DeConick A.D

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THE PI OF POLITICS
communities by promoting a new, previously unknown God who wanted
nothing whatsoever to do with traditional sacrifices and other public ceremonies.
For Gnostics, the practice of religion was not about civic duty
and moral obligation but about personal therapy and triumph. The human
being and its needs surpassed the old god; indeed, it overturned
them and their earthly representatives. This transtheistic perspective not
only cut across Judaism but also laid waste to the Roman cult.
Gnostic groups emerge on the margins of religion, within social and
political landscapes that have been unkind to the people who join their
communities (see Rudolph 1983, 282–92; Grant 1966, 33–37, 118; Dahl
1981, 689–712; Smith 2004; Segal 1977, 262–65; Yamauchi 1978; Wilson
1995, 206; Pearson 1997, 120; Green 1985). In the case of the ancient
world, Roman colonization laid waste to native populations and native
religions, creating social, political, and religious landscapes of severe marginalization.
These landscapes were fertile ground for Gnostic countercultural
movements.
The American historian Theodore Roszak, who coined the term counterculture
, thought that countercultures emerge when people can no longer
align their moral compass and ideal visions with society and become
alienated within a society’s institutions (Roszak 1968, 95–96). Roszak
defines the essence of the counterculture, in psychological terms, as an
assault on the reality of the ego. The counterculture instead “transcends
the consciousness of the dominant culture and runs the risk of appearing
to be a brazen exercise in perverse nonsense” (55). It is like the invasion
of the centaurs that Apollo must drive back (although sometimes
Apollo does not win). It gains its vision and power from that moral and
imaginative level of human personality that lies deeper than our ego or
intellective consciousness. Although Roszak resists naming it anything but
“non- intellective consciousness,” he thinks this deep aspect of human personality
provides our guiding vision and ultimately determines for us what
we regard as sanity.
Roszak argues that the counterculture is reflected in any figure or
movement that privileges non-intellective knowledge and personal visions
of truth over cultural constructions of knowledge. In this way, Roszak
was able to take the question of counterculture, relative to the hippie
generation he was studying, and suspend it phenomenologically to embrace
what, for him, is at stake: the spirit of humanity that underlies social