Gnostic Religion Research Articles

Jack Spicer’s Impossible Quest for the Holy Grail

The American poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) called, in his second lecture for students in Vancouver, his serial poem The Holy Grail (1962), ‘fairly simple’. Readers will undoubtedly find it not simple at all. ‘Cryptic’ would be a better characteristic. But Spicer does not want to be more explicit. Is he concealing something? The poet did not, however, leave us without some clues, two of them being references to authors, namely Jessie Weston and Hans Jonas. The editors of his lectures did give some, but in my view not sufficient, attention to these references. Through this article I intend to correct this shortcoming. Weston’s medieval studies, especially those pertaining to Arthurian Literature, contain many elements also present in Spicer’s serial poem, thus providing a possibility to examine his poetics more closely. In addition, Hans Jonas’s book The Gnostic Religion (1958), subtitled The message of the alien God and the beginnings of Christianity, helps us gain a deeper understanding of Spicer’s poem; moreover, it explains his reluctance to write plain language. The knowledge Spicer intends to make known should at the same time remain somehow hidden, because, as an ancient tradition demands: only initiates have a right to know, to obtain access to gnosis.

Harold Bloom and <em>The American Canon</em>: RIP

Harold Bloom and The American Canon:RIP Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) I first met Harold Bloom to talk with once, in the fall of 1976. I had just started as an assistant professor at Princeton University in September, and this was a few weeks, at most a month, later. Bloom was visiting for two weeks, to deliver two big lectures, drawn from the opening and closing chapters of his forthcoming book in spring 1977, the long-awaited study Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. This book, the projected and actual bookend to Bloom's five-year period of theoretical elaboration, 1971-76, was intended to establish Stevens over Yeats. Yeats, his 1970 critique of "the greatest poet to write English in our century," as T. S. Eliot had famously anointed the Irish 1923 Nobel laureate right after his death in 1939, was followed by Bloom's theoretical tetralogy of The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbala and Criticism (1975), and Poetry and Repression (1976). In 1971, Bloom also published The Ringers in the Tower, a collection of his theoretically inflected essays from the 1960 s, mostly concerned with his version of romanticism as an internal quest romance in which the modern, post-Enlightenment poet, sought for his own powerful voice against past glories and contemporaneous rivals and vicissitudes. With his tetralogy, Bloom branded his romanticism as the anxiety of influence. The contemporary poet of any post-Renaissance period had less to worry about from such rivals and vicissitudes than (s)he did from those previous poets whose poetry the poet fell in love with, and whose echoes and allusions, return unconsciously against one's creative will. Bloom, ever the anti-Eliot, set out to demonstrate via his elaborate anxiety of influence theory of poetry, that rather than Yeats, Stevens was the rightful heir to romantic genius in our time, because Yeats sacrificed too much of his humanity to achieve what he did achieve, while Stevens, even more personally solipsistic than Yeats ever was in his life, nevertheless produced a vision more stoically humane than anything in Yeats. Yeats surrendered his imaginative power to a generalized vision of tragic historical process without any viable exceptions. Stevens, Bloom contended, accepted that the imagination itself had to be imagined as lost, before the world could be reimagined in whatever forms emerged in the future. Besides these lectures on "American Poetic Stances: From Emerson to Stevens" and "Poetic Crossing," Bloom also appeared in selective [End Page 485] preceptorials during his visit; these were breakout smaller sections of large lecture courses often taught by the lecturer and also, if large enough, assistant professors. My first semester's course load was indeed three such preceptorials, in modern drama, modern novel, and modern poetry. Bloom came into the modern poetry course right after we had completed our sessions on Whitman and were moving to Emily Dickinson. Briefly, we were introduced, and then once Bloom set up office hours for students and faculty to visit him, I dropped by and we chatted. But not about Yeats, Stevens, or Dickinson. Instead, with spoke about Valentinus. And the last substantive e-mail I received from him, before the one in which he announced he was being taken to the hospital where he was to die on October 14, 2019, referred to my being a Valentinian, as part of our by now long-running "joke" between us. Of course, he was right, as he always was. As a Gnostic, Bloom was his own school, whereas my views were more coincidental with what has been called by Hans Jonas, author of The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God to the Modern World (1958), the Valentinian Speculation. As such, I identified with the theory of Valentinus, a heretical Christian of the second century CE, who believed that the material world was created in a moment of fall, when Sophia, a member of the Divine Pleroma or Presence of the Alien God, secluded herself from the other members in an attempt to emulate the creative genius of the Alien God, but produced an abortion instead, a Demi-Urge, as her son, who sought to patch up...

The Knowing of Knowing

Abstract This article traces the idea of neo-Gnosticism in a series of occult and new religious movements from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Specifically, the article examines the links between two controversial groups that both described themselves as modern forms of Gnosticism: first, the European esoteric group, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and second, the American new religion, the Church of Scientology. Founded by Theodor Reuss in Germany in the 1890s, the O.T.O. described itself as a form of “Gnostic Neo-Christian Templar” religion, with sexual magic as its primary ritual secret. Its most infamous leader, British occultist Aleister Crowley, also developed a full scale “Gnostic Mass” for the group. Many elements of the O.T.O. and Crowley’s work were later picked up by none other than L. Ron Hubbard, the eclectic founder of Scientology, who also called his new church a “Gnostic religion,” since it is the “knowing of knowing” (scientia + logos). To conclude, I will discuss the ways in which these Gnostic and occult elements within Scientology later became a source of embarrassment for the church and were eventually either obscured or denied altogether—in effect, obfuscated by still further layers of secrecy and concealment.

Nihilism, Existentialism, – and Gnosticism? Reassessing the role of the gnostic religion in Hans Jonas’s thought

Late antique Gnosticism and Heidegger’s Existentialism are usually counted among the main theoretical targets of Hans Jonas’s philosophy of life and responsibility, since they are supposed to share the dualistic and nihilistic attitude the philosopher deemed most mistaken and pernicious. In particular, Gnosticism is commonly understood as the exact opposite of what Jonas strove to accomplish in his work. However, I think it is simplistic to relegate Gnosticism to a merely antagonistic role in the development of Jonas’s philosophy. My claim is that Gnosticism, being a non-nihilistic form of dualism, might have been a relevant source of inspiration – although not the only one – for amending the flaws of Heidegger’s Existentialism. By taking a closer look at the essay Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism, this article aims to clarify the critical and constructive role that Gnosticism might have played in shaping some of the major traits of Jonas’s thought. The first part of this essay deals with Jonas’s ‘gnostic reading’ of Heidegger’s Existentialism and highlights the positive insights drawn from such interpretative strategy. The second part focuses on three main motives in Jonas’s philosophy that may be traced back to the gnostic narrative: value objectivity and vulnerability, human responsibility and involvement in the history of being, and the sense of belonging to a wider dimension capable of providing orientation and meaning to human life.

Gnostic sects and trends in the past and present

The article describes the analysis of Gnostic sects of the Late Antiquity, with the exception of the concepts of large Gnostic systems. Particular attention is devoted to the consideration of the Mandaean religion - the only ancient Gnostic religion that exists to this day. The history of the formation of Mandaise, the determinative role of John the Baptist and the cult of Teyvila for the Mandaeans, as well as the peculiarities of their doctrine has been analysed.

Van den Broek, Roelof. Gnostic Religion in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ix+255 pp. $99.99 (cloth); $32.99 (paper).

Van den Broek, Roelof. <i>Gnostic Religion in Antiquity</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ix+255 pp. $99.99 (cloth); $32.99 (paper).

Conversational Text in the Neo-Mandaic Dialect of Ahvaz

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Neo-Mandaic is among the rarest and most seriously endangered languages of the world. Two extant Neo-Mandaic dialects, those of the cities of Ahvaz and Khorramshahr in southwestern Iran, are spoken by a few hundred adherents of Mandaeism, an indigenous gnostic religion of Lower Mesopotamia. Previous transcribed texts in the dialect of Ahvaz mostly deal with Mandaean culture and include Classical Mandaic vocables that are not used in the vernacular. The present annotated text is entirely colloquial, being a sample of daily speech amongst speakers of the dialect and reflecting a typical conversation between two Neo-Mandaic speakers in a situation where one is receiving his relative as a guest. It is, moreover, the first Neo-Mandaic text that involves a female informant.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

The Alexamenos Graffito and Its Rhetorical Contribution to Anti-Christian Polemic

Since its discovery in 1857 in a room of the Domus Gelotiana, the Alexamenos Graffito has been one of the widely known inscriptions exhibiting Roman attitudes toward Christianity. Early on, the graffiti was described and interpreted by a host of nineteenth century international scholars. These scholars provided descriptions of the physical layout of the domus Gelatiana, speculated on the date of the inscription and its interpretation and sought to place the graffiti in the context of other graffiti that otherwise appeared on the domus’ plaster walls. A good amount of that commentary was merely descriptive in nature and did little to go beyond the guidebook content required of the typical Victorian traveler. Even after the passage of a century, few attempts have been made to transcend the typical and near cliche description of the Graffito as a “blasphemous representation of Jesus of Nazareth” and few appear to have been interested in compiling and analyzing the collective record involving the Graffito. This has led to the unfortunate situation where no understanding has been achieved of the greater rhetorical implications of the inscription nor has a place been assign to the Graffito in the realm of anti-Christian polemic discourse. This paper seeks to advance scholarship regarding the Alexamenos Graffito by (1) surveying the available literature related to the inscription with the aim of understanding the physical context in which the Graffito was found; (2) assigning an approximate date to the Graffito; (3) understanding the polemical implications of the Graffito; and finally, (4) assigning a place for the Graffito in the larger conversation going on in the first through third centuries about Christianity’s place in Roman Empire. In doing so, the paper will argue first, that the Graffito belongs to the third century when the back and forth between pagan critics and Christian apologists was becoming most acute throughout the Empire; and second, that the Graffito is not a sincere expression of Gnostic religion as argued by John Henry Middleton, Marice Haupt and Richard Wunsch; and third, the Graffito is likely a polemical inscription aimed at denigrating Christianity, it is unique among pagan polemics against Christianity in that it raises arguments, albeit symbolically, that criticize Christianity as an offshoot of Judaism, lumping both together as religions not worthy of a citizen of Rome.

Gnose, dualisme et les textes de Nag‑Hammadi

Gnostic studies in the XXeth century have been influenced by Hans Jonas’ The Gnostic Religion and his existentialist approach of Gnostic movements, until the discovery of the Coptic Nag Hammadi texts, in 1945, gave access to a series of documents coming from the Gnostics themselves. Progressively, the panorama of Gnostic sects and movements deeply changed, calling into question the notion of “dualism” used by the Church Fathers when refuting their Gnostic opponents. If Plotinus criticizes the Gnostic contempt of the world and their life without ethics, the recently commented texts from Nag Hammadi attest the use of the Platonic demiurge understood in the frame of the biblical version of the creation. The beauty of the world is not absent from Gnostic texts. The role of the Gnostic demiurge in documents like the Apocryphon of John or the Valentinian Tripartite Tractate, for example, shows that access to salvation is possible in a philosophical and theological system that is monistic. The heresiological category of “dualism” has too often hindered the study of the Gnostics which does not correspond to what the new documentation brings out.

Volti di Asclepio

Asclepius’ faces. Hermetic origins and soul judgement. The Coptic fragment of the Asclepius, found in the Nag Hammadi library, has preserved a better report of the fate of souls in the afterlife according to Hermes Trismegistus than the Latin text. The souls encounter on their space travel a judge in the air, the Ruler over the Daimons: some are saved, others need purification and metempsychosis, still others are damned eternally. This Hermetic tripartite scheme has deeply influenced the Iranian Gnostic religion, the Manichaeism, in thefates of the Elects, Auditors, and Sinners. Moreover, the threefold sort of the soul after death, can be found in the Roman Catholic Church in the idea of inferno, purgatorio, paradiso. Key-words: Hermetism – Metempsychosis – Manichaeism – Zoroastrianism – Romanesque Art. ezioalbrile@yahoo.it

Dissimulation or Assimilation? The Case of the Mandæans

AbstractOne of the smallest ethno-religious groups native to Iraq and Iran, the Mandæans can claim to be one of the region’s longest surviving traditions as the last remaining Gnostic religion from Late Antiquity. Their survival is as puzzling as it is remarkable. According to their own traditions, they have always lived in close proximity to members of other faiths, never composing more than a small fraction of the population, and were always subject to the rule of others. Perhaps for this reason, the Mandæans have often presented their faith to outsiders in a manner that emphasizes common practices and shared beliefs, while still establishing barriers to full assimilation. While this strategy may have sustained the Mandæans as a community over the centuries, it has also repeatedly failed to protect them in times of intense sectarian conflict and is beginning to break down as Mandæans increasingly spread throughout the world.

The Religious Roots of Linguistic Nationalism

&lt;p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: x-small;"&gt;This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, nationalism is analysed as a kind of gnostic religion (in the sense given to this term by E. Voegelin). In the mind of their adherents, nations are ultimate realities in which the objective (fatalistic) and the subjective (voluntaristic) side of the historical process coincide. In the second part, it is argued that language, by its dialectical character, appears as the very incarnation of the nationalist ideal. The ensuing paradoxes of nationalist language policy are listed and briefly analysed: the equation of the language of culture with the language of everyday life; the equation of norm with use; the equation of object language with metalanguage; the equation of modernity with authenticity; and the equation of the national with the universal.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Swerving Neo-Platonists

Previous articleNext article No AccessSwerving Neo-PlatonistsLaura QuinneyLaura Quinney Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 37, Number 1Winter 2006In Honor of Geoffrey Hartman Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045209 Views: 1Total views on this site © 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Omens of the Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (review)

Reviewed by: Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection Eric J. Ziolkowski Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection, by Harold Bloom; 255 pp. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996, $24.95. This latest, intriguing addition to Harold Bloom’s prodigious scholarly output might be described as a book in search of a genre, as the narrative seems to shift constantly from one form of expression to another. First, confirming Bloom’s claim to be “writing spiritual autobiography” (p. 23), there is confessio. “At sixty five,” he is pondering his uncertainty as to “just when [his] self was born” (p. 15). Evidently aware of the dangers of narcissism, he assures us that “Bloom does not wish to worship Bloom” (p. 17). Instead, his “self” figures as only one of his “three separate but closely related quests”: knowing himself, knowing Shakespeare (“that mortal god” [p. 110]), and knowing God (p. 14). This emphasis on “knowing” is what makes Bloom in a very real sense a born-again Gnostic, someone who at thirty-five “got very wretched, and for [End Page 497] almost a year was immersed in acute melancholia” (p. 24) before being led through “a kind of ‘religious’ conversion” and “excursion into a personal literary theory” (p. 25) by his contemplation of Hans Jonas’s classic study The Gnostic Religion (1958). Bloom later offers an account of his own “near-death experience” (p. 133). In other instances, the narrative shifts into prophetia. Bearing out the augural implication of the first noun in his book’s title, despite a disclaimer about his “not being a prophet” (p. 225), the author succumbs several times to a seemingly irrepressible urge to don the foreteller’s mantle, as when he declares: “It is a dismal prophecy, but 1996–2004 could continue to be the reign of Speaker Gingrich, and thus become a future shock indeed” (p. 33); or “Doubtless, another American religious genius [like Joseph Smith, Jr.] will appear, though we will not know her (at first) when she does” (p. 73); or “The year 2000–2001 will not be a comfortable year in the United States of America, . . . because there are extremist groups among the premillennialists, and their disappointment could lead to violence” (pp. 223–24); or “I myself prophesy that this 1:1000 ratio [of Mormons to Roman Catholics world-wide] will decrease throughout the twenty-first century (p. 224). In the end Bloom opts for sermo as his preferred mode of speech, closing his book with what he calls “A Gnostic Sermon.” Unlike, say, the compelling yet nevertheless fictional Protestant Christian sermons proffered by the Reverend Thomas Marshfield in John Updike’s novel A Mouth of Sundays (1975), this is the real thing. Opening with a second-century Gnostic credo, Bloom preaches “to the unchurched, to seekers of many kinds, who are too lucid and spiritually mature to play with New Age and Woodstock toys” (p. 234). Peppered with quotations from such favorite Gnostics of Bloom’s as Valentinus, Monoimos, the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, and Emerson (who would probably have been surprised to find himself dubbed “founder of our American Gnosis” [p. 243]), Bloom’s message is very much a protest against the acceptance by institutional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam of an omnipotent and benevolent God who “coexists” with all the horrors and miseries of our world. He appeals to those who may be Gnostics already without even knowing it—that is, those who “know” themselves “as having an affinity with the alien, or stranger God, cut off from this world” (p. 252). In this book, when not serving as prophet, spiritual autobiographer, or preacher, Bloom pursues his primary double vocation as literary and religious critic. His ambitious aim is to show how four increasing concerns in our current culture are necessarily interrelated: angelogy (chap. 1), the quasi-predictive aspect of dreams (chap. 2), the so-called near-death experience (chap. 3), and the approaching Millennium (chap. 5). Finding the first three of these concerns to meet as a “composite image” in the fourth, he proclaims “the most authentic omen of the Millennium” to be “our emergent dream of a guardian angel of...

The Gnostic Adoption of John's Gospel and Its Canonization by the Church Catholic

The severest threat to early Christianity was the Gnostic religion, the roots of which were probably in Iran. By the late second century there was a full-blown Gnostic Christianity in Rome and Alexandria, making its appeal chiefly to intellectuals. Accounts of its teaching found in the writings of St. Irenaeus and other church fathers were held suspect because of their adversarial stance until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, which largely confirmed them. The first known commentary on the Gospel according to John is that of the Gnostic thinker Heracleon, while various Ghostic tractates betray clear Johannine affinities. Patristic writers, aware of this challenge, began to use John's Gospel with its "Word become flesh" and many attributions of humanity to him, culminating in his death, against the Gnostics. This article suggests what cannot be proved: namely, that the insistence of the epistles of John on Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh (1 John 4:2; 2 John 7) is clearly an anti-docetic and possibly anti-Gnostic polemic, free of any naive acceptance of what it deplores.

Does Environmental Ethics Need a Metaphysical Grounding?

For the past several decades until his recent death, Hans Jonas alerted us to at the core of our culture: a vacuum caused by both traditional ethics and modern natural science.(1) Technology today has altered the very nature of human action by allowing us to affect nature, both outside ourselves and within, in ways that are long-range, cumulative, irreversible, and planetary in scale. But traditional ethics has presumed that the effects of our actions are quite limited. With the exception of medicine, techne was believed to be ethically neutral. Ethical significance belonged to relations between humans, not between us and nature. was a constant, not object of reshaping techne. And while the moral good or evil of our actions lay close at hand, the long run was left to chance, fate, or providence. But all of this has changed with the advent of modern technology, and traditional ethics leaves us ill-equipped to account for our responsibilities when the very future of humanity is at stake. But this vacuum is intensified by the dominant scientific view of nature in the modern period: reductionistic materialism. On this view, nature is a machine; it harbors no values and expresses no purposiveness. idea that there are ends in nature is rejected as anthropomorphic conceit. Extrahuman nature is indifferent to itself and also to human beings who are cast adrift in it. We may matter to ourselves, but there is no larger scheme of mattering to which we belong. Though human beings may be subjects who posit ends and act in light of purposes, nonhuman organisms are mere objects: matter in motion. And eventually humans, as part of nature, become objects of their own fabrications to be shaped according to the designs of biotechnology. If nature presents us with no ethical norms, then no effort to change our own nature in the name of perfection, convenience, or experimentation could count as a transgression of essential limits or a violation of a natural standard of goodness. Herein lies the deepest root of our cultural crisis: nihilism. Lacking grounds for judging nature to be good and deprived of any stable image of Humanity to which we owe reverence, we are unable to answer the fundamental ethical challenge posed by our novel powers: Why should we care about the distant future of mankind and the planet? Unable to justify why the presence of humankind on the earth is a categorical imperative, we are unprepared for the attitude of stewardship that we must cultivate if we are not to squander the future in the interests of a profligate present. This is the emergency of ecological ethics today. If nihilism is the cause of this emergency, then the only sufficient response would be a philosophical critique of nihilism. This is precisely the task that Hans Jonas sets for himself, and not only in his later writings, but from the very beginning. I shall show how his project unfolds in three stages: (1) existential, (2) metaphysical, and (3) theological. Each stage is a response to the crisis of nihilism that Jonas diagnoses in his early essay, Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism, the epilogue to his first major work, Gnostic Religion. First, in Phenomenon of Life, Jonas offers an existential interpretation of the biological facts, arguing that purposive existence is not a special attribute of human beings, but is present throughout living nature. Second, in Imperative of Responsibility, he provides a metaphysical grounding of our ethical obligations to nature and to ourselves as special products of its evolutionary labors. Third, in his lecture The Concept of God After Auschwitz, he presents a theology of divine creation that is consistent with both his existential and metaphysical views. I shall ultimately argue that Jonas does not take theology to be necessary for overcoming of nihilism. Rational metaphysics must be able to ground imperative of responsibility without recourse to faith. …

The Tree of life and the Tree of death: A study of Gnostic symbols

This article is an analysis of the symbol of the Tree in Gnostic religion. The most striking characteristic of this symbol is that its qualities and functions are determined more by anthropology than by botany. In Gnostic religion the physiological processes of human fertilization and gestation are used as metaphors for the process of making a spiritual man. The Tree is life-giving, and can be perceived as being either female or male. In the latter case, the male generative Tree is opposed by a female Tree of death. The symbol of the Tree is applied both in Christian Gnostic systems and in systems which are not Christianized. The Tree can be personalized and may be associated either with Jesus or with Eve. In the Conclusion, the problem of the Tree as a universal symbol is discussed.

Book Review: The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity

Book Review: The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity

The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Hans Jonas

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook NotesThe Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Hans Jonas Robert M. GrantRobert M. Grant Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 40, Number 1Jan., 1960 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/485227 Views: 25Total views on this site Copyright 1960 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.