DeConick A.D

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GNOSTIC ALTERED STATES
being, our deep self, experiences constant anxiety and terror right from
the moment we are born.
It is nothing we have done that makes us this way. There is no sin committed
that makes humanity fallen, depraved, and deserving of suffering.
There is no “bad karma” that we created for ourselves in a past life and
now face. This separation anxiety, this primal trauma, is a deep part of who
we are, and it connects us all like a red thread. The everyday sufferings
that we face are only surface evidence of a much deeper existential problem
that must be dealt with before we can live healthier lives.
The Gnostic response was to heal this problem by developing therapeutic
ceremonies of religious initiation. Although from group to group
there is wild divergence in the details and arrangements of these ceremonies,
as we will see in the five case studies in the next chapter, the types
of ceremonies performed by Gnostic groups cluster around a few primary
objectives.
For instance, there are ceremonies that awaken the unconscious or
sleep ing spirit. These ceremonies often are performed as virtual underworld
journeys. Purgation rituals, performed as celestial ascents through
demonic territories, had a cathartic function, ridding a person of fears,
terrors, passions, and bad intentions by forcing him or her to face them
one by one. Because the newly awakened spirit was only a fledgling, a neophyte,
it had to be individuated and fully matured before it could take its
place among the transcendent divinities. So Gnostics developed rituals of
maturation in which the ascending spirit was gradually transformed into
a full divinity. These maturation ceremonies usually took place as ecstatic
ascents into the transcendent realms. Gnostics also put into place rituals
that integrated the fully individuated spirit with the source of ultimate
reality, the primal God whose coming into being started it all.
It is unclear from the fragmented nature of the literature whether all
Gnostic groups offered each of these types of rituals or if the ceremonies
were progressive, so that the underworld journey was the first ceremony
that the initiate underwent and the integration ceremony the last. Given
what we know about the mystery religions, however, it is likely that most
Gnostic groups had some version of all four ceremonies and that they
performed them as a progressive, even lifelong project of therapy for the
members of their groups.