Gnosticism

Author: Leandro Alegsa Creation date: November 13, 2022

Gnosticism is a group of religious ideas from around the 1st century. "Gnosis" is the ancient Greek word for "knowledge", but now more closely means "esoteric knowledge". Gnostic ideas were a main part of early Christianity before being persecuted by other Christians. Gnostic ideas are also found in sects of Judaism and Islam, as well as in alchemy and other kinds of esotericism.

The word "Gnostic" was mostly used by people who were against these ideas. For this reason, some researchers have said that Gnosticism is a false grouping of many separate religious movements. There are many problems for people who research Gnosticism:

Main features of gnosis

Kurt Rudolph (1990) outlines five essentials to order or characterize gnosis:

Dualism, there is an opposition between good and evil, and there is a transcendent, hidden god and a lower creator god (demiurge).
Cosmogony, also in the result dualities are described, light and darkness, spirit and flesh; evil was present in creation from the beginning
Soteriology, a redemption is approached in gnosis via the path of realization of the dualistic nature of the world.
Eschatology, the goal of the believer is to move into the place of good, to recognize the primacy of the spiritual dimension in one's existence
Community and cult

The following theses belong to the central contents of gnosis:

There is a perfect all-embracing God.
By an arbitrary or self-referential act in the Aeons an imperfect God comes into existence. This is called Demiurge or Creator-God, because he in turn creates the material universe on his own authority.

The Demiurge is identified in many Gnostic writings with YHWH, the God of the Tanakh, the Old Testament of the Bible.
Therefore the Gnostics assume that Jesus of Nazareth is not the son of the God of the Jews, but - as an incarnation of the Christ - the child of the perfect Godhead, thus understood spiritually, not physically (Christology).

Likewise, the Demiurge creates man and transmigrates him into ever denser matter.
Creation (and man), however, fundamentally carry within them the principle of the original perfect Deity from which they cannot be separated.
Some gnostic currents see the material world including the human body as "evil", others put the emphasis on the inherent spiritual principle, which enables the way back to spiritual perfection respectively unity.
The indwelling spiritual principle, also called pneuma, spark or seed, must become conscious to the human being in distinction to the psyche in order to be able to recognize and release the attachments to the material world.

A clear summary of the Gnostic worldview can be found in the article on the Apocryphon of John. This can by no means be generalized for the whole "gnosis", but it applies at least to one (or more) of its larger currents (Sethian gnosis / Barbelognosis).

Later influences of or references to gnostic traditions

Gnostic elements were adopted in medieval Europe by alchemists, the Bogomils and the Cathars, and in the Islamic world by Druze and Yezidis, among others. Spiritualism was also associated with Gnostic traditions.

In the 19th century, Mormonism and later Theosophy adopted various Gnostic traits. For the 20th century, some influences on anthroposophy, the Rosicrucians, the Grail movement, and the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung are discussed.

The historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke emphasizes the influence of Gnostic and Manichean thought patterns on ideologies of racist esotericism, for example in Ariosophy or in Miguel Serrano.

In particular, using a concept of gnosis that is not defined in terms of religious studies and history, but rather in terms of content, some authors (including psychologists, philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries) have established a connection with "gnosis".

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