But there is a connection. Around the year 180 AD an orthodox Christian bishop named Irenaeus wrote a book called Against Heresies. One of the heresies he fulminated against was Gnosticism, and it is from this account that we learn much of what we know about that movement. Historians have long argued over how seriously to take the accounts of heretical beliefs given by orthodox writers in such books. Why would we assume that they accurately portray the ideas of those they are attacking? But this is by far the best source we know of, and it generally agrees with the Gnostic sources recovered from the Nag Hammadi Library, so we go with what we have.
According to Irenæus ("Adversus Hæreses," i. 24, 3-7), the Gnostic Basilides gave the name of Abraxas to the highest Being, who presides over the 364 kingdoms of spirits (52 x 7 = 364), because the numerical value of the letters of this name is equivalent to 365 (a = 1, b = 2, r = 100, a =1, x = 60, a = 1, s = 200)—i.e., the 364 spirits + the Highest Being Himself. . . . In a magic papyrus it is expressly stated that Abraxas is equivalent to 365, the number of days in the year
In the system described by Irenaeus, "the Unbegotten Father" is the progenitor of Nous "Discerning Mind"; Nous produced Logos "Word, Reason"; Logos produced Phronesis "Mindfulness"; Phronesis produced Sophia "Wisdom" and Dynamis "Potentiality"; Sophia and Dynamis produced the principalities, powers, and angels, the last of whom create "the first heaven". They, in turn, originate a second series, who create a second heaven. The process continues in like manner until 365 heavens are in existence, the angels of the last or visible heaven being the authors of our world. "The ruler" [principem, i.e., probably ton archonta] of the 365 heavens "is Abraxas, and for this reason he contains within himself 365 numbers".
I've always found this kind of cosmic speculation absurd, and not just because it is weird. Even if you accept all this, what then? A birthed B from which emanated C, D, and E, which created F, which transformed into G, and – what are we supposed to do about it? With Gods, one is supposed to worship them, but there is no evidence that anyone ever worshipped Abraxas. Who would worship an emanation? I suppose this is part of what we mean by Gnosticism; the main point was to know, not to worship or be good.
One of the things orthodox Christians hated about Basilides was that he considered the material world stupid and irrelevant, and therefore denied that Jesus could have suffered and died. Suffering and dying are stupid things of the irrelevant material world, and Jesus was, to Basilides, beyond all that. But the business of all those Principalities and Powers ruling the world was very widely believed among early Christians; St. Paul seems to tell us that Jesus came to earth to overthrow their rule.
But I can get weirder than that. The author of wikipedia's article on Abraxas, which comes with a lot of warnings about the citing of questionable sources, seems to be an adept of some kind of strange lore. He or she tells us,
The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, for instance, refers to Abrasax as an Aeon dwelling with Sophia and other Aeons of the Pleroma in the light of the luminary Eleleth. In several texts, the luminary Eleleth is the last of the luminaries (Spiritual Lights) that come forward, and it is the Aeon Sophia, associated with Eleleth, who encounters darkness and becomes involved in the chain of events that leads to the Demiurge's rule of this world, and the salvage effort that ensues. As such, the role of Aeons of Eleleth, including Abraxas, Sophia, and others, pertains to this outer border of the Pleroma that encounters the ignorance of the world of Lack and interacts to rectify the error of ignorance in the world of materiality.Got that?
As I have written here several times, one of the most striking things about classical magic is how much of it seems to be based on no theory of or even consistent attitude toward the non-material world. You just take symbols from old traditions mix them up with words that sound impressive when chanted and maybe some lighting effects, throw in the most expensive ingredients you can afford, and presto, you can invoke magical powers. If you have no idea what the name ABRAXAS means or where the snake-legged beings comes from, so much the better, that must mean it is truly arcane.
I have the same feeling about the kind of theology we see in Basilides. I find this stuff about the unbegotten father producing mind which produces mindfulness which produces Logos, or the Aeons of the Pleuroma, to be just a more intellectual version of Abracadabra Alakazam.
I do understand that Gnosticism has a serious theological point to make, which is that things are so bad in this world that a good and omnipotent creator cannot possibly be in charge. Perhaps people found (and still find) that thinking of the universe in this way gives them hope. If this world is under the power of the evil demiurge but might be saved by the intervention of the Uncreated Father, maybe that is a way to remain theologically optimistic without wishing away the horrors of earthly life.
But, really, 365 heavens, one for each day; what happened to the quarter heaven for the quarter day that Caesar put in the calendar 150 years before any of this stuff was written? Why does Nous produce Logos, rather than the other way around? Why are there principalities, powers, and angels? And why not a fourth or fifth or 365th category of immortal being?
I'm sorry, I find all of this Baroque multiplication of spritual beings and creative events absurd. There is not, in the Gnostic tradition, even any clear idea about where this supposed knowledge came from: no tablets handed to Joseph Smith by an angel, no revelation in the desert. Basilides, so far as I can tell, offers no justification at all for his statements about things I regard as unknowable. (The Apocryphon of John comes 200 years later).
I find it spectacularly apt that the centerpiece of this crazy theology is a being that, so far as we can tell, is just a made-up name attached to a made-up image. ABRAXAS went from a nonsense word carved on stones to the name of the supreme creator of the universe. Why not? To me, this Gnostic theology adds nothing to the strange face staring from the stone. To me, it just piles words and names that sound magical and cool on top of one another until the reader is either bedazzled into some kind of meditative state or throws the scroll into the fire in disgust.
To quote the webcomic Lackadaisy...
ReplyDelete"Dada is twaddle."
"What a delightful tautology!"
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Gnosticism has always struck me as having the same sort of spirit as Dadaism.
If your primary complaint about something (be it the art world or all of existence) is that it doesn't actually make sense like the Establishment thinkers claim it does, then what better way to argue that very point than by fabricating your own intentionally absurd expression of thought in the same style and vein of the Establishment schools, as a form of biting satire?
The Romans famously claimed that they invented satire. Like most things the Romans proudly claimed for themselves, it actually has roots in Greece - but they certainly named it, as well as refined it and greatly popularized it. I think it's entirely plausible that Basilides (himself a Greek) simply took satire to an extreme, much as the Dadaists did. I'd be curious what an expert familiar with his work might think about that notion.
There Is More to this cosmos than petty human stuff! However, it has nothing to do with the human stuff that humans have concocted from their imaginings. Now that we can see beyond our sphere we see the Cosmos. Unfortunately people want to imagine.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I see some historical-psychological meaning in the phenomena John is discussing. This meaning leads me to feel, I guess, some degree of sympathy with them.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me they reflect, more or less, three broad trends in the Mediterranean (or Greco-Roman, or whatever, I'm not sure what one should call it) culture of the time. First, it's clear to me that, at some point, more than one ancient culture becomes preoccupied with the dichotomy between a flawed, fragile, changeable material existence, and the unflawed, invulnerable, unchanging realities it can imagine, whatever form the latter might take (a typical "heaven" or locale of the gods; mathematics; a perfect non-existence; etc.). Still-familiar expressions of this, such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave, caught people's imaginations, and lodged in their minds in ways they couldn't stop thinking about--and, in some/many quarters, still can't. (I would self-indulgently add that I'm ambivalent about the basic idea: on the one had, I have often been puzzled at the basic Greek (and Buddhist?) presumption that if something can change, that makes it inferior, second-best, regrettable, deplorable; on the other, I'm always aware that we are, most of us--and certainly I am--potentially one sudden diagnosis or external-world crisis or death of a loved one away from some pretty agonized feelings on this point.)
Second, members of this culture continued to be compelled by what Rudolf Otto called the numinous, and what Mark Fisher called the weird and the eerie--one could cite others, such as Freud and the Unheimlich--and put much of this psychological/aesthetic compulsion into religious ideas and imagery. If the imagery is weird, if the names sound portentous but have no clear meaning, if the beings presented come from nowhere--well, that is all part of the point, no?
Finally, this culture continued to react to the problem of cultural cosmopolitanism: in a world of trade and empire, what did one do with one's "native" culture? Cling to it, or suck up the outside cultural riches on offer? Judaism of course went through a major crisis on this issue. But if the imagery, language, and ideas are an untheorized mish-mash of local and outside--well, that may or may not be quite "the point," but it's understandable.
I absolutely laud and defend one's right to be turned off by something--above all, in order to retain the right to do so myself, of course. But for some reason, I felt compelled to utter these points.
@David - Yes, absolutely, the Gnostic theology that bugs me is one of many expressions of the religious pluralism, and religious confusion, of the Empire. People longed for the numinous but were not really embedded in any particular tradition to which they naturally turned for answers. Part of what makes Roman religion and magic interesting to me is the close parallels to our own time.
ReplyDeleteThe question of belief is of course a hard one, but I wonder how much anyone believed in the 365 heavens and so on. Maybe it was just a way of conveying the vastness and mystery of the cosmos. Maybe the point was to listen to a sermon that traveled through these cosmologies, not trying to remember the details but just being awed by the immensity of it, of the potential for change embedded in the system. Functionally, for most readers, maybe it was more of a poetic fantasy than a precise description. Maybe the point was to invoke hope.
In the Zohar, one meditated on things like God's Chariot or the Seven Crowns, not because one believe in them literally, but as a way to achieve a mystical state.
That is what interests me: the exitence of religion and magic that seem, to me, largely divorced from truth claims about the universe. That the supreme god of Basilides had a name that essentially means "abracadabra" fits perfectly, to me, with a religious system in which many if not most people were uncertain about the nature of the gods or of ultimate reality. Belief that there was some sort of numinous world was, I think, nearly universal, and belief magic could work was at least very common.
I know people in our age who freely admit that they have no idea about the ultimate reality but just "go with what works" for them. That, it seems to me, was the Roman way.
I am not sure what Basilides was getting at; what inspired me to write this was being struck by his transformation of ABRAXAS into the supreme being.
"the Gnostic theology that bugs me is one of many expressions of the religious pluralism, and religious confusion, of the Empire. People longed for the numinous but were not really embedded in any particular tradition . . ."
ReplyDeleteAnd that, of course, is why authenticity is so very important. People fear such judgments--and, if they receive them, are wounded by them. Among internally-divided groups that were once tradition-bound (or, more to the point, conceive themselves that way), such judgments are a--indeed, the--weapon. Hence, also, the fixation on "we're so special" identities, and the fear and hate for Dolezal types. It is, in large part, a matter of esteem and honor.