Lawrence Durrell writes, “This is a strange and original essay, more a work of literature than of scholarship, though its documentation is impeccable. It is as convincing a reconstruction of the way the Gnostics lived and thought as D.H. Lawrence’s intuitive recreation of the vanished Etruscans.”
“A remarkable book for both knowledge and the understanding of Gnostic texts, so abstruse at first sight, and for the poetical interpretation of the Gnostic movement across history. Lacarriere is particularly well informed about the various currents and undercurrents of Gnosticism, and their perennial importance for the religious and the mystic mind.” — Marguerite Yourcenar
Jacques Lacrarriere (1925-2005) was a French writer who studied philosophy and classic literature and was known for his work as a critic, journalist, and essayist. In 1991, he received le Grand Prix de l'Academie francaise (The Great Prize of the French Academy).
Lawrence Durrell writes, “This is a strange and original essay, more a work of literature than of scholarship, though its documentation is impeccable. It is as convincing a reconstruction of the way the Gnostics lived and thought as D.H. Lawrence’s intuitive recreation of the vanished Etruscans.”
“A remarkable book for both knowledge and the understanding of Gnostic texts, so abstruse at first sight, and for the poetical interpretation of the Gnostic movement across history. Lacarriere is particularly well informed about the various currents and undercurrents of Gnosticism, and their perennial importance for the religious and the mystic mind.” — Marguerite Yourcenar
Jacques Lacrarriere (1925-2005) was a French writer who studied philosophy and classic literature and was known for his work as a critic, journalist, and essayist. In 1991, he received le Grand Prix de l'Academie francaise (The Great Prize of the French Academy).
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Lawrence Durrell writes, “This is a strange and original essay, more a work of literature than of scholarship, though its documentation is impeccable. It is as convincing a reconstruction of the way the Gnostics lived and thought as D.H. Lawrence’s intuitive recreation of the vanished Etruscans.”
“A remarkable book for both knowledge and the understanding of Gnostic texts, so abstruse at first sight, and for the poetical interpretation of the Gnostic movement across history. Lacarriere is particularly well informed about the various currents and undercurrents of Gnosticism, and their perennial importance for the religious and the mystic mind.” — Marguerite Yourcenar
Jacques Lacrarriere (1925-2005) was a French writer who studied philosophy and classic literature and was known for his work as a critic, journalist, and essayist. In 1991, he received le Grand Prix de l'Academie francaise (The Great Prize of the French Academy).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780720618020 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Peter Owen Publishers |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Bookwire |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 136 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Gnostics
By Jacques Lacarriere, Nina Rootes
Peter Owen Publishers
Copyright © 1973 Editions GallimardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7206-1802-0
CHAPTER 1
THE PERFORATED VEIL
When all the complicated calculations prove false, when the philosophers themselves have nothing more to tell us, we may be forgiven for turning to the meaningless twitter of the birds or to the distant counterweight of the stars.
MARGUERITE
YOURCENAR
Memoirs of Hadrian
What emotions does the sight of the sky inspire in us, if not praise, enthusiasm, and admiration? It is vast, infinite, immutable, omnipresent; it eludes the relative and the measurable; it is a parameter of the incommensurable. But in this concert, which we consider natural and which celebrates dawn, zenith, nadir, and twilight with equal assurance, discordant notes sometimes jar the ear. To be vast is good. To be infinite is too much. To possess planets and stars is an incontestable triumph. But to possess them by the million, to teem with stars which are so many eyes trained upon the world each night as if tracking our dreams, is to wield excessive power, to display a very suspect splendour. Something in this immensity turns and meshes its gears with a regularity so precise as to be disquieting; and exactly for whom — or against whom — this mechanism deploys its flaming wheelworks, we do not know.
So, in this simple look directed at the celestial vault, the Gnostics find themselves confronted with the ultimate nature of reality: what is this matter which is by turns full and empty, dense and tenuous, luminous and dark, of which our sky is made? Is this dark shore, this tenebrous tissue, this interstitial shadow wherein the stars seem pricked like incandescent pores, constituted of matter or of space? Is the 'real' sky nothing but its light, these winking eyes on the ocean of night, or is it at one and the same time that which shines and that which does not, a fire flaming and dark by turns? Do its shores and its black abysses comprise a nothingness, an absence of light, or are they the concrete material which interposes itself between our earth and the distant fires which it obscures?
No doubt this question will seem absurd, or at least premature, in the age of the Gnostics. Nevertheless, it is implicit at the very starting-point of their thought. Since man, in their view, is a fragment of the universe, and since the body of the one and the space of the other proceed from a simple material, both must obey the same laws. Man is a mirror in which one can discover the reduced and condensed image of the sky, a living universe carrying within him, in his body and in his psyche, fires and dark shores, zones of shadow and of light. Are these lights and shadows simply forms split off from a single material, or two materials of opposing nature? All our existence, all our choices as thinking hominids are vitally implicated in this simple question. Thus, the Gnostics searched the splendours and the terrors of the sky to find an answer to our own duality. Never was there asked a more pertinent question and never were the stars scanned so earnestly.
And it seems that what struck these men most forcibly, as they watched throughout the Egyptian nights, is the dark portion of the sky — the vastness, the omnipresence, the heavy opacity of that blackness. It hangs over us like a veil, a wall of shadow encircling the earth, a tenebrous dome through which appear, here and there, through chinks, faults and gaps, the glittering fires of another world. A gigantic black lid seals in our universe and encompasses us with its opacity.
Dark wall, black lid, circle of shadow. And beyond that, in a second circle, the fire of the planets, the stars and all the heavenly bodies. The eye apprehends this other world by means of the luminous dots cut out of the fabric of the darkness in the shape of constellations, the sparkling lace perforating the tissue of the cosmic night. Why did the being — the god or demiurge — who thus perforated the veil of our sky, trace these enigmatic stencilled patterns that echo the familiar shapes of our world? Because, without a doubt, they are the sign of something, the sketch for some plan; they are messages or symbols scattered across the celestial vault. For example, one Gnostic sect, the Peratae (an obscure name meaning Those Who Pass Through), discovered in the constellation of the Serpent or the Dragon the very meaning of the genesis of the cosmos. It is a curious constellation, one of the most vast in the boreal sky, yet one to which little attention is paid. It stretches its sinuous shapes between Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, its tail lost in the direction of Gemini, its triangular head pointed towards the pole star. Its outline lacks the geometric precision of the Bear, the elegance of the Swan (Cygnus), or the severity of the Scorpion (Scorpio). But coiled as it is round the northern pole, as if suckling on the navel of the sky, one can understand why it should quickly become charged with symbolic importance.
The Peratae, who specifically regarded the Serpent as the first Gnostic in the world, the one who possessed primordial knowledge and had tried to communicate it to the first man, in Eden, recognized in this constellation the symbol of the primordial Serpent and his implication in human destiny: 'If a person has eyes that know how to see, he will look upward to the heavens and he will see the beautiful image of the Serpent coiled there, at the place where the great sky begins. Then he will understand that no being in heaven or on earth or in hell was formed without the Serpent.'
And so, these constellations relate the earliest segment of the world's history and are distinct signs, well worth deciphering since each has its terrestial counterpart. Up there, the great Serpent, coiled around the roots of heaven. On earth, the Serpent of Eden, coiled around the roots of the Tree of Knowledge. The sky — like the Biblical myths which the Gnostics often interpreted in the manner of modem mythologists, seeking to read the hidden meaning (today we would say 'unconscious meaning') that underlies their images, symbols and analogies — the sky, then, is the first source of knowledge.
If one wished to apply a contemporary idiom to Gnostic cosmology, one could say that the first circle (the circle of shadow) represents the strictly solar system, and the second (the fire of the planets) the galactic system to which we belong. But beyond the second circle the Gnostics imagined others — varying in number — right up to the ultimate centre which constitutes the source and the root of the entire universe. These intermediary worlds, these circles ranged in echelons up to the navel of the world, are totally invisible to us. It is through intuition, or rather through revelation, through gnosis, that the Gnostic knows of their existence. For, judging by all the evidence, the Gnostics built a pure mental construction — rather strange and refreshing, like the systems of the physicians of the Ionian school in Greece — upon an a priori vision of the universe.
One could say that these other worlds, presaged and divined by Gnostic speculation, in fact represent what modem astronomy calls nebulae, spirals, and extra-galactic clusters. A Gnostic like Basilides calls this world beyond the second circle, beyond the plants and the sphere of fixed stars, 'the hyper-cosmic world'. Therein resides the Supreme Being, the God-Nothingness, guardian of all destiny, all becoming, retainer of all seeds, powers, and potentialities; the purely intelligible fire which held, and still holds, the seeds of everything that fell thereafter into the inferior circles (supralunar and sublunar), and became animate and inanimate matter, forms, incarnations, stones, trees, and flesh. It can be seen that the distances that separate all these worlds from each other are measured in terms of weight. Just as the semen of man, the minute, invisible seed possessing a scarcely measurable weight, acquires size and weight as it develops, so do the primordial seeds, the potentialities of a hyper-cosmic world, acquire weight by falling into the lower world, becoming more and more dense in substance.
It seems, then, that for the Gnostics there exist several states of matter: an igneous, superior state which belongs to the hyperworld, and successive states corresponding to the different circles, graded as the seeds materialize and take on darkness, opacity, gravity. Our own matter, that of the earth, plants, and all living creatures, is in some way the seed of the ethereal particles of the hyper-world, but grown infinitely heavier. Little by little, these particles have fallen down to our level as the result of a primordial drama which comprises the history of our universe, in the same manner that particles of dust and débris are slowly deposited at the bottom of marine abysses to form sediment. All the beings of our world are, in the eyes of the Gnostics, the sediment of a lost heaven.
And from the bottom of this dark sea, man perceives nothing of the luminous surface of the upper world except in ephemeral forms, fleeting reflections, evanescent phantoms which are like those phosphorescent fish that alone illuminate the age-old darkness of the great ocean depths. And our matter, because it is heavy, because it is dark — the darkest and heaviest of all — is also the least dynamic, the most immobile, as fixed and as heavy as atoms reduced to their nuclei. Immobility, the glacial cold of matter and flesh deprived of primal fire and sinking ineluctably towards that absolute zero which is the final stage of material death.
The implications of this image of creation, split into several universes of which the last — ours — is totally separated from the others by a barrier of dense shadow, are obviously profound. Weight, cold, and immobility are at once our condition, our destiny, and our death. To surrender oneself to weight, to increase it in all senses of the term (by absorbing food, or by procreating, weighing the world down with successive births), is to collaborate in this unhappy destiny, to ratify the primordial fall which is the cause of it, to ally oneself with the work of death undertaken by the being or beings who provoked this tragic cleavage. In modem terms, it is hastening the trend towards what we call entropy. Curiously enough, the Gnostics perceived, albeit summarily and imperfectly, the fact that the destiny of the material world tends towards inertia. The task of the Gnostic, therefore, is to climb this fatal slope, in the literal and in the figurative sense, to try to cross the dividing wall, to regain, by a progressive shedding of the alienating weight of his body and his psyche, the higher world from which we should never have fallen. To discard or lighten all the matter of this world, that is the strange end the Gnostics pursued.
I will say but little for the moment of the reasons for this initial split, this radical separation between the worlds, which condemns us to live in the darkest circle, this fall which makes man the prisoner of alienating matter. I will simply state that, at a certain moment in the dawn of time, when seeds were in their earliest awakening and all possibilities virgin, one of the inhabitants of the hyper-world — god, demiurge, angel or aeon (a term which appears frequently in Gnostic cosmology and which signifies an immortal, a living and personalized being) — one of these creatures, through error, pride, or fecklessness, intervened in the unfolding of the world and provoked disturbances, vibrations, and fibrillations of igneous matter which brought about its progressive degradation and its descent towards the lower circles. The world in which we live is not only opaque, heavy, and given over to death, but is above all a world bom of a monumental machination; a world that was not foreseen, not desired, flawed in all its parts; a world in which every thing, every being, is the result of a cosmic misunderstanding. In this whirlpool of errors, this universal shipwreck which is the history of matter and of man, we on earth are rather like survivors condemned to eternal solitude, planetary detainees who are the victims of injustice on a truly cosmic scale. Stars, ether, aeons, planets, earth, life, flesh, inanimate matter, psyche — all are implicated, dragged into this universal disgrace.
Fortunately, the gaps, the perforations which shine in the celestial wall of our prison show that a possible way of escape exists. In the star-studded night, the Gnostic knows that not all contact with the higher circles is irremediably lost, and that perhaps he can conquer his fate, break the ancient curse which made the world a cheat and a sham, and cast us down, far from the sparkle and the blazing illumination of the hyper-world, down to the gloomy circle in which we live, this 'circle of dark fire.'
CHAPTER 2THE DARK FIRE
Injustice governs the universe. All that is made and all that is unmade therein carries the imprint of a corrupt fragility, as if matter were the fruit of an outrage in the womb of nothingness.
EMILE CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
To know our true condition, to realize that we are condemned to live under a fantastic mass of darkness, beneath oceans and successive circles; to know that man, atrophied and infirm, vegetates in submarine lairs like the proteus, that blind eel-like creature that lives in subterranean waters, naked and white (or rather albino, since white is still a colour, after all) ... to know this is the first step in Gnostic thought.
The same piercing look that the Gnostics cast upward to the sky was also turned upon the earth. The earth of Egypt, burned by solar fire, made up of deserts and arid mountains, or, around the Nile, alluvial marshes which harbour a teeming life among a riot of weeds and wild grasses, gave rise, perhaps, to the images they formed of our planet. For this particular earth is moulded out of violent contrasts, implacable struggles between the blinding light of the days and the icy darkness of the nights, as if the elements themselves, throughout the cycles of time, were powerless to do anything but meet in headlong collision.
I remember walking on the outskirts of Alexandria one evening; it was early autumn. The stars were shining with a fantastic clarity. A swirling vapour rose from the ground to mingle with the ambergris-like perfume of the marshes. The crystalline sky, so pure that not a star winked, and the scalding earth, from which life itself seemed to well up and overflow, offered two irreconcilable faces of reality: the mineral austerity of the infinite sky and the confused turbulence compounded of the sweat of the soil, this quivering veil of odours and the stench of putrefying matter.
But the truth is that neither the sky nor the earth, nor its odours, nor even — beyond these primary factors — the confusion of history and the disarray of systems in the age in which the Gnostics lived, can entirely explain this inquisitorial stare brought to bear upon our world. One feels that their vision of man and of the earth was dictated by a global feeling regarding matter itself, a feeling made up of both repulsion and fascination. Not that they were insensible to the beauty of the world or of the sky. A young Alexandrian Gnostic, Epiphanes, who died at the age of seventeen, wrote one of the most arresting pieces imaginable about the earth, the sun, justice and love. But what haunts the Gnostics above all else, when confronted by matter — by its opacity, its density, its compactness, its weight (and they felt this weight, this materiality, in those states that seem most subtle: the trembling of water, the wind of the desert, the shimmering of the stars) — what haunts them is the intolerable awareness that this inhibiting matter is the result of an error, a deviation in cosmic order; that it is nothing but a poor imitation or a caricature of the original matter of the hyperworld. The heaviness, the sluggishness imparted to everything — from the air to a stone, from an insect to a man — is an unbearable constraint, an intolerable curse. And its consequences are multiple. For, added to the weight of matter and of living bodies, there is the inevitable heaviness of the spirit. Our thinking is bound by the same constraints as are our bodies; it collides against the same barriers and is dragged down by the weight of the same contingencies. The majority of Gnostics expressed this dullness of the spirit — inherent in the matter of which we are composed — by a simple and revealing analogy: that of sleep. Sleep is to consciousness what weight is to the body: a state of death, inertia, a petrification of the psychic forces. We sleep. We spend our lives asleep. And only those who are aware of it can hope to break down these walls of mental inertia, to awaken in themselves the spark which, in spite of all, still glows within us, like a tear in the veil of corporeal night.
To awaken, to be alert, to keep vigil, these are the recurring themes in Gnostic texts. If Hermes is one of the favourite gods in their pantheon, it is because he is the personification of The Wide-Awake, the god to whom Homer long ago attributed the power to 'awaken, with his golden wand, the eyes of those who sleep.' Since Hermes was also the god who acted as what is pompously called a 'psychopomp' in ancient mythology (that is to say, one who accompanies souls through the kingdom of the dead, guiding them to the tribunal of the three infernal judges), he became known as the one who keeps his eyes wide open, like a living being, even in the realm of shadows, and who stays awake in the very heart of death. In any case, the names and attributes of those whom the Gnostics elevated to the rank of Initiates do not matter. What does matter is to perceive, over and above the meanderings of mythological or of theoretical systems, the existence and the quest for an asceticism and a specific power: the ability to keep one's eyes open, to refuse sleep, to awaken to a true consciousness of oneself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Gnostics by Jacques Lacarriere, Nina Rootes. Copyright © 1973 Editions Gallimard. Excerpted by permission of Peter Owen Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Lawrence Durrell,Introduction,
The Workings of the World,
1 The Perforated Veil,
2 The Dark Fire,
3 The Stranger,
4 The Body's Bastard Birth,
History, Men, Sects,
5 The Highroads of Samaria,
6 The Masters of Gnosis,
7 Absolute Experience,
8 The Ash and the Stars,
9 The Impossible Mirror,
The Paths of Gnosticism,
10 The World's Wanderers,
11 The Purity of the Mountains,
Towards a New Gnosticism,
Bibliographical Notes,