Part 2

Of course, it is a bit of a leap from perceiving daily life as delusory to embracing an ancient cosmology that specifies a false god, a True God, a malevolent pantheon of Archons, and a hieros gamos (divine marriage) of Christ and Sophia. Unless one is in the market for a ready-made dramatic cast of spiritual entities to believe in, the Gnostic myths best serve as metaphors for one’s dilemma – and, in fact, that may have been the role they played for the early Gnostics, as well.

There are two ways to view the Gnostic myths as potent metaphors: one inner and one outer. The inner way is to see the Gnostic cosmology as a visionary description of the hurdles one must leap in meditation. In trying to ascend to a contemplative state of pure consciousness, one must move beyond the incessant activity of the mind (the Demiurge), and past one’s fears and compulsions (the Archons), before one can arrive at a consciousness beyond time and space (the Pleroma). The successful achievement of this gnosis while still “in the body” prepares one for the similar passage that one’s consciousness must take after death.
An outer reading of the Gnostic cosmology, on the other hand, might consider the Demiurge to be anyone’s flawed and limited image of God, which must be seen through and surpassed on the way to true spiritual insight. The Archons would be the many social laws, institutions, and corporate entities that hamstring one’s existence. On this level, a kind of external gnosis would be one’s realisation of the ultimate inability of these earthly captors to imprison our higher self. In this reading, Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection serve as metaphors for our own daily immolation and extrication. In this instance, a Gnostic motto might be:

“Don’t let the bastards get you down!”

Wandering Bishops

Reading The Da Vinci Code or The Gnostic Gospels or watching “The Matrix” are all very well, but such books and movies do not by themselves constitute a Gnostic revival. Revivals or movements require actual social vehicles to engage and embody people’s interests. One place this is happening – albeit on a small scale – is in the low-profile milieu of small independent Gnostic churches. An examination of this phenomenon leads us to the quirky turf of “wandering bishops” – a curious subculture of purported Catholic, Orthodox, and Gnostic bishops who usually (and painstakingly) trace their lines of apostolic succession back to (wait for it) St. Peter or one of the other apostles. This requires some explaining.

The mainstream Roman Catholic Church hangs its legitimacy on unbroken lines of consecration from bishop to bishop, extending all the way back to St. Peter. Only bishops (or higher clergy) can ordain priests or consecrate other bishops – a form of organisational quality-control, as well as a narrow conduit for the divine grace that is said to be conveyed in the sacrament of ordination. Since an ordination or a consecration makes the recipient “a priest forever unto the order of Melchizadek,” a priest or bishop who later turns heretic, or otherwise runs afoul of the Church’s hierarchy, retains legitimate Orders – even if forbidden to celebrate Mass or excommunicated from the Church.

Employing a liberal interpretation of this curious rule, schismatic churches such as the Jansenist Dutch Church, which broke with Rome in 1723, could claim legitimate apostolic succession despite their status outside the Roman Church’s umbrella. Taking this logic one step further, some bishops consecrated by bishops of the Dutch Church (later the Old Catholic Church, following an alignment with other “national” churches in 1889) claimed the right to start their own churches and pass on the line of “valid” consecration. For instance, Bishop James Ingall Wedgewood was consecrated a bishop in the Old Catholic Church in 1916 and within two years had founded the Liberal Catholic Church, which became a kind of esoteric house church for the Theosophical Society. [3.]

Bishops C.W. Leadbeater and James Wedgewood, Sydney, 1920

One of the most influential of these independent bishops was Joseph René Vilatte, an Old Catholic missionary in Wisconsin, who sought and received consecration as bishop from the Syrian Jacobite Church in 1892 in Ceylon and subsequently consecrated several other bishops in North America and France who consecrated numerous other bishops in turn.

Needless to say, notions of doctrinal fidelity or consistency – which were understandably a key concern of Rome – were lost in the shuffle, with the result that independent bishops, who were often “more Catholic than the Pope,” sometimes shared the same apostolic lines as esoterically inclined bishops with Gnostic leanings. Over time, this led to a new generation of Gnostic bishops who could now claim apostolic succession. Exactly why apostolic succession would matter to latter-day Gnostics is something of a mystery, particularly since whatever legitimacy the original Gnostics claimed derived from gnosis itself, not from institutional standing. One suspects that even heretics desire approval, and in the absence of Gnostic lines of succession, most latter-day Gnostic bishops are quite happy to gain succession from St. Peter, illicit though it may be – especially if it tweaks the nose of the Vatican. [4.] 

One Gnostic “Patriarch” in France, Jules Doinel (Tau Valentin II), sidestepped the issue altogether by receiving “a double spiritual consecration; the first by Jesus in person, the second during a spiritualist séance by two Bogomile bishops.” [5.]  Doinel, who founded the Universal Gnostic Church, went on to consecrate the noted French occultists Papus and Sédir, thus empowering further Gnostic lines, some of which have continued to the present. Another Gnostic group of French origin, the elusive Holy Order of Miriam of Magdala, has cited traditions of a female apostolic line extending back to Mary Magdalene, but has attached no importance to providing verification of such traditions. The spurious Priory of Sion, celebrated in The Da Vinci Code and hyped in Holy Blood, Holy Grail – and likely of no earlier origin than 1956 – avoided ecclesiastical trappings altogether, preferring to concoct a lineage based on the supposed bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene which the Priory claimed to guard. [6.] 

Richard Duc de Palatine (1916-1978), an Australian of French descent
founded the Pre-Nicene Gnostic Catholic Church.

Perhaps representative of the Gnostic branch of bishops in the English-speaking world was one Richard Duc de Palatine, an Australian originally named Ronald Powell, who was initially ordained in the Liberal Catholic Church and, in 1953, consecrated a bishop by Mar Georgius I (Hugh George de Willmott Newman), Patriarch of Glastonbury, one of the most fecund independent bishops. Palatine then founded his own Pre-Nicene Gnostic Catholic Church. Palatine, whose penchant for organising esoteric orders was second to none, also founded the Order of the Pleroma, the Brotherhood of the Pleroma, the Disciplina Arcani, and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light. These appear to have led a largely mail-order existence. [7.]  Palatine’s episcopal concerns were intermingled with esoteric, magical, and even Freemasonic preoccupations, but in spite of this – or perhaps due to it – some serious modern Gnostics became associated with him. The most notable is Bishop Stephan Hoeller, arguably the foremost proponent of a contemporary Gnosticism.

Hoeller was consecrated by Palatine in 1967 and for a number of years worked within the fold of his Church and other groups. His Los Angeles-based Ecclesia Gnostica (Church of Gnosis) grew out of his work with the Pre-Nicene Church, and Hoeller has been an indefatigable author and synthesizer, drawing upon ancient Gnostic sources, Jungian psychology, and esoteric Christian concepts, in an effort to construct a modern Gnostic presence.

Secret Teachings of Jesus

As a diligent search of the Web will show, there are an ever increasing number of fledgling Gnostic churches, most of them situated in, or derived from, the “wandering bishop” milieu. Many of them consist of little more than a bishop and a local congregation, if that. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. After all, the ancient Gnostic sects amounted to the same thing: scattered groups with little uniformity between them. But it also presents the would-be seeker of gnosis with a certain dilemma: Can gnosis be taught? And if it can, who is qualified to teach it?

The ancient Gnostics claimed to be guardians of the secret teachings of Jesus, teachings that were lost when Gnosticism was defeated. Formal issues of apostolic succession aside, no modern Gnostics can claim to perpetuate those teachings in unaltered form, because the chains of transmission have been lost. Even the scriptures that have been recovered – as fascinating as they may be – retain an opaque quality, because the original interpretive keys are absent.

Thus, any modern Gnostic group or teacher must be carefully evaluated, based on subtle qualities that evidence real spiritual depth and understanding. Impressive lists of titles, degrees, and credentials mean little if there is no indication of a voice that speaks from the experience of gnosis. While it may be too much to expect that any given Gnostic teacher is going to be the embodiment of divine illumination, one still has the right to expect that those who talk the talk can walk the walk.

Divine knowledge may be gained in a variety of ways – after all, it was not the exclusive possession of the Gnostics, any more than the True God is the possession of any single religion. If teachers of real attainment choose to use the metaphors of ancient Gnosticism to encourage self-discovery, then the Gnostic revival may fulfill its promise. But if the rekindled interest in Gnosticism is going to amount to anything besides a few books and movies and an unsatisfied hunger for enlightenment, we need to see a growing indication of the true discovery of inner godhood, not a fruitless scramble to decipher a few fragments of someone else’s gnosis.

Footnotes:

1. Some scholars have suggested that this reframing of G-d was first done by Jewish intellectuals who were themselves dissatisfied with the Torah’s portrayal of the deity. Thus early Christian Gnosticism may have been influenced by, or may have been an extension of, a Jewish Gnosticism intent on reinterpreting the Jewish religious traditions. See: Birger A. Pearson, “The Problem of ‘Jewish Gnostic’ Literature,” in Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early Christianity, edited by Charles W. Hedrick and Robert Hodgson, Jr. (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Publishers, 1986), pp. 15-35.

2. Yuri Stoyanov, The Hidden Tradition in Europe (London: Penguin/Arkana, 1994).

3. The premiere exposition of this milieu is Peter F. Anson’s Bishops at Large (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), which is both droll and exhaustively detailed. It is, sadly, long out of print. A more recent (and apologetic) discussion of the phenomenon can be found in Lewis Keizer’s The Wandering Bishops: Apostles of a New Spirituality (2000), available in PDF format.

4. The Vatican, for its part, seems to have nothing encouraging to say about independent bishops. One of the more common claims of Vatican recognition for the sacraments and orders of the Liberal Catholic Church, for instance – a supposed positive ruling by the Roman Congregation of Rites – has been exposed as a hoax. (See: “Rome and Liberal Catholic Orders,” by Rev. L. K. Langley. The Vatican’s stance appears to be that so-called valid orders are worthless without the Church’s recognition.

5. Anson, p. 307.

6. See: Robert Richardson, “The Priory of Sion Hoax,” GNOSIS Magazine #51, pp. 49-55, (www.gnosismagazine.com). Reprinted in New Dawn No. 61 (July-August 2000).

7. Anson, pp. 492-495, and J. Gordon Melton, The Encyclopedia of American Religions, Second Edition (Detroit, Mich: Gale Research, 1987), pp. 612, 618.

© Copyright 2005 by New Dawn Magazine and Jay Kinney. This article first appeared in New Dawn No. 85 (July-August 2004). For further information visit www.newdawnmagazine.com