Gaia vs. The Off-Planet Father

With some reservation, I will respond to the post of Mr Mercurius concerning Christian Gnosticism. To be blunt, I am not inclined to dialogue with anyone who cannot show in some elementary manner that they get what I am talking about in the first place. Otherwise, where is the balance of the exchange? Readers be warned that the post of Mr Mercurius is not a response to my first article on this site. He does not address or reflect on a single point in my argument about the life-destructive impact of off-planet religious paternalism. Instead, he takes the article as the occasion to protest against my disregard for the so-called Christian Mysteries, and to scold me both on my lack of learning and my initiatory failings.

To set the record straight: The statement that “all the Mysteries were dedicated to the Magna Mater, the Great Mother,” is not my claim. It is lifted directly from the writings of the Church fathers who condemned the Pagan Mysteries as heresy and perversion. Hippolytus, I believe, made this true observation in the Refutation of all Heresies. He was of course referring to the Pagan Mysteries, which are non-Christian and pre-Christian, predating redemptive religion by many thousands of years. My book, Not in His Image, is about the Pagan Mysteries, not the so-called Christian Mysteries or Gnostic Christianity. If Mr Mercurius cares to dialogue further with me, he can at least show me (and readers of this site) that he has some basic understanding of what I try to say about indigenous shamanism in Europe, i.e., the visionary and ecstatic path of Pagan nature-worship. Then, if he so wishes, he can proceed to critique or refute my views.

Mr Mercurius may be outraged, as others have been, at my stunning disregard for Christian mysticism, of the self-defining Gnostic variety, or whatever. I have not written about this matter specifically or at length, so far, and I welcome this opportunity to broach my views here – although briefly and inadequately. For his part, Mr Mercurius offers a pretty good synopsis of the Christian Rosicrucian concept of Christos and Sophia, derived from the Valentinian school, so that readers can compare it to my Gaia-oriented makeover of Sethian Gnosticism which is radically non-Christian and anti-Christian in the sense that it rejects the male redeemer myth and the divine messiah/victim who is the dominant idol of the Piscean Age. The options are clear: either humanity is in need of being saved by an embodied male messiah, or it isn’t. What to you think?

I do disregard Christian Gnosticism, but rather in the way a recovering alcoholic of 25 years disregards Johnny Walker. I do not consider it a viable path of spirituality, and I have strong reasons for this objection, based on having followed the path of Christian Gnosticism, both in the visionary and practical sense, for a good part of my life. I do not disregard it lightly, but I do so ruthlessly, and without compromise, as one who has been through it, and outgrown it. To insiders, the esoteric belief-system that Mr Mercurius so helpfully outlines – i.e., the dual redemption by Christos and Sophia – will be recognizable as a Steinerite dogma that asserts the necessity of the male redeemer figure imagined as a human-divine hybrid. Many readers may not be aware that the term “Mystery of Golgotha” originated with Rudolf Steiner (1875 – 1925), the Austrian occultist who founded Anthroposophy after splitting from the Theosophical movement of H. P. Blavatsky. I was involved with Steiner’s work for many years and had a massive library of his books and lectures, including material available exclusively to members of the Anthroposophical Society. Although I was never a card-carrying member, I gave seminars for Society members in L.A., Santa Fe, and at Emerson College in England.

I say “Steinerite dogma” because the assertions made can neither be questioned nor tested, and are considered sovereign truth by members and followers. I would ask Mr Mercurius, on what authority does he base the claim that the Mystery of Golgotha did anything for humanity, or ever happened at all? His own experience? Or Steiner’s testimony? Rudolf Steiner, the latest proponent of the Rosicrucian fantasy of astral-etheric intervention, was a good Catholic boy who, after all is said and done, ended up propounding exactly what he had been told to believe: that the miraculous resurrection of a male redemptive figure changed the fate of humanity. That is a belief, and nothing but. I maintain that it is not a genuine spiritual proposition, but a political ploy disguised in religious jargon. In Not in His Image, I propose that Christianity never offered a salubrious teaching for humanity, and cannot be excused as an esoteric teaching that somehow got distorted or hijacked, for it was a corrupt message from the outset. I base this view on over 40 years of study, critical analysis, and mystical experience. I wonder how long Mr Mercurius has been espousing the Steinerite line.

Of course, I could be wrong. The time I put into getting through the redemption myth that is bringing humanity down could have been misspent, and many years of work do not guarantee a veracious result. It might appear that I am disingenuous, if not ungenerous. Mr Mercurius offers an olive branch, an opportunity to reconcile. If I had done my homework, he says, “both in terms of his academic research of Mystery schools, and in terms of his personal initiation,” then I “would understand what the High Initiates have always known: that Christ the Redeemer, just like the Organic Light of Sophia, is a mystical reality, and the “Great Work” requires the direct revelation of both Aeons in order to constitute the Golden Chain of Hermes Trismegistus—the chain that links Heaven and Earth.” The implication here is clear: Mr Mercurius is a High Inititate, or spokesperson for such, who knows things that I have not fathomed. My book may be demanding in some ways, and surely is, but one thing I have certainly not demanded is to be taken for a spiritual authority on the order of a High Initiate, or to speak for anyone of that presumed status.

And the Organic Light, by the way, is a disclosure unique to my book and other writings on metahistory.org. Mr Mercurius co-opts this precious term without showing either that he knows that I mean by it, or why he objects to my view of it. I don’t know what Organic Light he is talking about, but the one I have seen is not “contaminated with matter, ego, and the dark side of human nature (the “terrible dragon,” the “devil”)”. Could it be that his Christian Gnostic Rosicrucian perspective on the core secret of the Mysteries is the problem of contamination, not anything in the Light itself?

Mr Mercurius asserts that “shamanic Christianity still, to this day, represents Mystery Wisdom at the highest levels.” I would warn readers that shamanism contains the word SHAM. It’s shamming we’re talking here, not genuine indigenous mysticism, not egodeath, rapturous immersion in nature, and direct instruction from the Wisdom Goddess. I am sick to vomit of hearing this word, shaman. (I reached the limit when I read in Carl Ruck’s book The Apples of Apollo that James the Brother of Jesus, the leader of the genocidal Zaddikite cult in Jerusalem, was a shaman.) My argument in Not in His Image is that Christianity is not and never was a genuine spiritual belief-system, and mystical or pseudo-Gnostic variants of the Christian redeemer are no better than the Pope glorified into a transcendental cartoon. I show that Christianity is a sham, however you cut it, and I explain why. It is most definitely not, and never was, the Mystery Wisdom at the highest level. Quite the contrary, it is the main symptom of the corruption of our capacity to reach that Wisdom.

I do not write to please or appease. I totally reject the notion that “an authentic, shamanic Christianity has existed in secret for the past two thousand years,” although I acknowledge how important this notion is to people who are attached to Western esotericism. Mr Mercurius claims that I make a grave error in not seeing that Christian and Pagan Gnosis are two modalities of one supreme truth. But I do not write to reconcile the original Gaian Gnosis with the redemptive ideology whose perverted proponents and ignorant converts destroyed the Mysteries of the goddess Sophia, whom we today call Gaia. I draw the line. You cannot have a male avatar redemption myth and living Sophianic mysticism on the same planet. The Steinerite salvationist myth is no better than any other, even if you tack on it a palimony clause including Sophia as female redemptive agent. The assertion that the Organic Light is in any sense trapped in matter is totally alien to my mystical experience, with or without psychoactive plant teachers, and totally contrary to the spirit of the Pagan Mysteries that celebrated direct, ecstatic access to the Divine in the sensory world.

I accept that some people will embrace so-called Christian Mysteries, as I myself did for many years, but I do not accept objections to my Gaian revision of the Pagan Mysteries except from those who can show they know what I’m talking about before they protest to it. Mr Mercurius is offended by my disregard for a belief-system he holds sacred. Well, I guess I don’t know how to speak the truth I see without offending someone… The messianic delusions of the Piscean Age are far from over “The supreme import of the esoteric Christian Mysteries” is in how they show humanity’s loss of faith in itself and its empathic bond to Gaia-Sophia, the sole redemptive force in our story. I do not write to reconcile or compromise with alternative beliefs about redemption. I write to recover a massacred heritage rooted in the biopsychic genius of our species in the way that paternalistic make-believe such as the Mystery of Golgotha are not, and can never be.

Just for the record: The claim that “the Light of Christ is the means by which the fallen Sophia is redeemed” is an accurate expression of the Valentinian school, the historical source of Christian Gnosticism. I represent the Sethian school of radical Pagan Gnosis that asserted that the course of Sophia’s cosmic adventure relies not on Christ but on “the luminous epinoia,” the power of human imagination. Scholars may argue over these issues all they like, but planetary mysticism is about poetry, not dogma.