian view, 59
15-16 Shakespeare, William, 120
Shelley, Mary, 133
Raghib, Andarawus ‘al Quss’ Abd Shenouda, Pope, 7
as-Sajjid, 13 Simon Magus, 60, 132
Raine, Dr Kathleen, 136, 139 Singer, Dorothea, 125
Raymond VI of Toulouse, 83, 87 Socrates, 118
Raymond VII, 90 Solomon, 125
Raymond-Roger of Foix, 80 Sophe, Flavia, 58
Religion, Natural, 132 Sophia: in Valentinian myth, 54, 55

186
 INDEX

Sophia of Jesus Christ, 13 UNESCO, Third International

soul, ascent of, 44 Committee, 1970, 17
Spirit, Holy, 54 Urizen, 141-4
‘Star Trek’, 53
Steiner, Rudolf, 162 Valentinian system, 54-5, 75
Stephen of Tournai, 76 Valentinians, 55, 60
Stromateis, 40 Valentinus, 14, 29, 33-5, 48, 53-9
Suso, Henry, 151 Vaughan, Thomas, 158
Sydney, Sir Philip, 121 vegetarianism: of Cathars, 78
Vidal, Peyre, 84
Tano, Phocion, 14 Vision, divine, 144

Tat, 115 Voltaire, 139

Tauier, John, 151 von Anhalt, Prince Augustus, 156
Taylor, Thomas, 138, 139
Waldman, Professor, 134
Tertullian, 53
Weigel, Valentin, 146, 151, 156
Theodas, 56
William of Paris, 88
Theodore of Tabinnisi, 3, 5
women: in Catharism, 80; in gnosis,
Theodosius I, 62
59; in Languedoc, 72;
Thomas and the Evangelists, 30
troubadours’ attitude towards, 72
Thomas, Judas Didymos, 12, 29
words: gnostic suspicion of, 57-8
Till, W., 16
Thoth, 43 Yates, Dame Frances, 122
Three Steles of Seth, 26 Yeats, W. B., 139, 141, 142
Thunder: Perfect Mind, 26
Trimorphic Protennoia, 26 Zoas, 144; Los, 142; Luvah, 142;
Trinity, Holy, 119 Tharmas, 142; Urizen, 142, 143
troubadours, 72 Zoroaster, 107, 113
truth, Apostolic, 48 Zostrianos, 26, 29
Turner, H. E. W., 30 Zucjietto, Gerard, 72
 .

'
/n Sew**
 (con tin ued from fron t flap)

appalling to the church that it founded the

Inquisition specifically to crush it.
But fire and sword could not kill Gnostic
ideas. They are a persistent and persuasive
part of both our high art and our popular
culture—as The Gnostics proves by pointing
out their influence on such figures as the
humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola,
the poet William Blake, and the composer
John Lennon, who praised the Gnostics for
“becoming Christs themselves.”

Cover art: Funerary stele with the representation of a sanctuary, with Coptic
inscription, Greek cross and ankhs. 6th c. Coptic Museum, Cairo, Egypt
Courtesy of Borromeo/Art Resource, NY

Jacket design by Jeffrey J. Faville

Barnes
8<Noble
BOOKS
NEW YORK
A n arrangement was come
TO WHEREBY ALL THOSE WHO
WERE CATHOLIC OR WHO SUR¬
RENDERED THE CATHAR FAITH WOULD
BE SET FREE. AT THIS, MANY OF THE
SOLDIERS BAULKED. THEY HAD NOT
COME ALL THAT WAY, THEY SAID, TO
WATCH HERETICS GO FREE. THEY HAD
COME TO EXTERMINATE THEM.

- from The Gnostics

ISBN 0-7607-0478-3
90 000 >

780760 704783