DeConick A.D

59
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
One of the fascinating aspects about the way societies function is that
communities, like individuals, create and share memories. Memory is
not just a function of the individual’s mind but a function that individuals
share with one another as a collective. These communal memories
transcend our individual memories, yet we as individuals still take part
in them.
Scholars call this feature collective memory, or better, collective remembering.
In any given society at any given time there exists a communal
memory buffer, short-term storage of shared knowledge that involves
an individual’s working memory and the collective’s assortment of gossip,
news, written work, dramatic performances, material objects, and the like
(Anastasio et al. 2012).
Thus, the religious buffer is a collective assortment of information
about a variety of religions, revelations, spiritual sensibilities, religious
experiences, and metaphysical speculations. Certain groups in any given
society focus attention on particular items in this buffer, tagging them,
contesting them, and blending them with long-term knowledge already
familiar to them. And sometimes, when the blending occurs at just the
right moment in just the right way, they consolidate, and a new, viable
way of being religious emerges. Because it is useful or meaningful in some
novel way, the memory stabilizes as a new concept and the emergent
spiritual orientation sticks. This is what happened when Gnostic spirituality
came online around the beginning of the first century CE and
provided people with a new way to frame their relationship to the world
and to God.
When we are talking about innovative ideas like Gnostic spirituality
that emerge within the religious buffer, we are not talking about simple
syncretism, when two ideas are associated with one another and are understood
to represent the same thing, as when Isis is understood to be
also the Greek goddess Demeter, or when Zeus is understood to be the
same god as YHWH or Rê. Innovative structures that emerge from the
religious buffer, such as Gnostic spirituality, are about the creation of a
conceptual blend that is totally unique yet entirely contingent upon the
matrix of the religious buffer. In this case, the whole is not the sum of its
parts but something altogether new.
When we examine the complex diversity of Gnostic movements that
arose in the first and early second centuries, we can get a good feel for what
the religious buffer that birthed Gnostic spirituality must have looked like