The Mandaeans have been the focus of international news recently "Save the Gnostics" said the New York Times because their community has been an unintended casualty of the U. Most of Iraq's Mandaeans have had to flee to other parts of the world. There are people who call themselves "Gnostics" today, such as the Ecclesia Gnostica Gnostic Church in Los Angeles, but their religion is an amalgam of beliefs rather than a true reflection of ancient Gnosticism. More common in today's culture are the movements and books that show the continuing influence of Gnostic ideas—such as Scientology, the New Age, novels like The Da Vinci Code, and even some aspects of psychotherapy.
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Read This Issue. Subscribe to Christianity Today and get instant access to past issues of Christian History! Get the best from CT editors, delivered straight to your inbox! The Unfolding Faith. According to his novel, the Gnostic Gospels of Philip and Mary show that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers though this interpretation is disputed , and fearing that the revelation of this fact would destroy the Church, the Catholic establishment has carried out a series of murders to keep the secret from leaking out.
There is a certain historical justice in Brown's suggestion that the Catholic Church has been willing to kill to stop people hearing about Gnosticism. The Cathars or Albigensians in southern France in the 13th century were Gnostics who rejected the trappings and intrigue of organised religion; who unlike Catholicism treated men and women as equal before God; who had few of Christianity's hang-ups about sex; and who stood apart from the materialism, politics and corruption of the world, seeing it as the work of humankind, and sought a higher, purer way of life.
Rome so feared the good example that the Cathars offered that it condemned them as heretics and set up the Inquisition to kill them off and write them out of the authorised version of history. But you can't keep a good story down, and the broadcaster and novelist Kate Mosse is among those riding the Gnostic new wave. Her Cathar-based novel, Labyrinth , set for publication in , was sold at auction after a fierce bidding war among publishers. There's an element of us, confronted by the state of our world, finally abandoning the linear view of history - that humankind has simply got better and better at things - and instead searching through the past for guidance, for wonderful flowerings and movements that seem to understand our needs so much better than anything else currently on offer.
And Gnosticism, I think, offers the possibility that the answer is there within us and always has been. Back then I could see its attraction - feeling free of any institutional constraints on being spiritual, a way for ordinary people to seek divine enlightenment. But if the new adherents get beyond the desire to look groovy and radical and really start looking at what Gnosticism was all about, they are in for a nasty shock.
The Gnostics split spirit and matter, and saw matter as evil. They believed that men were spirit and women were matter. So, yes, there may have been some Cathars who allowed women a role - usually only after they had had sex with an enlightened man - but at heart Gnosticism was profoundly anti-woman and one of its greatest influences on Christianity was to make it the same.
So beyond the initial thrill for The Da Vinci Code readers or Matrix Reloaded viewers of discovering this skeleton in Christianity's closet there lie some unpleasant choices if they want to take on board Gnosticism with the traditional zeal of a convert. The bottom line is its demand that you reject everything to do this world as flawed and evil - homes, cars, money, all that is matter, not spirit. It is quite a challenge. There was always a pessimistic, bleak, almost manic, streak in Gnosticism.
That is why the early church fathers tried to bury it because they realised it had nothing invested in continuing this world. And potential new converts might also like to ponder the example of the Bogomils, a Bulgarian Gnostic cult in the 9th century. It insisted, in line with Gnostic beliefs, that sex for procreation was the work of the Devil, as it only served to prolong a world that was a vale of tears. So all its adherents, if they wanted to make love, were only allowed to bugger each other.
Given such strictures, it is perhaps unsurprising that, despite the numbers of those expressing a fashionable interest in Gnosticism or the history of the Gnostic gospels, there are few actually signing up. Not that this anti-institutional philosophy has ever been much given to organisation. If I were a certain kind of scholar, I might speculate that there is so much gnosticism in LA because Hollywood is the symbolic centre of the archonic media matrix where the illusory world of the demiurge is created.
More prosaically, LA has long been a centre for religious innovation due to being multicultural, liberal and relatively cheap. People were going West in search of new ways of life long before the Hippies emerged from Haight-Ashbury to catalyse the spiritual revolution of the New Age movement.
Moreover, contemporary gnostics mix esoteric ideas with Christianity, and so appeal much more to American Baby Boomers than to their relatively secularised European counterparts. For example, the Ecclesia Gnostica performs a Gnostic Mass weekly in the Besant Lodge of the Theosophical Society, a converted silent movie theatre underneath the Hollywood sign. Services have been performed weekly by Bishop Stephan Hoeller, now aged 87, since While they have some associated groups, the Ecclesia Gnostica is largely confined to Los Angeles.
The Apostolic Johannite Church, for example, have a number of branches around North America, though they are currently strongest in Canada. They also focus on a liturgical mixture of Christian and esoteric traditions, though here the focus is more on a Rosicrucian rather than Jungian tradition.
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