Canonbury Masonic Research Centre
The Eighth International Conference organised by CMRC
Saturday & Sunday 4-5 November 2006
Canonbury Academy, 6 Canonbury Place, London N1 2NQ
Gnosticism, which was closely related to the Hermetic Tradition, arose within the Church in its identifiable forms in the second century, as a group of heterodox schools of thought that had originally developed within earlier pagan religious circles. The diverse forms of Gnosticism are characterised by their dualist beliefs, and by their reliance on revealed knowledge (gnosis) rather than on grace as the means of salvation. However, in the course of the last century the term Gnosticism has been applied to the philosophy and spirituality of a far wider range of esoteric movements. The range of papers presented at the conference reflected this broader view.
The dominant tendency of Craft scholarship in the late 19th and 20th centuries has been to treat with suspicion the idea that Freemasonry’s ritual and self-definition possesses either ancient lineage or notable spiritual import, yet in 1721 Dr William Stukeley FRS, joined a lodge in London in 1721 in the expectation of finding a remnant of the ancient mysteries, an antediluvian knowledge tradition preserved in the ‘Art Mystery’ of Masonry. And while the United Grand Lodge of England emphasises that Freemasonry is not a religion, and that it offers neither salvation nor a particular revealed truth, hostile outsiders argue that Masonry conceals some kind of cult, more fully explored in additional degree systems. It is thus important that the complex question of whether or not Freemasonry is in some sense a ‘gnostic tradition’ is addressed openly and fully, especially as scholars now regard Freemasonry as a vital component of an emerging picture of ‘Gnosis and Western Esotericism’ that has itself become a distinct academic study.
Richard A. Crane MA BA(Hons) LGSM ACJMI
Gnosticism deals with the belief that by spiritually revealed means one can attain to esoteric, spiritual, occult or mystical knowledge. This paper deals with the latter, the aim and path pursued within Christianity and Islam toward a relationship by a finite subject with the infinite subject. The classic distinguishing characteristics of mysticism, following William James, are first examined. The traditionally accepted path of the Christian mystic, which passes through the three stages known as the Purgative Life, the Illuminative Life and the Unitive life, are examined and commented upon. The Sufi seeks by knowledge to attain illumination through certainty. The illumination is a realisation of knowledge beyond the Divine Law and also union with the Inner Truth by meditation and by calling upon the Divine Name. No two Sufi paths are the same. The Sheikh or Master chose the exact course and timing of the individual path of each disciple. His task was to unveil to his disciples the inner meaning of orthodox Islam, which was necessary to follow the path of love to initiation. Two possible approaches to the Sufi’s quest are detailed. The mystical paths evidenced in both Christianity and Islam can be seen as inward paths of self knowledge endeavouring to eliminate the effects and experiences of this temporal world in an attempt to taste eternity in the here and now. The mystic is unable to either properly explain or prove himself. He does not mind because he is a knower. He has been there. Is this the true Gnostic?
Dr Roger Dachez
At the end of the 19th century, French Freemasonry was deeply involved in political affairs. After the ’48 Revolution, during which the government was mainly composed of freemasons, and the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, ending with the fall of the French Second Empire, the 3rd Republic was finally established. In those times, for many years, French masonry had been the only private society tolerated by the state. It had become the refuge of republicans and radicals in a time when political parties, in the modern sense of theses words, did not exist. Dr Gerard Encausse (1865-1916) — better know under the nomen mysticum of Papus — reviver of ‘occult studies’ after Eliphas Levi (1810-1875) and member of the Theosophical Society, tried but was unable to join a lodge under the Grand Orient or even the Grand Lodge of France. Eventually he decided to create or, according to him, to awaken — a new initiatory society. With his friend Stanislas de Guaita ( 1867-1897), he placed the Order under the spiritual authority of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803), better known as the ‘Unknown Philosopher’. The Martinist Order was designed as a king of ‘counter-masonry’, or more precisely like a ‘super-masonry’, with new symbols and new rites. Since Papus’ time, many other Orders made their appearance in France but also in Belgium, in Switzerland and even in England and overseas, such as the Traditional Martinist Order (TMO) or Martinist Order and Synarchy (MOS). In France, where martinism is still very active, several members of the Order are also freemasons, but the two Orders remain entirely different without any official relations.
Professor Emeritus Philip Davies
Among scholars of ancient Judaism and Christianity, it has been the majority view in the last half-century that gnosticism arose as a Christian heresy and only in the second century AD. The existence of Jewish gnosticism has generally been either denied or overlooked — by both Christian and Jewish scholars. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide quite clear evidence that gnostic ideas — possibly a gnostic religious system, even — were developed before the Christian era. These ideas do not appear in all the scrolls, but there is no doubt that they were accompanied and interpreted by certain religious rituals that can be called ‘mystical’. It has been argued by Philip Alexander, the historian of early Judaism, that in the Dead Sea Scrolls we find the origin not only of the entire Jewish mystical tradition but also, possibly, of the Judeo-Christian mystical tradition. This lecture will explain and examine the texts from the Scrolls that permit such a conclusion, and will try to sketch out the ‘gnostic’ system that can be reconstructed from them, including the role of eschatology and astrology. Although these findings are not pursued into later Jewish or Christian gnosticism, the intellectual and religious roots from which the gnosticism of the Scrolls may have grown are considered, and it is demonstrated that no study of the Gnostic tradition should ignore the Scrolls as evidence of the earliest stage of this tradition within the Jewish-Christian tradition.
Dr Peter Forshaw BA MA PhD (London)
The Renaissance rediscovery of antiquity not only looked back to the treasures of classical Greece and Rome, but also evinced a fascination for the mysteries of the ancient Hebrews, Chaldaeans and Egyptians. At the same tune as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was enthusiastically introducing the Christian West to the wonders of Cabala, his slightly older contemporary Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) broke off from preparing a Latin translation of the complete works of Plato to work on a manuscript recently obtained by his patron Cosimo de’ Medici. This was a collection of fourteen texts attributed to the wiseman Hermes Trismegistus, a collection that came to be known as the Corpus Hermeticum and which was to exert a great deal of influence on subsequent occult philosophers, including Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), author of the famous Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), the revolutionary alchemical thinker, Theophrastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), and the theosophical alchemist, cabalist and magus, Heinrich Khunrath of Leipzig (1560-1605), best-known for his Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1609). This latter work includes an engraving of a rock on which is carved the ur-text of alchemists, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, together with the famous extract describing his dream revelation of “the nature of God and everything” from the hermetic Pimander. Hence we have encapsulated in one image hermetic inspiration for both the purification and perfection of matter in alchemy and a theosophical-theurgic ascent to the divine, both knowledges received ‘enthusiastice’ or ‘theodidaktike’ as the ‘donum dei’ (Gift of God) through both mediate and immediate revelation from the divine. This paper shall introduce several examples of the influence of such ‘hermetic’ philosophy on these thinkers, shall consider one or two instances of the criticism they received for their efforts from the orthodox Lutherans Thomas Erastus (1524-1583), Andreas Libavius (1560-1616) and Daniel Colberg (1659-1698) and show that although the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum are not, strictly speaking, Gnostic works, the ideas they contained led the occult philosophers to be accused of subscribing to heretical gnostic ideas. Cicero: No man becomes great without divine inspiration.
Robert A. Gilbert BA (Hons)
To most early Christians, ‘gnostic’ was a term of opprobrium applied to a wide range of perceived heresies, but the more specific term, ‘Gnosticism’ was not introduced until the mid-17th century, and it was rarely used in scholarly discourse for a further 150 years. Since the early 19th century, however, it has come into its own. With ever-changing subtleties of meaning, ‘Gnosticism’, as a label, has been used in both the defence and definition of orthodoxy, and in assaults upon traditional Christianity by occultists, freethinkers, psychologists, literary critics and feminists. Only within the last two decades has there been any serious attempt to provide a precise and meaningful definition of the word, but there is as yet no agreement as to whether such a definition has been, or can be established. R.A. Gilbert surveys the history of the word and its varied applications from the perspective of an historian of ideas rather than from the stance of a specific faith or school of academic opinion.
Robert A. Gilbert BA (Hons)
To most early Christians, ‘gnostic’ was a term of opprobrium applied to a wide range of perceived heresies, but the more specific term, ‘Gnosticism’ was not introduced until the mid-17th century, and it was rarely used in scholarly discourse for a further 150 years. Since the early 19th century, however, it has come into its own. With ever-changing subtleties of meaning, ‘Gnosticism’, as a label, has been used in both the defence and definition of orthodoxy, and in assaults upon traditional Christianity by occultists, freethinkers, psychologists, literary critics and feminists. Only within the last two decades has there been any serious attempt to provide a precise and meaningful definition of the word, but there is as yet no agreement as to whether such a definition has been, or can be established. R.A. Gilbert surveys the history of the word and its varied applications from the perspective of an historian of ideas rather than from the stance of a specific faith or school of academic opinion.
Professor Emeritus James M. Robinson BA BD DTheol PhD (Princeton)
The Gospel of Judas, written around the middle of the second century, was mentioned pejoratively by the heresiologists Irenaeus and Epiphanius, for which reason all extant Greek copies were destroyed and the text no longer copied. The only copies to survive were these translated, as were other Christian texts, into the native Egyptian language, Coptic. These texts were not located by heresy-hunters, and so survived to be buried for safekeeping, to be discovered in the dry sands of Egypt over the course of the last century. The most important of these discoveries was the thirteen Nag Hammadi Codices found in December, 1945, which provided the flood of Coptic Gnostic texts that revolutionized the study of Gnosticism, but around 1980 the Codex Tchacos was discovered near El Minya in Central Egypt. This contained a number of texts, among which were previously unknown Gnostic tractates in Coptic translation, including The Gospel of Judas and a Book of Allogenes. The Gospel of Judas is a Sethian Gnostic text, which is the branch of Gnosticism most prevalent in the Nag Hammadi collection. It presents Judas as the only apostle with the hidden Gnostic knowledge of the good God hidden in the realm of light, far above the evil world created by the demiurge, whose own evil nature is obvious from the hell-of-a-mess he created as his world. This same evil God inspired the Bible, which therefore presents his bowing-and-scraping servile worshippers in a positive light and those sent from the hidden good God above as evil. Thus, by wearing Gnostic glasses, one can detect those emissaries from the realm of light by locating those condemned in the Old Testament, such as Cain, Esau, Korah, the inhabitants of Sodom, and, in the New Testament, first of all Judas Iscariot. While the rest of the apostles are more or less literally asleep at the switch on Maundy Thursday, only Judas is there to help Jesus effect his escape from the bondage of the flesh back to the realm of light whence he came. The discovery of The Gospel of Judas, and of the Nag Hammadi codices, has ensured that the study of Gnosticism is no longer based primarily on the invidious and pejorative excerpts chosen by the heresiologists for refutation and ridicule, but on the primary texts themselves, which provide a basis for similar forms of religiosity still today.
Dr Leon Schlamm
In response to persistent charges by his theological critics that he was a Gnostic, Jung insisted that he was neither a Gnostic nor a metaphysician, neither a theist nor an atheist, neither a mystic nor a materialist, but rather an agnostic empirical scientist, an analytical psychologist. Yet Jung’s enthusiastic engagement with Gnosticism spanned four decades. from his early citations of Mead’s translations of Gnostic and Hermetic writings and his paranormally produced gnostic poem, Seven Sermons to the Dead attributed to Basilides (closely associated with his ‘inner guru’ Philemon), to his systematic treatment of Gnostic materials in Aion in 1951 and the acquisition by the Bollingen Foundation, through the efforts of Gilles Quispel, of the Jung Codex (containing the Gospel of Truth) in 1953. I will begin this presentation by examining the reasons for Jung’s sustained interest in Gnosticism, in particular identifying those Gnostic teachings (reinterpreted psychologically) which he believed anticipated his own work on the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. I will, however, also demonstrate, particularly through his handling of Gnostic materials in Aion, that Jung’s understanding of the individuation process and synchronicity was inconsistent with the anti-cosmic dualism of Gnostic materials available to him in Patristic writings and that, contrary to many of his critics (for example, Martin Buber and Victor White) as well as some of his supporters (for example, Stephan Hoeller), Jung never identified analytical psychology with the soteriological perspective of Gnosticism. In the second half of this presentation I will argue that, given that many symbols and ideas of Gnosticism are shared with later Jewish and Christian Kabbalah (as well as European alchemy influenced by Kabbalah on which Jung drew far more heavily than Gnosticism), Jung’s psychological perspective, particularly after 1945 when he became more familiar with Jewish scholarship on Kabbalah through his association with Gershom Scholem and Zwi Werblowsky, is far closer to Kabbalah than Gnosticism. While Jung no more identified his work with Kabbalah than with Gnosticism, I will demonstrate that there are striking similarities between the thrust of the argument of his essay “Answer to Job” published in 1952 (only a year later than Aion) and the soteriological perspective of Kabbalah, particularly in its Lurianic form, as Jung himself later acknowledged.
Dr Madeleine Scopello HDR
Some Gnostic authors whose writings, composed in Greek during the 2nd and 3rd centuries have been preserved under a Coptic translation of the 4th century, pay a particular attention to the symbol of the Temple, which is allegorically interpreted with the aim of symbolising the Soul. These trends of interpretation are nourished by Jewish pseudepigrapha, Qumran literature and the speculations of Philo of Alexandria. The lecture focuses on the treatise of the Teaching of Silvanus (Nag Hammadi codex VII, 4) where the Gnostic plays the role of the Great Priest entering the Temple, and on the two opposite visions of the Temple of the Gospel of Judas (Codex Tchacos).
Professor Emeritus Roelof van den Broek
The gnostic sources mostly confine themselves to emphasising the saving nature of Gnosis, but they also concern themselves, although less explicitly with the process of deification. This paper introduces the hermetic and gnostic movements in Antiquity, and then sets in context the two forms of hermetic initiation that are described in the Greek and Coptic gnostic sources. In each of these forms the initiate has an experience of being deified. The characteristics of this divine status are described in terms derived from the Greek philosophical tradition, but the experience is deeply religious and mystic. There is, however, no reason to assume, as some scholars have done, that the descriptions of spiritual transformations in hermetic texts are no more than a literary phenomenon, which did not correspond to actual experiences in real life. On the contrary, the experience of a spiritual transformation with a lasting influence on the receiver’s personality is of all ages, as will be discussed in the last part of the paper.
In the debate about the role of religion Colin Wilson sides with those who maintain that Civilisation cannot survive without a religion, and with Jung, who said: The soul has a religious function. But what is religion? At its simplest level, it is recognition that the universe has meaning, which we are usually too blind and limited to see. Yet we do glimpse it on occasion, and he quotes many contemporary mystics and visionaries who believe they have seen it. His first book, The Outsider, was about men who feel an instinctive hunger for ‘vision’, and a deep dissatisfaction with a life that seems focused on the material level. Many of these 19th-century ‘Outsiders’ were tormented by the sense that life is tragic and meaningless. Yet a few of the greatest — like Nietzsche — glimpsed the truth: that we often collude in our own defeat through pessimism — a pessimism that has become a typical feature of our culture. One of Wilson’s own most important insights came via the work of the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who argued that all healthy people have what he called ‘peak experiences’ — surges of the feeling that Chesterton called ‘absurd good news’. Religious ritual is designed to release this feeling by causing us to ‘open ourselves to meaning’, but it can be released in many other ways. Wilson argues that in order to grasp what is happening in these moments, and how we can learn to repeat it, we need to make a study of what might called ‘the geography of consciousness’, using the method that the philosopher Husserl called phenomenology.
Professor Thierry Zarcone
This paper examines the interactions between Muslim Gnosticism (and Sufism) with Freemasonry, in Turkey and Iran in the 19th and 20th century, considering both the use of Gnostic and Sufi terminology and ideas by the Muslim translators of Masonic rituals into Turkish and Persian, and the question of why in the mind of the Turkish and Persian brethren Freemasonry was equated with their Sufi brotherhoods (tariqa). It will further examine the broader question of whether there was a truly “esoteric freemasonry” in Turkey and Iran, concerned with practices dealing with Gnosticism, mysticism, hermetism, etc. rather than with politic, social and charity.
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