That Old Time Religion

One of the selling points of gnosticism for starstruck interpreters like Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels is that its disdain for sexuality translates into an extension of religious authority to female believers -- though Gnostics have few kind words for female genitalia or the process of procreation. Pagels argues in her most recent book The Origin of Satan, and in her earlier Gnostic Gospels, that Christianity is a dualistic religion and the "orthodox unfairly drove the Gnostics out and demonized them," according to this critique of her work.
As far as the American media are concerned, the beliefs of the Heaven's Gate cult may as well have dropped from the sky -- much like the appointed celestial chaperones that 39 cult members dispatched themselves to meet last week. Press reports made passing reference to the sect's "gnostic'' or "neo-gnostic'' doctrine, but never bothered to define such esoteric terms. Instead, reporters and commentators have dwelt obsessively on the exotic-sci fi trappings of the cult and its now-infamous Web site. They have also noted in lurid, breathless detail the bizarre practices of the Heaven's Gate faithful -- their purple face-dressings, their surgical castrations, their neo-Maoist uniforms and haircuts. And of course, news hounds eager to shoehorn Heaven's Gate into the received template of crazed cult violence stories have made much of cult leader Marshall Herff Applewhite's "messianic'' charisma, his reported breakdowns and homosexual affairs: Surely there must be a megalomaniacal madman at the center of all this, bullying and exhorting his lost, codependent flock over the cosmic cliff.
All this makes for diverting copy, to be sure, but does little to explain the otherworldly beliefs of Heaven's Gate. As difficult as it may be for the media to believe, the puzzling actions of the Heaven's Gate faithful flow out of a very consistent, intelligible religious tradition that dates back to late antiquity. And that tradition, gnosticism, is far from a backwater fringe movement in American culture and spirituality. Gnosticism takes up entire sections in New Age bookstores; it also suffuses mainstream self-help and spirituality literature -- major publishing houses have issued handsomely packaged translations of gnostic scripture, and, in one case, even a helpful calendar of meditations called "A Gnostic Book of Days.'' Among gnosticism's more celebrated highbrow adherents were British novelist Lawrence Durrell and Carl Jung -- whose loopy gnostic outlook, in turn, has furnished inspiration for many a latter-day spiritual-cum-psychological best-selling author, from James Hillman to Thomas Moore to Clara Pinkola Estes to Bill Moyers. Just last year, renowned literary critic Harold Bloom published Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection, half a gnostic spiritual autobiography, and half an interpretation of gnostic themes in American religious history and New Age spirituality. Even Stephen King's current tandem of best-selling horror novels, Desperation and The Regulators, are steeped in gnostic themes and explicit gnostic terminology.
What, then, is gnosticism, exactly? It is, first and foremost, a fiercely world-denying faith. The original gnostics, who reached their peak of influence in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, held that the creation of our world was a colossal, cosmic mistake -- the handiwork of a pseudodeity called Ialdabaoth, a deceitful (if clumsy) demiurge. The true God had retreated far beyond the reach of the created universe -- which in gnostic mythology is commonly described as an abortion -- and into a realm of unconditioned repose and nonbeing, known as the Pleroma. Believers could only gain access to this rarefied state through the esoteric lore of gnosis, or knowledge, which taught, among other things, that the body, sexuality, and all institutions of the human social order were repugnant, decaying affronts to the higher soul (or pneuma) of the gnostic elite -- so much metaphysical deadwood that the heroic, solitary believer had to clear away to enact his or her own salvation.

Last week's Filter reviewed the Higher Source coverage and the scandal's connection to Web: "The Higher Source group was by no means the first to pen a collective suicide note, but they may well have been the first to transcribe it into HTML. For those of us in the Web industry, the obligatory dark humor came quickly to the surface: yet another new media company facing massive layoffs and praying for a golden parachute."

Feed reader nefer@gate.net writes: "Reporting the news to oneself as it happens by utilizing the Internet can be exhausting, but it allows one to more quickly dispose of the latest tragedy. The next tragedy is waiting somewhere out there, and no doubt online will be the easiest way to get through it."
Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.

This singularly bleak cosmogony held no brief for politics and history: the individual's salvation and rapid, fastidious retreat from the world were its sole aim, and gnostics saw themselves, quite unapologetically, as a tiny, elect spiritual aristocracy. The rest of the world, quite literally, could be damned. Even this crudely oversimplified account of gnostic doctrine suggests a striking correspondence with the teachings of the Heaven's Gate cult. Applewhite's followers scornfully referred to their bodies as "containers'' and "vehicles'' and likened their pending mass suicide to something as humdrum as junking an old used car (this was, after all, Southern California). Pages from the cult's Web site refer with similar scorn to "human-mammalian indulgences'' and deride the conventions of "mammalian civilization.'' Indeed, if commentators on the ghastly Heaven's Gate affair were more attuned to gnostic beliefs, they would have discovered on the Web site an explicit reference to the castration of the six male cult members days before it was officially reported: "Some in the class have chosen on their own to have their vehicles neutered in order to sustain a more genderless and objective consciousness.''
Applewhite (who appears to be the author of the Web pages) goes on to offer a full-blown cosmology to account for the misleading institutions -- particularly the established religions -- that have kept human "plants'' that might otherwise harbor "deposits'' of a noumenal "soul'' in a state of created bondage. This account, which posits a ruling caste of space aliens known as "Luciferians,'' corresponds to the gnostic belief in a class of corrupted (if not exactly fallen) angels who were key spiritual obstacles in the soul's harrowing journey toward the Pleroma. In Applewhite's reveries, Luciferians must be overcome in order for aspirants to gain the strength to leave this world and ascend to The Next Level. The Next Level, the document continues, "abhors religions, for they bind humans more thoroughly to the human kingdom, using strong misinformation mixed with cosmic or universal consciousness of Creation.'' Religions also proffer "a type of Second Coming that would clearly be abominable to the Next Level'' -- i.e., the resurrection of the scorned body.
As for the figure of Jesus proper, the site testifies -- as has been widely reported -- that Applewhite saw himself as a latter-day incarnation of Christ. What no one has reported, however, is that contemporary gnostics commonly embrace Jesus (if not his purported Applewhite visage) as an esoteric prophet of the gnostic faith, bowdlerized and distorted by later generations of believers and theologians. Rock critic and soi-disant historian Greil Marcus, a hipster gnostic enthusiast, extols the Christian gnostic heresy that whoever arrives at gnosis becomes "not a Christian but Christ." Likewise Harold Bloom -- whom few would propose to brand a messianic madman -- writes in Omens of the Millenniumthat "Gnostic Christianity, I suspect, began with Jesus himself, and with the Jewish Christianity led by his brother James after the death of Jesus.''
What has made gnosticism flourish so lavishly in the hothouse of American spirituality? Bloom argues, with some justification, that gnosticism is the "American religion'' -- that its studied, measured retreat from creation and its cosmic adoration of the individual soul can be traced to such ur-American titans of the spirit as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith. (The latter, in Bloom's estimation, is the pre-eminent "genius'' of American religion; there's little doubt, in any event, that the despised cult of 19th-century Mormonism also furnishes many suggestive parallels with Heaven's Gate theology.)

Harold Bloom, the Jewish-gnostic heavyweight intellect who isn't afraid of being sentimental, warned in an interview with Home Arts Web site about children's books: "'I may begin to weep... There is nothing I despair about more. I'm old-fashioned enough and romantic enough--and absurd enough, I suppose--to believe that children, by and large, are natural readers until this is destroyed for them by the media--by horribly overloud rock and by hideously endless television."
Yet as incorrigibly individualist as it is, the "American religion'' also has strong roots in more worldly, Puritan theology. The theology of colonial Puritanism -- and its later rehabilitation at the hands of theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold and H. Richard Neibuhr -- rejected, to put it mildly, any notion that the individual soul was spawned in any quiescent, precreated Pleroma. It was, instead, sunken in sin, doomed in all likelihood to eternal damnation -- and bound to all manner of communal restrictions and obligations in what colonial New Englanders called the priesthood of all believers.
Gnostics past and present -- and most contemporary Americans of whatever official religious affiliation -- would never stand for such notions of communal morality. While figures such as Emerson and Smith may have dabbled in quasi-gnostic individualism, they were each, in their own idiosyncratic ways, also dedicated reformers. Emerson spoke against the Mexican-American War, counseled resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, and supported John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Smith instituted a communal system of property-ownership, welcomed both freed-slave and Native American converts, published a Mormon newspaper, and even ran for president in 1844.
This outlook, indeed, marks a key cultural divide we have traversed since the time of Emerson and Smith. For much of American history, social reform was a direct expression of religious faith: The abolition movement, the women's movement, the temperance movement, even to some degree the American Revolution, grew out of a prophetic faith that earthly history and human social movements had something to do with the fate of the individual's soul. Of course, this outlook could easily slide into jingoistic millennial notions such as Manifest Destiny or atrophy into the spiritual Babbitism of proto-New Age movements like Christian Science and the "New Thought.'' Yet the critical point is that 19th century believers saw their redemption being worked through American society; now American believers and nonbelievers alike scarcely acknowledge the reality of their own society.
It's surely no accident that America's current gnostic renaissance coincides with a culture-wide posture of civic disengagement. Indeed, one can effectively stand the press coverage of Heaven's Gate on its head and instead of asking why these UFO nuts committed suicide en masse, consider why adherents of such an alien-seeming faith seem so prototypically American. Cult members were reportedly avid fans of The X-Files and Star Wars; they dressed for their suicides with Star Trek "Away Team'' badges affixed to their arms. Consider, moreover, how the myths distilled into these pop culture productions resonate with gnostic myths of spiritual ascension. Star Wars, Star Trek, and the X-Files all hinge on the primal drama of seekers after knowledge pitted against an indifferent, and often hostile, cosmos. Star Wars director George Lucas has bestowed on it the overt pedigree of neo-Jungian religion scholar Joseph Campbell, yet another connoisseur of the gnostic. The X-Files, of course, instructs us in the myriad ways that the truth is driven underground -- while insisting that government, and the public world at large, rests on a foundation of calculated lies, perfidy, and conspiracy. Star Trek at least is comparatively restrained in the shock-paranoia department, but, as the cult's rather pathetic parting homage suggests, also reinforced the notion of transcendence through highly evolved machinery and the simple will-to-power.
Indeed, it's not too great an exaggeration to suggest that gnosticism is the faith, par excellence, of the hermetically isolated consumer. Amid the disjointed, opaque pileups of ever newer media and ever shriller prophecies in the New Information Age, it's cognitively quite plausible -- and no doubt emotionally quite satisfying -- to think of our common world, and perhaps even our own bodies, as an unreal, easily discardable apparition. This, indeed, is the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard and his beloved "simulacra''; it is also the unsubtle aesthetic behind such posthuman, postmodern ventures as David Cronenberg's "Crash.'' It's also, more mundanely, the world we increasingly accept in lieu of dedicating ourselves to infinitely homelier notions such as justice, equality and the dignity of labor. It does no service to the victims of the collective delusion preached by Applewhite and Heaven's Gate to pretend that their interpretation of our world is that much different from the commonly sanctioned ones we indulge in.
(March 31, 1997)

Indeed, the gnostics aren't the only ones who've gotten tangled up in the web. That brazen Scientology sect, for instance, has quite a site -- with the late L. Ron Hubbard waxing evangelical on Real Audio about, well, the usual: "Man: Good or Evil?" and "Increasing Efficiency." The Scientologists have also recently won a suit over copyright issues online. Check out the Times coverage of the skirmish: "The Church of Scientology, which believes that man's spiritual problems stem from an intergalactic holocaust 75 million years ago, has other lawsuits pending..."

In his Figments on Levity.com, Erik Davis invokes all of us -- the children of cyberspace and modernity -- into a sense of gnostic spiritualism: "Most of us feel like fleeting, transient beings in a world of endless flux because we remain moderns. Modernity does not think in spaces, it thinks in times--the past is consumed in forgetting, not contained in memory ... As Walter Benjamin wrote, 'An appreciation for the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory.'"

Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.

One of the selling points of gnosticism for starstruck interpreters like Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels is that its disdain for sexuality translates into an extension of religious authority to female believers -- though Gnostics have few kind words for female genitalia or the process of procreation. Pagels argues in her most recent book The Origin of Satan, and in her earlier Gnostic Gospels, that Christianity is a dualistic religion and the "orthodox unfairly drove the Gnostics out and demonized them," according to this critique of her work.	As far as the American media are concerned, the beliefs of the Heaven's Gate cult may as well have dropped from the sky -- much like the appointed celestial chaperones that 39 cult members dispatched themselves to meet last week. Press reports made passing reference to the sect's "gnostic'' or "neo-gnostic'' doctrine, but never bothered to define such esoteric terms. Instead, reporters and commentators have dwelt obsessively on the exotic-sci fi trappings of the cult and its now-infamous Web site. They have also noted in lurid, breathless detail the bizarre practices of the Heaven's Gate faithful -- their purple face-dressings, their surgical castrations, their neo-Maoist uniforms and haircuts. And of course, news hounds eager to shoehorn Heaven's Gate into the received template of crazed cult violence stories have made much of cult leader Marshall Herff Applewhite's "messianic'' charisma, his reported breakdowns and homosexual affairs: Surely there must be a megalomaniacal madman at the center of all this, bullying and exhorting his lost, codependent flock over the cosmic cliff. All this makes for diverting copy, to be sure, but does little to explain the otherworldly beliefs of Heaven's Gate. As difficult as it may be for the media to believe, the puzzling actions of the Heaven's Gate faithful flow out of a very consistent, intelligible religious tradition that dates back to late antiquity. And that tradition, gnosticism, is far from a backwater fringe movement in American culture and spirituality. Gnosticism takes up entire sections in New Age bookstores; it also suffuses mainstream self-help and spirituality literature -- major publishing houses have issued handsomely packaged translations of gnostic scripture, and, in one case, even a helpful calendar of meditations called "A Gnostic Book of Days.'' Among gnosticism's more celebrated highbrow adherents were British novelist Lawrence Durrell and Carl Jung -- whose loopy gnostic outlook, in turn, has furnished inspiration for many a latter-day spiritual-cum-psychological best-selling author, from James Hillman to Thomas Moore to Clara Pinkola Estes to Bill Moyers. Just last year, renowned literary critic Harold Bloom published Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection, half a gnostic spiritual autobiography, and half an interpretation of gnostic themes in American religious history and New Age spirituality. Even Stephen King's current tandem of best-selling horror novels, Desperation and The Regulators, are steeped in gnostic themes and explicit gnostic terminology. What, then, is gnosticism, exactly? It is, first and foremost, a fiercely world-denying faith. The original gnostics, who reached their peak of influence in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, held that the creation of our world was a colossal, cosmic mistake -- the handiwork of a pseudodeity called Ialdabaoth, a deceitful (if clumsy) demiurge. The true God had retreated far beyond the reach of the created universe -- which in gnostic mythology is commonly described as an abortion -- and into a realm of unconditioned repose and nonbeing, known as the Pleroma. Believers could only gain access to this rarefied state through the esoteric lore of gnosis, or knowledge, which taught, among other things, that the body, sexuality, and all institutions of the human social order were repugnant, decaying affronts to the higher soul (or pneuma) of the gnostic elite -- so much metaphysical deadwood that the heroic, solitary believer had to clear away to enact his or her own salvation.
Last week's Filter reviewed the Higher Source coverage and the scandal's connection to Web: "The Higher Source group was by no means the first to pen a collective suicide note, but they may well have been the first to transcribe it into HTML. For those of us in the Web industry, the obligatory dark humor came quickly to the surface: yet another new media company facing massive layoffs and praying for a golden parachute."
Feed reader nefer@gate.net writes: "Reporting the news to oneself as it happens by utilizing the Internet can be exhausting, but it allows one to more quickly dispose of the latest tragedy. The next tragedy is waiting somewhere out there, and no doubt online will be the easiest way to get through it." Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.

Harold Bloom, the Jewish-gnostic heavyweight intellect who isn't afraid of being sentimental, warned in an interview with Home Arts Web site about children's books: "'I may begin to weep... There is nothing I despair about more. I'm old-fashioned enough and romantic enough--and absurd enough, I suppose--to believe that children, by and large, are natural readers until this is destroyed for them by the media--by horribly overloud rock and by hideously endless television."	Yet as incorrigibly individualist as it is, the "American religion'' also has strong roots in more worldly, Puritan theology. The theology of colonial Puritanism -- and its later rehabilitation at the hands of theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold and H. Richard Neibuhr -- rejected, to put it mildly, any notion that the individual soul was spawned in any quiescent, precreated Pleroma. It was, instead, sunken in sin, doomed in all likelihood to eternal damnation -- and bound to all manner of communal restrictions and obligations in what colonial New Englanders called the priesthood of all believers. Gnostics past and present -- and most contemporary Americans of whatever official religious affiliation -- would never stand for such notions of communal morality. While figures such as Emerson and Smith may have dabbled in quasi-gnostic individualism, they were each, in their own idiosyncratic ways, also dedicated reformers. Emerson spoke against the Mexican-American War, counseled resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, and supported John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Smith instituted a communal system of property-ownership, welcomed both freed-slave and Native American converts, published a Mormon newspaper, and even ran for president in 1844. This outlook, indeed, marks a key cultural divide we have traversed since the time of Emerson and Smith. For much of American history, social reform was a direct expression of religious faith: The abolition movement, the women's movement, the temperance movement, even to some degree the American Revolution, grew out of a prophetic faith that earthly history and human social movements had something to do with the fate of the individual's soul. Of course, this outlook could easily slide into jingoistic millennial notions such as Manifest Destiny or atrophy into the spiritual Babbitism of proto-New Age movements like Christian Science and the "New Thought.'' Yet the critical point is that 19th century believers saw their redemption being worked through American society; now American believers and nonbelievers alike scarcely acknowledge the reality of their own society. It's surely no accident that America's current gnostic renaissance coincides with a culture-wide posture of civic disengagement. Indeed, one can effectively stand the press coverage of Heaven's Gate on its head and instead of asking why these UFO nuts committed suicide en masse, consider why adherents of such an alien-seeming faith seem so prototypically American. Cult members were reportedly avid fans of The X-Files and Star Wars; they dressed for their suicides with Star Trek "Away Team'' badges affixed to their arms. Consider, moreover, how the myths distilled into these pop culture productions resonate with gnostic myths of spiritual ascension. Star Wars, Star Trek, and the X-Files all hinge on the primal drama of seekers after knowledge pitted against an indifferent, and often hostile, cosmos. Star Wars director George Lucas has bestowed on it the overt pedigree of neo-Jungian religion scholar Joseph Campbell, yet another connoisseur of the gnostic. The X-Files, of course, instructs us in the myriad ways that the truth is driven underground -- while insisting that government, and the public world at large, rests on a foundation of calculated lies, perfidy, and conspiracy. Star Trek at least is comparatively restrained in the shock-paranoia department, but, as the cult's rather pathetic parting homage suggests, also reinforced the notion of transcendence through highly evolved machinery and the simple will-to-power. Indeed, it's not too great an exaggeration to suggest that gnosticism is the faith, par excellence, of the hermetically isolated consumer. Amid the disjointed, opaque pileups of ever newer media and ever shriller prophecies in the New Information Age, it's cognitively quite plausible -- and no doubt emotionally quite satisfying -- to think of our common world, and perhaps even our own bodies, as an unreal, easily discardable apparition. This, indeed, is the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard and his beloved "simulacra''; it is also the unsubtle aesthetic behind such posthuman, postmodern ventures as David Cronenberg's "Crash.'' It's also, more mundanely, the world we increasingly accept in lieu of dedicating ourselves to infinitely homelier notions such as justice, equality and the dignity of labor. It does no service to the victims of the collective delusion preached by Applewhite and Heaven's Gate to pretend that their interpretation of our world is that much different from the commonly sanctioned ones we indulge in. (March 31, 1997)
Indeed, the gnostics aren't the only ones who've gotten tangled up in the web. That brazen Scientology sect, for instance, has quite a site -- with the late L. Ron Hubbard waxing evangelical on Real Audio about, well, the usual: "Man: Good or Evil?" and "Increasing Efficiency." The Scientologists have also recently won a suit over copyright issues online. Check out the Times coverage of the skirmish: "The Church of Scientology, which believes that man's spiritual problems stem from an intergalactic holocaust 75 million years ago, has other lawsuits pending..."
In his Figments on Levity.com, Erik Davis invokes all of us -- the children of cyberspace and modernity -- into a sense of gnostic spiritualism: "Most of us feel like fleeting, transient beings in a world of endless flux because we remain moderns. Modernity does not think in spaces, it thinks in times--the past is consumed in forgetting, not contained in memory ... As Walter Benjamin wrote, 'An appreciation for the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory.'"