Jordan Stratford

St. Ratford's Law

2012-01-21T10:36:00.001-08:00

Anything decried as "devil-worship" is automatically;

a) more interesting, and

b) not devil-worship.

The Atheist Student, Death Threats and Insanity

2012-01-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

First, this article:

Why Is an Atheist High School Student Getting Vicious Death Threats?
Her state representative has called the student "evil" and she has been threatened with violence, rape and death. What gives?

A complex issue turned into dumbth by a poorly-written article.

First, and well-duh-obviously, there's no excuse for the vitriolic assault on this child. Monstrous.

As an out-of-the-closet religious minority I was verbally assaulted and put up with death-threats from "born again Christans" as a teen (never Catholics, though, something it took me decades to realize).

Since then, as a critic and author working the "god-beat", writing on religious topics, most of my abuse and death-threats come from atheists, and, to a lesser extent, New Agers. But overwhelmingly it's the atheists who want to send me to the hell neither they nor I believe in.

(Historically, humans are very good at punishing those with differing opinions, and no culture of opinion has ever been more _efficient_ at punishing non-conformists than atheism.)

What bothered me about the article most (aside from the obviously horrific recounting of the abuse suffered by this child) was this paragraph:

"Religion, unlike any other belief system or social structure, is based on a belief in that which cannot be seen, felt, heard, touched, or otherwise detected by any normal or reliable means. It is based on ideas that have no good evidence to support them, and that by definition can't have good evidence to support them."

That's a painfully ignorant straw-man fallacy. Hell, mathematics is based on "that which cannot be seen, felt, heard, touched, or otherwise detected by any normal or reliable means". Show me a zero. Show me quantum foam. But underpinning these "unseen, unfelt, unheard" phenomena is a disciplined, rational pursuit of logical examination. So too is authentic, religious experience. Those who pioneered logic in the West were, by today's standards, religious.

Now, I personally don't subscribe to the majority of religious *conclusions* arrived at by the highly trained and razor sharp minds of Augustine and Aquinas. But that doesn't mean that they weren't employing fierce intellects and constructing logical argument. Religion - real, historic, religion, not this fringe anti-dinosaur silliness - is not based on "huh, this sounds kinda cool, I guess I'll believe that" but rather it's based on MILLENNIA of inquiry, debate, reason, history, testing, and discipline. Which is how you end up with the father of the scientific method being a monk, and Copernicus a priest, and Newton a deeply religious figure.

The author of this article exploits the terror of this girl's experience in order to engage in unfounded anti-religious bigotry, and that exploitation is no less shameful than the vicious morloks who pursued her in the first place.

Hypocrisy

2011-12-14T20:20:00.000-08:00

When asked what bothers people most, or concerns them the most about another's character, the answer is often hypocrisy.

The word comes from Greek theatre, and essentially it means "acting" or "faking it". Playing a role and stating the lines rather than really meaning it. It starts out implying insincerity, but our cultural context makes it even more malevolent: contradicting your morals. Stating one thing, and doing the opposite. We take it even further: hypocrisy means telling someone else that they are morally inferior for doing something that we're doing ourselves.

Let me first get this out of the way. We all do this.

We're all hypocrites. We establish a set of objective rules, then we subjectively rationalize why those rules, under certain circumstances, don't necessarily apply to us. But God help someone other than us who feels entitled to the same exemption. Because we know we mean well, and sometimes, y'know, you just gotta do what you just gotta do, y'know?

So, obviously, I'm a hypocrite. That fact doesn't sit right with me, but that doesn't mean it's not a fact.

But let's say that hypocrisy is not the worst thing ever. Because I think it does tell us something about ourselves individually, and it can actually be beneficial collectively.

In a recent study published by the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 17% of scientists who also described themselves as atheists attended church more than once a year (implying that a greater percentage went at least once). It's a take-the-kids thing. I get it. "Let the kids decide for themselves". I think it's marvelous. Here we have kids who would otherwise be exiled into the odd cultural illiteracy of never having set foot inside a Church, at Easter or Christmas or both, get to take it all in. "Ah, yes, here's the common cultural context that built Oxford University and the Parthenon and The Last Supper and the Pieta and orphanages and food banks." But for the kids to have this experience, to actually have the data before them, their parents have to bend their own rules a little. They have to embrace hypocrisy, if only for a little while.

An atheist friend of mine said "we atheists aren't all joyless drones", and of course they're not. Because you can state that existence has no objective meaning, you can state there is nothing "right" or "wrong" outside of relative and disposable social constructs – and then in practice you can discern meaning, do something meaningful, discern the difference between right and wrong and choose the right thing for its own sake. You can deny meaning, even be morally opposed to the very proposition of meaning, and then act in a meaningful way.

You can denounce myth and culture and anything that can't be dissected and rail against the evils of imagination and magical thinking... and then take your kid to see Santa, because you're not in fact a joyless drone. You're a well-meaning hypocrite. That's a good thing.

Hypocrisy rounds out our edges. It keeps us from being ideologues. Keeps us human, frail, vulnerable, open. Hypocrisy exposes us to experiences and connections we'd intellectually repudiate, enabling us to see that emotion, intuition, and circumstance all have their part to play.

The celibate nun who falls in love. The staunch environmentalist who plants a non-native-species rose in the garden. The lit snob who reads a trashy novel on the beach. All of us who see the cracks in the surfaces of our ideals, and dwells in those cracks for just a little while, just this once. Because it's okay.

A little hypocrisy won't kill you, because there's forgiveness at the other end of that. We're very good at forgiving ourselves for our transgressions. We could all use a little help externalizing our forgiveness. Then we can turn, again, to our ideals and ask why we have them, why we need them, in the first place.

If you're not a hypocrite, your ideals are too close, and you're not thinking big enough. Elevate your ideals, fail at them, forgive yourself – and others – and try again. You have a lifetime to do this.

The Most Important Definition in "A Dictionary of Western Alchemy"

2011-12-12T12:55:00.000-08:00

Zosimos of Panopolis (born c. 300 AD) A Greco-Egyptian Gnostic/Hermetic philosopher, alchemist, and the author of the first-known book on alchemy, composed in the fourth century. Included in this fragmentary surviving text is one of the earliest defi nitions of alchemy:
The composition of the waters, and the movement, and the growth, and the removal and restitution of bodily nature, and the splitting off of the spirit from the body, and the fixation of the spirit on the body are not operations with natures alien one from the other, but, like the hard bodies of metals and the moist fluids of plants, are One Thing, of One Nature, acting upon itself. And in this system, of one kind but many colors, is preserved a research of all things, multiple and various, subject to lunar influence and measure of time, which regulates the cessation and growth by which the One Nature transforms itself.
As inspiration to modern or speculative alchemists, Zosimos’s greatest surviving contribution came not from a laboratory, but from his dreams. Zosimos documented repeated visions of either himself or a homunculus being repeatedly destroyed by way of torture, only to be transformed into a spiritual being. Jung was inspired by this account and wrote an extraordinary analysis of Zosimos’s visions (The Visions of Zosimos, 1937).

Okay, so why is this the most important entry in the book? Because Zosimos, who made such an amazing contribution to alchemical study, did so without a laboratory, without apparatus, without investing thousands of dollars in compounds, supplies, tubes and beakers.

He did it by dreaming.

Magonia Review of Books

2011-12-08T07:25:00.001-08:00

... has a critical-but-fair look at the Dictionary of Western Alchemy. She points out a half dozen terms she'd like to have seen included (as well as stating an omission-that-wasn't), but if someone found even 25 terms missing, the book would be only 5% larger than it is now. And if I'd stopped at 525 terms instead of 500, someone would mind that I had missed another two. To me this just speaks to the breadth of the discipline. And I chuckled at the assertion that one could find all the various bits of the book online, which is more or less true, although in a loss of context, and it raises the question as to why anyone would buy Rumi or Whitman in paperback when it's all available on Project Gutenburg. What are books, exactly?

Most of the review states the obvious – this is not a manual for lab chemistry, and the book is therefore dismissed as "whimsical", which I rather like.

http://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2011/11/alchemy-words-and-meanings.html

DWA makes Theo Forward "Notable Books" List

2011-12-06T16:26:00.001-08:00

"The book under review here is not an introduction to alchemy, but it is an extremely useful compilation of alchemic terms and symbols, explained with admirable clarity. Anyone interested in alchemy for its own sake or as an important cultural stream in Western thought will benefit from having this work to consult."

http://www.theosophyforward.com/index.php/notable-books/494-notable-books-10.html

Neoplatonism Tarot Sketches

2011-12-05T12:10:00.001-08:00

From the desk of Dr. Jeffrey S. Kupperman, some promising efforts towards a Neoplatonist Tarot.

http://jeffreyskupperman.com/gallery/gallery2/

Aeon Byte Interview

2011-12-05T07:26:00.001-08:00

One of the most venerated esoteric arts is Alchemy, which cuts across all religions and ideologies. Both the Orthodox and Heterodox have sought its arcane gifts, whether it's lead to gold or holistic medicine. For the first time a book comes out that categorizes the wisdom of the alchemists in Western Culture, a gathering of important terms, from ancient Egypt to Jungian Psychology. Needless to say, the book is long overdue; and beyond just a dictionary of Alchemy it reveals the various scientific and mystic tributaries it has influenced for thousands of years. We learn about the origins and evolution of Alchemy; and why it's still very important for spiritual liberation in a modern world. We study it from all its angles and traditions that include Christianity, Islam, the Occult, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and even Harry Potter. We leave no Philosopher's Stone unturned!

http://www.aeonbytegnosticradio.com/2011/12/dictionary-of-western-alchemy-12102011.html

We Can Live Without Music

2011-12-01T09:59:00.001-08:00

We can. We don't need it. Someone could swear off music and not be impacted economically – it wouldn't stop medicines from being invented or skyscrapers from being built or the crops coming in. Planes would not fall from the sky.

It can be argued that music has caused suicides, homicides, anthem-inspired nationalism resulting in tragedy. Musicians, too, are suspect, as they tend to be moody, temperamental, impulsive and frequently illogical. This may explain why a great number – if not the majority – of the world's scientists are not musicians.

Music is divisive. People feel strongly, occasionally violently, about one sort or another. Minute distinctions are made between genres, sub-genres, specific time periods of sub-sub-genres. People argue passionately about this stuff.

But we do seem hard-wired, as humans, to create and respond to music. It emerges from all cultures at all times. It can reasonably be posited that this musical reflex is a defining characteristic of human experience.

Of course, the exact same thing can be said of religion.

We don't need it. We could do away with it completely. But I think we'd we'd be poorer for it, and it's against our nature.

So sit with the music of your religion. Allow its rhythm to move you, its themes to inform you, its melodies to inspire you. Dance to it.

Rocking your religion is among the most human of all things.

Alchemist book tour kicks off with Dec. 1 Salt Spring event

2011-11-24T19:53:00.001-08:00

“The alchemical world view assumes meaning,” Stratford said. “There is a ghost in the machine, and everything is inhabited by the ghost of meaning. The meaning of a chemical process, in its origin and its purpose, is divine. So in this world view, there is no line drawn between chemistry and theology. It’s the same thing.”

By providing explanations of the terms associated with alchemy, Stratford said he is hoping to reintroduce the language and symbolism that informs that worldview. Those who stand to benefit from adopting its framework are those in psychology, dreamwork, poetry and other creative modes.

http://www.gulfislandsdriftwood.com/lifestyles/134468503.html

Heartbreak and Politics

2011-11-13T18:27:00.001-08:00

I'm resigning from political heartbreak.

As a Traditionalist a la Guenon, I'm fatigued from having those who subscribe to my Perrenialism emerge from the ranks and likes of Evola and his ghastly bastards of the Right. As a liberal, meaning one who holds that the betterment of citizens is through the embrace of the liberal arts, I'm exhausted by the heartbreaking abuses of logic and fixation by those who cling to the label. I think abortion is sad, that guns are interesting but deeply unwise, that governments need governing, that unions are multi-billion dollar multi-national corporations but I'm glad they exist, that people are inherently generous and kind, libertarians are the most dull and dangerous of all animals, and that conservatives who conserve nothing are Modernist shadow-puppets labelled "self-interest", which used to be a sin. Much of what used to be a sin was a sin for a damned. good. reason. And all is lost, there. The wasteland of individualism without individuation. The wasteland through which Sophia Achamoth wanders, confused and blistered and amnesiac.

I'm nothing but a cloud of opinions and indignation. An idiot howling at a heedless tempest.

None of this makes me one whit more wise, more deep, more loving, more joyous. My opinions, my aesthetic, my politics, isn't making me more human or whole or even funny. Odd how we prize funny over human or whole, but there we are. I'm done with it.

I choose human. I choose loving. I choose wine and dancing and prayer and kisses.

I renounce political heartbreak.

2011-11-07T19:02:00.001-08:00

Magical Buffet: 10 Questions with Jordan Stratford

2011-11-06T22:00:00.000-08:00

"The Magical Buffet is where spirituality, politics, and pop culture collide, with hopefully entertaining and enlightening results."

– Read it here.

30 Years Ago Tonight

2011-10-31T15:14:00.005-07:00

I walked into a circle of stones and candlelight, and I'm not sure I ever walked out.

A welcome antidote to some of the misrepresentative nonsense of recent weeks:

2011-10-27T19:47:00.000-07:00

If you've strained your eyes from rolling skyward after the recent torrent of blather and complete fabrication of the positions of scholarship – something akin to declaring that NASA's lead scientists affirm that the moon landing was faked – here is a considered, rational presentation of Gnosticism and Gnostic themes from one of the foremost scholars (a real, paid, professional academic, not just a paying-audience-member like me) in the field. Dr. Birger Pearson was recently the guest speaker at the conclave of the Apostolic Johannite Church. (You know. One of those "neo-" Gnostic churches that's all new agey and stuff and doesn't read books. Pay no attention to the PhDs and professional academic researchers and editors in the audience. They must have wandered into the wrong meeting.)

Here are some salient and fortifying highlights. Dr. Pearson states:

"Gnosticism" is a legitimate term, as "Gnostic" is a self-descriptor that existed in the classical period, and both "gnosis" and "-ismos" are universally accepted phrases of that time. "Gnosticism" therefore is the most logical name for what we're doing, and what we're talking about.

(Basically, if you're being told that "scholars agree that Gnosticism never existed", you're being lied to. Gnosticism as genre, as aesthetic, as movement and above all as message, is extremely threatening to the world-view of some, and they'll throw any nonsense at you when threatened.)

Gnosticism and Christianity are distinct movements and entities.
Gnosticism arose from Judaism, and only later came into contact with Christianity.
Apocryphon of John is a pre-Christian myth that was later Christianized via a frame-story.

(This latter point was the hypothesis of a paper of mine submitted for my doctoral studies in 2006, and Dr. Bruce Chilton didn't bat an eye. However I received a great deal of "you don't know what you're talking about, all scholars dismiss this" hatemail when I posted the paper online.)

His summary of the Gnostic world-view is succinct:

Gnosis is a pre-requisite for salvation.
Gnosis is knowledge of the true nature of both humanity and divinity - two sides of the same coin.
The human self is of divine origin, and to the divine it shall return

His use of the term "dualism" is highly qualified – used liberally rather than technically – citing the two characters of the transcendent God and the creator god; and the rift / fall resulting in the creation of the kosmos. Pearson's dualism – Plato's dualism of idea and ideal – is biased towards distinction, rather than the "irreconcilability" charge of neoheresiologists.

And that's just from the first half-hour. It's good for what ails you.

From the Chick-tract rantings and misrepresentation of scholarship by literalists, fundamentalists, and anti-Gnostic propagandists, O Lord, deliver us.

Amazon Author Central

2011-10-27T14:21:00.000-07:00

It's odd that my Amazon Author Page doesn't allow me to add books I've edited or to which I've contributed, but there you go.

A Note on Tradition

2011-10-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

It seems to me entirely exoteric, that is, outer, to dismiss Tradition and orthodoxy and dogma as though these hold nothing for the seeker of the esoteric.

But esotericism, deepening, operates on the assumption that within these same wounding or difficult or uncomfortable or unpopular Traditions is the very heart of the matter, the very thing for which one is seeking.

The Traditions rejected in our wounding, whether by semi-informed advocates of that Tradition itself or from our own need, as we mature, to cast off the cultures of previous understandings, hold for us the promise of a rich vein of inquiry. As a child perhaps the priest told you there was no room for you at the Eucharistic table, or that rite x was closed to you for whatever reason. The odds are good that the priest was an ass, and that buried for centuries within the bosom of that same rite is a spark of the Infinite Divine, reserved only for you.

As Gnostics we don't run away from the things that we understandably might. Liturgy and scripture and thinkers which have been in the past weaponized against our Work, our nature. Instead we go further in, deeper, and we dive in the waters rather than getting out of the pool. We examine, play, recontextualize and remix and reconsider and reinterpret the facets of Wisdom we find, buried within the recriminations against finding at all. It's paradoxical, yes, but we neither accept nor reject what others declare to be orthodoxy. We treat the whole milieu as a kind of suspension medium, journeying further in with doubt, with wit, with intuition, with our yearning for Holy Wisdom.

Reviews for "A Dictionary of Western Alchemy"

2011-09-29T18:34:00.001-07:00

"An impressive collection of concepts and ideas... a standard and classic in the field"

– Brendan Myers PhD., author of Loneliness and Revelation

"Stratford brings his unique insight and experience... steeped in Renaissance lore, Gnostic thought and Jungian theory."

– Jeffrey S. Kupperman PhD., editor of the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition

"Stratford's work is precisely what has been missing... accurate, insightful and accessible."

– Stephan Hoeller PhD., author of The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead and Gnosticism: A New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing

"Stratford brings cryptic words and images alive, with rich, deep and practical meaning."

– Thom F. Cavelli PhD., author of Embodying Osiris and Alchemical Psychology

B is for Balsam

2011-09-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

}+{ balsam

An emulsion serving as a suspension medium for essences. Paracelsus considered the balsam of vitriol (“the green lion”) to be the vital essence of the human body, repelling putrefaction. From Arabic basham, “perfume.”

A is for Alembic

2011-09-05T15:35:00.000-07:00

A simple distillation apparatus comprised of a retort (a spherical vessel with a long, downward-sloping tube) and a cucurbit (the receiving vessel). A substance is heated in the retort, condensing at the capital and collecting downward into the cucurbit. It is used as a metaphor for rigorous intellectual and spiritual inquiry, distilling only the essence of an idea. From Greek ambix , “mixing cup.”

From "A Dictionary of Western Alchemy" coming this Fall from Quest Books.

You Are Here.

2011-09-05T13:52:00.000-07:00

I've been asked to clarify the distinctions between epiphany and gnosis as I outlined in this post. I just want to talk about the mental state of epiphany, about finally seeing things as they are, and how that informs your history and your journey.

At epiphany, you see the system as a whole and your part in it. You feel privileged, provided with insider information, and you have the teenager's loathing for childhood. Propelled forward, but still using pre-existing tools to decipher and interpret your experiences.

Knowing, as you do now, that the old order has been overthrown, you understand that order to be overthrowable, disposeable, and untrustworthy. The authorities and opinions of your previous understanding having been exhausted, you distrust authority and opinion on principle. And well you should.

A kind of benevolent paranoia sets in. Any contrary signal to your current experience is understood as reactionary, trying to drag you "back to sleep." You're antagonistic to those who aren't exactly where you are in your understanding, maybe referring to those poor ignorant souls as "sheeple, implying they're somehow less than fully human.

In Qabalistic parlance you've pierced "the veil of Paroketh", the synthetic world view constructed by your senses and material world, a world you know have obviously outgrown. Clearly, the light you're looking at was veiled before by the physical, the hylic, and now you're a spiritual being you have no place for that sort of thing. You're a dualist, of course - what benefit could anything have on the lower side of the veil?

And look at all this LIGHT! You're enlightened now. And gnosis means enlightenment. So that's that.

Except, of course, it isn't that. You're not there. You're somewhere else. You need a map.

There are lots of maps out there, but my favourite is often the Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life of Qabalah.

On this map, when you've had this epiphany, you're hovering in that space between Splendour and Victory, between Mercury and Venus, gazing up at the blinding light of the Sun, Tipareth.

You know the UNHOLY THEM are out to get you, you're a radical dualist, you read a lot of Philip K. Dick and you find yourself getting depressed. But this is the price of gnosis.

Except that this isn't gnosis. It's a dress rehearsal. Just as adolescence is not adulthood – but the only way to get there – epiphany is not gnosis. I get it, I really do. I railed against and squinted at the forces of patriarchy/capitalism/ whatever paternalistic projection I felt I needed to overthrow, just as the young buck in the forest seeks out the king stag in order to lock antlers and snort. It had to be done.

As I've said before, Gnostic literature is always a three act play: a unity; being stripped of that unity, cast out of the garden; and then the restoration, the coming home. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Epiphany and all its sturm und drang is the second act: antithesis. But there's more of the story to follow, as you progress up the tree.

The difference between epiphany and gnosis is the difference between diagnosis and treatment; one defines the problem, the other defines the solution.

At epiphany, the light shining above you is the solar beauty of Tipareth. But gnosis is behind this light, above this light. Gnosis is equivalent, on this map, to Da'ath, the "missing sphere" on the tree of life. This is the apple in which gnosis was concealed, to be plucked by Eve at the moment of her awakening. This myth makes Eve the first Gnostic – despite the external system imposed upon her, she reaches out to claim gnosis, the apple, as her birthright.

It must be added that her first act as an aware, complete individual – a Gnostic – was to share this gnosis with her husband Adam as an act of love. Not only is she the first Gnostic, she is the first human liberator.

The other thing to remember is that this is merely an illustration – a model used to shed light. It's a map, not the territory. In Qabalistic tradition, we are all of us inhabiting every stop along the way simultaneously, but our attention dwells in one sphere or another from time to time. So I completely understand the angst, the antagonism, of those who've recently had an epiphany – because I'm there, too. Part of me remains there, rooted in that experience, defined by it. All I can offer is that every sincere Seeker has persevered, refused to be blinded by the light, and proceed up up up the paths of the Tree, to the promise of the Crown, and beyond.

The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity

2011-09-02T19:39:00.000-07:00

Review of Bib Lit here, and an excellent PDF review here.

"While most ancient thinkers emphasized gnosis, knowledge of some particular sort, the use of gnostikoi in reference to people was unusual. The term itself was also a positive one. So Brakke makes the case that Irenaeus would not have volunteered a positive designation of this sort for those with whom he disagreed. Therefore the moniker gnostikoi most likely reflects the group’s own usage. "

Book Trailer: Dictionary of Western Alchemy

2011-07-18T18:03:00.000-07:00

Satanic Panic

2011-07-03T22:27:00.000-07:00

I was living in ground zero when it hit: Which is to say, my home town, when I was in Jr. High School, was overcome with Satanic Panic.

Michelle Remembers, published in 1980, detailed the "memories" of a mental patient being five years old, tortured by a Satanic coven of hundreds in Victoria British Columbia over many years. Ritual blood drinking cannibal orgy yada yada. Of course, there was no record of key elements in the story – a car crash, the girl herself missing, a few hundred Victorians running around sans sacrificed-to-Satan fingers. People quoted in the book denied ever being quoted, corroborating experts denied ever having corroborated. The book was, in every conceivable detail, bullshit.

But that didn't stop Geraldo Rivera from exploiting the Hammerfilmesque schlock of the book and turning it into a 20/20 episode; resulting in a wave of hysteria, incarceration, and violence. The book's author became a millionaire via consulting fees on "occult crime". Parents lost kids to courts for having tarot cards on their bookshelves. Pets of suspected devil-worshippers were removed (and put down). A full-time police officer was posted to the maternity ward at the hospital lest devil-worshippers steal and eat yet another baby (except nobody had ever even tried to take a baby from the ward, but hey, our tax dollars were fighting Satan!).

At my high school, "everybody knew" about the vast Satanic conspiracy that ran the town. At least the kids in Grade 9 sure claimed to have always known. And when the Born-Agains rolled into the crowd to get testimony, man, did they get their money's worth: Straight-laced friends who had maybe snuck a cigarette once confessed to being hard-core drug users, driven to chemical excess by the unrelenting pressure of Satanic music. Like The Scorpions. Bearers of training bras that had experienced at worst exterior friction suddenly outed themselves as former prostitutes, enslaved by pawns of the Satanic cult. Mercifully, an army of over-zealous youth pastors had arrived to liberate them from the Satanic menace. You were nothing without a great conversion story, and the one-upmanship was iceberg-bound full steam ahead. Otherwise-sane friends came back from summer camp speaking in tongues. Seriously. Hummalah Bebhulla Zeebuhlla Bop!

Here's the thing to remember: none of it was true. None of it. It wasn't dramatized for illustrative purposes. It was just... bullshit. We'll come back to that in a second.

Eventually, the lawsuits trickled in, and Michelle Remembers (poised for a TV movie adaptation and a sequel) limped to the discount bin. But it still left its mark on Victoria as "the Satanist capital of the world" (alongside Geneva, for, um, y'know, reasons or something). Then there was the guy who went on Christian TV and named names of who was in the cult and who had tried to sacrifice him (and his wife, who seemed rather unsure about the whole story). He got sued for libel and fined 10 grand for pulling that story out of his butt, and the fine was paid by faithful TV viewers who felt the poor Christian was being picked on by the Great Satanic Them™.

As an "out of the broom closet" media weirdo and pentacle-toting PAGAN RIGHTS activist ("Remember the Burning Times!" Yeah, sorry. Teenager. Sigh.), I was an obvious target. A local group of Born Again police officers started an off-duty group to track and report on Those On The List, and I was On The List. I received overt if silly death threats from various Christian youth groups, usually along the lines of DIE SATAN SCUM on notes under my apartment door. And then there was the sidewalk conversation with a high-school associate (and his matching purple-tee-shirted gym-friends) that they were "going to find me and kill me" because clearly I was a Satanist (They didn't kill me, but they did kill a flamingo, by throwing firecrackers into a bird sanctuary that was holding a Psychic Fair at the time).

(And I definitely wasn't a Satanist. Oh, I'd read "The Satanic Bible" in a bookstore over several leanings, and found it boring. This wasn't the key to unlimited dark powers, not that I go for that sort of thing anyway. This was zitty Nietzschean sulking. "THEY are sheep. WE are badass." It seemed like an excuse to act like a jerk in hopes of seeing a naked lady. A lot of it struck me as having a very strong anti-Semitic subtext, with no theological point to make except for the insistence that it didn't have a theological point to make. I did, years later, have a brief correspondence with Stephen Flowers –although I didn't know it was him at the time– about Germanic Neopaganism because he'd said some things in an interview that struck me as batshit crazy, so I wrote to him and asked for clarification. He replied. The crazy remained. Anyway, that's as close as I ever got to real honest-to-God-is-dead Satanism.)

The point is, as I said, none of it was ever true. It was a conveniently-packaged monster-under-the-bed for those with some serious Freudian issues ("they forced me to have sex with a baby, then kill it and eat it" – who makes this stuff up?), but it did have real-world consequences. What about the children who were told time and again by prosecutors that they were the victims of ghastly sexual and homicidal undertakings? How do you tell a child who's grown up with this victim-identity for a decade (or more) "oops, we got it all wrong, you were normal and well-loved"?

[Let me state the obvious that there is a handful of people who self-identify as "Satanists" for philosophical, iconoclastic, antinomian, literary, ironic or even commercial reasons. They're harmless. I'm not talking about those guys.]

Trotting out Satan is always –always– hysterical and absurd. Declaring that so-and-so is (or was) a Satanist is always seriously crazy. Ascribing Satanic motive to x, particularly when motive itself is so hard to pin down, is seriously seriously crazy. Please put down the Satan, you're embarrassing yourself.

Anyway, adults saying that x is Satanic because y is a Satanist is never about reality, it's about delusion and neurosis and territoriality and othering, because seeing people as complex and nuanced and acknowledging that a person we don't like may often say things we agree with makes us uncomfortable. It's much easier to point and shriek "Satan!" that it is to deal with fact, messy human inconvenience, and actual events.

Every once in a while, still, I get called a Satanist. Or my friends are "avowed" Satanists. Or my church is Satanic. I know there are people out there who have been told to be afraid of me, afraid of things I write, afraid of the sacraments and hospital visits and prison ministries and cups of coffee handed out to the emotionally wounded by my fellow clergy. I'm either a cover-up-agent or total dupe for not knowing that the Great Satanic Them™ is the (dark, evil) root and (spooky, woo woo) flower of my church. Unfortunately for the demon-hunters, my church was ever, from its founding documents to local incorporations and every intent and vow uttered and each babe baptized and each couple married and every consecration and ordination, ultimately and irrefutably Christian. But yes, esoterically Christian. Gnostic Christian.

I can point out that mysticism, contemplation, and personal insight have always been part of Western religion, and there's a parade of Catholic and Orthodox saints who used exactly the same liturgy-bits we do in our parish for exactly the same reason – consideration, reflection, insight, humility. I point out that esoteric means "deeper", that "occult" means hidden, because not all our truths or rich veins of inquiry are out there in the open and obvious and surface. But for some entrenched audiences, I'm just spinning my wheels. Because there's a straight line in pop culture that says esoteric = occult = Satan. Unorthodox = Satan. This is the narrative arc of a Chick tract. Grown-ups just don't think like that – but it's so much easier than real life. It explains so much.

It just isn't true.

Ask Deeper Questions Facebook Page

2011-06-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

You might know this already, but this exists:

I only use my FB profile with people I've sat down and had coffee with, so I made this page for, well, everything else.

His Eminence +Shaun McCann and Dr. Birger Pearson

2011-06-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

At the most recent Conclave of the Apostolic Johannite Church, the guest lecturer was renowned Gnosticism scholar Dr. Birger Pearson, author of Ancient Gnosticism and other gems.

To me, this seems evidence of a church – indeed a wider movement – continually challenging itself on its assumptions. Using research and consulting with the top authorities in the world to confront and verify and deepen our understanding of this rich and vastly complex scriptural legacy.

Of course many of the issues that keep my inbox full (monism/dualism, panentheism, a Pleroma that is in fact a Pleroma) were settled by scholarship in the 80s, and generally settling on the three-act-structure model (monist in origin, temporary and qualified dualism, yielding to synthesis and liberation), pre-Christian origins and "nothing whatsoever outside the Pleroma" which I've illustrated on this blog ad nauseam. But it's healthy to not just consult scholarship as a way of proof-texting or shoring up assumptions, but to actually break bread with researchers and wander through the subtleties and nuances that make this field so fascinating and rewarding.

We're none of us "neognostics" any more than 21st century Christians are "neochristians" or contemporary Jews are "neojews". We're looking (examining, pondering, questioning, theorizing, reinterpreting) critically at our roots, at the context of authorship and both personal and collective relevance, and using this knowledge to further our own spiritual maturation. Traditional academic scholarship is by no means the only valid way of looking at Gnostic scripture – art and liturgy, psychology and intuition help complete a picture that would otherwise be skeletal and possibly misleading – but it's a good idea to make sure periodically that we've got our Greek (and Coptic) right.

The Banach–Tarski Paradox

2011-05-06T17:58:00.000-07:00

First, some gross oversimplification.

We have the timeless experience of gnosis; we have communities of Hellenized Egyptian Jews in the Ptolomaic period (350-30 BCE) writing about gnosis and using mythography to illustrate and amplify this experience (Let's call them "Gnostics" because honestly what else are we going to call them? Gnosis-ists?); we later have "The Jesus Movement" ("Early Christians")– Jews talking to other Jews about reforming Judaism; later still we have those gnosis-writing Hellenized Egyptian Jews incorporating Christian themes and characters into their literature (we'll call them "Gnostic Christians"); later later we see the Christian conversation spreading West and adopting much of the form and organization of Roman Paganism ("Orthodox Christians") – but this was merely one form of expression among many.

One of the people who was rather fond of that particular expression was Irenaeus, who argued for the primacy of his particular version. He was rather scathing of the competing forms, regardless of when they had shown up. He probably wouldn't have thought much of the Jesus Movement, had he been around 170 years earlier. And he certainly didn't think much of the Gnostics.

Irenaeus managed to do two curious things:

i) He outlined a plethora of opinions, practices, and quotations and attributed them, rightly or wrongly, to the Gnostics

ii) He ended up defining orthodox Christianity as the opposition to these same opinions, practices, and quotations. The end result is a wholly new religion that took his reading of "It's Not Judaism™" Paul and cranked it up to 11.

Right. So we have four distinct entities as a result of this:

a) the ongoing cacophony of the Christian conversation

b) A shiny new product on the shelf, Anti-Gnostic Iranaeus-Brand Christianity™, which would later be known as "orthodoxy"

c) the ongoing cacophony of what we now call Gnosticism, and

d) Iranaeus' (and later heresiologists') version of what he understood Gnosticism to be, or at least how he wanted it to be understood by others. Obviously, this is going to be a rather different from how any Gnostic at the time (regardless of what they called themselves) would actually present their world view.

Got it? Christianity-as-a-messy-whole, a spanking new Orthodoxy, Gnosticism-as-a-messy-whole, and Iranaeus' skewed interpretation of Gnosticism.

On and on through the hoary centuries, and the Gnostic conversation and the Christian conversation began to overlap less and less as the orthodox voice started to drown out everyone at the table. But that's history - a marketplace of ideas and movements, some adapt and become dominant, others retract and become recessive. The Gnostics never really went away, they endured in small, insular communities (such as the Mandaeans) or as a magnetic influence in others (such as the Druze or the Bogomils).

Okay, We're All Caught Up Now

Like I said, this is gross oversimplification. There's no way to accurately sum this up in less than a few thousand pages. But for our purposes, looking back over our shoulder, we see two distinct entities – what Gnosticism was, and what the heresiologists said it was.

Even then, "what Gnosticism was" was a whole series of competing, conflicting, nuanced, complex, occasionally bizarre takes on Greek myth and philosophy, esoteric Judaism, early Christianity, Egyptian cosmology, Hermeticism, and anything else that was lying around. There was no centralized, authoritative, definitive "Gnosticism" per se – just a literary and philosophical movement identified by its allegorical treatment of specific themes.

Anyway, if you throw all of that in a bucket and call it "Gnosticism", what we do know now is that when the heresiologists were talking about it, they got it all wrong. Either deliberately as a straw-man propaganda thing, or sheer cluelessness. But the stuff that was in the bucket, and what they said were in the bucket? Different things. Let's call them "Gnosticism" and "Heresiological Pseudo-Gnosticism". Kind of the same way we had authentic Judaism and what anti-Semites later described Judaism to be, blood of unbaptized babes and all. Different.

But it gets weirder.

Because so much of the contents of the original "bucket" were inaccessible to the West for so long, the only "Gnosticism" in town was Heresiological Pseudo-Gnosticism; deliberately misrepresented Gnosticism. And as orthodoxy centralized political power, it also accumulated all the blame that goes with such power, which is to say it started to annoy some populations rather a great deal. The thinking went that anything which bothered the powers-that-be can't be all bad, so we see some groups actually *endorsing* Heresiological Pseudo-Gnosticism as not only authentic, but a good thing, if only to annoy the orthodox.

"World-hating dualism" (and the mutually exclusive extremes of radical ascetism and wild libertinism), which certainly weren't present in the original bucket, featured prominently in Iranaeus' fever-dreams, and became the hallmarks of this word "Gnosticism". The heresiological hermeneutic got to own the word. For the most part, it still does (which is why it thinks it has the right to kill it). So some people embraced these ideas, and called themselves Gnostics. Some still do.

But now the cat's out of the bag – or perhaps more accurately the djinn is out of the jar – and we have access to primary source texts and know more accurately what the contents of the bucket actually were, why do we still have groups clinging to (and showing preference for) the heresiological view? Gnostics didn't actually draw straws to pick bishops the way Iranaeus said they did (and he didn't even actually say that, technically, which is a whole other layer of confusion right there) but some people identify as Gnostics because that idea appeals to them so much. Gnostics didn't hate the world, but some people hate the world and call themselves Gnostic as a result.

How amazing, elastic, capacious, are the original Gnostic myths that they can accommodate not only their original intent, but also their deliberate mischaracterization and still be spiritually valuable? It's astonishing. Miraculous, even.

There's a set-theoretic geometry trick called the Banach-Tarski paradox. You can jigsaw up a three dimensional sphere into bits, and reassemble those bits into two perfect spheres of the same size as the original. Shouldn't be possible, but it is, and thus a paradox.

Gnostic literature is subject to the Banach-Tarski paradox. You can take this rich, weird, lush vein of myth and symbol and rite and rant and argument, and you can spin it into the lovely po-mo Jungian Sophia-as-alchemical-insight; and you can spin it into the distinctly Christian you-hate-the-world-and-the-world-hates-you cranky dualist Sophia-as-whore bitterness of the heresiologists and their subscribers. Two perfect spheres extracted from the same source material, both in their way valid, provable, defensible – the same way you can extract a chunk of Paul and end up with Thomas Merton or the Westboro Baptists.

I've said before that we're the Gnostics now, and we get to decide what to do with this stuff. Anyone, anywhere, can pick up this stuff in translation (or slog through the interlinears, glossary in hand), identify with it, and own their response to it. We get to decide what this stuff means. And it's okay that we're going to see different communities coalesce around these different responses.

The conversation about how Middle-Platonic was classical Gnostic community x or how Christian was classical Gnostic community y is all well and good and fascinating (and keeps Brill in business), but as far as those first Ptolomaic Hellenized Egyptian Jews were concerned, those angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, it was never about Gnosticism or Christianity or Judaism or any label to begin with.

It's about gnosis.

You're Not Good Enough

2011-05-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

Well, you're not. Neither am I.

First off, "not good enough" is not the same as "not good." I'm sure you're good.

There are two "not good enough"s. A real one, and an artificial one. The real one states the obvious. I'm not good enough to compete in the Olympics. I'm not good enough to cut an album or win an Oscar or be selected for the space program. I'm just not. I remember being eight years old and realizing, on my own, that my artistic ability meant that I would never be good enough to draw Spiderman for a living (at the time, I thought that was the coolest job in the world. There was a cut, and I hadn't made it).

Many people spend their whole lives being told they're not good enough, for all the wrong reasons.

Too fat, too thin, too tall, too short, too shy, too forward, too cerebral, too emotional, too gay, too straight.

By being told we're not good enough, we're really being told we don't conform to some external ideal. Obviously this is an absurdly false criteria, and ultimately toxic.

The "antidote", as presented in popular culture, is that you're perfect the way you are. God don't make no mistakes. Celebrate the awesomeness that is you. You go, girl. If anybody can't handle you, it's their problem, not yours.

This, too, is toxic. It's not true. You're not perfect just the way you are. You're flawed, you have faults and habits and prejudices and blind spots, and those keep you from loving and accepting love, from living in the fullness of your own ability and abiding in your integrity. You have work to do. We all do.

So what to make of all of this? Both "you're not good enough according to some external ideal" and "you're all that and a bag of chips" are archonic traps, usually designed to sell you something. A diet, a yoga matt, or a latté as a reward for being so magnificent. Both are about exploiting our inner dialogue to provide you with easy answers, not deep questions.

"Know Thyself", as a philosophy and directive, is what differentiates both of these traps from a path to your own integrity. It's not an easy answer, but an ongoing conversation.

You're good, but you're not good enough. Yes, you're a spark of the infinite divine. But you're also a bunch of other things – angry, possessive, frustrated, lazy – that get in your way of abiding in your authentic self. You're not good enough, yes, but you're not alone in this, and through a lifetime of patience, perseverance, contemplation, listening, study, forgiveness, effort, humor, humility and love, you are constantly unfolding your authenticity, getting closer to that spark, and expressing it.

That's precisely what that lifetime is for. It's okay. We're all doing this together, whether we recognize it or not. Know Thyself.

Pre-Christian Gnosticism?

2011-04-16T17:06:00.000-07:00

1. Almost in chorus, the majority of scholars accept that the current editions of most Gnostic texts available to us are from the Christian era. That is to say, the versions, edits, and copies we can point to archaeologically were revised, edited, and copied after the first century CE.

2. Almost in chorus, the majority of scholars accept that the ideas and constructs inherent in Gnostic literature predate Christianity. These are Jewish Wisdom literature, allegory of Greek myth, Egyptian cosmology, all mashed up with a later addition of window-dressing ("frame story") of Christian fan-fiction. The ideas, themes, forms, cosmologies, pre-date Christianity, having been developed before the first century CE.

3. It is generally regarded that some passages – and in some instances entire texts – of Gnostic literature are pre-Christian in origin. The Hymn of the Pearl, before its name-change. Thunder: Perfect Mind is, to any Egyptologist, a Ptolemaic (350 BCE - 30 BCE) Isis doxophony (although there's a recent attempt to put it in a Christian context, but I haven't read it yet).

4. It would be unusual to find a scholar of Gnosticism who would exclude the Sethians from the Gnostic continuum. That is to say, virtually everybody considers the Sethians to be Gnostic.

5. The Apocalypse of Adam is likewise almost universally regarded as a Sethian text.

6. The Apocalypse of Adam has a generally accepted date of authorship of c. 200 BCE (Bohlig, Rudolph).

7. If the Apocalypse of Adam is in fact both Sethian AND dates from 200 years before Christ, and if we are to consider the Sethians Gnostic, then Gnosticism – at least Sethian Gnosticism – is demonstrably and inarguably pre-Christian. QED. To object to this is pure historical revisionism.

This wouldn't ruffle a single feather if Pagels, Meyer, Turner, Pearson et al were in the room. They know this. They don't care. It's hardly news. Now, new evidence could confirm this, or blow it out of the water. Either way, new evidence is welcome, but the existing evidence says "Pre-Christian Gnosticism" and nothing yet contradicts it.

So Who Cares?

Really, there's a monster under the bed here. Some fear a kind of Pagan Conspiracy which seeks to rob Gnosticism of its correct place in the time-out corner of the Christian classroom.

The problem is, if we wish to illustrate the Pagan influence – particularly in the theme of the Divine Feminine – on Gnostic literature, we have a lot of time in which to do it. Even by the third century CE, Isis and Athena were bigger box-office than Jesus. Lots of Pagans around to suggest a word change here or there at the local scriptorium. A "Pagan-influenced" Gnosticism doesn't need a pre-1 AD start date in order to be perfectly valid (Meyers commentary on the Apocryphon of John does that). All the non-Christian Gnostic stuff doesn't get any less non-Christian (or further from "the Goddess" if you're conspiratorially-minded) by having a second-century date of authorship. Gnosticism doesn't need a pre-Christian date, but history hands it one nonetheless. The feared Pagan Conspiracy fails to materialize, and there is no monster under the bed after all.

The only cage rattled by the acceptance of historical and archaeological fact is the one housing those who insist that Gnosticism is a Christian heresy. "There was orthodoxy, and later Gnostic heretics who sought to deviate from it and subvert it". Some have invested heavily into this world view, and unfortunately for their return-on-investment, it turns out to be completely hollow. Rather than Gnosticism being somehow an "apophatic*" faith, identifying itself with an "at least we're not those guys", it is orthodoxy which emerged from the clamor of the agora, defining itself over centuries to be "that which Gnosticism was not". So in the end it is orthodoxy, and the orthodox heresiologists, which are in fact apophatic. Irony, or hypocrisy?

*This is not the same as apophatic theology, which is wonderful.

An Occasional Extravagance

2011-04-05T10:30:00.000-07:00

If we follow the trail of dualism, we perpetuate the skewed perspective of Christian heresiologists... If we instead trace the aspects of Gnosticism that were most important not to Christian heresy-hunters but to the history of religion in the West, we may ignore the rejection of matter as an occasional extravagance.

(Gnosis: an esoteric tradition of mystical visions and unions, Merkur 1993, 114)

Retractions, Errors, Omissions

2011-03-30T10:36:00.000-07:00

I've been sorting through the first two archives of this blog, which I began seven years ago, in the compilation of what I tongue-in-cheekily call my 'greatest hits' album – a collection of sermons and articles to be published later this year.

I discovered some statements I'd made, and have since changed my mind about in light of new evidence. Here's a sampling:

1) Cathars and Gnosticism

When I first began researching the Cathars some 20 years ago, my French was not up to speed to read academically, and there was little material available in English. In those early days, I got the distinct impression that as of the 13th century, the Cathars could be seen as a surviving sect of pre-Nicene Gnosticism, just as the Mandaeans could be so classified. There seemed to be a straight line between the Paulicians to the Bogomils to the Cathars, with all the "Gnostic Paul" intact from the get-go.

In the last decade or so, I softened this position greatly. I was reflecting recent-ish North American scholarship. No, the Cathars were not exactly Gnostic, just sorta kinda thematically similar, but no linear heritage could be established. I deflected, obfuscated, and fudged around the edges. I was doing this as recently as a year ago.

In the last two years, though, I've been reading the material in French, including the source material obtained during the Inquisition. My current findings are that I got it right the first time: The Cathars were Gnostic, as Gnostic as the Basilideans, Ophites, Valentinians or Carpocratians, and there is indeed a straight line from Paulicians to the Bogomils to the Cathars. Further, this is the accepted norm in European scholarship: it is almost universally acknowledged that Catharism is a form of Gnosticism theologically, historically and archaeologically. So either the European scholars are behind the curve, or the North American scholarship to which I was exposed was perhaps overreaching. Either could be the case, but for now – until new evidence emerges, which is always welcome – the Cathars were Gnostic, in my book.

2) The Gnostic "All" and the Hermetic "All"

In the late 80s I read The Corpus Hermeticum for the first time, and I was blown away – not by what it was so much as by what it wasn't. It certainly wasn't what Sir James Frazer said it was. It wasn't even what Robert Graves said it was. It wasn't an ancient Greek Picatrix, which I had been lead to expect. Instead it was a uniquely Ptolemaic collection about enlightenment, about experiencing the divine in a direct, rational way.

Around the same time I read Layton's "The Gnostic Scriptures", and it was apparent to me that I was looking at a continuum of thought from the Hermetica. This was before I had a grounding in Egyptology with regards to religion. Largely due to nuances of translation (and the Gnostic material's generous sprinkling of ellipses) the Gnostics seemed wilder and darker and perhaps less articulate than the Hermetica, but only in the way that real gold is always much darker than we imagine it to be.

Regardless, it was obvious to me that when the Gnostics were talking about "the All", they were talking about the exact same "All" that is really the primary subject of the Hermetic texts. Same era, same geography, same mash-up between Greek dialogue and Egyptian mystery.

Again, exposure to predominantly North American scholarship (although from the Messina era, which is as antique as I am) lead me to soften that. No, scholars see the Hermetic All as monist, whereas the Gnostic All clearly only applies to things Gnosticism likes and not to things it doesn't. I bought into this for quite some time.

And it's silly, and I was wrong to do so. There is no evidence of which I'm aware (after crawling through JSTOR for a very very long time and talking with scholars) of any cause for this change in definition. In other words, there's no linguistic or theological event that changes the basic meaning of the word, either in Greek or Coptic, for its presentation in these texts but not those texts. Further, as I gained an understanding in the core idea of "Allness" in both Greek and Egyptian religion, it's obvious that any distinction is misleading and false. Hermetic All = Gnostic All. Until something proves otherwise.

3) Secret Mark

Like most Gnostics, I was very wary of Secret Mark as a subject. It's been used as a kind of shibboleth to identify those who engage in paleobabble. Start thinking of Secret Mark as authentic, and next you'll be declaring that the pyramids were built by UFOs.

My first exposure to Secret Mark was criticism not of the text, but of Morton Smith's interpretation of the text. This was a huge mistake. Rejecting Smith's conclusions (as I still do) is not the same as discounting the authenticity of the text. It was foolish of me to do so, but I stubbornly persisted until an in-depth exposé in BAR last year.

Basically, the evidence suggesting that the document is a forgery is threefold;

1) There's a "forger's tremor" evident in the manuscript,

2) That ancient texts don't get transcribed into modern books, and

3) That the "free flowing salt" mentioned in the text didn't exist in antiquity and was a Morton Salt joke embedded by the alleged perpetrator of this hoax.

The evidence, however, is that;

1) There IS no forger's tremor that any graphologist was able to discern,

2) That we DO have instances of ancient texts transcribed into modern books, and

3) That free-flowing salt WAS available in antiquity, and its existence is well-documented.

So the only reason left to believe that Smith forged Secret Mark is ad hominem – a well-respected scholar bet his entire career on a hoax because he was essentially a jerk. I don't buy it.

My current position, in light of new evidence, is that I agree with the minority opinion of Dr. Marvin Meyer: Secret Mark is likely an authentic (albeit likely pseudepigraphical) first century text. Aside from the need to re-locate the copy from which Smith was working, it's vital to do a literary analysis of Clement's style and see if it gels. That should shore things up one way or another.

The point of this post is that my opinions and responses are never finalized, never dogmatic. I seek out fresh perspectives, welcome new evidence, rattle my own cage. I'm not a scholar, I'm an enthusiast and afficianado and I'm damned curious about how all of these pieces fit together. I weigh perspectives from other disciplines – language, archaelogy – against the tools that I have ready: logic, theology, history. And because I'm fueled by curiosity, I'm always asking for input from religious scholars and Egyptologists and historians (none of whom will ever give me a straight answer, of course, but provide me with a great reading list). This cycle of inquiry, engagement, analysis, re-evaluation, I find affirming, challenging, and lifelong.

Why I Don't Blog Very Often

2011-03-28T13:16:00.000-07:00

[Because I only have so much time, and part of that time is being a priest, and only part of that priest-time is writing, and only part of that priest-writing-time is blogging.]

Apostolicity

2011-03-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

[Another repost, this one from 2006, but I feel it timely. Recently I've been corresponding with a scholar in Scotland about the Apostolic claims of modern Gn churches. While superficially discredited, further examination shows that all of us are extremely well-documented as Old Dutch, Syrian, Malabar, Coptic etc. in our roots and lineage, going back to the pre-Nicene era. But even those early, "primitive" churches were the inheritors of something older and larger than themselves. No church, no community of spiritual engagement, no set of questions, came out of nowhere. This illustrates why that ligature is important to me.]

Once upon a time a young girl was walking along an African beach. She saw a small, smooth, black stone, and put it in the pocket of her dress. She liked the way it rubbed against her thumb, and she wondered how the stone got to be on the beach, whether it had washed ashore from distant lands, or belonged to a great black mountain that had worn away on that very spot. She imagined great trees and wild animals alive on that mountain - she swore the stone remembered the perfume of those trees and the night-cries of the animals. The stone nestled in her tightly closed palm, both secure in the pocket of her dress, as she walked home, and days later to the park, and years later to school, and years later still on an eventful train traveling through South Africa.

The young Indian man on the train was a law student, well dressed, and there was an air of confident calm about him. The girl, now a young woman, felt a kind of love for the man that wasn't romantic, but she was compelled to... to what? Kiss him? Speak to him? No. From her pocket she pulled her thumbworn stone, centered it in her open palm, and presented it to the young man, who's warm brown eyes locked hers and smiled in silent understanding.

The lawyer would one day be known as Mahatma Gandhi. Legend has it he offered the stone to a salt merchant in India, who in turn gave it to his son, a hand on a container ship. In Marseilles, the sailor's eyes met that of an elderly baker; again the stone was passed on, and again, to reside in the top desk drawer of an eccentric Swiss patent clerk. The clerk would weigh the stone absently while he dreamt of the nature of time, and of light.

Albert Einstein gave the stone to his housekeeper - unsure of what compelled him to do so - and she in turn gave the stone to her niece, who was distraught at the death of her infant child. This is how the stone came to rest on a windowsill cluttered with bird skulls, chinese coins, and small bronzes of Hindu gods. The window looked out a lake, and the lake looked back into the office of Carl Jung, who mailed the stone to an antiquities dealer in Ostende, who presented it to his younger brother, visiting from New York. And on and on, the stone at once reflecting and absorbing the light around it, the narrative arcs and imperfections of the lives it touched.

I will tell you this; the stone is here in my breast pocket right now, next to my heart. It reminds me that the story is larger than my life, that it has been the companion of great men and women, and little men and women, and angry and flawed men and women. The stone is older than what I want or who I am. It ennobles me and it humbles me. And one day the stone will leave my pocket and I will die.

Now I will tell you this: there is no stone.

Rather, there is a laying on of hands and a blessing in a language once rich with life and now reserved only for such blessings, and the arcane magics of medicine and law. All the same, there was someone who touched someone who touched someone famous, and that famous someone touched someone who was a scoundrel, and the scoundrel touched someone who saw the blessing for what it was and not the mere tricksterism of a fool, so he touched someone and so on down through the centuries. And then there was my blessing, the hands on my head and the smell of dust and incense, and the ancient words spoken. And those words here, next to my heart, larger and older than anything I can possibly be alone.

2011-03-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time – which is how all such stories begin – was the Void, and the Void was with God, and the Void was God. This is the empty Fullness, of which nothing can be said, for all are ripples on the sea of the Fullness.

The Fullness, sensing itself, beheld the divine polarity, the seer and the seen. And then there were two.

The two, desiring again to become one, create a third in their reunion, and so Sophia was the child of the polarity.

She yearned above all to create, as she was created, and extending forth she issued seven aeons, each a circle rippling out farther from the center; each circle both a realm and a Ruler, devoid of the primal Spark from which their Mother was made. In turn, these sparkless realms desired their own creatures, and made for themselves the system – the kosmos – and into it cast all of humanity, to dwell in blindness, for the Rulers were terrible and powerful.

Out of great love for the creatures of the Rulers, Sophia cast herself down from the Fullness, bearing the Sacred Flame that was the impetus of her own generation. This she secreted past the seven rulers of the seven heavens, to conceal herself in the form of a serpent, and dwelt in the Garden that was the prison of ignorance wrought for people of earth.

In the Garden was a tree, and in the apple of this tree Sophia cached the Spark, and offered the fruit of the Holy Gnosis to Eve. Upon awakening to gnosis, Eve possessed something her creators and captors did not understand, and was restored to her birthright as an aware emanation of the Fullness. In compassion, she offered the fruit to her husband, which angered the Rulers – for awareness of who we truly are and from where we have been cast was forbidden by them.

"There is no God before me", cried their King; whereupon Sophia shed the serpent’s skin and revealed Herself, declaring, "You are wrong, Blind One". And the people were free to leave the Garden and find their own way.

Some of the Rulers wept with remorse, asking their Mother to return them to the Fullness that they might take their share of the Spark of the Divine. To these She gave the Sacred Flame, and told them to scatter it among all things in the world, that the people might discover them, and upon discovering, remember their sacred kinship with the Queen of Heaven, and the totality of the Fullness.

The Gnostic Road

2011-03-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

A repost from 2003...

There seems to be some confusion between epiphany and gnosis, so I thought I'd dust this off.

1) Aporia ("roadlessness"). A feeling of disorientation or exclusion from the accepted conventions of the world, and a sense that "this is not the deal". The certainty that something is wrong with the universe, and creeping paranoia that

a) this is not the real world and

b) that the forces in charge of this world are hiding something secret, something powerful.

2) Epiphany ("shining above"). The big light bulb over the head, the primal "Aha!" that reveals the glowing spark of divinity in all things. A perception of real and immediate and undeniable TRUTH in art and life and joy and beauty and the sacred real. And likewise the horror at the unimaginably cruel, relentlessly unjust existence to which we've been sentenced.

3) Agon ("struggle"). This is where things get ugly. The problem is, the Opposition is real, organized, and thoroughly pissed off at your recent epiphany. You're suddenly a lightning rod for "bad luck" in the form of THE SYSTEM - parking tickets, tax audits, bank charges, mechanical failures, illness, miscommunication. People are "worried about you". This is where most people either give up and deny their epiphany, or go crazy and talk to themselves on the bus.

The real struggle is in finding equilibrium - knowing what you know, and continuing to live in the world. Rendering unto Caesar. Sitting down with the Archons and negotiating some kind of truce.

4) Gnosis ("insight"). Equivalent to (yet distinct from) the satori of Zen or the nirvana of Hinduism, this is personally-negotiated spiritual enlightenment. A first-hand experience of divinity as real and present. Tag, you're it.

Even then, you're not out of the woods. It's so easy to succumb to the gravitational pull of archonic forces, from which we can never fully escape. We fall asleep, spiritually and creatively and compassionately. Gnosis doesn't come in a box. It's a seed that's planted in the heart. It needs to be nurtured, nourished, kindled, in order to take root and grow.

5) Charis ("grace"). This is Sainthood, the ability to radiate your own gnosis to others, and overcome the limitations imposed on you by the Archons.

Remember that, just as in Qabalah, you're at every step of this road simultaneously. Some are more apparent points than others. I'm reminded of the tradition of the Divine Twin – that a core, essential aspect of our selves is there, abiding in Grace, awaiting our reunion.

Interview with an Exorcist

2011-02-23T13:21:00.000-08:00

Why the fascination with exorcism in popular culture?

We're a story-telling culture, and exorcism is mythic. It's the dynamic tension between the invisible and the manifest. Between good and evil, order and chaos. "Man vs. Himself" as any eighth-grade English teacher will tell you. When we see this happening on screen, we can put a face on what we fear, what we dislike about ourselves. We can externalize the dis-ease within. For ninety minutes, anyway.

And currently we have the debate within media and education which is billed as science versus faith. That's not the real debate, of course. It's really within science itself; meaning versus nihilistic materialism. But in a movie, it's simplified to "I'm a rational scientist, I'm losing my faith, but here's this evidence that evil is real, therefore God must be real too." Movies dumb it down for us, and makes the struggle we all have, daily, to become better people, a little more understandable.

Do you believe in demons?

Well, "believe" comes from "beloved"; those things one values or prizes. It's a word I don't use lightly, so that's very complicated. A demon – from the Greek daemon – means "intelligence", as a noun, not a quality. It is an idea that has some kind of traction. The classical Greek idea of "genius" is a daemon. Conscience is a daemon.

Addiction is such an idea. Racism is such an idea. But so are things like loyalty, or a sense of duty. It's an intangible, but it has a tangible effect. Such ideas seem to have the same kind of impact as though they were third-party entities – what Jung called "splinter psyches". They seem to act out of self-preservation, like an organism, and replicate like a virus within a host, whether that host is an individual, a family, or a society. People will sacrifice their lives, or the lives of others, when possessed by such ideas. So it seems obvious to me that when looked at it in this light, "demons" most certainly exist.

They're not incorporeal evil beings waiting to corrupt the innocent?

That kind of language is a literary device for attempting to illustrate the phenomenon, so its accuracy is limited. But I don't dismiss it out of hand. Isn't domestic violence evil? Isn't it incorporeal until it manifests? Doesn't it corrupt the innocent? Don't we incorporate – literally take into our bodies – the idea of it when we're exposed to it? Doesn't it replicate from generation to generation? We have to remember that while we have these caricatures of demons in our culture – bat-winged minions of evil – as simplistic as they may be, they're there because they are partly, if abstractly, true.

So it's a psychological, not a spiritual phenomenon?

I don't differentiate between the two in this instance. I don't see the value in making such a distinction.

What is exorcism?

Literally it is the "swearing out" of demonic ideas from the host. It is a healing of the psyche by removing damaging psychic constructs. As in any healing process, the first stage is diagnosis. The demon – or idea, or fixation – must be identified. This is more important for the afflicted than it is for the exorcist: one needs to get a handle on one's problems, obviously.

Exorcism employs ritual psychodrama; a kind of theatre in which the idea is given a concrete identity as a way of distinguishing the parasite from the host. It's like saying "you're an alcoholic, but you're not alcoholism". If you don't identify the problem as alcoholism from the get-go, you're not going to make a lot of progress.

In this ritual, the individual is reminded of their power (from French pouvoir, ability) as a spiritual being. That they are divinely connected to a divine source as participants in what can be seen as a divine conversation. The space for the ritual is blessed, to create a stage for the psychodrama. We're reminded, through poetic invocation, of the quality of divinity – transformative divinity – within that space, and within the "actors" in that space.

Then, through traditional gestures such as anointing and touch, the possessed is encouraged to separate these unwanted intelligences from their psychic whole – from their thinking, their world-view, and most importantly their identity. The individual undergoes transformation in a sacred space. It's a very ancient an powerful experience. There's something tremendously human about having that transformation – that commitment to personal purification – witnessed, blessed, honoured.

Is it dangerous?

Whenever you're dealing with archetypes and deep psychological forces, there are dangers. Particularly when it's outside of a medical or psychiatric environment. That's why exorcism is always done in the context of modern medical care.

You're taking people into places within themselves they'd rather not be. Animal places. Wounded places. You're also unleashing imagination as a means of distancing the identity from the demon. They're going to give that injury a name, a voice, a persona as a way of both animating it and seeing it as something outside themselves. It's very disturbing, but necessary for the release of that toxicity.

There's also a danger to the exorcist. It's an oddly intimate process through which both the practitioner and the possessed are extremely emotionally and psychologically vulnerable to one another. The imagination of the possessed can cue in on that and exploit that vulnerability of the exorcist. So this animated demon – which is to say this character that's been brought on stage in the psychodrama – can in turn threaten, coerce, seduce, or physically assault the exorcist.

This is why the exorcist has to be disciplined. Keep your emotions in check. Don't fuel the drama of the situation. Remember this is a sacrament, as sombre and enduring as the Mass.

The thing to remember is that this drama has a third act. The persona that the possessed gives the demon will eventually become exhausted, like a storm that's blown itself out. The subject will feel intense catharsis; they may vomit, or sob, or feel euphoric. It's the role of clergy there to be present, to support and witness this moment.

And that's it?

No. This process is undergone at least three times. Often more.

Is it effective?

The documentation is at once compelling and suspect. Anecdotally, it's overwhelmingly effective. The only clinic tests conducted have been done so by those who have a vested interest in either proving or disproving exorcism at the outset. All I can say is that many individuals find it helpful, and as a necessary component of their healing of addiction or dealing with mental illness and trauma. It's our job as clergy to offer that sacrament when requested.

How did you become an exorcist?

It's one of the Minor Orders of the Church. One doesn't need to be a priest in order to become an exorcist. In our tradition, the challenge is put thusly:

In the Order of the Exorcist the power of the will is more definitely developed. The healer heals through intention and intention is an operation of the Will. The healer focuses the will on producing wholeness of life in others, for to heal means to make whole. Transformation of the will involves culturing the heart in order to assist others in healing themselves of separateness. [...]

Therefore, be always aware that love changes everything and all our loving is in response to the love that the Beloved has for us.

Are you prepared to strive to exercise mastery over your own will, attempt to alleviate suffering and soothe afflictions through the all-healing power of Love?

So it's a commitment to refine the will, to be aware of distinction, and wholeness, and seeing both "health" and "holiness" in that idea, in that word, of wholeness. An then to see the whole thing as an act of compassion, an act of love.

I think it's helpful to remember that, in Western tradition, exorcism was historically the province of women. In Jewish and non-Jewish semitic cultures, women would make a mark on the forehead of the subject with saliva. This was a simple, domestic, ritual purification.

When we first see the character of Mary Magdalene introduced in Christian texts, she is the woman possessed by seven demons. Gnosticism understands these seven demons to be archetypes of fatalism, of "the Archons"; the "way of the world". It's her liberation from these forces that identifies her as a Gnostic. She's free, and aware, and serving others to be in that same psychological and spiritual space.

Poetry is the enemy

2011-02-17T09:21:00.000-08:00

Poetry is the enemy
and must be everywhere
eradicated

Poetry posits
the unprovable
the irrational;

It clings to intangibles
love, loyalty, hope
for which there are no

monogrammed squares
in the periodic table
Poetry kills thousands

Of young people,
every year, deluded
by Shakespeare, Neruda

Into taking their own
irrational lives
their abandoned carbon

shells found alongside
rough lines unmetered
thin on fact or compelling

Argument. Poetry makes
no contribution to the social
fabric; all poets mad

And madness, evil
and evil to be contained
dispensed with

Historically, no true
nation held poets
in any real regard

And by true nation
Of course I mean
those free of poetry

No bigot, I
I merely wish to
ensure the safety

Of our rational
future; a book
burning here or

There a modest
price, really,
in the scheme of things

[This is what goes through my head when atheists talk about religion being the root of all evil]

The Lord's Prayer in Coptic

2011-02-02T17:29:00.000-08:00

Thinking of the 8 million Coptic Christians in Egypt, keeping their language and traditions alive after millennia, praying now for peaceful self-determination and freedom from tyranny for all their fellow citizens.

NACGB Statement on Egypt

2011-02-01T17:41:00.000-08:00

Recent events in Egypt and Tunisia, as well as elsewhere in Middle East have highlighted the importance of governments that are responsive to the needs and rights of their citizens. We, the members of the NACGB, support unequivocally the right of all peoples of to self-determination and freedom from oppressive government.

Whereas both Gnosticism and Christianity generally have their roots in the lands of the Middle East and North Africa and

Whereas the Gnostic Churches owe an especial debt to the traditions of Egypt and

Whereas the Gnostic Churches share a unique bond with Coptic Christians, in whose language many of the Gnostic Scriptures are written, therefore

We pray that those entrusted with the public good in Egypt and elsewhere, and those who struggle for freedom in their own nations will be guided by the Holy Spirit and act in the interests of peace, freedom and human dignity. We pray for a peaceful conclusion to the conflict in Egypt and also that the needs and rights of all Egyptians, of all faiths, genders and origins, will be respected by the government of Egypt.

– source

The Null Hypothesis

2011-01-15T16:06:00.000-08:00

Let's say one wished to take a purely dispassionate look at a world religion, in search of some definitions. Let's take Judaism. Not to beat up on Judaism, but bear with me.

1. There was never a uniform, monolithic Judaism. What we call "Judaism" is really a composite of many radically different sub-cultures; Pharisee, Saducee, Essenes, et cetera.

2. Classical Judaism was extremely place-based: worship could ONLY occur at the Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE

3. Literature in the Temple period shows that Judaism placed a great deal of import on animal sacrifice; in addition, Jewish law states an extremely long and varied list of capital crimes.

So, we could conclude that a) "Judaism" is too broad a term for the phenomenon, b) that the end of the Temple was really the end of what could be reasonably considered "Judaism", and c) any resurgence without animal sacrifice and capital punishment for all manner of social transgressions would have to be considered a kind of pseudo- or neo-Judaism. Clearly, we should abandon the term, and only resort to the lower-case-and-scare-quotes "judaism" when we refer to what we used to call Judaism but now know better.

Oy vey.

It should be quite apparent that no reasonable person would assert this. There is no credible argument to assume that post-Temple Judaism is anything but an authentic continuation and expression of Judaism. What existed still exists, and to insist otherwise is patently absurd. If one were to propose this, one's motives would be questioned, and with good cause.

And yet.

A double standard clearly exists in the classification of Gnosticism. It's true: there was never any uniform, monolithic big-G Gnosticism; we have diverse schools with wildly differing opinions among the Valentinians, Sethians, Basilideans, Ophites. It's true, too, that we have no continuously surviving "congregations" of Gnostics from the classical period. Also specific passages in some texts may speak to an then-culturally-ubiquitous view on gender, or sexuality, or that nature of the resurrected body, or matter in general; passages that seem out of step with contemporary social mores among practicing Gnostics. But to assert that we don't, and never did, exist? This is not a reasonable assumption, and reasonable people do not put forward such a conclusion.

In science, when testing for a certain phenomenon, it is often useful to bear in mind that the subject of your researches may not exist at all. If you're looking into why protein x bonds with protein y, it's worthwhile to consider that the bonding may only appear to be happening, or that whatever is going on is actually the result of something completely outside the sphere of your experiment. Generally, though, this doesn't apply to social sciences. If an archaeologist was to suggest that, say, the Etruscans never existed, and all the architecture and potter sherds and statuary belonged merely to a proto-Roman tribe, this would hardly be taken seriously. Just as easily we could dismiss the above hypothesis that Judaism is extinct, and that modern Jews practice "neo-judaism". The null hypothesis simply cannot be reasonably applied to social sciences, such as archaeology or comparative religion.

I've already addressed Williams' deeply flawed reasoning for wanting to do away with the label "Gnosticism". And it's true, and welcome, that scholars such as Pagels wish to shed light on the tremendous diversity of the early Christian conversation, including texts and movements to which we now refer as Gnostic. De Conick has gone so far as to distance herself from the obvious label "Gnostic", preferring the neologism "transtheist, which, while vastly better than Williams' "biblical demiurgical", is still both unwieldy and unnecessary. As Erhmann pointed out, if we don't call it Gnosticism, we won't know what we're talking about.

If we are to look at Gnostic literature, as I have often suggested, as a literary genre characterized by specific form and themes – as identifiable as an Elizabethan sonnet or twentieth-century detective fiction – then it is clear that some of it is pre-Christian, much of it is non-Christian, and the remainder is somewhere within the Christian continuum, although admittedly outside the sphere of Orthodoxy. The relatively recent admission of the Christian subset of Gnostic texts in no ways invalidates those which are part of the greater set.

Is Sethian literature – some of which is inarguably pre-Christian – part of a greater phenomenon, or does it stand alone? It certainly seems like a continuation of Jewish, Egyptian, and non-Jewish Semitic thought. Its themes are consistent with the rest of what we've been calling "Gnostic" for centuries. Yes, Sethianism is part of early Christianity as well, but that in no way negates its character of extra- and pre-Christian tradition. It is a sister of Valentianism, which is also both Christian and something outside of Christianity. The word "Gnosticism" is the best tool we have for illustrating this "both/and" quality.

Here I think is the root of the problem. The reality is that Gnosticism and Christianity co-existed and commingled for centuries, contributing to and informing one another. However, it was vital for an emerging Orthodoxy to distinguish itself from Gnostic entanglement, and thus the view that all things Christian were in one sphere, and all things other – Gnostic or not – belonged in the other sphere. This mistaken and ultimately unworkable hermeneutic lead to a number of texts being labelled Gnostic regardless of whether they had the hallmarks of Gnosticism as a genre.

Rather than setting aside this mistaken reading, some scholars struggle within its gravity well, proposing a forced and ultimately misleading model wherein what we call Gnosticism is merely an illusion generated by the diversity of voices in the formation of Christianity. The problem is, we end up with some texts which are clearly in the genre of non-Christian Gnosticism, such as Thunder, or Hymn of the Pearl, either erroneously folded into the Christians sphere or excluded from their natural context (ie, as part of the Gnostic phenomenon).

Better to simply suggest that we set aside the heresiological view, accept the reality of a vital, integral pre-Christian Gnostic genre, and observe the interplay of theme and character and setting with Christian literature. Not either/or, but both/and. Eminently more reasonable, in my opinion, and vastly more fertile.

Abraxas Ring

2011-01-11T20:41:00.000-08:00

"The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must first destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The name of the God is called Abraxas."

Reproduction of a 2nd century Alexandrian ring with an infamous Abraxas intaglio gem by LA artist Robert Seitz.

I shall soon be in possession of this delicious artifact.

On Sophia: Clip from the Aeon Byte archives

2011-01-02T17:26:00.000-08:00

The lovely Lin from Portland unearthed a dusty clip of a conversation I had some years ago with Miguel Conner on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio (formerly Coffee, Cigarettes and Gnosis) about Sophia and Her role in Gnosticism (as a Goddess, but not really a Goddess) and why it's complicated. Honestly I don't remember saying any of it, and I'm rather glad I didn't say anything entirely daft.

Anyway, 10 minutes of the thing is here for free, and the whole show is available here for just $2.99 which keeps Aeon Byte on the air. And there's a massive archive of past weirdness and genius so you're sure to find something to warm the cockles of your heretical heart.

As a further plug, transcripts of some of the best conversations with scholars such as Birger Pearson, John Turner, Elaine Pagels, April De Conick, Marvin Meyer, Bruce Chilton – all the biggies – have been compiled into an extraordinary and eminently readable little volume Voices of Gnosticism, available here.

Hermeticism and Gnosticism

2010-12-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

Discuss.

Okay, let's read first. Let's read a lot first.

Some years ago, I proposed a Blake Year. Hundreds of Gnostics around the world joined me in reading the collected works of William Blake, quoting him on blogs, posting images of his artwork, and basically having a huge love-in for the man after whom I named my son (Liam Blake Stratford). For me this culminated in attending the Blake retrospective at the Petit Palais in Paris last year. I think the true Gnostic tradition goes something like this: read the source material, ask deeper questions, go create something and see what you come up with. The recognition of Blake as a vital contributor to Gnostic thought and culture. and the connection that others made with his work was extremely worthwhile and I consider the whole undertaking to be a success.

So, to that end, I'm proposing an Hermetic Year. Let's all read the Hermetica, and see what we come up with.

When the Naj Hammadi texts were first discovered, the reception seemed to be operating out of a reading which placed the Hermetica and Gnostic literature on a continuum. This was possibly out the assumption that all the "weird stuff" belonged in the same category. As more critical scholarship got a crack at it, the differences began to emerge – to the point where some readers could be forgiven in misunderstanding that Gn and Hm were in some ways not only incompatible but antithetical. Now, this isn't the case (I've been reading medieval quotes of 4th century Alchemical texts, and it's obvious these guys were equally Hm and Gn), but it does serve as a cautionary tale about oversimplifying the then-currently-popular reading among some academics (until the next year's papers). The solution, as always, is to go back to the primary source texts, pop the hood, and see for ourselves. It's been almost 20 years since I've read the whole thing, so it should be an eye-opener.

So go grab yourselves a copy of the Hermetica. I have a great facing-page translation edition (so you can check the Greek as you go) from Shambhala (the 1993 addition attributed to the wrong Walter Scott! It's not the Ivanhoe guy!) – an early 2000-ish edition has several pages missing in the middle, so you might want to check.

There's a PDF of questionable origin here, and an online Mead here.

Anyway, eighteen libelli plus three Asclepius bits equals one every two weeks or so for the year. I'll read, ponder, look stuff up, and post it here. Who's with me?

UPDATE

Well that was fast.

Rev. Donald Donato has shared on his excellent blog a Brandeis Special Collections piece he wrote describing a surviving CH ms in Latin. It's here.

And when venturing into uncharted territory, it's good to have a native guide. Dr. Jeffry Kupperman, editor of the always-great Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition, has agreed to be my go-to person for head-scratchers and points of clarification.

I know the best geeks.

Musings: Acosmism & Mary

2010-12-08T11:09:00.000-08:00

I think there's certainly a legitimate framing of Gnostic literature that supports acosmism - the idea that the experiential universe does not exist and is only an illusion. But it's not my reading, and it's not a surface reading. The surface reading (specifically the Apocryphon of John) clearly contradicts this position. But that's okay, because Gnostic literature is designed to resonate on many levels, often in dynamic tension to the literal meaning.

What amuses me is that the supporters of the acosmic reading, who do so out of a defense of literalist, radical dualism, are forgetting that acosmism is actually a monist position. Further, it's an absolute monism borrowed from Eastern religions. I know that if I were to contradict primary source texts, and prop up an eisegesis of acosmic monism by looting Buddhism and Hinduism, I'd be criticized as a New Ager. So there's your recommended daily allowance of irony, right there.

I don't want to dismiss acosmism out of hand, because there's a valuable lesson here for those working to draw wisdom out of these texts. Is the experiential universe an illusion? Certainly, our experience of the universe is an illusion. We project a desired outcome on events, and interpret those events in light of our aspirations. Those projections are based on imaginary constructs: status, envy, covetousness, ego. All psychic debris that have no underlying hypostasis. Things like a good day, or bad luck, or poor timing, don't actually exist, objectively. We just make this stuff up as we go along, at our peril. I think that the communities of authorship were trying to tell us this – "the world" is a corpse. Those who live in it are "dead". The matrix cannot tell you who you are.

You can see how this is a philosophical argument, not an ontological one. These texts are not stating as a point of natural history that there's no such thing as an atom or an element. These authors had read their Plato; they weren't ignorant, they were making a point. Switching gears in context and conversation just as we do today, to try to illustrate an inherent message about perception, about self-destruction, about futility. About hope.

Yes, there's a teleological monism, and emanations cosmogeny from there... sorry 'bout that. There's the Great Big Everything, and rippling out of that, for better or arguably worse, is "everything else", getting further and further away from that single point. All those "everything else"s constitute the system, the kosmos, in which we inhabit. Think of a stone dropped in water, with ripples outward. Each ripple (mind, memory) expresses, pushes out, another ripple (matter, eternity), away from the stone. But the ripples have their own sub-stance (under-standing), their own essence, and all ripples are not created equal. They are still in the Pleroma as a kind of suspension medium, but they are definitely their own things. So from an overhead view, they're individual circles, disconnected. From the side, they're waves, all expressions of an underlying event. Both perspectives are valid, and each bring with them their own set of questions.

To illustrate this difference in natures, I presented The Gospel of Mary. Some years ago I had the pleasure of attending a course on this Gospel with Dr. Bruce Chilton as part of my doctoral studies. Dr. Chilton is regarded as one of the foremost authorities on this text, and he was kind enough to unpack the thing line by fragmentary line in its original (and corresponding) language(s), in the context of its history and in other – sometimes competing – texts.

Anyway, it was just this trotting out of Mary, which I used to show how all the components of everything were not consubstantial (everything is resolved to its root, both earthly and heavenly things), that I managed to convince someone, a longtime reader, of the opposite; that everything was dissolved into the same thing. And I had to think about that one for a minute.

I set up a point, bring my familiarity with a text (and the expertise of someone vastly more educated than I) to make that point, and, based on exactly the same words, convinced someone of the position 180 degrees from what I intended. While I'm not going to get into the PTERF war ("all" vs. "all except...") I'll leave that one to the chasm between meaning and gloss. But still, the words are so rich, have such capacity, that they seem still, despite millennia and nuances of translation, to accommodate what seem to me to be even contradictory readings.

I'm reminded of the watchwords of the holy degenerate St. Ratford, "This shit is complicated."

However, my main point in raising – and loving – The Gospel of Mary - is its depiction of the restoration of the soul to the Pleroma. This third movement, the synthesis of Gnosticism, is about reconciliation with our ultimate nature. That we are restored to our root.

"The powers asked the soul, 'Where are you coming from, slayer of humans, and where are you going, conqueror of space?'
"The soul answered and said, 'What binds me is slain, what surrounds me is destroyed, my desire is gone, ignorance is dead. In a world I was freed through another world, and in an image I was freed through a heavenly image. This is the fetter of forgetfulness that exists in the world of time. From now on I shall rest, through time, age, and aeon, in silence."'

Voices of Gnosticism

2010-12-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

Voices of Gnosticism
Miguel Conner
Bardic Press, 2010
242 pp.

Even if you're not familiar with Miguel Conner's fascinating web-radio show, Aeon Byte (formerly "Coffee, Cigarettes and Gnosis"), you probably enjoy the idea of sitting down with a baker's dozen of the world's leading scholars on Gnosticism.

Conner has assembled transcripts of his interviews with Karen King, Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, Marvin Meyer and others, on Gnostic texts and their interpretation. This is the chatty, back-of-the-conference-room-after-the-panel conversation that pierces the veil of the ivory tower. The reader is a fly on the wall during a very frank and engaging exchange among tremendously dedicated and knowledgeable people.

What I find most compelling are the nuanced differences among scholars: Is Gnosticism Jewish? Christian? Or something other? Judas: Good Guy or Bad Guy? Is the Gospel of Thomas Gnostic? What becomes abundantly clear is that we've just began to analyze the corpus of Gnostic literature, and some fascinating glimpses are starting to emerge about the conversation of the early Christian centuries and Gnosticism's place at the table.

My only quibble is with the title: this is not the "Voices of Gnosticism" but rather the voices of those outside Gnosticism peering in. It would seem odd to call a book "Voices of Judaism" comprised of Christian and agnostic scholars interviewed by a solitary Jewish host. Perhaps a follow up volume, "Voices of Gnostics" is in the works interviewing the Wachowski brothers, Tori Amos, Steven Hoeller, Rosamonde Miller and Robert Crumb?

Anyway, this is a terrific and approachable read. It's a current snapshot of academic readings in Gnosticism without requiring a PhD. to follow it (a common enough criticism for those encountering these ideas for the first time). Certainly the most readable book on the subject to come out this year, and top of the Christmas list for your local Gnostic.

"My Desire Has Ended, and Ignorance Has Died." I Wish.

2010-11-29T15:52:00.000-08:00

More hate-mail. I'll stick to clarifying statements of fact.

First, I have yet to find any reference on JSTOR or in any philosophical or theological dictionary which would suggest I've used the terms pantheism or panentheism incorrectly (in fact a little doo-dad I made some years ago explaining them is used in some college courses and cited in at least one doctoral dissertation). Please look these up yourselves and make your own call.

I am not proposing nondualism or suggesting that Gnostic texts are nondual.

I have said, and logically proven, that the term "dualism", in the formal, ontological, philosophical, and theological senses of the term, fails to apply accurately to Gnostic texts. I have also said that the term is ultimately unhelpful in wrapping your head around the Gn world-view.

I've also acknowledged that the term is almost universally used in scholarship. I haven't denied this, I've simply said it's not a very good idea. You have to create a new thing, "gnostic dualism", that is fundamentally unrelated to the dictionary definition of the word. But yes, this happens all the time. I just personally don't happen to like it.

Where I have been critical is to call it out directly: If an individual is summarizing Gnosticism as the incompatibility between spirit and matter they are a) committing a staggeringly superficial oversimplification that's terribly misleading and b) contradicting much of the primary source evidence (remember primary source evidence?). This doesn't strike me as particularly scholarly.

However, that's a long way from advocating nondualism. Nondualism is something else, and I'll leave it to the nondualists to talk about it. It's an actual thing, look it up, discuss amongst yourselves – it's just not what we're talking about over here. Just because I say that x is not an apt term, does not mean that I'm suggesting non-x. If I said that calling Gnosticism a vertebrate doesn't make much sense, that's not the same as insisting that it's an invertebrate.

So asking me to cite scholars to back up my claims of nondualism seems rather silly seeing as I haven't made any.

I have not said that matter and spirit are "consubstantial" in Gnosticism.

They aren't. Do they have the same origin, according to the Apocryphon of John? Obviously and irrefutably. But they are not of the same substance. Neither do they have the same hypostasis. And of course, neither are memory, or immortality, or the Platonic qualities of "dry" or "cold", of one substance. There are a myriad of characters here. Just not two. A ding-dong and a twinkie are not the same thing, even though the come out of the same factory. And I could say more about the ding-dongs and twinkies in my in-box, but that would be uncharitable.

So asking me to cite scholars to back up my claims of consubstantiation seems rather silly seeing as I haven't made any.

I have not said that matter is to be restored to the monad.

I have said that we are to be restored to the monad. Now, during the early NT period, the nature of the resurrected body was THE topic. The gist was that, at some point in time, we'd experience the resurrection and have a body. But was it the same body? Was it made up of the same stuff as it is now?

Will matter then be destroyed or not?
– Gospel of Mary 4.21

This isn't a question about matter in the Platonist sense. This is about the resurrected flesh. And it's a really good question for those who took the resurrection seriously. All I can say is that Jesus and the Pharisees seem to have had different opinions on this one, or at least were framing the question in a different way.

So, I'm not even suggesting that matter and spirit become consubstantial later on. I've said that, according the Gnostic theology, spirit is not alien to matter. Matter is not a spirit repellent. The fact of the Incarnation in Gn literature should hammer that point home. (No, docetism is not an identifying characteristic of Gnostic thought, although some docetism does contain some Gnostic elements.)

The Good came into your midst, to the essence of every nature in order to restore it to its root (ie restoring matter to "its own" nature). – Gospel of Mary 4.27

The Valentinians celebrated the Eucharist. The Gospel of Philip underscores its importance as a sacrament, and there's even a cryptic nod in Thomas (the "five trees" can be understood as the five sacraments of GoPh). This is quite literally the celebration of "The Good into your midst". The infinite becoming finite. The spirit inhabiting matter. This is not the same thing as the spirit becoming matter. But neither is it matter repelling and not relating to spirit. I thought this one was a gimme, but apparently not.

Anyway, here we are, down here on the ground. And the Incarnation, and the Eucharist, and the redemption of Sophia, and the Gospel of Eve, and wood split and stones lifted tell us that, as Philip K Dick learned, you can find God in the gutter. Down here in Malkuthville, corner of Materia and Sarx Street.

What makes us free is the gnosis of whereto we speed. If we're not speeding anywhere, what's gnosis for? Again, this should be a gimme as far as Gnostic theology goes. The All is being dissolved, both the earthly things and the heavenly (GoMM 8.17). The Reunion is the third act of Gnostic literature, the synthesis after the thesis of monist origins and the antithesis of dualist awakening. Gnosis isn't just a maudlin acceptance of our current crisis, our distance from the Divine. Gnosis shows us the way home, restores us to the Fullness, not in the afterlife or when we're no longer corporeal but here and now. Even the enlightened sages of Gnostic history still had to go to the bathroom.

In the Gospel of Mary, after she explains about the liberation of the soul, and its ultimate restoration to the Pleroma, abiding forever in rest and silence, Andrew and Peter say they don't believe her. She's wounded, and says;

What do you think? Do you think that I have thought this up myself?

I'll leave it at that.

Feel Free to Disagree

2010-11-22T13:45:00.000-08:00

Got some criticism from the last post, so I thought I'd clarify.

I get a LOT of mail, mainly from people who are less interested in learning about Gnosticism than from people who want to condemn it. Much of the condemnation isn't actually based on anything other than Voegelinista propaganda, but some of it is based on actual misunderstanding. And the most common misunderstanding is around the use and abuse of the term "dualism". "You Gnostics think there's a two-way war between spirit and matter, and this is why blah blahbeddy blah."

As I've pointed out, the word "dualism" is, at best, unhelpful. It's not entirely accurate, and doesn't actually aid in understanding the Gnostic weltanschauung. So I tried walking readers through Gnostic literature and its thesis (everything starts out as one thing and flows from that one thing as an expression of that one thing), antithesis (the world we live in is definitely not unified with that one thing, and there's a very real tragic brokenness and suffering) and synthesis (reconciliation of opposites and putting it back together as a mature, aware individual). Gnostic literature, which is rarely clear about anything, tends to be pretty clear about those three points. Things were peachy, things are broken, let's get to work.

Now there are quite a few Gnostics who took issue with this examination, and thought it was about them somehow. Some Gnostics are all about the antithesis, deny the thesis altogether, and reject the synthesis as a waste of time. And that's fine. I'll get to exactly how fine that is in a minute. But first I want to address the scathing, nastiest thing hurled at me for a long time: I got called a pantheist!

Pantheism vs. Panentheism
Well, obviously that's not nasty, some of my best friends are pantheists. It was just intended to be nasty. It's also quite silly, as I'm obviously not one.

Pantheism states that God equates with the experiential universe, which equates with God. This rock is God. That tree is God. And God is defined by the experiential universe.

Panentheism suggests that God is not so defined. If God is the egg, the experiential universe is the yolk of the egg. If God is the ocean, the universe is a fish in the ocean. Once you've got through the entire experiential universe, there's a whole lot of God left over. In this way, pantheism and panentheism are incompatible. Pantheism says God stops here, and panentheism says no, God doesn't stop here. I could paste-bomb thousands of pages about how ineffable and incomprehensible and BIG the Pleroma is in Gnostic scripture, but I'm going to assume most of you are familiar with the concept.

Pantheism says "God is everything and everything is God and that's that."

Panentheism says "God is everything and then some, and everything is God but there's God outside of everything as well."

From the Apocryphon of John:

"For he does not exist in something inferior to him, since everything exists in him."

Pantheism would argue, sure, everything exists in him, but of course he exists in something inferior to him seeing as it's all equal. Well, pantheism and panentheism are never going to agree on that one. While all dogs are mammals, all mammals are not dogs. The set is greater than the subset, and they're not equivalent.

The Valentinians agreed with Plato, that the experiential world contained the idea of the divine, a kind of imago dei. Without that idea, and that potential, it was completely without value. So there has to be more than just our material existence, which is obviously going to decay. They were, as I am, vaguely pessimistic about the world at their fingertips, because that's not ultimately what we're about. But the Vals thought of the universe not only as a vessel which contained the divine spark, but also a kind of breeding ground for opportunities for gnosis. Obviously, this here-now wasn't the ideal realm, but it wasn't alien to the ideal realm either. Hence the pro-marriage, pro-baby stance of Valentinian literature and the gorgeous poetic metaphors of season and harvest. The Valentinians were clearly not... antitheticals, if you will. They acknowledged the rupture in reality, but they also recognized the reality of the Pleroma and looked for liberation via gnosis – not later somewhere else, but here/now. And that's just one community of Gnostic textual authorship.

Feel Free to Disagree

So, Apocryphon of John, widely regarded as the go-to text for Gnostic cosmogeny, very clearly states that God is not outside the universe (or more specifically not JUST existence or non-existence; apophatic theology is like that and says "don't put this in a jar and label it because it's not going to work", it's not an ontological statement). It says quite emphatically that "everything exists in him". I didn't make that part up. It's just there. And that's not a pantheist statement, either, as it's part of a panentheistic whole.

But you know what? Apocryphon of John is just something some guys wrote down. They were doing the math, kicking ideas around, trying to sort it all out. It's okay to disagree with them. If the idea that "everything exists in him" doesn't fit with you, nobody says you have to swallow that particular papyrus pill. The text really really really honestly does say that, but you don't have to like it. These guys were just riffing on Greek creation myths anyway, and Meyer is great at pointing out the correlation between Zeus, the birth of Athena, and the reflection of Narcissus in the text. Now, I happen to think these guys were on to something, and I find it useful in my own spiritual questioning and in assisting others when asked to do so. But I also find value in those original Greek myths themselves, and I respect the collective wisdom there. It humbles and informs me; it keeps me digging for treasure.

But if some wish to look at the entire corpus of Gnostic literature and merely extract the "things are broken" antithesis, ignoring the thesis of the Pleroma altogether, and use their antithetical insight to create art, forge meaningful relationships, practice compassion, then bravo. It was never my intention to take a swing at you. You're as Gnostic as anybody if you choose to so identify. And that's the whole point. We're the Gnostics now. We get to decide what to do with this stuff. If you want my help, I'll help. If not, I'll just applaud. Either way, I'll learn something.

One. Two. Three.

2010-11-15T15:19:00.000-08:00

Many of you are bored of the whole dualism debate, as am I. But I still think it's important for several reasons;

1) Primary source evidence suggest strongly that Gnosticism is not dualist per se

2) The term "dualism" is largely meant as a pejorative in order to dismiss Gnosticism's validity as a world-view

3) In order to make the term apply, dualism's proponents stretch the definition of the word to the point where it could be applied to ALL branches of Western religious thought and is therefore as unhelpful as it is meaningless.

So given the overwhelming evidence, why do some still fixate on this dualism idea? As we've seen in other posts, there is an aspect where Gnosticism clearly separates the ideal from the actual. There is a very real, very tragic break in the kosmos (the system): the kosmos itself is a tragedy. It's this inherently Middle Platonist pessimism that so characterizes Gnostic thought I don't think you could honestly call it Gnosticism without it. But the essence of Gnosticism as a living philosophy, classical or modern, does not reside there.

An analogy is in the orthodox view of Original Sin. This is a very big deal in Christian thought. But the issue isn't just left at "oh, we're sinful, it's hopeless." Christianity presents a solution to the problem; the blood atonement of Christ as sacrifice. Christians don't wander around gnashing their teeth about the hopelessness of Original Sin (unless they're Calvinists). There's a way out. Problem, solution. Easy.

Likewise, Gnosticism sees the kosmos = tragedy, and offers a solution.

One.

"He is the invisible Spirit, of whom it is not right to think of him as a god, or something similar. For he is more than a god, since there is nothing above him, for no one lords it over him. For he does not exist in something inferior to him, since everything exists in him."

If there is one übertext of Gnostic cosmogeny, it is the Apocryphon of John. And how monist is this? Everything is God. Nothing isn't God. You can't even say that goodness is God an non-goodness isn't God, because there's no such thing as "isn't God". This is pure, absolute monism. And from the monad, forethought. Forethought asks for other entities/qualities to be created that She might be endowed with them, and hence foreknowing, indestructibility, eternal life, and truth. Everything flows out of God. In terms of Gnostic theology, this is the first and last word, and the word is unquestionably, inescapably monist.

Two.

Uh oh.

"The world came about through a mistake. For he who created it wanted to create it imperishable and immortal. He fell short of attaining his desire. For the world never was imperishable, nor, for that matter, was he who made the world." – Gospel of Philip

Yep. It's broken. We're all born dying. Flesh and blood don't inherit the kingdom. This isn't real, it isn't home, it isn't us. Disease, decay, injustice, death, horror, greed, obsession, hunger, loneliness. Get us the hell out of here.

And yet here, at this philosophical point, so many Gnostics remain. They can't let go. They feel as ripped off as any suburban teenager, knowing that there's more out there than ambition to become the second top-selling realtor in the tri-state area or the assistant manager at Wendy's or gathering 2000 facebook friends. And they're upset. But that anger untranscended becomes a neurosis – a knot in thinking that becomes a little kosmos in itself. The system is out to get you, nothing is real, existence is a prison, the body a monster.

Clad in the shape of a deer she is worn away with death´s slavery, Now she has mastery and glimpses light: now she is plunged in misery and weeps. Now she is mourned, and her self rejoices. Now she weeps and is finally condemned. Now she is condemned and finally dies. And now she reaches the point where hemmed in by evil, she knows no way out. Misled, she has entered a labyrinth. – Naasene Psalm

Breathing in that mindset is difficult. Loving, creating, doubly so. Rejection of falsity of projection is an important step in the maturation of the Gnostic, but residing in that space is banishing oneself to the wasteland. Misled, you enter a labyrinth. Yes, let us mourn for errant Wisdom. But let us remember how that story ends – with the seeding of divine Wisdom in the world, and reunion in the Fullness. Forgetting that is, ultimately, a kind of sad blasphemy against the Pleromatic reality. Embracing dualism is a kind of amnesia – exactly the amnesia Gnosticism is supposed to solve;

"I forget that I was a son of kings,

and I served their king;

and I forgot the pearl, for which my parents had sent me,

and because of the burden of their oppressions

I lay in a deep sleep. " – Hymn of the Pearl

Three.

For I am the first and the last.

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin. – Thunder: Perfect Mind

The reconciliation of opposites. The reunification that is ultimately the Great Work of the alchemists. Git back to where you once belonged.

This is our work. This is Gnosticism – creating and celebrating a culture which nourishes gnosis to reside in the heart. Not to forget that "everything exists in him" as per the Apocryphon of John. Ours is to undertake the tikkun olam, the repair of the world, through gnosis. Through knowing who we really are, what birth means and what rebirth really means.

"Light and Darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor evil evil, nor is life life, nor death death." – Gospel of Philip

We put it all back together. We don't despise the air or the river. We breathe and drink deeply.

"Split a piece of wood; I am there.

Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." – Gospel of Thomas

The divine is everywhere, in everything. And of course it is everything. Gnosis lets you know that.

"I remembered that I was a son of royal parents,

and my noble birth asserted itself.

I remembered the pearl,

for which I had been sent to Egypt" – Hymn of the Pearl

"And nothing exists outside of him. But all exist within him." – Bruce Codex

It's unlikely that it was Churchill who said "If you're going through hell, keep going", but it was good advice nonetheless.

Diminished Capacity

2010-11-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

I wake up in a beauty I do not yet trust.

The suite's stone fireplace and arbutus beams are dimly discernible by the weekend sun groping half-heartedly through forest mist. The house resembles the background of DVD bonus features shot on Skywalker Ranch. Indulgent in scale. California arts and crafts colours. Avacado and terracotta. I'm here more or less by accident, or fortune long-familiar but recently seemingly estranged.

I'm admitting here, confessing, that I've been in a state of diminished capacity. It has caught me by some measure of surprise.

I've always had answers at my fingertips. Oh, I know how to do that. Oh, I can fix that for you. Oh, I have a friend who's exactly the person you need. My entire livelihood has been about connecting and ensuring connections. Connecting ideas to words, images, capital. Connecting dates to events, transactions, delivery, presentation. I've quite literally made people millions by doing this. I've made people's dreams come true, over and over. Mercurius, god of message and signal, commerce and technology.

Of course, such commitments have never been entirely unconditional. I have small children, after all. Epilepsy that can render me utterly useless for days (seizure, aftershocks, tests, specialists, more tests). Finite resources.

And it's just the finity of these resources with which I've become recently, so forcibly familiar. Always a contractor, a freelancer, I'm accustomed to going long stretches between significant compensation. A kind of square wave of not only funds, but time, creative energy, focus. Nothing, then everything, in an inverse of time/money. And yet, almost always, a way to postpone or delay "pressing need". Enough margin of time, resources, supports to not have to drop everything in order to address the emergent. The hostage-taking of present crises.

I can say, here is this signed first edition. I knew the author well, or heard him read, or she cited my work.

I can say, here is my book on Amazon. Number something in its category. Quite something for a small academic press.

I can say, here is the University at which I lectured. My students remember me with some kindness.

But my techne has now failed me. A Wordpress install that won't. A dropped call. The time-sensitive document caught in a spam filter. A client cheque clearing from America taking just a few days too long, meaning a missed payment, a reschedule, an addendum to contract. A child's fever meaning an unreturned call, a missing signature, a pushed deadline, an unfortunate typo. Not excuses, not exactly, just a regrettable series of compounding almosts. A day late and a dollar short, as my grandparents' generation would say.

Overwhelmed by the underwhelming. A tide of minutiae, lacunae, mantissa.

I can say, here is the contract from my publisher. I owe her a manuscript this month.

I can say, here is a screenplay. The producer is going to get back to me, he says.

I can say, here is a spiritual retreat in May, I have yet to confirm, based on evaluating the probability that the cost of the flight won't be consumed by, say, the van's mercurial transmission.

For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For the want of a horse, the rider was lost. For the want of a rider, the message was lost. For the want of a message, the battle was lost. For the want of a battle, the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

This doesn't factor in the many, many horseshoe nails, jury rigs, I've successfully MacGyver'd over the last year. The multiples of almost-didn't-make-its, the skin of my teeth. Rabbits from hats. But like the holed-up survivor in a zombie film, it doesn't matter how many you've put down, but how many keep coming.

Two weeks ago our family dog was killed. My heart broke in a way overwhelming and unexpected. Presented with malice and irrationality from a direction out of character and context, we moved house, suddenly. For reasons that baffle technical support, we have no phone, no internet, for a week now.

If not for the generosity and patience of lover, family, friends, long-time clients, it would have unravelled in a way more drastic. And yet, unravelled it did. I did. Regret, disappointment, six-out-of-ten. In the binary paradigm of success/fail, an indelible null the weight of an albatross.

But these are of course first-world problems; my diminishments irrelevant to the manufacturers of my Bangladeshi jeans or Chinese iPhone. No one is shooting at me. There is food. Clean water. The new home is as I said beautiful – no, more than beautiful. I can say honestly that if I were to be handed a million dollars, a million and a half, I would not be able to afford this place on its five acres of arbutus forest and lavender fields, here on my tiny artists-colony island. Paradise. And yet fortune has led me here, under generous terms.

So I try another, older techne, in the making of my children forest-wise. Here is salal, here ferns, these dozen different mushrooms we will identify from a book in the main house's library (we populate the dozen metres of floor-to-loft-ceiling built-in-bookcases, drawing books from wine boxes and sorting them by spine colour). My five-year -old son finds a deer trail, and leads as we follow and tell signs. Scat. Rubbed bark here. Mosses to the north. These bushes here picked clean of lemon-green new growth. Indian summer here. This walk a way of healing, mending, connecting, re-affirming.

I will the return of words, of ligature. The embrace of season, accepting the sun's own subtle diminishment in cycle. Receive this quieter gift.

AJC Conclave 2011 - Birger Pearson!

2010-10-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

The Parish of St. Mary of Magdala and the Apostolic Johannite Church are proud to present the 2011 AJC Conclave - May 29th to June 5th, 2011 at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat in Sedalia, Colorado.

Each year the clergy, seminarians, laity, friends and family of the AJC gather together to socialize, learn and build community.

This is our twelfth Conclave and as with all of our Conclaves, we will have lectures and panel discussions on a variety of interesting topics by a variety of interesting people. We will also have social events to promote fellowship and community and as always a majority of the events at our Conclave will be open to the public.

We’ve worked hard every year to bring you speakers, workshops, education and a fellowship unparalleled in the ecclesiastical Gnostic Movement- and this year will be no exception, as the Apostolic Johannite Church is committed to raising the bar year after year. With our 2011 Conclave, we’ve done it again.

On that note, we are very proud to present to announce to you our speakers for Conclave 2011:

Dr. Birger Pearson: Two Lectures-

I. The Sethian Gnostics
II. Mary Magdalene

The Rev. Father Vincent Hovley, S.J.:

The Gospel of John / The Johannine Path and the Eucharistic Path

The Most Rev. William Behun, Ph.D.:

The Gnostic Restoration

The Reverend Deacon Donald Donato: Two Lectures:

I. The Levitikon
II. Johannites and Marian Spirituality

The Rev. Father Lance Hoddinott, RN:

Practical Considerations on Pastoral Care for the Terminally Ill

The Reverend Deacon Bray Weaver:

Styles of Meditation

Mr. Scott Wolter, Geologist:

The Knights Templar

We’ve got more exciting things in the works and details are already being added- you can follow all the action athttp://conclave.johannite.org/

The cost is:

$700 per person (includes meals, lodging and workshops for entire Conclave),
$1300 for couples (includes meals, lodging and workshops for entire Conclave)
$100 for individual days with lodging (includes meals, lodging and workshops)
$70 per day for offsite (includes meals and workshops)

Official Registration begins December 1st and closes April 15th. If you would like to register early, please contact us at info@johannite.org

Is Gnosticism Dualist?

2010-10-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

While we're on the topic of "Is Gnosticism X?" let's look at the most abused (and abusive) term associated the the Gnostic phenomenon. Dualism.

Dualism A (Theological Dualism): The religious doctrine that the universe contains TWO EQUAL and OPPOSED powers of good and evil, often characterized by TWO DEITIES.

That's it. That's the real, honest to God dualism right up there. That's what "dualism" means. If you don't have two gods, it's not dualism. If you they're not equal, that is, if there's more good ultimately than bad, or if God is more powerful than the Devil, it's not technically dualism.

In Gnostic mythology, everything originates from the same source. It's called "emanations cosmogeny". Everything flows out of the Fullness, the Pleroma. This puts Gnosticism in the realm of monism, not dualism (although it's not quite that simple – this monism is qualified to the point where once all the factors are considered, it's closer to dualism philosophically if not ontologically).

The "devil" role – the source of the problem – is occupied in (a minority of) Gnostic literature by a servant, the Demiurge, who's a secondary character and not about to give the Pleroma a run for his money.

Given this, there is absolutely no way Gnosticism, ancient, modern, or in between, conforms to the theological definition of dualism. You can make a rubber stamp "dualism" and thump it all over Gnostic texts, but it doesn't change the fact that when religious scholars are talking about dualism, they're talking about something that does not apply to Gnosticism.

Dualism B (Ontological Dualism): The principle that there are TWO fundamentally and irreducibly different types of being or operation. Intellect and will. Virtue and sin. Spirit and matter. For example, Aristotle can be boiled down to a polemical dualism of truth and falsehood. Things are either of one category or another, and that's that.

Rather than just give us two kinds of natures, Gnosticism gives us a variety of models from which to choose; the threefold hylic, psychic, and pneumatic, for example. In the Apocryphon of John, yes, matter is distinct from spirit (matter is the mother of the four demons "hot, cold, wet, and dry", but not a demon herself), but both are distinct from thought. And memory. And form. etc. There are no "one-or-the-other" modes to be found here, regarding how the mechanics of the world works, but dozens. There are just too many players to be dualistic.

Dualism C (Philosophical Dualism): Hmm. Having dispensed with the actual, technical meaning of the word, now we're getting closer to a kind of dualism we can use. There IS, at the core of Gnostic experience, a red-light-green-light conversation, where things are either one thing or another. And it's the distinction between the perfect world and imperfect world. Every Gnostic reaches some kind of point where they realize "this is not the deal". The matrix isn't real. The daily projection of our waking world is false, hollow, forced, and working against us. And beneath that, above that, escaping the bonds of that pedestrian world, is something other, something beautiful. Home.

So it's this recognition that, sure, everything may flow out of god like ripples in a pool, but some of those waters got very choppy along the way, and our world somehow has broken away from the ideal, real world. So when those proponents of Gnosticism describe it as dualist, this is really the only definition that can legitimately apply. Not a matter/spirit dichotomy (you need two things for a dichotomy, and the Gnostic cast of characters is sliced into too many bits for that as we've seen) but a real vs. unreal framing of the human situation.

This is where the sliding continuum between monism and dualism can be somewhat fleetingly helpful. Because of Gnosticism's acknowledgement of the rift in reality, it can't be considered absolute monism, but more a qualified monism. But because of what the word "dualism" actually means, it obviously isn't an absolute dualism, but rather a qualified dualism, and even then in the most abstract, nuanced, and philosophical sense.

Now, Gnostics are a slippery lot, employing in the literature BOTH/AND rather than EITHER/OR thinking. Which is why when an outsider attempts to apply a blanket term or strict categorization to the Gnostic phenomenon, it most often proves unhelpful.

Dualism D (Practical Dualism): This kind of dualism is practical: don't do that, do this. Don't smack back, turn the other cheek. Don't cast your pearls before swine, go off into the desert and think about stuff instead. The problem with Practical Dualism as any kind of definition is that it's universal. There's practically (ha!) no religious movement or spiritual teaching that doesn't involve this in some way. So it's utterly useless as a category. If I were studying ancient religions and trying to identify one particular sect based on the fact they wore sandals, I'd soon realize everybody wore sandals, and my criteria would suddenly be so all encompassing as to have no practical value.

So, is Gnosticism dualist? Not in the technical meaning of the term, no. Not in the theological or ontological sense. However in one philosophical aspect we do see a very real and vital dualism as a stage in the awakening Gnostic. We have to see the difference between how things appear and how they are. This distinction is the point at which the Gnostics hang their hat. So that's a real, philosophical dualism. Practically, of course, it's not a particularly helpful definition, as we've seen, but in terms of honestly appraising the Gnostic world view, it's important to stop at that point for a while.

The conclusion then is clear: Gnosticism is only dualist in the most subtle and sophisticated of ways. A hermeneutic which merely states "Gnosticism is dualist" is so simplistic as to be misleading, because it drags with it implications of the term which obviously do not apply. But we must agree that, after jumping through some hoops and tossing out a dictionary or two, that yes, there is an aspect of dualism in Gnosticism. And it's this one:

It's only a paper moon
sailing over a cardboard sea
but it wouldn't be make-believe
if you believed in me

Is Modern Gnosticism "New Age"?

2010-10-12T19:42:00.000-07:00

It's a common foil for those opposed to Gnosticism and its ideals to castigate it as "New Age". This is done mostly by Evangelical Christians who are entirely ignorant about Gnostic theology or precepts. It's usually a technique to associate Gnosticism with either Satanism or Nazism (or liberalism with some GnostiSataNazi agenda), and frequently used in radical right political diatribes.

But it's also used by those neo-heresological anti-Gnostics who wish to erase our history in hopes of erasing our present. For example, if a modern Gnostic finds inspiration from Gospel of Thomas or Thunder: Perfect Mind, one is told that technically these aren't Gnostic, and any ideas you had originating from these texts are obviously not Gnostic either – therefore the REAL origin of your thinking must come from "the New Age".

I didn't say it was logical. But it IS used, repeatedly, in debate: "You disagree with my hermeneutic, therefore you are New Age" (ie not a real Gnostic or not very bright – this isn't fair to educated, considered self-identifying New Agers, of whom there are no doubt bajillions, but it's used as a derogatory epithet regardless). The idea is that by tying modern Gnosticism with New Age, Gnostics will shut up and go away, or at least stop using the word "Gnostic" so that it can become the exclusive property of dead, largely orthodox, radically-dualist Christians, with none of that pagan or Sophianic or Jungian funny business.

So let's take a look at the core of the argument. Is 21st century Gnosticism "New Age"?

Characteristics of New Age vs. Gnosticism

(First off, let me apologize for the generalities – I'm sure there is as great a range within the New Age experience as there is with any other approach to religion and spirituality, and just because I'm not part of your religion doesn't mean I automatically disrespect it. And yes I'm sorry for the constant use of New Age as a pejorative in Gnostic circles. I know that's not very nice. I used to say "newage, rhymes with sewage" because gosh wasn't I original and clever. Until I realized I'd never say "Sufi, rhymes with goofy." I stopped doing it, but only recently, sorry.)

New Age is esoteric and metaphysical

As is Gnosticism, agreed. And, um, Sufism. And Qabalah. And a bunch of orthodox Catholic saints. And the Druze. Along with several branches of Buddhism. Check.

New Age thought stresses personal responsibility for spiritual development

Yes, this is shared by modern Gnostics. Of course, there are aspects of this in Judaism and Buddhism etc., too. Tag, you're it. Check.

New Age is syncretic, fusing many different traditions.

Yes, Gnosticism is the fusion of Greek philosophy, Judaism, Classical Paganism , Egyptian religion, and later, early (Pre-Nicene) Christianity. However, New Age syncretism is heavily weighted to Eastern inspiration, whereas Gnosticism is Jewish/Greek/Egyptian in essence and expression. So, sorta kinda.

There is no external authority in New Age – you are the authority

In modern Gnosticism, we place "authority" in our scriptural traditions, and in those spiritual ancestors who have attained gnosis. We have saints and scriptures and catechesis. Ultimate responsibility rests in the self part of "know thyself", but still, we acknowledge authority outside ourselves. Nope.

All is One in New Age; there is absolute monism

Well, Gnosticism has the Pleroma, the Fullness, so yes, ultimately all is one, sure, but it's not that simple. This unity isn't readily available, and it's veiled from us. There's a very real and very problematic disconnect. So more honestly, Gnosticism's view can be described as somewhere between qualified monism to qualified dualism – which is a fundamental distinction between the absolute monism of New Age. No way, José.

New Age holds a literal belief in reincarnation

While some modern Gnostics choose to hold to this, there is nothing in Gnostic literature which actually states it. Often passages or symbols are taken out of context, or meaning is superimposed upon them ("the ouroboros means re-incarnation, gnosis saves us from incarnation," etc.) but at face value there's no evidence that classical Gnostics believed in it, although it's a common enough minority view among some moderns. But it's certainly not a defining characteristic of Gn as it is NA. So that's a no, then.

Astrology plays an important role in New Age

But in Gnosticism, astrology is kind of a problem. It's the "fate" you got handed by your captors, as a sign of your imprisonment. Nothing says "systemic control" like the assumptions of astrology. Once you have gnosis, astrology no longer applies to you. You're not a Virgo, anymore. The forces that make astrology "work" for others are seen as adversaries to the Gnostic. Age of Aquarius? Just another prison. Nuh uh no way no how.

You make New Age up as you go along

Gnosticism, on the other hand, has traditions of praxis and liturgy which are disciplined, considered, and ancient. Thanks for playing.

"If it feels good, do it"

New Age can be said to embrace an "if an idea appeals to you it's probably a good one" principle. Gnosticism, in stark contrast, is at the borders arguably paranoid, oh-so-slightly pessimistic, and deals with some unpleasant truths about our spiritual situation, with no easy answers and incessant self-questioning. I realize this makes New Age sound like fun whereas Gnosticism is a total pain in the ass, but that's not too far from the truth. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.

New Age culture often appears vaguely anti-Christian

Christianity is frequently "othered" in New Age conversation. It is the standard, frequently, against which New Age defines itself (just as, to be fair, I'm doing now, sorry). Christianity is tired and dogmatic, New Age is fresh and liberating. Christianity is institutional, New Age is personal. You get the idea. None of these statements are true, per se, but you see this all the time. In contrast, most Gnostics are Christian. Yes, Gnosticism is pre-Christian, but the majority of its thinkers, literature, and cultural tradition developed in and emerged from a Christian cultural milieu. However, while most modern Gnostics are Christian, this anti-Christian ("anti-orthodox") bias rings regrettably loud and clear in many Gnostic discussions – so we'll have to declare this one a wash.

So, Gnosticism, ancient or modern, cannot reasonably said to be New Age in outlook, belief or practice. Despite the efforts of some who would seek to drive some kind of definitive wedge between "so-called modern Gnostics" and "real authentic classical (dead) Gnostics", such a distinction is misleading and intellectually irresponsible. On the whole, contemporary Gnostic religion is as similar to 3rd century Gnostic religion as 21st century Christianity is to 3rd century Christianity (so much for the term "neo-Gnostics" – are 21st century Hindus "neo-Hindus"?). Some differences. Huge shift in ambient culture. Some outright contradictions. Mostly a muddling-through. But Gnosticism is Gnosticism, and it's not New Age.

Jung Chicks with Dicks

2010-10-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

Last night I had one of those fleeting moments of insight into unpleasantness. I speak of course to the monstrous crawling horror of OLG, On Line Gnosticism; a slavering beast I have fed lo these twenty years.

There are, among any fetishistic and autocannibalistic tribe, "camps" or biases. This has always been apparent, but their taxonomy has been elusive, largely due to the significant overlap between the two most prominent.

The Dickians

Followers of the world-view of the brilliant Philip K Dick, they tend to be well-educated, well-read, and articulate. They also inherit Dick's unapologetic paranoia and are prone to clinical depression. For them, Gnostic texts are at once a code and at the same time extremely surface, which is to say, they say what they mean. For them, Gnostic literature (ancient and modern) describes a literal, objective reality that is highly dualist in nature – not just the "real vs. ideal" qualified-dualism of NeoPlatonism, but often the actual "nature bad spirit good" ranting of Marcionites. Dickians attract unwanted and semi-informed sympathy from conspiracy theorists and the entheogen people.

The Jungians

Followers of the world-view of the brilliant Carl G Jung, they tend to be well-educated, well-read, and articulate. For them, Gnostic texts are dream journals composed during therapy – highly symbolic, and highly personal. Their only objectivity is in their relevance to archetype and to the collective unconscious which we all share. Their view ranges from qualified monism (the earth - actual rocks and trees and flowers and bunnies - is not the world - the kosmos or system of authority, time, money, rules) to absolute Hermetic monism (there's nothing whatsoever outside the Pleroma). Jungians attract unwanted and semi-informed sympathy from New Agers, NLP practitioners and "small g gnostics" (those who think "know thyself" is cool but have little understanding about the theology, ecclesiology and dogma of Gnosticism proper).

There is, as I mentioned, a strong overlap between these two groups, largely due to a fondness of PKD by the Jungians and a fondness for Jung by the Dicks. These views are not irreconcilable, but when push comes to shove, the biases are evident. For example, a Dickian is more likely to believe in an historical Jesus – and those who take the mythicist position on Jesus will turn around and insist that Simon Magus was historical. For them the Archons are "out there". The Jungians will read the whole shebang as myth, as an account of individuation and the struggle with the ego, and affirm "We have met the Archons and he is us", to paraphrase.

The Chicks

Victims of the world view of the deranged Jack Chick - arguably the world's most effective Christian in terms of getting the word out. Chicks are characterized by the literalist superficiality of uniquely American Protestantism. The bible is the word of God, Jesus is a-comin', and Paul was right about absolutely everything. But these are Fundies with an heretic twist (okay, technically all Protestants are heretics, but let's set that aside) – they see Gn scripture as a vital addendum to their Sunday School understanding of their faith. They lack critical reading skills, sticking to the same bias of "well if God wanted to tell us something he made it easy to ready so it says what it means." They insist Paul was a Gnostic and stop there. There are very few Chicks on Gnostic forums – less than 10% – but they pee in the pool very quickly.

Now, I'm a staunch Jungian, but my best friends and harshest critics are Dickians. A long-running Gn forum died some years ago, eventually, because the Dickians ran the Jungians out of town. Some months ago I posted a guest editorial on another blog about the symbolic resonance between two different (and historically distant) myths, and received a barrage of hate mail from Dicks who couldn't get past the surface of it ("how can myth one be the origin of myth two?!") and see that both were expressions of one underlying archetype. Recently, a heavily Jungian-biased online forum has been overrun with Chicks, and there konstunt funetik speling is enuff to mak the Yungees hedd asplode.

The big point is, none of it matters. All this posturing and territoriality, straw-men and bluster, obfuscates what we're all doing here – trying to learn, trying to share, maybe testing our assumptions behind the anonymity of a browser. Some are just lonely and want to connect to someone via a mutual fondness for an image or a phrase they don't yet fully understand.

I'm reminded (via a recent post by the wonderful Bishop Rosamonde Miller);

"All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with winning or losing this game of chess." –Marcel Duchamp.

Social Media Experiment: Living Gnosticism e-book only $10 for the next 36 hours

2010-09-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

Kindles and iPads and Kobos, oh my!

A lot of you have been asking for a copy of LG for your readers, so I thought I'd make and experiment to see how many would actually buy a copy.

So I'll be making Living Gnosticism available as a PDF until midnight Friday October 1 Pacific Time for only $10. Just to see if I get orders from people I don't know (and reconnect with readers I do!).

I promise to share the results of the experiment – I think it might be telling, because we Gnostics are a bookish lot, and I wonder how many of us have gone digital. Given the growth of Gnosticism mirrors the ubiquity of online activity, my wild guess is twenty. I may be wrong. But that's the fun bit of an experiment...

Paypal will be processed by the lovely and talented Mrs. Wife Lady, zandra (at) zandra.ca

Don't have $10? Check out the many affordable and amazing recordings at Aeon Byte!

UPDATE

The tally came in at.... 18! With most purchasers choosing "laptop" as their e-reader of the moment. (as a PDF, you can read it on anything, even a Blackberry or iPhone).

I posted this offer 6 times over the 36 hours to my 348 twitter followers, and to 1074 FaceBook friends. Now, when you post to FB, not all your friends see your posts in their news feed, as FB randomly selects only 100 for you to focus on, and unless you have that friend in your recent activity, they're essentially invisible. At last count 16 people "shared" the offer, either to help me out with a sale, promote the book in general, participate in the experiment, or some combination thereof.

So, what prompted this response? The discounted price point? The content being made available in a new format? The compressed time frame making people curious? 14 of these sold within the first 6 hours, creating a bit of a buzz.

I do wonder what this means for the short-term future of small publishers, and for the variety and quality of new books on the subject...

One Year

2010-09-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

In the last year I;

- moved to Salt Spring Island

- pitched and sold a book to a major publisher

- wrote 7 feature screenplays

- performed a baptism, ordination, and two weddings

- got a dog

- learned to play the ukulele

- expanded our art collection

- made three short documentaries about artists

- coached a dozen clients

- taught film school

- produced a huge arts event in an historic venue

It feels like a sabbatical. I suppose that's why I'm broke. ;-)

The Most Reverend John Cole – 1953-2010

2010-08-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

The North American College of Gnostic Bishops mourns the passing of one its own- The Most Reverend John Cole, in Ecclesia Tau Ioannes Harmonius.

His Grace was a dedicated and true Servant of the Gnosis, and an accomplished esotericist and Martinist- having served as a Bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Apostolica (Bishop of Evansville, Indiana), Presiding Bishop of the Gnostic Church of Christianopolis, Grand Master of the Ancient Martinist Order (Sar Quaero Lucem) and Grand Commander of the Rosicrucian Order of the Grail.

His Grace joined the NACGB as the delegate for the Gnostic Church of Christianopolis in early 2005 and in 2007 scaled back his participation to Individual Membership. This was owing to his battle with cancer which he would continue to fight bravely in the years to come.

His Grace was widely respected in the Ecclesiastical Gnostic movement, and he enjoyed good relations with many clergy and laity throughout. We all have been blessed by his efforts and contributions, and his presence will be felt and remembered for many years to come.

May eternal light shine upon him.

Ouroboros Photoshop Brushes

2010-08-22T10:59:00.000-07:00

Here, thought you might need these...

Hold the Door

2010-07-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

[Andrea H. was admitted this weekend to the Ostariate, the ancient order of the Doorkeeper, at Regina Coeli Parish in Victoria BC. This simple rite got me thinking about thresholds, limits, discernment-at-the-door. Congratulations, Andrea, and welcome.]

There's a lot of stuff in the priest-biz about vision. Having a vision. Receiving a vision. Being a visionary. Writing a vision statement.

I don't have a vision. And I'm okay with that. More about that in a second.

There's also a lot of stuff about "seeking". About being a seeker. Well, I'm not a seeker. I'm a happy finder, and conscientious digger-downer; I'm insatiably curious. But I'm not seeking.

We're pretty much conditioned to assume that someone without a vision, who is not a seeker, would make a lousy priest. Maybe we're right about that. I'm not so sure.

When I say I don't have a vision, I'm saying, "my integrity is not your integrity. What I love is not necessarily what you love". I don't see – or wish to see – the church-building ambitions so prevalent in western religious occupation. I don't convert, I don't preach, I don't proselytize. I just share. If my spiritual tradition and religious philosophy (or rather, those of which I'm fond; they're not mine, obviously) appeal to you, then that's great. If not, that's great. It's not a take-it-or-leave-it thing, although it may seem that way. It's more like, go ahead, pick it and play with it – you can't break it. It's okay. Let me know what you come up with.

My church, the Apostolic Johannite Church, is now the largest ecclesiastical Gnostic church in the world. Which is kind of like being the largest association of left-handed accordion-playing Sanskrit scholars in the world. If five years from now my church is five times larger than it is now, that's terrific. If it's five times smaller, okay, there we are.

That's because there's an ontology to the whole thing. It is. If a type of fern becomes fashionable as a motif and shows up on tee shirts, the fern doesn't care. When fern-themed tee shirt sales plummet, the fern doesn't care. It has vital, important work to do, um, ferning. The fern isn't about to write a vision statement. It's not about to tell the moss it better start ferning, either.

Neither is the fern seeking. It's got its fronds full, if you take my meaning. It's already put down roots, digging deeper for nutrients, for sustenance, for life-giving water. It doesn't pick up after six months and try another spot down the road. It can't grow that way. Neither can I.

Oh, it puts out its spores, seeds the wind, and wishes well whatever my grow from that. It's not fretting about it. Releasing seeds to the air is just part of its fern-ness. I suppose that is what I'm doing here. I write because I'm a writer. I write about Gnosticism because I'm a Gnostic. That's all.

My church has a seminary program for those who are discerning the call to the priesthood. It's volunteer-run. Seminarians pay nothing for tuition. And the instructors, who have jobs, families, parishes, PhDs or theses-due-real-soon-now, donate 20 or 30 or 100 hours each per student, with no compensation. Yes, people who teach for a living, teaching for free. And most of these seminary students will give up. It's too hard. It takes too long (four years). I don't want to read that, or write that, or chat online at that time or return an e-mail. It's far too easy to find another church, another Order, that will just hand over the titles and the credit without having to do or learn anything. But we keep doing it, keep offering it up. Because it's what we do. Maybe this crop of seminarians will be the last Gnostic priests ever. Oh well.

If you're a small religious movement facing perpetual minority, the pressure tends to go in two directions. One says, go out. Get the numbers up. Another dot on the map! Twelve people at Mass? It was only nine last week!

The other says, go in. Hide. Let us not cast our pearls before swine. Let's close the doors, clutch our sacred tomes to our breast, for we the Guardians of the Grail say "none shall pass." But, God, that's boring. It's also ridiculously arrogant. These traditions aren't ours. We're stewards, not owners.

The third way, the path we're actually taking, is an interesting compromise. It says, we'll be over here, doing our thing. But the doors are open. Walk in, look around, leave when you like. We'll still be here. No one will thrust you through the garden gate, and no one will bar your way. If you wave, we'll offer you some tea. If you'd like to try your hand at gardening, we'll give you tools to help out. But that's it, really. The gate will be neither removed nor sealed against you.

We'll just be over here, tending the garden.

Mythtory

2010-07-09T10:37:00.000-07:00

Is myth more important than history?

No.

Interesting, I get a lot of mail from people who say I've said this (either agreeing or disagreeing) so perhaps I should clarify.

Myth is more influential than history.

Myth is a precursor of history.

My perspective is that our standard take on history vis a vis myth is utterly backwards. It's usually assumed that there's an historical event, an historical person, and with retelling and co-option and manipulation and flawed memory, we have myth.

"There was a real guy who led outlaws in the forest, and this person became known as Robin Hood and after that it's all made up." That's how we think it goes.

And we're wrong.

Instead, we have within our psyches and our cultures a well of stories, archetypes. These stories seek to express themselves because they're how we navigate the world and our experiences. There's a ready-made metaphor for everything. Humans are symbol-using, meaning-seeking creatures, and our archetypal library is a vital tool for organizing the events we later know as "history".

So, there's the story of a hero, who gives up one kind of reality and privilege of civilization in exchange for a different, wilder reality and the privilege of the forest. And he continues to take energy out of the "false" society of castles and feudal lords and transfer that energy into the "real" society of companionship and authentic response to nature. So there's Robin Hood, and then later there's "some guy doing stuff" who REMINDS us of the Robin Hood archetype. And then it's history.

Note that this does not negate the existence of the "some guy". Acknowledging that the slain-and-risen-god archetype predates Jesus by thousands of years does not mean that there is no historical Jesus whatsoever. It just means that we, as humans, knew exactly what to do with him when he showed up. It also means that the historical person is not the cause of the myth, and it means that most of our experience (and consequences) of whatever history is in there is shrouded under an older and ultimately more significant archetype. When we talk about Jesus, most of the conversation we're having is about myth, and very little about history.

History matters. History is important. Facts matter, as close as we can get to them. We must never throw away facts after we have tidily packed our history away into one myth or another. There's always the very real possibility that we have filed it under the wrong myth. But no mistake – the myth was there first. That's just how it works.

There are powerful psychological clues to how we associate –even subconsciously– mythic resonances with others. One of those is assonance; another, etymology. It's overstating the case that Plato and Plotinus were somehow the same person, but it's futile to dismiss the reality that the similarity of their names are not experienced in similar ways by our brains, which signals us to file them under one category or another. So for the record, Plato and Plotinus are different people, but the "something" that happens in our brain to one is the same something that happens to another.

Asherah, or Ashtoreth, is the Semitic Mother-Goddess who is the wife of the God "El" (literally "God") identified with Yahweh. Her name is lent to the sacred poles, trees and groves involved in her worship, with forty references to these in the Hebrew bible. She is worshipped "wherever thou findest a high mountain or a lofty hill and a green tree."

In ancient Syrian texts around 1200 BCE, Asherah is called 'At-hirat of the Sea' She is also known as Qodesh ("holiness"). Later, an Egyptian Goddess "Qudshu" is identified with Hathor, whose Egyptian name "Het-hert" is etymologically resonant with At-hirat. Het-hert is later connected with Aset ("Isis") who is also recognizable as the Greek Astarte and Babylonian Ishtar. She is the "Queen of Heaven" for whom early Hebrews baked cakes for her festival.

Her role as sea-goddess is also evoked in the name "Miriam" - "bitter", specifically the bitterness of briny sea water. Miriam is Mary, from whom "marine" is derived, and is seen later in her personification of "Stella Maris", Our Lady Star of the Sea.

This charming Virgin with the blue robe and pearl necklace was the ancient pagan Sea-goddess Marian in transparent disguise – Marian, Miriam, Mariamne ('Sea Lamb') Myrrhine, Myrtea, Myrrha, Maria or Marina, patroness of poets and lovers and proud mother of the Archer of Love, Robin Hood, in the ballads, always swore by her.

A familiar disguise of the same Marian is the merry-maid, as 'mermaid' was once written. The conventional figure of the mermaid – a beautiful woman with a round mirror, a golden comb and a fish-tail – expresses "The Love-goddess rises from the Sea." The Greeks called her Aphrodite ('risen from sea-foam').

– Robert Graves, The White Goddess

Take all the Marys in the Jesus stories. Mary Theotokos . Mary of Bethany. Mary Magdalene. Three characters, and yet their name suggests that they inhabit the same mythic space. Meri, Goddess of the Sea. Meri the sea-brine that is amniotic fluid. Birth, initiation, subconscious. Mary who is the initiator of Christ's birth, another Mary who through anointing is the initiator of his mission, and ultimately through the washing and the shroud, the initiator of his death and rebirth. It makes sense through a mythic lens, through a Jungian lens.

Is this "more important" than the historical facts? No. It's also not about the historical facts, whatever they may have been (and we don't know).

Recently I wrote about commonalities between John the Baptist and another Middle Eastern initiation-by-water figure, Oannes. I noted the assonance between the names "John" and "Oannes". They are mythically the same name. However, it would be idiotic of me to suggest that this was "evidence" that JBap didn't exist and he was just a local variant on some neighbouring faerie tale. It has been pointed out (in the comments on my Wild Hunt guest post) that the accepted etymology for the name John is "the grace of God" or "God is gracious". Better would be "God has blessed". But that process of blessing is to be anointed by water, so around and around we go again. (In my post I used the alternate etymology "of the waters" which was confirmed by one native Hebrew speaker and a Hebrew scholar – I acknowledge that this reading is non-standard and I didn't mean to overstate the case).

This is not to suggest a linear chronology of history or the evolution of language. It is to acknowledge the reality of the archetypal resonance between these two figures.

I have always preferred myth to history, because history consists of truths which turn into lies, while myth consists of lies which turn into truths – Cocteau

Vancouver Mass Update

2010-07-08T09:34:00.001-07:00

The Vancouver Mass at the Unitarian Church for the 17th has been cancelled. Stay tuned for a new date.

Guest Blog on The Wild Hunt

2010-06-24T06:39:00.000-07:00

While Jason's away on holidays, he's invited a number of us weirdos (esoteric, pagan, witchy types) to fill in. Here's my bit in honour of Midsummer, and the feast of John the Baptist.

http://wildhunt.org/blog/2010/06/christianitys-pagan-god-of-midsummer.html

Sophianic Gnostic Mass in Vancouver

2010-06-18T11:52:00.001-07:00

I will be doing a Mass at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver, 949 W.49th, on July 17 from 1-4. Reading and intro lecture, then the Mass.

We will be doing a number of baptisms, confirmations and minor orders at that time, so if you'd like a service to be performed, please contact me ahead of time.

Confessions of a Spiritual Dilettante: J is for Johannite

2010-06-09T10:27:00.000-07:00

The Apostolic Johannite Church, thanks to the extraordinary efforts and translation talents of Rev. Donald Donato, will be releasing The Lévitikon in English for the first time. This is a crucial document of post-classical Gnosticism, previously available only in French. The Lévitikon will be available on June 24th, the feast day of St. John the Baptist, via the Church's website. What follows is a selection from my introduction to the book.

The story has it that in 1804–the year Napoleon became Emperor and Thomas Jefferson became president–a young French doctor named Bernard- Raymond Fabré-Palaprat (1777-1838) found, in a Paris bookseller’s cart, an ancient manuscript, reportedly medieval. The brief preface to the text claimed to have been penned by one Nicephorus of Athens, a monk. The document, in Greek, was for the most part a common copy of the Gospel of John.

For the most part.

There are certain critical additions to and omissions from the conventional telling. It ends at the Nineteenth Gospel and not the Twenty First (neglecting to include any resurrection narrative). It is not merely incomplete; it deliberately concludes with the entombment of Jesus, a teaching about the remission of sins usually found in the Twentieth Gospel, and this resolution:

John the Disciple that Jesus loved gives testimony to the truth of this scripture so that you believe it, and so that you will teach it.

There are other interesting additions. In the Sixth Gospel, when the Jews question Jesus’ claims to have come down from heaven, the customary confusion is that his parents are known to the crowd: “Do we not know his mother and father?” However, in this curious text, the question is posed;

Is it because he lived with the Greeks that he has come thus to converse with us? What is there in common with what he learned from the Egyptians, and that which our fathers taught us?

This presents Jesus as a bearer of alien information –he carries with him a source of teachings outside of Torah. This portrayal of Jesus as outsider, misunderstood by his ambient culture, becomes critical later on, and characterizes the entire Gospel.

Of specific note, and the hinge to the whole affair, is this peculiar passage inserted at the end of the Seventeenth Gospel;

In truth, I say unto you that I am not of this world, but John will be your father until he comes to be with me in Paradise, and he will anoint in the Holy Spirit.

John will be your father. Not Peter. John. This purportedly authentic medieval manuscript claims that Jesus was an initiate of secret Egyptian teachings, unknown to the Church of St. Peter, and that these teachings were preserved by the Church of St. John – the Johannites.

Up to the year 1118 the mysteries and the hierarchic Order of the initiation of Egypt, transmitted to the Jews by Moses, then to the Christians by Jesus Christ, were preserved by the successors of St. John. These mysteries and initiations ... were a sacred trust ... preserved from all adulteration ... These Christians, appreciating the courage and piety of the [Templar] Crusaders ... held it their duty to trust to hands so pure the knowledge acquired over so many centuries. ... Hugues de Payens (the Templar Grand Master) was invested with the Apostolic Patriarchal Power and placed in the legitimate order of the successors of St. John...

Such is the origin of the foundation of the Order of the Temple and of the fusion in this Order of the different kinds of initiation ... designated under the title of Primitive Christians or Johannites.’

– Manuel des Chevaliers du Temple (1811)

Fabré-Palaprat reconstituted both the Order of the Temple and the Primitive Christian Church of St. John, organized and illustrated through the vessel of nineteenth century Freemasonry. Assisting the doctor was the Monsignor Mauviel, a Haitian bishop consecrated in 1800, who bestowed both ecclesiastical legitimacy and Apostolic Succession upon this resuscitated venture.

Regardless of the questionability of the source documents, the Johannite Church was a real, legitimate ecclesiastical undertaking with valid sacraments and sincere seekers.

Possibiliities

The entire enterprise was a fraud perpetrated by Fabré-Palaprat, and the document a forgery concocted to provide his occult society with authority.
The document is a modern forgery, and Fabré-Palaprat unwittingly “fell for” what amounts to a practical joke. One wonders what the motive would be, however. Now, we do see a number of Enlightenment era attempts to euhemerize the bible through aggressive redaction; but these tend to omit any miraculous events. In contrast the Lévitikon’s John includes the miracles of the loaves and fishes, water into wine, and the raising of Lazarus.
The Lévitikon is an authentic medieval document, but its authorship was spontaneous; which is to say that someone originated this version ex nihilo in the 12th century.
The document is authentic and genuinely speaks to an existing tradition or legends concerning the Gospels, but was only written down when this text was penned.
The document is an accurate copy of much older text, and is in effect an alternate accounting of the Gospel of John, before later and more familiar redactions.

Regardless of which assumption one chooses, The Lévitikon stands on its own merits in one vital regard; it is an interesting opportunity for reframing the question of the Gospels and authority. In a milieu of post-Revolutionary anti-clericalism, the Johannite Church was an attempt at reframing the bible through a lens outside of the Catholic/Protestant dyad. Authentic valid, and historical, but outside of the troublesome associations of the See of Peter. It offered a way of reaching back to “primitive” authority as a kind of end-run around the Papacy without resorting to Puritanism or Calvinism, which would have had little appeal to Fabré-Palaprat’s aesthetic of Napoleonic grandeur and the remaking of Europe in the Imperial image. Even were the entire thing counterfeit, it would be no less significant than that other ecclesiastical forgery, The Donation of Constantine, which resulted in the assumption of the Roman Empire by the Papacy.

What are we left with? Questionable half-histories, redacted gospels, myth and legend. But at the same time, we have communities of tradition, inquiry, and service. The entire Johannite continuum, of saints and scoundrels both, smacks of sensus plenior – a kind of divine significance unimagined by the milieu and egos of the architects. The Johannite Church stands today in a balance of alternative and continuity, of ancient liturgy and innovative inquiry. Holding ideas of Gnostic heresy and Christian orthodoxy in dynamic tension, it manifests weekly in traditional Eucharists, and daily in pastoral phone calls, hospital and prison

visits, and academic research.

It is in this context of service, inquiry and inspiration that we bring to you the first English translation of The Gospels According to the Primitive Church.

The Very Rev. Monsignor Jordan Stratford STL

Prefect for the Congregation on Ecumenical Relations

& Apostolic Prefect for British Columbia

Dear Inbox

2010-06-06T18:44:00.001-07:00

I support Israel's right to exist and to defend itself. I support the right of Palestinians to peaceful self-determination and dignity. ALL parties are subject to criticism and accountability – the IDF, the US, Hammas, the EU, the UN – everybody. Nobody gets carte blanche. I deplore violence against civilians, and advocate for compassion, justice, and education. Feel free to un-friend me if that bothers you.

Obscure Comparative Religion Observation

2010-06-02T09:02:00.001-07:00

You can tell that Gnosticism is derived from Judaism based on how many of us end up Buddhist.

Why Modern Gnostics HAVE TO BE Abstract Psychologizers

2010-05-31T16:36:00.000-07:00

Now the creation took up the whole of each of the four elements; for the Creator compounded the world out of all the fire and all the water and all the air and all the earth, leaving no part of any of them nor any power of them outside. His intention was, in the first place, that the animal should be as far as possible a perfect whole and of perfect parts: secondly, that it should be one, leaving no remnants out of which another such world might be created: and also that it should be free from old age and unaffected by disease.

– Timaeus

Then God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered into a single basin, so that the dry land may appear." And so it happened: the water under the sky was gathered into its basin, and the dry land appeared. God called the dry land "the earth," and the basin of the water he called "the sea." God saw how good it was.

– Genesis

She requested from the invisible, virginal Spirit - that is Barbelo - to give her foreknowledge. And the Spirit consented. And when he had consented, the foreknowledge came forth, and it stood by the forethought; it originates from the thought of the invisible, virginal Spirit. It glorified him and his perfect power, Barbelo, for it was for her sake that it had come into being.

And she requested again to grant her indestructibility, and he consented. When he had consented, indestructibility came forth, and it stood by the thought and the foreknowledge. It glorified the invisible One and Barbelo, the one for whose sake they had come into being.

– Apocryphon of John

Two observations of interest;

1) The author of the first text was unaware of the second and third; the author(s) of the second was unaware of the first and third; and the author(s) of the third text was very well acquainted with both the first and the third text, and

2) None of these passages are true.

There was no Creator who put the sky and the ocean in a bucket; and there was no Barbelo granting foreknowledge to the "thrice-male, the thrice-powerful, the thrice-named androgynous one", or angel Boabel forming the toes of Adam. Didn't happen.

Plato was wrong. The Jews and the Christians are wrong. The Gnostics were wrong.

So we're either to conclude that the authors were ignorant, mistaken, wilfully misleading, or something else. That something else is the interesting bit. Because if the answer is that these guys were simply ignorant, mistaken, or pulling our leg, we should quite rightly ignore them.

But instead we assume that these things are metaphors written by individuals struggling with the big questions, and selecting language to communicate that struggle in hopes of inspiring and illuminating the struggles of others. Because if that's not what these texts are, they're just... wrong.

The great supposition of Gnostic work (and we might be wrong) is that there's actually tangible, applicable Wisdom in this stuff. Now we DO know that Gnostics were accused of being mythographers, creating "enormous fictions" to suit them. But we assume that there was a point to all of this fictionalizing. And that point was about illustrating, conveying, and imparting Wisdom. The scriptures are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

Hylic, Psychic, Pneumatic. There's no wisdom in taking this literally, as classifications for people. It's horrid. "You people over there are hylic, all you care about is cheeseburgers and America's Next Top Model. All YOU folks over there care about is calculus. But we enlightened goo-roos are your enlightened spiritual superiors!" This line of thinking just makes you a jerk. But if you psychologize, and see these as states, as shifting priorites, as shifting, fleetingly-manifest behavioural templates, you get to actually understand something about human nature.

Somewhere in this model of hyle, psyche, pneuma is real Wisdom. They're lenses, and we can learn a lot about these lenses when we look through each of them at the other two.

The hylic lens says, hey, there's something in here, in this matter, that's not about the matter itself. Sensation, stimulus. It's all a kind of immediate metaphor for something else, but that something else is really, honestly, readily accessible through this concrete stuff. It's bloody marvelous.

The psychic lens - the soul lens - is about the experience of the spark in the stuff, and how we enjoy it and are informed by it, and then, ultimately, how we shape all this kosmos around us. It looks at the hylic lens and wants to explain things to it; it looks at the pneumatic lens and wants desperately to understand it, to put it in some kind of box. It's a little threatened by both of the other two.

But the pneumatic lens - the spirit way of seeing - is transcendent. It lovingly sees that body and soul are partners in a dance. "Lift a stone and you will find me there." There has to be a stone, and a lifter. A seeker, and that which is found. The pneumatic doesn't judge sarx for being sarx. It just... is. Pneumatic vision is generous, elastic, expansive. Ethereal.

I see in spirit that all are hung
I know in spirit that all are borne
Flesh hanging from soul
Soul clinging to air
Air hanging from upper atmosphere

Crops rushing forth from the deep
A babe rushing forth from the womb

It's all a part of the big holy everything, in its way. And it's manifesting here and now, expressed in fecundity, suspended from spirit.

So, if all you had to go on was this bit from the Tripartite Tractate:

To each one he gave a name, since the two orders are in a name. Those belonging to the thought and those of the representation are called "the Right Ones" and "Psychic" and "the Fiery Ones" and "the Middle Ones." Those who belong to the arrogant thought and those of the likeness are called "the Left", "Hylic", "the Dark Ones," and "the Last."

...you'd miss out on the Wisdom there. And that's the Gnostic leap of faith; I assume that these authors were on to something, and that something spoke of Wisdom.

That's really the question: Is there something other than a surface reading going on in Gnostic scripture, or are these guys just not really bright?

It's a curiously psychic task to insist on what these texts meant to their authors and first communities. We have a few good (competing) ideas, but we don't know for sure. Let's assume that Iranaeus and those who cling to the heresiological hermeneutic of Gnosticism are right: Gnostics hated matter because of yada yada yada (it really doesn't matter - ha! - about the specifics, but it all comes down to who-said-what-to-whom in the story of Creation). So even if the ancient Gnostics - all of 'em - agreed that this particular surface reading is accurate, it just means the ancient Gnostics were WRONG. We can ignore them, then. We're just left with this pile of stuff, these really fascinating whacked-out science fiction stories about angels and demons and puny humans. Now, if it's meant to be taken literally, it is as I said just wrong, and there's nothing we can do with it - especially if we have to take it literally too.

But we don't.

That's just it. We're grown ups. We can look at this stuff if it calls to us and respond. Why? Because we are as much sparks of the Divine as the authors of these ancient texts. We're just as passionate, just as curious, just as enslaved by the kosmos, just as hungry for truth and liberation, just as prone to the scythe, just as beautiful.

Now, there just so happen to have been these guys around the year zero; Jews, educated in Greek, living in Ancient Egypt, arguing about stuff. These were the first Gnostics – this is where Gnosticism comes from. One of those guys was Philo of Alexandria, and his entire schtick was that scripture had both a surface meaning and a vastly more important allegorical meaning. He freely admitted that often the literal meaning made no sense, or was contradictory (exactly the same charges that orthodoxy leveled against Gn scripture). But we don't throw out the scripture with the silly or bizarre surface reading – we dig for the allegorical. We crack the words open to reveal the succulent wisdom Within.

Even back then, Gnostics were all about poetry, about metaphor - about being abstract psychologizers.

I'm a cleric, not an academic. My job is to respond, to inquire. It's not to dissect the frog and wonder why it refuses to hop off the table. As someone working in this tradition, it's my response to listen to Wisdom's invitation in these texts, to separate the subtle from the gross, and to distill something I can share in hopes of healing the rift between us and the Divine. I can't do that by being a literalist, particularly in a tradition where our literalism is untenable, nonsensical – and, like Genesis and Timaeus, patently untrue. But within, within! It's gorgeous, and light, and forgiving, and clever, and lovely.

Of course encrypted messages don't make sense without the key. The key is your intuition, your imagination, your stillness, your integrity. It's the key you were born with, bequeathed to you as your birthright as an emanation of the Mystery.

Turn that key. See what happens.

Spiritual But Not Religious

2010-05-28T16:34:00.000-07:00

I love these people a lot. I like where they're coming from.

Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR) is three very distinct things; an idea, a meme, and a movement. I'd like to share my response to each of these.

SBNR: The Idea

Unmediated, our responses are authentic. We're connected, and we know it. We're not going to have our experiences invalidated by what others assumed they were supposed to be. We've learned what we've learned, we feel what we feel, we love what we love – and nobody gets to call that "wrong."

Distinct cultures describe universal ideas, so curiosity and syncretism build a more comprehensive picture of the Big Questions. "Organized Religion" has frequently attempted to control, invalidate, diminish or prohibit these kinds of experiences which we hold as not just personally valuable but culturally and globally necessary in our time of shared, planetary crisis.

Well, damn. That's great. 100%. High fives. Sign me up.

SBNR: The Meme

Here's the snag: Ask these people what they mean by the terms "spiritual" and "religious" and you begin to encounter problems. The SBNR Meme has definitions of these words that "feel" right, but are not rooted in either history or English.

Religion means to re-connect, to re-read or re-consider – stuff the SBNR Idea considers to be a good thing. But after even the most cursory examination, "spiritual" is everything an SBNR likes, and "religious" is everything they don't. That's not fair. It's not logical. And it's not true. And in order to subscribe to it, you have to lump all "religious" people together as simple-minded, dogmatic, forbidding (and likely misogynist and homophobic to boot). Somehow the Dalai Lama gets a pass. He's apparently not religious. Same with St. Francis, or St. Hildegaard. Extremely freakin' religious people get mischaracterized and misrepresented in this scenario, and others simply get vilified.

I get that a LOT of SBNRs are what I call "liturgically wounded". Somebody somewhere broke something – a Catholic priest told them sex was dirty (Did he READ catechism? Catholic teaching thinks sex is awesome.); some Rabbi said a woman can't be a teacher (but Judaism has women as judges, queens, prophets); so some individuals were completely off the reservation, abusing their authority, and people got hurt. Lots of people. MILLIONS of people. Let's face it: Hundreds of millions of people. A handful of guys missing the point, peeing in the pool for everybody else. It's awful.

But it's not license for SBNRs to make up new meanings for these words and vilify all the millions of religious who home the homeless, feed the hungry, build real community in churches, make art, and preserve the traditions which make up this pesky mess called civilization. That's it, in a nutshell: no religion, no civilization. Even state religion evokes deep emotional responses and motivates people to do things. Hell, even Richard Dawkins' fundamentalist book-burning atheism is a medieval, self-righteous ecstasy cult on eleven. But it's still religion (with a passionate, frenzied following).

Oh, and "dogma"? Dogma just means "teaching". So "dogma is bad" is a dogma. Oh, the irony.

Bottom line, SBNR, while a great idea, has some serious intellectual and factual problems as a meme, as a phenomenon.

SBNR: The Movement

And it is a movement, isn't it? Books, conferences, leaders, celebrities, registered corporations, seminars – things to buy and people to idolize. Individuals with good hair evangelizing the great I'm-not-responsible-for-my-culture's-past message of SBNR to adoring crowds, Mastercards in the air, ready –starving– for more.

We humans are ridiculous. Beautiful, holy, majestic, and proFOUNDly dumb in groups. SBNR devolves into just another group.

I take that back. Not JUST another group. But a group with an invisible, severed head. In fact SBNR The Movement is a very different animal from SBNR The Idea – antithetical, even.

Look at the quotes from the many, many SBNR websites. Even though they are frequently – but not always – unattributed, they often come from a single source.

Osho.

Who is Osho? You probably remember him as the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The narcissist with the fleet of Rolls Royces, running the free sex compound in California who poisoned – not plotted to, but actually poisoned – the adjacent town when they wouldn't let him expand his little cultist-factory. He was arrested, deported, and nobody would take the schmuck. While deriding religion, he demanded absolute loyalty and unquestioning servitude from his followers. But that's okay, because he wasn't, y'know, religious. Religious = bad. So long as you insist you're not a religion, just "spiritual", you get a fleet of luxury cars and a line-up of nubiles ready to service you AND contaminate the food supply of the neighbours who piss you off. Nice gig. He died 20 years ago.

It's not too much to suggest that SBNR *as a movement* is a front for Osho-ism. And that makes me tremendously sad, as it's a complete betrayal of the authentic, important SBNR The Idea. Once again, we see a beautiful Truth (SBNR The Idea) distorted in the service of Some Dead Guru in order to process credit card transactions.

I'm a religious person. Ligature, connections. I re-read, re-think, re-connect, re-consider. And I'm going to go reconsider and reread some Thomas Merton, some Jung, some Philip K. Dick, some Crossan, some Rumi, some de Chardin, some Hildegaard, some Julian of Norwich, some Jean Cocteau. The pick-n-choosy heretic in me can do a lot better than Osho.

Namaste.

Beltane

2010-05-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Confessions of a Spiritual Dilettante: I is for Islands

2010-05-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

Salt Spring Island

Spiritual pursuit - not necessarily inspiration but pursuit - is best done in solitude. Our words isolated, insulated, mean being island-like. It has always been islands, like the seven islands of Avalon, that conjure our idea of retreat, wilderness, journey, reflection. In popular imagination it is islands where you'll still find dinosaurs, or cargo cultists who worship your shipwrecked self as a god because you resemble their sacred idol – a 1970s copy of People magazine that washed ashore just as you have.

It was from the once-islands of Glastonbury that Katherine Maltwood looked and sketched the Glastonbury Zodiac, seeing an analog between ancient earthworks and the bronze-age heavens. It was to Vancouver Island, off the coast of British Columbia, she later moved and undertook in ernest her work as a sculptress, exploring in marble and bronze the themes of the Grail and the Divine Feminine.

And from that Island, where my sons were born, where my wife was born, I packed everything and moved halfway around the world, a decade ago. We landed on the Island of Santa Catarina (another Katherine) in southern Brasil, and gave ourself to the place.

Ten years ago my lover and I stepped off a plane into the cloying, digestive air of Florianopolis Brasil, an air blown to crystal by the winds that came of the warm, warm Atlantic and sculpted the island's dunes into being. There we had lizards, tequila, sandboards, infinite evenings in hammocks as we dismantled and mantled our lives and ourselves. We we married - wedded, welded - fused there by a amethyst storm that was lightning for hours and no hint of rain. Cemeteries that were places of life and counsel and remembrance. Ubiquitous music, and myths only of surfers and their entourages of models and cinematographers.

Ten months ago, and another island. This of the center of Paris. Once a fishing village, and bereft of the now myriad bridges, at once countless and numbered, the hum in my feet know this to be pagan, sacred ground. The gem is still the thousand year cathedral, wrought by Templars drunk on blood and hashish. The temple is to Our Lady, and we all know who She is, and where She is to be found.

Ten days ago, Vancouver island. I teach film school there. Never home, exactly, but where I've spent the narrow majority of the years of my life. For me, it was a place of initiations; the orders of witchcraft and freemasonry and matrimony and fatherhood. My sons were born there. My grandparents, there buried. There is a tree, there, tucked behind a museum, and few know its secret. But I do. Katherine, Saint Katherine of Glastonbury, brought with her a cutting, a scion, from the Grail Tree. This tree flourished from the thorn-staff of Joseph of Arimethea, come to England – another island – to hide the Grail after the Crucifixion. He plunged his staff into the barren hillside, against to wrest his back as he sat and slept. On waking, the staff was a mature Palestinian Thorn, which blossoms at Easter and, it's said, Christmas. A Protestant zealot cut down the tree in the 17th century, but townsfolk nourished the cuttings and replanted in the original spot. And so, Katherine, as part of her preparations for the new world, thought to take this arboreal legacy to Nova Albion, the New England – a secret name for Vancouver Island given by the pirate-knight and lover to the Queen, Sir Frances Drake.

And here, Ten-hours-and-ten-minutes-and-ten-seconds-ago Salt Spring Island. As a youth, hookey and hitchhiking with a beautiful and generous girl along roads of sheep and honeysuckle. Cliff-camping and rising before the park wardens came asking for monies we didn't have. Impossibly serendipitous offers of suppers, beds, wine, all sung for and spun for in conversation or flirtation or cartomancies. The thaumaturgy of adolescence. So the island came to me to be a place of unfixed limit, of casual infinities the way an unwounded and immortal seventeen year old sees his world.

At 23 I returned here for a week long Tibetan Buddhist retreat, in a mountaintop monastery. I sat in silence for hours, drew water, chopped vegetables for the resident monks, slept in a tiny unheated cell. In my off hours I would climb to the hill's crest and look out across the Gulf Islands, sun-dappled and sparkling in the Pacific.

So again I have sailed here to sing for my supper, to advance to my muse as much as to retreat from some world I'm hesitant to invoke here. That's it, isn't it? The danger of complacency in paradise and its narcotic, somatic fruits. Once recharged, ignited and inspired, too easy for this alchemist to remain in his laboratory, like some feudal baron in his taurean stronghold of comfort and creatura. But there are seasons to such work, and now here, serving where I can, taking inspiration, kindling something into being to later share.

I meet here, weekly, with three other artists/writers. We're all the same age, have similar Pagan/Buddhist/ecclectic roots. When we meet we manifest elemental weapons: Robert is a wand of willful fire; Lisa the disk of earth and motherhood; Ahava the joyous cup of flow and intuition; and I the sword of languages of alchemy and qabalistic connection. Ours is an ongoing conversation about sustainability, about the value of creative work, about media, literacy, democracy, ecology, culture at the crossroads.

Today my lover and I will pile kids and dog into the van and drive to the south end of the island, walk the beach by the bay and see the other islands stretch out into the Pacific mist; note the tops of snow-covered volcanoes peek out from distant overcast.

I like it here.

Sound Bite Gnosticism

2010-04-10T09:34:00.000-07:00

"Hearken to the Logos, understand Gnosis, love life."

It's a nice bit. We have a lot of those. This one is from Apocryphon of James. Here's the context;

"Hearken to the word, understand knowledge, love life, and no one will persecute you, nor will anyone oppress you, other than you yourselves."

The whole passage sounds like more work. It's multifaceted. It comes with a warning; about ego, about the burden of spiritual work, about the necessity and danger of the work's relentlessness. Do x and you'll be fine – from the outside. The inside, however, is where the real agon takes place, and it's going to be difficult.

Both "sound bites" are true, authentic Gnostic teachings. But if you only ever heard the first, you'd be
a) taking things out of context, and
b) missing out on the challenging richness of this broader offering of Gnostic Wisdom.

I'm extremely fortunate that most of the time I'm looking at or working with Gnostic material I'm either sitting down with the whole text, or speaking to someone. Maybe it's on the phone, maybe it's a prolonged conversation over coffee. Back and forth, a little deeper each time. So when the first, little sound bite above comes up, there's a time to appreciate it and reflect. And there's time to move on to the other, more nuanced and more complete passage. Like a yoga posture where you bend, breathe, slack, and bend deeper into the pose.

Real, human interaction and discussion is the ideal way to explore this stuff. That's why we have churches in the first place – respectful, sacred and safe space to inquire, learn, challenge, share. With all the lovely tactile human stuff like eye contact and the sign of peace and a hug on parting.

I think you see where I'm going with this. On the internet, you often get the first bit - maybe it's a quote in response to a question, maybe it's in someone's signature file. And you get this really great bit that is, honestly, a really great bit. But it is only half the story. Which is fine, so long as you're going to get the rest of it in some way; next Sunday at Mass, or with a phone call with friends, over coffee with other seekers. Human exploration written by other humans in the context of community, grasping at wisdom together over centuries.

Now, if your only contact with Gnosticism is the internet, you're going assume (naturally) that everybody is seeing what you're seeing – the little bumper sticker version. Maybe nobody ever gave you the context of that quote you like so you can look it up yourself in different translations and chew on it for a while. Still, Gnosticism's biggest fans seem to fit in this category - sincere individuals called to this aesthetic, this world-view, and these texts. Usually these people are the only Gnostic for miles, and the various boards, threads, groups, blogs are all they have at the start of their journey. The net is a blessing; but its travelers wisely recognize they don't have the whole picture.

If your only contact with Gnosticism is internet and primary sources, something even worse can happen than simplifying Gnostic teaching. You'll see the gap between what is repeated online and what's really there, and you'll begin to dismiss all modern Gnostics as having a superficial understanding. You'll start to marginalize your fellow travelers because they're only getting the first part and not the second, and you might get bitter enough to reject what they have to contribute, even though their reflections on the first, shorter passage may be insightful and legitimate. Those who allow this bitterness to take route are Gnosticism's biggest critics. They suffer – truly suffer – from assuming that everyone is a twinkie of some kind and their out-of-context sound bites make them less authentic, less whole. Stuck in their increasingly hateful echo chamber, the individuals from this second camp don't have the complete picture either; they just assume they do.

I'm grateful for the conversations I've had online and the things I've learned there. I've made (and lost) genuine friendships. But Gnosticism is not and never will be an "internet religion". It's a starting point, not the journey itself. The journey is holding hands of someone in pain. It's witnessing a member of your community take a lifelong vow to something (a marriage, a vocation). It's being blessed in the name of the Pleroma and the Logos and the Pneuma Hagion while you inhale the incense and watch the flicker of candles. It's the embrace during the sign of peace. That's what Gnosticism feels like, looks like. It's bad hospital coffee and soup-kitchen mop handles.

"Sound Bite Gnosticism" – internet-connecting Gnosticism – is good and wonderful. Internet Gnosticism plus individual research is also lovely, but that path leads through the thorny thicket of disappointment. Take that path – but don't abide there. Keep going. Don't stop at the Greek or Coptic word for anything – look at what the authors were feeling, what they were afraid of. Disagree with them. You're a real Gnostic, you're allowed to do that. Meet real, human, three-dimensional people and shake their hands. Break bread. Ask deeper questions. Hearken to the Logos; understand Gnosis; love life.

Faithful Apostasy

2010-04-08T09:32:00.000-07:00

If asked whether he’s a believer, Wes, a Christian pastor, won’t give a simple answer. He has struggled with his faith for years. He can’t say whether he believes or disbelieves in any easy way. Instead, he tries to explain something more subtle, closer to “both” and “neither” than “yes” or “no.”

“The difference between me and an atheist is basically this,” he says, “It’s not about the existence of God. It’s: do we believe that there is room for the use of the word ‘God’ in some context? … I think the word God can be used very expressively in some of my more meditative modes. I’ve thought of God as a kind of poetry that’s written by human beings.”

[...] “It’s not,” says “Darryl,” one of the five, “that I’m not a believer. I do believe in God.” He raises the all-important question posed by Augustine: what do you believe when you say you believe in God? Or, maybe just as important: what do you disbelieve when you disbelieve in God?

[...] There are also, of course, many ways of answering, many ways of believing and not believing. But the study dismisses all but a few characterizations of belief as untenable. Most of the preachers “who do not believe” make attempts to stake out other points on a spectrum of belief, but they are criticized as “spin doctoring.” With this judgment, and the moral weight it carries, the authors come to the end of their empathy. Dennett and LaScola are mono(a)theists: they claim to know exactly what God is and they call it hooey. For them God is ridiculous, and they insist on their simple definitions even if that means dismissing the accounts of more reasonable beliefs offered by those who hold them.

– Read the whole thing

If you are a smart atheist, please write a book. I would love to read it. Because the Four Horsemen? All I see is straw-man arguments, childish name calling, and "all religion is a Chick tract" ignorance. They can't ALL be that daft. So, please, atheists, find someone with a rudimentary grasp of logic and history, and write a good juicy atheist book. Thank you.

A ReligioDork's Guide to the iPhone

2010-04-04T11:35:00.001-07:00

I'm all Eastery, so I'm taking a break from things of consequence and am going to geek out a bit. I've noticed among my fellow clergy that the iPhone has become the doodad-of-choice, so I thought I would share what's on mine.

Acrobible New King James Bible: this is a GREAT application of an iffy translation. It allows you to easily search, bookmark, highlight and annotate; it even has a smart little reminder function to help you work out a reading plan.

iMissal: This is a full Roman Catholic missal with ecclesiastic calendar, prayers, daily reading, and rites. Been looking for this one for a while.

Olive Tree Bible Reader 4: New American Bible. In my opinion this is the BEST translation available in the English language, but the software is "meh". It does everything that the Acrobible does, but the interface is clumsy as all get out.

Oxford Dictionary of the Bible: Elegant software and ridiculously useful. This is the bible-based-bar-bet champion, listing every proper noun and useful bits (drachma vs. denarius, for example).

TOP English to Hebrew dictionary: Very handy for those of us gettin' our Qabalah on.

Greek Alphabet: in flashcards. Good for reference or as a simple game for reinforcing learning.

Hebrew Alphabet: from the same people as above.

Hebrew Calendar: Reinforcing the months of the year, as well as highlighting holidays.

Now, what I really want is a Latin dictionary, and Novum Testamentum Graece, and the entire Nag Hammadi Library, and a Coptic dictionary... The App Store only has one application under "Gnostic", which is a copy of Hesse's Demian. There's an opportunity there, somewhere. But as Msgr. Rassbach comment on the phone last week, we're the only religion we can think of where the sacred texts are not public domain – everybody owns a translation.

NACGB Address

2010-03-09T08:24:00.000-08:00

The following is the text of the State of the College address from the President of the North American College of Gnostic Bishops , delivered at the 2010 Alexandrian Gnostic Church Conventicle:

Your Eminence, Your Grace, Your Excellency, Brothers, Sisters and Clergy of Alexandrian Gnostic Church, the Apostolic Johannite Church, guests and friends.

I want to thank His Eminence and the Alexandrian Gnostic Church particularly for the opportunity to address this Conventicle as well as for your hospitality, fraternity and dedication.

Everything you are gathered here to do reflects the best the College has to offer and most of all embodies the principles of the North American College of Gnostic Bishops.

We can have no greater exemplification of the purpose of the North American College than what we can each see here reflected so plainly in the faces of our brothers and sisters gathered this weekend.

Communion, education, dialogue, respect, the sharing of resources, a common intelligible voice, informed by compassion, guided by reason, fueled by action, framed in diversity and grounded foremost in the experience we call Gnosis.

It is these very things that have driven and enabled the Churches of the College to achieve some remarkable things in the last six years.

The foremost of these things are education and organic communion.

Through the dialogue of NACGB Churches- the member jurisdictions have been better equipped to create on the one hand, and maintain on the other, Active Seminary programs that not only educate and encourage historical, theological and religious exploration, but pastoral exploration as well- working to create true formation for its candidates, with a direct impact on spiritual and social value derived by the good people for whom these candidates are formed. Creating spiritually and socially aware individuals in the Body of Christ, institutionally promoting the exercise of conscience, while leaving its exact determination to the individual themselves.

At the same time, the exchange of ideas found in the halls of the College has enabled its member jurisdictions to promote Gnostic education in a way that helps define, nurture and recognize the individual traditions and customs which each Church brings to the table, while being committed to ensuring the independence of those same Churches, and enshrining the same in the College’s Constitution itself.

Through the exchange of reading lists, course material, event speakers and the continuing education of clergy and laity- the Jurisdictions of the North American College work to bridge the gap between intellectual and scholarly study, responsible for reminding and grounding us in our historical roots and a boots-on-the-ground theology possessed of a transformational quality which brought each one of us here in the first place.

Making a priority of these things in turn better equips the Jurisdictions of the College as we prepare to enter a new decade of mainstream exploration and examination of Gnosticism as an historical movement, a modern religious movement and a personal spiritual path.

We have also seen an unprecedented exchange of information, resources and people- providing community, support, pastoral care and sacramental service in situations where one individual church cannot sufficiently provide alone.

Neither is this exchange limited to clerics, dignitaries and administrative personnel- indeed we have seen the flowering of spiritual exchange and friendship at the heart of each of the NACGB Churches- particularly through our Conclaves and Conventicles- clergy and laity of different churches, each offering all they have freely, to give rise to a unity that transcends the need for uniformity. You don’t have to take my word for it, ask yourself how you feel when our time here this weekend comes to a close.

What defines the North American College of Gnostic Bishops to the rest of the movement and determines the success we have in interacting with it, is how we interact and conduct ourselves with each other.

Through its commitment to common causes- be they social, spiritual or otherwise, and through profound statements of intent followed by examples of action- the North American College has worked through adversity and opposition to create an environment where those jurisdictions and peoples on the margin can be brought into the center- promoting voice and respect alike in equal measure to all within the movement as befits the dignity of each individual Gnostic’s calling.

One such means whereby the Churches of the NACGB have sought to do this, and whose efforts have been validated is the All Saints Accord.

Bringing together twelve signatories from ten very different Gnostic Bodies both within and beyond the NACGB- the All Saints accord embodies the best principles present in its members through the commitment to the respect, equality and openness found at the heart of each of these Churches.

Statements such as this one, combined with regular consultation, interaction and participation have created an organic communion enforced by common respect, common trust and most importantly- a common desire- to see that no one is turned away.

We have gone further than we ever have to make our common tradition a living and open one, accessible by many, bringing together scholars and seekers, philosophers and pilgrims, each enriching the journey of the other.

Yet despite the advances I have already outlined, there remains challenges to the continued success of the College and the Ecclesiastical Gnostic movement in general. These are challenges and impulses that have been created over the last two centuries of our history. Isolationism, one-up-man-ship, backbiting, legalism, revisionism, to name a few.

For many looking on and looking in, the face of Ecclesiastical Gnosticism as it has been known in the last two centuries appears by a casual glance to have been dominated not by spirituality but by rote religion, not communion but recognition. Egocentricity in the guise of individuality, tolerance in the clothing of acceptance, a supplanting of the organic with the organizational, and prizing the cult of personality over the veneration and sanctity of personal experience. Machination over metanoia, arrogance over amity, narcissism over nepsis.

When our Churches provide a thousand words about our pedigree and ten words about where we can be found or what we can do for our brothers and sisters, we have a problem.

When our Churches talk strongly about the rightness of our cause, the wrongness of our enemies, but offer no opportunity, ear or hand for the poor in spirit, we have a problem

When our histories are wielded like weapons to fight imaginary wars from the slights of the past, we have a problem

When our Churches refuse to dialogue, because we feel that offering a seat at the table to a brother or sister church is beneath us, we have a problem

While the NACGB neither created nor sought these problems, we are and must ever be, opposed to them with every resource at our disposal, but more importantly we must be resolved to be a part of the solution.

The North American College of Gnostic Bishops began as a counter-impulse to these all too human tendencies, working to create mutual assistance, amity and communion.

There is no quick or easy solution to banishing the negative characteristics in our movement but the path to overcoming where our movement is not at its best is through this same counter-impulse.

When we realize that our lineages exist not merely to honour our past but to motivate our future, we have the makings of a solution. When we realize that in turning our backs to those in need, that no one is right, and everyone is wrong, we have the makings of a solution. When we realize our histories are to be laid out like landmarks to guide towards wholeness, compassion and understanding,we have the makings of a solution. When we realize that honouring another’s vocation honours our own and that never is anything lost by listening, we have the makings of a solution.

Just as the experience of Gnosis is the beginning, so too are these realizations a beginning.
How we meet them in the world, on the streets and between the pews is where the real work unfolds.

In order to meet these challenges we must expand and develop the efforts of the College, started six years ago and continuing here in this very gathering: dialogue, education, respect and cooperation.

We must reach beyond the limits of territorial instinct through efforts like the All Saints Accord, and work to strengthen our relationships with those Churches, Bishops and organizations outside of the College’s boundaries and mandate- recognizing where our brothers and sisters labour sincerely and with love to the betterment of their fellows. Churches like the Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum and the Ecclesia Gnostica, without whom, much of these efforts would not be possible, and the Gnostic Church of Mary Magdalene, Communities like Palm Tree Garden and Spiral Inward, where Gnostics at great distance, can meet, discuss and share their experiences.

In the coming years, the North American College of Gnostic Bishops will open its doors in new directions, establish new relationships, and strengthen the ties it already participates in- the last of which we’ve already begun through Constitutional changes to allow a jurisdiction to submit clergy and lay representatives for the formation of Advisory Council to the College. This will, in time, ensure that the College always has resource of perspective in how its projects, and policies impact the people who labour the most directly towards making our movement a better, more inclusive, more responsible movement.

We’ve also implemented a standing constitutional committee to guarantee that the College always serves the best interests of its members by protecting it from potential abuses from those who are elected to serve those members. A North American College that is grounded in process, reason and compassion in working with its existing members, is all the better equipped to face the challenges that are presented to it.

Finally, and most importantly- beyond legislation, committees, and accords, there remains a more powerful tool to ensure the success of the College and Ecclesiastical Gnosticism in the years to come. It is made all the more powerful by the fact that it is something that is shared by the entire movement, The NACGB, Gnostic Churches and each individual Gnostic- and that is the power of our example.

More powerful than the words of scripture are the actions inscribed on the parchment of our lives. More pervasive than lineage and succession are the connections we can make and maintain with each other. More moving than ancient tradition, custom or rite, is the communion of humanity and divinity through the power of community. Our scriptures, our lineages, and our tradition are not replacements for these things, but exist to serve them and taking them out into the world is the most powerful alchemy we possess.

I want to thank each of you here, as well as many of our brothers and sisters who couldn’t be here, for your commitment, hard work, and most of all, for your example. We’ve come a good distance, and our work here is by no means complete, but with your continued help and dedication to not only your own spiritual journeys but to our collective journey as well- complete it we shall.

May the Divine Beloved Bless you: +Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

Philip K Dick Covers

2010-03-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

Check out this gorgeous cover gallery of Italian editions of Dick novels.

And a reminder of why that's relevant to this blog.