DeConick A.D

181
GNOSTIC ALTERED STATES
Gnostics perceived their initiations as medicine for the damaged soul,
and some heavenly helper like Jesus as their physician. Gnostic initiation
worked to make initiates aware of their unconscious selves as the source
of both their greatest anxieties and their greatest power. Their initiations
were largely cathartic; initiates faced their ultimate demons and conquered
their deepest anxieties and fears. The process healed the broken
and alienated self through a process of self-actualization. Gnostic initiation
prompted the individuation and empowerment of the self beyond the
impermanent ego, and then its integration into the transcendence from
which it came. All in all, the experience was an ecstatic and erotic one.
Gnostic Incubation
The Apostolic Catholic Christians who write about the Gnostics report
that, almost universally, the different Gnostic groups had secret mysteries,
ineffable or unspeakable teachings and practices that were delivered
to the initiates “in silence” and were intended to remain in silence. By
this, the Catholics meant that the Gnostics took pledges, often under
oath, to never divulge the Gnostic mysteries to those who were not initiated.
Apostolic Catholic authors state that Gnostic initiation did not start
until after the initiates had intentionally committed to keeping secret the
mysteries they were about to learn. Rightly or wrongly, their critics understood
this culture of silence to reflect the obligatory silence that was
required of the initiate into the Greek mysteries of Demeter and Dionysus
or those of the Egyptian Isis.
Tertullian, a Christian lawyer in Carthage, sums up this attitude when
he describes their earnestness to learn “and be introduced to true quiet”
(Tertullian, Valentinians 11.4). He says that the Valentinian Gnostics configure
themselves like Eleusinian worshippers, consecrated by a “profound
silence.” The only thing celestial about them, he jokes, is their silence
(1.3). Tertullian goes so far to say that the Gnostic God is one that imposes
silence on his faithful (9.1). The Apostolic Catholics, including Tertullian,
assume that this Gnostic orientation toward silence has more to
do with Gnostic mysteries being abominations unfit to be spoken than
with the likelihood that the Gnostic mysteries had nonverbal, experiential
components.
It is certainly likely that various Gnostic groups might not want their
initiatory mysteries divulged to the uninitiated, but I doubt that this is the