Pagan truths

GNOSTICISM is a label applied to a collection of religious ideas that has long exerted a certain appeal to public intellectuals and controversialists, ranging from the theologian Marcion in the 2nd century AD to literary critic Harold Bloom in our time. What attracts them, I suppose, is the conviction that the highest truths are available only to a small circle of initiates -- the Greek term gnostokoi can be translated as “those who understand divine matters, knowing what the gods know.”

The latest to unfurl the banner of Gnosticism is John Lamb Lash, who describes the Gnostics of the ancient world as “the elite of Pagan intellectuals” and declares that their writings are “the explosive charge that can blow the institution of the Faith off its foundations, for good and all.” By “the Faith,” he means the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition in its entirety, and he intends to do nothing less than convert his readers into latter-day Gnostics.

Lash, whose publisher describes him as “an exponent of the practice of mythology,” rejects much of the contemporary scholarship on Gnosticism. For example, he dismisses the work of Princeton historian Elaine Pagels, author of “The Gnostic Gospels,” because she places the texts discovered at the Egyptian archeological site of Nag Hammadi within the context of early Christianity. Such an approach, he insists, “has hampered understanding of who the Gnostics were, and why they protest so vehemently against the rise of Christianity.”

Lash seeks to rescue Gnosticism from the dustbin of Christian history and restore it to its rightful place amid the splendors of pagan antiquity. To signal his admiration for the fecund religious imagination of paganism, he capitalizes the word “Pagan” as if it were a single faith rather than a phantasmagorical assortment of beliefs and practices. But he does point out that Gnosticism itself shouldn’t be described as a religion or even a sect, if only because gnostokos was “the generic term for any person learned in divine matters.” Above all, he insists that Gnosticism represents the path toward “spiritual deep ecology,” symbolized by today’s adherents of the Greek earth goddess Gaia.

“Not in His Image” is perhaps best compared to Robert Graves’ “The White Goddess,” an earlier and only slightly less eccentric effort to find and explain the linkages among the fantastic variety of religious experiences in the ancient world. Like Graves, Lash is a self-invented scholar who has read widely and thought deeply. (He is the author of “Quest for the Zodiac,” “The Hero” and “The Seeker’s Handbook,” and the co-founder of metahistory.org with a former wife, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who lived with Timothy Leary in the 1970s. And he is general executor of the estate of Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Jan, to whom he also was once married.) He confidently issues pronouncements about what he calls “the wholesale genocide of Pagan culture” and prescriptions for the spiritual salvation of the world.

Lash offers this work as a corrective to the “scholarly specialization” that condemns the Gnostics to “an obscure and uncertain place on the margins of the history of religion.” Along the way, he seeks to repudiate what he sees as the pigheadedness of the academic establishment. Thus, for example, he condemns biblical scholars who do not see the continuities that Lash detects between the early Christians and the religious community at Qumran. He calls them “Zaddikites,” but they are better known to the lay reader as the custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls: “They fail to realize that the message of love in the charming miracle tales of the New Testament is a sugar coating on the bitter cyanide of Zaddikite ravings.”

But Lash is not concerned merely with scolding biblical scholars. His goal is to melt down the religious and philosophical ideas of antiquity and recast them as a serviceable faith for our world. In place of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, which he links to “the religious schizophrenia of the ancient Hebrews” and which he flatly condemns as “annihilation theology,” he proposes that we embrace Gnosticism and what he dubs “Gaian ethics,” which he describes as “not a call to faith in God, but faith in the human species.”

Lash is capable of explaining the mind-bending concepts of Gnosticism and pagan mystery cults with bracing clarity and startling insight. At moments, however, he slips into a kind of New Age rant as baffling as any mystical text. “What we seek in ‘Gaia theory’ is a live imaginal dimension,” he writes in one such passage, “not a scaffolding of cybernetic general systems cogitation.” Or: “Gnosis, taken as a path of experimental mysticism, and the Sophianic vision, taken as a guiding narrative for co-evolution, can provide the spiritual dimension for deep ecology independently of the three mainstream religions derived from the Abrahamic tradition.”

Even he acknowledges that his book can be “a long haul and a lot to follow” and that his line of reasoning “demands exceptional concentration from the likes of us, many of whom cannot stay in the moment for three minutes at a time.”

Lash’s arguments are often lively and entertaining, even when they aren’t convincing. When he contends that Celtic civilization spread to the far corners of the ancient world -- “An apocryphal legend claims that John the Baptist was a Celt,” he writes, “and Mary Magdalene was Circassian, half Celt, half Jewish” -- he is reduced to citing the film “Lawrence of Arabia” to support the proposition that “Celtic half-breeds survived in the Levant down into the early twentieth century.”

And when he considers what he calls the “sci-fi theology” of the ancient Gnostics, he comes uncomfortably close to affirming that the otherworldly “Archons” of Gnostic myth were authentic extraterrestrials.

“It is worth noting that the first great UFO wave of the twentieth century occurred in the summer and fall of 1947 when Jean Doresse was in Cairo examining the Nag Hammadi Codices, at the very moment the first Dead Sea Scrolls were found,” Lash writes. “This was also the year that the CIA was founded, with the dual intention (according to UFO conspiracy buffs) to co-opt alien technology and cut a deal with the aliens, allowing them to experiment covertly on human subjects.... In fact, a CIA agent named Miles Copeland was dispatched to Damascus to examine and photograph some of the first scroll fragments to be unearthed.”

At one telling moment at the outset of his book, Lash describes how his life was transformed when, in early adolescence, he was reading a copy of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” in the back seat of the family car on the way back from an orthodontist’s appointment in upstate New York. “I swore to finish what Nietzsche had begun,” he declares. “I vowed to think through and live out his critique of Christianity to the end.”

With “Not in His Image,” he keeps that vow. But when Lash invites us to embrace the “high strangeness” of what he calls the “ET/Archon” hypothesis “with the Gnostic theory of alien intrusion” -- “the stranger it gets, the more sense it makes,” he insists -- he passes wholly through the looking glass. *