On her book The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today
Cover Interview of May 16, 2017
In a nutshell
In The Gnostic New Age,
I tell the powerful story of how gnostic groups arose in the first century CE
as countercultural religious innovators, offering people in antiquity a
completely new way to look at themselves, their world, and their gods. I
present gnosticism, not as a religion, but as a religious worldview or
spirituality that engages multiple religions and affiliations, and remodels
them in countercultural ways, producing new religious movements even to this
day.
All the religions of antiquity
– Judaism, Christianity, and Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian religions –
based their beliefs and practices on a type of spirituality that envisioned
human beings as slaves or servants to very powerful and often capricious gods
and government authorities who were their deputies on earth. These religions mainly
served to keep the world orderly and the gods satisfied and happy, so as to avoid
punishments like famine, disease, and defeat in war. People did this by
providing the gods with sacrifices that fed them, worship that respected their
power, and lifestyles that honored their rules and kept chaos at bay.
Gnostic spirituality
interrogated this traditional understanding of religion by turning worship away
from the gods of the nations to a supreme transcendent God whom they considered
the source of all life. This made the gods of the nations, including the
biblical God, lesser deities, even false gods and demons. Furthermore, this
transcendent God of worship was not a God that could be described or learned
about through some catechism or scripture. This supreme God beyond all Gods had
to be experienced by each person or met face-to-face in a mystical embrace. Gnostic
groups used rituals they designed to bring about this initiatory experience.
These practices significantly
changed ancient people’s understanding of the human being. The human being was
no mere mortal according to gnostics. Humans, they thought, contained an actual
piece of the transcendent God within them, and they called it the human spirit.
This piece of God is what makes humans transcendent, capable of journeying
beyond their bodies, beyond their world, to a place of utter Good and Light,
which is their source. This journey home and integration with God transforms
and empowers the human initiates to externalize the God Within, to become gods
on earth, to make their own choices based on conscience rather than obedience
to gods and kings.
This meant that religion
took on a specific therapeutic function that it did not previously have, to
transform and empower human beings as gods, to give humans the power to conquer
fate, resist the dominant authorities and traditions, and create a better world
for themselves. This reorientation of religion features the rise of the
individual and free thinking which became foundational to the history of the
Western world and our own history as Americans.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
In The Gnostic New Age, I tell the powerful story of how gnostic groups arose in the first century CE as countercultural religious innovators, offering people in antiquity a completely new way to look at themselves, their world, and their gods. I present gnosticism, not as a religion, but as a religious worldview or spirituality that engages multiple religions and affiliations, and remodels them in countercultural ways, producing new religious movements even to this day.
All the religions of antiquity – Judaism, Christianity, and Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian religions – based their beliefs and practices on a type of spirituality that envisioned human beings as slaves or servants to very powerful and often capricious gods and government authorities who were their deputies on earth. These religions mainly served to keep the world orderly and the gods satisfied and happy, so as to avoid punishments like famine, disease, and defeat in war. People did this by providing the gods with sacrifices that fed them, worship that respected their power, and lifestyles that honored their rules and kept chaos at bay.
Gnostic spirituality interrogated this traditional understanding of religion by turning worship away from the gods of the nations to a supreme transcendent God whom they considered the source of all life. This made the gods of the nations, including the biblical God, lesser deities, even false gods and demons. Furthermore, this transcendent God of worship was not a God that could be described or learned about through some catechism or scripture. This supreme God beyond all Gods had to be experienced by each person or met face-to-face in a mystical embrace. Gnostic groups used rituals they designed to bring about this initiatory experience.
These practices significantly changed ancient people’s understanding of the human being. The human being was no mere mortal according to gnostics. Humans, they thought, contained an actual piece of the transcendent God within them, and they called it the human spirit. This piece of God is what makes humans transcendent, capable of journeying beyond their bodies, beyond their world, to a place of utter Good and Light, which is their source. This journey home and integration with God transforms and empowers the human initiates to externalize the God Within, to become gods on earth, to make their own choices based on conscience rather than obedience to gods and kings.
This meant that religion took on a specific therapeutic function that it did not previously have, to transform and empower human beings as gods, to give humans the power to conquer fate, resist the dominant authorities and traditions, and create a better world for themselves. This reorientation of religion features the rise of the individual and free thinking which became foundational to the history of the Western world and our own history as Americans.