Adds Jonas, and movements all joined in the "Platonic underworld"of gnosticism.The gnostic systems compounded everything_ Exactly from this standpoint, gnosticism must beoriental mythologies, astrological doctrines, Ira- understood not as a legitimate social phenomenon butnian theology, elements of Jewish traditiom, as a political-intelligence deployment by the oligarchicalwhether Bibilical, rabbinical, or occult, the wntwllers of the cult enemy of Christianity.Christian salvation-eschatological, Platonic termsThe Isis cult and its sister cults were determinedand concepts.58 to destroy Christianity from the inside. Gnosticism,by adopting the protective coloration of being aAt the time, the gnostic movement brought to- quasi- or pseudo-Christian sect, used that capabilitygether everyone who today would associate himself to try to introduce the ancient belief structure of theor herself with the so-called "counterculture," and cults back into the Christian movement. For instance,the Aquarian Conspiracy. The ancient equivalents of where Christianity had established the potentthe women's liberation movement, the gay rights father-figure God as its deity in contradistinction tomovement, the ecology movement, "consciousness- the female goddesses of the cults, the gnostics immeraising,"sensitivity training, EST, transactional anal- diately revived the fearfulfigure of an insane goddessysis, libertarianism, and dozens of other related cults as the central personage inthe sect's pantheon. In an54 August 1980 / CAMPAIGNER
early gnostic text, Thunder, Perfect Mind, we find the "emptiness," man was held in bondage by the evilfollowing horrifying self-description of the goddess: spirits that ruled that sphere. The two worlds wereconsidered utterly alien to each other.I am the honored one and the scorned one. Further, according to the typical gnostic idea, atI am the whore and the holy one. a certain point in the creation, a female emanation ofI am the wife and the virigin .... God called Sophia (Wisdom) "fell" out of the pleromaI am the barren one, and many are her sons.of 'the heavens into the kenoma; this was the "fallenI am the silence that is incomprehensible. Thought of God." By falling, Sophia brought aI am the utterance of my name.pneuma (spirit) of the divine world into the degradedworld of mankind• and creation, and that pneuma wasOr again, from the Trimorphic Primal Thought: distributed among men and women as a sort of"spark" of the divine. Fearing that two such differentI am androgynous. I am both Mother and Father, natures must not be mixed, God sent "his only son"since I copulate with myself, and with those who in the form of another Aeon clown to earth to bringlove me.... I am the womb that gives shape to back the lost Sophia and the pneuma, and to reunitethe All. I am Meirothea, the glory of the Mother. the divine spark with the pleroma again.A rough, perverted parallel with the Christ storyFrom this standpoint, the gnostic "Trinity," as can easily be detected here.opposed to the Christian trinity of God as Father- But according to the gnostic view, it was the dutySon-Spirit, was described by the gnostics in the of each man and woman to eventually purge them-Apocryphon ofJohn as follows: "I am the Father. I am selves of that divine pneuma within them so that itthe Mother. I am the Son." Gnostics asserted that: could return to God. Because mankind was composedof the world of Darkness and was therefore essentiallyHeaven and earth have a shape similar to the evil, the gnostics recommended that mankind mustwomb, and if anyone wants to investigate this, let deliberately degrade itself by consciously doing evil,him carefully examine the pregnant womb of any in order to expel thepneuma back to God. Such acts ofliving creature, and he will discover an image of self-degradation were _sually performed by a cultthe heavens and the earth, priestess in sado-masochistic rites.Thus,, in the gnostic view, moral law as suchdoesSuch hideousness was also carried over into the not exist. Man is not redeemed by "becoming likestory of Jesus as recounted by the gnostic "Chris- unto God," as the Christians said, but by exactly thetians." The forged Gospel of Philip purports to recount opposite process.the story of Jesus by noting that "the companion of As already mentioned, the Constant companion ofthe Savior is Mary Magdalene, but Christ loved her Simon Magus was a woman called Helena, whommore than all the disciples and used to kiss her often Simon claimed to have discovered in a whorehouse inon the mouth, and the rest of the disciples were Tyre, and who, according to him, was a recentoffended by it .... ,,_9 incarnation of a fallen "Thought" of God, redeemedWhat, then, was the gnostic principle? What uni- by Simon, who said that he was the messenger sent byfled virtually every gnostic system was their belief in God to redeem Helena.a radical dualism. Like the ancient Oriental cults, the In the sermons of Simon, he described Helen asgnostics asserted that the entire universe was divided symbolic of the degradation and suffering that hisinto spheres of Light and Darkness. Each sphere was followers would have to endure. In language thatruled independently of the other, although all good explicitly revealed how Helena represented the accuderivedfrom the sphere of Light, while evil resided mulated centuries of female goddesses of the cult,in the world of Darkness. But, in the gnostic system, Simon announced that Helena was the literal emboditherefore,as under the Stoic belief structure, progress ment of the famous Whore of Babylon denounced sowas impossible, passionately by St. John the Divine. Said Simon,For the gnostics, the transcendental world of describing her incarnations:Light and "fullness" was separated from mankind byan unbreachable gulf, and man was condemned per- And she suffered all manner of abuse from them,manently to live out his life in the world of matter, that she might not return upward to her Father,the terrestrial sphere of Darkness. In the pleroma ( = and this went so far that she was even enclosed in"fullness"), God and His Aeons, or angels, existed in human flesh and migrated for centuries fromethereal purity, while in the kenoma, the world of vesselto vesselinto different female bodies....CAMPAIGNER / August 1980 55
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