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.