DeConick A.D

79
SUPERPOWERS AND MONSTERS
let, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap buildings in a single
bound. Look up in the sky. Is it a bird? Or a plane? No. It’s Superman.
Pagan Gnosticism and the Hermetics
Like us, the Gnostics, too, had their superpowers and their monsters. The
stories that they constructed to express their newfound spirituality were
classic pageants of trickery, skirmishes, and defeat, featuring the struggle
of powerful gods and monsters for control of humans and their affairs.
Humanitarian gods descending from alien worlds, ascending transfigured
humans, incognito identities, clandestine plans, secret knowledge, and
feats of magic all are standard fare in their stories. The good god and his
emissaries fight to triumph over evil and to liberate humanity from the
monsters and their tricks, so that humans can assume their true station as
gods themselves. Like us, the Gnostics expressed and spread their truth in
the powerful language of story and myth.
For the Gnostics, however, these stories were not comic book fiction or
Hollywood movie magic (see Kripal 2011). These stories actually narrated
the reality beneath all that is going on around us. Gnostic truth isn’t so
much that our surroundings are illusory but that, behind it all, something
bigger is happening, some reality of which most of us are unaware most
of the time. What is going on behind the scenes of our normal lives? A
cosmic power struggle between good and evil, and the fate of the human
being as slave or free, as impotent or empowered, hangs in the balance.
The Gnostic story took many shapes as it was popularized by the ancient
people to express their novel countercultural spirituality with its emphasis
on the divine human. Fantastic versions of the story surged across
the ancient religious world, forging new pathways in the conventional
network of religious thought and practice. By the early second century
CE, the power of its countercultural current had already carved two new
pathways—one pagan, another biblical—across the old Nile delta and into
the Mediterranean world. Gnostic spirituality had gone viral.
The pagan pathway is a form of Gnostic spirituality that emerges within
religious circles of men and women devoted to Hermes Trismegistus, the
Thrice-Great God. We call these people Hermetics. The biblical pathway
focused on the Jewish hero Seth, the youngest son of Adam and Eve. We