Richard Smiththe scholar, not the musician is a strong learned scholar. He participated in the complete edition of the scrolls of Nag Hammadi, first source of the early gnosis. R. Smith included a comment* that I found quite relevant. When a licensed researcher has the foresight of a visionary, I can only rejoice. I feel less alone.
*Richard Smith, Afterword: The modern relevance of gnosticism (RSA), in The Nag Hammadi library in English, revised edition 1996.
Gnosis survival
This integral unfortunately only exists in English. While waiting for a French translation to be released, my readers will appreciate the analysis I give here.
Gnosis is not limited to the Gnostic movements of the first centuries, it has permeated our culture from its origin and our traditions owe much to it. It has survived through the centuries thanks to enlightened minds, mostly writers, which Smith lists by giving them a voice.
They do not necessarily know each other, they do not belong to a club or a literary movement, yet all of them express a little bit of gnostic wisdom. They break the shackles of monolithic certainties of one-sidedness. Their voice could have been lost in the noisy multitude of the dominant ideology. It was not.
In search of light
As they are not very much in search of light and in defiance of the accepted certainties, we call them a little spiritualist or esoteric. It is true that the Spirit, for them, is written with a capital letter.
It is also true that they feel invested with a mission, to discover the diamond hidden under the vulgar gang that the dominant thought has closed on him. But their mission is neither priesthood nor militancy. They do not try to convince, they express their truth.
Whether they are dedicated to esotericism or spirituality, matter and the world that comes from it only interest them very incidentally. My writings are part of these two trends. I do not defend them, but rather claim them.
Smith has the wisdom not to confine himself to ancient texts, he tracks down the extensions of gnosticism in various writers, and I admire his approach. So I wanted to give my own list, to be published in a future article, The gnosis and arts.see at the end of this article
Jung’s Gnostic ring
The psychoanalytic theories of Carl Gustav Jung express quite clearly the tendency of the great scholar to join the Gnosis.
C.G. Jung continually refers to the Gnosticism in his writings and was often photographed “wearing his gnostic ring”. In Psychological Types he writes of “the vastly [compare to that of the Church] intellectual content of Gnosis, which in the light of our present mental development has not lost but has considerably gained in value.”
He goes on to praise the “Promethean and creative spirit … we find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed : a belief in the efficiency of the individual relation and the individual knowledge.” (loc.cit. pp 538 539)
Beat Generation
Among the modern appropriations of gnosis, Smith has noted the poetry of William Blake, the Moby Dick of Herman Melville, the novels of Hermann Hesse, the mystico-social practice of Rudolf Steiner, the “powerful literary expression of Gnosticism“, a desire for total liberation expressed by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, founders of the literary movement called Beat Generation.
“I salute the terrible presence of the gods, Sabaot, Jehovah,
Astaphes, Adonaeus, Elohim, Joal, Jaldaboth,
Eon from Eon born ignorant in an abyss of light,
The reflections of Sophia that make the dreaming galaxies sparkle,
Vortex of stars, fine silver fishnet, hair of Einstein!”
Allen Ginsberg (RSA, p.546)
The Beat Generation has had a great influence on post-war American culture. Artists like Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez are the direct heirs. These poets were the active soul of the pacifist movements against the war in Vietnam, with Jane Fonda, who accompanied in France the protest movement of May 68. Jacques Dutronc, the man behind the song, adds his own grain of salt:
There are those who protest
Who claim and who contest
What I do is just my best,
I turn on and rest.
Sophia the Wise
The only reproach I can make to Richard Smith is not to emphasize the primordial importance of Sophia la Sagesse, great forgotten by the Papist theologians, great ignored by the Cathos followers, clever little mouse who makes a way in rebellious heads like mine, Convinced that I am to find his trace, if not in the canonical texts, at least in those of Nag Hammadi or directly in the Akashic annals.
The relativisation of the crucial role played by the Goddess in the process of our creation has remained present in Celtism and Druidism, as evidenced by the Celtic trinity of Father, Mother and Child. Gnosis is marked by sexism, very present in the Middle East and in the Judeo-Arab countries. This sexism deliberately alters the original teachings according to which Sophia was assimilated to the Eternal Feminine, to the Virgin and Mother, in other words to the Great Goddess.
Our Virgin Mother
- Ana and the Wolf
- Fountain Whity
- Golden Love
- Our Lady Anne
- The Zeus Case
- A Love of Ama
- The Great Goddess
The Book of Goddesses
- The Book of Goddesses
- The Great Passage
- The Ultimate Dawn
- Into the Uncreated
- Forgetting Hell
- She the Human
