Uncategorized | The Blog of Baphomet

In part one of these reflections; we considered perspectives on what the Gnostics were pointing toward in their vivid and at times anarchic mythologies. It’s hardly surprising that more mainstream Christians got pissed with them – while outwardly appearing orthodox in many ways, their take on the nature of the divine was radically subversive.

For the majority of the Gnostics, the realm of nature and the God of the Old Testament were incompatible with the picture of the divine painted by Christ in the New Testament. If both Yahweh and the natural world were capricious and violent how could one reconcile this with the “heavenly Father” that Jesus believed was ever listening and attentive? For many Gnostics, the tribal, desert God of the old covenant represented at best an outdated perception of the Pleroma’s true nature; at worst this “God” was a deceiver actively seeking to blind humanity to the divine spark within. While I personally don’t buy into such beliefs, they do reflect an important human dilemma as we seek to evolve metaphysical principles that we feel are more congruent with our own experience of life.

In reflecting on these themes, I think it’s fair to own my own biases as both an aspiring Process theologian and a creative magical practitioner. For the uninitiated, Process theology is deeply interested in what the emergence of religious myth reveals about the shape and concerns of human consciousness. Even a cursory study of religious phenomena reveals both our greatest aspirations and the depths of our prejudices. Humanity’s religious expressions, be they tribal deities, anthropomorphized monotheisms, or Lovecraftian terrors, all mirror our collective journey through history. This is not to imply some bleeding out of mystery; rather it glories in religion as art. The gods are real precisely because we’ve made them so (see Pratchett’s “Small Gods” for a fantastic exposition on this concept).

As I hinted at last time, my hunch is that the Demiurge gets a bit of a hard time from many of the Gnostic traditions and gets turned into some sort of cosmic whipping boy! In most Gnostic myths, while the Pleroma kicks back as the “unmoved mover” in his cosmic chill-out zone, it’s the feisty Sophia and her wayward son who actually get on with doing something! Good ideas are great, but unless they work their way through to planning and creative expression, they remain ideas only. The Demiurge arguably represents the messy reality of how we produce and maintain a creative endeavor. As humans we may long for an idealised state in which nothing dies and pain never gets felt, but our shared experience of what happens day-to-day is far from this. Our yearning for Platonic ideals may well be part of our evolving consciousness (you can blame your Neo-Cortex if you want :)), but it may be that the complex joy and violence of Life is like this because it couldn’t function otherwise.

Feisty Sophia

So how do we seek to reconcile our ever-changing, messy world with this longing for a more tranquil numinosity? We could certainly have a decent attempt at going into denial about either part of this equation and burying ourselves in either materialist hedonism on one extreme or spiritual fantasy on the other. The trickier alternative (and my suggestion) is that we have to bare the tension! Here we need to return to the wisdom of the Mother. Between Pleroma and Demiurge lies Sophia. Although some of the gnostic myths want to lay blame at her door for seeking independence, Sophia seems to be key in understanding how the realm of the ideal works alongside our experience of reality. Wisdom (the heady fusion of intellect, experience and intuition) allows us to oil the cogs in helping our ideas move into plans, our plans into actions and our actions into Art.

In contrast to most “believers”, magicians are often those who actively seek to explore dualities and are willing to get their hands dirty in the process of seeking a potential synthesis. The tension between the transcendent and the imminant is what fuels the art and science of magic. What we experience in being embodied and feeling the pull of the transcendent fuels our curiosity and the alchemy of self-transformation. The interplay of longed for ideal and pragmatic action create a hermetic frisson via which new realities might be born.

In my own work as a magician I find myself attracted to those depictions of the Demiurge that reflect something of the alchemical tension innate to a more awakened encounter with the human dilemma. The images of both Abraxas and Baphomet that are most familiar to us, provide vivid pictorial depictions of the cosmic balancing act that we are engaged in. Humanoid bodies mutate with animal heads and transgendered bodies, as arms point at balance or bear the whips and keys of our deliverance. For me these glyphs are road maps for becoming; the path of the demiurge being a journey through the reality of our lives not simply away from it. As much as the realm of matter and the body may provide challenges and obstacles, this is the place we find ourselves, and where the work needs to happen.

Many of you will know that the Gnostics and I have got a thing going on. If I’m honest, one part of the attraction is that they have provided a reason for me to keep stalking Jesus, the other being that they had a pretty weird take on why our experience of life can seem a tad crappy (yes I am a magister of understatement).
For the religious philosopher the knotty issue of theodicy (the problem of evil) has always proven to be of a decidedly Gordian nature. Whether our gods are singular or plural, if we attach to them either omnipotence or omniscience then the reality of human pain is likely to raise some awkward questions regarding their goodness. For the fervent Dawkinite, the presence of suffering and disaster in our world is enough to render the possibility of godhead unlikely at best.

While recently revisiting some of the Gnostic’s primary sources in June Singers’ excellent “A Gnostic Book of Hours”, I was once again struck by the novelty of their solution to our experience of suffering:

Yaldabaoth (the demiurge) stole power from his mother (Sophia), for he was ignorant,

Thinking there existed no other except his mother alone…..

When the Arrogant One saw the creation which surrounds him

And the multitude of angels which had come forth from him,

He exalted himself above these and said to them:

“I am a jealous God, and there is no God besides me.”
The Apocryphon of John

When we attempt to engage with its primary texts we see a complexity and variation that mustn’t be minimised in an attempt to homogenise the subtle variety of narratives regarding our beginnings. While present day magical practitioners may reference “gnosis” in relation to the in-coming of new insights, many scholars of the early Gnosticism would view an emphasis on cosmic dualism as being innate to the traditions that they are seeking to categorise.

Certainly as we look at manifestations following on from the early historic sects such as the Sethians and Valentinians we do encounter groups that seem to have a decidedly negative attitude toward the realm of matter. While we may be heavily dependent of the polemical accusations of their opponents, from what we know about groups as diverse as the Manicheans and the Cathars, it is hard to deny that their views of the material realm were less than positive. In some ways this is hardly surprising given their life expectancy, infant mortality and dental care! While I might struggle with such perspectives, I’m also slightly anxious that my own rose tinted eco-consciousness may largely based on my own western privilege and the current availability of antibiotics.

As the Gnostics appeared to have placed a far higher value on a more experiential and non-historic approach to the Christ story, one might question the degree to which such cosmological models were viewed literally. I am however aware that in my desire to project my own image of the Gnostics as some sort of existential freedom fighters, that I might be glossing over their potentially hostile view of the material world.

Given the view that the material world was a vale of tears, it was perhaps of little surprise that they viewed such a realm as being the creation of a less than imperfect being or Demiurge i.e. “This god that you thought was the supreme being is at best a lesser agency and at worst a delusional and deceptive megalomaniac set on deceiving humanity.” The Gnostics tended to view their mission as an attempt to resist the Demiurge’s control in order to return to the perfect, true Source or Pleroma.

Ancient, no yays.

Now an understanding of such a dualistic perspective maybe critical for the purposes of our understanding of Gnosticism as a historical phenomenon, but many would rightly question the psychological and environmental wisdom of holding such a worldview. Many contemporary revivalists of the Gnostic tradition have emphasised the similarities between the gnostic message and the central dilemmas at the heart of the four noble truths [of Buddhism], and existentialism. Their core concerns regarding dissatisfaction and impermanence have considerable overlap with the Gnostic’s longing for a salvation away from the material.

The discomfort that many of us feel in adopting such a negative attitude toward the world that we know, means that many Neo-Gnostics adopt a more hermetic view of our origins. What we might describe as a form of “soft dualism”, relies on a more Neo-Platonic view of emanation where the reality (and messiness) of life on our planet results from its distance from the original divine source.

This softer perspective certainly allows a greater acknowledgement that we can experience the material world as both incredibly beautiful and pleasurable without having to view such experiences as being as a result of false consciousness. To experience the tension between the imminent and transcendent, the material and ethereal, is arguably at the core of the human dilemma.

Certainly within the Corpus Hermeticum we can see the tension between these two positions as the redactor of the current text has incorporated sayings that represent both a radically dualist and a more emanation based view. This tension between finding the divine in and through matter in contrast to abandoning it runs through the history of many religious traditions.

The blessed curse of human consciousness seems to be that the closer that we move to the potentiality of what we might become, so our desire not to be limited by the mortality of our bodies intensifies. Such longings need not translate into metaphysical realities, rather they reflect a widespread aspiration of consciousness that we often project into our belief systems. For the Gnostic this longing to continue beyond the terrestrial finds fulfilment through seeking a strange and Alien God!

While such contradictions and tensions might perplex someone trying to construct a coherent belief system, for the practicing magician, these polarities can be utilised in the exploration of some potent psychic territory. In my next post I will spend a bit more time examining both these methods and the vistas they may potentially open up.

Recommended reading:

Curton, Tobias. The Gnostics and Gnostic Philosophy

Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Scriptures

Flowers, Stephen. Hermetic Magic

Hoeller, Stephan. Gnosticism

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels

Singer, June. A Gnostic Book of Hours

Smith, Andrew Phillip. The Gnostics

Trismegistus, Hermes. Corpus Hermeticum