Peter O'Leary
Seven Tenets of the New Gnosticism
first tenet
The New Gnosticism is incarnational whose body is hidden knowledge.
The New Gnosticism, like all the old gnosticisms, avails hidden instructions of deep revelatory insight. These teachings are worked like a mint into a code. A mother lode of knowledge detonated into matter. A gold dust. Fertile as pollen, and as collectible. By those assiduously driven to do so. This body of knowledge anatomizes divine realities; hierophanizes divinity itself. As the universe externalizes this knowledge, bodying it forth, the body occultates it in crypto-emotional vales where it must be quarried through a form of mindfulness, an admixing of memory and desire. In this sense, the divine life and the divine revelation are manifested through the human form. Anthropos, taught Valentinus, is “the underlying nature of that collective entity, the archetype, or spiritual essence of human being.”[i] Religious and poetic language, in these terms, is a language of internal transformation written out on the skin of the cosmos itself.
From the Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said, ‘Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds. When one finds, one will be troubled. When one is troubled, one will marvel and will rule over all.’”[ii]
second tenet
The world into which we are thrown is a broken world.
The New Gnosticism sheds a light on a sad old world, one in which all the old chants have been incanted, all the old plaints are historical prophecies, all the poetry is spent of meaning and stripped of power, and all the poets are demiurgical fools.
From Jacques Lacarrière, The Gnostics: “I will simply state that, at a certain moment in the dawn of time, when seeds were in their earliest awakening and all possibilities virgin, one of the inhabitants of the hyper-world—god, demiurge, angel or aeon …—one of these creatures, through error, pride, or fecklessness, intervened in the unfolding of the world and provoked disturbances, vibrations, and fibrillations of igneous matter which brought about its progressive degradation and its descent towards the lower circles. The world in which we live is not only opaque, heavy, and given over to death, but is above all a world born of a monumental machination; a world that was not foreseen, not desired, flawed in all its parts; a world in which every thing, every being, is the result of a cosmic misunderstanding. In this whirlpool of errors, this universal shipwreck which is the history of matter and of man, we on earth are rather like survivors condemned to eternal solitude, planetary detainees who are the victims of injustice on a truly cosmic scale. Stars, ether, aeons, planets, earth, life, flesh, inanimate matter, psyche—all are implicated, dragged into this universal disgrace.”[iii]
third tenet
The New Gnosticism is incendiary; its arson destroys the world’s demiurgic powers, whose poetry is marked by torpor, low wattage, and acts of border-policing, condemnation, and control.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus insists, “I have thrown fire upon the world, and look, I am watching until it blazes.”[iv] Consonant with the arson of the New Gnosticism is vigilance and witness. If you would set fire to the world, if you would set fire to anything, you are obliged to pay attention to its damage. This attention constitutes a form of worship. Of what? Gnosis of course. Knowledge that withers demiurgic powers and restores logos into mythos. A note on the Demiurge. He is a vicious, jealous, and wrathful being. In this respect, he resembles many poets at the top of their game.
From Ioan Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: “[I]n On the Origin of the World the first Archon arises in the Darkness emanating from Sophia and notices the existence of something higher than himself; at that moment, his Jealousy and his Wrath split from him, and a watery substance—Matter—flows down into the Chaos.”[v]
And from The Apocryphon of John: “Just then, while I was thinking these things, behold the heavens opened and the whole creation below the heaven was illuminated. And the world quaked. I was afraid and behold in the light I saw a child standing by me. When I saw him, he became like an old person and he shifted his resemblance, becoming like a servant. These semblances before me were not multiple beings but there was only a single likeness having many forms in the light. And the semblances appeared through each other and the semblance had three forms. He said to me, ‘John, why are you doubting and fearful? For you are not a stranger to this likeness. Do not be fainthearted! I am the one who dwells with you always. I am the Father. I am the Mother. I am the Son. I am the one who exists forever, undefiled and unmixed.’”[vi]
fourth tenet
You are initiated into the new Gnosticism whenever you contribute to its incantations.
In 1958, Mircea Eliade wrote that the originality of a person living in modernity is “his determination to regard himself as a purely historical being, in his wish to live in a basically desacralized cosmos.”[vii] Initiation resituates you to the sacred axis, typically through a series of ordeals. Principally, you enter the darkness—the nave of a Dark Church—where you are harrowed. “It is by virtue of these rites,” says Eliade, “and of the revelations that they entail, that [a person] will be recognized as a responsible member of society. Which to say, as someone who keeps the ability to respond.
Two hymns from the Mandaean Ginza:
where is the darkness from?
Who are these hideous creatures?
Where is the darkness from?
Who are the inhabitants sitting there?
How were their actions born,
which are hideous and fearful?
And their enormous flaws?
Their frightening ugliness?
They are disfigured and deformed.
water is prior to darkness
Water is prior to darkness.
Prior to darkness is water.
Nothing is without an end.
No number is before the uthras were.
Light beings are prior to darkness.
Prior to darkness are the uthras
and older than their inhabitants.
Goodness is prior to the malice
of the place of darkness.
Gentleness is prior to the bitterness
of the place of darkness.
Living fire is prior to the consuming fires
of the place of darkness.
Praise is prior to the practice
of sorcery and witchcraft.
Hymns and books are prior to the sorcery
of Hewath, the terrible woman.[viii]
fifth tenet
The New Gnosticism is epistemologically nonplussed.
If all the New Gnostic poets were seeking transfigured light, and they are; if the secret knowledge of the pleromatic hyper-cosmos were bright on the desks of the New Gnostic poets, and it is; if the New Gnostic poets lived without this knowledge despite seeking it constantly, and they do; and if it all went on in a way that penetrated the chaos, and it does; a law of inherent complements—the hidden and the revealed; the restricted and the permitted. An essential unity whose eruptions counterpoise a noetic expansion.
From “Sound and Severance” (“mu” fifty-ninth part):
Choric escort…
Chronic
dispatch… Wondered what but
andoumboulouousness awaited
them. They were waiting to be
born it
seemed… It wasn’t one
was
it,
one wasn’t enough, he nor he
the I and I’s
he and he of it,
he
nor he the he and he’s I and
I…
Gnostic
imposter each according
to the other.[ix]
sixth tenet
The codex of the new Gnosticism is the apocryphon of a fallen wisdom; the measure of the new Gnosticism is a testament to ecstatic illumination.
The presence of Sophia-Wisdom in a cosmic mythos permits interrogators to solve “an unfathomable metaphysical problem: How is it possible that impermanence stems from permanence, lack and pain from Fullness and immovability?”[x] All the fallen wisdom scatters like spores on the winds and in the temperature of the broken universe, collected by foragers, intentional and inadvertent alike, on whom these pollens gather, to be concentrated by later treatment or to be scattered further when relinquished. An apocryphon is a secret book. The secret book is a cryptogam, a hiddenness that gives birth to something new. Gnosis means four things: knowledge of the secrets of existence; elaboration of this knowledge into speculative systems; knowledge of the “way” of the soul’s future ascent; and finally, knowledge of the magic and rituals by which these forms of gnosis can be prepared for. Gnosis culminates in apotheotic rebirth: simultaneous obliteration and deification.
From Hans Jonas, The Gnostic
Religion: “[Ecstatic Illumination] involves an extinction of the natural faculties, filling the vacuum with a surpassingly positive and at the same time in its ineffability negative content. Annihilation and deification of the person are fused in the spiritual ecstasis which purports to experience the immediate presence of the acosmic essence… The mystical gnosis theoû—direct beholding of the divine reality—is itself an earnest of the consummation to come. It is transcendence become immanent; and although prepared for by human acts of self-modification which induce the proper disposition, the event itself is one of divine activity and grace.”[xi]
seventh tenet
the missing tenet
Instead, a parable of the Book of Concealment. Sifra di-Tsni’uta appears in the Zohar after Perashat Terumah, an exhaustive, 350-page commentary on two chapters of Exodus. It consists of five highly concentrated, very short chapters interpreting the beginning of Genesis. It is anonymously attributed. Gershom Scholem described it as the Zohar’s most perplexing tract. Near the beginning, it states, “Secrecy within secrecy was prepared and arranged in a single skull filled with crystalline dew. Membrane of air, purified and sealed; those strands of clean fleece hanging evenly.”[xii] Later, it states, “The Ancient One is hidden and sealed; the Short-Tempered One, revealed and not revealed. Revealed, written in His letters; concealed, sealed by letters unsettled in their places, for about Him above and below are unsettled.”[xiii] Daniel C. Matt explains that the title, Sifra di-Tsni’uta, can be rendered variously as the book of concealment, secrecy, modesty, or discreetness. “The term ‘concealment,’” he tells us, “applies to the profound subject matter, which is concealed from human comprehension, or which should be concealed from the uninitiated; but it also refers to the enigmatic style, which modestly conceals the mysteries.”[xiv]
Profound subject matter. An enigmatic style. There are books of compression so incredible, they resound in the ultra- and infra-audible range, beyond the ken of normal human hearing. “The Book of Concealment.” The Mystical Theology. The Emerald Tablet. These are texts whose depths can only be sounded by dowsing and divining; that is, by intuition. Who is the New Gnostic? The New Gnostic is the one dowsing these depths for the unsounded sound to give it a poem as the arena for its audition.[xv]
[i] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 122.
[ii] Gospel of Thomas, saying 3, translated by Marvin Meyer (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p. 23.
[iii] Jacques Lacarrière, The Gnostics, translated by Nina Rootes (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), pp. 19-20.
[iv] Gospel of Thomas, saying 10, p. 27.
[v] Ioan Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis, translated by H.S. Wiesner and the author (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), pp. 93-4.
[vi] The Apocryphon of John, translated by Karen L. King in The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 27-8. Scholarly indications (brackets and verse numbers) have been excluded from this quotation.
[vii] Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, translated by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), p. ix.
[viii] In The Gnostic Gospel, edited by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer (Boulder: Shambhala, 2003), pp. 539, 540.
[ix] Nathaniel Mackey, Nod House (New York: New Directions, 2011), p. 112.
[x] Coulianu, p. 73.
[xi] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, third edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 284, 285. The four kinds of gnosis are taken from Jonas as well.
[xii] The Zohar, Pritzger Edition volume V, translated by Daniel C. Matt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 535.
[xiii] ibid., p. 540.
[xiv] ibid., p. 587.
Seven Tenets of the New Gnosticism
first tenet
The New Gnosticism is incarnational whose body is hidden knowledge.
The New Gnosticism, like all the old gnosticisms, avails hidden instructions of deep revelatory insight. These teachings are worked like a mint into a code. A mother lode of knowledge detonated into matter. A gold dust. Fertile as pollen, and as collectible. By those assiduously driven to do so. This body of knowledge anatomizes divine realities; hierophanizes divinity itself. As the universe externalizes this knowledge, bodying it forth, the body occultates it in crypto-emotional vales where it must be quarried through a form of mindfulness, an admixing of memory and desire. In this sense, the divine life and the divine revelation are manifested through the human form. Anthropos, taught Valentinus, is “the underlying nature of that collective entity, the archetype, or spiritual essence of human being.”[i] Religious and poetic language, in these terms, is a language of internal transformation written out on the skin of the cosmos itself.
From the Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said, ‘Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds. When one finds, one will be troubled. When one is troubled, one will marvel and will rule over all.’”[ii]
second tenet
The world into which we are thrown is a broken world.
The New Gnosticism sheds a light on a sad old world, one in which all the old chants have been incanted, all the old plaints are historical prophecies, all the poetry is spent of meaning and stripped of power, and all the poets are demiurgical fools.
From Jacques Lacarrière, The Gnostics: “I will simply state that, at a certain moment in the dawn of time, when seeds were in their earliest awakening and all possibilities virgin, one of the inhabitants of the hyper-world—god, demiurge, angel or aeon …—one of these creatures, through error, pride, or fecklessness, intervened in the unfolding of the world and provoked disturbances, vibrations, and fibrillations of igneous matter which brought about its progressive degradation and its descent towards the lower circles. The world in which we live is not only opaque, heavy, and given over to death, but is above all a world born of a monumental machination; a world that was not foreseen, not desired, flawed in all its parts; a world in which every thing, every being, is the result of a cosmic misunderstanding. In this whirlpool of errors, this universal shipwreck which is the history of matter and of man, we on earth are rather like survivors condemned to eternal solitude, planetary detainees who are the victims of injustice on a truly cosmic scale. Stars, ether, aeons, planets, earth, life, flesh, inanimate matter, psyche—all are implicated, dragged into this universal disgrace.”[iii]
third tenet
The New Gnosticism is incendiary; its arson destroys the world’s demiurgic powers, whose poetry is marked by torpor, low wattage, and acts of border-policing, condemnation, and control.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus insists, “I have thrown fire upon the world, and look, I am watching until it blazes.”[iv] Consonant with the arson of the New Gnosticism is vigilance and witness. If you would set fire to the world, if you would set fire to anything, you are obliged to pay attention to its damage. This attention constitutes a form of worship. Of what? Gnosis of course. Knowledge that withers demiurgic powers and restores logos into mythos. A note on the Demiurge. He is a vicious, jealous, and wrathful being. In this respect, he resembles many poets at the top of their game.
From Ioan Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: “[I]n On the Origin of the World the first Archon arises in the Darkness emanating from Sophia and notices the existence of something higher than himself; at that moment, his Jealousy and his Wrath split from him, and a watery substance—Matter—flows down into the Chaos.”[v]
And from The Apocryphon of John: “Just then, while I was thinking these things, behold the heavens opened and the whole creation below the heaven was illuminated. And the world quaked. I was afraid and behold in the light I saw a child standing by me. When I saw him, he became like an old person and he shifted his resemblance, becoming like a servant. These semblances before me were not multiple beings but there was only a single likeness having many forms in the light. And the semblances appeared through each other and the semblance had three forms. He said to me, ‘John, why are you doubting and fearful? For you are not a stranger to this likeness. Do not be fainthearted! I am the one who dwells with you always. I am the Father. I am the Mother. I am the Son. I am the one who exists forever, undefiled and unmixed.’”[vi]
fourth tenet
You are initiated into the new Gnosticism whenever you contribute to its incantations.
In 1958, Mircea Eliade wrote that the originality of a person living in modernity is “his determination to regard himself as a purely historical being, in his wish to live in a basically desacralized cosmos.”[vii] Initiation resituates you to the sacred axis, typically through a series of ordeals. Principally, you enter the darkness—the nave of a Dark Church—where you are harrowed. “It is by virtue of these rites,” says Eliade, “and of the revelations that they entail, that [a person] will be recognized as a responsible member of society. Which to say, as someone who keeps the ability to respond.
Two hymns from the Mandaean Ginza:
where is the darkness from?
Who are these hideous creatures?
Where is the darkness from?
Who are the inhabitants sitting there?
How were their actions born,
which are hideous and fearful?
And their enormous flaws?
Their frightening ugliness?
They are disfigured and deformed.
water is prior to darkness
Water is prior to darkness.
Prior to darkness is water.
Nothing is without an end.
No number is before the uthras were.
Light beings are prior to darkness.
Prior to darkness are the uthras
and older than their inhabitants.
Goodness is prior to the malice
of the place of darkness.
Gentleness is prior to the bitterness
of the place of darkness.
Living fire is prior to the consuming fires
of the place of darkness.
Praise is prior to the practice
of sorcery and witchcraft.
Hymns and books are prior to the sorcery
of Hewath, the terrible woman.[viii]
fifth tenet
The New Gnosticism is epistemologically nonplussed.
If all the New Gnostic poets were seeking transfigured light, and they are; if the secret knowledge of the pleromatic hyper-cosmos were bright on the desks of the New Gnostic poets, and it is; if the New Gnostic poets lived without this knowledge despite seeking it constantly, and they do; and if it all went on in a way that penetrated the chaos, and it does; a law of inherent complements—the hidden and the revealed; the restricted and the permitted. An essential unity whose eruptions counterpoise a noetic expansion.
From “Sound and Severance” (“mu” fifty-ninth part):
Choric escort…
Chronic
dispatch… Wondered what but
andoumboulouousness awaited
them. They were waiting to be
born it
seemed… It wasn’t one
was
it,
one wasn’t enough, he nor he
the I and I’s
he and he of it,
he
nor he the he and he’s I and
I…
Gnostic
imposter each according
to the other.[ix]
sixth tenet
The codex of the new Gnosticism is the apocryphon of a fallen wisdom; the measure of the new Gnosticism is a testament to ecstatic illumination.
The presence of Sophia-Wisdom in a cosmic mythos permits interrogators to solve “an unfathomable metaphysical problem: How is it possible that impermanence stems from permanence, lack and pain from Fullness and immovability?”[x] All the fallen wisdom scatters like spores on the winds and in the temperature of the broken universe, collected by foragers, intentional and inadvertent alike, on whom these pollens gather, to be concentrated by later treatment or to be scattered further when relinquished. An apocryphon is a secret book. The secret book is a cryptogam, a hiddenness that gives birth to something new. Gnosis means four things: knowledge of the secrets of existence; elaboration of this knowledge into speculative systems; knowledge of the “way” of the soul’s future ascent; and finally, knowledge of the magic and rituals by which these forms of gnosis can be prepared for. Gnosis culminates in apotheotic rebirth: simultaneous obliteration and deification.
From Hans Jonas, The Gnostic
Religion: “[Ecstatic Illumination] involves an extinction of the natural faculties, filling the vacuum with a surpassingly positive and at the same time in its ineffability negative content. Annihilation and deification of the person are fused in the spiritual ecstasis which purports to experience the immediate presence of the acosmic essence… The mystical gnosis theoû—direct beholding of the divine reality—is itself an earnest of the consummation to come. It is transcendence become immanent; and although prepared for by human acts of self-modification which induce the proper disposition, the event itself is one of divine activity and grace.”[xi]
seventh tenet
the missing tenet
Instead, a parable of the Book of Concealment. Sifra di-Tsni’uta appears in the Zohar after Perashat Terumah, an exhaustive, 350-page commentary on two chapters of Exodus. It consists of five highly concentrated, very short chapters interpreting the beginning of Genesis. It is anonymously attributed. Gershom Scholem described it as the Zohar’s most perplexing tract. Near the beginning, it states, “Secrecy within secrecy was prepared and arranged in a single skull filled with crystalline dew. Membrane of air, purified and sealed; those strands of clean fleece hanging evenly.”[xii] Later, it states, “The Ancient One is hidden and sealed; the Short-Tempered One, revealed and not revealed. Revealed, written in His letters; concealed, sealed by letters unsettled in their places, for about Him above and below are unsettled.”[xiii] Daniel C. Matt explains that the title, Sifra di-Tsni’uta, can be rendered variously as the book of concealment, secrecy, modesty, or discreetness. “The term ‘concealment,’” he tells us, “applies to the profound subject matter, which is concealed from human comprehension, or which should be concealed from the uninitiated; but it also refers to the enigmatic style, which modestly conceals the mysteries.”[xiv]
Profound subject matter. An enigmatic style. There are books of compression so incredible, they resound in the ultra- and infra-audible range, beyond the ken of normal human hearing. “The Book of Concealment.” The Mystical Theology. The Emerald Tablet. These are texts whose depths can only be sounded by dowsing and divining; that is, by intuition. Who is the New Gnostic? The New Gnostic is the one dowsing these depths for the unsounded sound to give it a poem as the arena for its audition.[xv]
[i] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 122.
[ii] Gospel of Thomas, saying 3, translated by Marvin Meyer (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p. 23.
[iii] Jacques Lacarrière, The Gnostics, translated by Nina Rootes (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), pp. 19-20.
[iv] Gospel of Thomas, saying 10, p. 27.
[v] Ioan Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis, translated by H.S. Wiesner and the author (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), pp. 93-4.
[vi] The Apocryphon of John, translated by Karen L. King in The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 27-8. Scholarly indications (brackets and verse numbers) have been excluded from this quotation.
[vii] Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, translated by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), p. ix.
[viii] In The Gnostic Gospel, edited by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer (Boulder: Shambhala, 2003), pp. 539, 540.
[ix] Nathaniel Mackey, Nod House (New York: New Directions, 2011), p. 112.
[x] Coulianu, p. 73.
[xi] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, third edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 284, 285. The four kinds of gnosis are taken from Jonas as well.
[xii] The Zohar, Pritzger Edition volume V, translated by Daniel C. Matt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 535.
[xiii] ibid., p. 540.
[xiv] ibid., p. 587.
