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GNOSTICISM
One of the most essential Gnostic characteristics was a hard-core Platonism that amplified the otherworldliness of the old Greek metaphysician into a severe dualism that pitted the spirit against flesh and the world. Taking the widespread human intuition that something is amiss to new levels of cosmic crankiness, the Gnostics insisted that life on our heavy ball of sex and death was not just an unmitigated disaster - it was a cosmic trap. The central myth of Gnosticism's byzantine cosmologies held that the creator of this world is not the true god, but an inferior demiurge who ignorantly botched the job. Plato also spoke of a wordly demiurge in the Timaeus, though he characterize this craftsman as a basically benevolent fellow. The Gnostic demiurge is not necessarily evil, but he and his ministers (known as archons, or rulers) are at the very least arrogant blowhards who mistakenly consider themselves to be the lords of the universe. Humans are imprisoned in the material universe of fate that they control, though we carry within ourselves the leftover sparks of the divine and precosmic Pleroma (Fullness) that existed before the demiurgic construction company plastered everything over. Human beings are thus, in essence, absolutely superior to the ecosystem - not stewards or even masters, but strangers in a strange land.
In contrast to orthodox Christianity, with its guilt ridden doctrine of original sin, the Gnostics held that the sorry state of the world is not our fault. The error lies in the structure of the universe, not within out essential selves. We don't need to expiate any crimes, but simply to discover or recall the way back home - a way out that is also, mystically speaking, the way inside. Unlike the Church, which encased the spiritual autonomy of the individual believer within an elaborate corporate hierarchy founded on the ruins of the Roman state and the magical transmission of apostolic authority, the Gnostics recognized instead the supreme authority of esoteric gnosis: a mystical breakthrough of total liberation, an influx of knowing oneself to be part of the geniune godhead, of knowing oneself to be free. In one of the few surviving fragments, the great Alexandrian Valentinus - a second-century Gnostic Christian who was once in the running for Bishop of Rome - wrote:
"What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, where from we are redeemed; what birth is and what rebirth."
The primary polarity of Gnostic psychology is not sin and redemption, but ignorance and gnosis, forgetting and memory, sleep and the awakening of knowledge. The Gnostic sought the pure signal that overrides the noise and corrosive babel of the world - an ineffable rush tinged with teh Platonic exalation of mind, a first-person encounter with the logos etched into the heart of the divine self within.
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