Gnostic:

https://www.google.com/search?q=dore+illustrations+for+raven&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjbz_apjZTaAhUPM6wKHZSwBaoQ_AUICigB&biw=1260&bih=641#imgrc=BVrm5u3pFLwb6M: downloaded 3/30/18
I plan to explore what I can about some people called the Gnostics.  Just about everybody throughout just about all of history has had some sort of religion.  I hesitate to call Confucianism a religion, but I suspect when it was ascendant, there were smaller cults that would seem to be more like ordinary religions.  Ok, suppose you have a religion, and I do not share it.  You can prove its tenets to your own satisfaction but not to mine.  So, I expect I would call your beliefs, your “faith.”  And I would take no offence were you to call my own beliefs my own “faith.”  If there is no proof nor disproof, then the conclusion must be that for such issues as the nature of God, we can never know for sure.  Thus, we are all actually “agnostic;” we cannot resolve all such issues.

Well, enter the Gnostics.  Their response is, “Oh, yes we can.”  Hmm.  I draw on the textbook The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, Vintage Books division of Random House, New York, 1989.  Go there is you want a professional approach; I broach this for my own purpose, not for the purpose of forwarding the field.  My source for the texts is The Gnostic Gospels Alan Jacobs, Watkins, London 2oo6.  Yes, I know.  The whole point of having a title to a book is to make it different from the title of another book in the same field.  There’s something agnostic about this.

The mainstream opinion appears to be that the Gnostics were an alternative to the orthodox interpretation of the ministry of Jesus.  Now there are those who will say, “Yeshua,” or some sort of name, but seeing as how the first sign a newborn will live is when it fills its initially airless lungs, and as how the last physical movement at death is the lung emptying by elastic recoil so that the person expires, it is not surprising that the soul has been conflated with breath.  So, if you sneeze, you blow your soul away.  It comes back unless, worse luck, a devil darts in and claims the empty carcass.  So your friend may say, “Bless you,” to keep the devil at bay.  Since no degree of moral turpitude can put you beyond the mercy of Jesus, if you but call on him, even if you are as evil as your significant other, then bingo – off to heaven.  But if the devil can make you sneeze, tough mams, down you go to sizzle land.  The friend who blesses you evidently has more sympathy for you than faith in you.  On the other hand, the helpful stranger who says, “Ah, but you should say Yeshua …”  Well that sounds like a sneeze already, eh what?

This I assert that the Gnostics were an alternative to the orthodox.  Now they, the Gnostics, are kind of fun.  They glommed right onto the story, in the Garden, of Satan offering wisdom and telling the truth while God attempted to deny human freedom and told a lie.  So the notion of serpent-like creatures is acceptably Gnostic. 

They also, apparently taught that everything is an illusion, that souls can jump between bodies, and they thus anticipated “The Matrix” and “Time Travelers.”  Much of what was remembered about them was excoriating essays by orthodox writers not sympathetic with them.  More recent finds allow them to speak for themselves.  This is not much on an encouragement.  Some say the Vril Society pursued Gnostic teachings and they wound up part and parcel with Nazi mysticism.  I really can’t comment on that.  The notion of serpent evil overlords, archons may be the word, comes out in Everything you Need to Know but Have Never Been Told, David Icke, David Icke Books, UK, 2017.  I can’t comment on any of that, but I do have one observation on content:  Jesus was nice.  The first recorded nice person was of course the witch of Endor, but that story is such a deft drama that it is not very plausible.  After Jesus, the next nice person I know of was Uncle Remus.  Kindness is not that common.  Anyway, the beatitudes seem to say, “Be nice.”  I like that, and I fail to see it in any of the Gnostic writings. 

The tenor of the time was not really like that.  Go to Bath in England and you will find a hot spring with a Roman bath. 

This image is from Google Earth Pro.

When I was there, I was puzzled to find it depressing until I realized it was a hospital.  Well the spring itself is most beautiful, putting up an eternal bunch of bubbles, and in the old days people would write a prayer on a slip of lead and toss it into the spring.  This picture is from https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=749&ei=v4hIXNO-M6XujwTuo6nwBw&q=bath+england&oq=bath+engla&gs_l=img.1.0.0l10.7257.9840..13128...0.0..0.60.552.10......0....1..gws-wiz-img.....0.1_m-FJHj1C0#imgdii=M8rijjS43j06wM:&imgrc=7ok3icBjfw5nbM:

I thought this was a wonderful window into the minds of those thousands of years ago, what ventures did they pray might be supported or give thanks for a good outcome?  Well the prayers were all curses.  Niceness has never really been popular; I don’t get it from the Gnostics, either.

So Gnosticism was always schismatic.  In the first few centuries this had a selective advantage; the political climate was all about “you must worship state gods” and then “you must be Christian.”  Anything else had a selective advantage because it limited gene pool size.  Gnosticism thrived, murder people though the state might.  After about 500, the globalists had basically died out so people were starving in little inbred villages, and now globalist tendencies only opened one village to the next, escaping inbreeding, raising birth rates and snuffing out Gnosticism. 

So now you know. 

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