New Podcast hosted by John Price

If you are interested, I sat down with John Price the host of The Sacred Speaks last week and discussed my book The Ancient New Age. The podcast is our unedited talk (The Sacred Works podcast link), so it is longer than most podcasts I’ve done. At the end of the podcast, John features one of the songs from an album I created with two Houston musicians, called Gnosis in Rhythm and Song. I need to get the CD tracks put up on Amazon yet. That is in the works. But this is a nice sample.

Gnosis volume 3.1 published on Hermetism

I am happy to announce that the special issue of GNOSIS 3.1 is published.  Christian Bull as a guest editor put together a special collection of papers on Hermes Trismegistus.  I am particularly delighted with this special collection because I have felt for a very long time that the hermetic sources often don't get the attention that they should in the study of gnostic movements and literatures. 

While this is a single contribution, it shows the wide range of impact that the hermetic materials and traditions have had from religion in the late antique world to modern America.  The articles are slices of hermetism playing out in ancient alchemy, divination, the history of science, church sacramental practices, and Theosophy.  These articles help us think outside the box, that hermetism is not a set of prescriptions defining a special religion or philosophy. Rather hermetism is the dynamic interplay of traditions authorized by Hermes Trismegistus fluctuating within different cultural situations and locations.  Enjoy!

Contents

Christian H. Bull, "Wicked Angels and the Good Demon: The Origins of Alchemy According to the Physica of Hermes"

Anna van den Kerchove, "The Notion of Truth in Some Hermetic Texts and Chaldaean Oracles"

Kevin van Bladel, "Al-Bīrūnī on Hermetic Forgery"

Claudio Moreschini, "The Interpretation of the Sacrament of the Eucharist as Palingenesis according to Foix-Candale"

Erin Prophet, "Hermetic Influences on the Evolutionary System of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy"

Book Reviews and Received

Gnostic America Group Photo

Our esteemed group at the Gnostic America Conference. 

Photo Credit: Ariana Vincent

Gnostic America Conference Day: Catherine Albanese

I thought it would be fun to track the papers at the conference and post a few words about each one with a photo. 

Catherine L. Albanese (Keynote)

“The Gnostic in Us All: Thinking from the Macrobiotics of Michio Kushi”

Abstract: Way back when in graduate school, I wrote a paper on the Gospel of Thomas, one of the documents discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945.  The debate over its gnosticizing elements was alive and well, and I weighed in with an argument that its thorough oblivion to history rendered it Gnostic—in the capital-“G” sense.  Of course, there were other Gnostic elements cited then by scholars—such as Thomas’s turn within to a self on divinity’s edge and its enigmatic sayings with their salvific and mystical secret.  Later, in 1976, I published the paper in an academic journal.  That was the end of my Gnostic story.

Or so I thought.  But in 1986, I began the practice of macrobiotics.  As I studied the teachings of Michio Kushi, its foremost American teacher, I began to smell more than a whiff of religion.  His wife, Aveline, had published a cookbook with the subtitle For Health, Harmony, and Peace.  Michio Kushi himself, with longtime political interests in world government,  elaborated on a cosmological spiral, with humans descending from a “unique principle” as it divided into yin and yang.  Finding balance with yin and yang energies through diet and lifestyle would lead to alignment and peace.  What lay ahead, if macrobiotic principles were followed, was “one peaceful world.” 

Somewhere on the road to one peaceful world, Kushi discovered the Gospel of Thomas.  He began to use it regularly, incorporating it into popular “spiritual” seminars.  I will leverage an account of the gnostic (here small-“g”) content of macrobiotics on Michio Kushi’s commentary on the Gospel of Thomas—The Gospel of Peace (1992)—and also on related works.  My task will be to think through the gnosticism of brown rice and a peaceful world in terms of late twentieth-century American society and culture, to find the lines of connection, and to explore them as encrypted signs—in the twenty-first century still—of the gnostic in us all.

Catherine L. Albanese is J. F. Rowny Professor Emerita and Research Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  With a Ph.D. in American religious history from the University of Chicago (Divinity School, 1972), she is former department chair at UCSB Religious Studies (2005-2010) and former president of the American Academy of Religion (1994).  Her award-winning book, A Republic of Mind and Spirit:  A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion, was published in 2007 (Yale).     She is the author of numerous other books and articles, including America:  Religions and Religion, now in its fifth edition (Cengage, 2013).  In 2014, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

REMINDER: Gnostic America Conference Starts March 28

We hope you can join us for all or part of the Gnostic America conference, March 28-31. 

Wednesday, March 28

3:30-5 pm     PANEL 1: FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN GNOSTICISM

  April D. DeConick, The Sociology of Gnostic Spirituality

  Gregory Shaw, Can We Recover Gnosis Today?

7-8:30 pm    KEYNOTE LECTURE

  Catherine L. Albanese, The Gnostic in Us All: Thinking from the Macrobiotics of Michio Kushi

Thursday, March 29

9-10:30 am    PANEL 2: THE THEOSOPHICAL CONNECTION

  Erin Prophet, Hermetism, Kabbalah and “Double Evolution” in Blavatsky’s Root Race Theory

  Simon Cox, Theosophical Gnosis and Astral Hermeneutics 

10:45-12:15    PANEL 3: GNOSTIC NEW RELIGIONS

  Victor Nardo, Illuminating the Illuminatus: The Gnosticism of Richard, Duc de Palatine

  Cathy Gutierrez, Know Place:  Heaven's Gate and American Gnosticism

2-3:30 pm    PANEL 4: NEW AGE GNOSTICISM

  Simon Joseph, American Gnosis: Jesus Mysticism in a Course in Miracles

  Mitch Horowitz, The New Age and Gnosticism: Terms of Commonality

4:30-5:30 pm  GNOSIS IN RHYTHM AND SONG, RICE MEMORIAL CHAPEL

  April DeConick, Sonja Bruzauskas, and Craig Hauschildt

Friday, March 30

9-10:30 am    PANEL 5: GNOSTIC MEANING-MAKING IN MODERNITY

  Miguel Connor,  Exiting the Black Iron Prison: How My Podcast on Gnosticism Taught Me We Live in Gnostic Times

  Matthew Dillon, The Afterlives of the Archons

10:45-12:15    PANEL 6: LITERARY GNOSTICISM

    Eric Wargo, The Space Jockey and the Future of Enjoyment: Alienated Sentience in the World of H.R. Giger

    Samuel Stoeltje, Channeling a Utopian Apocalypse: Alice Neihardt Thompson’s The Great Adventure

2-3:30 pm  PANEL 7: GNOSTICISM AT THE MOVIES

  Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, A Metaphysical Rebel? Camus’s Analysis of Gnosticism and Its Influence on Literature and Cinema

  Fryderyk Kwiatkowski, Eric Voegelin and Gnostic Hollywood: Cinematic Portrayals of the Immanentization of the Eschaton

7-10 pm    SCREENING OF DARK CITY with POST-FILM PANEL, RICE MEDIA CENTER

Saturday, March 31

9-10:30 am    PANEL 8: INTELLECTUAL RESPONSES TO THE GNOSTIC RENAISSANCE

  Lance Owens, C.G. Jung and the Gnostic Renaissance

  Arthur Versluis, Gnosis in the American Study of Religion

10:45-12:15    PANEL 9: ESOTERIC CURRENTS IN AMERICA

  Timothy Grieve-Carlson, American Aurora: Early American Religion and Jacob Boehme

  Hugh Urban, The Knowing of Knowing: Neo-Gnosticism from the O.T.O. to Scientology

2-3:30 pm    PANEL 10: THE MYSTIC AND THE GNOSTIC

    Erik Davis, The Electric Chrism Acid Test: The Problem of Psychedelic Gnosis

    Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Mysteries of Safed: Unexplained Correspondences in a Modern Jewish Visionary

Catherine Albanese: Keynote Address

There are several special events, all open to the public, as part of the Gnostic America Conference.  Here is the poster for the Keynote Address by Catherine Albanese.  Hope you can join us.  Please share this event around.

Gnostic America Conference, March 28-31, Rice University

I am pleased to announce the Gnostic America Conference.  We will convene at Rice University on March 28-31.  The conference is free and open to the public.  We are exploring the afterlives of Gnosticism in America.

In addition to cutting-edge paper presentations by 20 international scholars and graduate students, we have some spectacular special events in the evenings.  Check the poster for times and locations.

On Wednesday evening, Catherine Albanese will deliver the Keynote Address on the Gospel of Thomas and the Macrobiotics of Michio Kushi. 

On Thursday evening, the soprano soloist Sonja Bruzauskas and percussionist Craig Hauschildt will be performing GNOSIS IN SONG AND RHYTHM, based on Gnostic liturgies that I translated from the Nag Hammadi literature.

On Friday evening, we will be screening the Director's cut of Dark City, followed by a panel discussion of the film.

New Series from Baylor

I am happy to announce a new book series from Baylor University Press called The Library of Early Christology series.  This series is a collaborative effort to bring together "essential readings" that represent the new history of religions school, with a focus on the study of early Christology and its historic Judaic antecedents.

Most of these books were published by other publishers (Mohr Siebeck, Brill, and Fortress) as part of a limited-run series.  Now they are being republished and distributed via Baylor in order to bring these important works to a new and wider audience.

With that said, I am so pleased to announce that my first monograph, Seek To See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of Thomas, is now published as part of this series, along with my mentor's book, Jarl Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism.  Both of these books (and many more!) are available at very reasonable prices now.

Problematizing Religious Secrecy and Deviance

I just returned from Erfurt, Germany, where I attended a conference on Esotericism and Deviance put on by the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE).  I want to record some of my impressions of the conference and take-aways.

The word esotericism comes from the adjective esoteric, which has been used since ancient times to refer to religious movements and philosophical schools that keep at least some of their knowledge secret, so that it is reserved only for the members who join the group.  So in the case of the ancient texts I study, esotericism is equivalent to religious secrecy, and it is very easy to explore how groups tried to capitalize on the secrets for group bonding, and guard any deviant behavior or ideas within this secrecy so that the deviance is shielded from external gaze and retribution from society. 

My paper ("Deviant Christians") was on how this worked out for early Christian groups and affected their ability to recruit and survive intergenerationally.

The problem with esotericism comes when academics who study esoteric religious movements since the Renaissance have decided to call their field Esotericism.  You might not think this problematic until you realize that the term runs into trouble when esoteric religions meet popular culture in modernity and we end up with the wide distribution of occult secrets, a process that is now being called Occulture (occult+culture).  So Esotericism is no longer defined by religious secrecy.  It has become openly distributed knowledge.

What about deviance?  Is Esotericism then defined by deviancy?  It was clear from the papers at the conference that there was trouble in trying to deal with religious deviance and its relationship to Esotericism.  Scholars at the conference expressed great discomfort with the idea that Esotericism has to be deviant.  And I saw no real model emerge to handle this problem meaningfully.

I think the main trouble comes from the fact that to really work with the concept of deviance, you really have to do so from a sociological perspective.  You have to understand local culture and its dominant norms and what the esoteric movement is doing with them.  This means that what is deviant is going to change from locale to locale with many shifts over time and geography.  What is culturally deviant at one time, may become mainstream down the road.  So an esoteric movement might be deviant one day, and maybe move into the mainstream later on.  Does the religious movement remain esoteric in this case? 

I would argue that this question is not the question that needs to be answered.  What makes more sense to me is to problematize the issues that esoteric movements face and outline the patterns of response that result from the movements trying to handle these issues.  We can do this with ancient groups and modern groups the same.

• How is the movement using religious secrecy as social capital and as a shield for its deviance? 
• What social strategies does the group turn to in order to construct a movement that restricts its internal social network?  Why do this?
• How does the esoterized group deal with issues like isolation and recruitment? 
• Does the group lessen its deviance and begin to open its social network to outsiders? 
• How does the group accommodate to societal expectations and traditional religious perspectives? 
• How far does the group go public and reveal its secrets to increasing larger social networks? 
• Or does the group stay isolated and secret, or become more isolated and secret over time? 
• Why does the group choose these options? 
• How do these options affect the long term survival of the group?

If we move to this kind of sociological problematizing, then deviance is most likely in the picture somewhere.  It is just a matter of trying to understand the dynamics of deviance within esoteric group formation and development.  No esoteric group is stable on any of these issues.  Esoteric movements are special because they choose to reserve their internal network to members only, and to bond around religious secrets which are very often deviant or countercultural.  This can only be mapped and understood on a case-by-case basis, which will reveal to us both variety and patterns of similarity.  It will tell us everything about the social process of esoterization and nothing about Esotericism.

All of this is to say that Esotericism as a field cannot be defined by deviancy, but it is essential for scholars who are involved in the field of Esotericism to unpack sociologically the relationship between deviancy and any given esoteric group.  While Esotericism cannot be defined by deviancy, it is a sociological dynamic experienced by esoteric groups that needs much more careful theoretical and historical attention.

Matthew Dillon defends "The Heretical Revival"

An announcement.  My graduate student, Matthew Dillon will be defending his dissertation on April 18, 12-2:30 pm, 215 Humanities Building, Rice University.  This event is open to the public.  He has written a book called "The Heretical Revival: The Nag Hammadi Library in American Religion and Culture."  Since I am one of the judges, I cannot present my opinion at this time - but only announce that it is happening.

Gnosticism and the transpower of the book

Last evening, I spoke to the Friends of Fondren and the Rice community about my book, The Gnostic New Age.  I spoke about why I wrote the book and why gnosticism is so vital in American culture today, even though ancient gnostic communities did not survive historically. 

As I was composing my remarks, I realized that a common thread links the reason why I wrote the book and the reason why gnosticism persists in our culture. It is the transpower of the book, the power of the book to transform who we are, to change our lives in a moment. 

I am reminded, for instance of St. Anthony whose life utterly changed when he heard Matthew 19:21 read aloud, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasures in heaven."  He was a wealthy 18-year old who went out and sold all his properties, donated his money to the poor, and left for the desert to become a hermit devoted to Jesus.  I am also reminded of St. Augustine whose life transformation came at age 31 when he read the words of Paul, "Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires" (Romans 13:13-14).  He gave his money to the poor and entered the monastic life.

What is it about the direct engagement with a text that has such power to change our lives in ways that we never suspected or anticipated? 

---

Here are my remarks from last evening.

Why did I write this book?

The Gnostic New Age is a book that really has its origins at the beginning of my own intellectual journey, which was in 1982 when I was just at the beginning of my college career.  The incident was so important that I recorded it in the opening pages of my book.  It represents what I like to call the transpower of the book, that is the power that books can have to transform our very identities and redirect our futures in unexpected ways.

Excerpt read from pp. 1-3.

In 1982, I was finishing my first year of college.  I was enrolled in a two-year program to become a registered nurse and had been doing rounds on the oncology floor of the local hospital and in geriatrics.  I was eighteen years old and any romantic notions I may have had about health care when I started school vanished with the first catheter I had to insert. 

One day, to distract myself from my existential crisis, I visited the local bookstore hoping to find a good novel.  But I didn’t have any luck.  Back at home, my mother pulled out a book that she had been reading and handed it to me.  “I bet you will like this,” she said.  I glanced at the cover.  The Other Gospels by Ron Cameron. Gospels that never made it into the New Testament.  Unknown sayings of Jesus.  Could be interesting, I thought.

That is how I read the Gospel of Thomas for the first time, in the opening pages of The Other Gospels. As I read this gospel, I encountered a Jesus who impressed me, a Jesus who was unknown in conventional Christian circles…Here, in the Gospel of Thomas was a Jesus I wanted to know more about…

What was up with this? …Why wasn’t this gospel in the New Testament?  I wondered…

That is how my journey started, with the transpower of the book.   I was profoundly awakened in my experience of reading an ancient text, which led me to read more books and pose more questions.  Which all led eventually to my reflections in The Gnostic New Age.

What do I try to do in this book?

In scholarship, the gnostic has been deconstructed for various reasons that I will not get into here, so much so that there are scholars who argue that gnostics did not exist in antiquity as real groups of people, but were instead alternative Christians who were demonized by other Christians and turned into gnostic heretics through a mean rhetorical battle.  My book pushes back on this academic narrative, since the historical evidence supports the existence of gnostics and gnostic groups in antiquity as transgressive and countercultural communities whose identities stretched over and even beyond Jewish, Christian, Grec0-Roman, Egyptian, Zoroastrian and even Buddhist boundaries. So bottomline, what I try to do in The Gnostic New Age is explain (1) who the ancient gnostics were, (2) how they thought about traditional religions like Judaism and Christianity, (3) what type of new religious movements they created, and (4) how this revolutionized religion during their time and continues to do so today in America.

The book has special merit because it targets a public audience. It is very readable for the non-specialist audience, and is innovative in its form.  In order to help modern readers grasp ancient outdated concepts about gnosticism, each chapter in the book is framed by a discussion of a contemporary film that itself addresses gnostic concepts in modern terms and images.

What makes a gnostic? 

I construct a model of gnosticism from the ancient sources that highlights 5 characteristics ofthe ancient gnostics.  (1) the gnostic worships a transcendent God who exists beyond the gods of all the world’s religions, including the creator God of the bible.  You can imagine how transgressive this message was, that Zeus, Baal, Rê, and the biblical God are not real Gods, but lesser trickster deities who should not be worshiped.  (2) This real God can only be known through direct religious experience which, gnostics claim, is generated by a variety of initiatory rituals.  (3) The gnostic believes that the human being is innately connected to the transcendent God, having an uncreated divine nature, which they call the spirit.  (4) Gnostics find themselves in a transgressive relationship to traditional religions like Judaism and Christianity, especially in their reuse of traditional religious ideas and their interpretation of scriptures, which are flipped up side down.  For instance, the snake in the story of Adam and Eve is not evil, but an enlightener.  (5) Gnostics were inclusive free thinkers, drawing on knowledge and practices from a variety of religions, philosophies, and scientific theories of their era, as well as direct revelatory experiences.

This means that gnosticism is not a religion, but a religious worldview or spirituality that engages multiple religions and affiliations, and remodels them in countercultural ways, producing both religious reform movements and new religious movements.  Using this model, the book explores comprehensively the variety of gnostic religious movements that arise in antiquity in way that no other book has done up to now. 

Why is the gnostic still with us in American religion and culture?

The final chapter returns to the idea of the transpower of the book.  If Catholicism defeated gnostic religions in antiquity, how is it that gnostic currents have become so prevalent today?  Gnostics were prolific writers and their lost texts reemerged within modern culture starting in the 1800s.  This rediscovery of ancient gnostic literature has resulted in the redistribution of gnostic ideas into American culture and has fed the growth of new religious movements like Theosophy, the psychological program of Carl Jung, and even the New Age movement. There was a very a productive period in scholarship following the publication of the Nag Hammadi gnostic scriptures into English in 1978, making the gnostic gospels a household phrase.  The gnostic gospels were heavily marketed in the 1980s and 90s as an alternative form of Christianity for Americans disillusioned with traditional denominations, and as a critique to traditional Christianity with its judgmental Father God and concept of original sin. 

Think about the hype around films like Stigmata that featured the Gospel of Thomas and the Di Vinci Code that told stories from the Gospel of Philip.  This message about the recovery of a lost form of Christianity from antiquity hit home for a large number of Americans who were disillusioned and dissatisfied with the Christianity of their parents and churches that they felt had nothing spiritual to offer.  There is a synergy here, a real audience for gnosticism among Americans who view themselves as free-thinkers and people who question authorities, from the church to the government.   It was practically love at first sight, so that gnosticism impacted everything from traditional churches to novels to films like The Matrix and Avatar, which help us to think along transgressively gnostic lines about who we really are, where we are from, why we are here, and what our destiny might be.  As long as gnostic writings are available for people to read and reflect upon, gnostic spirituality will never go away, but will continue to revolutionize religions of today and tomorrow.  It is the transpower of the book.

I would like to close with a reading of one of my favorite pages in the book. 

Excerpt read from pp. 282-284.

The Romans suspected that the early Christians in general were deviants, and they criticized the Christians’ religion as “new” and “superstitious”…By the early second century, the Apostolic Catholic leaders intentionally began to create a better interface between their religion and the traditional values of Rome…For the most part, this domestication did not happen among the Gnostic Christian groups, who prized the new, the revelatory, the unmediated experiences of the God beyond the gods of civic duty and the patron-client relationship. The Gnostic Christians made little claim to an ancestral past, preferring to sever the tie with Judaism and marketing their Gnostic communities by promoting a new previously Unknown God who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with traditional sacrifices and other public ceremonies.   For Gnostics, the practice of religion was not about civic duty and moral obligation, but personal therapy and triumph.  The human being and its needs surpassed the old gods, and indeed, overturned them and their earthly representatives.  This transtheistic perspective cut across not only Judaism, but also laid to waste the Roman cult.

Gnostic groups emerge on the margins of religion within social and political landscapes that have been unkind to the people who join their communities. In the case of the ancient world, Roman colonization laid waste to native populations and native religions, creating social, political, and religious landscapes of severe marginalization.   

The American historian Theodore Roszak, who coined the term counter culture, thought that it emerged when people could no longer align their moral compass and ideal visions with the direction of the society, or more simply put, when people become alienated within society’s institutional structures.  Roszak defines the essence of the counterculture in psychological terms as an assault on the reality of the ego as our true identity…

Sociological studies of countercultural movements show that transgression can become for some people a flagship, a way to mobilize and revolutionize an environment that has left them powerless.  These type of movements can lead to political coups and violence. But this did not happen with the Gnostics who must have known that taking up arms against Rome was futile.  Instead the Gnostics turned their transgression into a celestial coup to overthrow the demonic hoard that controls our world and sets into power our kings and princes.  They felt that if they could gain control of the terror at its roots by disarming the Rulers of the heavens, then their human representatives, the kings, would be sure to fall. 

Even more countercultural was the Gnostic belief that the human displaced the gods.   The human had crossed over the boundary that had so long separated the gods from the human.  Now the human was out of place, a divine being no longer afraid of the gods, the ancestors, or the obligations of traditional rank.  Gnostics were free of social and political restraints that their gods and ancestors had imposed upon them for centuries.  The Romans were right.  This was revolutionary and dangerous.

The Gnostic New Age to be featured at author event

The Friends of the Fondren Library at Rice University have selected my book, The Gnostic New Age, to be featured at their annual Author Reception on Wednesday, 5:30 pm, in the Farnsworth Pavilion.  I will be speaking briefly about my book and reading a passage that is one of my favorites.  Hope you can make it.

Gnostic Cinema in Modern America

For those of you who cannot be with us for the Gnostic Film Festival at Rice University, March 24-26, I am sharing my opening remarks and slides here on my blog.  You may wish to rent the films at home and view them remotely with us.  I have deeper analyses of each film in various chapters of The Gnostic New Age, if you are interested in engaging those ideas while you screen the films.

Welcome to the first every Gnostic Film Festival.

Many of you may be already asking yourselves “A Gnostic film festival?” what is that?  Aren’t these science fiction and fantasy films?  The short answer is, Yes they are…but, the goal of this festival isn’t about viewing these films as science fiction and fantasy adventures, but seeing them as public conduits of gnosticism, religious currents that were persecuted, and, consequently, went gone underground for two thousand years.   So two big questions for us.  We have to wonder why we are seeing a resurgence of gnostic ideas within modern American culture, where gnostics are celebrated as heroic rather than feared as monsters.  Second, we have to wonder why it is that the science fiction and fantasy genre, and not some other genre, is so conductive to this celebration.

I began really noticing this resurgence of gnostic currents as a casual filmgoer and reader of science fiction and fantasy novels.   It started to become something of a game between my husband and I, who could spot the gnostic undercurrent first. It is not that the gnostic undercurrent was in every science fiction and fantasy film we saw.  It wasn’t.  But when it was, it made the movie.  It turned upside down our expectations.  It made us sit back and think about our preconceptions about reality and what it means to be human.  It made us want to question authority.  It had flipped our world in some way.  It had made us uncomfortable.

What is real?

Why uncomfortable?  The gnostic, more than any other religious current, is transgressive.  It is countercultural when it comes to interacting with conventional religions and traditional worldviews.  It is this deviant religious edge that made gnostic groups in antiquity so suspicious.  They generated so much suspicion among the early Christians that ancient gnostic groups were persecuted to extinction.

What made these gnostic groups so threatening to the early Christians?  This is a good question and one that I wrestle with in my book, The Gnostic New Age.  First of all, gnostic thinkers generated a type of spirituality that was very innovative in antiquity.  Gnostics built new religious movements out of this spirituality.  What made them different?  Gnostics of all stripes developed religions that were oriented toward the worship of a transcendent God, a God beyond all the Gods of the traditional religions, a God beyond Zeus, beyond Baal, beyond Rê, even a God beyond YHWH the Jewish and Christian Father God of the bible who creates and rules the world.  Gnostics believed that humans have been tricked into worshiping all these false Gods at the expense of knowing and worshiping the supreme God of Goodness, Love and Light, the God who transcends all, even gender.  Humans, they thought, have been tricked into believing that their true selves are creatures made to serve the whims and wills of these false Gods.  Even worse, these false Gods keep humans enslaved in the world the Gods created for their own benefit.

So one of the big concerns of gnostics is to try to figure out what is real?  Where are we in the realms of existence?  Now you might imagine that scriptures written by ancient Gnostics have some highly imaginative and speculative stories to tell. And you would be right.  Gnostic mythology and stories are wildly imaginative, speculating about realities that are controlled by alien beings living in multiverses.  These ancient stories are only matched by science fiction and fantasy today, which also tries to showcase possible alternative worlds, dimensions and futures of humanity.  I have come to wonder whether science fiction and fantasy stories are comparable to ancient gnostic stories, in that they help us see the problems with our present world and dominant culture, and give us ways to critique and transform how we live in the world.

What is human?

There is another deep concern in gnostic writings as in science fiction films: to help us to see what it means to be human, where our boundaries are as human beings, where we might cross those boundaries or extend them and experience transformation into something bigger than we thought we were.  This is something that the ancient Gnostics obsessed about.  They were convinced that human beings are more than our physical bodies and our souls. They thought that human beings were born with a piece of the transcendent God buried within them.  They usually call this the human spirit.  But this spirit is what empowers them and makes them bigger, stronger, and better than even the false Gods who rule the world.  It is what makes humans freed from the laws and rules established by these Gods.

What is the goal?

In gnostic stories, the human spirit is always portrayed as entrapped, enslaved, and subject to the authority of false Gods and rulers.  The human spirit starts out in a sleep state, even unconsciousness.  It came to exist within the human being through a fantastically imagined fall into the human world, where it has become trapped in a state of suffering.  The goal of gnostic religions was to liberate the human spirit by awakening it ritually, and helping it return to the true world of its origin, a transcendent other world, where it would be able to reunite with the real God, the source of the human spirit, or some type of spiritual avatar or angel.

You can imagine how subversive these ideas were in the first and second centuries when gnosticism was born.  The divine human.  YHWH and Zeus and kings and priests to be overthrown.  Real worlds beyond our own fraudulent one.  These are the seeds of free-thinking and revolution.  And in antiquity, they were suppressed and demonized.

Why today?

So the question that begs to be answered: If Catholicism defeated gnostic religions in antiquity, how is it that gnostic currents have become so prevalent today?  Here we have to thank the power of the written word.  Gnostics were prolific writers and their lost texts have reemerged within modern culture starting in the 1800s.  This rediscovery of ancient gnostic literature has resulted in the redistribution of gnostic ideas into American culture and has fed the growth of new religious movements like Theosophy, the psychological program of Carl Jung, and even the New Age movement.  Most importantly, the huge collection of gnostic writings known as the Nag Hammadi library was found in 1945 and fully translated into English in 1978.  So it is no surprise to me that the films with cutting edge gnostic themes are those produced in the 1990s, following a productive period in scholarship that made the gnostic gospels a household phrase.  The gnostic gospels were heavily marketed as an alternative form of Christianity for Americans disillusioned with traditional denominations, and as a critique to traditional Christianity with its judgmental Father God and concept of original sin. 

Think about the hype around films like Stigmata that featured the Gospel of Thomas and the Di Vinci Code that told stories from the Gospel of Philip.  This message about the recovery of a lost form of Christianity from antiquity hit home for a large number of Americans who were disillusioned and dissatisfied with the Christianity of their parents and churches that they felt had nothing spiritual to offer.  There is a synergy here, a real audience for gnosticism among Americans who view themselves as free-thinkers and people who question authorities, from the church to the government.   It was practically love at first sight, and film producers used the opportunity to create some pretty awesome films that make us think about who we really are, where we are from, why we are here, and what our destiny might be.

This weekend we will be viewing six of these gnostic films: The Matrix, The Truman Show, Pleasantville, Avatar, Dark City, and Altered States.  The films will be introduced by graduate students who are enrolled in my Gnosticism seminar.  Following each film will be a 10-minute Q&A period also facilitated by the graduate students.  To bring a close to each discussion, I will present a short reading from my book The Gnostic New Age which discusses these films in relationship to ancient gnostic ideas and practices. 

I hope you are ready to meet the gnostics in these films, and to be unsettled.

Gnostic Film Festival at Rice Cinema

You are invited to the Gnostic Film Festival at Rice Cinema, March 24-26.  Admission is free!  I will be doing short reading from my book, The Gnostic New Age, and the graduate students enrolled in my Gnosticism Seminar will be fielding questions from the audience following each film.  We will even provide snacks!  Hope to see you there.

Gnostic New Age is Published!

Feels so good to hold The Gnostic New Age in my hands!  A box of books just arrived at my office.  So headed to a coffee shop in the village to have a read. 

Please share this post.  I would like to get word out that the book is available (finally!).

Feature on my book in Rice News

There is a feature on my book (coming out in September) in the Rice News this morning.

New book by Rice’s DeConick explores the emergence and revolutionizing role of gnosticism

Gnosticism is a countercultural spirituality that forever changed the practice of Christianity. This is the premise of a new book by April DeConick, the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice and chair of the Department of Religion.

Photo by Jeff Fitlow; article by Jeff Falk

“The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion From Antiquity to Today,” published by Columbia University Press, will hit bookstores in September. The 392-page book has already been selected to receive a subvention award from the Figure Foundation, which very selectively supports publications, mainly in philosophy and religion.

Before gnosticism emerged in the second century, the belief was that passage to the afterlife required obedience to God and king, DeConick said. Gnosticism proposed that human beings were manifestations of the divine, unsettling the hierarchical foundations of the ancient world, she said. - See more at: http://news.rice.edu/2016/08/28/new-book-by-rices-deconick-explores-the-emergence-and-revolutionizing-role-of-gnosticism/

Secret Religion is released!

I have been working with two other editors, Jeff Kripal and Tony Pinn, on a 10-volume series on Religion for Macmillan.  These volumes are a hybrid between a textbook and a reference book.  There are only two volumes left to be published.  We started this project when we were contacted in August 2014.  So it is very exciting to have these volumes already published.  Only two years.  Really unbelievable!

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My pet project was a volume called Secret Religion, and it just came out in hardcover and e-book. 

I want to thank all the scholars who took out time from their schedules to write for this volume.  It wouldn't be the great book it is without all of you!  You were WONDERFUL to work with!

In order of their contributions:  Michael Williams, Matthew Dillon, Grant Adamson, Tuomas Rasimus, Madeleine Scopello, Bas van Os, John Turner, Kevin Corrigan, Marco Pasi, Wouter Hanegraaff, Kocku von Struckrad, Claire Fanger, Hugh Urban, Dylan Burns, Erin Prophet, Henrik Bogdan, Chad Pevateaux, Jared Calaway, Jeff Kripal, Brian Ogren, Kevin Sullivan, Christopher Rowland, Kelley Coblentz-Bautch, James Davila.

It can be purchased via Macmillan or Amazon: Secret Religion.

Description: Religion: Secret Religion is part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series dedicated to the study of religion. Composed of twenty-four thematic chapters, this volume looks at the margins of religion or religious texts and traditions that are not considered authoritative by orthodox communities. The volume is broken down into three sections that correspond with different classifications of religion in the margins: gnosticism, with its focuses on knowledge of a transcendent God who is the source of life and the human spirit; esotericism, with its focus on private religion kept from the public and critical of orthodoxy; and mysticism, with its focus on immediate contact with the ultimate reality. Each classification will be explored historically and comparatively to give the reader a more rounded understanding. The volume also includes bibliographies, filmographies, images, a glossary, and a comprehensive index, all of which aid the reader in exploring this rich, rewarding, and relevant field.

Gnostic New Age Receives Award

I was just notified that my new book, The Gnostic New Age, has been selected to receive a subvention award from the Figure Foundation.  This foundation very selectively supports publications, mainly in philosophy and religion.  I am delighted.  My book will be published in September. 

If you are interested in reading some of the pre-publication reviews, they are available HERE.

Got a cover for The Gnostic New Age

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My book is becoming more and more real. I have a cover! Waiting still for the typeset proofs. It is slated to be published in September 2016. 

In the meantime, I have to share the cover because I think it is so beautiful.  I found an artist, Elena Ray, whose work humbles me.  She devotes her art to trying to understand revelation and the transcendent.  The cover of my book uses one of her pieces called "Green Circle."

Call for papers in mysticism, esotericism and gnosticism in antiquity

For more information about this amulet, see http://www.livescience.com/49239-ancient-amulet-palindrome-inscription.html, where it was originally published.  The amulet is a palindrome.  It can be read forwards and backwards.  The message?  "Iaeo is the bearer of the secret name, the lion of Re secure in his shrine." 

Just a reminder that the SBL group Mysticism, Esotericism and Gnosticism in Antiquity (MEGA) invites SBL and AAR members to submit proposals for the San Antonio meeting. 

This group is looking for papers on any theme or text related to direct knowledge of the divine or God for its open session.

Papers on the subject of amulets and inscribed religious objects are especially welcome for a special session on this topic that we are jointly holding with the Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds group.

An invited book review session is also planned with the following books featured: April D. DeConick. 2016. The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion From Antiquity to Today (Columbia University Press); Frances L. Flannery. 2015. Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism: Countering the Radical Mindset (Routledge); Andrei Orlov. 2015. Divine Scapegoats: Demonic Mimesis in Early Jewish Mysticism (SUNY).

Submit proposals via the SBL website.