I fucking hate Seafair. The damned Blue Angels are buzzing my house again. Why can't they fly blimps? Or zeppelins? Zeppelins could buzz my house any day.
I recently read The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas, which is not only interesting in its own right, but a positive Velvet Goldmine for anyone interested in the fiction of John Crowley. Jonas seems to have been a significant source of imagery and theology for Crowley's Ægypt books; and Crowley's fiction should prime one to plow through Jonas' account. It examines Gnostic transcendental religion in the first centuries after Christ, both in general and with specific accounts of the Valentinians, the Manichaeans, and an extremely rude man named Marcion, among others...
One fault I can find with Jonas is that he deliberately downplays many times the outrageous, picaresque, or grotesque qualities of the Gnostic myths (as opposed to the Gnostic theologies) so as to treat them in more symbolic and academic terms. This is unfortunate if, like me, you have no real interest in theology of any sort, but a very powerful interest in exotic manifestations of the human imagination. Tastes vary.
Jonas taught me that I am definitely no sort of Gnostic at all; while I find their myths and their beliefs far more interesting and far more engrossing than those of orthodox Christianity, Gnostic acosmism is a big turn-off for me. (And then there's my whole not believing in the supernatural thing, but we can ignore that if we treat all religion as philosophy in allegorical clothing.)
The heart of the Gnostic conception is--or seems to me, based on my limited reading so far, to be--this: we are strangers in this world. The powers and principalities that govern this world are not our fathers, not our Gods, not to be worshipped or obeyed. We come from Outside; we are children of a transcendent, alien God, and, like him, our spirits have nothing of this world in them. We are trapped in the body and in the world, the dominions of hostile and unsympathetic forces, and the Gnostic revelation aims at setting us free to return to the Realms of Light beyond. That seems to be the essential content of the gnosis, in its various factional forms; the Old Testament is often regarded as a work of the Demiurge who rules over the material world, and is thus positively anti-divine, while Christ, in Christian Gnosticism, absorbs traits of the more general Gnostic Messenger, sent down from the Realms of Light bearing seals of great power to pierce through the celestial spheres and slip past their jealous Archons to bring us the Call to awaken...
The Messenger walks among us, but is not of our kind: he or she or it has knowledge and power beyond ours, the knowledge and power to defy Fate itself. The Messenger passes through worlds and generations...
This Messenger is, essentially, Doctor Who.
As a mathematician, though, I end up being more of a Platonist. Mathematics often feels more like a process of discovery than of invention; and if it is true now, it has always been true, and will always be true, and its truth is independent of the physical world or, indeed, of the knowledge of its truth. Mathematics is the exploration of an ideal world. Or that's how I think of it, anyhow, to keep myself from feeling as if I'm just jerking off into my own mouth all day long. So it's back to the Renaissance and the Hermetics for me now...
On an utterly unrelated note, here is a piece of software called the Hog Bay Notebook. Oink.
Posted by aloysius at August 07, 2004 01:47 PM | TrackBack |