Gnosticism in modern times

Gnosticism is an ancient name for a variety of religious ideas and systems, originating in Jewish-Christian milieux in the first and second century CE.

The Mandaeans are an ancient Gnostic ethnoreligious group that have survived and are found today in Iran, Iraq and diaspora communities in North America, Western Europe and Australia.

The late 19th century saw the publication of popular sympathetic studies making use of recently rediscovered source materials.

This article attempts to summarize those modern figures and movements that have been influenced by Gnosticism, both prior and subsequent to the Nag Hammadi discovery.

King sets out to show that rather than being a Western heresy, the origins of Gnosticism are to be found in the East, specifically in Buddhism.

In an article in 1891, Mead argues for the recovery of the literature and thought of the West at a time when Theosophy was largely directed to the East, saying that this recovery of Western antique traditions is a work of interpretation and "the rendering of tardy justice to pagans and heretics, the reviled and rejected pioneers of progress..."[6] This was the direction his own work was to take.

From 1896 to 1898 Mead published another serial article in the same periodical, "Among the Gnostics of the First Two Centuries", that laid the foundation for his monumental compendium Fragments of a Faith Forgotten in 1900.

By the time he left the Theosophical Society in 1909, he had published many influential translations, commentaries, and studies of ancient Gnostic texts.

[8] After a series of visions and archival finds of Cathar-related documents, a librarian named Jules-Benoît Stanislas Doinel du Val-Michel (a.k.a.

Founded on extant Cathar documents with the Gospel of John and strong influence of Simonian and Valentinian cosmology, the church was officially established in the autumn of 1890 in Paris.

Carl Gustav Jung evinced a special interest in Gnosticism from at least 1912, when he wrote enthusiastically about the topic in a letter to Freud.

[12] Jung saw the Gnostics not as syncretic schools of mixed theological doctrines, but as genuine visionaries, and saw their imagery not as myths but as records of inner experience.

[18] The first publication of translations of Nag Hammadi texts occurred in 1955 with the Jung Codex by H. Puech, Gilles Quispel, and W. Van Unnik.

The EGU continued until 1960 when it was disbanded by Robert Amberlain (Tau Jean III) in favor of the Église Gnostique Apostolique that he had founded in 1958.

The Gospel of Thomas, held to be the most complete of the Nag Hammadi texts, is the subject of the book The Mustard Seed by Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho.

[16][24] Centered in Los Angeles, the Ecclesia Gnostica has parishes and educational programs of the Gnostic Society spanning the Western US and also in the Kingdom of Norway.

The Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum (EGM), commonly known as "the Church of Gnosis" or "the Gnostic Sanctuary," was initially established in Palo Alto by bishop Rosamonde Miller as a parish of the Ecclesia Gnostica, but soon became an independent body with emphasis on the experience of gnosis and the balance of the divine masculine and feminine principles.

[27] Samael Aun Weor had been a member of an occult order called the Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua, but left after the death of Arnold Krumm-Heller.

However, his disciples subsequently formed new organizations to spread his teachings, under the umbrella term 'the International Gnostic Movement'.

These organizations are currently very active via the Internet and have centers established in Latin America, the US, Australia, Canada and Europe.

[30] In the 1950s, Eric Voegelin brought a German academic debate concerning the classification of modernity to the attention of English-language readers.

[31] The category of gnosticism has been adopted by other scholars to frame several revolutionary phenomena (such as Bolshevism and Nazism, Puritanism, radical Anabaptism, Jacobinism,[32] and lastly Salafi-Jihadism[33]).

[39] Pope Francis suggests that a modern form of Jansenist rigour which he has criticised in his encyclical letter Dilexit nos can be seen as "a recrudescence of that Gnosticism which proved so great a spiritual threat in the early centuries of Christianity because it refused to acknowledge the reality of 'the salvation of the flesh'."

The aim of his letter, which focuses on "the heart of Jesus Christ", is to avoid the danger of withdrawal to a "disambodied spirituality" which treats matter as evil.

This may be related, certainly, to the sudden availability of Gnostic texts to the reading public, following the emergence of the Nag Hammadi library.