I'm sorry for your loss. I recently lost a family but I can take no solace in religion because there is no afterlife. If you read the Hebrew Bible (or if you read the NT correctly too), you'll see that there is no such thing as Heaven. Sheol is a state of non-existence.
Barbelo is not the pleroma in gnosticism, she is an emanation of Yahweh. The rest reads like a garbled version of a Phillip K. Dick novel. Also pretty sure you can't be "blessed with gnosis" -- that's not how it works.
An interesting (and ancient) Gnostic prayer, thought I might share (I've loosely translated a few Mandaean-specific words into a more traditional Abrahamic language):
The Soul's Deliverance
Hail to you, hail to you, soul,
for you have departed from the world.
You have left corruption...
I believe that the demiurge is nothing more than a mistaken concept and simplistic (theistic) conception of God that keeps us "chained" to organized orthodox religion.
The idea that some kind of divine entity specially created the Earth and humanity really needs to go if we are to grow...
Nazz,
(Abrahamic) Gnosticism originated with eclectic Jewish sects before Yeshua was born. Mandaeism and Kabbalah are two surviving offshots of this tradition. Christian gnosticism is essentially the expression of the faith that Jesus Christ was one of these Gnostic Jews.
Pagan (Egyptian)...
ELoWolfe, I agree with you that most of these groups have little to do with ancient gnosticism. Most Western esoteric traditions (Tarot, Alchemy, the Masons, etc.) are a millennium or more younger than any gnostic tradition.
But also remember that Christianity is younger than gnosticism. I see...
Strangely enough, I think Wikipedia puts it well: "Gnosis taught a deliverance of man from the constraints of earthly existence through "insight" into an essential relationship, as soul or spirit, with a supramundane place of freedom."
This "supramundane place of freedom" is the Pleroma which...
Everyone's taking a shot in the dark. It seems like most of those gnostic churches take the rituals of orthodoxy and add some verses from, say, Thomas to their sermons. I'm looking at Unitarian Universalist churches since I don't want to trade one dogma for another.
I leave it vague simply because I don't know -- I haven't achieved gnosis. A big point of difference between us is that I'm a pantheist. That's going to make my theology look extremely "minimal" from the point of view of a more traditional theist.
For me gnosis is vaguely "self-knowledge"...
I think if you take the basic gnostic framework -- a flawed physical world as a prison for the soul -- you can take the concept in wildly different directions and remain gnostic.
I don't believe in most of what one would consider the supernatural -- for me, archons, gods, miracles, angels...
Shermana, I think it's admirable that you're trying to reconstruct some kind of gnostic orthodoxy. However, your theology (some kind of Valentinian reconstruction, I take it) does not have a monopoly on the term "gnosis." Remember that this concept existed in Hellenistic thought before the...
I'm interested to hear an elucidation of the LDS idea that God the Father was once a mortal man:
God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man... I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that...
Interesting. Generally, neo-Platonism is compared to gnosticism and seen as the potential root of the gnostic system. The demiurge is a neo-Platonic construct, for example.
You are setting up a false dichotomy. The Bible is neither a "book of lies" nor an objective history -- it's a healthy mix of mythology and historical fact. We can safely say that nothing in Genesis 1 happened and that the Great Flood in Genesis 6-9 was not a historical world flood but more...
Well now it's a debate of panentheism vs. pantheism. I just don't see a reason to believe in a divinity entity/diety that is distinct from the Universe in any way.