Chrism – ☩ Ecclesia Gnostica

The Nature of the Redeemer

A Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Advent

by Bishop Steven Marshall

The nature of the Redeemer is a very real mystery to the Gnostic, not in the conventional sense of something that is to be deduced and solved but in that it is something that is too great to be expressed in ordinary words and speech. It cannot be figured out rationally or in statements of fact or theory. It cannot be reduced to a single person in history, a specific figure in religion or even a single experience that is true for all. In this case, we must approach the amplification of this intent with caution and the realization that all we can do is open some windows that may reveal a few facets of this great mystery. As recounted in the collect for this Sunday, “O Thou our Redeeming Power… our thought has not swerved from searching Thy secrets.”

Many references and insights of Gnosis may appear secret, but they are secret only in that they can only be apprehended through mystical experience; they transcend ordinary thought and speech. Without the Gnosis, without the mystical experience for ourselves, such theoretical knowledge is nothing worth. Only the interior experience can transform us. Our Pre-Eucharistic prayer refers to “the Grace beyond thought and speech.” The prayer of Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom), one of the principal Goddesses of Tibetan Buddhism, refers to her in the title “beyond thought and speech.” In the same way the nature of the Redeemer is beyond thought and speech.

The use of the word “nature” in this context might also be explicated by the Buddhist term for the essential and true nature of a thing, which is Dharma. It is similar in meaning to the Chinese Tao or “way” as well. This relates to a phrase in the Gospel of St. John where the Christ exclaims, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Yet we must not narrow this to one person in history; the nature of the Redeemer cannot be contained in such a fashion. The “truth” and the “way” suggests something much more intrinsically universal and yet individual in expression and realization.

In the Gnostic framework the individual is redeemed through a process of internalization and consciousness of the figure of the Redeemed Redeemer. One of the mythic representations that most fully expresses this process is that of the Holy Prophet Mani. Although Mani’s vision is the result of a unique transmission, he poetically draws upon the religious imagery surrounding him, including that of mystical Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Alexandrian Gnosticism. He describes the First Man (Human), the androgynous Anthropos, as a Man (Human) of Light who is tricked and trapped by the Darkness or is otherwise knowingly sacrificed to the Darkness to redeem the Light previously consumed by it. One can find remarkable parallels of the consuming of the Light by the Darkness in the story of Ungoliant, the monstrous spider who poisons the life and drinks the light of the Two Trees in The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien. (I do not pretend that Tolkien was inspired by the Manichean writings, but suggest that, although inspired by Finnish, Celtic and Germanic mythology, he primarily drew upon a vision of mystical truths and a source common to the prophets of any age.) The Darkness wishes to defeat the Light by consuming it, and by that means the Light is fragmented into sparks and dispersed throughout the cosmos. Such a metaphor is described equally in the Lurianic myth of the fragmented sparks of Adam Qadmon and in the Sethian Gnostic accounts of the seed of Seth. In the Manichean myth the distress of the Darkness, in having consumed the Light, brings forth material creation and the living universe. This entire cosmos by which the Darkness hoped to capture and defeat the Light becomes a mechanism for freeing and putting back together the fragments of the Light dispersed throughout the Chaos. Yet this redemptive process does not happen automatically. The dispersed sparks of the Light of the First Man suffer from a faint of ignorance, a forgetfulness of their origin. The Father of Greatness who with the Mother of Life engendered the androgynous First Man together send envoys of light in the form of Messengers of Light to remind the fragments of the First Man of their celestial origin and perfection. In this scheme the process of redemption is remembering from whence we came. This call to remembrance is present in all the traditions of Gnosticism, in all times and cultures. It is poetically recalled in the “re-membering” of the body of Osiris in the Egyptian mysteries and in the Manichean myth with the gathering together of the fragmented light of the First Man.

“When men asked for the Redeemer, then the Mother of Life, and the First Man and the Spirit of Life decided to send to their children One who should free them and save them, to show them the knowledge and the righteousness and rescue them from evil.” (The holy prophet Mani) A Messenger of light is sent by the Father of Greatness and the Mother of Life for our Redemption. Another portion of Manichean writings lists not just one, but a stream of such messengers sent throughout history: “Seth-el, Shem, Enos, Nikotheos, Enoch, Elias, Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, Mani.” The Redeemer is not just an occurrence in history. The Messenger continues to come to us, the ever-coming and redeeming Logos. Like the Chanticleer of the dawn the Redeemer comes to awaken us from the slumber of ignorance, to guide us to Liberation. The Christ came to free us, to save us, “to show us knowledge and righteousness and to rescue us from evil.” He did not come to bring us a vicarious atonement by dying on a cross, but he came into this world to bring a message of liberation and a redeeming power to achieve it. According to the writings of Mani, the Christ only appeared to be a man: “While coming, the Son changed himself into the form of man, and He appeared to men as a man, being no man, and men fancied him to have been born.” The Gnostic Christ is both a mysterious otherness and a perfect likeness within us. In the Odes of Solomon, the redeemer figure states, “I am from another race.” We too, our essential spirits, are alien to this worldly reality; they are the exiled sparks of the First Man (Human), the Redeemed Redeemer. So too, we bear a kinship to Christ in that way. The goal of the Gnostic is not to become a Christian but a Christ. To seek to know this divine nature is to “wonder at the place from whence we have come.”

(The Untitled Apocalypse from the Bruce Codex)

In reference to the Redeemer as the way, the truth and the life”, the Sanskrit word dharma besides the true “nature” of a thing and the “way”, also means the “law.” The nature of the redeemer, then, is the Law, for the Law of the Gnostic is one, the Law of Love:

“And he also gave us the law: to love one another, and to honor God and bless Him, and seek Him—who He is and what He is—that we should wonder at the place whence we have come, and not return to evil again but follow after Him who has given us the Law of Love.”

(The Book of the Gnosis of the Light, from the Untitled Apocalypse of the Bruce Codex)

The commandment to love one another and to love God intends that we “should wonder at the place from whence we have come.” To discover the nature of the redeemer within us we must seek God within ourselves and find our way to the place from whence we have come. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, “If they say to you: whence have you originated, say to them: We have come from the light where the light has originated from itself.” When we seek who and what God is, we find who and what we are. The Redeemer and the redeeming power within us are one; the nature of the Redeemer and our true divine nature are the same. “If you will know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the sons (offspring) of the living Father.”

Redemption to the Gnostic means liberation, liberation from the collective powers of the mass psyche, as well as those bonds within our own individual psyches. If not for such a redeeming power from outside the system, the hyletic and even most of the mind-centered people of this world would never make it. The wheels of karma and fate are not sufficient to the task. Certainly, we have our own work to do in the process of purification and redemption; yet our worldly oriented egos alone are not sufficient to the task either. Without the Divine Aid we end up in the same hole, shoveling and shoveling the same old mire, without ever getting out of it. The Redeemer came to lift us out of both our individual limitations and the bonds of the mass psyche. Besides the message of an alternative world view, the Redeemer brought a liberating power, a power to alter our consciousness into more elevated states of perception, a power conveyed through the institution and revivification of mysteries, which the Church today calls “sacraments.” The sacraments are mysteries; the Redeemer also is a mystery. The sacraments are doorways to a transcendental mystery. The sacraments enact metaphors and myths of transcendent and timeless processes of purification and apotheosis. The rituals become external cues to an interior state of consciousness as well as external symbols of an interior and invisible grace from on high.

The whole world has a need for redemption and liberation. Mani writes of the light of nature trapped in the suffering world of material creation. To the Gnostic salvation is, as the alchemists of old, to liberate the light of nature and the light fragmented in ourselves. We can accomplish such a task only by becoming liberated ourselves through recognition of the transcendent and redeeming power within us, however it may reveal itself to us. Whether yellow, black, red or white, masculine, feminine, young, old, Neopagan, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Moslem or Jew. The Redeemer humbly adapts itself to our humanity, not just once 2,000 years ago, but every time it reveals itself to us. Every time that the mystery of the Eucharist takes place the redeeming power and light of the Logos sacrifices itself to the limitations of matter for our sakes. Like Buddhism, Gnosticism places more emphasis on the message and the redemptive process itself rather than on the individual founder in history. And yet, one cannot really discuss the nature of the redeemer without giving due recognition to the inestimable importance of the mystery-figure of Jesus in the Gnostic soteriology and world view. He lived an archetypal life, the Word made flesh, that we too might have that life of spirit and wholeness, which is our spiritual birthright, not by mere belief in a historical or pseudo-historical event, but through Gnosis, a knowing that his story is the story of each one of us and that we must discover the redeemer and the one in need of redemption within.

Another aspect of the redemptive process related to this world view is the bringing together of the masculine and feminine parts of the Androgynous First Man, Adam. In this regard the mythic figure of the redeemer transcends gender designations. The Gnostic myths are replete with stories of divine feminine figures redeeming the fallen masculine as well as divine masculine figures redeeming the fallen feminine. To some degree the Gnostic journey towards wholeness involves both these relationships within us, regardless of our outward gender. In the Sethian gospels Eve is called the Mother of life, the Mother of all living, just as the divine feminine is titled in the Manichean scriptures. The Gnostic Eve is not an evil temptress; rather, she is the bringer of enlightenment and Gnosis to Adam; she awakens him from the sleep of unconsciousness of who and what he is. Through the divine, feminine spirit of Eve, Adam’s progeny, the seed of Seth, carry the light and its message forth to all generations of Gnostics, which culminates in the advent of the Christ.
The Christ is the divine redemptive image of the redeemed Adam, just as the Blessed Virgin Mary is the redemptive image of the divine Eve. Likewise, the Sophia who gives herself to the depths of the material chaos for our redemption is redeemed by the Christ to become the feminine image of the redeemed redeemer. The Gnostics portrayed this latter image of redemption in the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The point of all this juxtaposition of masculine and feminine images is that we have both these natures and their relationship to the divine within us, spiritually. Thus, for the Gnostic, the story of the Advent of Christ brings not a mere recounting of historical or pseudo-historical facts but a rich mythic weaving together of timeless archetypes and our potential for liberation and redemption.
In referring to the Redeemer as “the way, the truth and the life,” the way implies a process, in Gnostic terms, a process of interpreting religious symbols to represent, illumine and further develop an interior Gnosis. The varied, diverse and occasionally contradictory mythologems of the Gnostics model this process. These are not “just” psychological symbols but symbols in a Jungian sense, symbols that are not simply to be studied but to be used in the process of portraying the interior realities of Gnosis, a process facilitated by mystery actions using them (sacraments). When we “do” something with them they may “do” something with us. Symbols, in this sense, represent spiritual potencies that are at once intra-psychic and extra-psychic, mystic and cosmic, individual and collective, subjective and objective. In this manner, the religious symbols of Christmas: the figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Christ child and others can take on an even more transcendent and illuminating character.
The mother Mary of the Christmas story is called, in the Western Church, the Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception refers to the doctrine that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was conceived without original sin to be a fit vessel for the birth of the Christ Child. To put this in a Gnostic context we must understand that the doctrine of original sin was by no means universally held in Christendom until after its popularization by St. Augustine of Hippo. The Gnostic myth rather indicates a doctrine of original divinity. In this fashion, we are all immaculately conceived. But we are yet far from that divine nature with in us. Rather than an original sin, we suffer from an original ignorance, an ignorance of our divine origin. Each of us, in spirit, is conceived immaculately in the love of the Father of Greatness and the Mother of Life. We have the potential and capacity to bring forth the “virgin birth” of the Christ within us. Yet without Gnosis and an awakening from our ignorance, without the Gnosis of this Divine Love, we have nothing. In reference to the “virgin birth,” it is the realization that the Mother of Life, her unadulterated love remains ever itself, one, undefiled and pure, regardless of its myriad forms of expression, for it is by the Law of Love that we are brought to “wonder at the place from whence we have come.”

A passage from an Ethiopian manuscript based on the Protevangelion describes Mary’s conception and announces her role in the birth of the Savior:

“Gabriel appeared to her and said: Peace be unto thee, O Woman. Fear not, for thou hast found mercy with the Lord, and behold, thou shalt conceive and bring forth a daughter and thou shalt call her name Mary; from her shalt spring the light of creation and Him for whom the worlds wait.”

Mary is the immaculately conceived and purified Holy Grail prepared for the descent of the Christ. Yet, she in many ways is an image of our own souls and represents our individual role in and preparation for the Advent of the Christ within us. As announced by St. John the Baptizer: “For this is He that was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah… the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight a pathway for our God.’”

Mary affirms this role in the Gospel story of the Annunciation by saying, “Be it done according to Thy word.” She realizes that the Holy Grail that is herself, before it can bring forth the Christ Child, must be cleaned and emptied to receive the Fullness. So too must we, in some way, empty and clean our cups to receive the Christ, for the ego-personality alone cannot transform the base metal of our personality into the golden chalice of the divine birth. The womb of Mary, the Mother of life, represents the Holy Grail. Through Gnosis we are prepared to conceive the interior Virgin Birth, spiritually. She has been called the Spirit of Prophecy and the Daughter of the Voice, both represented as a dove. Dove, or the Latin “Columba”, is the title for virgins, such as Mary who were dedicated in the Temple of Jerusalem. The Christmas season brings to us the Dove of Peace. Thus, it is the spirit of Mary, as a dove, who ushers in the peace at Christmastide. She speaks in the heart, announcing the coming of the Redeemer and our own Redemption. She introduces us to the nature of the Redeemer, the Prince of Peace that dwells within us. As in Jung’s “Hymn to Izdubar” in “The Incantations of Liber Secundus” of The Red Book, we must in some paradoxical fashion become the mother of our Selves: “I am the maiden, the simple mother, who gave birth but did not know how.” The mother “who gave birth but did not know how” speaks to the mystery of the process of the birth of Christ, which must occur within each of us.

As our consciousness grows and our ego is transformed, the birth takes place, the peace descends upon us, and we bring to fruition the seed of our redemption. Thus, we become one with Christ and know the Redeemed Redeemer within us; we know the redeemed and the Redeemer as one. We know the one who is redeemed and the one who gives birth. The Holy Mother of all gods, Our Lady reveals to us the nature of the Redeemer who dwells within us and is our truest Self. We find the mystery that that which is born in us, like Christ, has always been, is now, and ever shall be, the ever-coming and Redeeming Logos.

My Lady is a fragrant rose,
And near to God my Lady grows;
And all my thoughts are murmuring bees
That haste in silent ecstasies
Upon her beauty to repose.
Sweeter than any flower that blows,
Since all the scents her lips disclose
Are prayers upon the heavenly breeze,
My Lady is.

Her summer never comes and goes
And, for the sweetness she bestows,
My heart’s the hive where, by degrees,
I hoard my golden memories.
For Mary, as my Angel knows,
My Lady is.

-Anon

Steven Marshall is the Bishop of Queen of Heaven Gnostic Church, a parish of the Ecclesia Gnostica in Portland, Oregon.

Renewal of Life

A Homily for New Year’s Day

by Bishop Steven Marshall

The New Year’s holiday is part of the progression of the Christmas season. Occurring subsequent to the winter solstice, Christmas and the New Year have similar significance as the rebirth of the light and the renewal of life at the darkest time in the semester of the sun’s waxing. The birth of the new year, like the holy birth of Christmas, is symbolized as a child, the birth of the infant light. Many old European customs and celebrations reflect the symbolism of the child during this beginning of the new year. One such custom is the election of the Children’s Bishop (episcopus puerorum). The elected child would dress up as a bishop, journey in children’s procession to the archbishop’s palace, and from a window in the palace, give a pontifical blessing upon the entire gathering.

New Year’s Day occurs in the Christmas cycle as one the twelve days of Christmas, the period between the ending of the lunar calendar and the beginning of the solar year, a time betwixt and between, a time of misrule when the usual rules and authorities of the world are suspended. It is a time of temporary chaos, confusion, celebration, and breaking down of old established forms to make way for a new light and new resolutions, the eternal new-born child of the year. These twelve days represent an opportunity for a psychological and spiritual renewal as well.

The Children’s Bishop was also called the fatuorum papam, the Fool’s Pope. At this time of the new year people would celebrate the festum stultorum (feast of fools). During this feast, a servant at court or, more often, the court fool would serve as the Lord of the Misrule in place of the usual head of the manor. The Lord of Misrule would rule for the one night of the feast and entertain the assembled guests with the making of foolish and madcap rules for everyone to follow. In the reversal of the relationship of the ruler to the ruled, a reversal of conventions and values also occurred.

The Lord of Misrule has a function similar to that of the medieval fool, whose task it was to mock authority and give a humorous and compensatory perspective to the convention of rulers and rulership. His task is also to point out the absurdities of convention by poking fun at the head of the court and keeping the conventional authorities from getting too puffed up with themselves.

The Gnostic in the world has a role similar to the role of the fool in medieval society. The role of the Gnostic is sometimes to reverse the conventional view of reality, to turn the wisdom of the world on its head, like the image of the Hanged Man in the Tarot with his radiant nimbus and beatific smile. The Gnostic writings often point out the absurdities of the conventional figure of Jehovah and reverse the interpretation of the Old Testament myths. The values of the world and the spiritual values of the Gnostic are often contrary. Even so, the values of unconscious are often polarized to the values of the conscious persona as well.

The “Time of Misrule” provides an opportunity for entering into the unconscious, so that something greater may come into consciousness, so that a greater consciousness might come to birth. The writings of Hermes Trismegistus describe a technique for bringing forth this birth of consciousness. “Your consciousness is in God; draw it into yourself, and it will appear; will, and it takes birth; suspend the senses of the body and the birth of the Godhead takes place.” Suspending the senses of the body breaks down the world that the lesser self (ego) has built up. The breaking up of the ego’s conventional structures for obtaining information allows consciousness to bring in and assimilate the birth of greater consciousness. This is the way of the birth of the Divine Life within. As stated in a Valentinian homily, “Those who dissolve the world and are not dissolved themselves are lords of all creation and destruction.”

The ego in the psyche has a function similar to the Gnostic Demiurge, which means “architect.” Like an architect, the ego creates an ongoing stream of worlds and ideas, but they are artificial creations. There is a difference between an artificial creation, lacking life and consciousness, and a creation to which we have given birth. The process does not so much involve a dissolution of the ego itself but a dissolving of the world that the ego has artificially created out of error and ignorance. Consciousness must overcome the four functions of the ego: sensing, thinking, feeling and intuition; it must overcome the power of the four elements in order to enter the stillness and silence of Midwinter where, in the hush of the night, in our own soul, the spiritual birth takes place.

The Hermetic writings state that the body of Gnosis is built by an inner purification through the mercy of God.

But first you must purify yourselves from the mindless torments of matter, one of which is ignorance, though there are many others, which force the man who is confined to the prison of the body to suffer by way of the passions. But these at once depart from him on whom God has had mercy, and so the body of Gnosis in man is built.

The ego persona can not manufacture the body of Gnosis by way of its own creations. The process of giving birth to a greater consciousness within us is not under our ego control; it requires the grace of God for the miracle of spiritual rebirth to occur. Yet it also requires an act of will on our part, a fervent intention, a desire for this change to occur.

In interpreting this passage, we must meditate on the rising above or transcendence of the passions of the body. This is not at all the same as the repression of the bodily appetites with which most of us in our Puritan culture are well acquainted. In many ways the path of rebirth is the reversal of the Puritanical repression of the bodily passions. In repression we are exerting the control of our lesser wills; in transcendence we are invoking and receiving the grace of a higher Self within us, that takes us to a still place where, like in the hush of midwinter, the new birth comes about in us. “This is the way of true rebirth. And now my child be still, and keep solemn silence; and thus will the grace from God not cease to come upon us.” Kyrie Eleison. “O lord, pour forth thy grace upon us.”

As in the Hermetic Literature, C. G. Jung was also very much inspired by the subject of rebirth in Gnosticism:

When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then as Nietzsche says, “One becomes Two,” and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation. He who is truly and hopelessly little will always drag the revelation of the greater down to the level of his littleness, and will never understand that the day of judgment for his littleness has dawned. But the man who is inwardly great will know that the long expected friend of his soul, the immortal one, has now really come, “to lead captivity captive”; that is, to seize hold of him by whom this immortal had always been confined and held prisoner, and to make his life flow into that greater life—a moment of deadliest peril.

In the above quote we hear echoes of the insights contained in the Hermetic writings about rebirth. Here Jung describes the rebirth in relation to a summit of life. This suggests the transitions and passages that we experience in our lives. It also implies the need to transcend the “little will” and the “lesser personality” to make this transition from the lesser into the greater life. These changes and transitions are often painful and entail a letting go of a previous state in order for a new state to appear. In such a fashion, there is a mystical death before the interior and spiritual rebirth. How this spiritual rebirth differs from many life passages is that the aftermath of our suffering and loss transports us to a place of greater consciousness where the pain and sorrow is transcended. As promised in the Revelation of St John: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes and their shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be anymore pain.”

In order for all things to made new, the former things must pass away. The consummation of Gnostic rebirth gives us a way to transcend the sense of loss and pain, and to make the transitions and passages in our lives occasions for renewal and joy. We can consummate this rebirth by becoming the dwelling place for the interior God and the greater life. The Revelation of St John proclaims, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.” According to Jewish mystical writings the Tabernacle of God is dwelling of the Shekinah, the feminine presence of God. In the Gnostic writings She is Sophia, the Holy Spirit, the Heavenly City, the New Jerusalem. She is described as a city, a community of people not built by human hands, a fellowship of knowers. The fifth Gnostic Mystery describes this mystical fellowship in terms of a new birth of the light within our hearts.

“Behold a small star from the heavens descends to earth with light more brilliant than the sun. It comes to dwell in the hearts of the children of men and women, and these hearts are the foundation upon which is built the Eternal City, New Jerusalem.”

So this renewal in which there is no more pain, comes through the hearts of those in an invisible fellowship of Gnosis and in community with each other. If we care for each other through the passages, we can make them occasions for renewal and joy. Consciously will, desire and intend with inner resolve and the birth of the Godhead takes place within the tabernacle of our hearts. As we go into the New Year let us make our resolutions not on the basis of worldly expectations but on the true grace of insight and resolve that comes from the divine light within us. So may we prepare a place in our hearts and in our community for the mystical rebirth to take place. Then we shall proclaim with our Indwelling Divinity, “…for the former things are passed away. Behold, I make all things new.”

Steven Marshall is the Bishop of Queen of Heaven Gnostic Church, a parish of the Ecclesia Gnostica in Portland, Oregon.

The Gnosis of Remembering

A Homily for the Day of All Souls

by Bishop Steven Marshall

All Souls’ Day is traditionally a time to remember the blessed dead. In Latin cultures they call it the Day of the Dead. They decorate the graves of the dead and remember the relatives and loved ones that have passed beyond those graves. They recall a spiritual connection with some spiritual and immortal part of those deceased whom they have loved or admired while in earthly life.

As we remember those loved ones and revered ones who have passed on, we must remember our own eventual death and contemplate why the dead are called “blessed.” Why is an intimate understanding of death so important to the Gnostic paradigm? One that comes readily to mind is that those who have died have passed over into another realm of consciousness, another world, another reality. Connection with such an alternative reality is very much a part of the Gnostic journey to wholeness. Through connection with an alternative reality we might achieve consciousness of the original Light from which we come and to which, with divine aid, we have the potential to eventually return.

As we remember those who have passed over before us, we can begin to understand some of the cryptic sayings of the early Gnostics concerning death and gain insight into our own end. In The Gospel of Thomas the disciples ask Jesus, “Tell us how our end will be.” He answers with a question. “Have you then discovered the beginning that you inquire about the end? For where the beginning is, there shall be the end. Blessed is he that shall stand at the beginning, and he shall know the end and he shall not taste death.”

This logion is not the first place in the Gospel of Thomas where the phrase “shall not taste death” occurs, as it comes at the very beginning in the first logion where Jesus’ first utterance is, “Whoever finds the understanding of these words shall not taste death.” So from the very beginning the gospel the Savior points us to the mystery of death, of the birth which is a spiritual death, and the spiritual rebirth which transcends death. Dr. Jung in his commentaries on the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes this mystery in more contemporary terms:

“The supreme vision comes not at the end of the Bardo, but right at the beginning, at the moment of death; what happens afterward is an ever-deepening descent into illusion and obscuration, down to the ultimate degradation of new physical birth. The spiritual climax is reached at the moment when life ends.”

This logion from the Gospel of Thomas also suggests that our origin and our end are the same, but that we must first stand at the beginning before this is true. We must know our beginning in the Light before we leave this flesh if we are to enter the light beyond shadow after death. This also intimates that the immortality of the soul, so that we “shall not taste death,” also depends on this same salvific Gnosis of our origin in the Light. This is an act of remembering in truth, not an intellectualized affirmation, a stated belief, or an imagined reality. The injunction, “Memento morte,” remember death, might lead us to this same necessity of remembering the truth of our origin and recognizing the unfortunate condition into which we have been cast. This remembering might bring us sorrow in the recognition of the wretched condition into which we have been thrown, as the Mandaeans express it, “cast into a stump,” yet also the certainty and hope for transcending it. The logion quoted above also intimates that we have the potential to pass over and at least catch a tiny glimpse of that light while still in the flesh. Just one real taste is all it takes. Then you know, with a certainty beyond all doubt, that we have come from the Light, and to that place of repose we shall return when we lay aside the flesh. One of the few statements revealed about the Eleusinian mysteries is that they gave to the initiate a certainty regarding the immortality of one’s soul after death and a liberation from the fear of death throughout the remainder of one’s life. The aim of the Gnostic mysteries is very much the same.

The Repose mentioned in the Gnostic writings relates closely to this original end, and also to the peace which comes to the Gnostic through this experience. The initials on many tombstones, R.I.P., stand for “Rest in Peace.” The early Gnostics often referred to the repose of the Blessed Dead as the Rest as well. One of the major obstacles to serenity and peace in our lives that we all come in with is fear, the fear of death, the fear of how our end will be. This fear is the root of all other fears and anxieties in our lives, it is hardwired into our bodies. It inspires the first question asked of Jesus in this logion from the Gospel of Thomas. “Tell us how our end will be.”

One of the psychological complexes that blocks us from transcending and finding release from our fear of death is guilt. This is why so much of the sacred mysteries depend upon a granting of absolution and an inner purification to receive the Gnosis of the Light. In the Book of the Pistis Sophia it is written:

“Every man who is to receive the mysteries, if they knew the time wherein they would leave the body, they would be mindful and commit no acts of darkness, so that they might ever inherit the Kingdom of the Light.”

There is not a saint who lived who did not commit some act of darkness sometime during earthly life. The mere fact of incarnation puts us into a condition of alienation, forgetfulness and ignorance against which we must ever struggle. We come into this world and find only spiritual emptiness in ourselves, because we are blind in our heart, as related in the Gospel of Thomas. Some harm we do merely to guard our life and property in this world, other acts of darkness we commit, if not with the evil intents of our wounded egos, then through the mere clumsiness of the flesh or sheer stupidity or ignorance of the consequences of our actions. These we must accept as the ever present weaknesses and limitations of earthly existence. Yet there is an admixture of darkness within us that comes from the archons, such evil inclinations as vacillation, deceit, lust, pride, anger, greed and envy. All of these have fear as their foundation, for, in the great Gnostic myth, it was the fear of the first Archon, the Demiurge, that generated them. Of those acts which stem from the limitations of earthly existence we must be absolved and forgiven; of those latter evils which the archons have wound about us as veil upon veil of fog and obscuration and night we must be purified. According to the Book of the Pistis Sophia we are purified of these by receiving the mysteries and going to the Light. We are purified by consciousness; we are purified when we stand at the beginning by the fiery spirit which we become through our own consciousness of our origin in the Light.

“Now then, let him who shall do what is worthy of the mysteries receive the mysteries and go to the Light. He who is to receive the mysteries becomes a great fire, very mighty and wise, and it burns up evils, and the flames secretly enter the soul and consume all the veils which the spirit of imitation has fastened on it, and the soul surrenders their destiny, saying to the rulers of destiny: ‘Take to yourselves your destiny; henceforth I come no more to your region; I have forever become alien to you, being about to go to the region of my inheritance.’ Thus the knower, the receiver of the mysteries is free in his body and out of it, whether born on earth or reborn in heaven.”

This saying from the Pistis Sophia describes the Gnostic Renunciation. This is in many ways an inner prelude to the Gnostic sacrament of Redemption. To accomplish this renunciation we must have those experiences of the Light that allow us to consciously affirm our essential alienness to the veils that the archons have wound about us and give them back to them, to let the mighty fire of our spirit enter the soul and burn away these veils. We achieve this by recognition of our origin in the Light, the region of our inheritance. The Apocalypse of Paul describes the confrontation and passage of these seven archons. His conversation with the last and seventh archon, the Chief Archon, exemplifies the essential nature and goal of the Renunciation:

“Then we went up to the seventh heaven and I saw an old man surrounded by a cloud of light and whose garment was white. His throne, which is in the seventh heaven, was brighter than the sun by seven times. The old man spoke, saying to me, ‘ where are you going Paul, O blessed one and the one who was set apart from his mother’s womb?’ But I looked at the spirit (that accompanied me), and he was nodding his head, saying to me, ‘Speak with him!’ And I replied, saying to the old man, ‘I am going to the place from which I came.’”

It is possible and, indeed, required of us as Gnostics to pass over these veils and experience the place of light from we came while still in the flesh. We know then that we have come from that place of Light and to it we shall return when we cast aside this flesh. “Shall not taste death” does not mean that we will not lay down this flesh when it is time to depart this world, but that our consciousness will not taste death; our consciousness of who we truly are beneath all the obfuscations with which the veils of the archons have surrounded us will not die. We are assured of the continuity of our consciousness because we have gained conscious recollection of our existence before this life, even before any lives in this world. With this we cast off our fear of death and all other fears which stem from it from which those veils of darkness were generated. We may not have the experience of fully crossing over to the place of Light and bringing the memory back to bodily consciousness, but we need only remember a small taste, the tiniest whiff of the divine fragrance of that experience to remember the authenticity of that Light when we come to it again. Most of us have at some time had experiences of feeling just a little closer to a place of love and light and the company of spirits from which we have come. These insights and experiences of Gnosis do not happen upon command or worldly desire. Through diligent struggle and a sincere heart-felt longing we gradually, veil by veil, come closer to these realities. One insight, one experience builds upon another but only if we remember and make spiritual use of the experiences with which we have been graced.

If we do this, if we truly take on the “noble striver’s struggles” to achieve this greater consciousness, then we will find that we are no longer empty in this world, that we have a great treasure within us, a treasure that has been with us from the beginning, but that we were too blind to see. That which we took for treasure in this world becomes empty and we see the poverty of worldly existence. “But I marvel at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty.” (Gospel of Thomas) Again we come to that Gnostic conundrum that we must find this spiritual treasure within us before we can relinquish the imitations that we take for wealth, yet these very imitations are what obscure that inward treasure and blind us to it. This is why we cannot accomplish this by individual struggle alone. Divine aid has been dispensed to us; mysteries have been left for us as “an outward sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” These mysteries can remind us of that treasure if we let them. In material form though they be, they can remind us of that spiritual treasure that cannot be taken away, that cannot be tarnished, that cannot rot, that moths cannot devour, nor worms destroy. Always the Gnostic task is to remember; as in the words of the Savior, “Do this in remembrance of Me.” In remembering the Blessed Dead, let us also remember the one who was sent for our deliverance and liberation, to awaken us from our forgetfulness and to remind us of our origin beyond this world. To remember death is to remember the beginning. On All Souls’ Day we are reminded of that beginning. We are reminded of our essential task of renouncing the world, of transcending death and of the communion with our fellow spirits. Let us remember. Let us stand at the beginning whereby we shall know the end and “shall not taste death.”

Steven Marshall is the Bishop of Queen of Heaven Gnostic Church, a parish of the Ecclesia Gnostica in Portland, Oregon.