DeConick A.D

11
INTRODUCTION
as magazines and newspapers. Like the e-book, the Gnostic is an emergent
structure, an innovative concept that some ancient people began to
use to describe a new way to be religious.
The Ideal Characteristics of Gnostic Spirituality
Ancient people understood this new type of spirituality to have certain
ideal attributes. In this book, I present ancient Gnosticism as a form
of spirituality that in ancient memory was associated with five ideal
charac teristics.
The first characteristic is framed around direct experiential knowledge
of a transcendent God, what the Gnostics called gnosis. In these ecstatic
moments, the Gnostics felt immersed in the overwhelming presence of
transcendence, believing that they had been reunited with the very ground
of being. The experience was utterly transforming, a therapy that restored
them to spiritual and psychological wholeness. According to Gnostic stories,
the god they met in ecstasy is the God who lives beyond our universe
in a realm of transcendence. This God is absolute goodness and love.
Second, these ecstatic states were not always unbidden raptures but
were carefully choreographed in terms of ritual. Gnostic spirituality is
oriented toward particular religious practices that were used to prompt
the ecstatic states and unitive experiences of transcendence that Gnostics
pursued. These practices were built around ceremonies of induction or
initiation. They had intense contemplative and incubatory components
as well as virtual dramas that simulated journeys through the underworld
and celestial realms. They were largely cathartic and psychologically
therapeutic.
Third, because they experienced complete unity with the transcendent
God in their initiations, these people were convinced that humans have
an innate spiritual nature that is an extension of this transcendence. It is
the divine embodied in each of us, the transcendent God made immanent
within the human. They called this spark of God the pneuma, or spirit. It
is our permanent immortal aspect, whereas most Gnostics thought that
the psyche, or soul, was mortal. Although the soul survived the death of
the physical body and could be reincarnated or suffer in afterlife purgatories,
it would not live on eternally. Once the universe ceased to exist, our
souls would blip out like extinguished lights.