Reforming Gnosticism

When people say, “My goodness, your Gnosticism is so different than what I have come to understand Gnosticism to be,” that’s because I didn’t take it from secondary sources. I took it from the original sources.  Then of course, Valentinian Gnosticism is an early form of what has come to be called Christianity. Christianity diverged immensely from the original message around the 300’s and on up, when the gnostic books were taken out of Orthodoxy. Those folks that are called heresiologists are the people that went around slapping heresy labels on the early Christianity—the early Valentinian Gnosticism. They weeded it out of the official sacred texts that made their way into the New Testament.

The main book of the Nag Hammadi that I relate to is called the Tripartite Tractate. I believe it to be the purest form of gnosis. It has very little in the way of mythologies, of extraneous characters, of the names of things and the numbers of things and the astrology of it all.

Valentinian Gnosticism from the Tripartite Tractate is unique in that the fallen Aeon is not called Sophia, a female character. The Aeon who fell is called Logos, not to be confused with the Son of God, Christ, or Jesus.

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Tag: nature of God

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    The God Above All Gods

    I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled out. The word for that sort of study is “cosmogony,” which is defined as the study of the origins of the universe. This makes the most sense to me–to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are and then, after that is established, to see how that applies to our lives. Then we can ask, “Why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live?” After that, we can finally consider the termination of the universe and what happens after we die. All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This knowledge is known as “gnosis.”