The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

encouraged all sorts of more radical and heretical religions. One heresy
in particular, radical or extreme Gnosticism, led to many violent deaths.
The difference between Hermeticism and Gnosticism was far
more than terminology. Hermeticism conceived man as a rough stone,
the rude material for perfection. A philosophical chisel knocked-off his
rough edges, crafting him as a perfect human for the cosmic Temple. It
was analogous to the stonemason producing a perfect cubic ashlar for a
worldly Temple. This was the work of the supreme creator and goes back
to Plato's Demiurgos. 744 Hermetic beliefs were uplifting and life
affirming. Man is the image of the macrocosm and his body is the
garment and weapon of his soul. 745 The body is an essential and
indispensable part of the Good Creation. Celibacy and asceticism are not
revered but consistently renounced. Cosmic Zoroastrianism holds the
same belief.
Radical Gnostics, such as Manichaeists and Cathars instead
absorbed naive dualism, which lacked order from a vertically integrative
element. Scholars also call this Radical Gnosticism anti-cosmic dualism.
Through this odd framework, they perceived the radical Demiurge, or god
of the material world, was the god of the Old Testament Yahweh. The
Gnostics regarded him as mad and evil in the same way as the Egyptian
Set and Zoroastrianism Ahriman was intrinsically evil. The major
similarity was that both Yahweh and Ahriman received the material world
until the End-time.
Radical Gnostic religions twisted the elegant duality of pure
Zoroastrianism, called Monarchical or Cosmic Zoroastrianism into a
delaminated and intrinsically anarchical framework. They regarded the
material world and the body as bad and the soul as good. As the body
was bad, procreation was abhorrent. Death was welcome as a casting
away of worldly baggage. 746 This ascetic existence is the complete
antithesis of hermetic belief.
Today, we occasional see a cult falling into the same radical
Gnostic quicksand of soul is good and body is bad. In the 1990s, this led
to mass suicides in the Order of the Solar Temple and Heaven's Gate.
The seeds of the association of body with evil seem to have arisen
with the Thracians who strongly believed in the beauty of death and
immortality of the soul. 747 They celebrated death in their Dionysian or
Bacchic Mysteries. However, the Thracians showed legendary bravery
on the battlefield because of this preoccupation with death. This
characteristic was so attractive to the kings of soldier states that it became
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