Happy Gnew Year

Practicing Gnostic Christians include New Year's Day as one of their Holy Days. Here's an explanation from the good gnostics at Gnosis.org:

New Year's Day occurs in the Christmas cycle as one the twelve days of Christmas, the period between the ending of the lunar calendar and the beginning of the solar year, a time betwixt and between, a time of misrule when the usual rules and authorities of the world are suspended. It is a time of temporary chaos, confusion, celebration, and breaking down of
old established forms to make way for a new light and new resolutions, the eternal new-born child of the year. These twelve days represent an opportunity for a psychological and spiritual renewal as well.

As a good gneo-gnostic, I will inform my own New Year's meditations and celebrations with this wonderful bit of gnostic mythology about the "usual rules" beings "suspended" by allowing my imaginative powers to envision what I might bring forth from within for myself and for my family in 2009.

New Year's Day for gnostics typically includes a Thanksgiving ceremony as well, so I'll also be giving thanks for the incredible blessings of 2008.

"The consummation of Gnostic rebirth gives us a way to transcend the sense of loss and pain, and to make the transitions and passages in our lives occasions for renewal and joy."

Lessons in Gneo-Gnosticism: The Divine Within

Discover the X in Christmas

One of the Advent messages brought by my pastor at the tiny United Methodist Church where I'm a member and have attended frequently for 30 years was a standard Orthodox sermon built around the popular theme of putting "Christ" back into "Christmas". It was a nice message and I enjoyed it, particularly the part where Pastor Peggy, an exceedingly competent and sincere Orthodox minister, took on the practice of substituting "X" for "Christ" in the word Christmas.

As I sat there taking in Peggy's fine Advent sermon, I was looking forward to reminding her after the service that an "X" is one of the symbols early Christians used to represent Christ. Therefore, of course, the word "Xmas" literally represents "Christmas" making it unnecessary to rail against the former as an offense to the Spirit of the season. To Pastor Peggy's credit, however, she explained at a later point in her homily that even though an "X" is, in fact, an ancient symbol for "Christ", that most contemporary users of the term aren't reflecting upon the Christolic Symbology of the letter "X" as a representation of "Christ" when they jot down Xmas in place of Christmas in a likely attempt to further secularize the meaning of Christmas.

OK, fair enough, I thought and I shared a laugh with her after the service that I was gonna get on her about the "X" until she adeptly preempted my protest.

I'm writing this post after Christmas dinner as I sit on the couch in my wife's mother's basement with my wife and two children. We are in the midst of a Christmas Movie Marathon. For whatever reason, I started thinking about the business of how the use of "X" for Christ fits so well for those of us who approach our Christ with a Gnostic Spirit of Gnot-Gnowing. As an interesting alternative to the common Orthodox concerns about substituting an "X" for "Christ" in "Christmas", I'm thinking how the letter "X" in its form of the variable in an equation actually perfectly represents Christ -- especially at Christmas.

The story of the literal Christ of literalistic believers, ironically, can easily be proven to be a more derivative and unoriginal story than that of the "X" of history we intentionally unorthodox seekers find buried in the shallow grave of the Orthodox Christmas. The Orthodox Christ was literally born of a Virgin on December 25th in identical fashion to Mythra, which stole the same story from the ancient Egyptian God, Horace.

So, it is the Orthodox Christ of the traditional Christmas story that is an inappropriate substitution for the "X" of "Xmas" instead of the other way around!

The Orthodox Christ was nothing new, but the Gnostic Christ presents the same "X" variable to human beings today that it presented to the people of ancient Palestine some 2,000 years ago. Like our world today, we sense that we are or could be something more than we are and that maybe there's something missing from human heart which manifests itself in the problems of human history -- some unknown variable that might solve the problem and give us all the answers.

In the Gnostic approach, the metaphorical Logos gives birth to the Transformative Constant -- the Baby X -- in the empty manger of the Unknown Variable. The existing paradigm of "God", which persists even to this day even among a majority of the world's "Christians", was God which men used in various fashion to grant for themselves the throne of political power. A King decides to commit genocide against a neighboring Kingdom for political reason and the story is told as the dictate of a sovereign God who demands that men and women seek His will through Kings, Priests and carefully crafted scriptures which serve more to enslave than to liberate.

Christ does not represent this well-understood and popular notion of God the Father. Christ, the X of Christmas, represents a wholly Alien God -- a complete Unknown Variable.

"I will give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart."

~Attributed to Yeshua in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

Before it had been taught to extract an "eye for an eye" and a "tooth for tooth" but Yeshua, the Son of the Unknown Father, says to "turn the other cheek" and to give a person a coat if that person steals your shirt. Yet, we explain these hard sayings away as we regress back into the known and comforting God of exact rules perfectly fitting for human institutions. We forget about the X altogether and we claim again, as always, that what is known to man -- continuous war, economic exploitation, hunger and poverty -- are the necessary condition of humanity. The call of Christ to embrace an entirely Alien God, but loving God who asks us to practice humility, generosity and forgiveness in the place of arrogance, irrational selfishness and retribution.

The Alien God replaces the illusion of knowing with the truth of not-knowing as represented by the mystery of the Eternal Christ, which is the metaphorical "X" inside both the individual conscience and the collective unconscious. The literal Christ of Christmas happens once in history as a physical date of birth. The metaphorical X of Xmas happens each and every time Light and Love are given the space to birth forgiveness and redemption within the hearts of humankind.

So, as the literals, the fundamentalists and the Orthodox lament the promotion of Xmas while arguing that the literal Christ has been lost to secularization, there are some who passionately embrace the X of Xmas as the perfect symbology of the Eternal Christ who calls us into direct communion with the Alien God, whom we believe is the Father whom Yeshua and others discovered with nothing more complicated than an open heart and a mind which seeks only the Truth.

The Gospel of Truth, part of the collection called "The Gnostic Gospels" lost for 15 centuries until discovered at Nag Hammadi, speaks of this "incomprehensible" Christ -- this X of Xmas in the following verse:

In their heart, the living book of the Living was manifest, the book which was written in the thought and in the mind of the Father and, from before the foundation of the All, is in that incomprehensible part of him."

When we engage that "incomprehensible part of him", we have found the X of Xmas which is always seeking a place to born within us.

Merry Xmas!

Joseph Campbell & The Matrix

The key to a gneo-gnostic perspective on faith is to not get stuck to the metaphor, as Joseph Campbell would say. The Matrix is a great gneo-gnostic cinematic achievement directly influenced by Joseph Campbell's work. The protagonist's name is "Neo", of course!

All religions will pass...

All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.

~V.V. Rosanov

"That which God has joined together..."

"...let no man put asunder." ~Yeshua

I began reading Elaine Pagel's Adam, Eve & the Serpent tonight.  From the intro and 1st chapter, I'm still thinking about how Yeshua made a big deal about divorce when divorce was an accepted practice for Jews in Yeshua's day.  Pagel's scholarship so often puts New Testament teachings in a fresh light and her efforts to show the link between the Genesis story and Yeshua's insistence that marriage represents a sacred union are intriguing given the Apostle Paul's later depature from the implications of Yeshua's teaching.  You really see this over and over in the New Testament where later writers create a more convenient rendering of Christian ethics that is implied by the sayings attributed to Yeshua.

No one does a better of job of taking scholarly religious questions and turning them into intriguing explorations which can be easily enjoyed by a wide audience than Pagels.

If your interested in Gnosticsm, Pagel's book The Gnostic Gospels ranks as core "gospel" within the Gneo-Gnostic canon.  I look forward to the rest of what was her follow-up to TGG, Adam, Eve & the Serpent, so that I can share what jumps out at me on the Gneo-Gnostic Gnews.

I Am Who?

I have a name that I didn't choose.  I do not recall choosing to exist.  I live in a confusing and conflict rife society with a bunch of other creatures who seem to share my predicament.  A bunch of my fellow humans (that's we call ourselves -- humans) seem to have a lot of answers, but I don't buy any of it.  Call it "faith" or "fantasy" or DNA inspired memetics, I just don't think anyone else knows anything more (or less) than I do about why I'm here, how I got here or where I'm going.  Temporality is the only objective reality to which I can bring myself to subscribe without creating a flood of untenable cognitive dissonance.  The question, "Who am I?" can be answered sufficiently by a simple reversal of subject and predicate -- "I am 'WHO'?"

A Bloodless Thanksgiving

span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">One of the 50 books found in the Nag Hammadi library is the "Prayer of Thanksgiving".  This prayer was offered before the partaking of the Holy Meal, which meant a meal without the blood of animals.  Sort of like having lunch on Melrose in Hollywood, these early Christians weren't a fan of killing animals to support human life.  Significant evidence exists to confirm that many early Christian sects as well as communities of Jewish Gnostics and Egyptians Gnostics, which are now grouped under the generic "Gnostic" label, were vegetarians.

Here's the ancient "Prayer of Thanksgiving" which was ceremonially offered before a Gnostic Holy Meal:

The Prayer of Thanksgiving

Translated by James Brashler, Peter A. Dirkse and Douglas M. Parrott

This the prayer that they spoke:

"We give thanks to You!
Every soul and heart is lifted up to You,
undisturbed name, honored with the name 'God'
and praised with the name 'Father',
for to everyone and everything (comes) the fatherly kindness
and affection and love,
and any teaching there may be that is sweet and plain,
giving us mind, speech, (and) knowledge:
mind, so that we may understand You,
speech, so that we may expound You,
knowledge, so that we may know You.
We rejoice, having been illuminated by Your knowledge.
We rejoice because You have shown us Yourself.
We rejoice because while we are in (the) body,
You have made us divine through Your knowledge.

"The thanksgiving of the man who attains to You is one thing:
that we know You.
We have known You, intellectual Light.
Life of life, we have known You.
Womb of every creature, we have known You.
Womb pregnant with the nature of the Father,
we have known You.
Eternal permanence of the begetting Father,
thus have we worshiped Your goodness.

There is one petition that we ask:
we would be preserved in knowledge.
And there is one protection that we desire:
that we not stumble in this kind of life."

The Significance of Nag Hammadi

Ancient cultures believed that God/s revealed "secrets" to certain special people according to the whatever purpose the God/s had for the revelations. The nature of many of these "secrets" was that not everyone was ready to hear them and even fewer would be able to understand them correctly. Gnostics believed they had been given a secret "gnosis", or knowledge, about many of life's Ultimate Questions. Some of this information, according to many of the most well-known Gnostic teachers, would have been very dangerous to people who might not be able to handle the truth. So, many Gnostic teachers were very deliberate about how they shared these secrets with the uninitiated.

If you're thinking this sounds a lot like the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), the Masons or the Scientologists -- you'd be right on! Most cults follow some form of the same organizational features. Well, at least the ones that succeed share many similarities.


Orthodox Christianity, of course, shares many of these same features. Sometimes, when studying early Christianity, it becomes difficult to determine who was influencing who when it came to how what we know call the "Orthodox" church operated and how the so-called "Gnostics" operated. It is important to note here that there were as many tribes of Christianity as their were charismatic and/or well-organized Christian teachers. So, this whole conversation of "Gnostic" versus "Orthodox" is simply a convenient way to talk about them.

The question I want to answer with today post is, "Why are we hearing so much about the Gnostics now when I don't remember hearing much about them until just a few years ago?

The simple answer to this question is, "Because of a place in Egypt called 'Nag Hammadi.'"

In 1945, an Egyptian peasant named ironically "Muhammed" was digging around in the sand and discovered a clay vase. Little did Muhammed know that inside that vase, Christian monks had hidden 12 leather bound papyrus codices containing several volumes of forbidden Gnostic teachings that had been banned by the leadership the Orthodox Christian church as heresy.

So, why didn't we hear anything about this in 1945?

Well, you would have if you'd been an antiquities scholar, an archaeologist or a theologian. Due to a complex drama that unfolded related to these documents, the Nag Hammadi Library wasn't made publicly available until 1975.

The Nag Hammadi Library is now considered to be one of a handful of the most significant archaeological finds in history and is rivaled only by the Dead Sea Scrolls for Biblical scholars and theologians.

Okay, but I don't remember hearing anything in 1975 either...

The popularization of the Nag Hammadi Library began with a single scholar with a penchant for being able to place the Nag Hammadi texts into an accessible form for laypersons. You know, dummies like us! That single scholar was Professor Elaine Pagels, a Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her seminal work, The Gnostic Gospels (1979), put forth the argument that at least one of these texts, The Gospel of Thomas, deserved to be considered as one of the earliest Christian "gospels". Orthodox scholars, of course, haven't been too keen on that suggestion.

To me, the most important achievement of Pagel's work has been to help create a renewed interest in trying to understand the origins of the many modern manifestations of Christianity, including the notion that early Christians were anything but unified in their beliefs about even most fundamental questions of what it was that Yeshua bin Joseph (Jesus) actually taught to his disciples.

In the last several years, Dan Brown's novels, particularly The Davinci Code, took many of the Gnostic controversies and turned them into a first class theological thriller.

The signficance of the Nag Hammadi, then, has been enormous because it has opened up a dialog about what it means to be a Christian today and if there is room in Christianity for a point-of-view that has re-emerged as powerfully as ever after being buried for over 1,500 years.

Nag Hammadi also plays a central role for the Neo-Gnostic seeker because it is from the Gnostics that the Neo-Gnostic has been granted permission to work out their own salvation without fear or trembling!

Gnow Gnothing Gneo-Gnostics: The 4G Gnetwork

Religion knows things.  Lots of things.  Very small things like what to eat and what to wear.  Very big things like how to get to Heaven and/or avoid an eternity in Hell.  Ancient Gnostics knew quite a lot, too, but they held their gnosis with a different spirit than their Orthodox brethren.  The Gnostics were more fluid where the Orthodox were rigid and employed the same sort of organizational controls as any other tightly managed religious cult.

As a self-described Neo-Gnostic, my only claim of genuine gnosis is that I truly don't anything.  Oh, I accept many things as being "true" -- such as my own existence, the need to figure out how to sustain myself if I want to see how far I can take this thing called being human and that there seem to be some observations from which we can draw some inferences about a few things.  But, when it comes to the Ultimate Questions like is there something like the God of the major religions that wants us to do very specific things while on Earth or if there's an Afterlife where I'll still have my human personality -- I simply DON'T KNOW.

This is where I'll begin this journey that I call the Not-So-Secret-Gnosis of the Gneo Gnostic -- with this first affirmation of Neo-Gnosticism: 

I do not know the answers to life's Ultimate Questions and yet I choose to live by faith that I will be Eternal.