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Gnosticism and the Christian Myth

Taking off from, and expanding on, a number of ideas found in the works of Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, I’ll be posting a number of concepts and theories for consideration.

Freke & Gandy have done an excellent job in their books “The Jesus Mysteries” and “Jesus and the Lost Goddess,” but, as we have found again and again, without both the scientific background of cosmic catastrophe we have uncovered via hints from the Cassiopaeans, and the more esoteric background concerning hyperdimensional realities, again, via explication by the Cs, most of what gets written about these matters tends to not cover some of the most essential issues. I hope to bridge these gaps here.

So, let us begin.

For thousands of years, human beings have grappled with the Mystery of Life. The legends tell us that during a Golden Age, mankind KNEW the secrets and lived a blessed life in communion with the gods until some terrible thing happened and the gods withdrew leaving man in darkness, more or less. This may be an allegorical myth AND a literal description of cosmic events. As above, so below. I’ve covered another aspect of this in the upcoming issue of the Dot Connector so those interested in the topic will want to get this issue.

Over 2,000 years ago, there was, at the time, a wide ranging Gnostic tradition that flourished among all the cultures of the ancient world. These cosmopolitan Pagan civilizations had been trading, conquering and synthesizing with each other for centuries. Plato had described the peoples of the Mediterranean as “frogs around a small pond.” Then, along came Alexander the Great who transformed that world into essentially one culture.

The Gnostic tradition had a common mystical philosophy and they all were trying to go beyond literal religions. Among some Jewish Gnostics, a school of thought began to form in Alexandria, Egypt, and it is they who synthesized the Jewish and Pagan mythology, producing rather distinctive variations on the more ancient forms.

This approach was, from the beginning, contaminated by certain elements that allowed it to be easily distorted. Those familiar with Ponerology can understand those elements as the work of schizoidal psychopaths. Those elements were present in the Jewish literature – a schizoidal take on writing history after the model of Herodotus – and this was blended with the purer, Pagan Gnosticism. This hybrid form eventually came to be known as Christianity.

Under the influence of the cosmopolitan Greek world, certain Jewish mystics sought to find greater depth in the Jewish “history” that had been produced. As an aside, there are those who say that this literature was produced to be intentionally initiatory, but the facts do not support that thesis. The allegedly historical Israel was created to support the agenda of a religious priesthood-clique seeking power and it was necessary to gather support from the masses and thus, the fake history of Israel was produced from many tribal tales and legends, genealogies created and added in order to show that a very disparate group were really “one”, and voila! Instant ancient history leading all the way back to god himself!

Getting back to the Jewish mystics who aspired to Gnosis, the Jewish Gnostics pored over their “history,” declared it to be mystical allegory, and claimed to be inheritors of secret mystical teachings passed down from their own great Gnostic master, Moses. They actually went further than that: they claimed that the great Pagan philosophers had originally received their wisdom from Moses and that all other intellectual advances were thanks to the Jews. This view has come under increasing criticism as more and more researchers discover that things were actually the other way around: the Jews borrowed many myths from other cultures, re-worked them as history which they saw as doing things one better than the originals.

However, in a world that came to be dominated by this Jewish version of history, many things are obscured and incomprehensible due to the simple fact that this single element – that the Jews stole the history of others and claimed to have it all first – is not factored into our view of our past.

It is not likely that these early Jewish Gnostics realized that the slow-acting poison of schizoidia was already incorporated into the history that they now proposed to study as allegory. Of course it was very much allegory because it originated as the myths of other peoples!

So, in their re-working and re-combining of the Pagan and Jewish materials, these Alexandrian Jewish Gnostics did not realize that they had included the poison of the schizoid in their system – they were simply trying to explore reality in a particular context and were just trying to “get closer to god,” so to say, in a context that was acceptable to their social milieu.

At the beginning, they were not known as Christians; they were probably known as the Therapeutae and the Essenes which the Jewish Gnostic, Philo, described as two branches of a single school of philosophy. They honored not only their alleged own master, Moses, they also followed the great Pagan philosopher, Pythagoras whose disciples had set up communities throughout the Pagan world. The Jewish historian, Josephus, tells us that the Essenes were comparable to the Pythagoreans. Philo, the Jewish Gnostic, was known as “the Pythagorean.” He describes the Therapeutae as practicing a contemplative life which is also what the Pythagoreans did. He tells us that their wisdom came from Greece. The Greeks, of course, said that it came from Egypt. If one has studied the works of Iman Wilkens, (Where Troy Once Stood), one might be aware that the land called Egypt was originally located in Northwst France and it was only after the conquest of Alexander the Great that the land we now know as Egypt was called Egypt. So, when one reads of ancient Egyptian mysteries, one must be very careful to consider exactly what this may mean.

Anyway, back to our Therapeutae and Pythagoreans: The Cynic school of Pagan Gnosticism called their tradition “The Way.” The Therapeutae called their tradition “The Way” also. The 4th century Christian historian, Eusebius claimed that the Therapeutae were the first followers of his “historical Jesus Christ.” The problem with this is that Philo’s description of the Therapeutae was written before the time that the historical Jesus was supposed to have lived. However, Eusebius may have been right in one sense: the Therapeutae and the Essenes may very well have created the Christian Myth of Jesus.

The Jewish Gnostics synthesized the myths from Genesis and Exodus with the works of Plato (Timaeus), and Pagan myths of the dying and resurrecting god (which were originally something else, as we will see) to create the Jesus story.

According to these Jewish Gnostics, Genesis was supposed to encode the descent of the soul into physical incarnation. The Exodus was interpreted as a myth encoding the “way back to god.” That is, the Jewish exodus from Egypt was interpreted by the Jewish Gnostics as stages of initiation and return. Combined with the Dying God myth (Moses dies before entering the Promised Land and is resurrected as Joshua), and voila! You have the most influential myth of our civilization.

Basic Structure of Exodus and the Jesus Story as Initiation Allegories as presented by Freke & Gandy:

Initiation Process Exodus Jesus Story

Purification:    Crossing the Red Sea  –  Baptism by John
Death of the Old Self:   Death of Moses  –  Crucifixion
Gnosis:   Promised Land/Joshua   –  Resurrection

The next question is: what happened to the Jesus Myth as a MYTH? How did it become history?

Originally Published 2011_03_03