Topics
Khepershop
Guestbook
New/Updates
| Home Topics Khepershop Guestbook New/Updates |
|
Introduction | Origins | Teachings | Schools | |
|
| Influences | Glossary | Books | Links |
| Gnosis | The Pleroma | Gnosticism as Anti-Religion - The Negative Old Testament God | Cyclic, Historical, and Dramaturgic Time | Pessimistic Astrology | The Gnostic Dramaturgy - Creation and Redemption | The Gnostic Saviour |
The following pages give an account of the Gnostic conception of creation of the Divine Powers (Aeons) and the Universe. You can start at the first link and go through, or simply dip in anywhere. But before going any further, a word about writing style. Most esoteric and occult teachers, for some infuriating reason, have a penchant for writing or presenting their metaphysics in the most turgid and unreadable way. And the Nag Hammadi Library is unreadable even relative to these other unreadables. So the first that strikes the reader when confronting this archaic text is its obscure style and rampant contradictions. In fairness, this may in part be due to the fact that these texts were worked over again and again by successive scribes and copyists. Each copyist would add his own interpretation and theories, without even bothering to see if these fit in with the original text. In this way these texts eventually became completely incomprehensible, as anyone who tackles The Nag Hammadi Library will discover.
But having said that, I simply cannot agree with those Catholic writers who dismiss the Gnostic material as some sad and sorry off-shoot that the Church in its wisdom discarded. Rather, I agree with Jung that the Church really diminished itself by rejecting Gnosticism. And the great revival of interest in Gnosticism in today's world only proves Jung's point; that the wonderful mythologising and cosmologising of the classical Gnostics still can contribute much to today's world.
images not loading? | error messages? | broken links? | suggestions? | criticism?
