It has taken me years and years to understand that we are all here on a quest to find ourselves. All the myriad things to distract you from finding out who you really are. And believing who you are. And fanning that little flame inside of you into a bonfire of possibility. Of course this world doesn't help at all, but if you are lucky enough to pay attention, that little message inside you can turn into a wonderful concert and you are born again, "with eyes that can finally see".
A Homily for Palm Sunday
by Rev. Steven Marshall
The Temporary Triumph of the Light before its Obscuration
Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week. Holy Week recounts a complex
and meaningful series of mythic events which lead to the Resurrection on
Easter Day. Palm Sunday represents a preparation, a setting up, for the
Resurrection to occur. As Gnostics we may differ from the mainstream in
our interpretation of these events, as to whether they are literal history
or strictly symbolic, or something in between. What is important for us
to focus on is that these events recount an interior experience of archetypal
dimensions. It does not matter if the events of Holy Week are historical
or purely mythical; they have a deep and archetypal meaning to the Gnostic
soul. The series of events in Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday, describe
a process of our own apotheosis and psychological transformation. Blind
belief in historical events is not going to transform us; we must cultivate
an experience of this archetypal reality. For this reason we celebrate
Palm Sunday not as a commemoration of an historical event but as an archetypal
mystery and another step in the process of psychological and spiritual
transformation.
Reading the Gnostics was a piece I wrote to accompany A Dictionary of
Gnosticism. In a modified form it will be one of the introductory
essays in Gnostic Tendencies, intended to whet your appetite for reading the Nag Hammadi Library.
Reading the Gnostics
And he [Jesus] said, “The kingdom is like a wise fisherman who cast
his net into the sea; then he drew it up from the sea, full of little
fish from below. Among them he found one good large fish. So he threw
all of the little fish back down into the sea without regret. Whoever
has ears to listen, let him listen.”
This parable, distinctively in the voice of Jesus, is found nowhere in the New Testament. It comes from the Gospel of Thomas, the best known of the ancient writings found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. The Gospel of Thomas
is overwhelmingly the most famous and most read of the texts found in
this cache for two reasons:- it has a good claim to contain sayings of
Jesus that are as old and as authentic as those in the canonical
gospels, and it is, at least superficially, easy to understand. It is
one of nearly fifty different texts or tractates in the Nag Hammadi
library, the bulk of which are Gnostic.
Gnosticism was a Christian-related religion that thrived in the
second to fourth centuries CE, though its origins may have been a little
earlier and it persisted in various forms much later. It emphasised the
importance of gnosis—experiential knowledge of the divine—within a
framework of myth and ritual. No two texts or Gnostic groups agreed on
the details of the Gnostic myth, but it typically involves the
following: the supreme, unique God emanates divine beings known as
aeons. These form the Pleroma, the fullness of God. However, the
youngest of these aeons, Sophia, falls from grace and in doing so
creates the material world, which is ruled by her bastard offspring the
demiurge, the craftsman of our world, often called Yaldabaoth. The
demiurge and his minions create the soul and body of mankind but are
tricked into incorporating an element of spirit in the human makeup.
Thus humans contain a divine spark which may be nurtured and fanned into
a flame. The subsequent history of mankind involves a struggle for the
human soul, on the one side the demiurge and his archons, on the other a
series of saviours or revealers who teach mankind how to attain gnosis
and develop the spiritual seed within them. Abbreviated and simplified
in this way, the Gnostic myth is understandable and appealing . However,
the original Gnostic texts are more concerned with their individual
elaborations of the myths than with clarity, and can be quite obscure.
Not all of the Nag Hammadi texts are difficult to penetrate. The Exegesis on the Soul
(despite its awkward title) is a beautiful and straightforward account
of the fall of the soul, personified as a young woman who drifts into
prostitution and is abused by thieves and adulterers but who eventually
repents and returns to her father and, in a daring use of sexual
imagery, may couple with the bridegroom in the bridal chamber.
Thunder: Perfect Mind is a striking proclamation by a female
voice, which includes fascinating, contrary statements —“I am the whore
and the holy, I am the wife and the virgin.” Thunder has been
adapted as a musical piece by David Tibet’s Current 93 band, and even
into an advertisement for Prada perfume directed by Ridley and Jordan
Scott.
Elaine Pagels won
popular and scholarly acclaim for her revolutionary interpretation of
the early Christian Church in “The Gnostic Gospels.” Then unthinkable
personal tragedy led her to the subject of a new book: What is Satan?
