Dr. Michael Heiser: Gnosticism Lecture (Full) The Gnostics and Their Remains Index. Sacred Texts Gnosticism Buy this Book at Amazon.com Contents Start Reading Page Index Text [Zipped] In the mid-19th century, eighty years before the chance discovery of a treasure trove of Gnostic manuscripts in a dump in Egypt, C.W. King collected what was known about the Gnostics in this book.
At that time there were only three sources of information on Gnosticism: polemics against them by early Christian writers, the Pistis Sophia, and a jumble of confusing images and cryptic inscriptions on Roman-era gems and amulets. In spite of all of the missing jigsaw pieces, King managed to assemble a picture of the Gnostics which is still cited today as authoritative. Rather than one monolithic group, the Gnostics had very diverse beliefs. King seeks links to Gnostic symbols and beliefs far afield, from India, to the Templars, Rosicrucians and Illuminati. --J. Title PagePrefaceContentsIntroduction Part I. Part II. I. Part III. The Agathodæmon WorshipThe Chnuphis SerpentI. Part IV. Part V. Stephan A. Hoeller. Stephan A. Hoeller (November 27, 1931)[1] is an American author and scholar. He was born in Budapest, Hungary into a family of Austro-Hungarian nobility. Exiled from his native country as the result of the communist rule subsequent to World War II, he studied in various academic institutions in Austria, Belgium, and Italy.
In 1952 he immigrated to the United States and has resided in Southern California ever since.[2] Career[edit] An author and scholar of Gnosticism and Jungian psychology, Hoeller is Regionary Bishop of Ecclesia Gnostica, and the senior holder of the English Gnostic transmission in America.[3] During a 2003 interview, he talked about Gnosticism: "I think we could describe it as a very early form of Christianity, very different in many respects from what Christianity became later on. I would say that this appears to be, as far as Gnosticism is concerned, the time that the Greeks called the kairos, the time when the Gods are reborn. Partial bibliography[edit] Notes[edit] SEVEN_ARCHANGELS.pdf.
Terence McKenna - On Gnosticism. The Gnostic World View: A Brief Summary of Gnosticism. Gnosis Archive | Library | Bookstore | Index | Web Lectures | Ecclesia Gnostica | Gnostic Society GNOSTICISM IS THE TEACHING based on Gnosis, the knowledge of transcendence arrived at by way of interior, intuitive means. Although Gnosticism thus rests on personal religious experience, it is a mistake to assume all such experience results in Gnostic recognitions. It is nearer the truth to say that Gnosticism expresses a specific religious experience, an experience that does not lend itself to the language of theology or philosophy, but which is instead closely affinitized to, and expresses itself through, the medium of myth. Indeed, one finds that most Gnostic scriptures take the forms of myths.
The term “myth” should not here be taken to mean “stories that are not true”, but rather, that the truths embodied in these myths are of a different order from the dogmas of theology or the statements of philosophy. The Cosmos All religious traditions acknowledge that the world is imperfect. Deity. The Gnosis Archive: Resources on Gnosticism and Gnostic Tradition. What is Gnosticism? Many visitors have requested some basic introductory material explaining Gnosticism. To meet this need we offer these "places to start": two short articles, The Gnostic World View: A Brief Summary of Gnosticism and What is a Gnostic? ; and an audio lectures (mp3 format) on the Gnostic concept of Christ: The Misunderstood Redeemer. A reading of the Overview of the Gnostic Society Library collection will also give a useful brief introduction to the history and textual legacy of the Gnostic tradition.
For more in-depth reading suggestions visit the Gnostic Society Bookstore—you will find offered there a selection of the best introductory and advanced books on Gnosticism, along with brief reviews of recommended books. And of course just "surfing" The Gnosis Archive will lead to a wealth of information. Meditations Take a moment to reflect on a brief meditation and reading from the Gnostic scriptures, selected from this week's Gnostic liturgy. The Gnostic Society Library. Mandaeism. "Mandaean" redirects here. For the ethnoreligious group, see Mandaeans.
"Mandean" redirects here. For the language family in West Africa, see Mande languages. According to most scholars, Mandaeans migrated from the Southern Levant to Mesopotamia in the first centuries CE, and are of pre-Arab and pre-Islamic origin. They are Semites and speak a dialect of Eastern Aramaic known as Mandaic. Mandaeans appear to have settled in northern Mesopotamia, but the religion has been practised primarily around the lower Karun, Euphrates and Tigris and the rivers that surround the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, part of southern Iraq and Khuzestan Province in Iran.
The Mandaeans have remained separate and intensely private—reports of them and of their religion have come primarily from outsiders, particularly from the Orientalist Julius Heinrich Petermann, Nicolas Siouffi (a Yazidi) and Lady Drower. Origin of name[edit] Other scholars[who?] History[edit] Beliefs[edit] Fundamental tenets[edit] According to E.S. MUNDUS IMAGINALIS. C.G. Jung - The Seven Sermons to the Dead (Septem Sermones ad Mortuos) (Seven Sermons to the Dead) C.G. Jung, 1916 (Translation by H. G. Baynes) Sermo I The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought.
They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching. Harken: I begin with nothingness. This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. CREATURA is not in the pleroma, but in itself. Yet because we are parts of the pleroma, the pleroma is also in us. I speak of it to make a beginning somewhere, and also to free you from the delusion that somewhere, either without or within, there standeth something fixed, or in some way established, from the beginning. What is changeable, however, is creatura.
The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Distinctiveness is creatura. What use, say ye, to speak of it? That said I unto you, to free you from the delusion that we are able to think about the pleroma. What is the harm, ye ask, in not distinguishing oneself? 1. 2. Gnostic Society Library: Sources on Gnosticism and Gnosis. Almost all of the several dozen internet sites with collections of texts similar to our own obtained their material by directly or indirectly copying some files present at the Gnosis Archive.
Ours was perhaps the first major collection of such texts to appear on "the web" in 1994, and thus has served as a source for others creating "their own" collections. Unfortunately transcription errors, typos, and primitive HTML formatting were present in the massive amount of material added to the Gnosis Archive in our first years; in a repeated process of "copying" they have been very widely propagated around the internet.
Over nearly two decades we have made many corrections to these texts. It appears that few of the sites copying material from this collection have taken the time to read, edit and correct the texts! This is of course exactly how the manuscript tradition has propagated errors in the past centuries, though with vastly different technologies of reproduction. Ouroboros. Historical representations[edit] Antiquity[edit] In ancient Egypt, the scarab (or dung beetle) was viewed as a sign of eternal renewal and reemergence of life, a reminder of the life to come. (See also "Atum" and "Ma'at. ") The ancient Mayans and Aztecs also took a cyclical view of time. In ancient Greece, the concept of eternal return was connected with Empedocles, Zeno of Citium, and most notably in Stoicism (see ekpyrosis). Egypt[edit] The first known appearance of the ouroboros motif is in the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, an ancient Egyptian funerary text in KV62, the tomb of Tutankhamun, in the 14th century BC.
Greece[edit] Plato described as the first living thing a self-eating, circular being—the universe as an immortal, mythologically constructed entity. In Gnosticism, a serpent biting its tail symbolized eternity and the soul of the world. Middle Ages[edit] Alchemy[edit] Chemistry[edit] Kekulé's proposal for the structure of benzene (1872) Kundalini Yoga[edit] Other traditions[edit]