CHAPTER TEN

GNOSIS AND CULTURE*

Gnosis is a Greek word that means “knowledge.” It comes from the Indo-European root gno from which the English word “knowledge” is derived. In Late Antiquity gnosis was used to designate an intuitive awareness of hidden mysteries as opposed to discursive, analytical knowledge. Gnostic comes from the Greek gnōstikos, knowledgeable. It was used in classical times as an adjective, never as a substantive noun. At the beginning of the Christian era, in Alexandria, there was a school of rebellious Jews who called themselves “Gnostics,” knowers. Later they superfi cially christianized their views and brought forth such writings as the Apocryphon of John, ca. 100. They venerated the Unknown God beyond god and held that the human self was related to this Ground of Being. Until this day there lives in Iran and Iraq a sect that adheres to the same views. They are called Mandaeans, which means nothing else than “Gnostics.” In the second century there were other Christian movements, in Alexandria and elsewhere, whose views resembled those of the Gnostics, but who did not call themselves Gnostics. About 200 there was a catholic thinker in Alexandria, Clemens Alexandrinus, who called himself a “true gnostic.” This led to a generalization and to the practice of designating all leaders of movements later expelled from the Catholic church as Gnostics. Gnosticism or gnosis is a modern invention. It is used by present- day scholars to indicate all currents of pluriform antiquity that are not Catholic, such as Jewish Christianity, Encratism (rejection of mar- riage), and related currents. This has led to an enormous confusion. The designation should be limited to those schools and religions that are ostensibly dependent upon the myth of the Apocryphon of John, to Valentinians, to adherents of Basilides, and to Marcionites. Gnosticism is not exclusively a Christian phenomenon. Jewish kab- balism has its origins in the heterodox Jewry of Alexandria, which

* Previously published in: C.G. Jung and the Humanities. Eds. K. Barnaby and P. d’Acierno, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1990, 26–35. 142 chapter ten produced the Apocryphon of John. The appellation “Adam Qadmon” (archetypal Adam), well known from the kabbala, has been found in pre-Christian gnostic documents found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, in the form of “Geradamas,” that is, “old, archetypal Adam.” In the ninth century, these same Jewish revolutionaries gave rise, in southern Iraq, to the Islamic gnosis of the Ismaili, the religion of the Aga Khan. All these Gnostics proclaimed a new God, after the old one had failed. It is not correct, however, as Hans Jonas held, that they dis- paraged the world excessively. A certain depreciation of matter and sex is characteristic of many philosophical schools of the Greeks, of Plato and the Platonists, and of the Stoic philosopher Posidonius and his followers. Christian Catholics had very strong reservations about the world and eros. The Gnostics were no exception to the rule. The large majority of them, however, believed that the world was brought forward to serve as a catharsis for the spirit, to make men and women conscious of their unconscious selves, a belief that, in effect, redeems the phenomenal world. Gnosticism found its achievement and fulfi lment in Manichaeism. As the Cologne Mani Codex shows, Mani, a Jewish boy who lived from 216 to 277, was brought up in a Jewish Christian community in Southern Mesopotamia. These people believed that God was the ori- gin of both good and evil. Mani, who was a cripple, abhorred these views. At the age of twelve, and again at twenty-four, he was con- fronted with a vision of his self, his guardian angel or twin or Holy Spirit, who revealed to him that light and darkness, soul and matter, good and evil are radically opposed to each other. After that he wan- dered through Asia to proclaim the new doctrine and to found a gnostic Christian church, which has existed for more than a thousand years in Asia. The Middle Ages, too, had their Gnostics. They were sectarians called Albigensians or Cathars, members of a gnostic antichurch that was founded in 1167 at Saint Felix de Caraman, near Toulouse, and who lived in southern France and northern Italy. The Cathars were bloodily persecuted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition. They owed most of their ideas to the Bogomils of Bulgaria and eastern Europe, who, in turn, went back to the Paulicians, Barbeliots and Messalians of Armenia, where ancient Gnosticism had survived. According to medieval sources, the Bogomils and the Cathars were a mixture of Messalianism and Paulicianism. This seems to be true. Messalianism (a name based on a word that means “prayers”) was