Gnostics - Ancient Answers to a Modern Crisis
There is a war going on for our minds. This is the first part of a trilogy of talks I have given on psychological insights into our current crises that first appeared 2,000 years ago...
As we all know, our lives were changed irrevocably after March 2020. After the Dark went ‘nuclear’ on us, and put us all on a war-footing, destroying lives and livelihoods with a fake pandemic, I discovered by accident that, shockingly, 2,000 years ago the ancient Gnostics had identified the same playbook that has been used against us today. Fortunately, not only did they identify the problems, but they also offered solutions. It isn’t all doom and gloom.
I have based much of this article on the work of American writer and thinker John Lamb Lash and his classic book ‘Not in His Image’ which I happened to come across last summer. Although he first published his book 17 years ago, he did slightly update it to take account of the 2020 pandemic and it is still relevant. In it he writes about the mystics and seers who buried their sacred texts at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in the C4th AD. Contrary to popular opinion, John LL makes v clear that they were definitely not early Christians – quite the contrary…
Nor were they Luciferian Satanists.
[Before explaining how Gnostics relate to today, I am first going to give a brief overview of their beliefs back in time. Please note that this view of Gnostics is v specifically based on Nag Hammadi texts, and not the later Renaissance understanding of Gnosticism. The page number references below are from JLL’s book.]
To place the Gnostics in context it helps to know that they lived in a Greco-Roman world some time from the C1st AD, a world in which Ancient Egypt had been comprehensively taken over. Since at least 333 BC Egypt had been under the control of Alexander the Great’s people, the Macedonian Ptolemies. By 30 BC Egypt had been conquered by the Romans. Ancient Egypt, as such, then no longer really existed after that as a place of wisdom traditions.
The Gnostics were thus around at the time of the destructions of the Great Library of Alexandria, the mystery school at Eleusis outside Athens and other places of learning. They believed that they were carriers of ancient knowledge and that they were a link back to ancient Egypt and a blueprint of civilisation [which is what I wrote about in my book, ‘Approaching Chaos…’].
But, by the time they buried their texts at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in the C4th AD, they felt they were in danger and that mankind was taking the wrong turning on our collective soul path. So, while they were keen to protect themselves from attack, they also strongly believed that they had a mission to warn humanity .
So who were the Gnostics, and why are they still relevant today?
In the first place, they didn’t call themselves ‘Gnostics’ – which has the sense of ‘knowing’ as in gnosis. Their word for themselves was telestai, based on a Greek word telos meaning ‘goal’, ‘aim’, the ‘ultimate’; ‘one who is aimed’ [JLL p124]. They maintained a ‘path of direct knowing’ [p120]. They described their teachers as ‘light bearers’, people who preserved the transmission of gnosis, people who taught the Mysteries [p110]. They saw their role as being the ones who kept alive the knowledge of how we realise our true potential; and who could see how we have been deviated, pushed off our path.
In this sense Gnosticism isn’t a religion but a radical alternative to religion; through the Sophia mythos, ‘a sacred narrative about the Earth to be found nowhere else’ [p332]. And we can learn much from their origin myth.
In particular, what the Gnostics claimed knowledge of was the Pleroma.
This is the plenitude, the fullness at the galactic centre, from which come the generative powers of the Aeons.
All is potential.
A myth of emanation not creation. No Big Bang.
It is the Aboriginal Dreamtime and is eternal [p169].
Not evolution but emergence.
Then one of the Aeons, named Sophia, decides to deviate from the cosmic order… She dreams out of the plenitude, out of the Pleroma, on her own without her male Aeon counterpart. This is her great Error [p160]. She dreams in Gaia, the Earth, and herself becomes both the Mother of Nature and Nature itself [p146].
She then finds the template for humans nesting in the Orion nebula [p188 & p210] (cf Orion’s Belt is reflected in the layout of the pyramids at Giza and Mexico). We are the ‘deathless’ humans, the ‘luminous children’ with whom she wants to collaborate to evolve her dream. This is our role: to work with Gaia to help the Earth evolve and create a world of great beauty, of fractals - JLL refers to autopoesis [p170].
Where it isn’t a case of the survival of the fittest, but the survival of what fits. All is in harmony.
Except that, unfortunately for us, before all this emerged, Sophia made another mistake. She inadvertently enabled the cosmic creation of disastrous entity known as Archons, as in the sense of ‘archaic’. (I will refer to them as the As.)
Archons - the ‘mind virus’
Archons do not come from the Pleroma, like we do. They are inorganic although alive in some form. They precede humans and can be regarded as ‘premature’. They can be compared to an aborted foetus and are more of an imitation life form [p180-181]; a kind of mind-virus or parasite. They lack creativity, can only imitate and copy (the distinction between fantasy and imagination illustrates the point. They lack imagination). Because the As cannot incarnate, they work through people. They are envious of people because they want to incarnate but can’t.
According to Gnostics, the As inhabit the planetary system and they are aliens in our world. Gnostics view the planetary system to be Archontic – clockwork, without emotion, a system but not alive. They saw the Earth as captured in an inorganic planetary system by deception.
Gnostics did not view the As as evil as such but as ‘in error’ [p192] and the people who work on their behalf as being deceived; and they saw the objective of the As as being to deviate humans off their true path, prevent them from co-evolving with Gaia. According to the Gnostics, the Archons have set up a deviant field which distorts human thinking – by working through the mind [p186].
Of special concern to the Gnostics 2000 years ago was the archontic trick of twisting monotheistic religion into something which suited the Archons and their minions [- for more details on the Gnostic attitude to religion, please refer to JLL’s book]. They accused them of destroying the Mystery religions, the druidic groves with all the zealotry of ‘end justifies the means’ thinking (which has direct parallels with our own climate activists today. Same mind set. Same mind virus.).
As a result from 400AD onward, the ancient wisdom lineages were no longer able to endure. The As succeeded in establishing a dominant materialist mindset, with the ultimate irony that people who became obsessed with materialism could not understand the nature of matter. They only wanted the Earth’s resources for the taking [p207] - and still do. The Gnostics had no choice but to go underground, and bury their sacred texts as at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Eleusis remains in ruins and the groves are still abandoned.
Hope returns. Lost knowledge recovered
Now, more than ever, when we are under attack from the As, we need the insights of the Gnostics. Luckily for us, their texts were re-discovered in Egypt in 1948 and John Lamb Lash has done a tremendous service for us all in interpreting them by going back to the originals. His analyses give great hope for humanity and a more uplifting destiny for us all.
The fundamental message is that every human matters. Everyone has potential and a part to play in working with Sophia/Gaia to evolve. We all have innate creativity and must use it to make the world a better place. But first we must realign with our true purpose and overcome the insidious influence of the As. We must recognise that humans are superior to the As and are here for a reason. We have purpose. And so a return to balance and harmony is needed.
The ancient Gnostics can show us the way. They taught techniques that used plant medicines, for example; using nature to understand Nature, as it were. As John Lamb Lash points out, a deep rapport with Nature is not available to the self-conscious mind (which is why working on yourself doesn’t work), but to the ego-free mind which plant medicines can assist in creating. They taught initiates how to lose the ego-dominated mind and to surrender to their higher purpose.
And what is even more pertinent to us today, they exposed the mind-tricks, the playbook that the As used and still use to deceive people. Once we know the playbook, and how we are being tricked, we can more easily navigate what is unfolding in our world because we can see the hidden psychological techniques. Armed with knowledge, it isn’t so easy then to knock us off our path. This is a playbook that hasn’t changed in thousands of years…
The 2,000 year old Playbook ~
Key characteristics of the playbook…
Lies. Lying is the most basic form of deception.
From the Spring of 2020 we were told a pack of lies about a not very effective bio-weapon. (It was zoonotic. Definitely didn’t come from a lab. Definitely not man-made. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with…”(?!). Health services: “overwhelmed”. House arrest/masks/social distancing will stop infection from spreading. Etc etc. The scale of the audacity beggars belief).
But there was more. More sophisticated ways to fool us. And it is in this context that the Gnostics are especially helpful.
Combining the new and the known. This technique makes it easier for people to accept a change. People will reject something that is either too familiar, or too unfamiliar. But with the right combination, as in a novel Coronavirus, there is less resistance. A new kind of cold makes it sound less threatening but still threatening enough because we don’t know exactly what kind of cold it is. An element of danger to generate fear.
2,000 years ago the Gnostics identified this trick of combination among those who were spreading Christianity. They were not happy about the Church pretending to present Jesus as a version of a pagan god; eg nailed to a tree like Odin. It was an obvious marketing move on the part of the As as the new Christian narrative would then appear more acceptable to the natives. But the deliberate deceit upset the Gnostics.
Guilt and ‘the greater good’. This is possibly the most powerful trick of all. So many decent, good-hearted people fall for it. People want to do the right thing. They are so easily guilt-tripped. But as John Lamb Lash emphasises, personal sacrifices for the sake of others is not altruism but egotism (“look at me, the martyr”). As he says, ‘the individual psyche will adapt to the stress of the collective imagination. It will become what it believes and forget what it knows’. [p86]. We thus fall prey to a dominator mind set and we don’t need reminding that christianity has excelled in encouraging guilt and self-sacrifice.
Disassociation/isolation. As we should know, this one leaves the most appalling scars. Humans are herd animals. They don’t like to be separated, to be alone. It makes them depressed. Clear that this is useful for control – the old ‘divide and rule’ principle. Covid-19 was in many ways worse than WWII Blitz when there was at least a shared community spirit. It is no coincidence that governments employed psychologists to increase the trauma of the pandemic, not heal it. [nb In 2011 the British Government had specifically rejected the lockdown strategy they finally adopted in 2020 - because they realised how traumatic it would be for society. In 2011 the plan was to keep schools open. What changed?]
Likewise, christianity encouraged separation, isolation: men into monasteries; women into nunneries, even to the point of becoming anchorites, ie literally walled-up. According to JLL, what happened in C5th AD was an attempt to cut us off from Earth (‘the great god Pan is dead!’) as Mother nature was not included in the official christian religion of the time; resulting, in his view, in the domination of nature reflecting the domination of women.
Countermimicry. This is perhaps the sneakiest. In JLL’s words, ‘copy something but make the copy, the false version, serve a purpose counter to the original thing or idea’ [p114]. A Trojan Horse of something that sounds good but is actually something else. Like the mRNA jab: pretend to protect but who knows what damage the jab has caused people whose lives have been changed forever.
In the case of the Gnostics, JLL points out that they were critical of Christians who preached kindness but practiced cruelty. The velvet glove hiding the iron fist.
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I have only identified a few of the tricks - the ones that the Gnostics knew about. There are others like projection, like gas lighting, like creating the free floating anxiety that Prof Mattias Desmet talks of. Or future shocks (eg the Adam Curtis documentaries). Modern advertising is full of these techniques – always conveying a twisted version of truth.
As you can tell from this article, it is v old. It has been around for a long time. Those who manipulate it know it well. What makes it easier for us is that they are predictable - because they lack creativity. The playbook doesn’t change. We cannot eliminate the As, but we can at least identify them and put them in their place by not allowing ourselves to be intimidated by them. Like the Gnostics before us, we can call them out. The Gnostics took the view that evil only happens when error is not corrected. The As are in error.
The ancient Gnostics can help us find ourselves again, remember who we really are; knowing that there is a place for everything. The Earth is abundant – even oil regenerates through abiotic methods. It is those who want us to believe that humans are the problem that are themselves the problem. The genocidal psychopaths - they are the ones in error who have fallen under the influence of the As. We don’t have to fall into their traps. Even in these testing times, we owe to those who are trapped to do what we can to exercise our freedom of choice and fulfil our potential for free, sovereign lives. We can then start to move forward to a time when the entire Planet one day will be liberated.
[Awareness of the As and their deviousness sets the scene for the next two articles on ‘Science & the Quest for Harmony’ and ‘Geopolitics: Freedom & Tyranny’]