More findings that blow me away!

[h1s_l0rdsh1p]

Now, last night, I decided to start my search for the truth by asking about information on Jesus of Nazerath.

To my surprise, someone said I should read up on something that I have heard of once before, but never looked into.

The Gnostic Gospel.
Gnostic Gospels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From this, I had heard that about "one of the most important parts", The Gospel of Thomas.

What was that?

One wikipedia, it states that:

Now, the Gospel of Thomas is not addopted by the Chruch,
And when speaking of it, we find:
In the 4th century, Cyril of Jerusalem mentioned a "Gospel of Thomas" in his Cathechesis V: "Let none read the gospel according to Thomas, for it is the work, not of one of the twelve apostles, but of one of Mani's three wicked disciples."
Very little trace of Manichaean dualism can be detected in this "sayings" Gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, which is agreed to be simpler and less legend-filled than that philosophy.

Keep the bold text in mind for later.

Now, as I was reading it, I decided to look up more upon all of this.
At the bottom of the page, there is a link to a site of "The Gnostic Society Library".

So, I went to this page. Now, as I continued on, they spoke of an even more important book. "The Apocryphon of John".

Now of course, I thought I should read this. And only into the Third and Forth chapter, I was blown away. I will post the text, than point out the very thing that blew me away.
**Note**
The beginning is about John going to a temple and someone asking him where is teacher is, and he telling him that the teach is gone. The man told him how his teacher was a liar. John was filled with doubt and went to be alone in the mountains and desert. Here's what is said that he found, while thinking to himself on the things he had learned.

3 Just th[en, while I was thinking these things, behold the [heavens opened, and] the [whole] crea[tion] below the heaven [was] illumi*nated. And [the world] quaked.

[I] was [afraid and behold] in the light [I] saw [a child stand]ing by me. When I sa[w him, he becam] e like an old person and he shifted hi]s semblance, becoming like a servant. These (semblances) before me were not multiple beings but there was only a (single) [li]keness [having] many forms in the lig[ht]. And the [semblances] appeared through each other, a[nd] the [semblan]ce had three forms.

[He] said to me, "John, Jo[h]n, why do you doubt and why [are you] fearful? Are [you] are a stranger to this likeness?—This is to say, do not faint[hea]rted! I am the one who [dwells with you (pl.)] al*ways. I [am the Father. I am] the Mother. I am the So[n]. I am the one who is undefiled and unpolluted.

[Now I have come to teach] you what exists [and what has come into being an]d what must [come into being so that you will under*stand the] things which are not apparent [and those which are appar*ent, and to teach] you about the [immovable] genera[tion of] the perfe[ct Human.

N]ow [then lift up] your [face so that] you will [receive] the things that [I will teach you] today [and you will tell them to your fellow] spirits who c[ome from the immovable] generation of the perfect Hu*man.

4 And [I asked so that I might [know.

And he said] to me, "[b]The Monad [is a mo]narch[y with]out any*thing existing over it. [It exists as the God] and Father of the [A]ll., the [invisi]ble which dwells above [the All, ...] imperishableness which exi[sts as the] pure light upon which it is not possible for any eye to] gaze.

[It is the] invisible [Spirit], and It is not appropriate [to consider It] to be like the g[o]ds or that It is something similar. For It is more than divine, [without anything] existing over It. For nothing lords [over It].

[. . .] not [...] in an[yth]ing less [... exists in It.

It alone [is eternal] since It does not need [anything.] For It is totally perfect. [It] does not [lack] anything such that [anything] would perfect It, [but] It is [al]ways completely perfect in [light]. It can*not be [limi]ted because there is nothing [before It] to limit It. [It is] inscrut[able because there] is no one who exists before It [to scrutinine It.] [It is im]measurable because there is nothing [which exists before It to measure] It. [It is] in[visible because there is] no one to see [It. It is an eternity existing] eternally. [It is ineffable because] there is no one able to comprehend It in order to sp[eak about It.] It is [un]nameable because [there is no one before It] to name [It.] It is [the immeasurable light,] which is pure, [holy, and unpolluted. It is in]effable [being perfect i]n incorruptibility. (It does) [not] (exist) in per[fection], blessed[ness, or] divini[ty] but It is [far] supe*rior (to these).

It is neither corporeal [nor in]corporeal. [It] is not large or small. [It is not] such that one could [say] that It has quantity or [quality]. For it is not possible for anyone [to know It]. It is not something among [existing things, but It is] far [super]ior—[not] as [being supe*rior] (to others as though It is comparable to them) but as that which belongs to Itself. It does [not partici]pate in the aeons or in time (as a constitutive part of them). For that which participates i[n an aeon] was first prepared (by others). It was [not given a p]ortion in time [because] It does not receive anything [from anoth]er- for [what*ever] It received would be received as a loan. For what exists prior] to anything else is not deficient such that It should receive [from any*thing].

For this one gazes marveling at Itself [alone] in Its light. [...] For It is a vastness. [It possesses the immeasurable [simpli]city. [It is] an aeo[n gi]ving aeon, life giving [life, a ble]ssed one giving blessedness, a knowledge giving understanding, a goo[d one giving] goodness. It is mer[cy giving] mercy and salvation. It is grace giving grac[e—not] such that it possesses it but that It gives.

Now, why did I point out "The Monad is such great detail?
Go to Wikipedia and see what a "Moad is, in old times.

Then, come back and tell me what you've found. ;)
I'm sure YOU TOO will be blown away.

[tejas]

...?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_%28Gnosticism%29

Indeed Gnosticism is very similar to Ickism :D

[whitenight639]

wow......


may refer to: in philosphy:

In Ancient philosophy the term can refer to:
Monad (Epicurus) (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monad_%28Epicurus%29&action=edit), Epicurus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia described "monads" that were the smallest units of matter, much like Democritus's notion of an atom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_%28symbol%29, For many others, including Pythagoras, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, Monad was a term for God or the first being, or the totality of all beings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_%28Gnosticism%29, the most primal aspect of God in Gnosticism.
the concept of "one essence" in the metaphysical and theological theory of Monism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Monadology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, a book of philosophy by Gottfried Leibniz in which monads are a basic unit of perceptual reality
Physical Monadology (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Physical_Monadology&action=edit) by Immanuel Kant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia also dealt with this topic.
In Hermetica - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, (a category of popular Late Antique literature purporting to contain secret wisdom) The Cup or Monad is one of the texts making up the Corpus Hermetica.
In early Biology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, the indivisible life essence, either the cell or nucleus. in mathematics:

Monad (category theory) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, a type of functor in category theory.
Monad (functional programming) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, type constructors that are used in functional programming languages to capture various notions of sequential computation.
A monadic function or operator may be the same as a Unary operation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, or one somehow having to do with either of the previous kinds of monad.
Monadic predicate calculus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is a form of logic based on unary operators. in music:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_%28music%29, a single note, in contradistinction to a dyad, triad, tetrad, and so on. proper names and popular culture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_%28Technocracy%29, the symbol of Technocracy Incorporated and the Technocratic movement of the early 20th century.
Windows PowerShell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, a command line interface for Microsoft Windows code-named "Monad".
xmonad - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, a window manager for the X Window System
John Monad, title character of the television series John from Cincinnati - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[eternal_spirit]

...?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_%28Gnosticism%29

Indeed Gnosticism is very similar to Ickism :D

.........

But more like Satanism I'd say.

Look up spermo gnostics Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and Aleister Crowley's sex magick rituals.

[eternal_spirit]

http://user.cyberlink.ch/~koenig/spermo.htm

[eternal_spirit]

The O.T.O. under Aleister Crowley

After Reuss' death in 1923, Crowley made an entreprise out of the O.T.O.'s secret. There is a surviving plan to promote the "Elixir of Life" (under the name "Amrita", the Magical Medicine) (27*) and to heal patients according to O.T.O. methods, (28*) that is: to heal them with yoga and sexual fluids. (29*) Crowley used the Ordo Templi Orientis (as he used other real or ghostly orders) as a play, a publishing house and found it a suitable instrument to extract the "gold" (be it alchemistical or sexual) from the pockets of his followers. To that purpose he pretended never having had sex out of sheer lust. (30*) It always should have been a "duty", a "prayer to God" (Aiwaz, Baphomet or Sheitan (31*) - there are many more disguises); in consequence a prayer to himself whom he identified with an erected penis.
Crowley's VII* is a treatise about the creative organ's divinity, and from his "Book of Lies" one can interfer that the vital fluid is a vehicle of immortality. The Matter is the original primitive material substance semi-spiritual, immortal and containing in itself the archetypes of all form and possessing the double potency of attracting to itself individual spirits and also particles of gross Matter to form their temporary envelope on this plane (the gnostic Rotten Place).
Crowley's VIIIth degree unveiled to the "pupil" that masturbating on a sigil of a demon or meditating upon the image of a phallus would bring power or communication with a (or one's own) divine being/Super Ego. The IXth degree labelled heterosexual intercourse where the sexual secrets were sucked out of the vagina and when not consumed (when considered holy) put on a sigil to attract this or that demon to fullfill the pertinent wish/order. (32*) In his "Emblems and Mode of Use" (33*) Crowley describes the method of how to smear sperm on a talisman/sigil in order to attract for example money. This paper is so secret that, at one time, its possession was equal with having the IXth degree O.T.O. There was no other proof until only recently: now one possibly needs to go through an examination test to prove "possession"/"knowledge" of the IXth degree O.T.O. (34*)
Crowley played around with different sexmagickal methods. One of the O.T.O.'s secrets is the adoration of the idol Baphomet of the old Templars. While the German splinter-group, the misogynist Fraternitas Saturni definitely tried (and still tries) to incarnate Baphomet in flesh (http://user.cyberlink.ch/%7Ekoenig/fs3.htm), (35*) in the O.T.O.-groups (that emerged after Crowley's death in 1947) the subject is not that clear although incorporated in the Xth degree. Crowley advised selection of a female partner. The magician and his mate "copulate continuously" until impregnation results: a homunculus. (36*) Maybe the ability of the Xth to create a homunculus was realised on the physical level in their privilegue of electing their OHO.
In the XIth degree, the mostly homosexual degree, (40*) one identifies oneself with an ejaculating penis. (41*) The blood (or excrements) from anal intercourse attract the spirits/demons while the sperm keeps them alive. On 31 March 1946 Crowley noted down a dream in his diary: "A most frightful semi-dream (between two normal motions) of giving birth to a foetus per anum. It was a mass of blood & slime. The nastiest Qliphotic experience I can remember!"
Crowley saw no use in the vaginal fluids nor did he think that women are divine, (42*) therefore he could not imagine lesbian sexmagick. He believed that "man is the guardian of the Life of God; woman but a temporary expedient; a shrine indeed for the God, but not the God." ==> Women exist for the use of men. His ideal female: "robust, vigorous, eager, sensible, hot and healthy". That is to say, his interest was in the woman's body and he wanted no spiritual or intellectual participation from her.
Crowley's main tools to achieve illumination remained: spermophagy, coprophagy and algolagnia (http://www.cyberlink.ch/%7Ekoenig/early.htm).

[h1s_l0rdsh1p]

.........

But more like Satanism I'd say.

Look up spermo gnostics Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and Aleister Crowley's sex magick rituals.

But we know that Crowley was under malevolent influence.
Many people that have corrupted these scripts because they want the truth hidden.

[eternal_spirit]

But we know that Crowley was under malevolent influence.
Many people that have corrupted these scripts because they want the truth hidden.

...........

Yes I'm not saying gnostiscism is evil per say. Satanists love to par
ody anything to do with christ and pervert it.

[tejas]

.........

But more like Satanism I'd say.

Look up spermo gnostics Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and Aleister Crowley's sex magick rituals.

Your lumping two different things under one category.

True Gnosticism has nothing to do with satanism.

The original christianity (which is gnosticism) was split into many different philosophies.

[h1s_l0rdsh1p]

...........

Yes I'm not saying gnostiscism is evil per say. Satanists love to par
ody anything to do with christ and pervert it.

Exactly! And that's what happened with the original scriptures of Jesus of Nazareth. When you read the Gospel of Thomas, nobody saw him as "The son of God", but rather an enlighten person. That's all.

But it was perverted. And even in the Gospel of Thomas, you can easily see the perversions.
But, remember. In that see of perversions, lies a small bit of the core truth.

What I'm amazed at though, is no one asked why I put "Manichaean dualism" in bold text. Do you guys REALLY pay attention, or do you just go along half awake? :p

[tejas]

This is really what Gnosticism is about:

http://www.gnosis.org/gnintro.htm

GNOSTICISM IS THE TEACHING based on Gnosis, the knowledge of transcendence arrived at by way of interior, intuitive means.

All religious traditions acknowledge that the world is imperfect. Where they differ is in the explanations which they offer to account for this imperfection and in what they suggest might be done about it. Gnostics have their own -- perhaps quite startling -- view of these matters: they hold that the world is flawed because it was created in a flawed manner.

Like Buddhism, Gnosticism begins with the fundamental recognition that earthly life is filled with suffering. In order to nourish themselves, all forms of life consume each other, thereby visiting pain, fear, and death upon one another (even herbivorous animals live by destroying the life of plants).

In addition, so-called natural catastrophes -- earthquakes, floods, fires, drought, volcanic eruptions -- bring further suffering and death in their wake. Human beings, with their complex physiology and psychology, are aware not only of these painful features of earthly existence. They also suffer from the frequent recognition that they are strangers living in a world that is flawed and absurd.

Many religions advocate that humans are to be blamed for the imperfections of the world. Supporting this view, they interpret the Genesis myth as declaring that transgressions committed by the first human pair brought about a “fall” of creation resulting in the present corrupt state of the world. Gnostics respond that this interpretation of the myth is false.

The blame for the world’s failings lies not with humans, but with the creator. Since -- especially in the monotheistic religions -- the creator is God, this Gnostic position appears blasphemous, and is often viewed with dismay even by non-believers.

Ways of evading the recognition of the flawed creation and its flawed creator have been devised over and over, but none of these arguments have impressed Gnostics. The ancient Greeks, especially the Platonists, advised people to look to the harmony of the universe, so that by venerating its grandeur they might forget their immediate afflictions. But since this harmony still contains the cruel flaws, forlornness and alienation of existence, this advice is considered of little value by Gnostics. Nor is the Eastern idea of Karma regarded by Gnostics as an adequate explanation of creation’s imperfection and suffering. Karma at best can only explain how the chain of suffering and imperfection works. It does not inform us in the first place why such a sorrowful and malign system should exist.

Once the initial shock of the “unusual” or “blasphemous” nature of the Gnostic explanation for suffering and imperfection of the world wears off, one may begin to recognize that it is in fact the most sensible of all explanations. To appreciate it fully, however, a familiarity with the Gnostic conception of the Godhead is required, both in its original essence as the True God and in its debased manifestation as the false or creator God.

In the Gnostic view, there is a true, ultimate and transcendent God, who is beyond all created universes and who never created anything in the sense in which the word “create” is ordinarily understood.

In most Gnostic gospels, the true god is reffered to as the ONE

[snoopsnuffleopagus]

Cordial Felicitations!, His Lordship:

It is well you seek information of this Character, whose Life was so profound, it 'Split Time'.

For Baseline, Benchmark Standards: The Book of Yahweh Thread, Religion Sub-Forum.

There are 'Absolutes' concerning Qualities of this Character. Beware of Qualities that are attributed to Yahshua Messiah, that contradict the Baseline, Benchmark Standards.

Kind Regards: Snoopsnuffleopagus

[tejas]

Exactly! And that's what happened with the original scriptures of Jesus of Nazareth. When you read the Gospel of Thomas, nobody saw him as "The son of God", but rather an enlighten person. That's all.

But it was perverted. And even in the Gospel of Thomas, you can easily see the perversions.
But, remember. In that see of perversions, lies a small bit of the core truth.

What I'm amazed at though, is no one asked why I put "Manichaean dualism" in bold text. Do you guys REALLY pay attention, or do you just go along half awake? :p

Mani was one of the first proponents of gnosticism in the persian area.

Whats your point? :E

[eternal_spirit]

What I'm amazed at though, is no one asked why I put "Manichaean dualism" in bold text. Do you guys REALLY pay attention, or do you just go along half awake? :p
..........

Sorry lol not got a clue what this means. The others on this thread may be of some help.

[h1s_l0rdsh1p]

Manichaeism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Manichaeism (in Modern Persian آیین مانی Āyin e Māni; Chinese: 摩尼教) was one of the major dualistic religions, originating in Sassanid Persia.

Although most of the original writings of the founding prophet Mani (Syriac, ܡܐܢܝ, c. 210–276 A.D.) have been lost, numerous translations and fragmentary texts have survived. At its height, Manichaeism was one of the most widespread religions in the world, with Manichaean churches and scriptures being found as far east as China, and as far west as the Roman empire. Although its last organized form appears to have died out before the 16th century in southern China, a modern revival has been attempted under the name of Neo-Manichaeism.

The original six sacred books of Manichaeism, composed in Syriac Aramaic, were soon translated into other languages to aid in the spread of the religion. As they spread to the east, the writings of the religion passed through Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, and ultimately Uyghur Turkish and Chinese translations. As they spread to the west, they were translated into Greek, Coptic, and Latin. The spread and success of Manichaeism was seen as a threat to other religions, and it was widely persecuted by Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and later, Islam.

Basically, this religion mixes middle-eastern, and eastern religions together.

Read up on it, it's interesting. ;)

[sunyatta60]

Basically, this religion mixes middle-eastern, and eastern religions together.

The Gospel of Thomas is a little dated for a more up to date information read The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard you will be surprised and you will I am sure enjoy it.

http://del.icio.us/gb_grr/system:filetype:mp3?page=2

[kblood]

Now, why did I point out "The Monad is such great detail?
Go to Wikipedia and see what a "Moad is, in old times.

Then, come back and tell me what you've found. ;)
I'm sure YOU TOO will be blown away.

Makes me think about monatomic gold.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=w5peRJvcJf8
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VGi_87s2kVQ

I am not sure, but does sound like that it might be connected in some way.

[cheeb]

Gospel Of Thomas,
As recorded by Didymus Judas Thomas(The Twin)

Chapter 13:
Jesus said to his disciples:
"Compare me to something, and tell me what I am like"

Simon Peter said to him
"You are like a just messenger"
Thomas said to him
"Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like"
Jesus said
"I am not your teacher,
because you have drunk,
you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that i have tended"

And he took him,and withdrew,
And spoke three sayings to him.

When Thomas came back to his friends, they asked him:

"What did Jesus say to you???"

Thomas said to them:

"If I tell you one of his sayings he spoke to me,
You will pick up rocks and stone me,
And fire will come from the rocks, and devour you"

I wonder what Jesus said to Thomas?
Must have been something Mindblowing!!!

Or maybe he said, "Thomas lend us a couple of sheckels,
I'm gagging fer a pint!!!"

:eek:

[thetonic]

Makes me think about monatomic gold.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=w5peRJvcJf8
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VGi_87s2kVQ

I am not sure, but does sound like that it might be connected in some way.


For real , what is Gardner on about this powder for whats the deal?, I always wanted to try it .. Has anyone had any? You better be super smart if you have!

[strider]

Can we not move this to the religious section... I'm bored of what Thomas might have said to someone already..

[anoninnyc]

my problem with gnosticism is that it just delays the real issue of evil.

so the creator of the universe created the world with the flaw of evil but there is some all good god that is even greater than the creator god. so why did this all good god allow for the creator god to create evil in the first place?

[cheeb]

my problem with gnosticism is that it just delays the real issue of evil.

so the creator of the universe created the world with the flaw of evil but there is some all good god that is even greater than the creator god. so why did this all good god allow for the creator god to create evil in the first place?

Perhaps:
We as people/animals/plants etc....
Are the universe experiencing itself,
In the form of flesh and blood,

The universe is learning about itself,
As are We!!!

[foreverspirit]

Gnostics or Illuminati?

The Origins of the Gnostic Movement


One the most daunting problems posed by the Gnostic Coptic materials is the question of origins. Who wrote these documents, and where did the authors came from? It is exasperating to delve into this material with no concrete idea of its human origin in cultural, historical, or geographic terms. Even assuming that the Egyptian codices are translations of “original writings” by Gnostics who belonged to cults scattered around Egypt and the Near East, we are left in bafflement as to where the Gnostic movement originated in the first place.

A Tangled Tale

The Nag Hammadi treatises are late scribal handiwork, poorly and erratically executed. They were copied down and translated — not written — by Coptic scribes using an improvised language. The desert monks who may have understood precious little of what they were translating. We do not know anything about the condition of the Greek texts they used, or why they were charged to make these translations. This being so, my educated guess is probably as good as anyone’s: I’d say the “originals” were rough notes taken by students in the Mystery Schools, or what remained of them. The notes may have been translated into Coptic — in my opinion, a form of scribal shorthand or stenography, rather than a genuine language — as a writing exercise for the scribes, rather than to faithfully preserve the materials. This is hard to imagine, perhaps, and painful to admit. But the awful fact is, these precious documents are appallingly shoddy, flawed, and incoherent.

We know where the Nag Hammadi codices were hidden, but not who put them there, or why. (On my notion that they may have been connected with the temple of Hathor at Dendera, a stone's throw from Hag Hammadi, see When the Mysteries Died.) We have no idea where the originals may have been written and stored, but the Royal Library of Alexandria is one possibility. There is some artifactual and architectural evidence that Gnostic sects were established around the Mediterranean basin, including Palestine, close to the Dead Sea encampment of the Zaddikim. The "originals" could have originated in hundreds of places.

Beyond the question of textual origins for surviving Gnostic documents looms the larger question of the origins of the Gnostics themselves? Scholars today ignore this problem as insoluble, and unworthy of their time. Their only take interest in the Coptic materials as they reveal something about the origins of Christianity, not Gnosticism. No serious scholar considers the content of Gnostic teachings and Mystery School instruction as such to be worthy of discussion. This disregarding attitude extends to the cultural, historical, and geographical origins of the Gnostic movement.

It was not always so, however. A hundred years ago, half a century before the Nag Hammadi find, scholars working on the Berlin, Askew and Ahkmin codices, and the paraphrases of Gnostic teaching found in the polemics of the Church Fathers (that is, the dossier of the prosecution), took a deep interest in the pre-Christian origins of the movement. When Doresse published The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics in 1958, there was still some debate over where the Gnostic movement originated. Amazingly, Doresse, a Catholic archeologist who was overtly hostile to the Gnostics, was the only post-Nag Hammadi scholar to cite what the Gnostics themselves had to say about the sources of their movement.

And thereby hangs a long and tangled tale.

The tale leads from Ephesus eastward past Hattusash, cold citadel of of the Hittites, and deep into Asia Minor: first to Harran, the bustling crossroads where Abraham arrived on the last leg of his exile from Ur in the Chaldees, then on to Ctesiphon, fabled for the soft heaps of amber in its marketplace, and into Parthia, home of the greatest archers in the world, past the scattered encampments of the Sabaeans, star-gazers who read in mystic trance the secrets of the thirteen heavenly Aeons, then deeper into Asia, beyond Nineveh, rich in courtesans, and beyond Hecbatana, smoke-filled city of a hundred gates, turning north toward the rugged Elbruz Mountains, and mounting to the high plain before Mount Hermon, the White Mountain of Seir, not far from the glittering, gunmetal blue of the Caspian Sea.

In plain English it leads to Azerbaijan, on the border of northwestern Iran. There, bounded to the north by the Araxes River, a high plateau fed by Lake Urmia marks the geographic matrix of the Gnostic movement. Doresse wrote: “There we find legends anterior to Gnosticism — those, for instance, which attributed a sacred character to Mount Hermon, the supposed residence of the Children of Seth at the beginning of human existence (p. 255).

Once the homeland of the Gnostic movement is located geographically (black diamond, upper center of map), a remarkable fact comes to light: the Urmian Plateau was the hidden navel of ancient cultures in Mesopotamia, aligned to the Fertile Crescent and symmetrically uniting the Near and Far East with the Mediterranean. See enlarged view of map for more details.

Star Wisdom

“Children of Seth” is the legendary name that Gnostics assigned to a sacred lineage of phosters, or revealers. The name Seth occurs in the Bible, in Genesis 4:25: “And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son, and called his name Seth. For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Adam slew.” Significantly, this is the only time it occurs. Seth belongs to “another seed,” a lineage set apart from the Judeo-Christian narrative of “sacred history.” From the inception of their story, Gnostics are situated outside the conventional narrative of Western spiritual life.

By the Sethians' own account, a tradition of secret knowledge concerning divine matters was transmitted from remote times by a succession of men and women who had mastered the illuminist method, Gnosis. The Revealers were an elite corps operating within a unique cultural and spiritual complex that emerged in prehistoric Iran: the Magian Order (MAY-gee-un). German scholars such as Gustav Widengren, Richard Reitzenstein, and M. H. Schraeder, who are largely ignored today, delved deeply into the prehistoric roots of Iranian religion known as Zurvan. This is the germ of the doctrine of cosmic duality attributed to the Persian prophet, Zoroaster, and spread throughout the world by the members of his religious order, the Magi. Reitzenstein in particular intuited that Gnostic ideas were influenced by Persian duality, or Zurvanism, but he was unable to work out how. No one since his time has done any better. The investigation is complicated by the remoteness of Iranian religion, dating to the 6th millennium BCE.

Persian duality is the great enigma in the history of religions. So far no scholar in the world, not even Mircea Eliade, has cracked the Zoroastrian nut.


Zarathustra is said to have been older than Plato by 6,000 years. He learned universal wisdom from the Good Spirit, that is the excellent understanding. His name translated into Greek, Astrothutes, means “star-worshipper" (Plato Prehistorian, p. 211).

In his elegant little book on the Gnostics, Jacques Lacarriere asserts that Gnosis was a path of illumination based upon ancient star-wisdom. The Jewish historian Josephus says that the Children of Seth were widely revered as celestial seers who “discovered the sciences of the heavenly bodies and their patterns” (Antiquities, I.68-72). All through the Near East and into Europa, the astronomer-priests of the Magian Order was known in late times as "Chaldeans," a rather misleading nickname. This term is a derivation of the Sumerian Kasdim, related to the Hebrew Chesed (a sepiroth of the Tree of Life) and Chassidim, "the pious," an ultra-conservative sect linked to the Zaddikim. The tendency of Biblical editing is to conflate Chaldean motifs with the Magian Order, conferring legitimacy on the patriarchs by way of association. Abraham's father, Terah, was a priest of the temple of the lunar god, Sin, in the city of Ur. There is a great deal of astro-mythological lore encoded in the Old Testament — evidence of Magian and Sethian influences. And, of course, the Magi figure vividly in the New Testament fable of the birth of the savior.

A scribal note written on the margin of Alciabides I, a work attributed to Plato, attests to the legend that Zoroaster lived in the 7th millenium BCE. Several other classical sources, including Aristotle, Pliny, and Plutarch, also tell us that “the Magian,” lived 6,000 years before the death of Plato. In her extraordinary and little-known book, Plato Prehistorian, Mary Settegast situates the rise of the Magian Order, the original priesthood of ancient Iranian religion, in the Age of the Twins, around 5500 BCE, a date supported by the Greek sources. Settegast refers here to Zodiacal timing based on the precession of the equinoxes.

The Age of the Twins, or Geminian Age, lasted from 6200 to 4300 BCE. The motif of duality associated with the constellation of the Twins is consistent with the central theme of Iranian religion, absolute cosmic duality, Good versus Evil. But this type of duality is not what we find in Gnostic teachings. In Not in His Image, I distinguish single-source duality from two-source duality (the two-source hologram of Philip K. Dick). The latter is typical of Gnostic writings. In the Sophia mythos, there is no internal split in the Godhead (the Pleroma), but there is an anomalous projection from it, setting up a two-world scenario.

Most historians do not use Zodiacal timing to frame historical and pre-historical research, but Settegast does so outstandingly. Indologist and mythologist Alain Danielou and cultural historian William Irwin Thompson also adopt this technique. I myself have applied it extensively for over thirty years.

Reader take note: Plotting events by precession does not require adopting the belief that the stars affect human affairs. A Zodiacal Age is framing device, comparable to a geological age (Pleistocene), an historical period (Bronze Age), or a cultural epoch (Tang Dynasty). The framework of the Ages is an heuristic tool, not an astrological con.

Precession became legitimate in academic research in 1969, due to the publication of Hamlet’s Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Herta von Dechend, but the book does not systematically apply precession to analysis of historical events.

Settegast uses precession deftly to coordinate ancient testimony on the Magian Order with archeological research, on the one hand, and historical-religious analysis, on the other.In my own researches with the master tool of precession, the Dendera Zodiac, I have found that Zodiacal Ages correlate to known historical and archeological evidents with impressive consistency, and often in astonishing detail. Axis C of the Dendera Zodiac, dated to 5,600 BCE, marks the Age of the Twins. A white marble figure of the "double goddess" from Catal Huyuk VI (pictured here, from Mellaart, The Archeology of Ancient Turkey, p. 21) clearly present the Twins motif. At Catal Huyuk archeologists have found twelve successive layers of building, representing distinct stages of the city and reflecting different eras of its history. The top layers of the mound, containing the most recent buildings, are dated at 5,600 BCE, the date of Axis C and the double goddess relic. I could offer dozens of similar examples....

Hidden Navel

Astronomer priests of the Magian Order and other skywatching seers from Hibernia to the Indus Valley would have used precessional timing to track the course of human experience over the long term. The Magi brought this method down from the Urmian Plateau and spread it throughout the Fertile Crescent. At Eridu (Ur in the Chaldees), directly south from the hidden navel of the Gnostic movement, precessional timing would have been imparted to the first Sumerian theocrats. But once it was turned over to state-supported priests and social controllers of the early Near Eastern theocracies, precession lost its value as a tool for educational planning and guidance. The telestai consecrated to guiding humanity fell into conflict with other Magians whose aims were political. The eventual split in the Magian Order devolved upon such arcane matters.

The period when the Gnostic movement emerged in prehistory is identified archeologically by the Hajii Firuz culture (5500 – 5000 BCE) of northwestern Iran and Turkmenia. It is centered on the Urmia basin, exactly where Gnostics located their spiritual hearth. The culture is named after an excavated site at the southern end of Lake Urmia, due east of Lake Van in Armenia. Over Lake Van looms Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark is said to have come to rest. Over Lake Urmia looms Mount Kuh-I-Khwaga, the “White Mountain of Seir” held sacred by Gnostics down into a period some five or six thousand years after their tradition was founded there. (Map detail from Mary Settegast, Plato Prehistorian. Radius of circle, about 165 miles.)

A legend hinted in Coptic codices says that the Revealer lineage began at the Mountain of Seir with one illumined couple, Seth and his consort, Norea. Mandaeans of the Iraq marshes, whose beliefs show many similarities to Gnosticism, recount a parallel legend of a founding couple, Anosh-Uthra and Yohanna, who established their base at the White Mountain. Seir is an Indo-Iranian root, cognate with Syr and Shri, “holy, hallowed, sacred.” Urmia derives from the ancient Persian word for water. Lake Urmia is an UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

According to an ancient legend that survives locally to this day, the lakeside city of Urmia was the birthplace of Zoroaster.

“A very old Magian center was located at Lake Urmia,” Settegast writes (p. 215). Some traces of this early settlement survive on the ground. Excavations at Hajii Firuz have produced rich archeological evidence, including a fired ceramic dish from the Halafian culture of Palestine, contemporary with it — i.e., the dish was brought to Urmia from Palestine. The décor shows the sixteen petal motif, the signature of the Mystery cells. (Settegast, plate 121a.) It is likely that the organization of the Mystery cults in the Near East, as well as the technique and teaching they transmitted, derive from the remote Iranian matrix.

The Magian Order spread from the Urmia basin in all directions: northward into the Caucasus mountains, southward into Iraq, eastward toward India, and westward into Asia Minor and Europe. But as dissemination proceeded, the Order gradually split into two distinct branches, Gnostics and Illuminati, as we might now call them. Each branch operated on different motives and methods.

Masters of Learning

Iraniologists have found the problem of the Magi to be one of the most compelling, as well as one of the most difficult, in the history of the ancient world (Settegast, p. 215).

Within the Order, Gnostics were given the title of vaedemna, “seer, wise one,” as distinguished from the priest, the zoatar, who officiated openly in society and advised Middle Eastern theocrats on matters of statecraft and social morality, not to mention agricultural planning — for Zoroaster was by all accounts responsible for the introduction of planned, large-scale agriculture.

Iraniologists consider the problem of the Magi to be one of the most compelling, as well as one of the most difficult, in the history of the ancient world.

The Parsi word zoatar is the origin of the Greek word soter, “savior.” Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition presents various permutations of the soter or redeemer figure. Redemptive religion, based on a superhuman agent who implements the will of the paternal deity, is termed soteriological. In Hebrew religion, this agent is the messiah, conceived either as a human person, the King of the Jews, or a superhuman entity such as Melchizedek (Zaddikim cult). In Christianity, it is Jesus as the incarnation of Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, following the hybrid theology of Saint Paul. In Islam, the redeemer figure is plural, assuming the form of various Imams and hidden masters. The Sunni-Shi'ite conflict is about the succession of Imans after Mohammed. In all cases the soter is a patriarchal figure, the central authority in a theocratic cult whose ultimate aim, make no mistake, is to dominate the entire world by imposing a social-spiritual order based on the dictates of an off-planet father god who speaks exclusively to white male demagogues (WMDs).

Persian soteriology is the origin of the One World Order shared today by neocon schemers and New Age fantatists alike Over centuries, it produced the master plan of the Magians who went into social engineering, "the Illuminati," by contrast to the telestai or Gnostics who restricted their work to educational and spiritual guidance. In the Coptic codices soter occurs frequently to designate the Gnostic master or teacher. But another term, phoster, is closer to the meaning of vaedemna, a wise or illuminated person (cognates: veda, vidya, wisdom, wit). Lest the reader despair, believing that I am unduly quibbling over terms, I must point out that a huge problem for humanity hinges on the difference between a seer and a priest, especially a state-sponsored priest. Mary Settegast astutely notes that Iraniologists “hold conflicting views regarding the historical milieu of the prophet.” The crucial problem is this:

At one extreme Zarathustra has been described as a primitive ecstatic, a kind of ‘shaman,’; at the other, as a worldly familiar of Chorasmian kings and court politics (p. 215 ff).

Here is that distinction that has baffled all scholars: between the shaman-seer and the sacerdotal priest who plays a hand in court politics. For the latter, agriculture was part of a sacred vocation. Since the cultivation of the earth was central to Zoroaster’s message, “missionary priests would presumably have been as well-versed in agricultural technique as in religious dogma… Irrigation, fertilization, cattle breeding, would have been part of a missionary’s wisdom” (p. 220). Does this sound creepily familiar? In the mission of the Zoroastrian Magi who took control of social organization under the theocratic paradigm, we have the ancient model of invasive colonialism and all it entails, a model still in operation today.

Now consider the nother side to the story. According to scholarly opinion today and popular tradition in ancient times, the Magi were regarded, not as missionaries with a state agenda to execute, but “dedicated servants of the Gods” and “masters of learning, credited with initiating the ‘cosmological sciences,’ the study of not only the heavens, but the elements and kingdoms of earth” (p. 215ff). Who are we describing here? Missionaries or visionaries? Enlightened emissaries of high culture or self-seeking colonialists?

Guides and Leaders

Within the limits of the present (long) article, I can do no more than introduce the issue of the Magi, “one of the most compelling, as well as one of the most difficult, in the history of the ancient world,” as Mary Settegast observes. This is not just a problem for scholars, however, it is a matter that concerns the very fate of humanity. It determines the way we view human potential and how we frame moral and ethical criteria by which society is guided. This long and tangled tale from northwestern Iran brings us to the core issue of human social experience: how we define what is evil, what works against life.

To summarize: Gnostics came from the Magian Order, but, in some crucial way, they were at odds with it as well. The Gnostic movement identified by scholars through the Coptic writings from Nag Hammadi and elsewhere was a spin-off from the Magian Order, even a sort of defection. The conflict within the Order was due mainly to two factors, one ideological and the other practical. Ideologically, Gnostic seers rejected the conflictual dualism of the Zurvan priesthood. Reitzenstein and others who placed the origins of Gnosticism in Iranian duality did not have enough source material to recognize that Gnostic dualism is a two-world system, not a split-source system. By split source, I mean that good and evil come from the same source. Gnostics rigorously denied this view. This is, however, the central Zoroastrian doctrine, inherited by an extremist sect of Palestine, the Zaddikim of the Dead Sea, and absorbed into Christianity like a lethal virus.

Today, delivering the State of the Union address, the American president relies heavily on the rhetoric of split-source dualism. We the good guys, them the bad guys. Gnostics considered that the problem facing humanity was not evil, but error. Absolute opposition of good and evil was an erroneous concept, and completely alien to their worldview. Gnostic ideas are wonderfully finessed, and their teachings are most finely nuanced when it comes to the problems of error and human responsibility. One finds none of this sophistication in the rigid, conflictual dualism of Zoroaster.

On the second matter, the practical aspect, the “primitive ecstatic, or shaman” would and could not act as a political animal. Shamans are intermediaries between society and the Otherworld, the Unknown. The vaedemna does not enter into the politics of social control, not even to proffer advice, because he or she is consumed with other priorities. For Gnostic seers, the priorities were to maintain the lineage of the Revealers, preserve the sacred method of instruction by the Divine Light, and teach and transmit what they knew to the world at large. They were consecrated to a sacred aim, a telos, that embraced two dimensions: the art of guidance and the work of culture-making. They did guide others, but they did not manipulate them in the way the zaotar or state-priest did. They guided individuals by mystic instruction and the example of character. In short, they maintained a rigorous boundary between their consecrated aim, to teach, and the political ambition to lead. The best guides are not leaders. The best guides are like spies, who do not like to be followed.

As Dylan sang long ago, "Don't follow leaders, watch ya parkin' meters."

Know-It-Alls

In his definitive study, “The History of the Term 'Gnostikos' ”, religious historian Morton Smith wrote that “gnostikos was not a common word.” He notes that respected initiates such as the Pagan emperor Marcus Aurelius did not use it. Neither was it common in Greek-language Judaism. It seems to have been used for the first time by Plato! In the Politicus 258e-267a, Plato refers to gnostike techne, “the art of knowing,” or perhaps “the art of managing things known,” in order to argue that “the ideal politician is defined as the master of the gnostic art” (italics mine). Plato asserts that “if such a being were to appear he would be a god come down to rule mankind.”

Well, there it is, as plain as day: Plato plays the deification card. His notion of a gnostikos is an expert advisor in theocratic government. i.e., rulership by the gods or those descended from gods. Buyt how can this be. It is known that Plato was initiated at Eleusis. If he had intimate contact with telestai, how could he have embraced and endorsed the program of the Illuminati, the Magians who run the theocratic agenda?

I would suggest that the answer lies in well-known analogy of Plato's Cave. According to this metaphor, objects in the sensory world are mere shadows cast by the Eidos, the divine Forms in the supersensory realm. But the Organic Light casts no shadow. I conclude that Plato, though initiated, never witnessed the Organic Light, the secret medium of Mystery instruction. Had he done so, he would never have invented the analogy of the Cave.

A fragment of Plato's manifesto of Illuminati statecraft, The Republic, is found translated into Coptic at Nag Hammadi (Codex VI, 5). This is the oldest text in the NHL, dating to almost 700 years earlier than the other documents. Yet no scholar has remarked on the highly unusual fact of its inclusion into the corpus. I have pointed out before that the guardians of the Mysteries did not call themselves gnostikoi, but telestai, "those who are aimed." It is known that gnostokoi was the term directed at them in ridicule by the Church Fathers: "smart-ass, know-it-all." I maintain that the telestai renounced this name because it was associated (via Plato) with the social engineers and special advisors of theocracy.

It is significant that the sole instance of a Gnostic sect known to have called themselves gnostokoi was a group of Carpocratians led by a woman named Marcellina. The Carpocratians tended to embrace the Hindu doctrine of avataric descent, i.e., flesh-and-blood embodiment of superhuman beings — an element of the theocratic scenario. The group led by Marcellina "had pictures and statues of many great teachers who were held in honor by their school, such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, and also a portrait of Jesus," according to the report of Origen (G. R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, p. 232ff). The cult of personality was totally incompatible with the mission and demeanor of the telestai. They would never have tolerated such statues, but glorification of "great men" is typical of the theocratic agenda.

The telestai maintained anonymity within their role as mystics and guardians of the Mysteries, although as teachers working openly in society, they of course had names and social identities. In other words, they did not parade their connection to the Mysteries for social standing or prestige. The names ascribed to Gnostics and initiates were actually titles rather than proper names: Asklepios (Aesculapius), for instance. The names of very few Gnostics - Simon Magus, Valentinus, Basilides, Hypatia - have come down to us.
" The kindly old gentleman with the wise and benevolent snake" is an archetype or icon of a telestes, not a real-life portrait. "Statues of Christ have sometimes owed something to statues of Asklepios. The consort of the physician was Health (Hygeia)... As for the snake, he is the most important person in the sanctuary." (Statue from Epidauros, Roman period. Atlas of the Greek World, p. 162)


Today we use the insult "Gnostic" to characterize the ancient movement whose members opposed, not only their own self-glorification, but the theocratic program of great men and male leaders established and enforced by the politically oriented Magians.

Conclusion

Theocracy, the prototype of patriarchal rule, is the trump card of the victim-perpetrator game, as I explain at length in Not in His Image. If the tyrant who afflicts and rewards his people can convince them he is appointed to do so by god, or that he himself is a god, then divine authority rules the day (as Constantine, the faux convert, understood so well). But theocracy, and the entire dominator complex it focalizes, was totally alien to the telestic mission to teach, enlighten, guide, enrich — in short, to encourage and cultivate human potential. The will to control and manipulate human potential can never be reconciled with such a mission. This is why the original Gnostics, adepts of shamanic ecstasy who taught from instruction by the Light, defected from the Magian Order. The Order around in the Urmian Plato in the Age of the Twins, around 6000 BCE. The split devolved after 4400 BCE, when the vernal point was shifting from the Bull into the Ram.

The Age of the Ram (c. 2000 - 120 BCE) is the era of Abraham and the rise of patriarchy, including the Roman Empire. Alexander the Great ruled the ancient world when the spring equinox was located in the head-stars of the Ram, known as Amun to the Egyptians. Consequently, Alexander had himself pictured on coins with the horns of Amun, and he staged an initiation at the Amun sanctuary of Siwa with the purpose of having himself elevated to a god-like status (yet another example of historical and artifactual verification of precessional timing). All this is totally consistent with the advancement of theocratic agenda in the Arien Age.

From their ancestral ground in the northwestern Iran, Gnostics would have been able to observe developments in the Fertile Crescent, including the rise of mass-scale agriculture and urbanization. Their status as nomadic sages, the famous “Chaldeans” of antiquity, would have given them every advantage to observe three momentous developments: the shift from the sacrificial king (primary scapegoating, the pharmakon method), to the sacred king (modified rite, requiring the hieros gamos, sacred mating with the Goddess, to assure the human worthiness of the king ), to the redeemer king (men anointing men, and to hell with sacred mating). They could not have closely analyzed this progression, not detected the pathological violence driven by redemptive beliefs as deeply as we can, however. At least, I don’t think so. The sheer force of it may even have taken them by surprise, not to mention the insidiousness of Illuminati techniques, perverting the regenerative rites of the Mysteries....



View of Lake Urmia with salt crystals and island
(Photo by Ehsan Mahdiyan)

We are at the other end of the long drama that began by the shore of Lake Urmia, with 2000 years worth of hindsight on the Illuminati program and what the message of divine love packaged in the redeemer complex can do to life on a small, lonely planet.

http://www.metahistory.org/GnosticOrigins.php
jll: OCT 2006 Flanders:cool:

[h1s_l0rdsh1p]

Nice post.

However, I was check out her website, and something kinda got to me about her.

[woghd]

I'd just like to say that I've read every post in this thread, and found it all quite intriguing, and it's threads like this that make it all worthwhile.

Archangel

[h1s_l0rdsh1p]

I'd just like to say that I've read every post in this thread, and found it all quite intriguing, and it's threads like this that make it all worthwhile.

Archangel

I'm glad you like it. But remember, not everything should be told to you.

It's like a Guru said once to someone who asked to be told what enlightenment is:

"I can tell you, but you may not accept it"
Meaning, he can tell him the truth of everything, but if he did so, the person would never truely feel enlightened. In order to take it's effect, it must be, not just learned by striffing to find it, but through realization of it.

[lifeofbrian]

Cordial Felicitations!, His Lordship:

It is well you seek information of this Character, whose Life was so profound, it 'Split Time'.

For Baseline, Benchmark Standards: The Book of Yahweh Thread, Religion Sub-Forum.

There are 'Absolutes' concerning Qualities of this Character. Beware of Qualities that are attributed to Yahshua Messiah, that contradict the Baseline, Benchmark Standards.

Kind Regards: Snoopsnuffleopagus

Mr Snoop, my hat off to You.

He indeed 'split time'.

[tejas]

my problem with gnosticism is that it just delays the real issue of evil.

so the creator of the universe created the world with the flaw of evil but there is some all good god that is even greater than the creator god. so why did this all good god allow for the creator god to create evil in the first place?

Because the true God isn't a creator per se. It is rather the fundamental being of all that is, the source.

Being what it is, 'things' exist from it, or things create themselves from it, not the other way around.

One of the Gnostic myths suggests that souls were not created, but that they created themselves from the source.

Cool eh :D

[tejas]

Gnostics or Illuminati?

The Origins of the Gnostic Movement


One the most daunting problems posed by the Gnostic Coptic materials is the question of origins. Who wrote these documents, and where did the authors came from? It is exasperating to delve into this material with no concrete idea of its human origin in cultural, historical, or geographic terms. Even assuming that the Egyptian codices are translations of “original writings” by Gnostics who belonged to cults scattered around Egypt and the Near East, we are left in bafflement as to where the Gnostic movement originated in the first place.

A Tangled Tale

The Nag Hammadi treatises are late scribal handiwork, poorly and erratically executed. They were copied down and translated — not written — by Coptic scribes using an improvised language. The desert monks who may have understood precious little of what they were translating. We do not know anything about the condition of the Greek texts they used, or why they were charged to make these translations. This being so, my educated guess is probably as good as anyone’s: I’d say the “originals” were rough notes taken by students in the Mystery Schools, or what remained of them. The notes may have been translated into Coptic — in my opinion, a form of scribal shorthand or stenography, rather than a genuine language — as a writing exercise for the scribes, rather than to faithfully preserve the materials. This is hard to imagine, perhaps, and painful to admit. But the awful fact is, these precious documents are appallingly shoddy, flawed, and incoherent.

We know where the Nag Hammadi codices were hidden, but not who put them there, or why. (On my notion that they may have been connected with the temple of Hathor at Dendera, a stone's throw from Hag Hammadi, see When the Mysteries Died.) We have no idea where the originals may have been written and stored, but the Royal Library of Alexandria is one possibility. There is some artifactual and architectural evidence that Gnostic sects were established around the Mediterranean basin, including Palestine, close to the Dead Sea encampment of the Zaddikim. The "originals" could have originated in hundreds of places.

Beyond the question of textual origins for surviving Gnostic documents looms the larger question of the origins of the Gnostics themselves? Scholars today ignore this problem as insoluble, and unworthy of their time. Their only take interest in the Coptic materials as they reveal something about the origins of Christianity, not Gnosticism. No serious scholar considers the content of Gnostic teachings and Mystery School instruction as such to be worthy of discussion. This disregarding attitude extends to the cultural, historical, and geographical origins of the Gnostic movement.

It was not always so, however. A hundred years ago, half a century before the Nag Hammadi find, scholars working on the Berlin, Askew and Ahkmin codices, and the paraphrases of Gnostic teaching found in the polemics of the Church Fathers (that is, the dossier of the prosecution), took a deep interest in the pre-Christian origins of the movement. When Doresse published The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics in 1958, there was still some debate over where the Gnostic movement originated. Amazingly, Doresse, a Catholic archeologist who was overtly hostile to the Gnostics, was the only post-Nag Hammadi scholar to cite what the Gnostics themselves had to say about the sources of their movement.

And thereby hangs a long and tangled tale.

The tale leads from Ephesus eastward past Hattusash, cold citadel of of the Hittites, and deep into Asia Minor: first to Harran, the bustling crossroads where Abraham arrived on the last leg of his exile from Ur in the Chaldees, then on to Ctesiphon, fabled for the soft heaps of amber in its marketplace, and into Parthia, home of the greatest archers in the world, past the scattered encampments of the Sabaeans, star-gazers who read in mystic trance the secrets of the thirteen heavenly Aeons, then deeper into Asia, beyond Nineveh, rich in courtesans, and beyond Hecbatana, smoke-filled city of a hundred gates, turning north toward the rugged Elbruz Mountains, and mounting to the high plain before Mount Hermon, the White Mountain of Seir, not far from the glittering, gunmetal blue of the Caspian Sea.

In plain English it leads to Azerbaijan, on the border of northwestern Iran. There, bounded to the north by the Araxes River, a high plateau fed by Lake Urmia marks the geographic matrix of the Gnostic movement. Doresse wrote: “There we find legends anterior to Gnosticism — those, for instance, which attributed a sacred character to Mount Hermon, the supposed residence of the Children of Seth at the beginning of human existence (p. 255).

Once the homeland of the Gnostic movement is located geographically (black diamond, upper center of map), a remarkable fact comes to light: the Urmian Plateau was the hidden navel of ancient cultures in Mesopotamia, aligned to the Fertile Crescent and symmetrically uniting the Near and Far East with the Mediterranean. See enlarged view of map for more details.

Star Wisdom

“Children of Seth” is the legendary name that Gnostics assigned to a sacred lineage of phosters, or revealers. The name Seth occurs in the Bible, in Genesis 4:25: “And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son, and called his name Seth. For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Adam slew.” Significantly, this is the only time it occurs. Seth belongs to “another seed,” a lineage set apart from the Judeo-Christian narrative of “sacred history.” From the inception of their story, Gnostics are situated outside the conventional narrative of Western spiritual life.

By the Sethians' own account, a tradition of secret knowledge concerning divine matters was transmitted from remote times by a succession of men and women who had mastered the illuminist method, Gnosis. The Revealers were an elite corps operating within a unique cultural and spiritual complex that emerged in prehistoric Iran: the Magian Order (MAY-gee-un). German scholars such as Gustav Widengren, Richard Reitzenstein, and M. H. Schraeder, who are largely ignored today, delved deeply into the prehistoric roots of Iranian religion known as Zurvan. This is the germ of the doctrine of cosmic duality attributed to the Persian prophet, Zoroaster, and spread throughout the world by the members of his religious order, the Magi. Reitzenstein in particular intuited that Gnostic ideas were influenced by Persian duality, or Zurvanism, but he was unable to work out how. No one since his time has done any better. The investigation is complicated by the remoteness of Iranian religion, dating to the 6th millennium BCE.

Persian duality is the great enigma in the history of religions. So far no scholar in the world, not even Mircea Eliade, has cracked the Zoroastrian nut.


Zarathustra is said to have been older than Plato by 6,000 years. He learned universal wisdom from the Good Spirit, that is the excellent understanding. His name translated into Greek, Astrothutes, means “star-worshipper" (Plato Prehistorian, p. 211).

In his elegant little book on the Gnostics, Jacques Lacarriere asserts that Gnosis was a path of illumination based upon ancient star-wisdom. The Jewish historian Josephus says that the Children of Seth were widely revered as celestial seers who “discovered the sciences of the heavenly bodies and their patterns” (Antiquities, I.68-72). All through the Near East and into Europa, the astronomer-priests of the Magian Order was known in late times as "Chaldeans," a rather misleading nickname. This term is a derivation of the Sumerian Kasdim, related to the Hebrew Chesed (a sepiroth of the Tree of Life) and Chassidim, "the pious," an ultra-conservative sect linked to the Zaddikim. The tendency of Biblical editing is to conflate Chaldean motifs with the Magian Order, conferring legitimacy on the patriarchs by way of association. Abraham's father, Terah, was a priest of the temple of the lunar god, Sin, in the city of Ur. There is a great deal of astro-mythological lore encoded in the Old Testament — evidence of Magian and Sethian influences. And, of course, the Magi figure vividly in the New Testament fable of the birth of the savior.

A scribal note written on the margin of Alciabides I, a work attributed to Plato, attests to the legend that Zoroaster lived in the 7th millenium BCE. Several other classical sources, including Aristotle, Pliny, and Plutarch, also tell us that “the Magian,” lived 6,000 years before the death of Plato. In her extraordinary and little-known book, Plato Prehistorian, Mary Settegast situates the rise of the Magian Order, the original priesthood of ancient Iranian religion, in the Age of the Twins, around 5500 BCE, a date supported by the Greek sources. Settegast refers here to Zodiacal timing based on the precession of the equinoxes.

The Age of the Twins, or Geminian Age, lasted from 6200 to 4300 BCE. The motif of duality associated with the constellation of the Twins is consistent with the central theme of Iranian religion, absolute cosmic duality, Good versus Evil. But this type of duality is not what we find in Gnostic teachings. In Not in His Image, I distinguish single-source duality from two-source duality (the two-source hologram of Philip K. Dick). The latter is typical of Gnostic writings. In the Sophia mythos, there is no internal split in the Godhead (the Pleroma), but there is an anomalous projection from it, setting up a two-world scenario.

Most historians do not use Zodiacal timing to frame historical and pre-historical research, but Settegast does so outstandingly. Indologist and mythologist Alain Danielou and cultural historian William Irwin Thompson also adopt this technique. I myself have applied it extensively for over thirty years.

Reader take note: Plotting events by precession does not require adopting the belief that the stars affect human affairs. A Zodiacal Age is framing device, comparable to a geological age (Pleistocene), an historical period (Bronze Age), or a cultural epoch (Tang Dynasty). The framework of the Ages is an heuristic tool, not an astrological con.

Precession became legitimate in academic research in 1969, due to the publication of Hamlet’s Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Herta von Dechend, but the book does not systematically apply precession to analysis of historical events.

Settegast uses precession deftly to coordinate ancient testimony on the Magian Order with archeological research, on the one hand, and historical-religious analysis, on the other.In my own researches with the master tool of precession, the Dendera Zodiac, I have found that Zodiacal Ages correlate to known historical and archeological evidents with impressive consistency, and often in astonishing detail. Axis C of the Dendera Zodiac, dated to 5,600 BCE, marks the Age of the Twins. A white marble figure of the "double goddess" from Catal Huyuk VI (pictured here, from Mellaart, The Archeology of Ancient Turkey, p. 21) clearly present the Twins motif. At Catal Huyuk archeologists have found twelve successive layers of building, representing distinct stages of the city and reflecting different eras of its history. The top layers of the mound, containing the most recent buildings, are dated at 5,600 BCE, the date of Axis C and the double goddess relic. I could offer dozens of similar examples....

Hidden Navel

Astronomer priests of the Magian Order and other skywatching seers from Hibernia to the Indus Valley would have used precessional timing to track the course of human experience over the long term. The Magi brought this method down from the Urmian Plateau and spread it throughout the Fertile Crescent. At Eridu (Ur in the Chaldees), directly south from the hidden navel of the Gnostic movement, precessional timing would have been imparted to the first Sumerian theocrats. But once it was turned over to state-supported priests and social controllers of the early Near Eastern theocracies, precession lost its value as a tool for educational planning and guidance. The telestai consecrated to guiding humanity fell into conflict with other Magians whose aims were political. The eventual split in the Magian Order devolved upon such arcane matters.

The period when the Gnostic movement emerged in prehistory is identified archeologically by the Hajii Firuz culture (5500 – 5000 BCE) of northwestern Iran and Turkmenia. It is centered on the Urmia basin, exactly where Gnostics located their spiritual hearth. The culture is named after an excavated site at the southern end of Lake Urmia, due east of Lake Van in Armenia. Over Lake Van looms Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark is said to have come to rest. Over Lake Urmia looms Mount Kuh-I-Khwaga, the “White Mountain of Seir” held sacred by Gnostics down into a period some five or six thousand years after their tradition was founded there. (Map detail from Mary Settegast, Plato Prehistorian. Radius of circle, about 165 miles.)

A legend hinted in Coptic codices says that the Revealer lineage began at the Mountain of Seir with one illumined couple, Seth and his consort, Norea. Mandaeans of the Iraq marshes, whose beliefs show many similarities to Gnosticism, recount a parallel legend of a founding couple, Anosh-Uthra and Yohanna, who established their base at the White Mountain. Seir is an Indo-Iranian root, cognate with Syr and Shri, “holy, hallowed, sacred.” Urmia derives from the ancient Persian word for water. Lake Urmia is an UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

According to an ancient legend that survives locally to this day, the lakeside city of Urmia was the birthplace of Zoroaster.

“A very old Magian center was located at Lake Urmia,” Settegast writes (p. 215). Some traces of this early settlement survive on the ground. Excavations at Hajii Firuz have produced rich archeological evidence, including a fired ceramic dish from the Halafian culture of Palestine, contemporary with it — i.e., the dish was brought to Urmia from Palestine. The décor shows the sixteen petal motif, the signature of the Mystery cells. (Settegast, plate 121a.) It is likely that the organization of the Mystery cults in the Near East, as well as the technique and teaching they transmitted, derive from the remote Iranian matrix.

The Magian Order spread from the Urmia basin in all directions: northward into the Caucasus mountains, southward into Iraq, eastward toward India, and westward into Asia Minor and Europe. But as dissemination proceeded, the Order gradually split into two distinct branches, Gnostics and Illuminati, as we might now call them. Each branch operated on different motives and methods.

Masters of Learning

Iraniologists have found the problem of the Magi to be one of the most compelling, as well as one of the most difficult, in the history of the ancient world (Settegast, p. 215).

Within the Order, Gnostics were given the title of vaedemna, “seer, wise one,” as distinguished from the priest, the zoatar, who officiated openly in society and advised Middle Eastern theocrats on matters of statecraft and social morality, not to mention agricultural planning — for Zoroaster was by all accounts responsible for the introduction of planned, large-scale agriculture.

Iraniologists consider the problem of the Magi to be one of the most compelling, as well as one of the most difficult, in the history of the ancient world.

The Parsi word zoatar is the origin of the Greek word soter, “savior.” Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition presents various permutations of the soter or redeemer figure. Redemptive religion, based on a superhuman agent who implements the will of the paternal deity, is termed soteriological. In Hebrew religion, this agent is the messiah, conceived either as a human person, the King of the Jews, or a superhuman entity such as Melchizedek (Zaddikim cult). In Christianity, it is Jesus as the incarnation of Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, following the hybrid theology of Saint Paul. In Islam, the redeemer figure is plural, assuming the form of various Imams and hidden masters. The Sunni-Shi'ite conflict is about the succession of Imans after Mohammed. In all cases the soter is a patriarchal figure, the central authority in a theocratic cult whose ultimate aim, make no mistake, is to dominate the entire world by imposing a social-spiritual order based on the dictates of an off-planet father god who speaks exclusively to white male demagogues (WMDs).

Persian soteriology is the origin of the One World Order shared today by neocon schemers and New Age fantatists alike Over centuries, it produced the master plan of the Magians who went into social engineering, "the Illuminati," by contrast to the telestai or Gnostics who restricted their work to educational and spiritual guidance. In the Coptic codices soter occurs frequently to designate the Gnostic master or teacher. But another term, phoster, is closer to the meaning of vaedemna, a wise or illuminated person (cognates: veda, vidya, wisdom, wit). Lest the reader despair, believing that I am unduly quibbling over terms, I must point out that a huge problem for humanity hinges on the difference between a seer and a priest, especially a state-sponsored priest. Mary Settegast astutely notes that Iraniologists “hold conflicting views regarding the historical milieu of the prophet.” The crucial problem is this:

At one extreme Zarathustra has been described as a primitive ecstatic, a kind of ‘shaman,’; at the other, as a worldly familiar of Chorasmian kings and court politics (p. 215 ff).

Here is that distinction that has baffled all scholars: between the shaman-seer and the sacerdotal priest who plays a hand in court politics. For the latter, agriculture was part of a sacred vocation. Since the cultivation of the earth was central to Zoroaster’s message, “missionary priests would presumably have been as well-versed in agricultural technique as in religious dogma… Irrigation, fertilization, cattle breeding, would have been part of a missionary’s wisdom” (p. 220). Does this sound creepily familiar? In the mission of the Zoroastrian Magi who took control of social organization under the theocratic paradigm, we have the ancient model of invasive colonialism and all it entails, a model still in operation today.

Now consider the nother side to the story. According to scholarly opinion today and popular tradition in ancient times, the Magi were regarded, not as missionaries with a state agenda to execute, but “dedicated servants of the Gods” and “masters of learning, credited with initiating the ‘cosmological sciences,’ the study of not only the heavens, but the elements and kingdoms of earth” (p. 215ff). Who are we describing here? Missionaries or visionaries? Enlightened emissaries of high culture or self-seeking colonialists?

Guides and Leaders

Within the limits of the present (long) article, I can do no more than introduce the issue of the Magi, “one of the most compelling, as well as one of the most difficult, in the history of the ancient world,” as Mary Settegast observes. This is not just a problem for scholars, however, it is a matter that concerns the very fate of humanity. It determines the way we view human potential and how we frame moral and ethical criteria by which society is guided. This long and tangled tale from northwestern Iran brings us to the core issue of human social experience: how we define what is evil, what works against life.

To summarize: Gnostics came from the Magian Order, but, in some crucial way, they were at odds with it as well. The Gnostic movement identified by scholars through the Coptic writings from Nag Hammadi and elsewhere was a spin-off from the Magian Order, even a sort of defection. The conflict within the Order was due mainly to two factors, one ideological and the other practical. Ideologically, Gnostic seers rejected the conflictual dualism of the Zurvan priesthood. Reitzenstein and others who placed the origins of Gnosticism in Iranian duality did not have enough source material to recognize that Gnostic dualism is a two-world system, not a split-source system. By split source, I mean that good and evil come from the same source. Gnostics rigorously denied this view. This is, however, the central Zoroastrian doctrine, inherited by an extremist sect of Palestine, the Zaddikim of the Dead Sea, and absorbed into Christianity like a lethal virus.

Today, delivering the State of the Union address, the American president relies heavily on the rhetoric of split-source dualism. We the good guys, them the bad guys. Gnostics considered that the problem facing humanity was not evil, but error. Absolute opposition of good and evil was an erroneous concept, and completely alien to their worldview. Gnostic ideas are wonderfully finessed, and their teachings are most finely nuanced when it comes to the problems of error and human responsibility. One finds none of this sophistication in the rigid, conflictual dualism of Zoroaster.

On the second matter, the practical aspect, the “primitive ecstatic, or shaman” would and could not act as a political animal. Shamans are intermediaries between society and the Otherworld, the Unknown. The vaedemna does not enter into the politics of social control, not even to proffer advice, because he or she is consumed with other priorities. For Gnostic seers, the priorities were to maintain the lineage of the Revealers, preserve the sacred method of instruction by the Divine Light, and teach and transmit what they knew to the world at large. They were consecrated to a sacred aim, a telos, that embraced two dimensions: the art of guidance and the work of culture-making. They did guide others, but they did not manipulate them in the way the zaotar or state-priest did. They guided individuals by mystic instruction and the example of character. In short, they maintained a rigorous boundary between their consecrated aim, to teach, and the political ambition to lead. The best guides are not leaders. The best guides are like spies, who do not like to be followed.

As Dylan sang long ago, "Don't follow leaders, watch ya parkin' meters."

Know-It-Alls

In his definitive study, “The History of the Term 'Gnostikos' ”, religious historian Morton Smith wrote that “gnostikos was not a common word.” He notes that respected initiates such as the Pagan emperor Marcus Aurelius did not use it. Neither was it common in Greek-language Judaism. It seems to have been used for the first time by Plato! In the Politicus 258e-267a, Plato refers to gnostike techne, “the art of knowing,” or perhaps “the art of managing things known,” in order to argue that “the ideal politician is defined as the master of the gnostic art” (italics mine). Plato asserts that “if such a being were to appear he would be a god come down to rule mankind.”

Well, there it is, as plain as day: Plato plays the deification card. His notion of a gnostikos is an expert advisor in theocratic government. i.e., rulership by the gods or those descended from gods. Buyt how can this be. It is known that Plato was initiated at Eleusis. If he had intimate contact with telestai, how could he have embraced and endorsed the program of the Illuminati, the Magians who run the theocratic agenda?

I would suggest that the answer lies in well-known analogy of Plato's Cave. According to this metaphor, objects in the sensory world are mere shadows cast by the Eidos, the divine Forms in the supersensory realm. But the Organic Light casts no shadow. I conclude that Plato, though initiated, never witnessed the Organic Light, the secret medium of Mystery instruction. Had he done so, he would never have invented the analogy of the Cave.

A fragment of Plato's manifesto of Illuminati statecraft, The Republic, is found translated into Coptic at Nag Hammadi (Codex VI, 5). This is the oldest text in the NHL, dating to almost 700 years earlier than the other documents. Yet no scholar has remarked on the highly unusual fact of its inclusion into the corpus. I have pointed out before that the guardians of the Mysteries did not call themselves gnostikoi, but telestai, "those who are aimed." It is known that gnostokoi was the term directed at them in ridicule by the Church Fathers: "smart-ass, know-it-all." I maintain that the telestai renounced this name because it was associated (via Plato) with the social engineers and special advisors of theocracy.

It is significant that the sole instance of a Gnostic sect known to have called themselves gnostokoi was a group of Carpocratians led by a woman named Marcellina. The Carpocratians tended to embrace the Hindu doctrine of avataric descent, i.e., flesh-and-blood embodiment of superhuman beings — an element of the theocratic scenario. The group led by Marcellina "had pictures and statues of many great teachers who were held in honor by their school, such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, and also a portrait of Jesus," according to the report of Origen (G. R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, p. 232ff). The cult of personality was totally incompatible with the mission and demeanor of the telestai. They would never have tolerated such statues, but glorification of "great men" is typical of the theocratic agenda.

The telestai maintained anonymity within their role as mystics and guardians of the Mysteries, although as teachers working openly in society, they of course had names and social identities. In other words, they did not parade their connection to the Mysteries for social standing or prestige. The names ascribed to Gnostics and initiates were actually titles rather than proper names: Asklepios (Aesculapius), for instance. The names of very few Gnostics - Simon Magus, Valentinus, Basilides, Hypatia - have come down to us.
" The kindly old gentleman with the wise and benevolent snake" is an archetype or icon of a telestes, not a real-life portrait. "Statues of Christ have sometimes owed something to statues of Asklepios. The consort of the physician was Health (Hygeia)... As for the snake, he is the most important person in the sanctuary." (Statue from Epidauros, Roman period. Atlas of the Greek World, p. 162)


Today we use the insult "Gnostic" to characterize the ancient movement whose members opposed, not only their own self-glorification, but the theocratic program of great men and male leaders established and enforced by the politically oriented Magians.

Conclusion

Theocracy, the prototype of patriarchal rule, is the trump card of the victim-perpetrator game, as I explain at length in Not in His Image. If the tyrant who afflicts and rewards his people can convince them he is appointed to do so by god, or that he himself is a god, then divine authority rules the day (as Constantine, the faux convert, understood so well). But theocracy, and the entire dominator complex it focalizes, was totally alien to the telestic mission to teach, enlighten, guide, enrich — in short, to encourage and cultivate human potential. The will to control and manipulate human potential can never be reconciled with such a mission. This is why the original Gnostics, adepts of shamanic ecstasy who taught from instruction by the Light, defected from the Magian Order. The Order around in the Urmian Plato in the Age of the Twins, around 6000 BCE. The split devolved after 4400 BCE, when the vernal point was shifting from the Bull into the Ram.

The Age of the Ram (c. 2000 - 120 BCE) is the era of Abraham and the rise of patriarchy, including the Roman Empire. Alexander the Great ruled the ancient world when the spring equinox was located in the head-stars of the Ram, known as Amun to the Egyptians. Consequently, Alexander had himself pictured on coins with the horns of Amun, and he staged an initiation at the Amun sanctuary of Siwa with the purpose of having himself elevated to a god-like status (yet another example of historical and artifactual verification of precessional timing). All this is totally consistent with the advancement of theocratic agenda in the Arien Age.

From their ancestral ground in the northwestern Iran, Gnostics would have been able to observe developments in the Fertile Crescent, including the rise of mass-scale agriculture and urbanization. Their status as nomadic sages, the famous “Chaldeans” of antiquity, would have given them every advantage to observe three momentous developments: the shift from the sacrificial king (primary scapegoating, the pharmakon method), to the sacred king (modified rite, requiring the hieros gamos, sacred mating with the Goddess, to assure the human worthiness of the king ), to the redeemer king (men anointing men, and to hell with sacred mating). They could not have closely analyzed this progression, not detected the pathological violence driven by redemptive beliefs as deeply as we can, however. At least, I don’t think so. The sheer force of it may even have taken them by surprise, not to mention the insidiousness of Illuminati techniques, perverting the regenerative rites of the Mysteries....



View of Lake Urmia with salt crystals and island
(Photo by Ehsan Mahdiyan)

We are at the other end of the long drama that began by the shore of Lake Urmia, with 2000 years worth of hindsight on the Illuminati program and what the message of divine love packaged in the redeemer complex can do to life on a small, lonely planet.

http://www.metahistory.org/GnosticOrigins.php
jll: OCT 2006 Flanders:cool:

Very cool website. I remember coming across it before years ago when I was investigating Gnosticism.

In fact, this website led me onto Icke!

In Gnostic myth, there are beings called Archons.

These beings are the 'evil' rulers of this world.

If you read into the myths, a lot of similarities between the archons and the reptilians become apparent.

The least of which describes the archons looking like a reptile ! ;)

http://www.metahistory.org/AlienDreaming.php

[anoninnyc]

Because the true God isn't a creator per se. It is rather the fundamental being of all that is, the source.

Being what it is, 'things' exist from it, or things create themselves from it, not the other way around.

One of the Gnostic myths suggests that souls were not created, but that they created themselves from the source.

Cool eh :D

yeah but this does still not answer the question of why there is evil in the world.

[foreverspirit]

yeah but this does still not answer the question of why there is evil in the world.

Maybe infinite evil is all there is and Love is an illusion. Maybe love of servitude was the goal and the possibility of love of self (pure self) could and might emerge, was overlooked. We know for sure evil ultimately ends up being very foolish, dull, silly and boring in what it does.

The glitch of self love though, seems to ever be struggling to get out of the grips of evil, servitude, bondage as far as we can tangibly see?:cool:

I know it still does not answer the question of why there is evil in the world.

[tejas]

Maybe infinite evil is all there is and Love is an illusion. Maybe love of servitude was the goal and the possibility of love of self (pure self) could and might emerge, was overlooked. We know for sure evil ultimately ends up being very foolish, dull, silly and boring in what it does.

The glitch of self love though, seems to ever be struggling to get out of the grips of evil, servitude, bondage as far as we can tangibly see?:cool:

I know it still does not answer the question of why there is evil in the world.

?
Firstly good and evil are just terms, there is no such thing as either they only exist dually or in a humans mind. It is a matter of opinion.

To a Gnostic, the only real evil is ignorance. Hence they seek to Know or Gnosis :E

What the gnostics meant by evil was why a system where death, survival, and ignorance would be intrinsic to everything. Thus the combination of these three creates suffering.

Think about it, death is programmed into the DNA. Every being born is Ignorant of everything, it has to learn. The 'creator/s' programmed our DNA to get old and to die. To forget and relearn. Thus to suffer.

Same goes for the food chain, it is a program.

The gnostics hypothesized that there is a very simple explanation to why these very ideas are intrinsic to the system. The creator made it that way!

Evil or ignorance is a result of the system.

[vienna]

look up 'The Talmud of Jmmanuel'
and the Meier case
http://www.proaxis.com/~deardorj/Jmmanuel2.jpg
claimed to be the true teaching of 'Jesus' before the catholic church distorted it and teh document is argued to be the predecessor to the Gospel of Matthew.

Talmud of Jmmanuel' - Google Search

43. "You, however, will be the cornerstone of the folly by which I will be called 'Jesus Christ' and the 'redeemer' for a deluded religious cult."

44. And Jmmanuel was furious, seized a stick and chased Saul away.

45. Saul, his thoughts full of revenge, joined forces with Juda Ihariot, son of the Pharisee, and they discussed how to seize Jmmanuel so he could be handed over to the henchmen.

[foreverspirit]

?
Firstly good and evil are just terms, there is no such thing as either they only exist dually or in a humans mind. It is a matter of opinion.

To a Gnostic, the only real evil is ignorance. Hence they seek to Know or Gnosis :E

What the gnostics meant by evil was why a system where death, survival, and ignorance would be intrinsic to everything. Thus the combination of these three creates suffering.

Think about it, death is programmed into the DNA. Every being born is Ignorant of everything, it has to learn. The 'creator/s' programmed our DNA to get old and to die. To forget and relearn. Thus to suffer.

Same goes for the food chain, it is a program.

The gnostics hypothesized that there is a very simple explanation to why these very ideas are intrinsic to the system. The creator made it that way!

Evil or ignorance is a result of the system.


Dress it up in fancy terminologies all one wants. Just a term eh. All happens just in the mind? If a kid is getting you know what up their you know where, I consider it pretty evil. And happening to a body that is feeling.

As for GNOSTIC, read my post GNOSTICS or ILLUMINATI. Should I be gullible enough to buy into the same ideologies that they are perpetuating? I for the moment, think not!!

Someone is going to have to come up with something a lot better than this dualistic mumbo jumbo:cool:

[foreverspirit]

look up 'The Talmud of Jmmanuel'
and the Meier case
http://www.proaxis.com/~deardorj/Jmmanuel2.jpg
claimed to be the true teaching of 'Jesus' before the catholic church distorted it and teh document is argued to be the predecessor to the Gospel of Matthew.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=Talmud+of+Jmmanuel%27&spell=1

43. "You, however, will be the cornerstone of the folly by which I will be called 'Jesus Christ' and the 'redeemer' for a deluded religious cult."

44. And Jmmanuel was furious, seized a stick and chased Saul away.

45. Saul, his thoughts full of revenge, joined forces with Juda Ihariot, son of the Pharisee, and they discussed how to seize Jmmanuel so he could be handed over to the henchmen.

Oh my goodness!! What hocus pocus is this now?:cool:

[king]

Now, last night, I decided to start my search for the truth by asking about information on Jesus of Nazerath.

To my surprise, someone said I should read up on something that I have heard of once before, but never looked into.

The Gnostic Gospel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnostic_gospel
From this, I had heard that about "one of the most important parts", The Gospel of Thomas.

What was that?




One wikipedia, it states that:

Now, the Gospel of Thomas is not addopted by the Chruch,
And when speaking of it, we find:
In the 4th century, Cyril of Jerusalem mentioned a "Gospel of Thomas" in his Cathechesis V: "Let none read the gospel according to Thomas, for it is the work, not of one of the twelve apostles, but of one of Mani's three wicked disciples."
Very little trace of Manichaean dualism can be detected in this "sayings" Gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, which is agreed to be simpler and less legend-filled than that philosophy.

Keep the bold text in mind for later.

Now, as I was reading it, I decided to look up more upon all of this.
At the bottom of the page, there is a link to a site of "The Gnostic Society Library".

So, I went to this page. Now, as I continued on, they spoke of an even more important book. "The Apocryphon of John".

Now of course, I thought I should read this. And only into the Third and Forth chapter, I was blown away. I will post the text, than point out the very thing that blew me away.
**Note**
The beginning is about John going to a temple and someone asking him where is teacher is, and he telling him that the teach is gone. The man told him how his teacher was a liar. John was filled with doubt and went to be alone in the mountains and desert. Here's what is said that he found, while thinking to himself on the things he had learned.


Now, why did I point out "The Monad is such great detail?
Go to Wikipedia and see what a "Moad is, in old times.

Then, come back and tell me what you've found. ;)
I'm sure YOU TOO will be blown away.

gnosticism is the basis of Masonic doctrines.
Read Alexander Hislop's Mystery Babylon


Gnosticism (from Greek gnōsis, knowledge) refers to a diverse, syncretistic religious movement consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world created by an imperfect spirit, the demiurge, who is frequently identified with the Abrahamic God. The demiurge, who is often depicted as an embodiment of evil, at other times as simply imperfect and as benevolent as its inadequacy allows, exists alongside another remote and unknowable supreme being that embodies good. In order to free oneself from the inferior material world, one needs gnosis, or esoteric spiritual knowledge available only to a learned elite.

[tejas]

Dress it up in fancy terminologies all one wants. Just a term eh. All happens just in the mind? If a kid is getting you know what up their you know where, I consider it pretty evil. And happening to a body that is feeling.

As for GNOSTIC, read my post GNOSTICS or ILLUMINATI. Should I be gullible enough to buy into the same ideologies that they are perpetuating? I for the moment, think not!!

Someone is going to have to come up with something a lot better than this mumbo jumbo:cool:

Just think logically for a sec mate. Yes the poor kid is getting raped, for the kid it is painful. But as sick as it sounds, the rapist is getting pleasure from it.
The coin has two sides.

A wolf eats a lamb, for the lamb this is a horrible, wrong, evil action.

For the wolf he is only having breakfast, mmmmm yummy.


Both christianity and buddhism are the only religions that explain intrinsically that all life suffers.

As Icke said in his book, People see all the suffering in the world and ask, would an all loving god create that? Well maybe an all loving god didn't

It makes perfect sense!

Although, I agree that dualism is an illusion, it is still a permeate one. We see dualism all around us.

It may be an illusion, but it is an illusion that kills.

As for your post. Firstly the writer of that article is in fact a gnostic or at least has some gnostic views, you only need to read the other articles to see that.

It is true that gnosticism is part of illuminati rituals, but then so every is every belief system.

[foreverspirit]

Just think logically for a sec mate. Yes the poor kid is getting raped, for the kid it is painful. But as sick as it sounds, the rapist is getting pleasure from it.

The coin has two sides.

A wolf eats a lamb, for the lamb this is a horrible, wrong, evil action.

For the wolf he is only having breakfast, mmmmm yummy.


Both christianity and buddhism are the only religions that explain intrinsically that all life suffers.

As Icke said in his book,

It makes perfect sense!

Although, I agree that dualism is an illusion, it is still a permeate one. We see dualism all around us.

It may be an illusion, but it is an illusion that kills.

As for your post. Firstly the writer of that article is in fact a gnostic or at least has some gnostic views, you only need to read the other articles to see that.

It is true that gnosticism is part of illuminati rituals, but then so every is every belief system.


And so their ideologies re: suffering is necessarily intrinsic and dualistic, both side of the coin crapoloa is simply unacceptable, considering the source!!!:cool:

[foreverspirit]

Gnostics or Illuminati?

The Origins of the Gnostic Movement


One the most daunting problems posed by the Gnostic Coptic materials is the question of origins. Who wrote these documents, and where did the authors came from? It is exasperating to delve into this material with no concrete idea of its human origin in cultural, historical, or geographic terms. Even assuming that the Egyptian codices are translations of “original writings” by Gnostics who belonged to cults scattered around Egypt and the Near East, we are left in bafflement as to where the Gnostic movement originated in the first place.

A Tangled Tale

The Nag Hammadi treatises are late scribal handiwork, poorly and erratically executed. They were copied down and translated — not written — by Coptic scribes using an improvised language. The desert monks who may have understood precious little of what they were translating. We do not know anything about the condition of the Greek texts they used, or why they were charged to make these translations. This being so, my educated guess is probably as good as anyone’s: I’d say the “originals” were rough notes taken by students in the Mystery Schools, or what remained of them. The notes may have been translated into Coptic — in my opinion, a form of scribal shorthand or stenography, rather than a genuine language — as a writing exercise for the scribes, rather than to faithfully preserve the materials. This is hard to imagine, perhaps, and painful to admit. But the awful fact is, these precious documents are appallingly shoddy, flawed, and incoherent.

We know where the Nag Hammadi codices were hidden, but not who put them there, or why. (On my notion that they may have been connected with the temple of Hathor at Dendera, a stone's throw from Hag Hammadi, see When the Mysteries Died.) We have no idea where the originals may have been written and stored, but the Royal Library of Alexandria is one possibility. There is some artifactual and architectural evidence that Gnostic sects were established around the Mediterranean basin, including Palestine, close to the Dead Sea encampment of the Zaddikim. The "originals" could have originated in hundreds of places.

Beyond the question of textual origins for surviving Gnostic documents looms the larger question of the origins of the Gnostics themselves? Scholars today ignore this problem as insoluble, and unworthy of their time. Their only take interest in the Coptic materials as they reveal something about the origins of Christianity, not Gnosticism. No serious scholar considers the content of Gnostic teachings and Mystery School instruction as such to be worthy of discussion. This disregarding attitude extends to the cultural, historical, and geographical origins of the Gnostic movement.

It was not always so, however. A hundred years ago, half a century before the Nag Hammadi find, scholars working on the Berlin, Askew and Ahkmin codices, and the paraphrases of Gnostic teaching found in the polemics of the Church Fathers (that is, the dossier of the prosecution), took a deep interest in the pre-Christian origins of the movement. When Doresse published The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics in 1958, there was still some debate over where the Gnostic movement originated. Amazingly, Doresse, a Catholic archeologist who was overtly hostile to the Gnostics, was the only post-Nag Hammadi scholar to cite what the Gnostics themselves had to say about the sources of their movement.

And thereby hangs a long and tangled tale.

The tale leads from Ephesus eastward past Hattusash, cold citadel of of the Hittites, and deep into Asia Minor: first to Harran, the bustling crossroads where Abraham arrived on the last leg of his exile from Ur in the Chaldees, then on to Ctesiphon, fabled for the soft heaps of amber in its marketplace, and into Parthia, home of the greatest archers in the world, past the scattered encampments of the Sabaeans, star-gazers who read in mystic trance the secrets of the thirteen heavenly Aeons, then deeper into Asia, beyond Nineveh, rich in courtesans, and beyond Hecbatana, smoke-filled city of a hundred gates, turning north toward the rugged Elbruz Mountains, and mounting to the high plain before Mount Hermon, the White Mountain of Seir, not far from the glittering, gunmetal blue of the Caspian Sea.

In plain English it leads to Azerbaijan, on the border of northwestern Iran. There, bounded to the north by the Araxes River, a high plateau fed by Lake Urmia marks the geographic matrix of the Gnostic movement. Doresse wrote: “There we find legends anterior to Gnosticism — those, for instance, which attributed a sacred character to Mount Hermon, the supposed residence of the Children of Seth at the beginning of human existence (p. 255).

Once the homeland of the Gnostic movement is located geographically (black diamond, upper center of map), a remarkable fact comes to light: the Urmian Plateau was the hidden navel of ancient cultures in Mesopotamia, aligned to the Fertile Crescent and symmetrically uniting the Near and Far East with the Mediterranean. See enlarged view of map for more details.

Star Wisdom

“Children of Seth” is the legendary name that Gnostics assigned to a sacred lineage of phosters, or revealers. The name Seth occurs in the Bible, in Genesis 4:25: “And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son, and called his name Seth. For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Adam slew.” Significantly, this is the only time it occurs. Seth belongs to “another seed,” a lineage set apart from the Judeo-Christian narrative of “sacred history.” From the inception of their story, Gnostics are situated outside the conventional narrative of Western spiritual life.

By the Sethians' own account, a tradition of secret knowledge concerning divine matters was transmitted from remote times by a succession of men and women who had mastered the illuminist method, Gnosis. The Revealers were an elite corps operating within a unique cultural and spiritual complex that emerged in prehistoric Iran: the Magian Order (MAY-gee-un). German scholars such as Gustav Widengren, Richard Reitzenstein, and M. H. Schraeder, who are largely ignored today, delved deeply into the prehistoric roots of Iranian religion known as Zurvan. This is the germ of the doctrine of cosmic duality attributed to the Persian prophet, Zoroaster, and spread throughout the world by the members of his religious order, the Magi. Reitzenstein in particular intuited that Gnostic ideas were influenced by Persian duality, or Zurvanism, but he was unable to work out how. No one since his time has done any better. The investigation is complicated by the remoteness of Iranian religion, dating to the 6th millennium BCE.

Persian duality is the great enigma in the history of religions. So far no scholar in the world, not even Mircea Eliade, has cracked the Zoroastrian nut.


Zarathustra is said to have been older than Plato by 6,000 years. He learned universal wisdom from the Good Spirit, that is the excellent understanding. His name translated into Greek, Astrothutes, means “star-worshipper" (Plato Prehistorian, p. 211).

In his elegant little book on the Gnostics, Jacques Lacarriere asserts that Gnosis was a path of illumination based upon ancient star-wisdom. The Jewish historian Josephus says that the Children of Seth were widely revered as celestial seers who “discovered the sciences of the heavenly bodies and their patterns” (Antiquities, I.68-72). All through the Near East and into Europa, the astronomer-priests of the Magian Order was known in late times as "Chaldeans," a rather misleading nickname. This term is a derivation of the Sumerian Kasdim, related to the Hebrew Chesed (a sepiroth of the Tree of Life) and Chassidim, "the pious," an ultra-conservative sect linked to the Zaddikim. The tendency of Biblical editing is to conflate Chaldean motifs with the Magian Order, conferring legitimacy on the patriarchs by way of association. Abraham's father, Terah, was a priest of the temple of the lunar god, Sin, in the city of Ur. There is a great deal of astro-mythological lore encoded in the Old Testament — evidence of Magian and Sethian influences. And, of course, the Magi figure vividly in the New Testament fable of the birth of the savior.

A scribal note written on the margin of Alciabides I, a work attributed to Plato, attests to the legend that Zoroaster lived in the 7th millenium BCE. Several other classical sources, including Aristotle, Pliny, and Plutarch, also tell us that “the Magian,” lived 6,000 years before the death of Plato. In her extraordinary and little-known book, Plato Prehistorian, Mary Settegast situates the rise of the Magian Order, the original priesthood of ancient Iranian religion, in the Age of the Twins, around 5500 BCE, a date supported by the Greek sources. Settegast refers here to Zodiacal timing based on the precession of the equinoxes.

The Age of the Twins, or Geminian Age, lasted from 6200 to 4300 BCE. The motif of duality associated with the constellation of the Twins is consistent with the central theme of Iranian religion, absolute cosmic duality, Good versus Evil. But this type of duality is not what we find in Gnostic teachings. In Not in His Image, I distinguish single-source duality from two-source duality (the two-source hologram of Philip K. Dick). The latter is typical of Gnostic writings. In the Sophia mythos, there is no internal split in the Godhead (the Pleroma), but there is an anomalous projection from it, setting up a two-world scenario.

Most historians do not use Zodiacal timing to frame historical and pre-historical research, but Settegast does so outstandingly. Indologist and mythologist Alain Danielou and cultural historian William Irwin Thompson also adopt this technique. I myself have applied it extensively for over thirty years.

Reader take note: Plotting events by precession does not require adopting the belief that the stars affect human affairs. A Zodiacal Age is framing device, comparable to a geological age (Pleistocene), an historical period (Bronze Age), or a cultural epoch (Tang Dynasty). The framework of the Ages is an heuristic tool, not an astrological con.

Precession became legitimate in academic research in 1969, due to the publication of Hamlet’s Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Herta von Dechend, but the book does not systematically apply precession to analysis of historical events.

Settegast uses precession deftly to coordinate ancient testimony on the Magian Order with archeological research, on the one hand, and historical-religious analysis, on the other.In my own researches with the master tool of precession, the Dendera Zodiac, I have found that Zodiacal Ages correlate to known historical and archeological evidents with impressive consistency, and often in astonishing detail. Axis C of the Dendera Zodiac, dated to 5,600 BCE, marks the Age of the Twins. A white marble figure of the "double goddess" from Catal Huyuk VI (pictured here, from Mellaart, The Archeology of Ancient Turkey, p. 21) clearly present the Twins motif. At Catal Huyuk archeologists have found twelve successive layers of building, representing distinct stages of the city and reflecting different eras of its history. The top layers of the mound, containing the most recent buildings, are dated at 5,600 BCE, the date of Axis C and the double goddess relic. I could offer dozens of similar examples....

Hidden Navel

Astronomer priests of the Magian Order and other skywatching seers from Hibernia to the Indus Valley would have used precessional timing to track the course of human experience over the long term. The Magi brought this method down from the Urmian Plateau and spread it throughout the Fertile Crescent. At Eridu (Ur in the Chaldees), directly south from the hidden navel of the Gnostic movement, precessional timing would have been imparted to the first Sumerian theocrats. But once it was turned over to state-supported priests and social controllers of the early Near Eastern theocracies, precession lost its value as a tool for educational planning and guidance. The telestai consecrated to guiding humanity fell into conflict with other Magians whose aims were political. The eventual split in the Magian Order devolved upon such arcane matters.

The period when the Gnostic movement emerged in prehistory is identified archeologically by the Hajii Firuz culture (5500 – 5000 BCE) of northwestern Iran and Turkmenia. It is centered on the Urmia basin, exactly where Gnostics located their spiritual hearth. The culture is named after an excavated site at the southern end of Lake Urmia, due east of Lake Van in Armenia. Over Lake Van looms Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark is said to have come to rest. Over Lake Urmia looms Mount Kuh-I-Khwaga, the “White Mountain of Seir” held sacred by Gnostics down into a period some five or six thousand years after their tradition was founded there. (Map detail from Mary Settegast, Plato Prehistorian. Radius of circle, about 165 miles.)

A legend hinted in Coptic codices says that the Revealer lineage began at the Mountain of Seir with one illumined couple, Seth and his consort, Norea. Mandaeans of the Iraq marshes, whose beliefs show many similarities to Gnosticism, recount a parallel legend of a founding couple, Anosh-Uthra and Yohanna, who established their base at the White Mountain. Seir is an Indo-Iranian root, cognate with Syr and Shri, “holy, hallowed, sacred.” Urmia derives from the ancient Persian word for water. Lake Urmia is an UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

According to an ancient legend that survives locally to this day, the lakeside city of Urmia was the birthplace of Zoroaster.

“A very old Magian center was located at Lake Urmia,” Settegast writes (p. 215). Some traces of this early settlement survive on the ground. Excavations at Hajii Firuz have produced rich archeological evidence, including a fired ceramic dish from the Halafian culture of Palestine, contemporary with it — i.e., the dish was brought to Urmia from Palestine. The décor shows the sixteen petal motif, the signature of the Mystery cells. (Settegast, plate 121a.) It is likely that the organization of the Mystery cults in the Near East, as well as the technique and teaching they transmitted, derive from the remote Iranian matrix.

The Magian Order spread from the Urmia basin in all directions: northward into the Caucasus mountains, southward into Iraq, eastward toward India, and westward into Asia Minor and Europe. But as dissemination proceeded, the Order gradually split into two distinct branches, Gnostics and Illuminati, as we might now call them. Each branch operated on different motives and methods.

Masters of Learning

Iraniologists have found the problem of the Magi to be one of the most compelling, as well as one of the most difficult, in the history of the ancient world (Settegast, p. 215).

Within the Order, Gnostics were given the title of vaedemna, “seer, wise one,” as distinguished from the priest, the zoatar, who officiated openly in society and advised Middle Eastern theocrats on matters of statecraft and social morality, not to mention agricultural planning — for Zoroaster was by all accounts responsible for the introduction of planned, large-scale agriculture.

Iraniologists consider the problem of the Magi to be one of the most compelling, as well as one of the most difficult, in the history of the ancient world.

The Parsi word zoatar is the origin of the Greek word soter, “savior.” Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition presents various permutations of the soter or redeemer figure. Redemptive religion, based on a superhuman agent who implements the will of the paternal deity, is termed soteriological. In Hebrew religion, this agent is the messiah, conceived either as a human person, the King of the Jews, or a superhuman entity such as Melchizedek (Zaddikim cult). In Christianity, it is Jesus as the incarnation of Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, following the hybrid theology of Saint Paul. In Islam, the redeemer figure is plural, assuming the form of various Imams and hidden masters. The Sunni-Shi'ite conflict is about the succession of Imans after Mohammed. In all cases the soter is a patriarchal figure, the central authority in a theocratic cult whose ultimate aim, make no mistake, is to dominate the entire world by imposing a social-spiritual order based on the dictates of an off-planet father god who speaks exclusively to white male demagogues (WMDs).

Persian soteriology is the origin of the One World Order shared today by neocon schemers and New Age fantatists alike Over centuries, it produced the master plan of the Magians who went into social engineering, "the Illuminati," by contrast to the telestai or Gnostics who restricted their work to educational and spiritual guidance. In the Coptic codices soter occurs frequently to designate the Gnostic master or teacher. But another term, phoster, is closer to the meaning of vaedemna, a wise or illuminated person (cognates: veda, vidya, wisdom, wit). Lest the reader despair, believing that I am unduly quibbling over terms, I must point out that a huge problem for humanity hinges on the difference between a seer and a priest, especially a state-sponsored priest. Mary Settegast astutely notes that Iraniologists “hold conflicting views regarding the historical milieu of the prophet.” The crucial problem is this:

At one extreme Zarathustra has been described as a primitive ecstatic, a kind of ‘shaman,’; at the other, as a worldly familiar of Chorasmian kings and court politics (p. 215 ff).

Here is that distinction that has baffled all scholars: between the shaman-seer and the sacerdotal priest who plays a hand in court politics. For the latter, agriculture was part of a sacred vocation. Since the cultivation of the earth was central to Zoroaster’s message, “missionary priests would presumably have been as well-versed in agricultural technique as in religious dogma… Irrigation, fertilization, cattle breeding, would have been part of a missionary’s wisdom” (p. 220). Does this sound creepily familiar? In the mission of the Zoroastrian Magi who took control of social organization under the theocratic paradigm, we have the ancient model of invasive colonialism and all it entails, a model still in operation today.

Now consider the nother side to the story. According to scholarly opinion today and popular tradition in ancient times, the Magi were regarded, not as missionaries with a state agenda to execute, but “dedicated servants of the Gods” and “masters of learning, credited with initiating the ‘cosmological sciences,’ the study of not only the heavens, but the elements and kingdoms of earth” (p. 215ff). Who are we describing here? Missionaries or visionaries? Enlightened emissaries of high culture or self-seeking colonialists?

Guides and Leaders

Within the limits of the present (long) article, I can do no more than introduce the issue of the Magi, “one of the most compelling, as well as one of the most difficult, in the history of the ancient world,” as Mary Settegast observes. This is not just a problem for scholars, however, it is a matter that concerns the very fate of humanity. It determines the way we view human potential and how we frame moral and ethical criteria by which society is guided. This long and tangled tale from northwestern Iran brings us to the core issue of human social experience: how we define what is evil, what works against life.

To summarize: Gnostics came from the Magian Order, but, in some crucial way, they were at odds with it as well. The Gnostic movement identified by scholars through the Coptic writings from Nag Hammadi and elsewhere was a spin-off from the Magian Order, even a sort of defection. The conflict within the Order was due mainly to two factors, one ideological and the other practical. Ideologically, Gnostic seers rejected the conflictual dualism of the Zurvan priesthood. Reitzenstein and others who placed the origins of Gnosticism in Iranian duality did not have enough source material to recognize that Gnostic dualism is a two-world system, not a split-source system. By split source, I mean that good and evil come from the same source. Gnostics rigorously denied this view. This is, however, the central Zoroastrian doctrine, inherited by an extremist sect of Palestine, the Zaddikim of the Dead Sea, and absorbed into Christianity like a lethal virus.

Today, delivering the State of the Union address, the American president relies heavily on the rhetoric of split-source dualism. We the good guys, them the bad guys. Gnostics considered that the problem facing humanity was not evil, but error. Absolute opposition of good and evil was an erroneous concept, and completely alien to their worldview. Gnostic ideas are wonderfully finessed, and their teachings are most finely nuanced when it comes to the problems of error and human responsibility. One finds none of this sophistication in the rigid, conflictual dualism of Zoroaster.

On the second matter, the practical aspect, the “primitive ecstatic, or shaman” would and could not act as a political animal. Shamans are intermediaries between society and the Otherworld, the Unknown. The vaedemna does not enter into the politics of social control, not even to proffer advice, because he or she is consumed with other priorities. For Gnostic seers, the priorities were to maintain the lineage of the Revealers, preserve the sacred method of instruction by the Divine Light, and teach and transmit what they knew to the world at large. They were consecrated to a sacred aim, a telos, that embraced two dimensions: the art of guidance and the work of culture-making. They did guide others, but they did not manipulate them in the way the zaotar or state-priest did. They guided individuals by mystic instruction and the example of character. In short, they maintained a rigorous boundary between their consecrated aim, to teach, and the political ambition to lead. The best guides are not leaders. The best guides are like spies, who do not like to be followed.

As Dylan sang long ago, "Don't follow leaders, watch ya parkin' meters."

Know-It-Alls

In his definitive study, “The History of the Term 'Gnostikos' ”, religious historian Morton Smith wrote that “gnostikos was not a common word.” He notes that respected initiates such as the Pagan emperor Marcus Aurelius did not use it. Neither was it common in Greek-language Judaism. It seems to have been used for the first time by Plato! In the Politicus 258e-267a, Plato refers to gnostike techne, “the art of knowing,” or perhaps “the art of managing things known,” in order to argue that “the ideal politician is defined as the master of the gnostic art” (italics mine). Plato asserts that “if such a being were to appear he would be a god come down to rule mankind.”

Well, there it is, as plain as day: Plato plays the deification card. His notion of a gnostikos is an expert advisor in theocratic government. i.e., rulership by the gods or those descended from gods. Buyt how can this be. It is known that Plato was initiated at Eleusis. If he had intimate contact with telestai, how could he have embraced and endorsed the program of the Illuminati, the Magians who run the theocratic agenda?

I would suggest that the answer lies in well-known analogy of Plato's Cave. According to this metaphor, objects in the sensory world are mere shadows cast by the Eidos, the divine Forms in the supersensory realm. But the Organic Light casts no shadow. I conclude that Plato, though initiated, never witnessed the Organic Light, the secret medium of Mystery instruction. Had he done so, he would never have invented the analogy of the Cave.

A fragment of Plato's manifesto of Illuminati statecraft, The Republic, is found translated into Coptic at Nag Hammadi (Codex VI, 5). This is the oldest text in the NHL, dating to almost 700 years earlier than the other documents. Yet no scholar has remarked on the highly unusual fact of its inclusion into the corpus. I have pointed out before that the guardians of the Mysteries did not call themselves gnostikoi, but telestai, "those who are aimed." It is known that gnostokoi was the term directed at them in ridicule by the Church Fathers: "smart-ass, know-it-all." I maintain that the telestai renounced this name because it was associated (via Plato) with the social engineers and special advisors of theocracy.

It is significant that the sole instance of a Gnostic sect known to have called themselves gnostokoi was a group of Carpocratians led by a woman named Marcellina. The Carpocratians tended to embrace the Hindu doctrine of avataric descent, i.e., flesh-and-blood embodiment of superhuman beings — an element of the theocratic scenario. The group led by Marcellina "had pictures and statues of many great teachers who were held in honor by their school, such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, and also a portrait of Jesus," according to the report of Origen (G. R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, p. 232ff). The cult of personality was totally incompatible with the mission and demeanor of the telestai. They would never have tolerated such statues, but glorification of "great men" is typical of the theocratic agenda.

The telestai maintained anonymity within their role as mystics and guardians of the Mysteries, although as teachers working openly in society, they of course had names and social identities. In other words, they did not parade their connection to the Mysteries for social standing or prestige. The names ascribed to Gnostics and initiates were actually titles rather than proper names: Asklepios (Aesculapius), for instance. The names of very few Gnostics - Simon Magus, Valentinus, Basilides, Hypatia - have come down to us.
" The kindly old gentleman with the wise and benevolent snake" is an archetype or icon of a telestes, not a real-life portrait. "Statues of Christ have sometimes owed something to statues of Asklepios. The consort of the physician was Health (Hygeia)... As for the snake, he is the most important person in the sanctuary." (Statue from Epidauros, Roman period. Atlas of the Greek World, p. 162)


Today we use the insult "Gnostic" to characterize the ancient movement whose members opposed, not only their own self-glorification, but the theocratic program of great men and male leaders established and enforced by the politically oriented Magians.

Conclusion

Theocracy, the prototype of patriarchal rule, is the trump card of the victim-perpetrator game, as I explain at length in Not in His Image. If the tyrant who afflicts and rewards his people can convince them he is appointed to do so by god, or that he himself is a god, then divine authority rules the day (as Constantine, the faux convert, understood so well). But theocracy, and the entire dominator complex it focalizes, was totally alien to the telestic mission to teach, enlighten, guide, enrich — in short, to encourage and cultivate human potential. The will to control and manipulate human potential can never be reconciled with such a mission. This is why the original Gnostics, adepts of shamanic ecstasy who taught from instruction by the Light, defected from the Magian Order. The Order around in the Urmian Plato in the Age of the Twins, around 6000 BCE. The split devolved after 4400 BCE, when the vernal point was shifting from the Bull into the Ram.

The Age of the Ram (c. 2000 - 120 BCE) is the era of Abraham and the rise of patriarchy, including the Roman Empire. Alexander the Great ruled the ancient world when the spring equinox was located in the head-stars of the Ram, known as Amun to the Egyptians. Consequently, Alexander had himself pictured on coins with the horns of Amun, and he staged an initiation at the Amun sanctuary of Siwa with the purpose of having himself elevated to a god-like status (yet another example of historical and artifactual verification of precessional timing). All this is totally consistent with the advancement of theocratic agenda in the Arien Age.

From their ancestral ground in the northwestern Iran, Gnostics would have been able to observe developments in the Fertile Crescent, including the rise of mass-scale agriculture and urbanization. Their status as nomadic sages, the famous “Chaldeans” of antiquity, would have given them every advantage to observe three momentous developments: the shift from the sacrificial king (primary scapegoating, the pharmakon method), to the sacred king (modified rite, requiring the hieros gamos, sacred mating with the Goddess, to assure the human worthiness of the king ), to the redeemer king (men anointing men, and to hell with sacred mating). They could not have closely analyzed this progression, not detected the pathological violence driven by redemptive beliefs as deeply as we can, however. At least, I don’t think so. The sheer force of it may even have taken them by surprise, not to mention the insidiousness of Illuminati techniques, perverting the regenerative rites of the Mysteries....



View of Lake Urmia with salt crystals and island
(Photo by Ehsan Mahdiyan)

We are at the other end of the long drama that began by the shore of Lake Urmia, with 2000 years worth of hindsight on the Illuminati program and what the message of divine love packaged in the redeemer complex can do to life on a small, lonely planet. :cool:

http://www.metahistory.org/GnosticOrigins.php
jll: OCT 2006 Flanders

[chris]

Material deemed blasphemous by the Vatican act often like the accomplice of the pick pocket.

Anyway, who came up with the definition of a Satanist?

[montag]

Gnostics or Illuminati?

The Origins of the Gnostic Movement



http://www.metahistory.org/GnosticOrigins.php
jll: OCT 2006 Flanders
Foreverspirit that is the third time you have posted this article, can you please just provide the link instead of copying and posting the whole thing every time? I'm starting to develop carpal tunnel from all of the scrolling..:D

montag

[foreverspirit]

Foreverspirit that is the third time you have posted this article, can you please just provide the link instead of copying and posting the whole thing every time? I'm starting to develop carpal tunnel from all of the scrolling..:D

montag


Sure can do. I apologize for the scrolling.:cool:

[kasalt]

Cordial Felicitations!, His Lordship:

It is well you seek information of this Character, whose Life was so profound, it 'Split Time'.

For Baseline, Benchmark Standards: The Book of Yahweh Thread, Religion Sub-Forum.

There are 'Absolutes' concerning Qualities of this Character. Beware of Qualities that are attributed to Yahshua Messiah, that contradict the Baseline, Benchmark Standards.

Kind Regards: Snoopsnuffleopagus

Mr Snoop, my hat off to You.

He indeed 'split time'.

On the contrary, "Yahshua Messiah" did not "split time". Time was split for him by the popes of the Roman Church. We call it the "Gregorian Calendar":

A modification of the Julian calendar, it was first proposed by the Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius, and was decreed by Pope Gregory XIII, for whom it was named, on 24 February 1582 via the papal bull Inter gravissimas issued from his seat (Villa Mondragone). Years in the calendar are numbered from the traditional birth year of Jesus, which has been labeled the "anno Domini" (AD) era,[1] and is sometimes labeled the "common era" or the "Christian Era" (CE).

The Gregorian Calendar was devised both because the mean Julian Calendar year was slightly too long, causing the vernal equinox to slowly drift backwards in the calendar year, and because the lunar calendar used to compute the date of Easter had grown conspicuously in error as well.

Gregorian calendar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

...and for no other reason.

[tejas]

And so their ideologies re: suffering is necessarily intrinsic and dualistic, both side of the coin crapoloa is simply unacceptable, considering the source!!!:cool:

Hmm you could say that, but then Ickes Idea of oneness is also part of gnostic/illuminated ideaology.


Anyway, who came up with the definition of a Satanist?

Too true!

[snoopsnuffleopagus]

Cordial Felicitations, kasalt:

Your Historic explanation is correct. It is your first sentence which is erroneous.

I did not Post: Yahshua 'Split Time'. As you correctly Posted, others did.

It is the Personage, Paradigm of Yahshua that was the Impetus.

YAHCHANAN BEN ZABDYAH (Son of Zabdyah=Bestowed by Yahweh)


1: In the beginning was the PLAN of YAHWEH, and the PLAN was with Yahweh, and the PLAN was Yahwehs

2: The SAME PLAN was in the beginning with Yahweh

3: ALL THINGS WERE DONE ACCORDING TO IT, AND WITHOUT IT NOTHING WAS DONE.

4: In this PLAN was LIFE, and that LIFE was the LIGHT to Mankind.

5: NOW, that LIGHT shines in the DARKNESS, but, the DARKNESS does not take hold of it.

Ultimately, Kasalt, it is all 'Good'. :)

Kind Regards & Have a Nice Thoughtful Day! Snoopsnuffleopagus

[kblood]

For me I do think it is a matter of perspective. How can we say anything is flawed? "A creator god made everything, but it was flawed"... well, I guess noone is perfect :rolleyes: As I see it everything is rather perfect. Maybe not in our own lives, but how can we tell wether the majority of what is happening is good or evil? And when we do, how can we be certain that our perception of it is not distorted in some way by the way we view the world, and maybe our past?

To me it all seems rather beautifull most the time. We all have the choice of spreading love, and whatever we recieve in return should be considered good. Some seems to have a mistrust in unconditional love, but that is how it will always be I guess.

I guess everything we know was sparked by some kind of conciousness, and then becomming the world we now know. What kind of conciousness this is, is hard to say. Seems to me that "evil" is mostly a man made concept, to describe destructive, abusive or maybe selfish behaviour.

What would evil be before beings became as concious as us? Seems to me that intelligence like ours make us evil, simply because we know how to survive in greater numbers than other species. It is up to us to live in harmony with everything and everyone as much as possible. Conflict is of course unnavoidable, but it still makes for good progress. Hopefully not at a high cost.

[kasalt]

Cordial Felicitations, kasalt:

Your Historic explanation is correct. It is your first sentence which is erroneous.

I did not Post: Yahshua 'Split Time'. As you correctly Posted, others did.


Then what did you mean when you wrote:

It is well you seek information of this Character, whose Life was so profound, it 'Split Time'.

[foreverspirit]

Hmm you could say that, but then Ickes Idea of oneness is also part of gnostic/illuminated ideaology.



Too true!


Who says Icke is to be belived unconditionally. This is a truth finding mission for us all. Question everything - everyone!!:cool:

[mahabaratara]

Looks like another good thread...I read just a little...I am going to have to come back to this...

Please again Lordship keep this up....I am a multi forum member...And your threads are consistenley throwing up things others dont...

Regards

Maha