Confessions of a Sophianic Gnostic

[I'm going to assume a basic familiarity with the definitions and cosmology of Gnosticism throughout this interview, and spare the oft-repeated preamble about what it all means - but certainly a quick drive-by of Gnosticism 101 and Gnosticism 102 might be in order. The usual disclaimers apply.]

Let's start with some background.

Okay, I'm 39, four kids, hopelessly in love with my wife of six years. I work as a Creative Director for a small ad agency, and I live in Victoria BC Canada. I've been a Sophianic Gnostic for about 17 years.

You've been a Priest for a little over a month now. A Priest of what?

I consider myself a Priest of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. What that means to me is that, if you go back say six, eight thousand years – well, further, actually – you have people employing a Eucharistic ritual to invest the material with the spiritual. The central idea of Western Religion is incarnation, that the Divine is real and can (and does) become manifest in the world. There are specific forms of this ritual that are unique in the West, and have a continuity from antiquity to the present day. You see this in ancient Egypt, throughout the Greek Mysteries, Persian Mithraism, through the Sol Invictus Cult of ancient Rome, continuing through Christianity. Later it winds through nominally Christian but distinctly heretical movements such as the Templars, the Cathars, the Rosicrucians, the Liberal Catholics and occult investigations of the late 19th Century. I am a part of that Tradition.

Specifically I'm a Gnostic Priest, of the Apostolic Johannite Church – an esoteric Gnostic Christian communion with valid apostolic succession.

Esoteric? Like occult?

Yes. The idea here is that in the process of that Incarnation I was referring to earlier, that there's some subtlety at work, and discernment required. We get signals *constantly* from the indwelling Divine, but there's also a very specific set of forces intent – willfully intent – on jamming those signals. Therefore a kind of negotiation emerges wherein the signals are encoded, and it time decoded by those intent on listening, on receiving.

Mythically this is expressed in "errant wisdom", the Fallen Sophia who plants a seed of the Divine within everything, and it's our job to collect these sparks until we have enough light to see our way home.

I've often said that being a Gnostic is like being a secret agent for G@d. One pictures members of the French Resistance listening to a homemade radio in the cellar, deciphering transmissions. "The woodpecker flies at midnight."

How did you get to become a Priest?

Well, I became a Gnostic Deacon in 1989 in a Church which no longer exists, and I was literally "shopping around" for a Gnostic Church to which to transfer my Diaconate. I connected with Monsignor Ken Madden+ of the AJC, and he encouraged me to apply to their Formation program. The Formation is a course of readings, with some writing and much discussion and reflection. Now, as it was a long-standing interest, I was already familiar with most of the books on the list, but the "holes" in it really illustrated my biases, and confronting these was extremely worthwhile. After a period of time, and almost daily contact with Bishop +Shaun, I flew out to Calgary for my Ordination in May.

I would also add that through this process of searching I also encountered the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica Hermetica, and was very attracted to what they were doing. So it came as a great delight to discover that the EGCH is the "sister-Church" of the AJC, with many clergy members serving jointly in both Churches.

The AJC is a Gnostic Christian Church. Are you a Christian?

Personally, I'm not a Christian, in that I don't believe in the exclusivity of Jesus story, and I reject outright the premise that faith is salvific. However, I do find the myth of Christ transformative, and powerful, and beautiful. The tradition of Christianity inherited the riches of the Western Religion, and I've learned to have a deep respect for that, and for others' experience within Christianity.

That being said, I think contemporary Christian culture is extraordinarily toxic. The night of my Ordination in Calgary, Monsignor Ken+ and I drove past this brand new $14 million "big screen tv" mega-church, and I joked about wanting to burn the place to the ground. The entirety of Protestantism strikes me as a failure, and seems so spiritually bankrupt. I'm personally convinced the only choice for a thinking, compassionate Christian is between Rome, Orthodoxy, and Gnosticism.

It is a tremendous challenge for Gnostic Christians not to abandon Christianity to the Nicene Councillors, and let it be whatever Iranaeus says it is. To maintain the knowledge that Christianity bears the spark of something real and holy, and to fight for that knowledge, requires an extraordinary conviction and integrity.

That's still a pretty solid endorsement of orthodoxy by a heretic.

Well, I think it points more to the poverty of Sola Scriptura than an endorsement of Sola Fides. I'm solidly in the Sola Sapientia camp in that regard. The first two cannot save you from Ignorance of who you really and are and where you come from. But it does seem a shame to me that the Eastern church, the Orthodox churches, are not taken more seriously in North America. At the age of sixteen I had a very moving experience at a Mass at St. Herman's of Alaska in Juneau. The Eastern rite has a resonance and an abiding mystery that Roman Novus Ordo Mass can't fathom, let alone an anemic guitar-led "worship gathering".

Despite the fact that Gnosticism is older than Christianity, there has always been a Gnostic thread in the Christian braid. Eastern Orthodoxy has a similar Sophiology to ours, and that may be due to the fact that our Gnostic Christian succession comes through the See of Constantinople.

What is Restoration Gnosticism?

In 1889 a Frenchman by the name of Jules Doinel had a vision, in which the Holy Spirit appeared to him in the form of Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom. She informed him that he was to reconstitute Her Church, specifically the Cathar church of the Albigensians. Doinel had tapped into a current earlier explored by another Frenchman, a Raymond de Fabré-Palaprat, who almost ninety years earlier had identified Gnosticism with both the Knights Templar and with the church of "The Beloved Disciple" of the Gospel of John (hence "Johannite"). In 1890 Doinel founded a Gnostic Catholic Church, and it survives today in the lineage of contemporary Gnostic Churches such as the Apostolic Johannite Church and Bishop +Hoeller's Ecclesia Gnostica, among others.

So Restoration Gnosticism is a post-Enlightenment, indeed post-modernist Religion that reinterprets Classical Gnostic symbolism into a dynamic and relevant context. Gnosticism has always been about such exploration and reinterpretation, so it's not a new religion per se, just a revitalization of something that could never be fully extinguished by totalitarian orthodoxy. Gnosticism is like gold; elemental, malleable, precious. It can't be diluted, only alloyed to be re-purified in the fires of history and reworked.

What is the role of clergy in the Restoration? Doesn't being a Priest make you more Gnostic than a layperson?

In this regard the Restoration can be seen as an expression of the Episcopi Vagantes phenomenon, in which clergy often outnumber laity, and Ordination and Consecration are more common Sacraments than the Eucharist. Early Ecclesiastical Gnostic churches measured their success by the number of Bishops they could crank out in a year. This was fueled by a sense of urgency, and of mission, to get a toehold in the world and reach out to those on the impassioned fringes of western religious thought; freemasons, theosophists, liberal catholics.

As for more-Gnostic-than-thou, we have to return to the idea of Sola Sapientia; gnosis is all that matters. The individual's experience and effort is paramount – the laity and not the clergy are really the heart and soul of Gnosticism. As a Priest, I can point you in some directions from which other Gnostics have benefited, but really it's a matter of personal initiative and responsibility. Now, we have the Sacraments, which can facilitate life as a Gnostic, but do not in and of themselves confer gnosis.

Can you forgive sins?

Absolutely. Sorry, terrible pun.

The Gnostic understanding of sin is similar to the original Greek idea, which is that sin is a kind of distraction. I want to be a certain kind of person, I want to live my life a certain way, but I'm constantly distracted from this ideal. Things get in the way, energy and moment go sideways. The Sacrament of Penance is about letting go of that distraction; addressing it, fixing it, and surrendering it to the Divine so you can get back to what it was you were doing. Everybody makes mistakes. The responsible acknowledge it, correct it, and get on with their lives – forgiveness of sins is a mechanism for living responsibly, and deliberately.

You used the word "Sophianic" before. What do you mean by Sophianic?

There are three predominant expressions of contemporary Ecclesiastical Gnosticism: Christian, Hermetic, and Sophianic. The Sophianic movement within Gnosticism understands that the closest Emanation to G@d which we can perceive is Sophia, the personification of Holy Wisdom who is also the Holy Spirit and the Shekinah, the Presence of the Divine. So our liturgy tends toward the honouring of the Divine Feminine and Her archetype in Mary Magdalene.

So Sophia is the Goddess?

She is an Emanation of the Divine, a symbol for an aspect of something greater than the symbol can express. Looking back to Egyptian religion, where we see the term "netjeru" or "names", the various personalities we see as Isis, Osiris, Horus (Aset, Wesir, Heru) etc. are really taken to be aspects of one infinite reality, and the symbols are there for the practical purpose of simplification. Like many facets of one gem. We see the same thing in a Christian church, where there's an infant, a teacher, a crucified man, a lamb, a dove, and a vine – all there to represent different aspects of one idea of Divinity. The aesthetic of Sophia is very attractive to those traditionally inspired by the Divine Feminine: women, artists, writers, poets, witches.

Are you a Witch?

Yes, I was initiated into The Witchcraft in 1981, and was fortunate to spend time with people like Robin Skelton, Janet and Stewart Farrar, Ray Buckland and Starhawk. Although my Witchcraft has more to do with Robert Graves than the avalanche of Fill-in-the-blank-ian Wicca paperbacks published in the last 15 years. I don't consider myself Wiccan, but I'm very comfortable with the term "Witch" - the creation of art and poetry and ritual to create intuitive ways of seeing, of understanding.

Isn't there a conflict between Witchcraft and Gnosticism? Witchcraft worships the Earth. Doesn't Gnosticism reject the Earth as evil?

I understand Witchcraft to be a way of seeing and negotiating with the forces of the world in a way that's entirely Gnostic. Certainly Wicca was engineered deliberately at the outset as a means to popularize the Gnostic Mass. I see the Earth worship of The Witchcraft to not be about the earth per se as the genius in it – the genus loci – , which we mythologize as the Spark of Sophia hidden everywhere, in every corner and aspect of the created world.

Gnosticism is not about the rejection of the earth, but a rejection of the systems that are placed upon it. Even then, it doesn't dismiss that system as necessarily evil, just that it can't tell you who you are. The accusation that Gnostics are dualists is a slander. As I've written before, Gnostic scripture employs natural metaphors constantly in a very positive way; storms, newborn babies, flowers, streams, the cycles of crops. We also see the Hermetic tradition abiding within Witchcraft and Gnosticism equally, so for me there's no conflict.

You have "a name in Religion" – what is that for? Isn't that pretentious?

My name in the Church is "Iordanvs", which is merely the formalization of my name, Jordan, or ירדן - the river of Baptism. I use this form very sparingly, but I think that it is legitimate to recognize a change in your identity after something powerful occurs to you, such as a wedding or an Ordination, or receiving a PhD. This to me is a long way from the "Lord Falcon-Droppinge" syndrome whereby some individuals take on pretentious psuedo-occult honorifics as a way of trying to impress others, or perhaps themselves. But really I just go by Father Jordan.

Isn't this disrespectful, dressing like Catholics and practicing heresy?

Certainly I understand that if you're Catholic, you might easily misconstrue what we're doing, particularly if you're unfamiliar with the origins of all this stuff. The important thing to remember is that Gnosticism and the Roman Church have coexisted for millennia, and that many of the forms which are popularly identified as "Catholic" are not exclusive to Christianity – indeed a great many of them pre-date Christianity. Much of the Catholic culture was shaped and contributed by Gnostics who saw no contradiction in what they were doing.

What about Faith? What role does it play?

Many would disagree with this but personally I find faith antithetical to gnosis. Faith generally means faith in somebody else's faith, and seems to me to be a denial of the personal responsibility that is the core of Gnosticism. I use the term Pistics to identify those who feel that faith is necessary for salvation - and I can understand the appeal of such a position. There is a real value in letting go of the intellect, from what you think you know, and much can be gained from that detachment. However I think that where Buddhism has succeeded in that technique, the West has failed and instead taken it into anti-intellectualism and dogma. "I don't know for sure, therefore I'm going to accept x, and x only, and anybody who accepts y just doesn't get it." It's a position that diminishes our birthright, as Sparks of the Divine.

We have this evidence in front of us; psychology, scripture, history, experience. And we have tools with which to explore this evidence; our creativity, our intellect, our compassion, wit and intuition. It's not surprising then that our understanding of the evidence evolves over time, that we're changing the landscape by walking through it. This is why I feel it's important for us not to try to be 13th century Cathars or 2nd century BCE Alexandrians, but real people living in the 21st century, using the gifts of unique perspective and our courage to negotiate with the forces shaping the world today. The burden of such personal responsibility, and the sense of "the long defeat" are tempered by the sheer, blinding beauty of it – that we know who are, where we come from. And of course a sense of humour in all this is indispensable. Our situation is tragic, and in a very real way, kind of hilarious.