DeConick A.D

70
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
It is within this religious buffer that Gnostic spirituality first manifests.
At this point, it does not manifest as a religious movement. It is a moment
of epiphany, when a new way of thinking about God and the human
emerges. We can only imagine the moment in a painted crypt of an Egyptian
temple when some religious pilgrims, seeking the truth outside their
native regional or ancestral religions, asked to be taken to meet Atum,
the god of preexistence, whom they had been discussing and learning
about from their Egyptian guru. In their conversations with their guru,
some of the Greek pilgrims may have identified Atum with Plato’s Good,
which dwelled above the zodiac, the whirl of the planets, and the rising
and setting sun. If there were Jews among the pilgrims, they must have
wondered how in heaven’s name their ancestral God YHWH could be
related to Atum.
Although it is true that in later Egyptian traditions Atum is amalgamated
with Rê, the sun god, these pilgrims were not interested in boarding
Rê’s bark like the kings of old. They did not want to shake hands with Rê,
Atum’s cosmic manifestation. They wanted to meet the real Atum, the
father-mother of all the gods and the source of all that exists.
They were not disappointed. Whatever they experienced during those
ecstatic shamanic quests changed them and the face of religion forever.
The religious pilgrims who met Atum in the crypt of an Egyptian temple
were convinced that their unitive experiences with the transcendent God
had renewed their inert spirits, enlivened them with the power of the
primal God, and liberated them from the tyranny of the capricious gods
who ruled the world.
They did not keep this knowledge to themselves. They shared their
experience of the primal God with whoever would listen to them, and
the spirituality they had realized as an epiphany in the crypt was shared.
It began to spread and interact with the frameworks of different religions
throughout the Mediterranean world.
Religion on its Head
Although it is evident that Gnosticism was forged within the fires of ecstatic
spirituality, it also is true that it upset the foundational worldview
of all three of the old types of spirituality—the servant, covenant, and ecstatic
forms—by inverting their message of servitude. The Gnostics, with