FT260

Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes exploring Gnostic­ism will recognise the paradox: the essence of it can be stated simply – to approach God through personal experience rather than through the mediation of a priest and ritual – but the mythology and cosmo­logy of it are contradictory, complex and practic­ally incomprehensible. I’ve tried to get my head around aeons and archons and the pleroma for years and have ended up baffled.

A Welsh-born former busker (with a harp!) who has recently returned from 10 years near the Sierra Nevada mountain range in northern California and now lives in Dublin may have the answers I’ve been looking for. Andrew Phillip Smith (right) has been writing on Gnosticism for some years, [1] but clearly faced the same problems that hit every­one else – so decided to do something about it.

“Like many other writers, I tend to write the books I want to read,” he told me. “Nobody has ever produced a dictionary of Gnosticism in the two centuries since Gnostic texts were rediscovered and began to be studied seriously. So I’ve compiled something that will be really useful to anyone with any interest whatsoever in Gnosticism, but that I can use myself in my further research.” [2]

His dictionary has nearly 1,700 entries, some of them revealing the incredible depth of detail in Gnostic mythology: I’m delighted to discover that Abrana and Boabel were angels who animated the toes of the left foot and right foot respectively, according to the Secret Book of John. Amongst this mass of myth, what is the basic story? Smith explains:

“The essence of the cosmology is of an ultimate God who emanates divine beings (æons) who populate the divine realm. At the limits of the divine realm a catastrophe occurs and the youngest aeon Sophia falls from grace, gives birth to her bastard offspring Yaldabaoth, the demiurge, who fashions the material world and, with his archons (Greek, ‘petty rulers’) creates mankind, who live in a state of spiritual sleep or ignorance. But humans contain a spark from the divine realm, planted in them despite the wishes of the demiurge, and saviour or redeemer figures are sent from the Pleroma to guide mankind and teach them how to achieve Gnosis. The salvation of mankind coincides with the redemption of Sophia.”

But how does that possibly have any application to today?

“The Gnostic myth is particularly appealing in modern times if we start from the position of the ignorance of mankind trapped in an illusory world by hostile forces,” Smith says. “I do believe it’s important to read the original texts, despite their difficulties and irrelevances. The Gnostic tradition was a creative one, and each writer adapted, embellished or refashioned the basic myth, so I have no problem with the creation of modern Gnostic myths – the modern Gnostic may even have a duty to do so.”

The demiurge is not a half-God or half-maker, as many people think; the word means “craftsman, artisan” (literally “public worker”); “demi” here comes from the Greek demos, the people, not from the Latin demi, half. So the demiurge who Gnostics believe created the world was an artisan – but something of a jerry-builder.

I’ve often thought that Gnosticism has the most logical solution to the problem of theodicy – why a good, loving, caring God allows pain and suffering in the world: not just man-made evil like robb­ery, rape and murder, but natural nastinesses such as earthquakes, the tse-tse fly and the common cold. The answer’s simple: it wasn’t the good God who made the world but the bad God – or perhaps the mad God, because there are two main versions of Gnosticism.

“Is it better to see the demiurge as a wholly malign influence (which could be a bit paranoid) as the Sethian Gnostics did, or more as an ignorant and limited but redeemable being, as did the Valent­inians?” Smith asks. Both are covered in some depth in his dictionary.

So, who are today’s successors to the Gnostics?

“That’s a tricky one because it depends what your criteria are: historical continuity, similarity of worldview, or whether the successors are in a similar relationship to mainstream Christianity. There are many contemporary Gnostic churches, some of which go back to the Gnostic Revival in 19th-century France which had affinities to Theosophy and the Independent Catholic movement. They have a strong sacramental focus, use the full range of available Gnostic scriptures and are generally quite eclectic. In terms of contemporary spiritual teachings, I might argue that the Gurdjieff Work has, at least in its psychological and cosmological side, a strong Gnostic affinity, with an emanationist cosmology, and its central notion of human sleep. And of course, Jung had a strong interest in Gnosticism and there are all sorts of people and movements who may claim to be Gnostic in the broader sense.”

In a sense, mystics in all religions are also Gnostics; and then there are the Mandæans, ancient Gnostics still, just, surviving today in Iraq – but that’s another story.

Notes
1 Andrew Phillip Smith: The Gnostics: History, Tradition, Scriptures, Influence, Watkins, 2008.
2 Andrew Phillip Smith: A Dictionary of Gnosticism, Quest Books, 2009.