Gnostic Homilies

[R Crowley the White]

Most of the quotations until further notice will be coming from this book.

The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity by Hans Jonas.​

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“Two beings were at the beginning of the world, the one Light, the other Darkness.” Mani

[Gnosticism and Buddhism, by the way, both emphasize this world of suffering and the working of the soul through aeons of time back to the light. In Christian gnosticism this light is called the Father, among many other names. This is an incredibly poetic group of related religions.]

 

[R Crowley the White]

Wednesday's homily,

“In the Hermetic Corpus we find the exhortation, “Turn ye away from the dark light” (C.H. I. 28), where the paradoxical combination drives home the point that even the light so called in this world is in truth darkness. “For the cosmos is the fulness of evil, God the fulness of good” (C.H. VI. 4); and as “darkness” and “evil,” so is “death” a symbol of the world as such.”

 

[Macrobius]

Will you be reading Elaine Pagels and the _Nag Hammadi Library_ or is that passe now?

 

[R Crowley the White]

Will you be reading Elaine Pagels and the _Nag Hammadi Library_ or is that passe now?

I don’t know about pagels but Nag Hammadi is on the list

 

[R Crowley the White]

“The tribe of souls was transported here from the house of Life” (G 24); “the treasure of Life which was fetched from there” (G 96), or “which was brought here.”

More drastic is the image of falling: the soul or spirit, a part of the first Life or of the Light, fell into the world or into the body. This is one of the fundamental symbols of Gnosticism: a pre-cosmic fall of part of the divine principle underlies the genesis of the world and of human existence in the majority of gnostic systems.

“The Light fell into the darkness” signifies an early phase of the same divine drama of which “the Light shone in the darkness” can be said to signify a later phase. How this fall originated and by what stages it proceeded is the subject of greatly divergent speculations.

Except in Manichaeism and related Iranian types, where the whole process is initiated by the powers of darkness, there is a voluntary element in the downward movement of the divine: a guilty “inclination” of the Soul (as a mythical entity) toward the lower realms, with various motivations such as curiosity, vanity, sensual desire, is the gnostic equivalent of original sin.”

 

[R Crowley the White]

“Gnostic myth is precisely concerned with translating the brute factuality experienced in the gnostic vision of existence, and directly expressed in those queries and their negative answers, into terms of an explanatory scheme which derives the given state from its origins and at the same time holds out the promise of overcoming”

 

[R Crowley the White]

Saturday’s Homily,

“The metaphor of sleep may equally serve to discount the sensations of “life here” as mere illusions and dreams, though nightmarish ones, which we are powerless to control; and there the similes of “sleep” join with those of “erring” and “dread”: What, then, is that which He desires man to think? This: “I am as the shadows and phantoms of the Night.”

[This writing feels like Lovecraft or Poe.]

 

[R Crowley the White]

“For the reader unfamiliar with Mandaean mythology we may just explain that Ruha is the demonic mother of the Planets and as the evil spirit of this world the main adversary of the sons of light.”

“The main weapon of the world in its great seduction is “love.” Here we encounter a widespread motif of gnostic thought: the mistrust of sexual love and sensual pleasure in general. It is seen as the eminent form of man’s ensnarement by the world: “The spiritual man shall recognize himself as immortal, and love as the cause of death””

 

[R Crowley the White]

The Dungeon of the World

“Thus, to retrieve its own, Life in one of its unfallen members once more undertakes to descend into the dungeon of the world, “to clothe itself in the affliction of the worlds” and to assume the lot of exile far from the realm of light.

This we may call the second descent of the divine, as distinct from the tragic earlier one which led to the situationthat now has to be redeemed.

Whereas formerly the Life now entangled in the world got into it by way of “fall,” “sinking,” “being thrown,” “being taken captive,” its entrance this time is of a very different nature: sent by the Great Life and invested with authority, the Alien Man does not fall but betakes himself into the world.”

[This reminds me of Buddhist and Hindu avatars who incarnate ‘down here’ in order to help souls find their way out]

 

[R Crowley the White]

“Having penetrated into terror’s empty spaces, He placed Himself at the head of those who were stripped by Oblivion” (Gosp. of Truth, p. 20, 34-38).

 

[R Crowley the White]

Neoplatonism. Quotes are from “Plotinus: The Simplicity of Vision” by Pierre Hadot


“Plotinian virtue expresses itself in a particular style of life and in a relationship with others that consists of mildness or gentleness. The secret of Plotinian gentleness is to be found in a transformation of one’s whole being, a practice of virtue and contemplation that makes one present to Spirit while not excluding presence to other people, the world, and even the body”

“Presence to the self can thus be identical with presence to others on the condition that one has reached a degree of inwardness sufficient for discovering that the self, the true self, is not situated in corporeal individuality but in the spiritual world, where all beings are within each other, where each is the whole and yet remains himself.”

“By the practice of the virtues, the soul can rise up once more to the Intellect; in other words, to a purely spiritual life.”

“As Hadot has shown in detail, in antiquity philosophy was a style of life: “The philosopher was less a professor than a spiritual guide: he exhorted his charges to conversion, and then directed his new converts—often adults as well as young people—to the paths of wisdom. He was a spiritual adviser”.”

“In his arguments against the Gnostics, Plotinus makes clear that he does not believe that sensible things are evil in themselves; rather it is the concern we have for such things that distracts our attention: “We allow ourselves to be absorbed by vain preoccupations and exaggerated worries . . . [It is this] concern . . . which prevents us from paying attention to the spiritual life which we unconsciously live””

 

[R Crowley the White]

Plotinus

“He situates himself and his experience within a hierarchy of realities which extends from the supreme level—God—to the opposite extreme: the level of matter.”

[There are similarities between Neoplatonism and Gnosticism but differences in feeling or tone. They are describing the same spread between matter and the Light or the One but the emotion is different. Gnosticism from what I can tell so far is the more poetic of the two, but generally I don’t think it’s wrong to classify them together in a broad sense]

 

[R Crowley the White]

Valentinian Gnosticism like many forms has it the material world is the creation of higher level non material emotions of pain and loss due to a mistake made by Sophia, which is described in detail. What is interesting to me beside all this is that Schopenhauer spoke of emotion as being the thing in itself which creates the material world. Schopenhauer was gnostic in other ways as well, such as his pessimism over individual incarnation, and his esoteric Christianity. I do not think he mentions Gnosticism in his writings, which is curious.