To be able to sort out these claims, we would have to know how conscious the ancients were of the deeper meanings of their own myths. And the evidence is not entirely consistent. Plato, perhaps the single greatest figure in ancient philosophy, did not seem to think that they had great value. In his Republic, he even argued they should be censored so that people would not be tempted to imitate the disgraceful behaviour of the gods in so many of the tales. Other authors, as we shall see in this article, recognised that these stories were allegories pointing to higher truths.

To take a reasonably simple example, there is the story of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection in a pond and fell in and drowned. The most obvious – and most familiar – explanation is a psychological one. Narcissus gave his name to narcissism, an extreme and pathological fascination with oneself. But deeper explanations are possible.

In the accompanying article, I suggest that awakening human potential has to do with a growing awareness of the true “I,” the Self that is able to stand back from all of its experience and witness it clearly and objectively. Of course under ordinary circumstances we are not aware of this true “I”; otherwise we would not need to rediscover it. The myth of Narcissus suggests how it was lost. We drown in our own reflections. That is, mind, witnessing its experience, inner as well as outer, comes to identify with this experience and forgets that it is anything other. It loses its own identity and is submerged in the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of the ordinary mind.

One of the most resonant of the ancient myths has a similar import. In the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, Osiris was an ancient god-king who ruled beneficently over the land of Egypt alongside his sister and wife, the goddess Isis. Osiris’s brother Set became jealous of him and plotted to destroy him. Set built a magnificent cedar coffin, which he brought to a banquet that Osiris was hosting, and said that he would give the coffin to anyone who fit its dimensions. Osiris himself lay down in the coffin and his body fitted perfectly. Set had the coffin immediately closed and nailed shut, and cast it into the Nile. Isis went about in search of Osiris’s coffin and finally found it in the Phoenician city of Byblos. But when Isis was away on a trip, Set laid hands on the coffin and cut Osiris’s body into fourteen pieces, which he scattered all over Egypt. Isis again went in search of her lost husband and was able to find all the parts except for her husband’s penis. Reassembling the parts, including a simulacrum of the lost member, Isis then restored Osiris to life, and from that time on he ruled as the god of the underworld. Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, then did battle with Set and defeated him.

We owe the most complete version of this story to Plutarch, an author of the first century CE, who wrote a treatise called On Isis and Osiris. Plutarch’s work is invaluable not only for this reason but because it offers an esoteric interpretation of the myth. Before providing his own meaning, Plutarch considers various other explanations and refutes them. Some of these explanations have an extremely modern sound, including the theory that the myth concerns “the generation of the corn and sowings and ploughings.” Plutarch calls those who believe such things a “dull crowd.”

The right interpretation, according to Plutarch, is that Osiris represents the logos, a Greek word that is usually translated as “word” or “reason” but which more accurately means the principle of consciousness that lies at the core of all beings, animate and inanimate. Isis is the feminine principle of nature, which generates all things. Set is the force of dissolution and decay. Plutarch writes, “For while the logoi and ideas and emanations of the God in heaven and stars remain [forever], those that are disseminated into things passible – in earth and sea and plants and animals – being dissolved and destroyed and buried, come to light over and over again and reappear in their births.”

Plutarch’s interpretation is cosmological. He believes the myth refers to the genesis and demise of everything in the universe. It is also possible to apply this perspective more specifically to the human condition. At the core of our being is this logos, this principle of pure consciousness, symbolised by Osiris. But in ordinary experience, consciousness does not come in a pure form; it is always consciousness of something. For humans, what we are conscious of is the whole of our experience, physical and psychological. This is symbolised by Isis: experience never ceases; like Isis, it constantly generates new forms. However, it can become fixed on a particular perspective on experience. This fixation, in contemporary terms, is called the ego. This is what Set represents. He creates a magnificent coffin, which is the physical body. Once it is entombed in this coffin, Osiris – consciousness – is immersed in the waters of obliviousness and is cut into pieces. As in the myth of Narcissus, consciousness forgets itself and identifies with its experience. This is a kind of death – but it is, paradoxically, the “death” of ordinary waking life. Only with the help of the forces of awakening, symbolised by Horus, can this dissolution be reversed.

Curiously, the only part of Osiris that is not recovered is the penis. This may be because the penis represents the generative capacity; the myth makes it clear that Osiris remains deficient in this area after his miraculous restoration. He and Isis do have another son, Harpocrates, but Harpocrates himself is weak in the lower body. This would suggest that after awakening, consciousness is no longer able to generate experience in quite the same way that it did before. The quality of the experience changes; it may be less vibrant, but there is also less attachment to it.

While this is an extremely brief version of both this myth and its interpretation, I believe it makes sense in the light of the ideas I have discussed in the accompanying article. Ordinary life, in which we think we are our experiences, is represented by Osiris’s incarceration in the coffin, for we have come to identify with the experience of the body and are symbolically dismembered along with it. But this identification is erroneous or illusory; that is, the broken fragments of consciousness can become integrated and symbolically reassembled. Consciousness then can rule in a new and glorified form.

These are universal truths. Because they are universal, this ancient myth can still speak to us. Moreover, the same motif occurs in many forms – in death and resurrection legends throughout the world, including those of Christianity. Many times they have taken the form of mysteries – sacred rites that are performed under special conditions to awaken the human potential and to remind the consciousness, the true “I” at the centre of each of us, that it must not identify with the transient and the impermanent.

Myth, as Jung stressed, often has a double meaning. On the face of it, a death-and-resurrection myth is a story designed to allay fears of death (and this, according to Cicero, was precisely the result of experiencing the ancient mysteries). On another level, the myth is saying something more and different. It does not deny life after death – quite the opposite. But it goes further; it says that what we think is waking life is a form of death, and what we think of as death is a birth to a higher life. In its esoteric forms, Christianity says much the same thing: life and death are not quite what they seem. The poet William Butler Yeats may have alluded to this truth when in his poem “Byzantium” he wrote: “I hail the superhuman. / I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.”

Of the two views of myth mentioned at the beginning of this article, I tend to sympathise more with Guénon’s than with Jung’s. I believe these myths are not, or not entirely, spontaneous eruptions from the unconscious but rather sacred teachings whose deepest meanings were always known and preserved by initiates. It was only after the traditions had perished in a living form that the myths were preserved as mere stories. Indeed we could go further and say that as soon as these deeper meanings are forgotten, the tradition perishes. One question for the future is whether these meanings have been totally forgotten by Christianity today, and whether it will collapse as a result. An alarming thought – even those who have little love for the religion may not relish the idea of being buried in the wreckage.

© Copyright 2011 by New Dawn Magazine & the respective author. This article first appeared in New Dawn No. 129. For further information visit http://www.newdawnmagazine.com

When, in the natural attitude which is that of all “normal” existing beings, I “see” a house, my perception is spontaneous, and it is that house that I see, and not my own perception of it. On the other hand, if my attitude is “transcendental”, then it is my perception itself which is perceived. But this perception of a perception radically changes my primitive approach.

The state of actually experiencing something, uncomplicated to begin with, loses its spontaneity from the very fact that the new contemplation has for its object something that was originally a state, and not an object, and that the elements which make up my new perception include not only those pertaining to the house “as such”, but those pertaining to the perception itself, considered as an actually experienced flux. And an essentially important feature of this “alteration” is that the concomitant vision I had, in this bi-reflexive state of the house that was my original “motif”, so far from being lost, displaced or blurred by this interposition of “my” second perception in front of “its” original perception, is, paradoxically, intensified, becoming clearer, more “actual” and charged with more objective reality than before.

We are here confronted with a fact that cannot be accounted for by pure speculative analysis: namely, the transfiguration of the thing as consciously experienced, its transformation into a “super-thing”, its passage from being something “known about” to something “known”. This fact is insufficiently appreciated, although it is the most remarkable in the whole field of phenomenological experimentation. All the difficulties met with in ordinary phenomenology and, indeed, in all the classical theories of knowledge, stem from the fact that they consider the duality consciousness – knowledge as being self-sufficient and able to absorb the whole of experience. Whereas the triad knowledge-consciousness-science alone can provide a genuinely ontological foundation for phenomenology.

Certainly, nothing can make this transfiguration apparent except the direct and personal experience of the phenomenologist himself. But no one can claim to have understood real transcendental phenomenology unless he has had this experience and been “illuminated” as a result. No one, not even the most subtle of dialecticians or the most cunning logician, who has not actually experienced this and has therefore not seen things-beneath-things, can do more than talk about phenomenology; he cannot actively participate in any phenomenological experience. Let us make a more precise example:

As long as I can remember, I have always been able to recognize the colors blue, red, and yellow. My eye saw them, and I had a latent knowledge of them. Certainly “my eye” did not ask itself any questions about them: how could it have? Its function is to see, not to see itself in the act of seeing. But my brain itself was as if asleep: it was not in any sense the “eye of the eye”, but merely a prolongation of that organ. And so I simply said, almost without thinking: that’s a beautiful red – or a faded green – or a brilliant white.

One day some years ago while walking among the vines in the Canton of Vaud overlooking the Lake of Geneva I had a most extraordinary experience. The other of the steeply descending slope, the blue of the lake, the violet of the mountains in Savoy, and in the distance the glistening glaciers of the Grand Combin – all this I had seen a hundred times. I know knew for the first time that I had never looked at them. And yet, I had been living there for three months.

It is true that, from the very first, this landscape had profoundly affected me. But it had only produced in me a vague feeling of exaltation. No doubt the “I” of the philosopher is stronger that any landscape. The poignant sensation of beauty we experience is only the “I” measuring and deriving strength therefrom, the infinite distance that separates us from beauty. But on that day, suddenly, I knew that it was I who was creating that landscape and that without me it would not exist: “It is I who sees you and who sees myself seeing you and in so doing creates you” This cry from the heart is the cry of the Demiurg when creating “his” world. It is not only the suspension of an “old” world but the projection of a “new” one. And in that instant, indeed, the world was re-created.

Never had I seen such colors. They were thousands of times move vivid, more delicately shaded, more “alive”. I knew that I had just acquired a color-sense – which I was seeing color for the first time, and that until then I had never really seen a picture or penetrated the world of painting. But I knew also that by this awakening of consciousness, this perception of my perception, I held the key to that world of transfiguration that is not a mysterious sub-world, but the true world from which we are banished by our ignorance. This has nothing to do with attention. Transfiguration is complete. Attention never is. Transfiguration knows itself in its positive sufficiency. Attention aims at attaining some day such sufficiency. It cannot be said, of course, that attentiveness is empty. On the contrary, it craves fullness. But this craving is not fulfillment. When I returned to the village that day, the people I met were most “attentive” to their work; yet to me they all seemed to be walking in their sleep.

Abellio was a deity of Soulès’ homeland, especially the Garonne Valley in Gallia Aquitania. His existence is known through a number of inscriptions that were discovered at Comminges. He may have been a god of apple trees. Equally, though Raymond is a name of Germanic origin, composed of the elements ragin (‘counsellor’) and mund (‘protector’), the name was, at the time of Catharism, specifically linked with the counts of Toulouse. The choice of protector and counsellor of the deity of light is apt to describe what Soulès envisioned to be his mission in life.

Soulès was born November 11, 1907 in Toulouse, and died August 26, 1986 in Nice. His parents came from Ax-les-Thermes, in the Ariège valley, only 16 kilometres from the ancient Cathar castle at Montségur. Soulès was a brilliant student, and during his engineering studies discovered an interest in politics and became a staunch supporter of Marxism. He joined the Étudiants Socialist of the XIV arrondissement of Paris, affiliated to the French Socialist party (SFIO). Here he befriended the celebrated political philosopher Claude Lévi-Strausse. Amongst his tutors was Marcel Deat, the politician and philosopher who formed his own party, the Parti Socialiste de France, under the motto ‘Order, Authority and Nation’.

In 1931, at the age of 24, he joined the Centre Polytechnicien d’Études Économiques, popularly known as X-Crise. The aim of the group was to study the political and economic consequences of the 1929 Wall Street crash. One of the results of this study was his adoption of ‘Planisme’, a political philosophy that embraced centralised control of the economy and key services, such as power and transport, which today remain pillars of most socialist governments.

According to Guy Patton, author of Masters of Deception: “It appears that the Planist approach offered the best route to a French national renewal and a change in France’s economic fortune. He wanted to replace the famous Republican slogan, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, with ‘Prayer, War, Work’, to represent a new society built on an absolute hierarchy led by a king-priest.” It is therefore apparent that Abellio did not want to stop with bringing socialism to power, but had a much greater vision for France.

Abellio was also on the board of the Atlantis magazine, founded in 1926 by Paul Le Cour. Le Cour was to be an inspiration for Pierre Plantard’s political and esoteric philosophy – the illustrious Priory of Sion. Le Cour himself was the heir of the Hiéron du Val d’Or movement, which campaigned for the return of a priest-king to rule France. All of these organisations, however diversified they might appear to be, had one common denominator: the return of a New or Golden Age, and it is here that they link up with Abellio’s vision for France.

In 1947, Abellio’s ‘Vers un prophetisme nouveau’ specifically called for the formation of “a grand order consisting of a community of initiates under the direction of a man with a sense of mission.” The question, of course, is: initiates of what?

Abellio wrote two books in the Gnostic genre, entitled Manifeste de la nouvelle gnose (Manifestation of the New Gnosis) and Approches de la nouvelle gnose (Approaches of the New Gnosis). He explored the possibility of a secret numerical code in the Bible, a subject that he developed in La Bible, document chiffré (which could best be translated as ‘The Bible Code’!) in 1950, and later in Introduction à une théorie des nombres bibliques (Introduction to a Theory of Biblical Numbers), in 1984. He proposed in particular that the number of the Beast – i.e. the Devil – 666, was the key number of life, a manifestation of the holy trinity on all possible levels, material, animist and spiritual.

Abellio’s writings all underline his ideology, which is that there is an ongoing process whose final term he called the “assumption” of the world’s multiplicity into the “inner Man.” Man was supposed to be able to achieve the complete unification of that multiplicity, a unification that would end up providing the subject with a “gnostic consciousness,” also called “secondary memory,” by the same token leading to the “transfiguration of the world.”

So far there is little evidence that Abellio might have been a Cathar. Whenever his ideology is explained, there are references to the influence of Pierre de Combas on his thinking, as well as his interest in Oriental philosophy, the Vedas, and eschatology. Indeed, it is only in Jean Parvulesco’s Le Soleil Rouge de Raymond Abellio (The Red Sun of Raymond Abellio) – and then even in a somewhat secretive manner – that the notion that Abellio likely had Cathar allegiances rises to the surface.

Parvulesco is a writer and French journalist, an heir of “Traditional thinking,” in line with other esoteric authors like René Guénon and Julius Evola. He knew Abellio personally and could penetrate into his inner world – see his ‘true self’, which was an important part of Abellio’s philosophy.

It is in the chapter “The Final Secret of Raymond Abellio” that we find – unexpectedly – two direct references to Catharism. But before doing so, Parvulesco opens the chapter by underlining that Abellio died in an “immense solitude.” He then writes how “Raymond Abellio never stopped to be, secretly, and whether he himself knew or not nevertheless is important, the ecstatic and suicidal ecstatic of Montségur, whom carried inside himself the mission for this life and for all lives to come.” He continues: “And, on the other part, he, so long amongst us as the confidential agent of the other world, is going to try to be, now, our confidential agent in the other world.”

The first paragraph is a rather awkward method of writing and it is almost as if Parvulesco is about to fall over his own words, trying to express something that is very intense. Parvulesco nevertheless makes it clear that Abellio had a mission, which he links with Montségur, and though some might argue Parvulesco used the castle’s name because it was near to where Abellio’s family originated from, that actually doesn’t work within the context, with references to suicide – noting that suicide was specifically linked with the Cathars besieged at that castle during the siege of Montségur. Even more specific: Parvulesco implies Abellio’s mission is specifically linked with Montségur – known for one thing only: the symbolic demise of Catharism.

Two pages later, and totally out of sorts with the tone of the book and chapter, Parvulesco introduces the Consolamentum. Parvulesco is at odds to explain the end of Abellio’s life, why he died in total isolation, and is unable to come up with a logical answer – except one: “the only answer that I can support is not the least: […] it is in the mystery of this sacrament instituted by the Consolamentum of the very perfect that it is where we need to search the reasons of his mystic complicity with the arrest of death that concerned him, and about which he did not ignore the promises of deliverance, the suspension of the movement of the penitential wheel of the blind lives. But let us not talk about that which is so savagely prohibited to be spoken of.”

Few have read this sole paragraph for what it really states. Not only does it refer directly to the fact that Parvulesco knew what Catharism meant – the end of the series of incarnations – and that such things should not be spoken of, but he specifically notes that it is in this framework and especially in the sacrament of the Consolamentum that one should search for the reason why Abellio died in the manner that he did. In short, Parvulesco states that Abellio died in total solitude, as he died after receiving the Consolamentum; the total isolation being nothing else but his Endura.

These two paragraphs are powerful evidence, by a person who knew him, that Abellio was indeed a Cathar. In two paragraphs, Parvulesco sums up the life of his friend as that of a man who was born with “the mission of Montségur” and who died in conformity to the Cathar rituals.

These paragraphs also put another episode in Abellio’s life in context: a theatre play entitled ‘Montségur’, which was about the Cathar Crusade. In the play, he set off the conflict between knowledge and power on the one hand, as well as an awakening and the part it played in a particular mindset. Was it his awakening and his mindset?

As such, all of his interests in the Bible, as well as Oriental philosophy, should be seen for what they were: the interests of a Cathar, who realised that the Bible and these philosophies contained ideas that were similar to his own – those of Catharism. These interests should not be seen – as most interpret them – as those of a social activist who went in search of a larger religious framework. It was a confirmation of his belief, rather than the exploration of beliefs to eventually pick one that suited him best.

Equally, as Parvulesco underlines, perhaps we should see his social activism and his struggle for a New Europe as his ‘mission’ – a mission that equally was part and parcel of the Cathar social agenda of medieval Europe. Though Abellio has often been labelled a synarchist (i.e. a man who proposed that the world be ruled by a secret elite – his ‘initiates’), it may be that he realised that after the fate that befell Catharism in the 13th century, rule by secrecy may have been the only method through which his – if not their – social reform could ever be accomplished. Hence, we need to ask whether his struggle – and that of those like him – is another Cathar revival.

Soldiers already lost in a war that becomes ever more total, ever more occult, we bear at the very edges of this world the spiritual arms and the most enigmatic destiny of military honours from the Beyond. In the ranks, both visible and invisible, of the Black Order to which we belong, those whom death has struck down march on side by side with those who are still standing.
– Jean Parvulesco, La Conspiracion de Noces Polaires

© Copyright 2008 by New Dawn Magazine & the respective author. This article first appeared in New Dawn 110. For further information visit http://www.newdawnmagazine.com

Wars between nations or faiths are commonplace. Sometimes, the leaders of nations turn against a minority resident within their own borders. But the Albigensian Crusade is unique in history, as the Pope on March 10, 1208 proclaimed a crusade against a ‘heresy’ that was present inside Catholic Europe itself. “These heretics are worse than the Saracens!” he proclaimed.

In retrospect, the crusade was one of the bloodiest episodes in European history. Indeed, the decades-long persecution of simple folk has often been seen as the event that prepared the way for the birth of Protestantism, as it awakened ordinary Europeans to the realisation that something was not ‘quite’ right within the papal corridors.

Today, the ‘heretics’ are most commonly known as Cathars, but historically they went under a number of guises for, in fact, they were not a uniform organisation at all.

The main focus, however, has always been on the Cathars (from the Greek word meaning ‘pure’), a name that is normally reserved for the dissident Christians who lived in Southern France and Northern Spain.

Catharism arrived in southern France and northern Italy in the 11th century. It was present in Orléans as early as 1022, when thirteen Parfaits – the name for the ascetic Cathar elders – were condemned to the stake. At the time, the south of France (the Languedoc) was not yet under the political control of Northern France. In the Languedoc, Catharism, endorsed by the local nobility, became a popular alternative to the Catholic Church. The likes of the Count of Toulouse – one of the most important rulers of Southern France – supported Catharism.

Cathar Beginnings

The first Cathar Synod was held between 1167 and 1176 at St. Felix-de-Caraman, near Toulouse. The event, attended by many local notables, was presided over by the Bogomil papa Nicetas of the Balkan dualist church (see ‘The Bogomils: Europe’s Forgotten Gnostics’ by Paul Tice, New Dawn No. 106, January-February 2008), assisted by the Cathar bishop of (Northern) France and a leader of the Cathars of Lombardy.

The Synod marked the start of the real struggle between the Catholic Church and Catharism, as the Church now had an organised body to fight. Of course, it meant ‘the enemy’ now had a name, and could thus be more easily fought.

As early as 1178, Louis VII of France asked for a forceful intervention to stamp out the New Church. In 1208, Pope Innocent III repeatedly tried to use diplomacy to stop the spread of Catharism, but in that year his papal legate Pierre de Castelnau was murdered (allegedly by an agent serving the Count of Toulouse). The event pushed him from diplomacy into military action. Some now consider the death of de Castelnau a false flag operation, engineered so that the crusade would be declared.

Whichever scenario is true, the end remains the same: an estimated 200,000 to one million people died during the twenty year campaign, which began in earnest in Béziers in July 1209. Papal troops marched to Béziers where they ordered that 222 people, suspected of being Cathars, be handed over to them by the town’s citizens. When this was refused, the papal troops decided to attack. One of the crusaders asked their leader, the Papal Legate Arnaud-Amaury, how to distinguish between the 222 heretics and the thousands of faithful Catholics that lived in the city. “Kill them all,” was the abbot’s alleged reply. “God will recognise his own!” The number of dead that day was between 7,000 and 20,000, the latter figure being the one quoted when Arnaud-Amaury reported back to the Pope.

With such carnage, the other towns (e.g. Narbonne and Carcassonne) offered no resistance and soon the Southern counts had lost their territories and powers to the King of France and his allies. For these Northern lords, attaining the lands of the Languedoc had always been paramount; their mission had been accomplished.

Though the crusade was over, only the powerbrokers who supported the spread of Catharism had been removed from power, their lands confiscated. What about the people? It is a known fact that the more one hunts down a group, the more convinced it becomes in its ways. Hence, at the end of the Albigensian Crusade, Catharism wasn’t by any means eradicated.

For this purpose, the Inquisition was established in Toulouse in 1229 to guarantee that any future resurgence of this ‘heresy’ was nipped in the bud – literally – but also that a new phase of the campaign could commence: individual manhunts to track down Parfaits (the Cathars elders) who were still hiding and preaching within the general population.

From 1233 onwards, hunting down Catharism was no longer done via wide-sweeping crusades, but on an individual basis. This meant any Cathars caught were ferociously interrogated about the secret network they were part of, their hideouts, their clandestine financiers and supporters, etc.

Faced with the incredible pains subjected to their bodies, and the Cathar oath not to lie, the Inquisition learned important secrets about the underground network. Despite this, René Weis, author of The Yellow Cross, states: “The Cathar movement in the late-thirteenth-century Sabartès was an underground organisation, and the Inquisition of Geoffroy d’Ablis never penetrated to its core in spite of the fact that it executed most of their leaders.”

Many Cathar elders realised the lethal dangers they faced and began to take refuge in the fortresses at Fenouillèdes and Montségur, while others were able to incite uprisings, which forced the Inquisition out of Albi, Narbonne and Toulouse. Count Raymond-Roger de Trencavel even led a military campaign in 1240, but was defeated at Carcassonne, surrendered and was exiled to Aragon.

The Church felt victory was near and only those Cathars hiding in the castles remained to be eradicated. A siege began of the castle of Montségur, where 300 soldiers and 200 Parfaits stood off an army of 10,000. Among the Cathars inside Montségur were the Cathar bishop of Toulouse and the Cathar bishop of the Razès, Raymond Aguilher, leading members of the ‘heresy’.

After a ten month siege, in March 1244, the castle surrendered. Though their life would be spared if they recanted, the Cathars preferred to be burnt, rather than reject their faith – a true sign of their conviction, which is one of the key reasons why Catharism today has such a wide appeal with the local people of Southern France.

The fall of a small, isolated but very idyllic fort, that of Quéribus, in August 1255, is often seen as the final demise of Catharism, but that is not true. In fact, in the following decades, there was something of a Cathar revival. The much hunted Cathar Parfait Pierre Authié even consoled the Count of Foix, Roger-Bernard III, in March 1302 in the hall of Tarascon castle, even though he was later buried by the Bishop of Carcassonne. It shows how many local lords still remained loyal to the Cathar cause.

The underground survival of Catharism has become symbolised by the events that occurred in and to the small village of Montaillou, near Montségur, as it was the subject of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s pioneering book of the same name. From 1294 to 1324, the daily routines of Montaillou’s 250 inhabitants are known, as they survived in the records of Jacques Fournier, later to be Pope Benedict XII. It was Fournier, then the local Catholic bishop, who unleashed the Inquisition at Pamiers against the villagers, even resulting in the arrest of the entire village in 1308. One should, perhaps, be happy they weren’t all killed…

Fournier also captured the last Cathar Parfait to be burnt at the stake: Guillaume Bélibaste, in 1321. Bélibaste’s bailiwick was the area between Rennes-le-Château – known for the mysterious 19th century priest Bérenger Saunière, who is at the core of the mystery of the so-called Priory of Sion and Dan Brown’s bestselling The Da Vinci Code – and the coastal city of Perpignan.

Bélibaste was the son of a rich farmer from Cubières. He became a shepherd and a Parfait, the pupil of the Parfaits Pierre and Jacques Authié, whom had stayed with Bélibaste’s family in Cubières. As the Inquisition’s stranglehold tightened, Bélibaste settled across the border, in Catalonia, where the political regime did not persecute Cathars, and he was able to make baskets and carding combs, as well as become the mentor to a local Cathar community. He nevertheless decided to return to his homeland, but was caught, tried, and burnt at Villerouge-Termenès.

Bélibaste’s death signalled the end of the official Occitan Cathar Church, which blossomed in the 11th century, organised in 1167, and perished in 1321. But though officially defeated in France, elsewhere, e.g. in Bosnia, Catharism continued to exist into the 15th century, when its adherents converted to Islam. Some, however, argue that Catharism in France may have disappeared as an organised Church in 1321, but that as a religion… it remains alive until today.

Though it was the Inquisition – the accusers – that wrote down the life of Authié and Bélibaste, there is general consensus the insights the accounts provide into their lives and beliefs are credible. Indeed, what precisely the Cathars believed, remains somewhat of an enigma. Some have even used it as a blank canvas, to paint their own thoughts or convictions on. Hence, a lot of myths and falsehoods now exist about Catharism.

The Cathar Revival

At the core of the Cathar faith was the rejection of the material world, which was seen as a trap imprisoning the soul. All things material were seen as evil and to be opposed and rejected. Hence, they built no churches, were largely vegetarian and shared both common possessions and ate common meals. Though it is true that their doctrine had room for Jesus and the Bible, especially the Gospel of John, and that they proclaimed Christ had no real body (if he was the Son of God, how could he have a body of flesh, which was evil?) and hence also died no real death, all of these accommodations should be seen as educational tools so that they could explain to those that had been raised as Christians where both teachings differed.

But in the end, their doctrine was appealing not so much for its core beliefs, but because the Catholic clergy were corrupt and as materialistic as one could be.

Today, Catharism is largely seen as a dualist religion, like most Gnostic and oriental teachings. The man largely responsible for identifying Catharism as such was Déodat Roche (1877-1978), often referred to both as ‘the Cathar Bishop’, if not ‘the Cathar Pope’. However, outside of France, his name is relatively unknown, as is that of his friend and Professor of Sociology René Nelli of the University of Toulouse (and often referred to as ‘the vicar of Catharism’), who lectured on the subject all over France.

Their fame has largely been eclipsed by the likes of Otto Rahn and Antonin Gadal, who saw the caves of the valley south of Foix as secret initiation centres for the Cathars – a theory that is now often widely accepted, but which has very little academic support.

Gadal continued the work started by the local historian Adolphe Garrigou. From the 1930s onwards, circles were formed around Gadal and the already mentioned Roche and Nelli. Together, they formed “La Société du souvenir de Montségur et du Graal,” to promote the forgotten history of Catharism – but specifically tying it to the Holy Grail – and the promotion of Montségur, and the region as a whole. It is here that what is now known as ‘neo-Catharism’ was born, and it has little to do with the original belief.

A second circle of Cathar enthusiasts had the countess Pujol-Murat as a key figure; she was one of Otto Rahn’s patrons. Rahn was a young German academic, whose books greatly advanced interest in Montségur and Catharism, both in the 1930s and now (see my article ‘The Strange Life of Otto Rahn: Author, Poet, Grail Seeker, SS Officer’, in New Dawn No. 109, July-August 2008). The countess claimed to be a descendent of Esclarmonde de Foix, who was seen (though historically inaccurately so) as one of the most esteemed Cathar Parfaits of the early 13th century and in some accounts held to be responsible for the rise of Montségur as the ‘Vatican’ of Catharism. It should be pointed out that these hilltop castles (like Montségur) were never ‘Cathar cathedrals’, as some would have it, but merely refuges for the Parfaits escaping the Inquisition.

The Countess hoped to discover the lost treasure of the Cathars – and the Templars – which she believed was the Grail itself, supposedly hidden at Montségur by Esclarmonde, just before she threw herself off the mountain to escape from the papal troops. Some therefore believed the Grail was hidden there, whereas others felt the Grail had been secreted out of Montségur, days before its fall. It is said four Cathars descended down the steep slopes, carrying with them a ‘treasure’. Though the story of this escape is true, whether they carried anything is a matter of debate. Furthermore, as the descent was steep and arduous, whatever they carried must have been small.

Amidst the wild speculation as to what they might have secured, some believe it was a holy book, containing the wisdom of the Cathar religion. It is indeed unlikely the Cathars secured a physical treasure, if only because it would have been too heavy, and in their eyes, unimportant: Catharism saw everything on this plane of existence as evil and despicable; money and wealth were chief amongst Earth’s – and Satan’s – vices.

Authors such as Walter Birks and R.A. Gilbert, as well as Elizabeth van Buren, have suggested the Cathars guarded a manuscript, knowledge – a spiritual treasure. This manuscript is often said to be the ‘Book of Love’ and is linked with the Gospel of John, and is claimed to contain “sublime teachings, marvellous revelations, the most secret words confided by our Lord Jesus Christ to the beloved disciple [John the Evangelist]. Their power would be such that all hatred, all anger, all jealousy would vanish from the hearts of men. The Divine Love, like a new flood, would submerge all souls and never again would blood be shed on this earth.”

It is known that books were very important to the Cathars, and some, such as “Stella,” by the Cathars of Desenzano, talk about the wars between God and Lucifer – underlining their dualist doctrine. But as Saint Dominic, founder of the Inquisition, is often depicted committing these books to the fire, it should come as little surprise that few have survived his ‘intervention’.

However beautiful Montségur is, the ‘real’ Cathar heartland are somewhat gentler slopes where now desolate villages once thrived. One such village, Arques, near Rennes-le-Château, is where the hunted Parfait Pierre Authié preached and found refuge, and the modern Cathar researcher Déodat Roche was born and lived. Today there is a museum dedicated to him.

Deodat Roche

Though Roche was part of the modern Cathar Revival, he never focused too much on the promotion of Montségur or the ‘initiation caves’, which for him were distractions – tourist attractions. Roche focused on the true Cathar belief.  But the question needs to be asked whether he discovered this, or whether he knew so all along.

For those who have studied and known Roche, there are hints that somehow Roche’s interest in Catharism was very fundamental – that he may have been one himself. He is known to have made solitary early morning walks to a hill just outside of Arques, where he was taken as a young child by his father. The site holds a statue of the Virgin Mary, and though this might appear typically Christian, the Cathars of the 14th century are known to have made similar pilgrimages to the nearby basilica of Notre-Dame-de-Marceille, which held a Black Madonna. As in Notre-Dame-de-Marceille, did the Virgin Mary in Arques have a secondary – dualist – meaning for Cathars – and Roche?

As mentioned, his home town of Arques also had a strong connection with Authié. Roche once unearthed an image of Pierre Authié and both he and others who saw this noted how remarkably similar the two men looked. Roche was not only mayor of Arques; he had also held important positions within the French judicial system. He was also a very private individual. He never spoke about whether or not he felt that he was indeed the possible reincarnation of Authié. Roche must have understood that what he was doing was uncovering what had been buried with Authié. If he did feel that he was the incarnation of Authié, then it was clear that upon this Parfait’s death, he had after all not entered Heaven.

So, what was Catharism? A dualist religion is primarily seen as a religion that believes in two competing forces, good versus evil, but it is much more than that. An insight into the Cathar cosmography comes from Authié himself. He preached that the Devil had sneaked into Paradise, after waiting 1,000 years at it doors. Once inside, he seduced the spirits, who all fell from a hole in Paradise for nine days and nine nights. After this Fall, they ended up on Earth. When Heaven had largely become depleted, God immediately plugged the hole. But the souls on Earth soon were saddened by their loss and the Devil offered them as comfort such overcoats that would make them forget the bliss of Heaven: the human body, which began a series of incarnations. It thus became Mankind’s mission to ascend back to Heaven, i.e. break the cycle of incarnations. By accepting this cosmography and performing the Consolamentum, one’s next death would end the soul’s odyssey and return it to Heaven.

The two most important Cathar rituals were the Consolamentum and the Endura.

In conclusion, neo-Catharism had little to do with Catharism as such. The notion of Jesus as a man of flesh and blood was rejected by the Cathars, yet neo-Cathars underline how the Cathars believed that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Christ. Yuri Stoyanov has indeed confirmed that the Cathars claimed as such and that this belief had no counterpart in Bogomil doctrines, meaning that the Cathars were unique amongst the dualists to have this belief. Their religion was not at all based on the knowledge that Jesus and Mary Magdalene created a dynasty but that, instead, Cathars in Southern France, where Mary Magdalene was a popular saint, used her in their cosmography, to illustrate the feminine aspect of the divine duality.

Cathars underlined the 1,000 years the Devil had to wait at the gates of Paradise before he entered it. Cathars saw it as their mission to have the soul repent for the sin of being seduced by the Devil, and once accomplished, it would return to Heaven. The Church, however, saw it differently, using especially Revelation 20:7, where it is said that after 1,000 years, Satan would be released from his prison. Seeing Catharism rose approximately one millennium after the death of Christ, chronicler Ralph the Bard and St Hildegard of Bingen – the latter who stated she had a vision in which she saw Satan released from his chains – said Catharism was in fact the return of Satan, there to destroy the Church. It was the very reason why it had to be destroyed; for many Christians, conquering Catharism meant slaying Satan. Thus, not only Catharism, but the Cathar Crusade itself, had an innate dualism to it too.

© Copyright 2008 by New Dawn Magazine & the respective author. This article first appeared in New Dawn 110. For further information visit http://www.newdawnmagazine.com

This insight can be hard to accept in the positivist world of mainstream Western thought. In these terms, either an event took place or it did not. Truth and falsehood are judged by this criterion alone. And yet such a stance has only a limited value. It is indispensable in history and journalism and perhaps in science (although the anomalous discoveries of twentieth-century physics have blurred the picture somewhat). But in the spiritual dimension, even though there are facts here as well, they are not of this kind. To overlook this truth is to mistake one reality for another.

Conventional Christianity has often made this mistake. Practically from the start, it has presented its case in literalistic terms: the Bible is true; moreover it is literally true. Its facts must be historical facts, and its record of the past must be a true one. At first these claims fostered Christianity’s rapid success in the ancient world. By the early centuries of the Common Era, Greco-Roman civilisation could no longer take its own myths seriously, so it was persuaded to adopt the Scriptures of the Jews and Christians on the grounds that these presented not only sacred truths but an accurate record of the past.

Since the Enlightenment, such claims have been more of an embarrassment than an advertisement for the faith. Over the last 250 years, scholars in many fields have taken Christianity at its word and investigated in great depth just how much the Bible jibes with science and history. The findings have not exactly vindicated the Good Book. Indeed the trend over time has been to call more and more of the Bible into question as a historical record.

From a scientific point of view, the tide began to turn in the early nineteenth century. In 1830–32, the British scientist Charles Lyell published his classic Principles of Geology, arguing that geological changes that are recorded in rocks could not possibly have taken place in the mere 6,000 years that Genesis assigned to the earth’s lifetime, but had occurred over a much longer period. A generation later, another, even more famous scientist, Charles Darwin, suggested that animal species had not been created by the Almighty on a single day of creation in 4004 BCE, but had evolved over much longer periods by what he called “natural selection.” (In fact, when Darwin had finished his magnum opus, The Origin of Species, he sent it to Lyell for comments.)

Historicity of the Bible Questioned

In recent decades, archaeology has cast doubt even on parts of the Bible that had seemed more or less factual, such as the history of Israel in the Old Testament. To take one example, a generation ago most scholars accepted the historicity of the Exodus from Egypt, believing at least that some migration of this kind happened, even if the narrative had to be stripped of its miraculous festoonings. Since then, the picture has changed considerably. Summarising recent findings in their 2001 book The Bible Unearthed, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman contend that the Exodus did not happen in any form that is recognisable from the archaeological record. The first mention of Israel in any known inscription, they note, dates from the reign of the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah in 1207 BCE. While this is around the time traditionally assigned to the Exodus, the inscription speaks not of a flight of Israelites (or even an expulsion), but of Merneptah’s successful incursion into Canaan, where Israel is reckoned among the peoples subdued. In any case, the Israelites could not have escaped to Canaan out of the hands of the Egyptians, because Canaan was part of Egyptian territory at the time; Merneptah’s invasion would have been to quiet a troublesome province.

Instead, Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that the biblical account of the Exodus is a composite of folk memories of the Hyksos – a Semitic people who ruled Egypt from c.1670 to c.1570 BCE before being expelled by the Egyptians. The Exodus story as we know it was framed in the seventh century BCE, when the national ideology of Jerusalem and the nation of Judah was beginning to crystallise – and Egypt was a powerful and aggressive neighbour.

Other scholars have come up with equally revolutionary insights. In her work The Great Angel, the British biblical scholar Margaret Barker points out that originally the Israelites worshipped a female goddess, known as Asherah (or sometimes as Hokhmah or “Wisdom”), as the consort of Yahweh, alongside El, the Most High God, and Yahweh himself, who was essentially a national deity allocated to Israel alone. Barker suggests that the famous Deuteronomic reform under the Judahite King Josiah – in which Josiah purges the Temple of these other gods and restores the worship of Yahweh alone (2 Kings 22-23) – was not a reform but an innovation, a purge of time-honoured traditions in an attempt to create a “Yahweh-alone movement.” This movement eventually took over Judaism after the Babylonian Exile and imposed its own agenda on the past.

One could make similar points about much of the rest of the Bible. The “quest of the historical Jesus,” as Albert Schweitzer so famously dubbed it, has gone on for over two centuries now without any really conclusive results. Most scholars are convinced that there is some admixture of myth and legend in the life of Christ as portrayed in the New Testament, but they differ enormously about just what was legend and what was not. The panel of liberal New Testament scholars known as the Jesus Seminar has won some notoriety for contending that Jesus neither said nor did most of the things attributed to him in the Gospels. As shocking as some may find this claim, it is hardly new: an array of German New Testament scholars reached much the same conclusions in the nineteenth century. A still more radical view holds that Jesus never existed at all: his story was merely a Jewish equivalent of the numerous death-and-resurrection myths circulating in the ancient world. Since there is no archaeological evidence for Christ’s life, and the textual evidence is elusive (none of the Gospels, canonical or apocryphal, even claims to be an eyewitness account), this position, as extreme as it is, is hard to definitively refute.

Biblical Stories as Allegory, Not History

What, then, are we to do with the Bible as history? Some will no doubt cling to it. The literary critic Harold Bloom has noted that in evangelical Christianity, the “limp leather Bible,” waved at the audience by the preacher, has itself become a totem. But others are unlikely to find refuge in a simplistic bibliolatry. They may be drawn to another approach – one that is equally ancient, and possibly more profound. It is that the Bible is not, and never was, meant to be taken literally, but has deeper meanings that are to be unearthed by those are capable of doing so.

This idea goes back to the very beginnings of Christianity and has always existed side by side with narrow literalism. Ironically, it was a major impetus for the creation of Christianity as a separate religion from Judaism. The nascent Christian movement often had to allegorise the Hebrew Scriptures to make use of them for its own purposes. The Apostle Paul writes about one biblical passage:

It is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman.

But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise.

Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.

For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.

But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all (Gal. 4:22–26).

Paul is saying that the real meaning of the story of Abraham and his two sons lies in the relationship of the Jews and the Christians. Ishmael, the older son, born to Hagar (or Agar), “the bondwoman,” is the Jews, who are in “bondage” to the Law of Moses. Isaac, the younger, born to Sarah, the “freewoman,” represents the Christians, who are freed from having to follow the Law. The story is an “allegory.”

The first authority to use the word “allegory” in this sense (the Greek is allegoria) – and the first to expound the Hebrew Bible in this way – was a philosopher who lived at the same time as both Jesus and Paul: Philo of Alexandria (c.20 BCE–c.50 CE). Although there is no reference to Jesus or Paul in his works or to Philo in the New Testament, it would be hard to overstate Philo’s influence on Christianity. To take one example, it was he who first used the Greek word logos (often translated as “word”) to mean the creative, structuring element in consciousness and to contend that this principle had engendered the world. Philo’s view was prevalent in the Judaism of the first century CE, in which the logos was often seen as a kind of deuteros theos or “second god.” The Christians appropriated this theology, especially in the Gospel of John, whose prologue “In the beginning was the Word” etc. is almost a programmatic statement of Philo’s thought. Philo, of course, never equated this logos with Jesus, as the Christians did, and once the Christian view had spread throughout the ancient world, the Jews dropped the concept of the logos entirely.

In any event, Philo viewed the Hebrew Bible through the lens of allegory. Here is Philo on Genesis:

“And on the sixth day God finished his work which he made.” It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed all in time…. But… it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that time had its existence as a consequence of the world….. When, therefore, Moses says, “God completed his works on the sixth day,” we must understand that he is speaking not of a number of days, but that he takes six as a perfect number.

Philo goes on to explain what he means by a perfect number. Obviously this is a far richer and more sophisticated understanding of a sacred text than the simplistic idea that the world was made in six literal days.

The Christian theologian who is most indebted to Philo was the third-century Church Father Origen. Origen went further than Philo, however, in being much more eager to discard the literal truth of passages that seemed contrary to reason. Here is Origen on Genesis:

Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, “planted a paradise eastward in Eden,” and set in it a visible and palpable “tree of life,” of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life: and again that one could partake of “good and evil” by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to “walk in the paradise in the cool of the day” and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events.

Origen does not spare the Gospels or the writings of the Apostles, “for,” he writes, “the history even of these is not everywhere pure, events being woven together in the bodily sense without having actually happened; nor do the law and the commandments contained therein entirely declare what is reasonable.”

Such an attitude seems strikingly modern – and yet these are the words of a third-century Church Father. Origen spoke of three levels of meaning to Scripture (body, soul, and spirit, in accordance with the tripartite division of human nature accepted by early Christianity). This view would be tremendously influential. The scholar Beryl Smalley has written that “to write a history of Origenist influence on the West would be tantamount to writing a history of Western [biblical] exegesis.”

By the Middle Ages, Origen’s three levels of meaning for Scripture would be expanded to four. They were called the literal, allegorical, moral, and “anagogical” or mystical senses. Dante, writing in the early fourteenth century, refers to them in his Letter to Can Grande, where he says of the Exodus:

If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if from allegory, it means for us our redemption done by Christ; if from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace; if from the anagogical, it means the leavetaking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical.

Origen, who is evasive about actually setting out the hidden meaning of Scripture (“it was the method of the Holy Spirit rather to conceal these truths and to hide them deeply,” he writes), makes reference to Egypt as well. He speaks of “the descent of the holy fathers into Egypt, that is, into this world.” For Origen as for Dante, then, the Exodus ultimately presents an allegory of spiritual liberation.

Origen died around 253 CE, crippled by torture during the persecution of the Christians by the Roman Emperor Decius. Since then, Origen has had an ambiguous destiny in the mainstream church. Revered in his own day, in later centuries he fell into disrepute among the orthodox. This happened for a number of reasons, but it was largely because his views on the relationship between the Father and the Son did not jibe with the doctrine of the Trinity as it would evolve in the fourth and fifth centuries. Furthermore, later theologians did not feel entirely comfortable with Origen’s assertion that much of Scripture was not meant to be taken as literally true. Although the churchmen were generally content to accept his idea that there were other meanings in addition to the literal one, they did not like to think the literal sense was wrong or even (as we’ve seen Origen say about the myth of Eden) ridiculous.

Protestantism and Literalism

If the Catholic and Orthodox churches were always comfortable with a symbolic meaning to the Bible, where did today’s excruciating biblical literalism come from? Partly from Protestantism. Catholicism and Orthodoxy always regarded the Bible as an authority, but never as the authority: the teachings and practices of the Church itself were held to be of at least equal weight. The Catholic Church always insisted that the Bible could be easily misunderstood by those who lacked the proper training; this was why the Church discouraged Bible reading by laypeople until comparatively recently.

By the early modern era, however, the Catholic Church had become so corrupt that some Christian leaders (and many of the ordinary faithful) realised that the church was keeping an exclusive monopoly on spiritual power largely to suit its own worldly ends. In breaking with the church, these leaders – the Protestant Reformers – decided to return to the Bible as the only proper authority: sola scriptura, “Scripture only,” as the formula had it.

This in itself might not have been so problematic, but the Protestantism that reached the American frontier in the nineteenth century was dominated by men who had little education and little idea of any other literature than the Bible. Such people have always existed: Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Catholic theologian, was alluding to them when he said, “Timeo hominem unius libri”: “I fear a man of one book.” In the United States, and, I suspect, in much of the rest of the English-speaking world, evangelical Christianity has become co-opted by these “men of one book.” Today in many parts of the US, it is possible to go into people’s houses and see no other book than the Bible. It is this element in Christianity that has made its presence felt in the rise of fundamentalism.

As a result, the Bible’s inner meaning has increasingly become the province of esotericism. Regarding the story of Christ, in her book Esoteric Christianity the Theosophist Annie Besant speaks of “the Christ of the human Spirit, the Christ who is in every one of us, is born and lives, is crucified, rises from the dead, and ascends into heaven, in every suffering and triumphant ‘Son of Man.’” The story of Christ is thus the story of each of us; the Incarnation symbolises our own descent into the world of materiality, where we pass across the stage for a short while before being crucified on the cross of time and space. But this suffering and death is only transitory or even illusory, since the Logos – the principle of consciousness – in ourselves cannot die. It will be resurrected again in other forms, recognisable or otherwise. (In the Gospels the risen Christ is sometimes recognised by his disciples, sometimes not.)

Some may find themselves impatient with these ideas, insisting that they are nothing more than a way of skirting the issue of historical factuality that must supposedly serve as the bedrock of faith. But what, might one ask, is being dismissed as mere allegory? Viewed in the way sketched out above, the stories of the Exodus and the passion of Christ are not mere edifying tales of the past. Nor are they creeds for blind belief or flags around which to rally the faithful. Rather they are deep expressions of what is going on inside us now. To know from inner experience what it is to be spiritually in “the land of Egypt, the house of bondage,” to see the Logos in ourselves crucified on the cross of time and space, is not evasion but among the most profound insights a human being can have.

I would even take the argument a step further. An allegorical reading of the Bible can actually be more demanding than merely dwelling on the meaning of the letter. Acknowledging “Pharaoh,” “Moses,” the “scribes and Pharisees,” even Christ as parts of ourselves can be unsettling. Few are eager to come to grips with their inner tyrants and hypocrites, and there are possibly even fewer who can bear to see their own higher natures. After all, to know that Moses the lawgiver exists in oneself is already a step out of the house of bondage. To see the Christ within is already to experience a resurrection. Such realisations confer a responsibility upon us that we are not always delighted to face.

As a result, it is often easier to keep these things at the safe remove of antiquity – to follow the disputes about who was the Pharaoh of Exodus; to pore over accounts of recent excavations in Biblical Archaeology Review; to thrill over the latest news feature that breathlessly proffers some allegedly new fact about the historical Jesus. In such a way we can keep these issues alive, but at a comfortable distance: they remain ineluctably “other,” about people who lived long ago. I suspect that this dynamic helps explain the unshakable thirst for biblical archaeology among the American public.

All this said, there is admittedly a problem with leaning too heavily on allegorical readings of Scripture. To be no longer able to take one’s own myths literally – even while accepting them in a figurative sense – does strip them of their power. This is due to the limits of our own understanding; we as a civilisation seem unable to hear the message “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet believed” (John 20:29). This is not a call to blind, stupid faith; it is an appeal to recognise realities that do not present themselves to our physical eyes and hands – the “evidence of things unseen.” But, trusting as we do in the Gradgrindian world of cold, hard facts, we put more trust in texts than in our own inner experience. We discover that the texts are not telling the exact truth about history, and we lose our faith.

Despite the noise (much of it overstated) about rising fundamentalism in the Western world, this loss of faith is likely to accelerate. What will happen when the news sinks in and we collectively understand that much, perhaps most, of the Bible is not literally true? We may continue to see their beauty and power as myths, just as we do with the tales of the Olympian gods, but they will have lost their numinous force for us. We will see the old gods mocked and derided, as they were in antiquity in the satyr plays of the classical Athenian stage and the satires of Lucian, and as we see today in films like Dogma and Jesus Christ Superstar.

In such instances, new myths, new versions of eternal truths arise. What these will be in the future remains to be seen; it is hard to imagine that they will come from any religion now existing. Of the models of reality now available, it is above all the one provided by science that has most captured the imagination of the thinking public. Like Christianity in ancient times, it seems to offer truth in place of myth, actualities in place of legend. And then we are left with a question that, I suspect, will not be answered in the lifetime of anyone reading these pages now: what will happen when the facts of science, implacably hard and substantial as they now seem, are proved to be myths in turn?

Bibliography

Dante Alighieri, Letter to Can Grande della Scala, Translated by James Marchand, http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/20B/Can.Grande.html

Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God, Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1992.

Annie Besant, Esoteric Christianity, or the Lesser Mysteries, Reprint, Wheaton, Ill.: Quest, 2006.

Harold Bloom, The American Religion, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, New York: Touchstone, 2001.

Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.

Origen, On First Principles, Translated by G.W. Butterworth, Reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Philo, The Works of Philo, Translated by C.D. Yonge, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993.

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, Translated by W. Montgomery, Reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1961.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, 2nd edition, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.

© Copyright 2008 by New Dawn Magazine & the respective author. This article first appeared in New Dawn 110. For further information visit http://www.newdawnmagazine.com

What have scholars learned from these often baffling and obscure documents? The issue is a complex one, but it’s possible to sketch out a few key points.

• The historical Jesus remains a mystery. Here is a man who was revered as a divine or semidivine being very shortly after his death. And yet there is not one surviving eyewitness account of him. None of the authors of the New Testament Gospels says that he saw Jesus with his own eyes; the closest we have is Paul’s claim he saw the risen Jesus (1 Cor. 15:5–7). And with the possible exception of the Gospel of Thomas, most of the lost gospels (including the Gospel of Judas) are later than the canonical Gospels and probably do not include a great deal of true biographical details about Jesus’ life.

Some scholars have taken this fact to mean there was no such personage as Jesus, that he was a mythic figure concocted to reflect certain sacred mysteries. While this is in all likelihood too extreme a conclusion to reach, it does show Jesus remains hidden behind a cloud of mystery.

• There was not one original Christianity, but many. Some more or less resembled what would later become Catholic and Orthodox Christianity; some were Gnostics; some denied Jesus was anything more than a great teacher. These differences go so far back that they probably reflect divergences in the views of Christ’s own disciples.

• There are grounds for a hermeneutics of suspicion. Until recently, it was taken for granted that the founders of proto-orthodox Christianity were essentially correct and honest in their portrayal of Christ and his teachings. The issue is considerably more complex now. It has become obvious many of the teachings that supposedly go back to the Apostles were formulated only centuries later. The most notable is perhaps the doctrine of the Trinity, which portrays Christ as divine and fully equal with the Father. This view did not appear in early Christianity. Originally, even those who regarded Jesus in the most exalted fashion, such as the author of the Gospel of John, saw him as kind of a “second god” through whom the Father worked. This view would later be condemned as heresy. The doctrine of the Trinity was worked out by Catholic and Orthodox theologians in the fourth through sixth centuries CE.

It has been deeply unsettling to Christians to realise that many of their most cherished views may be based on myths or even misrepresentations. But it is to the credit of biblical scholars of the last 200 years that they have been willing to face these issues, even when their findings challenge the deepest core of their own beliefs.

© Copyright 2006 by New Dawn Magazine & the respective author. This article first appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 2. For further information visit http://www.newdawnmagazine.com

Only twenty-five years ago, when one used the word “Gnostic,” it was very likely to be misunderstood as “agnostic,” and thus have one’s statement turned into its exact opposite. Such misapprehensions are far less likely today. Nevertheless, increased academic attention (beginning with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scriptures in 1945) and the ensuing popular interest have produced a confusion of tongues which is anything but helpful for the sincere inquirer into matters Gnostic. It is often difficult even to tell what is meant by the word.

The difficulty in defining Gnosticism is not entirely of recent origin. As early as 1910, a small book was published in London that in many ways foreshadowed current trends, including the difficulties in definition. The title of the work was Gnosticism: The Coming Apostasy; the author, a certain D.M. Panton, was an anxious defender of Christian orthodoxy, which he felt was menaced by an emerging Gnostic revival.

Gnosticism, Panton wrote, had surfaced in the twentieth century in the forms of Theosophy, Christian Science, some forms of spiritualism, and in what was called the “New Theology,” which had been introduced primarily by German writers on religion. (A biography of Marcion by theologian Adolf von Harnack created much interest and controversy at that time.) While earlier crypto-Gnostics, such as Emanuel Swedenborg, William Blake, George Fox, and Elias Hicks camouflaged their heretical beliefs, Panton argued, twentieth-century Gnostics no longer bothered with concealment. The gnosticising movements of the early twentieth century, wrote Panton, were “frankly and jubilantly Gnostic”; their thought and their movements carried within them the “throbbing heart of Gnosticism, perhaps the most dreaded foe the Christian faith ever confronted.”

In some ways Panton’s anti-Gnostic tirades have an advantage over much of the more recent literature, for Panton still possessed a clear understanding of what constitutes Gnosticism. Such is not the case today. If we contrast these early-twentieth-century analyses with some current ones, we may recognise how unclear our understanding has become. In a European publication concerned with contemporary aspects of Gnosticism, Ioan Culianu writes:

Once I believed that Gnosticism was a well-defined phenomenon belonging to the religious history of Late Antiquity. Of course, I was ready to accept the idea of different prolongations of ancient Gnosis, and even that of spontaneous generation of views of the world in which, at different times, the distinctive features of Gnosticism occur again.

I was soon to learn however, that I was a naïf indeed. Not only Gnosis was gnostic, but the Catholic authors were gnostic, the Neoplatonic too, Reformation was gnostic, Communism was gnostic, Nazism was gnostic, liberalism, existentialism and psychoanalysis were gnostic too, modern biology was gnostic, Blake, Yeats, Kafka were gnostic…. I learned further that science is gnostic and superstition is gnostic… Hegel is gnostic and Marx is gnostic; all things and their opposite are equally gnostic.1

At least one circumstance emerges from this statement that is widely overlooked in America. In Europe “Gnosis” and “Gnosticism” are almost always used interchangeably. The suggestion that term “gnosis” ought to be used to describe a state of consciousness, while “Gnosticism” should denote the Gnostic system, has never caught on. The use of such classical Gnosticism of Valentinus, Basilides, et al., persists in European literature, including the writings of such scholars as Gilles Quispel, Kurt Rudolph, and Giovanni Filoramo (to mention some of the most recent ones). It is true that Robert McLachlan put forth a proposal to use these terms otherwise, but current usage in Europe has not followed it.

It is evident that a word used in such contradictory ways has lost its meaning. No wonder writer Charles Coulombe despairs over the situation when writing in a Catholic publication:

In reality, “Gnosticism,” like “Protestantism,” is a word that has lost most of its meaning. Just as we would need to know whether a “Protestant” writer is Calvinist, Lutheran, Anabaptist, or whatever in order to evaluate him properly, so too the “Gnostic” must be identified.2

A Political Confusion

One of the most confusing voices comes from the discipline of political science. In his Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago in 1951, émigré scholar Eric Voegelin rose to the defense of what he called the “classic and Christian tradition” against what he perceived as the “growth of Gnosticism.”

This opening salvo was followed by such books as The New Science of Politics, the multivolume Order and History, and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Voegelin became a prophet of a new theory of history, in which Gnosticism played a most nefarious role. All modern totalitarian ideologies were in some way spiritually related to Gnosticism, said Voegelin. Marxists, Nazis, and just about everybody else the good professor found reprehensible were in reality Gnostics, engaged in “immanentising the eschaton” by reconstituting society into a heaven on earth. Since Gnostics did not accept the conventional Christian eschaton of heaven and hell, Voegelin concluded that they must be engaged in a millenarian revolutionising of earthly existence.

At the same time, Voegelin was bound to admit that the Gnostics regarded the earthly realm as generally hopeless and unredeemable. One wonders how the unredeemable earthly kingdom could be turned into the “immanentised eschaton” of an earthly utopia. That Voegelin’s new Gnostics had no knowledge of or sympathy with historical Gnosticism did not bother him either. Gnostics they were, and that was that.

Voegelin’s confusion was made worse by a number of conservative political thinkers, mainly with Catholic connections. Thomas Molnar and Steven A. McKnight followed Voegelin’s theories despite their obvious inconsistencies. In Molnar’s view, Gnostics were not only responsible for all modern utopianism, but also for the inordinate attachment of modern people to science and technology. The scientific world view, said these folk, is in fact a Gnostic world view, and it is responsible for treating humans as machines and for making societies into machinelike collectives.

The politicised view of Gnosticism continues to have its adherents, but these are increasingly recruited from the lunatic fringe. Gnostics are still represented as dangerous subversives in pulp magazines and obscure conspiracy pamphlets “exposing” Freemasons, Satanists, and other pests. Meanwhile, respectable conservative thinkers have dropped the Gnostic issue. Some, like scholar and former US Senator S.I. Hayakawa, have subjected Voegelin and his theories to severe criticism and ridicule.

Traditionalist Difficulties

Another sometimes confusing voice comes from writers who are bent on proving that within the existing major religions a secret tradition of gnosis may be found which is not identical to the “heretical” Gnosticism of the early Christian centuries. In his 1947 work The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley promulgated a kind of gnosis that was in effect a mystery reserved for elites, revealed at the dawn of history and handed down through various religious traditions, where it still maintains itself in spite of its ostensible incompatibility with the official dogmas of those traditions. With this view, Huxley approximated the more radical position held by Traditionalists such as René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon.

Huxley, on the other hand, never passed judgment on anyone who called himself a Gnostic. One could only wish the same could be said of other Traditionalists. Followers of Guénon (who, born a Catholic, converted to Islam in a somewhat untraditional manner) often castigate the early Gnostic teachers in a manner reminiscent of the more extreme ancient polemicists like Irenaeus or Tertullian.

The Traditionalists’ division of Gnostic writers into “false Gnostics” and “authentic Gnostics” reflects standards that are nothing if not arbitrary; contemporary research indicates that during the first three or four centuries CE there was as yet no true orthodoxy and thus no heresy either. Instead, many opinions on religious matters, including gnosis, flourished side by side. Certainly there were disagreements, but to arbitrarily extrapolate standards of falsity and authenticity from these polemics does not seem justified.

Academic Ambiguities

The 1988 edition of The Nag Hammadi Library contains a lengthy afterword entitled “The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism.”3 Its author, Richard Smith, ostensibly reviews the numerous developments in Western culture which appear to be related to Gnosticism. One would hope that here at last we might find a definition of true Gnosticism and a list of modern writers and thinkers who might appear as its representatives. Unfortunately this is not the case.

Smith lists a number of important figures of modern culture from the eighteenth century onward who were sympathetic to Gnosticism. Reading this afterword, however, one gets the impression that few of these seminal figures possessed an adequate definition of Gnosticism, and that they thus more often than not misused and misappropriated the term.

The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, for example, is accused of a “mischievous lie” in referring to the Gnostics in complimentary terms. (Admittedly Gibbon did not share the low esteem in which the Church Fathers held Gnostics, but does this make him a liar?) And the Gnostic and Manichaean sympathies of Voltaire are represented as being motivated by his opposition to churchly authority. But could the great philosophé have had other reasons for his views? It is well known that Voltaire was an ardent Freemason, and he might have received favourable information about Gnostics through the esoteric currents flowing in the secret fraternities of his time. Maybe he was privy to knowledge unknown to Smith.

In the same vein, Smith implies that C.G. Jung appropriated Gnosticism by turning it into psychological theory. “Jung takes the entire dualist myth and locates it within the psyche,” Smith writes.4 Personally I have devoted the major part of my life to exploring the relationship of Jung’s thought to Gnosticism, so such statements touch a nerve.

Jung was not only interested in the Gnostics, but he considered them the discoverers and certainly the most important forerunners of depth psychology. The association between Jung’s psychology and Gnosticism is profound, and its scope is increasingly revealed with the passage of time and the wider availability of the Nag Hammadi scriptures.

My studies have convinced me that Jung did not intend to locate the content of Gnostic teachings in the psyche pure and simple. To say that Gnosticism is “nothing but” psychology would have horrified Jung, for he opposed the concept of “nothing but.” What made Jung’s view radically different from those of his predecessors was simply this: he believed that Gnostic teachings and myths originated in the personal psychospiritual experience of the Gnostic sages. What originates in the psyche bears the imprint of the psyche. Hence the close affinity between Gnosticism and depth psychology. Jung’s view may thus be called an interpolation, but not an appropriation. The need for definitions appears greater than ever in the light of such controversies.

Psychological and Existentialist Models

The Italian scholar Giovanni Filoramo calls attention to the fact that the Nag Hammadi scriptures were favourably received by a wide public in part because “certain areas of the cultural panorama showed a disposition, a peculiar sensitivity to the… texts,… which dealt with a phenomenon that they themselves had in some way helped to keep alive.”5

One of the persons who kept the Gnostic phenomenon alive was C.G. Jung’s close associate, the Gnostic scholar Gilles Quispel, who laboured long and hard on relating the ancient gnosis of Valentinus and other teachers to the modern gnosis of analytical psychology. He saw the Gnostic effort as involving deep insight into the ontological self, and thus as analogous to the best in depth psychology. Quispel’s major work on the subject, Gnosis als Weltreligion (“Gnosis as a World Religion,” published in 1972), explains in detail the relationship of Jung’s model to Gnostic teachings. Quispel, like Jung himself, did not reduce Gnostic teachings to depth psychology, but rather pointed to depth psychology as a key to understanding Gnosticism.

Another key figure in the reevaluation of ancient Gnosticism was Hans Jonas. A pupil of existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger in the 1930s, Jonas turned his attention to the wisdom of the Gnostics, and discovered in them an ancient relative of existential philosophy. Existentialism’s pessimism about earthly life and high regard for experience as against theory thus found a forebear and analogue. Although critical of the Gnostics’ apparent “nihilism,” Jonas was, along with Jung, one of the most important figures to bring Gnostic teachings into modern perspective.

The linkage effected by Jung and Jonas between Gnosticism in the past and living philosophies in the present was of crucial importance and came very close to supplying gnosis and Gnosticism with vital, living definitions. The questions posed (and answered) by the ancient Gnostics revealed themselves now, not as outlandish and bizarre, but as earlier discussions of issues addressed in more recent times by Freud, Jung, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and many others.

Toward Definition

The search for definitions is never easy, particularly in such fields as the social sciences. In these disciplines much attention must be given to the historical context in which beliefs and actions unfold. Crucial differences and similarities in nuance, tone, and subtleties of mood are more important here than hard and fast definitions. The debate about Gnosticism, it would seem, turns on such nuances, and it may well be that not much can be resolved by definitions. Nevertheless, the present chaotic conditions warrant an attempt.

In 1966, a distinguished assembly of scholars convened in Messina, Italy, for the purpose of arriving at some useful definitions of Gnosticism. The results of this gathering were not encouraging. The scholars proposed restricting the use of the term “Gnosticism” to certain second-century “heretical” movements, while the broader term “gnosis” was to be used to refer to “knowledge of the divine mysteries for an elite.” While a useful attempt, it did not manage to clear up the confusion.

The difficulties in pinning down a definition of Gnosticism are intimately connected with the controversy about its origins. Was it indeed no more than a heretical offshoot, an eccentric and aberrant branch of Christianity, or was it the latest expression of a long, mostly hidden tradition that had existed for centuries before the Christian era? No one has answered these questions with final authority.

To understand Gnosticism, said Hans Jonas, one needs something very much like a musical ear. Such a Gnostic “musical ear” is not come by easily. One person who seemingly possesses it is Professor Clark Emery of the University of Miami. In a small work on William Blake, Emery summarises twelve points on which Gnostics tended to agree. Nowhere in the current literature have I found anything else so concise and accurate in describing the normative characteristics of the Gnostic mythos. Hence I shall present it here as a suggested collection of criteria that one might apply in determining what Gnosticism is. The following characteristics may be considered normative for all Gnostic teachers and groups in the era of classical Gnosticism; thus one who adheres to some or all of them today might properly be called a Gnostic:

The Gnostics posited an original spiritual unity that came to be split into a plurality.

As a result of the precosmic division the universe was created. This was done by a leader possessing inferior spiritual powers and who often resembled the Old Testament Jehovah.

A female emanation of God was involved in the cosmic creation (albeit in a much more positive role than the leader).

In the cosmos, space and time have a malevolent character and may be personified as demonic beings separating man from God.

For man, the universe is a vast prison. He is enslaved both by the physical laws of nature and by such moral laws as the Mosaic code.

Mankind may be personified as Adam, who lies in the deep sleep of ignorance, his powers of spiritual self-awareness stupefied by materiality.

Within each natural man is an “inner man,” a fallen spark of the divine substance. Since this exists in each man, we have the possibility of awakening from our stupefaction.

What effects the awakening is not obedience, faith, or good works, but knowledge.

Before the awakening, men undergo troubled dreams.

Man does not attain the knowledge that awakens him from these dreams by cognition but through revelatory experience, and this knowledge is not information but a modification of the sensate being.

The awakening (i.e., the salvation) of any individual is a cosmic event.

Since the effort is to restore the wholeness and unity of the Godhead, active rebellion against the moral law of the Old Testament is enjoined upon every man.6

The noted sociologist Max Weber wrote in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that “the perfect conceptual definition cannot stand at the beginning, but must be left until the end of the inquiry.” That is what we have done in the present inquiry also. Emery’s twelve points are in every consistent with the proposal set out by the colloquium at Messina. Second-century Gnosticism is taken as the principal model for all of these definitions, a practice that appears to be sensible. Nor is any separate recognition given to any so-called “orthodox gnosis” that is occasionally alluded to, more as a figure of speech than as any discernible historical phenomenon, in the writings of some of the Church Fathers who were contemporaneous with the Gnostics. It would seem that whatever is excluded by Emery’s definitions and the protocol of Messina may be more profitably considered from doctrinal perspectives other than Gnostic.

Whatever the value of this line of inquiry, at least it calls attention to definitions that are historically unimpeachable and terminologically definite. This is much more than the current literature – especially of the semipopular variety – possesses. Divisive categorisations that separate “false Gnostics” from “authentic Gnostics,” especially on the basis of orthodoxies which were never relevant to either Gnosticism or the Gnostics, may have to be discarded in the light of such definitions.

The random projection of contemporary fads and enthusiasms (such as feminism and the Gaia hypothesis) onto Gnosticism might also have to be controlled. But all of this seems like a small price to pay for some order and clarity in this field. We might have to take to heart the ironic admonition of Alice in Wonderland:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said,… “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Footnotes

1. Ioan P. Culianu, “The Gnostic Revenge: Gnosticism and Romantic Literature,” in Gnosis und Politik, Jacob Taubes, ed. (W. Fink, 1984), p. 290; quoted in Arthur Versluis, “‘Gnosticism,’ Ancient and Modern,” in Alexandria 1 (1991), pp. 307-08.

2. Charles A. Coulombe, “Solovyev: Gnostic or Orthodox?”, New Oxford Review, November 1991, pp. 28-29.

3. Richard Smith, “The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism,” in James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library, third edition (Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 532-49.

4. Ibid., pp. 540-41.

5. Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism (Basil Blackwell, 1990) p. xiv.

6. Clark Emery, William Blake: The Book of Urizen (University of Miami Press, 1966), pp. 13-14.

The article first appeared in Gnosis: A Journal of Western Inner Traditions (Vol. 23, Spring 1992), and was reproduced in New Dawn Special Issue 2 by permission of the author.

Because of these and related circumstances, most people are confused and bewildered about sex much of the time, and those who profess not to be thus flummoxed tend to take umbrage under clichés and half truths which they have consciously accepted, but which are not in harmony with either their instinctual or their spiritual natures.

It goes without saying that if the Gnostic worldview is any kind of a worldview at all, it must be able to address itself meaningfully to this predicament and thus to suggest spiritually sound ways in which men and women might successfully extricate themselves from the same. The present essay is an attempt to suggest some Gnostic ways of viewing and dealing with sexuality, and in offering it to the reader, the author is not unmindful of certain hazards.

Psychoanalyst Edward Glover once suggested that writing on psychologically charged subjects should be classified as a dangerous occupation. When in the course of such writing one happens to expose the unconscious motives of some persons, pandemonium is certain to follow. The psychologically exposed individuals frequently relieve their anxiety by attacking the writer who has presumed to disturb their precarious and cherished peace of mind. Martyrdom is surely not an uncommon experience to the Gnostic, and if some form of it befall the author, the risk will hopefully have been worth taking!

The ancient term “Gnosis” has two very useful modern analogues; they are the words “consciousness” and “meaning.” Both of these are vitally important to any useful consideration of sexuality. Without consciousness, in the psychological sense, sexuality is a mere expression of instinct: Useful in its domain, but unrelated to the enhancement of life, to the experience of the fullness of being. With the coming of consciousness, all experiences, including the sexual ones, acquire meaning. As consciousness adds a greatly needed component to experience, so meaning brings us the experience of totality, of the fullness (Pleroma) extolled by the Gnostics.

Between the reality of our lives lived in time and the quality of life’s timelessness, between our personal and mundane experiences and the realm which transcends the tangible world, there exists a creative tensional relationship of opposites. The Apostle Thomas, reporting the words of Jesus, reminds us that the saving, or Christ principle, always comes to us to make the two into one, to unite the above and the below, the left and the right, the inner and the outer, and the male and the female into a single one.

The reconciling agent of all such opposites is meaning. When, on the other hand, the tension between the poles of existence is lacking, then, as C.G. Jung has expressed it, human beings “have the feeling that they are haphazard creatures without meaning, and it is this feeling that prevents them from living their lives with the intensity it demands if it is to be enjoyed to the full. Life becomes stale and is no longer the exponent of the complete human being.” (Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung).

Sexuality is one of the most important tensional relationships of the opposites in life. It is therefore evident that it must have, it does have, great meaning. To leave such a rich mine of meaning, of Gnosis, unexplored would be a grave omission indeed. Let us then proceed with our exploration. As it is useful in such cases, we shall proceed from the ground upwards, as it were, and begin with the evidence of the physical aspect of humankind by reviewing the evidence of biology.

The Gnosis of Biology

The human species is a unique one in many ways, and not the least claim to such uniqueness is to be found in the sexual sphere. The human is the sexiest animal on earth. No other sexually reproducing species makes love with such frequency, and consequently, sexually toned behaviour saturates a large portion of the individual and social life of every man and woman. There is a biological reason for this. Unlike the female of every other species, the human female is capable of constant sexual arousal. She is biologically capable of copulating every single day of her adult life. She can make love during pregnancy, and she can become sexually active shortly after having a child. In fact, she can engage in sex whenever she pleases.

Animals are far less sexy than humans. All female animals have a period of heat (the estrus) during which they copulate, and when this period is over, neither the females nor the males of the species engage regularly in sex. (Among caged baboons and chimpanzees one may observe some sexual activity outside of the period of heat, as one may among free chimps and orangutans, but their sexual activities at “unusual” times are minimal when compared to the human.) Unlike humans, female animals do not accept males while menstruating, they do not initiate sex during pregnancy, and they do not resume their menstrual cycle before their young are weaned.

Due to the so-called “silent ovulation” (the absence of the signs of heat) of the human female, her fertility is never dramatically announced as it is among the animals. The result is that human couples do not know when a woman is ready to conceive. In order to insure the conception of offspring, humans thus must make love regularly, even past the time when conception has occurred. Similarly, especially where breast-feeding is not prolonged, human mothers are capable of resuming their ovulation about six weeks after delivering a child. There seems to be an unmistakable conspiracy of nature directed toward motivating human beings to make love daily, for the human female, alone of all other females, is uniquely designed to do so!

Anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, in her book The Sex Contract (William Morrow and Co., 1982) traces the evolutionary development of the unique human sexual situation. She tells us that the genetic evolutionary process which led to the present condition of humanity in regards to sex began about 8 million years ago, when humans became accustomed to walking upright. Protohominid females who delivered their young in a relatively immature state had a better chance of surviving childbirth, because the smaller birth canal, developed as the result of walking, made the delivery of large, developed infants hazardous. The mothers, now forced to care for their children for a long period, were more prone to engage in sex outside of their limited periods of fertility than they were wont to do earlier in their evolution. Since the most popular females were fed and protected most adequately, they tended to survive in greater numbers and thus passed on their genetic traits to more offspring. Thus our present patterns of biologically unlimited sexual intercourse came into being.

Dr. Fisher writes: “With the stimulus of constantly available sex, protohominids had begun the most fundamental exchange the human race would ever make.” The fundamental exchange consisted in bringing males and females more closely together than hitherto would have been possible. The bond of constant sexual interest kept them together in each other’s company; it made them divide their labours, to exchange food, to share the daily work and joys of living. Men and women became aware of each other emotionally, and eventually mentally and intuitively as the result of the sexual force which tied them together, creating a never abating forcefield of dynamic tension between them. Sex has become the progenitor of affection, love, relatedness, and above all, consciousness. From purely biological data we may thus infer with some justification that the coming of unlimited sexual expression became the fountain and origin of vast achievements of human consciousness which otherwise could and would not have come to pass. The implications of this insight for past, present and future are large indeed, and should be apparent to all.

The Gnosis of Psychohistory

Human biology has its history, and so does the human mind, or psyche. As one might expect, the importance of sexuality and of its influence on various aspects of human life are very much part of this history of the mind. Psychohistorians, whose theories contain elements relevant to the concerns of sexuality, are numerous. Among those inspired by Freud, singular distinction belongs to G. Rattray Taylor (Sex in History), while among C.G. Jung’s followers one needs to refer to Erich Neumann (The Great Mother and The Origin and History of Consciousness) as well as to Esther Harding (Psychic Energy; Its Source and Goal.) The considerations which are to follow here utilise the theories of these authors, and amplify their views by way of certain insights of the ancient Gnostics.

The protopsychology of the ancient Gnostics (as well as of others in the Hellenistic culture) perceived three main divisions of the human person. The first of these is matter, or body (hyle, soma); the second mind, or soul (psyche); and the third spirit (pneuma). The existential point of gravity of a person’s life moves according to certain patterns from one of these three to the others, and an individual’s type (today called psychological type) would be determined by which one of these three principles acts as the primary focus of his or her consciousness. All people are capable of experiences of body, soul and spirit in some measure, but the seat of their principal identity is located within one only. Thus, there are people whose outstanding concerns are invariably material, while others function chiefly from a centre of consciousness lodged in their mind, while yet others look at all things from a point of view that is primarily of a character that we might call spiritual.

The presence of any individual within one or the other of these three categories is not a matter of accident, but rather of a transformational growth and development or consciousness, which begins with the material plane and rises eventually to the spiritual.

When we apply this Gnostic idea to the matter of human sexuality we may find some useful insights. There is, first of all, what we might call a hyletic (matter oriented) type of sexuality. To persons of this type sexuality is primarily a bodily urge, largely unrelated to any feeling or regard for the partner in sex, and originally even quite unaware of the possible results of copulation in reproduction. In a sense, we might say that persons in this stage of development are not participating in a sexual act, but they are identified with it. An interesting phenomenon connected with this is the identification of persons with their sexual organs, as evidenced by works of much primitive art, where men and women are represented with disproportionately large sexual organs. Similarly one may note the use of words denoting sexual organs when describing an individual in the idiom of obscene slang. All of these are evidences of the identification of the entire person with sex. Men are merely phallus bearers and women vagina-carriers; they are not persons, but embodiments of their sexuality. Hyletic sexuality in its later stages also becomes involved in the idea of offspring. Men thus come to look upon their mates not as persons but as the potential or actual mothers of their children, and women look upon men as beings capable of giving them children. In each case we are dealing with a primitive phenomenon, a manifestation of hyletic or biological urges. (It needs to be recognised that the urge to have offspring is just as primitive and unconscious an urge as the one moving to sexual intercourse. The notion that the desire for children is somehow more moral and refined than the desire for sex is nonsense!) Freudian psychohistorians tend to call the hyletic phase of sexuality “matrist,” by identifying it with the archaic domination of children by the Mother. Matrist sexuality is quite permissive, even promiscuous and polymorphous, and leads to the formation of “shame cultures” and the development of the incest taboo. The term “oral” is applied to its quality by Freudian writers.

In the next stage of development, sexuality becomes linked with emotion and thinking. Ego-development having taken place, consciousness now wishes to subdue the unconscious and thus develops numerous devices for the control of impulse. This is the greatest period of sexual repression and the phase when issues of law and commandment take on a great importance. The Gnostic terminology calls this phase the psychic, for it is here that the mind-emotion complex called “psyche” (soul, or mind) becomes dominant. Mythologically and symbolically this ego or mind is frequently connected with the masculine principle, and thus we find that psychic humanity tends to be patriarchal and masculine in its orientation and consequently a negative view of femininity and of female sexuality predominates. Men in their desire for impulse control begin to view women as temptresses, as instinctual creatures who have to be subdued and controlled. Jungian psychology calls this the “patriarchal phase” while Freudian writers refer to it as “patrist” or father-identifying, and its predominant tendency is said to be “anal.” It is obvious that the dominant cultural influences of Western society are predominantly of this variety, and that most of these influences stem from religious roots within the semitic religiosity of Judaism, Islam and non-Gnostic Christianity. This phase of the development of consciousness is greatly attached to the institution of marriage, and its chief taboos are against adultery and homosexuality. Its result is the so-called “guilt culture.”

The third, or pneumatic, phase is the most difficult to discuss, because it denotes a form or state of consciousness that is as rare today as it was in the second and third centuries A.D. There is little doubt, however, that several ancient Gnostic teachers, most notably Valentinus, envisioned this spiritual condition as a union of the masculine and feminine aspects of the human being with a consequent androgynation, which undoubtedly would have its reflection in the sexual sphere also. While the anti-Gnostic church fathers with fierce inconsistency accused the Gnostics of excessive asceticism and licentiousness in the same breath, the more recent discoveries of Gnostic writings indicate that the Gnostics were intent upon a mysterious pneumaticisation of sexuality, which process was embodied in the Valentinian sacrament of the bridal chamber. One of the chief results of the pneumatic state of Gnosis is the ability of the Gnostic to rise above the law (antinomianism) and to be motivated no longer by the external commandment of so-called revelation, but rather by the internal command of the indwelling divine spirit. This might be envisioned as the highest form of situation ethics, inspired by intuition, rather than by any rational considerations. The principle is compatible both with the ethics of existential philosophy and with Jungian psychology. The pneumatic Gnostic can no longer rely on any external commandment but must live by the existential courage of daily moral decisions. In Sartre’ swords, “he is doomed to freedom.” C.G. Jung also envisioned a condition within the individuation process where in the moral laws of society and church are relativated and indeed rendered meaningless by the spiritual growth of the individual. Right and wrong become a matter of personal choice based on spiritual insight, rather than standards derived from a code delivered by god or by society.

The sexual implications of the pneumatic phase of the growth of consciousness are considerable. With the fusion of the masculine and feminine attitudes in the psyche, a fully mature sexuality may be expected to arise. Love becomes the fulfilling of the law, and it goes without saying that this love will have sexual expressions as well. Neither will the expressions of this love be in any way limited by human institutions and prejudices whether they concern marital status, the gender of the beloved or the permanence or impermanence of the love relationship. The spirit bloweth where it listeth; human institutions and earthly considerations must pale before the pneumatic love. The accusation of libertinism hurled against the Gnostics by Irenaeus, Hypolitus and others is thus revealed as the sort of misunderstanding the contemporary Gnostic might face also. The intuitive morality of the pneumatic can be readily confused by the uncomprehending with hyletic, immorality and amorality, while it is nothing of the sort. The pneumatic phase bears, incidentally, all the hallmarks of what Erich Neumann called the “integrative phase,” and its characteristics are to some extent identical with what Freudian psychologists envision as “genital” sexuality.

Different Strokes for Different Gnostic Folks

The above noted psychohistorical considerations raise important issues which might be of concern to contemporary Gnostics. Are all Gnostics obliged to follow the pneumatic ethic at all times? Is psychic morality, especially in the sexual area, still relevant to the Gnostic? Have we all successfully outgrown hyletic modes of behaviour? And how are the answers to these questions likely to affect the sexual behaviour of the contemporary Gnostic?

Our situation might be summed up as follows: We live in a culture which ostensibly follows a psychic system of morality in sexual matters, but which is in practice more often than not composed of persons whose character is hyletic. Pneumatics are far and in between, and usually hidden away in the secret corners of contemporary life. Moreover, all persons possess hyletic, psychic, and pneumatic components in their character, with one or the other predominating. It is thus evident that most persons, including Gnostics, will express their sexuality sometimes in ways that are hyletic, at other times they may be attached to attitudes that are predominantly psychic and in some instances they may be capable of behaviour that may be properly recognised as pneumatic. Most people may also go through these phases in their own lifetimes. It is by no means unusual for early youth to be sexually quite hyletic (a sort of adolescent sexuality, as it were), for young adulthood to be involved in the marital and societal ambiance of a psychic sexual morality, and for the middle-aged person to achieve a matter-of-fact and liberated attitude toward sexuality, without serious inhibitions and guilts; in short, an attitude that approximates that of the pneumatic.

Since it would be reasonable to say that modern Gnostics may thus find persons of all three orientations in their midst, it might be helpful to present here a few brief guidelines for all three types regarding sexuality.

The hyletic needs to be reminded that, while hyletic sexuality is no more sinful or less virtuous than any other kind, it is still limiting and limited. Indiscriminate sexual behaviour is characterised by unconsciousness and this is a condition one ought to outgrow. Still, no one can be equally conscious of all aspects of life at all times, and a relatively high level of consciousness in one area may be accompanied by a relatively low level in another. The key concept must always be authenticity. If our behaviour has adduced to it as much consciousness as we could muster under the circumstances, this should be enough. There should be no judging of anyone for his or her sexual mores. Authenticity by nature is a highly personal issue. One person may be far more authentic and conscious while associating with multiple sexual partners than another locked into a rigid psychic cage of so-called monogamy. Striving for consciousness will inevitably bring its own reward and is far more useful than blind obedience to external rules.

The psychic person may prove more troublesome within a Gnostic context than either the hyletic or the pneumatic. Unlike the happy-go-lucky hyletics, psychics tend to be rigid personalities with a strong proclivity for projecting their own shadows, especially their sexual shadows on others. They tend to be judgmental, intolerant and self-righteous. In short, they are a mess, or at least they appear as such. Psychics ought to remember that goodness, by anyone’s standards, including their own, is never enough. Wholeness, not goodness, is the objective of the Gnostic life. Jung was fond of saying in truly Gnostic fashion: “It is only the fullness of being that counts.” Rules exist in order to be outgrown. We may not always be ready to outgrow them yet, but the desirability of the prospect must always be kept in mind. When following rules after the fashion of the psychic we but see through a glass darkly, and we should aspire to the clear vision face to face with authentic reality. While we must be careful not to judge the hyletic, we must often dissuade the psychic from judging everyone. Psychics may also be reminded that it is the psychic law alone that creates sin. “I had not known sin but by the law” said a Hebrew prophet. The harsher our own standards of judgement the greater will be our own guilt and spiritual impotence and the more our potential for liberation will diminish. Sexual guilt has been the greatest single curse the demiurge and his minions have hurled against humanity; it has been the blight of our culture, the stifler of creativity and the enemy of Gnosis. It must be recognised and its suggestion rejected at all times.

That rare bird known as the pneumatic, must above all, be discreet. Pneumatics have a divine right to their freedom, including their sexual freedom, but they have no right to bad manners. The spiritual nobility of the world must maintain decorum and discretion while exercising its prerogatives. The humourous adage often attributed to the British aristocracy of some time ago may be remembered here: “Do what you wish, but don’t do it in the road and frighten the horses.” Politicised sexuality, such as we have experienced in the era of the various liberation movements often comes under the heading of bad manners. Rigid psychics will not be converted to a pneumatic point of view by being confronted with sexual behaviour inappropriate to their level of consciousness. Ill advised action inevitably creates reaction. Pneumatics need not be apologetic about their liberated state, and they need not dissimulate or be guilty of hypocrisy. At the same time they must extend to the unliberated the same freedoms they demand for themselves. Persons who flaunt their sexual unconventionality and wish to force everyone to bear their sexual foibles without complaint are usually hyletics putting on the mask of pneumatics. “By their manners and their discretion ye shall know them” could be said of the true pneumatics.

Conclusions for Daily – and Nightly – Life

It is a cliché that we live in an era of great sexual confusion. Clichés, however, are not usually untrue, they have merely become clichés by excessive repetition. Can the Gnostic point of view bring some clarity into this confusion? Can the contemporary Gnostic offer meaningful suggestions on the sexual topics and perplexities of our times? We shall answer such questions by stating our Gnostic position regarding individual issues of sexual significance.

Sex in general. Biology, psychology and Gnosticism indicate that sex is a beneficent, consciousness-enhancing factor in human life. Sexually active persons are healthier, more balanced, and generally more pleasant members of society then the sexually inactive. There is every indication that sex is good for you physically, psychologically and spiritually. All sex that is not injurious to anyone and does not violate the sovereignty of any person is good, although some kinds of sex, such as those among loving, concerned, compatible partners are no doubt better than others.

Sex and the Sacred. In many religions, both pre-Christian and contemporary, sexual practices play some part. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the notion that sexual acts and religious acts can converge, one must exercise considerable care when trying to apply such principles within a contemporary context. Such magicosexual practices as one finds in the Hindu Tantras, in the “great rite” of the witches, and in the sex magic of the late Aleister Crowley, all suffer from the shortcoming that they tend to depersonalise the individuals who participate in them. Joseph Campbell in his splendid book Myths To Live By has pointed out that beginning with the mysticism of the Troubadours, the West came to espouse love-magic as against mere sex magic. C.G. Jung’s commentaries on the Rosarium Philosophorum indicate that a similar principle of love-magic was present in the system of Alchemy. The Gnostic tradition indicates that the early communities of knowers, particularly those attached to the teachings of Valentinus, practiced a supreme rite of pneumatic union, sometimes called the “mystery of the bridal chamber” which may have served as the prototype of many later rites of love-magic, symbolising the union of the lower personality with the heavenly pneuma, which may be envisioned as being of a contrasexual nature (female for men and male for women). The development of a conscious personality is one of the great achievements of Western spirituality. Persons love, unconscious beings merely copulate. Both actions are magical, but the former is preferable to the latter. There is no doubt that the magic of the sexes needs to be re-incorporated into religion, but we must take care that in attempting to do this we will not resort to archaic practices which were useful in periods of history when consciousness and personality were minimal compared to contemporary conditions.

Marriage. The Christian sacrament of matrimony was the last to be formally accepted; it did not come to be generally used in the church for hundreds of years. The reason for this may be found in the unacknowledged fact that the early Church, along with the Valentinians, knew only one true marriage: the heavenly marriage of the personality to the spirit. The contractual relationship of two earthly personalities within the context of property, inheritance, and so forth, the church initially left purely to the state. Only when the Church allowed itself to become an agent of the secular power did she uniformly come to practice marriage as a sacrament. Thus the present practice of the sacrament of marriage is a deficient sacrament, a mere shadow of the mystery of the bridal-chamber. There is no reason why the church, even the Gnostic church, should not bless the contractual relationships of men and women when asked to do so, but it must be kept in mind that this is not a mystery of the same order as the Eucharist, or Holy Orders, or the other true mysteries. The notion that sexual congress without the benefit of such a contractual relationship is sinful cannot be accepted within a Gnostic context.

Homosexuality, bisexuality, and androgyny. It is generally understood that at the non-physical level, people are not limited to their bodily gender. Jesus declared in the Gnostic scriptures that he “came to make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female.” We may take this to mean that in order to attain to the Wholeness of the Pleroma, all persons are striving toward a spiritual androgyny. In the hyletic phase of development this often manifests as polymorphous bisexuality, in the psychic phase as homosexuality, and in the pneumatic phase it moves increasingly into the area of a spiritually based androgyny. None of these are sinful or should be condemned in Gnostic thinking. The idea of a “crime against nature” is meaningless to the Gnostic, for our nature is not merely physical nature, such as our gender, but our total nature within which all dualities exist. When asked about homosexuality, the great modern Gnostic C.G. Jung merely said: “Well, they are the only people who are trying doing something against over-population.” The attraction of persons of the same gender toward each other meets with the most powerful taboos of the patriarchal-psychic phases of cultural development and is therefore encumbered by many unnecessary ideas and apprehensions.

Birth control and abortion. Anthropologists have noted that agricultural societies tend to be opposed to the limiting of births, while nomadic-pastoral societies encourage the same. Many great religions came to adopt the mythos of the agricultural societies and have proscribed birth control and abortion. The theological justification brought forth in support of the position of these religions is more or less to the effect that the prevention of birth is a contravention of the will of God. Many religions believe that a distinct soul is attached to every foetus at conception and that therefore the destruction of the foetus is murder. This idea is highly speculative and, like all theological notions, not subject to any evidence. The Gnostic traditions hold that the soul’s connection with the foetus is minimal until the seventh month of pregnancy. The obsessive fury of various religionists in our days against both birth control and abortion ought to elicit no sympathy from Gnostics. It is obvious that the more conscious humanity becomes, the more it will exercise conscious control over the size of families and the less it will be inclined to place innumerable offspring heedlessly onto an overpopulated earth. That people simply ought to become sexually inactive when not desiring offspring is a notion that is as silly as it is unrealistic.

Monogamy, celibacy, and chastity. While often confused, these three terms have very distinct meanings. Monogamy denotes sexual exclusiveness in favour of only one partner; it is an idea that acquired much importance in the psychic phase of psychohistory. Even today it may have merit for some, but it ought not be advocated or enforced generally. As consciousness expands, the affectionate and emotional needs widen also. It may be counterproductive to be attached to rigid ideas of monogamy in such instances. Celibacy is the unmarried state, as is customary among the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. Gnostics make no rules about whether their clergy ought to marry or not, and thus the issue of celibacy is of no great import for us. Chastity implies abstention from sexual activity of any kind; it is a practice that puts a very heavy strain on the psyches of persons, and its benefits are minimal, if any.

Family. Whenever this term is used today, it tends to denote the nuclear family unit of industrial society, which means, really, a phenomenon of the last hundred years. In the time of Jesus or even in that of Louis XIV the concept of family differed radically from the one of today. To go along with the moral reactionaries of our time and to hold up the nuclear family of recent vintage as the divinely decreed paragon of all virtue and goodness and the best possible cornerstone of society is, to say the least, unrealistic. While some sort of family structure is likely to continue to exist in humanity, we must possess an elastic vision regarding its future contours and character. Some modern research indicates that radical changes in the present family image would be highly beneficial to the psychological well-being of people in our society. Dr. David Cooper, existential psychiatrist, and associate of R.D. Laing, in his fine work The Death of the Family (Penguin Books, 1971) has built a convincing case for the need to develop alternatives to the nuclear family of conventional society. Once again it must be remembered that as human consciousness grows, the importance of ties and roots based purely in blood and soil tend to diminish. Relatively primitive, traditional societies are often so constructed that the individual is tyrannised and dwarfed by the family. In contrast with this, modern urban societies are moving more and more in a direction where the family loses its hold over individuals who thus need to develop their own lives and resources. For practical purposes it may be noted that the less closed off, the less insular and nuclear the family is, the less likely it is to destroy the sexual and social independence of the individual. A family ought to act as a springboard to life and to people and not as a fortress wherein a small nucleus of persons shuts itself in, while shutting the greater world out.

Sex and the procreation of offspring. As one may deduce from various foregoing statements, the Gnostic cannot endorse the teaching that sex exists purely for the purpose of procreation. Such a view, even though held by theologians, is utterly un-spiritual and smacks of the worst kind of materialistic myopia. By this we mean that parenthood is but one of life’s functions, and it ought not to obtain ascendancy over all others. Children require “parenting” for only a certain period of their lives, and when parents fail to recognise this, untold unhappiness may result. Women, particularly, have been shunted by culture and religion into the over sentimentalised and inflated role of motherhood, and while starring in this role, have often forgotten how to be women. Monkish prudery being unable to accept the feminine in any other aspect but the maternal, the feminine ideal in Christendom became the mother, which condition in turn limited and constricted the psychic and physical lives of women.

One of the great tasks of modern Gnosticism is to restore the dignity and importance of the feminine within a spiritual context and this task includes liberating the feminine from such confining expressions as “mother” and “virgin” (not to speak of the biological absurdity of “virgin mother.”) As motherhood and fatherhood are but one of the possible by-products of human sexuality, so it is obvious that sexuality has far more and vaster functions in life than merely serving as a vehicle for procreation. Love, affection, relatedness, spiritual bonding; all of these are facilitated and enhanced by sex. Sex, we need to state again, is beneficial to humanity physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Procreation, on the other hand, is assuredly not always beneficial to the human race. Gnostics ought to add their urgent voice to the ever swelling chorus calling for effective programs and concentrated action against the population explosion. It is obvious that what the world needs is not less sex but less offspring.

Sexual Libertarianism

Modern Gnostics are not antiquarians. It is not our purpose to try to resurrect the Gnostic tradition in its ancient form, rather we strive to retranslate the available elements of Gnostic wisdom into forms appropriate for the present. One of the most relevant features of ancient Gnosticism is what might be called the libertarianism of the Gnostics. The available documents authored by or attributed to such lights of the Gnosis as Valentinus, Basilides, Marcion, Carpocrates, Epiphanes and others are all thoroughly libertarian in spirit. All of these Gnostic teachers and leaders would have no difficulty in agreeing with the following example of libertarian reasoning: “You as a person are better able to control your life than I am. Your life is your personal affair, for· better or for worse, except as in the living of your life you may impair or endanger the life and livelihood of others. No person nor set of persons on this earth has any logical right to interfere with you except as you may do injury to them.” (A Libertarian’s Platform by James C. Ingebretsen). Even as the political, economic, and religious lives of people are their personal affair, so are their sexual lives. The talons of the authoritarian demiurges of this world must be made to retract from the bedrooms of free men and women. Sexual relations which do not harm or injure anyone should be of no concern to legislation and to the police. Vague conjectures, based on private prejudice, and masquerading as statements about the “public good” and the “moral health” of the body politic ought never to serve as the basis for laws and ordinances.

It must be kept in mind that Gnostic libertarianism is not a mere matter of political or economic expediency. In reality this libertarianism is rooted in the most fundamental features of the Gnostic mythos, which has as its central theme the liberation of the incarcerated divine spirit from all bonds imposed upon it by the false cosmos of the demiurge. Early Christian leaders, even when not manifestly of the Gnostic fold, have often echoed the libertarian expressions of the Gnostic attitude. St. Paul the Apostle’s bold statement: “All things are permissible unto me,” as well as St. Augustine’s adage: “Love God and then do as you please” indicate that the Christian message was intended to replace the law of Jehovah, with the sovereignty of the individual soul restored by the new covenant of love. The relationship between freedom and love has been noted by many wise souls in many traditions, including in that of India, where we find a formulation of the five degrees of love through which the worshipper receives increase in what in our own tradition we might call Gnosis. The first degree of love, we are told, is the love of servant for the master, the second of comrade for comrade, the third that of parent for child, the fourth that of spouses for each other, and the fifth, or highest degree, is defined as passionate and illicit, that is, not sanctioned by any rule of society or of reason; a love totally unrestrained by any limitation whatsoever.

This fivefold system of varieties of love shows not only an increase of intensity from stage to stage, but also, and most importantly, an increase of freedom. What began as servitude ends in total freedom. As restraint gives way to freedom, the force of love increases, until it becomes the supreme liberating influence of being. Now this concept, or rather reality, is not unknown in Western mysticism. Even as we may rightfully assume that the Gnostic mystery of the bridal chamber was a spiritual rite, which yet was not without the physically sexual concomitant, so we know that from a certain time onward the alternative mystical tradition of the West came to abrogate the dualism of orthodox Christianity regarding love, and came to replace it with a unitary experience which was at once spiritual and physical. Medieval Christian orthodoxy insisted on the duality of eros (fleshly, or sexual love) and agape (spiritual love, or charity). The Gnostic tradition, whether expressed by Valentinus in Alexandria, or by the troubadours in medieval France has as its objective to “make the two into one” by uniting eros with agape and replacing both with the higher synthesis, called by troubadours amor. Amor is neither fleshly nor ghostly, neither sensual nor spiritual, but partaking of both qualities represents a totally new quality. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This whole, or rather wholeness, is none other than the terrestrial epiphany of the Pleroma. Sexual and non-sexual love combine to bring forth the ineffable greatness in human life.

Here then is to be found the royal secret of sexuality. As consciousness frees itself of the thraldom of the unconscious, and with it from the taboos, fears, and guilts inculcated by society and exoteric religion, the liberating force of eros joins the inspiring energy of agape. This mystic union then produces an explosion of freedom, a leap of liberty of unbelievable power. The sexual libertarianism of the Gnostic has now born its aeonial fruit, the great dénouement of the age long process has come. Sex is important because it liberates, and in order to liberate sexuality itself must possess an optimum degree of freedom.

Humans are sexual and spiritual beings at once. When one or the other of these dualities is repressed or neglected, disunity and torment prevail. When both are united in freedom, true liberation and joy manifest. Therefore we must be free: Free to live intellectually, emotionally, and indeed sexually. We must be free to experiment, to fail and to succeed, to be perplexed and to be enlightened. The day of the old law of restriction must be declared defunct and the dawn of the new law of freedom must be ushered in. In stating this we are not proclaiming a novelty. We have the words of St. Paul to the Romans saying: “God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.” Jesus said: “Judge not that you may not be judged.” And Heraclitus the Greek sage wrote: “To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right. Good and evil are one.” The great and terrible truth is: That we must be free, lest we perish; that we are condemned to freedom, that the undying obligation of self-liberation has been imposed upon us before the world began, yea, even before the creator of this world came to be. We were not born to abide by the dark laws, and to wear the blackened chains of the rulers of this world, but to be free, liberated consciously divine children of the light. As a Gnostic hymn put it: “Ours is the voice of awakening in the eternal night.” Due to the design of heaven this voice is uttered not by one, but by two; not by man alone or by woman by herself but by both in unison. The voice of awakening is at least in part a sexual voice; the hymn is not merely one of praise but of passion. Today as ever the words of Goethe remind us of the Gnostic truth:

“Mann und Weib, Weib und Mann,
Reichenandie Gottheit an.”
(Man and Woman, Woman and Man, Together they reach Divinity.)

The above essay first appeared in Abraxas 84, published by Ecclesia Gnostica, 1984, and was reprinted in New Dawn 121 by permission of the author.

The growth of environmentalism has come about in at least partial conjunction with the growth of a secular, i.e., nonreligious mindset in Western society. The British author G.K. Chesterton is credited with the saying that when people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing: they believe in anything. Thus, as support for traditional Judeo-Christian religiosity has declined, people in Europe and America have begun to look elsewhere to meet the very basic human need to revere something outside of themselves. In the comparatively recent past, Nazism and Marxism filled this gap in the lives of many people. After it had become obvious that these substitute religions were cruel disappointments, environmentalism provided a new god. The environmental writer Richard D. North gave expression to this truth in the following paragraph:

An awful lot of us just need to worship something. But in order to be able to worship, you have to be able to find something outside of yourself – and better than yourself. God is a construct for that. So is nature. We are falling in love with the environment as an extension to and in lieu of having fallen out of love with God. As it happens, it makes for a pretty deficient religion, but as an object of worship nature takes some beating.1

Looking at this phenomenon through psychological eyes, we might present another analysis. It would seem that today we humans are suffering from a certain psychological disequilibrium. Not long ago, most people still lived in a landscape where they felt encompassed by natural forces. Such is no longer the case. Many of us live in a landscape of artificial wilderness called the city; we turn night into day with the aid of electricity; we defy gravity in airplanes. As a result, a certain disorientation has entered our psyches. We try to bring this condition to consciousness, and in so doing we employ the method of projection. While trying to preserve our inner balance, we concentrate on the imperiled balance of the outer world. We shout “save the earth,” but inwardly, we desperately desire salvation for ourselves.

The Guilt Culture

One of the symptoms of our psychological crisis has been the widespread acceptance of the notion that we are merely part of nature and that the human individuality that renders us separate from natural systems is an undesirable illusion. Another psychic mechanism that plays an important part in our predicament is guilt. When things go wrong, when crises threaten, we do one of two things: we blame the circumstances on others (projection), or we blame ourselves (introjection). There is little doubt that the early and powerful Puritan influence has made the United States into an eminent example of a guilt culture. Today, some insightful scholars are coming to identify the pro-earth and antihuman syndrome as a new form of Puritanism.

“Here we have the essential Puritan outlook disguised as science – human beings, the sinners, occupy centre stage, and cannot move a muscle without risking the direst consequences in a cosmic drama,” as the noted naturalist Thomas Palmer wrote in the January 1992 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Puritanism has been ironically described as a belief holding that the devil must have invented ice cream because it tastes so good. The new Puritans of our time denounce much that makes our earthly life bearable as wasteful and irresponsible. The old Puritans thundered against us in the name of God; the new Puritans instil guilt in the name of nature and the earth.

Indeed, if one has a desire to feel guilty, one can find much justification for such feelings in the statements of radical ecologists. Humans are seen as despoilers, tramplers, the hackers and hewers who are making species disappear, who erode the ozone layer, and who perform innumerable unspeakable acts that injure the earth. Many of these accusations are made in the name of a dogma called “biodiversity.” This teaching declares that the greater the complexities and diversities of plant and animal life, the more ideal are conditions on earth. Before the eyes of radical environmentalists floats a vision of a paradise frozen in time, a paradise without human inhabitants. A fact seldom recognised is that some of the most catastrophic changes that have occurred in the history of the earth had nothing to do with humans. Science informs us that vast natural cataclysms have devastated the earth on many occasions. According to an article in the June 1989 issue of National Geographic, there was one such event 240 million years ago that destroyed about ninety-six percent of all species then inhabiting the earth. And to think that all this occurred without even the presence of one member of that villainous species, the human race!

“Green spirituality” & Traditional Spiritualities

Such, then, are some of the difficulties arising from the unbalanced, quasi-religious dogmatism of the radical ecologists. Clearly the so-called “Green spirituality,” in spite of its superficial appeal, cannot be considered as compatible with the traditional mainstream spiritualities of the West. These belief systems regarded the earth and the animal kingdom as strictly subordinate to the human being. The Old Testament, which is part of the authoritative sacred canon of both Judaism and Christianity, leaves no doubt on this point. Numerous passages could be quoted, but a mere two will suffice here: In the blessing given by God to Noah and his sons we read the following:

“Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth. Be the terror and the dread of all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven, of everything that crawls on the ground and all the fish of the sea; they are handed over to you” (Gen. 9:1-2). More poetically, but very much in the same vein, we find the Psalmist exclaiming: “The heavens belong to the Lord but the earth he has given to men” (Ps. 115:16).

It may be useful to recall that none of the great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam) can be reasonably said to hold to the concept of the superiority of earth and of the animal kingdom over humanity. Allowing for significant other differences, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, and most other religious traditions agree on the notion that human life is qualitatively different from other forms of life and that humans possess a spark of ultimate divinity, which is either absent from or far less developed in other creatures.

Intimidated by the ecologists, leaders of several mainstream Christian denominations have come to proclaim what they call “stewardship,” whereby they mean the responsibility of humans to “tend” the earth and its flora and fauna. The scriptural justification of this thesis is taken from Gen. 3:15: “And the Lord God took man and put him into the garden of pleasure, to tend it and to keep it.” This injunction clearly pertains to Adam’s role prior to his expulsion from his original habitat. In a lighter vein, one might say that Adam’s job as gardener was terminated when he was bid to leave paradise. Thus there was no gardening stewardship to be inherited by Adam’s descendants.

Much of contemporary ecological reasoning is based on the notion that the human being is exclusively a part and product of nature, an ungrateful and sinfully prideful child of Mother Earth. This is clearly contrary to the scriptures and teachings of the mainstream religious traditions, particularly the monotheistic traditions, as we noted earlier. What is often overlooked is that such a view is equally contrary to the worldview of the esoteric or alternative spiritual traditions. Esoteric spirituality looks upon the human not as a clever animal, but rather as a spirit inhabiting a body derived from the matter of earth. Plato, the father of much esoteric philosophy, looked upon humans as strangers to this earth. His famous parable of the cave shows humanity leading a melancholy existence in a realm separated from the light world that is its true home. The Platonist vision of humanity gave rise to the corresponding views of Neoplatonists, Hermeticists, and Gnostics, who together represent the fount and origin of the esoteric tradition in the West.

Underlying the esoteric transmissions is the perception that the human being is a sort of exile, a colonist from other, nonphysical dimensions, and that this status of exile is the source of humanity’s ambivalent relationship to earth and nature. It must also be recognised that humanity has brought forth a large number of achievements that upon closer scrutiny reveal themselves as unusual, unnatural, and unearthly. Even if we were to disregard the innumerable physical and technological inventions (which are regarded as sinful things by many ecologists), we are still left with the marvels of art such as sculpture, painting, music, and theatre, none of which ever appeared in nature.

Oscar Wilde’s witty comment “Life imitates art” may be applied here. There is little or no natural scenery in the world that can equal Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. We may also need reminding that while there is much natural beauty in the universe, none of it was created by a person in order to delight other persons.

The esoteric tradition accounts for the unique, or at least different, position of humanity in relation to earth and nature through the principle of emanation. The cosmos and its denizens are not created ex nihilo (out of nothing) by a creator. Rather they are emanated by a transcendental, impersonal divine essence. Thus, in a sense, all that exists is divine. Yet in certain ways this statement is rather misleading. Many of the inner teachings assert that the emanation of the divine essence occurs not at once but in a series of outpourings. The material world represents the earliest emanation, which is followed by a later outpouring of the matrix of plant and animal life, while the last outpouring is the one that brings human spirits to earth. (Such teachings are by no means unique to the West, for they can be discovered in Mesoamerican legends as well as in the traditions of Japan, India, and Africa.) The earth is not the “mother” of humanity, according to this view, but is a temporary habitat for human spirits. Some inner traditions hold that the earth as well as its flora and fauna have undergone a radical alienation from their origins, which accounts for the darkness and imperfection present in the “sublunar realm.” (The emanationist doctrine followed here is that of Valentinus, the Gnostic teacher of the second century AD.)

To summarise the above: We are not a mere part or product of physical nature. We have not grown like weeds from the soil of earth, and thus no kind of biodiversity can ever adequately account for the phenomenon of Homo sapiens. We are here on business of our own, which at times coincides with the purposes of nature but at other times diverges from it radically.

The Nature of Evil in the World

How easy it is to equate nature with the beauty of a spring morning or the song of the nightingale, the green of a meadow, or the azure of sky and sea! How much more difficult is it to acknowledge the shadow side of nature and to withdraw our unrealistically positive projections! As the Buddha proclaimed, suffering is the great existential reality of embodied existence. St. Paul agrees when he writes: “All creation groans and travails in pain” (Romans 8:22). All life lives on life, and thus living creatures kill and devour each other regularly. Almost always the death of sentient beings is preceded by a good deal of suffering. The lion’s claw, the tooth of the shark, the fang of the viper are as much part of nature as the flowers in our garden or the comforting adulation we receive from our pets. (Referring to the latter, we may notice the cruel game a cat will play with a captured mouse – a game quite unnecessary for the kill!) Even more grotesque and frightful forms of behaviour may be observed in the insect kingdom, where some species engage in mating and feeding practices that strike our mind as diabolical. Such considerations have motivated many thinkers to attribute not only unconsciousness but outright evil to nature. Thus the noted biologist and naturalist Lyall Watson writes:

Evil exists and seems to me to have sufficient substance to give it credence as a force in nature as a factor in our lives. It is part of the ecology and needs to be seen as such. My thumbs convince me, not that “something wicked this way comes,” but that it is already here and has been for a very long time, casting its shadow on almost everything we do.2 (emphasis added)

Perhaps more of us ought to consider the possible accuracy of the saying attributed to the Gnostic teacher Marcion: “Evil adheres to materiality as rust adheres to iron.” The natural world and the natural part of the human being are riddled with unregenerate, evil forces and tendencies.

The esoteric tradition of the West, of which the Gnostic teachings form an important part, recognises that evil is present in everything in this world. The current Green mythos would like to recognise evil only in humans and exempt the natural world. Following this reasoning, one would have to believe that the environment is always good and thus is preferable in its so-called natural state to any alterations introduced by human ingenuity. A good case in point concerns swamps, now euphemistically renamed “wetlands.”

“Wetlands,” so we are told, are wonderful things that virtually always should be protected from human interference. Now it is a fact of history that draining swamps has been regarded as one of the great achievements of human civilisation. Rome, the eternal city, owes its existence to the draining of the Pontine Marshes; Dutch engineering reclaimed much of Holland from the sea in the seventeenth century by means of dams and dikes. The Capitol and the White House in Washington, D.C., stand on former swamps; as do St. Petersburg, Russia, and Mexico City. Any attempt to carry out such works now would meet with fierce opposition from environmental lobbyists. There is a curious spiritual significance attributed to swamps and wilderness areas by many environmentalists. The difference between ordinary intelligent citizens on the one hand and perhaps many environmentalists on the other is that ordinary citizens may enjoy a watery habitat for pleasant birds or a nearby wilderness park for deer and coyotes, while the Green folk attribute a spiritual significance to such localities that puts them into the category of sacred shrines.

Swamps are but a single example of the curious situation that we face in contemporary society. When the work of humans is categorically decried as “unspiritual” and the wild is seen as sacred, one begins to suspect that some value system is skewed.

Some issues that arise in connection with environmentalists are even more curious. The present writer has some interest in an idyllic island not far from the metropolis of Los Angeles. This island, covered almost completely by wilderness, is inhabited by wild pigs, goats, and a small number of bison. Environmental enthusiasts have on occasion repaired to the island in order to slaughter many of these creatures. The reason given was that some of the rare plant life of the place had to be “saved” from these animals. (Certainly a Buddhist would not condone this, since pigs and goats qualify as “sentient beings” while plants do not.) In other areas, large numbers of sparrows are routinely destroyed in order to “save” bluebirds. One may wonder what gives the Green persons in question the right to decide which part of the ecosystem they may exterminate in order to allegedly assist another part.

Environmentalism, it would seem, tends to become an unduly heady business. The practicalities of human and other life are eclipsed by abstract ideas that are pursued with fanaticism. The bottom of the pit of Green irrationality has been reached by those animal rights extremists who time and again liken the slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany!

The Cultivation of Compassion

All of this brings us to a final consideration. Spiritual teachers, among whom the Buddha is most prominent in this regard, enjoin the cultivation of compassion. One reason they may have done so is that if humans do not exercise compassion, no one will. Nature does not know compassion, which implies the ability to consciously feel the suffering of another. Certain animals show love and devotion to their young, and sometimes to their mates, but this is not compassion. (Other animals show the opposite disposition: Young hyenas emerge biting and clawing from their mother’s womb and eat each other when convenient!) Compassion is a human quality; it may be called a uniquely human virtue. Needless to say, like other great virtues, compassion is not as ubiquitous among us as we might wish. Yet when consciousness rises to a certain level, compassion also tends to appear. It is to be doubted that compassion plays as great a role in Green consciousness as one might hope. Those in this camp are more often in love with their ideas about nature and its denizens than with the real sentient beings themselves. One cannot have true compassion for abstractions and collectivities such as ecosystems and for mental fictions such as “Mother Earth” or “Gaia.”

It is right that we should concern ourselves with the environment. Making the world a better place to live in might be one way in which we might become “the salt of the earth” (a term Jesus applied to his disciples). Using an avian metaphor, only an unwise bird befouls its own nest. But the bird is different from the nest, even as the inhabitant of the house is different from the house. We are not here to serve the environment, although we may assist it in various ways when this seems indicated. We are not called to worship the world, but to overcome it. And when in the fullness of time our wanderings on this earth will be over, we may hope to have left this land of exile in not too much worse condition than we found it. The human spirit, which dwells in our bodies, will not demand more of us, and possibly it will accept no less.

Footnotes

1. Jonathan Porrit and David Winner, The Coming of the Greens, London: Fontana, 1988, 251-52

2. Lyall Watson, Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil, New York: Harper Collins, 1995, xvi

This article originally appeared in Quest Spring 2009 and was reprinted with permission in New Dawn 115. For further information, please visit http://theosophical.org/publications/questmagazine/index.php. 

The question then becomes, whose advice do we take? There are few, if any, sources of authority that have not been called into doubt: church, society, government, the media, even the grand edifice of science itself. Consequently we’re thrown back on ourselves as the final arbiters of our own decisions, and while this may give a sense of freedom, that very freedom can feel dizzying and disorienting.

In putting together some brief suggestions about how to live one’s life, I’m making no claim to grand success or touting myself as a model, but having looked at many of these things from the perspective of the Western esoteric traditions, I can at least offer a few thoughts.

To my mind, there is one and only one universal and inflexible commandment that is to be applied at all times and in all situations: it is the old Greek axiom inscribed in Apollo’s temple at Delphi, Gnothi seauton: “Know thyself.” This exhortation has many levels of meaning. At the most basic level, it calls us to understand the truth about ourselves and our actions in daily life – such as knowing how many cups of coffee you can drink without facing insomnia tonight, or recognising how far you can be trusted (or trust yourself) in a delicate moral situation. Could you spend a weekend alone with your best friend’s spouse and keep everything above board? Maybe you can, maybe you can’t.

Knowing yourself in this relentlessly honest way, making what the Twelve-Step programs call “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” is necessary not only for freeing oneself from addiction but for facing the challenges of day-to-day life as well. It calls for a merciless honesty in realising all one’s weaknesses and limitations – but without the insane and compulsive guilt that often results from such realisation. It does little good to moan, like the more fanatical Christian saints or characters in Dostoyevsky’s novels, about how you are the most wretched sinner on earth, particularly since in all likelihood the truth is that you are no better and no worse than anyone else.

This realisation may be deflating (we all want to excel and will choose to excel in our sins if we lack any alternative), but it’s also freeing. Furthermore, it leads to the next dimension of knowing yourself: having compassion. The French have a saying: Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner: “To know all is to forgive all.” This is applied to ourselves as well. Christ urges us to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matt. 10:16). In one sense, this verse means that in order to live in any truly meaningful way, we have to see ourselves with two eyes: one of remorseless honesty, one of forgiveness and compassion. If we lack one or the other, life soon goes out of balance. Compassion without honesty becomes a license for anything; honesty without compassion breeds pathological guilt.

Given these principles, how are we to apply them to everyday life? Let’s begin with our relationship to the body. Not so long ago, what was healthy was (or seemed) reasonably clear: a balanced diet, regular exercise, moderation in (or abstention from) use of alcohol or tobacco. Today, on the other hand, we’re deluged with claims that any number of things in our daily lives are bad for us. There is probably no food product that hasn’t been hailed by one source as a cure-all and damned by another as a poison. Fruits and vegetables? Laced with pesticides. Meat? Riddled with antibiotics and hormones. Water? Polluted. Even organic products have come under suspicion. If we took all these claims seriously, we would be unable to let a single morsel pass our lips.

Claims about what’s healthy are often equally preposterous. I was amused, for example, by a study conducted by Harvard University several years ago. It showed that men who ate more than ten servings of tomatoes a day had a 35 percent reduced risk of prostate cancer. Even if we grant that the study was sound, who is going to eat ten servings of tomatoes a day? Probably if you did, the harm done to your stomach by the acid in the tomatoes would probably more than outweigh the benefits to your prostate. And this is merely one item. If you multiplied this sort of claim for everything on the market, it would require a Gargantuan diet to protect yourself from all illness – and then, of course, you would have to deal with obesity.

I make this point at such length because health (of which nutrition is, of course, merely one aspect) in many ways has become a preoccupation, even a neurosis in contemporary society. The American esotericist Manly P. Hall once said that there is a type of person that confuses God with vitamins. This kind of confusion is partly the handiwork of the mass media – for whom sensationalistic claims are the very lifeblood – but we are most susceptible to it if we remain disconnected from ourselves.

What can you eat, and what can’t you eat? The answer varies wildly from person to person. Some people need meat; others find it loathsome or nauseating. Some people can drink alcohol; others ought to stay away from it at all costs. The same goes for coffee or tobacco or almost any item you can put into your mouth. As for residues and contaminants, we have to face the issue with common sense. There is no way of avoiding them all. The most sensible approach is notice what adverse effects any given product has on you and act accordingly, while staying away from products that have extremely high risks associated with them.

Even so, it’s important to remember that scientific reports and media broadcasts all have this in common: they are talking about generalities and probabilities. There is nothing wrong with this in itself; it is how science thinks. But we ourselves are not generalities or probabilities; we are individuals, and what applies to people as a whole may not apply to us.

Again, of course, this can turn into a license for anything. A man may destroy his health through smoking while insisting that he, unlike everyone else, can smoke without harm. But you can cut through a great deal of this nonsense (inner and outer) with a certain amount of self-knowledge and inner honesty. Self-knowledge naturally includes a knowledge of the body, and this does not so much mean knowing the body as an abstract anatomical object as knowing how the body feels, even from moment to moment. Someone who is attentive in this way is far more likely to have a clear picture of what is good for her and what isn’t. It will be much easier for such a person to be able to connect, say, a feeling of late-afternoon fatigue with a skimpy breakfast eaten several hours earlier. Consequently, it will be far easier to fine-tune your diet according to what you really need rather than what the books and magazines say you need (advice that, in any case, usually turns out to be contradictory).

I could say much the same things about any other health-related issue – exercise, sleep, medicine. But let’s go on and suppose that your investigations reveal that you need to make some changes in your way of life. In order to accomplish this, you will again need a certain amount of self-knowledge to know what will work and what won’t. Take exercise. Many people admit that they could use more exercise, but the vast majority of these do one of two things: procrastinate (the spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff once observed that the sacred quality of hope had in modern man deteriorated into a noxious disease called “tomorrow”) or launch into some regimen that they have almost no chance of maintaining in the long run. If you’ve spent the last twenty years in front of the television, it makes very little sense to declare by fiat that from now on you will work out for two hours a day. You will probably quit within the week. Someone who is both more serious about exercise and more honest with himself might start with ten minutes a day. Ten minutes a day, after all, is better than nothing, and it has a far greater chance of remaining enjoyable or at any rate manageable to someone who is just beginning. Notice also the element of compassion: rather than inflicting exercise on yourself like a punishment, you are introducing it into your life in a kind and thoughtful way. As the regimen becomes more of a habit, you can expand it, and maybe after a few years (we are, after all, talking about a long-term change in life habits) you will find yourself working out for two hours a day.

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to extend these principles into most areas of your life. In the case of finances, for example, say you realise you need to save more money. How much, really, are you going to be able to save from month to month? It’s far better to aim for a more modest amount that you will be able to sustain rather than to put away a huge chunk that you will only need to dip into a month or two from now. Some changes may be astonishingly easy to make; others require more patience and skill.

When you begin to examine these dimensions of life through the lens of self-knowledge, you will almost certainly find resistance of one kind or another within yourself. Looking through my own life, I’m constantly amazed by what forms resistance takes and where it manifests. The most obvious types have to do with things I find unpleasant – doing a dirty job, delivering a message the other person will not want to hear – but often I find myself curiously resistant to doing things that on the face of it require no unpleasantness at all – sometimes even something as simple as returning a phone call from a friend. Beyond a certain elementary point it’s useless to analyse why I don’t feel like making the call. What’s more important is simply being aware of the resistance and consciously going past it to do what you need to do.

All of this may seem obvious enough, but there is another, subtler dynamic going on. It’s one that, for example, I have almost always found to be involved in procrastination of any sort (procrastination being merely one form of resistance). The need to accomplish something, when it runs up against inner obstacles, creates a curious cycle: the energy that you would have devoted to the task starts to feed the resistance, so that you finds yourself going around in circles. I need to make the phone call; I don’t want to; the fact that I don’t want to makes the task seem larger and more obnoxious than it is; which in turn makes me want to do it even less; and so on. I have known people who have tied up practically their entire lives this way. Sometimes the task does indeed turn into something daunting, as is the case with hoarders, who find themselves so buried in clutter that an entire day of cleaning will hardly make a dent in it.

Where does the solution lie? In his book Skillful Means: Gentle Ways to Successful Work, the Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku writes:

Once we understand how we escape from our difficulties and fears, we can resolve to change this pattern. The next time you encounter a problem and find yourself looking for a way around it, you can make a conscious decision to redirect your energy, to go into your problem and find a solution. Although you may at first feel a resistance to doing this, the positive feelings you will gain from honestly facing work and life will strengthen your ability to meet future challenges directly, and you will increase your incentive to grow.

When we honestly evaluate our motivation, our attitudes, our strengths and weaknesses, we begin to see a deeper side to our nature from which we can draw a vital energy that lends real meaning to our lives.

Tarthang Tulku speaks of gaining energy as a result of facing resistance. This is an important point. You may literally feel that there is a subtle wall of energy between you and your task, and you almost find yourself bouncing off it as if it were a force field. All of this is, of course, your own creation, and you can pierce through it simply by “honestly facing work and life” and plunging in. My own experience with this leads me to formulate it in what may be a strange way: when I confront the task, it sometimes feels as if I am somehow slicing into this wall of resistance.

The good news is that “slicing into” the resistance immediately begin to free up the energy that was bound up in it; it is as if some subtle membrane that was keeping things bottled up has burst and the energy is now free to circulate into the task itself. As a result, simply overcoming the resistance can give you much of the energy you need to accomplish the job.

These are, I realise, only rather brief indications of a process that individuals need to explore for themselves. Usually it’s easiest to do this in the context of an esoteric school of one sort or another, where tasks are often set up to create this kind of resistance and to teach the student how to overcome it. One of the most common techniques is to give a student a job he or she is not particularly good at. The intellectual is sent to carpentry; the businessman is told to paint a picture; the dreamer is given financial accounts to reckon. Indeed one of the functions of esoteric schools is precisely to teach the skills of overcoming resistance to the pupils. Finding one’s way in daily life with only a few indications is a harder task, but with luck it can be accomplished.

Whether it takes place in the context of an esoteric school or in an ordinary office, this overcoming of resistance again takes us back to knowledge. You can only overcome resistance if you see it. A friend of mine who was interested in the spiritual side of animal training was trying to teach her dog not to bark. “To stop a dog from barking,” she said, “you first need to make it aware it’s barking.” So it is with resistance: to overcome it, you must first see that you’re caught up in it. If you avoid this realisation through excuses, self-justification, blaming other people, and so on, you have lost before you begin.

Because awareness is so important to all aspects of inner growth, it’s usually made a central point of many esoteric teachings. Gurdjieff called it “self-remembering”; the Buddhists call it “mindfulness”; whatever the name, the process is more or less the same. You are to see yourself, and you are to see yourself as you are now, not in some past or future that is in any event largely the creation of your own imagination. To do this requires conscious presence, and there are many ways of practicing this on a day-to-day basis.

So far I’ve been speaking of self-knowledge in a comparatively external sense: seeing clearly one’s own strengths and weaknesses in daily life and coping with them as a builder has to cope with defects in a site or materials. This kind of knowledge is not to be despised; it can add tremendously to one’s efficiency and productivity. But it assumes that you know what your work is, and for many people this remains a highly vexing issue.

The answer, I believe, lies in a concept for which there is no word in English. In Sanskrit it is called svadharma, and it roughly means doing one’s own duty. The classic text that discusses it is the Bhagavad-Gita, one of the greatest of the Hindu sacred scriptures, written probably between the fifth and second centuries BCE. This book forms a part of a much larger whole, the titanic epic known as the Mahabharata, which culminates in a great war between two rival clans, the virtuous Pandavas and the corrupt Kauravas. One of the greatest warriors among the Pandavas is Arjuna, and his charioteer is Krishna, the incarnation of the god Vishnu. As the lines are drawn up for the decisive battle, Arjuna sees his relatives and some of his closest friends on the opposing side. He knows that enormous numbers of them will be slain, and he loses heart. He turns to Krishna and says he does not want to fight; he has no appetite for the power or glory that victory would bring.

Most of the Bhagavad-Gita consists of Krishna’s reply. It contains philosophy and cosmology as well as directions for yogic practice, but all of this centres on Krishna’s urging Arjuna to fight. Arjuna is a Ksatriya, a member of the warrior caste, and it is his duty – his dharma – to take part in the battle. Krishna goes so far as to say: “Better one’s own duty [to perform], though void of merit, than to do another’s well: better to die within [the sphere of] one’s own duty: perilous is the duty of other men.”

The word for “one’s own duty” here is svadharma. It is not a moral duty in the ordinary sense: rather it is the duty that is embedded in your deepest self. No one else can do the job that you were created to do. Liberation consists not of inaction or withdrawal from the world but of performing your duty selflessly and without attachment to results. Arjuna’s dharma is to fight in this monumental battle, which has more than a political or even moral function. It is destined to bring an end to the age and to restore a corrupt cosmic order.

People learn their svadharma, their special functions, in many different ways and at many different times of life. One person knows hers from childhood; another discovers it only in middle age. It is revealed by still, small voices and by visions on the road to Damascus, but also sometimes in a career aptitude test or by answering an ad in the classifieds. It may remain steadfastly the same, a ridgepole upon which one’s entire life depends, or it may gradually change and shift as time and circumstances change. In any event, it has a single core feature: you have (or come to have) the unshakable sense that this function, whatever it is, is why one exists, is what you were created to do.

For the Hindus, svadharma is intimately intertwined with svabhava, one’s own being, the core of one’s essence. To know your own work is to know your own being; you can’t understand one without the other. For some, this function may involve wealth and position; for others, modest and humble circumstances. It may call one person onto the magnificent stage of history and may require another to spend his life in obscurity. In any case, to know one’s task is in a very profound sense to know oneself.

Such a perspective leads us very deep into the recesses of our own nature, and as we make this journey of self-knowledge, we paradoxically go past the self as it’s conventionally conceived – the ego, the street-level personality. Ultimately we move toward our true nature, what we may call the “true I,” which Christianity calls the spirit or the kingdom of God, which Hinduism calls Atman or the Self, and which is known in countless other traditions under countless other names. The Hindu sage Sri Ramana Maharshi went so far as to say that simply following the question “Who am I?” as far back as possible in oneself will lead to enlightenment.

Strictly speaking, however, one can never, perhaps, truly know oneself. This is simply because what one is, the “I am” at the core of one’s being, the Self, is always that which knows. “The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it,” says Christ in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Men do not see it because it is the very principle in them that sees. The path to this realisation is, it would seem, an endless one, not because progress is impossible but because progress, if it is real, always opens up new horizons and new directions to move in.

© Copyright 2007 by New Dawn Magazine & the respective author. This article first appeared in New Dawn No. 104. For further information visit http://www.newdawnmagazine.com