DeConick A.D

216
HELL WALKS AND STAR TREKS
bodily silence as an incubatory practice. Once they had become skilled in
incubating silence, he instructed them about reality as it was revealed in
the Gnostic Book of Baruch .
Then, mimicking Elohim, Justin guided the initiates on their sky trek
to the star gate of the Lord, where they chanted the same line from
Psalms: “Open the gates!” When the portal opened they passed through
and were guaranteed a vision of the Good Father. As living spirits like
Elohim, they were offered a drink from a fountain of bubbling life-giving
water and then were told to bathe in it. The bath was magical, ending the
suffering of their divorced spirits by returning them to the realm of the
Good Father and securing them within his realm forever.
Hermaphrodites at Heaven’s Gate
One of the most complex descriptions of a Gnostic group is Hippolytus’s
narrative about the Naassenes ( Refutation 5.6.3–11.1; see Lancellotti
2000). The Naassenes called themselves Gnostics because they said that
they alone had experienced the depths of knowledge. Their other name,
Naassenes, is inspired by the Hebrew word for snake, nachash .
The Naassenes believed that the God from which everything originates
is a serpent living in the moist essence of the primordial universe.
In this belief, we are not far from the Egyptian Atum. In the Naassene
account of reality, the primordial god is a hermaphrodite, whom the Naassenes
call Adamas. Like the Egyptian All-Lord Atum, he is envisioned as
a serpent coiled in water before anything existed. This Primal Man, the
Father-Mother God, is the source of all life, which flows from him like a
river with three currents: the noetic (mental), the psychic (soul), and the
earthly (physical). This river and its currents flow from Adamas’s transcendent
realm down into the realm of Chaos.
The Naassenes or Snake Gnostics were ancient perennialists, people
who promoted the concept that the different religions around the world
all allude to the same universal God. They believed that this serpentine
God Before All Gods is the reality beneath the worship of every god at the
world’s shrines and temples, every religious ceremony, and every mystery
initiation. They believed that their ancestors had recognized an original
god called Primal Man, but that the glory of Primal Man had been tarnished
by trying to capture him-her in statues, temples, and myths.