The Serpent's Wisdom

Among the texts of the Nag Hammadi Library there is this one - the Paraphrase of Shem - that I've been looking at since last night. And TBH it kind of freaks me out.

First issue: where does this text come from? It seems to have been written entirely out of the blue. It is a Gnostic text but is not Jewish, Egyptian, Christian, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Mandaean, Buddhist, Hindu, Platonist, Roman, or anything. It does not bear any characteristics that identify it as being a product of any particular sect or school of Gnosticism. There are no markers that identify when or where it was written, except that it must have been before 350 CE. It might have been long before then.

There are some very slight clues. The first is that it uses the terms "Light" and "Darkness" which were characteristic of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and "Logos" and "Sophia" which were characteristic of... everywhere, really, that Alexander the Great conquered. The second is this:

When he will have appeared, O Shem, upon the earth, [in] the place which will be called Sodom, (then) safeguard the insight which I shall give you. For those whose heart was pure will con­gregate to you, because of the word which you will reveal. For when you appear in the world, dark Nature will shake against you, together with the winds and a demon, that they may destroy the in­sight. But you, proclaim quickly to the Sodomites your universal teaching, for they are your members. For the demon of human form will part from that place by my will, since he is ignorant. He will guard this utterance. But the Sodomites, according to the will of the Majesty, will bear witness to the universal testimony. They will rest with a pure conscience in the place of their repose, which is the unbegotten Spirit. And as these things will happen, Sodom will be burned unjustly by base Nature. For the evil will not cease in order that your majesty may reveal that place.

So, it was written by someone who mourned the destruction of Sodom. Not surprising really that someone should have, since the people who lived there must have had relatives and friends and compatriots and so on. The tradition teaches that the descendants of Shem moved to the east after the Flood, and south into Arabia, etc., so someone who claims ancestry from Shem by way of Sodom would have likely lived by the Dead Sea.

So that makes two markers that point to the Dead Sea. Not so weird or disturbing, eh? Except that the people who lived there at the time, the Nabateans, had no traditions that match any of the angel or archon names listed in the Paraphrase of Shem. I suppose the author might have just made up the names out of whole cloth, but it's very unusual. It would be unique, actually. Gnostics were almost always reacting to existing tradition.

It starts to get strange when you look at the archaeological evidence. There was never a city in the areas where Sodom and Gomorrah supposedly existed. The area is an incredibly desolate salt basin 50 feet under sea level. It's where water goes to die. Seriously, there is an entire mountain made out of salt there. Do you see anything missing? Only things like trees and life.

I suppose such an area might have seemed welcoming to someone who thought Nature was an evil demon. Which is where the text starts to get really strange. Nature is evil, and especially fearsome is her "dark vagina":

She (i.e. Nature) turned her dark vagina and cast from her the power of fire which was in her from the beginning through the practice of the Darkness. It (masc.) lifted itself up and shone upon the whole world instead of the righteous one. And all her forms sent forth a power like a flame of fire up to heaven as a help to the corrupted light, which had lifted itself up. For they were members of the chaotic fire. And she did not know that she had harmed herself. When she cast forth the power, the power which she possessed, she cast it forth from the genitals. It was the demon, a deceiver, who stirred up the womb in every form – . And in her ignorance, as if she were doing a great thing, she grant­ed the demons and the winds a star each. For without wind and star nothing happens upon the earth.

The first half of this text -- and it's quite long -- is a strange rambling tale of disembodied genitals rubbing up against each other and bearing elemental forms which take turns being astonished at one another. There is no sense of narrative structure, of progression from an initial state to a final state. Just this, on and on:

And the light which was in the Hymen was disturbed by my power, and it passed through my middle region. It was filled with the uni­versal Thought. And through the word of the light of the Spirit it re­turned to its repose. It received form in its root and shone without deficiency. And the light which had come forth with it from the silence went in the middle region and returned to the place. And the cloud shone.

On a basic level it is a manifestation of the "Terrible Mother" story mentioned by Carl Jung and Erich Neumann. But it's not really a surprise that this text and its material didn't catch on.

The podcast project I've been threatening for over a year is finally live! I found the time to work on it at last.

The Serpent's Wisdom

Lately I've been coming back to the Gnostic literature. This morning I encountered a text that hadn't really stood out in my mind before: the Revelation of Adam to Seth, a Sethian text with strong Hellenic overtones that has a really interesting hymn in the middle.

By this I mean the passage that gives fourteen different accounts of the origin of the savior, 13 of them attributed to thirteen kingdoms, the last attributed to "the generation without a king over it," which means in the context of the document the descendants of Seth, who are free from the spiritual fetters of the archons. The number 13 is interesting; if it was 12 we could easily see this as a reference to the 12 tribes of Israel -- which they may be, except that several of the savior-origin stories refer to various aspects of the Christian gospel (orthodox and otherwise). I'm losing my edge, or else I'd've already figured out who the 13 kingdoms were supposed to be. My instinct tells me this hymn is a ritual rubric.

There's also a reference to Solomon's 'army of demons,' which is a rather esoteric reference -- Bentley Layton says in a footnote that at the time there was a myth that Solomon had the ability to control and command demons, note for example the goetic grimoire named "the Lesser Key of Solomon the King." I wasn't aware the myth went back to antiquity... fascinating.

This post brought to you by the Thievery Corporation, who started their latest album Radio Retaliation with "Sound the Alarm," a collaboration with Sleepy Wonder:

Sound the alarm, order the attack
Selassie I soldiers beat Babylon back.

There's a lot of meaning in that beyond the historical reference, though we can start there. In 1928, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned King of Ethiopia and he assumed the royal name Haile Selassie I. Ethiopia was then one of only two independent nations in Africa, and many in Africa and the African diaspora saw the crowning of Selassie I as representing African resistance to the European colonial scheme.

In 1935 Benito Mussolini, who aspired to be the ruler of a new Roman Empire, invaded Ethiopia. It's hard to think of this as a "war"; Italian casualties were somewhere between 355 and 500, while Ethiopian casualties were in the order of 275,000. The colonial powers of Europe approved and recognized the occupation and annexation of Ethiopia in 1936 by the Italian Empire. Selassie I, in exile in England, warned Europe: "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow." Three years later saw the start of World War Two; and in 1941 British and Free French forces helped Ethopian troops liberate Ethiopia.

On one level the song is about these historical events, and on another level it is about the larger context of Africa shaking off the colonial powers. It also echoes the present day anti-neo-colonialist movement.

On yet another level, the song is a profession of the Rastafari worldview. "Babylon" is a generic name for empire (taken from those parts of Jewish scripture written after forced exile in Babylon) in a way that blends political reality with religious worldview. In this view all empires are the same; and all emperors, while they may have conflicts with one another, recognize each other as the powers that control the world's businesses, governments, and institutions.

Because my awareness of this worldview started with my investigations of ancient middle eastern Gnosticism, I still think of this as the gnostic view of political reality: worldly rulers are seen as shadows of demigod archons, whose empire over the earth is all-reaching; the faces may change, emperors may be deposed, but the numinous nature of Empire casts a permanent shadow on the human soul, and dominance will always resurface. Resistance against Empire is therefore not just political rebellion, but a challenge to the very concept of fate and to the notion that human nature is forevermore shaped by the desire to dominate others by force when possible. But this view is more than "gnostic": it the response of the religious spirit to the totality of economic and hegemonic domination that exists in the human sphere.

The visage on the album's cover is that of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the EZLN, and I bring this up to point out that while the song casts resistance to Empire in militaristic terms, the EZLN has actually turned away from the militaristic approach. This is good and necessary because, as the Revolution is beginning to understand, there is no way to defeat the Empire by matching the Empire's violence. When you take up arms "against" the Empire, you become of it, because Empire is rooted in the power you gain by pointing a weapon. For a graphic illustration of this point, I recommend Karin Badt's illuminating interview with a former FARC guerilla who was recruited as a young girl.

This morning i finished reading The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. Now it's time for my review of the His Dark Materials trilogy to which this is the conclusion.

I've been writing this review in my head through half the trilogy, but i wanted to actually finish the trilogy before setting any of it down.

The quality of Pullman's writing craft i'll give a B. It was particularly uneven with regard to vividness. In many parts, there was no attention given to the senses at all - no description of sights, sounds, smells. Now, typically, i don't like prose which is bogged down in elaborate descriptions of things. But a few hints here and there, just to tickle the senses, would have been effective - especially given the (literal) otherwordliness of many of the book's settings. In other places the setting descriptions were so elaborate the scene felt bogged down.

Dialogue was good though, and the characterization was (with one exception) superb. I love that the protagonist is an untidy, poorly-behaved, stomping-in-the-mud, neighborhood-warfare-waging, prank-pulling, truth-challenged 12 year old girl.

The exception is Marisa Coulter, a femme fatale who wields charm, seduction, and manipulation to achieve supernatural results. Coulter is the hardest character to read, because one never knows when she is being upfront and when she is lying until she actually acts. I know this is by design, and that element of not knowing would be laudable if it were done via any different means; but it's still unfortunate to see a character play an essential role mainly because everyone who meets her is stunned by how she looks.

Still, i have to give Pullman some points for writing a work of fantasy in which female characters are just as strong and prominent -- if not, on balance, a little more so -- as male characters.

The plotting and storytelling i'll give an A. As a whole the work is superbly conceived and structured. It's set in an elaborate multiverse and the reader finds herself wishing she could take tangents, just to learn more about this or that. Lyra's world, where the story starts, is fascinatingly different from our own. Even the experience of day to day life as a human being is vastly different there, because every person has a companion, a dæmon, who is an extension of their individual being and nature.

In many ways, this is the ultimate "underdog" story. The heroes are figures usually cast as villains: witches, fallen angels (esp. gay ones), dæmons, harpies, users of divination, gypsies ("gyptians" in Lyra's world), African kings, rebels, dissidents... while the villains of the book are figures of authority: various members of the European upper class, bishops and other church functionaries, and upper ranks of angels, including God himself.

Wait, so God is a villain in His Dark Materials? Well, it's more complicated than that. ( spoilerish stuff starts here )

Hmm, not sure how to characterize the last few paragraphs, but since they gel with my own views, i'm going to give it an A. Which means that my overall grade for the trilogy is about an A-.

Once upon a time, i was a conservative Christian. I turned away from this during my early teens, when i began to realize that certain of my beliefs simply could not be reconciled with logic, science, reality, and my personal experience.

During my years as a non-Christian, as i explored many different approaches to spirituality i never stopped feeling like a spiritual refugee, and so when i learned about Gnostic and liberal Christianity i began to think maybe i had found a way to come home, spiritually speaking.

Liberal theology is rooted in an approach to scripture at odds with the fundamentalist belief that the Bible is literally true, infallible, and designed as a timeless guide to life, belief, and morality. It has nothing to do with liberal politics, though many liberal Christians are also liberal politically.

Finally, a kind of Christianity i could sink my teeth into!

But after years of exploration in the realm of liberal theology, i find i still cannot reconcile Christianity, this time with economics, ethics, philosophy, justice, and again my personal experience.

Christianity is based on the idea that humans are separated from God in some profound way. The conservative Christians talk about "original sin" and "sin nature" which passes from father to offspring. In the Calvinist formulation, people are inherently "totally depraved," utterly incapable of embracing good and worthy by default of eternal damnation.

The problem with this belief is that it is damagingly divisive. Someone who is "lost in sin" is too easy to see as less than fully human, less than fully capable, worthy of pity or rejection. It is too easy to justify to oneself participating in the mistreatment of people who are called by one's leaders less than fully human; and history bears out the problems this has allowed.

Liberal Christians understand how divisive this belief has been and rejects its overt forms. But most of the liberal theology i've encountered does not, in the end, truly reject it -- because they still rely on Christ for some sort of salvation.

Spong, for example, proposed we understand humanity as "incomplete," still a work in progress. Other liberal theologians describe us as in need of healing from without, in need of divine guidance or leadership.

In the past, i looked to the idea of soteria as "healing" or self-improvement in the hopes of understanding Christian doctrine in a non-divisive way. This approach can only work if and only if healing is seen as voluntary, as something we seek if we recognize a need for change in ourselves. It should never be seen as something which all of us must undertake -- because then it becomes, in turn, an "us vs. them," a question of "who is seeking healing and who isn't?"

But the idea of Christ as an envoy from God, or a reflection within humankind of the divine presence, makes it impossible to think of healing as something voluntary -- because Christ, as the perfect human, the ideal to which we are to aspire, is a yardstick by which we will always come up short.

The fundamentalists see Christ as God in human form. Liberal theologians are likely to see Christ as a metaphor for human potential, or the divine presence in an understandable form; or they see Jesus as an extraordinary person, someone of immense charisma who moved socio-political mountains and taught people a lot about tolerance and love and co-operation.

I was striken then very hard by the observation of Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza that perhaps the proper way to view the early Christian movement is not one that starts and ends with Jesus, a single extraordinary individual, a man who saves us all by leading the way to a bright new world, but as a broad and diverse social movement to which many people contributed with their bravery and their witness. In this view, Jesus is simply a person who became, for a time, the movement's chief galvanizer and spokesperson.

To take a galvanizing figure and make him a figure of worship or emulation and to make him the central focus of theological inquiry takes the emphasis from where it must be (justice and compassion). The idea of Christ is therefore misappropriation; it diverts inquiry from the hard questions of justice and ethics and spins us in a whirlpool of philosophical auto-eroticism. (ETA: Alright, i know that's harsh. But immersion in a quasi-Marxian-inspired point of view has made it difficult for me to see anything that does not immediately contribute to justice as a potential contributor to the status quo, by taking our energy away from the important areas of focus. I've always been accused of being too serious for my own good.)

Is there any way to preserve the idea of Christ and maintain a focus on justice and compassion? I eagerly sought one. The best i could come up with is the idea that Christ is something which those who follow the Christian path are called upon to become or to embody when we they confronted with a person in need or an ethical dilemma.

But if that's the way it works, then phrasing it in terms of "Christ" or "savior" is distraction -- or worse, because the loaded cultural values of these terms means that phrasing discourse about acting justly or compassionately in this way makes us forever in danger of being diverted away from ethics and onto the distraction of Christology. It's safer just to say, "We have to be just and compassionate with one another," than to bring a religious term into it that risks diversion.

This leads to another concern i had, which is that once you apply a word to something for ease of description, people take the word and run with it as a label, and use it in a normative way to distinguish between one thing and another. Similarly, any kind of organization formed by people of one generation to solve the problems they face becomes a rigidified edifice which tends to cause problems in future generations.

In other words, anything resembling "systematic" theology or philosophy -- the attempt to coalesce one's worldview into a concise set of concepts -- puts us in danger of creating fodder for the perpetuation or justification of injustice.

That's a damn drastic thing to say, i know: but i've expounded several times in recent months on why i have concluded that there is no way any ideology can be "the answer" to human ills. This is a thunderous insight that continues to reverberate throughout my brain and shake down wall after wall. It's a threatening idea to anyone who has a pet ideology, and i even sometimes find myself resisting it. But if there is anything that has been shown to be true by the witness of human experience, it is this.

I suppose it is okay to post this now, it should have been graded by now (though i haven't received it back yet): the essay i wrote on Gnosticism for the final in Prof. Koester's class.

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What separated the gnostic Christians from the non-gnostic (hereafter ‘orthodox’) Christians was not simply a difference in beliefs or opinions, but deeply divergent ways of viewing the world, human nature, and divine nature. These divergences made reconciliation between the gnostics and the orthodox impossible.

Christianity is concerned with the state of humankind, asserting that people exist in a state of incompletion or depravity, and are therefore in need of salvation in order to achieve their potential intended by the creator. Salvation, Christians believe, comes to humankind from God by way of Christ.

The orthodox doctrine teaches that salvation comes from the presence of Christ with us, from Christ’s sacrifice, from Christ’s resurrection, from being baptized in Christ’s name, and from taking in the body and blood of Christ during the celebration of the Eucharist.

The label of ‘gnostic’ was given to Christian sects who taught instead that salvation came from knowing particular doctrine or having certain awareness. The death and resurrection of Christ or the presence of Christ in the sacraments were matters of less importance to the gnostics.

At the heart of gnostic belief is the notion that some people have a spark of divinity within them. This fragment of the divine spirit has been enchanted and so has forgotten who and what it is. The gnostics believed that the key to salvation was to re-awaken the divine spark to awareness of its nature and origin.

In contrast to this, the idea of a measure of divinity within each person became increasingly unpalatable to orthodox thinkers. The author of John’s Gospel took pains to dispel this notion, calling Jesus the “Only Begotten Son” of God, making it clear that Jesus’ divinity was unique. Later, Augustine promoted the notion of original sin, which precludes the gnostic idea altogether.

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My fourth homework for Prof. Koester's class regards the Canon Muratori and the development of a normative, authoritative canon.

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An old essay of mine on the sacred-sexual aspects of transgenderism was re-published online in an_gadhar's journal, The Shadow Sacrament: a Journal of Sex and Spirituality. Not work-safe.

For my second homework in Prof. Koester's class i have prepared a text on the Gnostic piece "The Hypostasis of the Archons." Dare i turn in a paper like this? Or should i turn in something more tame?

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