Gotta Love Conservatives

FORBIDDEN VACCINE: Ever year, about 500,000 women throughout the world develop cervical cancer. In the United States alone, the disease kills about 3,700 women annually. This year, scientists developed a vaccine against human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease that is the primary cause of cervical cancer. The vaccine produced 100 percent immunity in the 6,000 women who received it as part of a multinational trial. As soon as the vaccine is licensed, some health officials say, it should be administered to all girls at age 12. But the Family Research Council and other social conservative groups vowed to fight that plan, even though it could virtually eliminate cervical cancer. Vaccinating girls against a sexually transmitted disease, they say, would reduce their incentive to abstain from premarital sex.

– While You Were Sleeping.

The Crystal Cabinet

The Maiden caught me in the wild,
Where I was dancing merrily;
She put me into her Cabinet,
And lock'd me up with a golden key.

This cabinet is form'd of gold
And pearl and crystal shining bright,
And within it opens into a world
And a little lovely moony night.

Another England there I saw
Another London with its Tower,
Another Thames and other hills,
And another pleasant Surrey bower.

Another Maiden like herself,
Translucent, lovely, shining clear,
Threefold each in the other clos'd
O, what a pleasant trembling fear!

O, what a smile! a threefold smile
Fill'd me, that like a flame I burn'd;
I bent to kiss the lovely Maid,
And found a threefold kiss return'd.

I strove to seize the inmost form
With ardor fierce and hands of flame,
But burst the Crystal Cabinet,
And like a weeping Babe became-

A weeping Babe upon the wild,
And weeping Woman pale reclin'd,
And in the outward air again,
I fill'd with woes the passing wind.

– William Blake, The Crystal Cabinet

This is a gorgeous exploration of the Shekhinah, of being in the Presence of the Divine Feminine, and the poverty of its loss. The Maiden here is the Triple Goddess, of threefold smile and threefold kiss. The poem speaks to the prismatic quality of such an experience; how She opens us up to parallel, multiple realities which are of course fragile – it is the desire to seize and possess such an experience that makes it elusive, that shatters the cabinet.

Feast of St. John the Apostle

"We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him"

– 1 John 4:16

Oprahphobia

What keeps me up at night is that we will keep writing and publishing and (G@d forbid) evangelizing until we reach such a critical mass of popular curiosity that Deepak Chopra writes a book on Gnosticism and talks about it on Oprah.

Within months there will be Gnostic Aromatherapy candles at Crate and Barrel.

Fringe Protestant churches will use Gnostic texts to vilify Rome; identifying Gnostic Christianity – or more specifically their Christianity with a newly-bolted-on Gnostic label, as the One True Faith stolen by evil Romans (thereby justifying the Reformation in advance). There will be "Gnostic" Christian rock bands, playing to youth ministries at big-screen-TV megachurches.

"Jesus was a Gnostic!" people will insist over lattés at the mall, "and so were the Apostles!" (who of course in this interpretation are always actually historical people and never personifications of ideas). One literalist pseudohistory will be eclipsed, momentarily, by another literalist pseudohistory, only with the new one decked out in Valentinian cosmologies and quoting The Gospel of Philip.

Don't think this isn't coming.

What will be lost in this barrage of newage (rhymes with sewage) Protestant brand of Gnosticism, is our ability to resolve paradoxes. We don't create our own reality (who'd create cholera, if given the choice?), but of course we create our own reality (where does the kosmos originate if not in us, in our complicity?). The Demiurge is other but of course he's us. Christ is the Logos, external and immortal, but of course Christ is the mantle of our annointed Self. Myth is ancient and cultural but of course it's present and personal. The Pleroma is the Father, just not as you have been raised to understand the idea, Sophia is The Goddess, just not in the way that a Llewellyn paperback understands Her.

What drove early Christians nuts about us is that we agreed with everything. Pick a topic. Virgin birth? Check. Transubstantiation? Right on. Incarnation and Resurrection? Gotcha. We just didn't meant these things the same way Christians meant – and mean – these things. We're slippery that way.

It came up the other day that Valentinus quoted the forgeries that are Paul's "Pastorals" (which have as much to do with Paul as my grocery list) – even though these were deliberately counterfeited to denounce Gnostic influences on emerging Christian theology. Well, I think that Gnostics can find meaning encoded in a knock-knock joke or a washing-machine repair manual; such is the gift of inhabiting a spiritual space derived from metaphor, from applicability, from "this is not this but this is like this". Our language is not prose but poetry, both found and composed.

In this aspect the heresiologists are correct; Gnosticism is elitist. Not everybody is comfortable outside the superficially stable parameters of literalism and Aristotle. Sure, okay, we're adolescent posey anti-authoritarian beatniks, and yes, we're cooler than you. And yes, selling the equivalen of black turtlenecks and bongos at WalMart does in fact infringe on my pneuma-hipster cachet. I never claimed to be mature about this. But that's my problem. I'll get over it.

What we must remember is that the Divine so often conceals itself in the discarded. G@d in the Gutter. And what could be a better model of trash than disposable contemporary culture? It is ironic and of course archonically inevitable that the signal of Gnosticism should be co-opted by the noise of Rex Mundi. Nice one, Rex.

And yet it will blow over and people will set aside The Gospel of Mary next to their rear-view-mirror angels, their Da Vinci Code Air Fresheners and their chakra crystals. Gnostic scripture will once again be rejected and declared worthless; those who hunger for saccharine bromides will binge and purge and move on, having looked but not seen. And we will take such crude efforts at commodification, and with wit and irony we will culture-jam and recompose, remix, edit and mashup to celebrate the story sleeping beneath the plastic.

And we will still be here. Gnosis will still be here. Wisdom will have hid herself in the world, sending signals to those who love Her and remember to listen.

Hanukah

בס"ד

Hanukah Woodcut, 1727

"All the darkness cannot extinguish the light of a single candle, yet one candle can illuminate all the darkness."

– Traditional Talmudic Proverb

Many bright wishes and love to our Jewish family and friends! Remember, that without Judaism, there would be no Gnosticism (and as one loudmouth heretic priest once said, "the big problem with Gnosticism is that it's not Jewish enough").

Now if you'll excuse me I have latkes to make...

Nativity

This in my inbox this morning from Bishop +Rosamonde;

Pay attention now to exactly where the birth of nothingness takes place.  This eternal birth (of God) takes place in the soul in the manner that takes place in eternity.
 
There is only one birth – and this birth takes place in the being and in the core of the soul.  This birth takes place in darkness.  And not only is the Son of the heavenly Creator born in this darkness - but you, too, are born there as a child of the same heavenly Creator.  And the Creator extends the same power to you out of the divine maternity bed located in the Godhead to eternally give birth.  The seed of God is in us. 
 
Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree; and the seed of a hazel tree grows into a hazel tree; a seed of God grows into God. 
 
What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself?
 
And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace?  What good is to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?
 
This, then, is the fullness of time: when the Son of God is begotten in us. 
 
We are all meant to be mothers of God.

– Meister Johannes Eckhart
13th Century Dominican mystic

How perfect for this Feast of the Incarnation. Thank you Rosamonde!

I would like to extend warmest Christmas blessings to you all, particularly Bishop +Shaun McCann, Monsignor Ken Madden+, Bishop +Rosamonde Miller, Bishop +Gerald del Campo, Father Troy Pierce+, Rev. Terje Bergersen, Stu Berry, the brave souls of the RGIA pilot program who were handed an unannounced and unexpected hiatus due to family, career, and manuscript; the wonderful contributors of the Logosphere – "Straight A" Jesse, Jeremy (who's upcoming book on Thomas is the best yet written, period), Pauline, Jane, Scott and all who tend the grounds of the Palm Tree Garden; to the commentors on my blog, especially those who correct my ceaseless errors and acts of hubris (supporters are easy to come by; smart critics are more precious than gold: that's a shout out to you, Curt and Doug); to all of you and your families –

Bright Blessings and much joy.

Mithras Eve

He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation.

– Mithraic altar inscription

Pardon the pun. But I do find it valuable at this time to remember that the stories that hold us together, that we honour and incorporate, are as old as we are human. Lux ex tenebris. The Gathering of the Newborn Light. This to my mind does not make Christmas less special, it makes it timeless, universal. It is important to remember that our culture is syncretic - it values reinterpretation, innovative and personal retellings. The story itself transcends cultures, timelines, geographies; not because the story is fickle, but because it is real.

The Feast of Judas Thomas, the Divine Twin

And Thomas answered, "Therefore I say to you, that those who speak about things that are invisible and difficult to explain are like those who shoot their arrows at a target at night. To be sure, they shoot their arrows as anyone would - since they shoot at the target - but it is not visible. Yet when the light comes forth and hides the darkness, then the work of each will appear. And you, our light, enlighten."

The Soter said, "It is in light that light exists."

Thomas, spoke, saying, "Why does this visible light that shines on behalf of men rise and set?"

The Soter said, "O blessed Thomas, of course this visible light shines on your behalf – not in order that you remain here, but rather that you might come forth."

– The Book of Thomas the Contender

And Yet...

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether as learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.

Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison to all true kings that ever reigned?

Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

Or is it of the Virgin's silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right hand she crooks a finger, smiling,
How many the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?

Much snow if falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup:
Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.
The log groans and confesses:
There is one story and one story only.

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.

– Robert Graves, To Juan at Winter Solstice

The Long Night

And longer still the night, the dark is rising against us. Winter's bones know nothing of the warm flesh of summer, surely there can be no Spring. The light is overthrown, and we are undone.

What faint hope can we have against such a tide? How vain we are to think, at this chill hour, that we are not abandoned, that Sun will be restored to His throne? The stars are arrow-heads aglint in a night sky under whose cold it is death to sleep.

No, clearly the Light has no love for such as me.

No person have I touched I have not in some way poisoned with my selfishness and need. Every thought has been to vanity, every action dedicated first to animal impulse, and second to my own absurd aggrandizement. When I have been offered love I have contained it, criticized it, trivialized it. My praises of the Divine are adolescent and snide, every attainment due only to a callous skill at insinuating myself next to those with greater talent and greater heart. I ape philosophy like a drunk quoting Shakespeare. Where is the Sun for me? Away in disgust at my co-option of the language of goodness while revelling in my own prideful idiocy.

If Advent is to prepare for the coming of the Light, then in this, as in all things, have I failed. The wave of dark will surge and break over me, and day will fall away altogether.

ORA PRO NOBIS

Litmus Test 1.0 beta

There has been a tremendous amount of recent effort dedicated to the definitions of gnosis and Gnosticism - much of it to counter what can only be described as the most disastrous and irresponsible scholarship on the subject. Williams has declared that we simply don't exist and never did, and Voegelin has us defined as everybody who ever hated anything so much they wanted to make the world a better place, just like Communism and Nazism. Oy.

Regardless of those who declare that ancient and contemporary Gnosticism have nothing in common, we have the people, these Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt in 200 BC, telling these stories, asking these questions. Such questions and stories are valid, integral. Their symbolism and paths greatly influenced early Christianity, and not just as a defining negative. These people sought gnosis, attained it, centralized it. Their language is our language, their stories our stories. The historical reality of these people will not go away just because Williams finds their existence inconvenient.

There is a very real and historic continuity between our syncretizing Alexandrian friends and the early Christian church, and via the Johannite current to the Bogomils and Cathars. Gnosticism adapts, evolves, reinterprets, reimagines. Denying that contemporary Gnosticism is part of the ancient Gnostic religion is akin to saying that modern Jews aren't Jews. These assertions are not only intellectually dishonest, they are deliberately insulting.

Gnosticism is a religion. It is not an "approach" to religious ideas, and it is most definitely not a branch of Protestant Christianity. So let's get on with the definitions;

gnosis; (Gk. γνοσισ, "knowledge") profound insight, complete awareness, enlightenment. Contrast with episteme; working knowledge or familiarity. Synonymous with satori in Zen.

And really, we're done here. There is no "human gnosis" vs. "divine gnosis". No local or cultural gnosis. The gnosis of the Sufi is not different from the gnosis of the Alexandrian or the Inuit.

Gnosticism; a pre-Christian syncretic religion centered around the salvific nature of gnosis, emphasizing imagination, integrity, non-ordinary ways of seeing ("mysticism") and personal responsibility.

What is still missing is a litmus test; a set of criteria against which we may objectively place the Sethians, the Quakers, the Borborites and Ophites and Cainites and Bogomils.

Jesse and I were discussing this the other night, and this is what we came up with;

1) Soteriology: Gnosticism holds that gnosis is salvific, or necessary for the redemption of the human experience - in fact is central to such a process (in other words, gnosis as one of several qualities doesn't count).

2) Pre-existence: Gnosticism holds that what makes us us exists before our physical incarnation. Our origins are therefore not on earth but in the Pleroma.

3) Archons/Aeons: whether literally or figuratively, Gnosticism understands that there exists a heirarchy of forces governing the kosmos - different traditions state that these are in turn harmful, beneficial, or neutral, but each tradition maintains that such forces negotiate in their own interest, rather than ours.

4) Progressions of human awareness: that people are of different natures; for example, one model sees humans as hylic (worldly), psychic (intellectual) or pneumatic (spiritual), with these being "evolutionary" steps. Other progressive models qualify equally.

I would posit that a score of three out of four qualifies the candidate as belonging to the Gnostic religion, or at least warranting further clarification. Kabalah and Sufism, for example, pass the test: each of these contributed greatly to Gnostic thought and history, but are of course aspects of distinct, non-Gnostic religions. But all in all I'm confident that the test does get us further along. Bishop Hoeller has stated that one acquires a "musical ear" for Gnosticism, and I agree wholeheartedly, but this presents I fear too great a challenge for academe.

Academics are going to struggle for generations reconciling the reality of the Gnosticism above with the spurious definitions (or anti-definitions) of Williams and Voegelin. And it can't be done. Were I to publish (to critical acclaim) that a penguin is a mammal, the field of zoology would itself be compromised, the efforts of successive ornithologists greatly hampered. Only through the application of common sense and historical reality can we hope to soften the blow somewhat.

Jesse's post on the same subject is available here.

Philip Kindred Dick 1928-1982

Today is the birthday of Philip K Dick, author, Gnostic, and inadvertent founder of Phildickian Gnosticism.

His basic theme – that divinity is to be found in trash, in the rejected stone, and in the disposability of popular culture – played out in his own life, where epiphany was found via the jewelry of a drugstore delivery girl, and gnosis through a psychotic break (or via a pink laser fired from a satellite of extraterrestrial origin, take your pick). Through the examination of his agon and his naked honesty, Dick is the St. John of the Cross of our age, the corpus of his work a postmodern Dark Night of the Soul.

He is most popularly known as the writer of the novels which inspired the films Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Paycheck, although his opus, the four volume VALIS, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and Radio Free Albemuth has yet to make the transition to screen. His stories – often uncomfortable to read yet endlessly compelling – explore blatant Gnostic themes of identity and memory, of reality and deception, of humanity and redemption.

His Burroughs-esque Exegesis has yet to be published in its entirety, but it illustrates a brilliant and intuitive mind, sensitized both to the zeitgeist of his agon and its timelessness.

The Path of Gnosis

Jeremy brought my attention to a new Gnostic blog, EG Priest Father Troy Pierce+ in Salt Lake City.

It has been through Fr. Troy's+ efforts that we (and I mean the greater Gnostic Ecclesia) enjoy the EG Liturgical Calendar online, and I'm looking forward to the pocket version which should be available shortly.

Troy+ has some very insightful entries posted, and I look forward to his further contributions.

Anglicanism and Gnosticism

I continue to be fascinated by the ecclesiastical challenges of North American Anglicans, both within the ACC and ECUSA. The critical, conservative minority continually – and with no modicum of malice – levels of a charge of "Gnosticism" against the progressive theology of Bishops such as +Spong and +Griswold, and even those who are at least willing to consider Anglican Christianity as anything other than exclusive, fundamentalist, and literalist.

What the critics are attempting to imply, of course, is that one cannot be both Gnostic and Christian, that Christianity in and of itself is antithetical to the Gnostic world view and practice. Now, I maintain in this that they are demonstrably and manifestly mistaken. I believe I have some credibility in this issue as I am not a Christian defending my Christianity, and my right to it. I am a Gnostic Priest who ministers to those who self-identify with a broad range of religious traditions, with the majority of these considering themselves Christian.

However, the critics also imply that such values as tolerance, innovation in interpretation, and compassion are Gnostic, and in these assertions they are much closer to the truth. So instead of dismissing the conservative voices as merely intellectually dishonest and homophobic, let us look at some of the evidence before us.

What follows is a "spine" of theology by +John Shelby Spong, and it does seem to me to have profoundly Gnostic elements, in its rejection of third-party literalism and its emphasis on individual respect.

The 12 Theses of +John Shelby Spong

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

Readers may also wish to check out The Koinonia Statement.

As a long time admirer of +Spong and +James Pike, I can certainly empathize with those who likewise see strains of Gnostic thought within the theological work of the contemporary Anglican Episcopate – although where we differ greatly is that I see this as being a valuable contribution to the Christian tradition and an honouring the thinkers of the early Church.

What I would love to see - and what I perceive as the ultimate trajectory of +Spong's work – is for a contemporary, compassionate Christianity to take its rightful place in the continuum of the ancient Eucharistic Religion of the Incarnation, dating back countless millennia. Christianity is merely the caretaker of the deeper liturgical tradition which predates the Christian myth.

And my ego is sufficiently large and voracious enough to wonder one day if I shall be credited with coining the term cryptognosticism to describe the mystics and theological pioneers of ECUSA and the ACC.

Narnia Targeted To Christians

The film adaptation of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, the first installment of the Chronicles Of Narnia series, is being marketed strongly to a Christian audience. What do you think?

Marta Osburn,
Travel Agent
"Do they realize this movie is all about people coming out of closets?"

Harry Sousa,
Solderer
"It's high time we Christians fought back against those Hollywood elitists with our own movie about sorcery and witchcraft."

– The Onion

Mission Accomplished

Once he was a man like most others – a worldly man, seduced and jaded by material things.  But then , after a tragic accident, Stephen Strange discovered a separate reality, a higher plane of occult forces in eternal conflict.  Vowing to be Earth's first line of defense against magical menace, the erstwhile hero became Earth's foremost Master of the Mystic Arts!

Z and I were Christmas shopping and I came across a Dr. Strange action figure. I picked it up, the 8 year old in me going "Wow!", and I told her that when I was a kid I wanted to be Dr. Strange.

She replied, "Well, you can cross that one off your list. Mission Accomplished."

Violet Firth 1890 - 1946

Today is the birthday of Violet Firth, better know as Dion Fortune, the Gnostic, occultist, author, and psychotherapist.

"To say that a thing is imaginary is not to dispose of it in the realm of mind, for the imagination, or the image making faculty, is a very important part of our mental functioning. An image formed by the imagination is a reality from the point of view of psychology; it is quite true that it has no physical existence, but are we going to limit reality to that which is material? We shall be far out of our reckoning if we do, for mental images are potent things, and although they do not actually exist on the physical plane, they influence it far more than most people suspect."

Forune's symbol-rich novels The Goat Foot God, The Winged Bull, and The Sea Priestess stand both as guilty pleasures and serious testaments to the power of the invoked imagination, More information available at The Society of the Inner Light.

EGINA Reader Map

This is a map of the 100 readers this blog welcomed on Saturday. Mauritius! Singapore, North Korea! The green dots represent the last 10 readers at the time of generating the map. I also take great pleasure in the fact that I can identify some of these dots as people whom I have befriended despite not yet having met. I was interviewed about a dozen years ago on the impact of the internet on minority religions, and I made some comment about "the only Rastafarian in Moose Jaw", about how the 'net was making geographic isolation surmountable for religious communities, particularly those on the fringes of society, such as Baha'i in the Islamic world.

When I look at an excellent resource such as The Palm Tree Garden, or reply to the thrice-weekly plea "Where can I find a Gnostic near me?" I am grateful for the connections that the gnostiblogosphere has afforded us.

Is God a Person?

Let me begin by saying I don't believe in atheists. This is not to say that I do not personally subscribe to atheism, which I do not, but rather that I do not believe that there are any real atheists. I certainly have met a few individuals claiming to be same, but I have also met individuals who have confessed with utmost sincerity to being from outer space.

The conversation usually goes like this:

Self-Proclaimed Atheist: I'm an atheist.
Me: What do you mean by that?
SPA: Well, I don't believe in God.
Me: So what do you believe in?
SPA: Well, goodness, being kind. Love. Personal responsibility.
Me: So, no intangibles? Synchronicity? Non-local phenomenon? Intuition? Divinity?
SPA: Well sure, but not, you know, GOD god, like in the Bible.
Me: How about God in the Bhagvad Gita?
SPA: Well, that's cool, sure, I mean, God as a seven-headed cobra and stuff, with an elephant head. But not really, not, y'know, the guy on the throne with the white beard keeping track of every time you pick your nose or whatever.
Me: So, how about the Force, in Star Wars? An impersonal connecting quality, like nature only transcending time and space?
SPA: Sure, I believe in that. Or maybe the Goddess, that seems cool too.
Me: Sounds like God to me.
SPA: Sure, just not the old dude in the Bible.

Busted, you self-contradicting self-proclaimed atheists! The big remaining question is: who would believe in the old dude from the Bible? If God is in fact a transcendent Force – the existence of which is easier to prove than to disprove –, a process rather than a person, what is that old dude doing there, anyway?

The Thomist definition of a "person" is "an individuated substance with reason". An amoeba would qualify if it could think, and not just think like a hamster, running mazes and dreaming of fresh straw, but actually reasoning and pondering the nature of existence. Cogito ergo sum.

So, can you individuate the substance of God? Can you take "the Force" out of the equation and set it aside and ask it questions? I don't think so. As I understand it, the Divine is a relationship both within and without existence. In this view I am a panentheist.

The word "person" properly denotes a characterization, a mask rather than the wearer. It's a very different idea from the vernacular use of the word (kind of like the disastrous differences in the scientific and mundane use of the word "theory"), in which "person" essentially is taken to mean "some guy".

In Gnosticism, the idea that the Divine is "some guy" is considered idolatrous if not blasphemous. Where Gnostic texts deal with the subject, there's usually a kind of respectful abstraction, a tradition identical to the Hermetic. The Light. Understanding. An Abiding Presence Demanding Awe. The Divine is just too big to fit into one Personality. In fact when a Divine Personality does emerge in Gnostic literature, it is characterized by its flaws and failures, from Wisdom Herself to the Mad Scientist that is Her bastard offspring – the same Mad Scientist who is associated with the "bearded old dude", whom Blake referred to disparagingly as "Old Nobodaddy". God as "some guy" gives us the heebie jeebies.

The Gnostic application of the Trinity – three Person with one underlying reality – refers more to the Greek idea, that of masks. At some point talking about the great intangible godhead begins to generate diminishing returns; we need a scaffolding of sorts to reflect on our encounters with the constructs of God. So we have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, or the Pleroma (Fullness), the Logos (Word), and the Pneuma Hagion (the Holy Spirit who is Sophia, and the Shekhina). But these are visible expressions of the wake of the Divine rather than the Ultimate Holy Hoo-Ha itself, like concentric ripples from a stone in the water, but not the stone per se.

The Kemetic religion, which is my current favourite nominee for the ur-religion of the West and the origin specifically of Gnosticism, viewed the Divine as similarly vast, although the "names" or expressions of god are numerous, mercurial and fickle. These Netjeru (names), whether Isis or Anubis or Set or Hathor (or more properly, Aset, Yinepu, Set or Het-hert) are all facets of one gem, one big, BIG godhead. Many people are disoriented upon the discovery that ancient Egypt was, in a manner, monotheistic.

A similar challenge is easily overcome in a modern Christian church – one sees a vine, a lamb, an infant, a man, and a suffering convict, each of whom represent an aspect of one single character. The Jesus story would suffer greatly were we to exclude all but say the child of the manger, even though the complete story could be told using that one περσονα as a starting point. We impoverish the story with such single-minded exclusion, just as we do when we culturally see the Divine in "his" guise as the Architect, an omniscient, judging Santa Claus of a person.

Ironically it is the richness and multiplicity of symbol, of metaphor, that presents us with a way out of obsessive idolatry. Give me my burning bush, my dove, my tetragrammaton, my oroboros, my olive branch and wreath of laurel. Each of these are in a way a person, a mask of God, concealing as much as they reveal. Putting all our eggs in one basket, iconically speaking, results in just the kind of idolatry that the iconoclasm of Judaism, for example, was designed to overcome. I find both options equally fitting, and equally practical; the diversity of symbolism coexisting with the inexact and deliberately intangible language of Hermetic abstraction.

More Blakey Goodness

Not one but two recommendations within two hours for this book, one from Bishop Rosamonde (EGM) and the other from Father Troy( EG). Looks like I'll be ordering this one first.

I have tremendous regard for Dr. Singer, her death last year was a great loss to the community, and I deeply regret never having met her. Her "Gnostic Book of Hours" has over the years been a great consolation to me, and was my first exposure to the Hymn of the Pearl, which is among my favourites of the Gnostic Gospels.