DeConick A.D

68
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
In order to do this successfully, the first Gnostics developed elaborate
training programs that relied on bodily endurance and intellectual prowess.
Like other ecstatics, they believed that the human body could not
journey to the other realms, whether hell, heaven, or the wholly otherworld.
They needed a different body that could invade nonhuman realms.
Although they taught a progressive transformation of the body, the
transfiguration of the body is less about taking on a new form and more
about shedding the accumulated layers of human physicality, the weighty
bodies of flesh and psyche, to recover and release the glorious spirit in
residence. It was more about self-realization and actualization than a
metamorphosis from one state to another. Their concept of transfiguration
was understood in terms of uncloaking to reveal purer and purer
bodies of light.
So their initiatory rites served to teach a person to progressively unveil
the power of the spirit hidden within, to conquer the gods who ruled hell
and the skies, and to journey along the safest route back to the supreme
God. The journey was about the therapeutic growth of the divine self and
its reunion with God, when our tragic human experience of brokenness
and alienation is cured.
In Gnostic communities, the initiated were called the Perfected. They
were the people who, following their ecstatic quest, had returned to earth
to tell others about their experience. They considered themselves fully
transformed, already resurrected, and more powerful than the traditional
gods, including the biblical God YHWH. Because they believed that they
had conquered the gods with their power, they conducted themselves as
healers and miracle workers. The gods did their bidding, not the other
way around.
Pilgrims in Egypt
This focus on ritual ascent to the supreme God beyond the cosmos points
us again to the religious buffer of Egypt, which had a solid reputation in
the ancient world as the source of the oldest religious truths. It would
not be an exaggeration to say that there was deference in the Greco-
Roman world to Egypt as the site of spiritual knowledge. This deference
emerges in the literature as a sort of Egyptomania (Frankfurter 1998, 218).
“Greeks,” Heliodorus comments in his ancient travelogue about Egypt,
“find all Egyptian lore and legend irresistibly attractive” ( Aethiopica 2.27).