Glossary - exWitch Australia (formerly 'Born Again Pagan')

GNOSTICISM

Derived from a Greek word gnosis meaning 'knowledge', the term Gnosticism is applied to a philosophical and religious movement that influenced the Mediterranean world from the first century BC to the third century AD. It expressed itself in a variety of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian forms. Its name is derived from the fact that it promised salvation through a secret knowledge or understanding of reality possessed by its devotees.

Previously known mostly from the writings of its Christian opponents, gnosticism is now be studied in a collection of original documents found near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.

Despite the complex diversity of Gnostic groups and their teachings, the basic doctrines of gnosticism formed an identifiable pattern of belief and practice.

The Early Christian Gnostics saw the world about them as profoundly evil, as the real hell, and life on earth as a sentence served in a prison. Known as the 'Luciferian Doctrine', it turned orthodox Christian belief on its head...

If the world is evil, then the power which made it and rules it must be evil too, and some of the Gnostics identified this evil power as the God of the Jews, who is described as creating the world in the book of Genesis and whose behaviour in the Old Testament they found impossible to reconcile with Christian principles.

The good God, they said, lives far away in some distant heaven and we on earth are in bond-age to the evil Yahweh. As we have seen, they could draw some support for this opinion from the New Testament.

Gnostics generally regarded Jesus as a Saviour sent by the good God to rescue men from enslavement to evil, but the identifi-cation of Yahweh as the evil power naturally turned the Old Testament upside down.

Patriachs and prophets and servants of Yahweh turned into villains, and Cain, Esau, the Sodomites and other opponents of Yahweh became heroes. The serpent of Eden was now a messenger from the good God, sent to bring Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil so that their eyes would be opened to the evil nature of Yahweh's creation. Some Gnostics, or so their Christian antagonists said, attacked Jesus as the evil Son of the evil Father and glorified Judas Iscariot for betraying him.

If God the Father was an evil deity, then it could be deduced that the Ten Commandments, and the other moral rules laid down by him were also evil, intended to keep men in subjection to him. Some Gnostics led austere lives of self-denial to disentangle themselves from the wicked world, but others were accused of attempting to escape from bondage to evil by breaking all conventional moral rules.

Some said that once a man had received the gnosis, meaning 'knowledge', had understood the true nature of things, he could indulge in all his lusts and desires without fear of corruption.

Writing in the late 2nd century, St Irenaeus accused one group of Gnostics of maintaining that the soul could only free itself from the Devil's world by exhausting every possibility of human experience, by doing 'all those things which we dare not either speak or hear of, nay which we must not even conceive in our thoughts'.

A pervasive dualism underlay much of Gnostic thought. Good and evil, light and darkness, truth and falsehood, spirit and matter were opposed to one another in human experience as being and nonbeing.

The created universe and human experience are characterized by a radical disjunction between the spiritual, which was real, and the physical, which was illusory. This disjunction resulted from a cosmic tragedy, described in a variety of ways by Gnostic mythology, as a consequence of which sparks of deity became entrapped in the physical world.

These could be freed only by saving knowledge that was revealed to a spiritual elite by a transcendent messenger from the spirit world, variously identified as Seth (one of the sons of Adam), Jesus, or some other figure.

Renunciation of physical desires and strict Asceticism, combined with mystical rites of Initiation and purification were thought to liberate the immortal souls of believers from the prison of physical existence.

Reunion with divine reality was accomplished after a journey of the soul through intricate systems of hostile powers.

RESOURCES FROM OTHER CHRISTIAN SITES:
(Opens in a New Window)
GNOSTICISM (PDF Article) at Ankerberg Theological Institute

PLEASE NOTE:
One of the major problems with 'defining' Paganism and/or its beliefs and practices is that it is an 'organic' movement, in that it is undergoing constant change and re-evaluation from within, and as such any 'one-size-fits-all' approach to understanding Paganism will be found wanting.

Due to the very 'organic' nature of Paganism, and the many differing Paths and Traditions within it, in many cases no one definition may be universally accepted by all Pagans. Therefore, where such cases of possible conflicting and/or contradictory meanings of certain terms occur I have endevoured to give not only the generally accepted meaning, but also any major 'variations' in belief and/or practice.

Christians who believe this difference in meaning of certain key terms, beliefs and practices to be unique to Paganism need to remember that such conflicts also arise within the Body of Christ - the Church. Take for instance the differing practices amongst Christians concerning Baptism and the different attitudes towards women in the clergy.

- Jean-Luc