ABSTRACT
For those scholars who began their study of religion in departments of theology, as I did, the word “Gnosticism” will no doubt evoke memories of learning about the leather-bound papyrus codices accidentally discovered near the town of Nag Hammadi. They presented a form of religion based on γνῶσις (gnosis) – personal “knowledge” or “insight” – the “experience” of which was understood to redeem the self from its imprisonment within material existence. In some texts, gnosis, understood as “knowledge of the self,” was conflated with “knowledge of God,” which was discussed using the image of a “divine spark” that had become trapped in matter and, when “redeemed,” returned to its divine source. Hence, the principal structures of Gnosticism are typically understood in terms of a radical dualism: “matter and spirit, light and darkness, good and evil; the opposition between this-worldly imprisonment and other-worldly salvation; the linking of psychology, ontology, and soteriology in the paired categories of sleep/awakening, forgetting/remembering, ignorance/knowledge (gnosis)” (Galbreath 1981: 22). This, then, is our starting point when considering modern gnosis. While we should be nervous about claiming that any historical continuity exists between ancient and modern gnosis, nevertheless, if we consider, for example, William Blake’s work, Carl Jung’s psychology, Eric Voegelin’s pathology of modernity, Harold Bloom’s approach to literary criticism, or some of the principal discourses within modern occulture, it is difficult to ignore the “gnostic return in modernity” (O’Regan 2001; see also Grimstad 2002: 35–91).
