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Updated: May 3, 2025
When Gnosticism declined in importance, and its theories faded out of recollection, its peculiar phraseology received of necessity a new interpretation. The doctrine that God could not act directly upon the world sank gradually into oblivion as the Church grew more and more hostile to the Neo-Platonic philosophy.
The first reason why I have ventured on this present enquiry is that Simon Magus is invariably mentioned by the heresiologists as the founder of the first heresy of the commonly-accepted Christian era, and is believed by them to have been the originator of those systems of religio-philosophy and theosophy which are now somewhat inaccurately classed together under the heading of Gnosticism.
There was Simon the Magician, founder of gnosticism, father of every heresy, Messiah to the Jews, Jupiter to the Gentiles an impudent self-made god, who pretended to float in the air, and called his mistress Minerva a deification, parenthetically, which was accepted by Nicholas, his successor, a deacon of the church, who raised her to the eighth heaven as patron saint of lust.
All these doctrines exhibit such close affinities with Babylonian ideas as to warrant the assertion that the religion of Babylonia survives in Gnosticism; and since, as we know, Babylonian culture and customs maintained an undisturbed existence almost to the threshold of our era, there is no need to go back to the older periods of the Babylonian religion to find the connecting link, uniting Gnosticism with the Babylonian religion.
All these cults are far more akin to Gnosticism than mysticism, though they are saved, yet not wholly, from the lawlessness of Gnosticism by a pretty constant return to the outstanding conclusions of science and philosophy. Spinoza's Quest
It would be impossible to translate them into any Eastern language. The Rabbinical disputes with the Jews about justification and election have disappeared; the danger ahead is now from theosophy and the barbarised Platonism which was afterwards matured in Gnosticism.
We must not lose sight of the fact that in addition to the elements they borrowed from Buddhism, Christianity, Gnosticism and Islam, the Mormons introduced into their new Gospel a social ideal inspired by the Communistic experiments of the first half of the nineteenth century.
The enormous spread and popularity of Gnosticism the belief in the efficacy of words and formulas to control spirits and their actions in the centuries immediately after this, shows how ingrained magic ideas were, and how ready to sprout up when the counterbalancing interests of the old mythology were gone, and their place taken by the intangible spirituality of Platonism and the early Christian atmosphere.
And the value of it at the time when it was re-proclaimed to the world was that it was an affirmation in the face of a denial. Where Science began to cry "agnosticism," Theosophy came to cry out "gnosticism."
"But he himself lays down the general maxim, that it is 'good' for a man to continue as he was." "There we come to a question of criticism, what 'good' means: I may think it means 'expedient, and what he says about the 'present distress' confirms it." "My dear Reding," said Carlton, astonished, "you are running into Gnosticism."
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