In the June number I recorded
some of the deeper impressions which a study of the Trismegistic literature has
left on my mind, and endeavoured in a general fashion to set forth a few of the
leading ideas of the Religion of the Mind, or the Pure Philosophy, or Single
Love, as the disciples of Thrice-Greatest Hermes called their Theosophy some
nineteen centuries ago.
The most general term,
however, by which they named their science and philosophy and religion was
Gnosis; it occurs in almost every sermon and excerpt and fragment of their
literature which we possess. The doctrine and the discipline of Mind, the
Feeder of men and Shepherd of man’s soul, are summed up in the fairest
word—Gnosis.
Let us then briefly consider
the meaning of the name as the followers of this Way understood it. Gnosis is
Knowledge; but not discursive knowledge of the nature of the multifarious arts
and sciences known in those days or in our own. On this “noise of words,”
these multifarious knowledges of the appearances of things and vain opinions,
the followers of the True Science and Pure Philosophy looked with resignation;
while those of them who were still probationers treated them with even less
tolerance, declaring that they left such things to the “Greeks”; for
“Egyptians,” of course, nothing but Wisdom could suffice.
At any rate this is how one
of the less instructed editors of one of the collections of our sermons phrases
it. For him Egypt was the Sacred Land and the Egyptians the Chosen Race; while
the Greeks were upstarts and shallow reasoners. The like-natured Jew of the
period, on the other hand, called the body “Egypt,” while Judæa was the Holy
Land, and Palestine the Promised Land, and Israel the Chosen of God; and so the
game went merrily on, as it does even unto this day.
But the real writers of the
sermons knew otherwise. Gnosis for them was superior to all distinction of
race; for the Gnostic was precisely he who was reborn, regenerate, into the
Race, the Race of true Wisdom-lovers, the Kinship of the Divine Fatherhood.
Gnosis for them began with the Knowledge of Man, to be consummated at the end
of the perfectioning by the Knowledge of God or Divine Wisdom.
This Knowledge was far other
than the knowledge of science of the world. Not, however, that the latter was
to be despised; for all things are true or untrue, according to our point of
view. If our standpoint is firmly centred in the True, all things can be read
in their true meaning; whereas if we wander in error, all things, even the
truest, become misleading for us.
The Gnosis began, continued
and ended in the knowledge of one’s self, the reflection of the Knowledge of
the One Self, the All Self. So that if we say that Gnosis was other than the
science of the world, we do not mean that it excluded anything, but only that
it regarded all human arts and sciences as insufficient, incomplete, imperfect.
Indeed it is quite evident on
all hands that the writers of the Trismegistic tractates, in setting forth
their intuitions of the things-that-are, and in tricking out the living ideas
that come to birth in their hearts and heads, made use of the philosophy and
science and art of their day. It is, on the one hand, one of the charms of
their endeavour that they did so; for in so doing they brought the great truths
of the inner life into contact with the thought of their age.
There is, however, always a
danger in any such attempt; for in proportion as we involve the great
intuitions of the soul and the apocalypses of the mind in the opinions of the
day, we make the exposition of the mysteries depart from the nature of
scripture and fall into the changing notions of the ephemeral. Human science
is ever changing; and if we set forth such glimpses of the sure ideas and
living verities of the Gnosis as we can obtain in the ever-changing forms of
evolving science, we may, indeed, do much to popularise our glimpse of the
mysteries for our own time; but the days that are to come will accuse us of
clothing the Beauty of the Truth in rags as compared with the fairer garment of
their own improved opinions.
The documents that have been
preserved from the scriptoria of the Trismegistic tradition are by many
hands and the product of many minds. Sometimes they involve themselves so
closely with the science of their day that the current opinion of the twentieth
century will turn from them with a feeling of contemptuous superiority; on the
other hand they not unfrequently remain in the paths of clear reason, and offer
us an unimpeded view of vistas of the Plain of Truth. But indeed, even when
they hold most closely to the world-representations and man-knowledges of their
day they are not without interest; for it may be that in their notions of
living nature—the very antipodes of our modern-day opinions based on the dead
surfaces of things—they may have been with regard to some things even nearer
the truth than we are ourselves in this so boasted age of grace and
enlightenment.
Be this as it may, there are
ample examples of clean and clear thinking in the logoi or sacred
sermons, or discourses, or utterances, of the School; and one of the most
attractive elements in the whole discipline is the fact that the pupil was
encouraged to think and question. Reason was held in high honour; a right use
of reason, or rather, let us say, right reason, and not its counterfeit,
opinion, was the most precious instrument of knowledge of man and the cosmos,
and the means of self-realisation into the Highest Good which, among many other
names of sublime dignity, was known as the Good Mind or Reason (Logos) of God.
The whole theory of
attainment was conditioned by the fact that man in body, soul and mind was a
world in himself—a little world, it is true, so long as he is content to play
the part of a “procession of Fate”; but his Destiny is greater than that Fate,
or rather, let us say, his Unknowingness is Fate, his Awareness will be his
Destiny. Man is a little world, little in the sense of personal, individual,
separate; but a world for all that—a monad. And the destiny of man is that he
should become the Monad of monads, or the Mind of God—the Cosmos itself, not
only as perceived by the senses as all that is, both that which moves and moves
not, which is the Great Body and Great Soul of things; but also as conceived by
mind, as that Intelligible Greatness of all greatnesses, the Idea of all ideas,
the Mind and Reason of God Himself, His own Self-created Son, Alone-begotten,
the Beloved.
On this transcendent fact of
all facts is founded the whole discipline and method of the Gnosis of the
Mind. The Mystery of mysteries is Man or Mind. But this naming of the Mystery
should not be understood as excluding Soul and Body. Mind is the Person of
persons, the Presence of all presences. Time, space, and causality are
conditioned by the Mind. But this Mind, the True Man, is not the mind in
bondage to causality, space and time. On the other hand, it is just this mind
in bondage, this procession of Fate, the servant’s form, which is the
appearance that hides the potentiality of becoming the All, of becoming the
Æon, the Presence—that is, the subsistence of all things present, at every
moment of time, and point of space, and every instant cause-and-effect in the Bosom
of Fate. It is true that in the region of opinion, body, soul and mind seem
separate and apart; they are held by the man in separation as the fundamental
categories of his existence; and truly so, for they are the conditions of ex-istence,
of standing out of Being, that environment of incompleteness—the
complement or fulfilment of which is ec-stasis, whereby the man goes
forth from his limitations to unite himself with Himself, and so reaches that
Satisfaction and Fulfilment, which our Gnostics call the Pleroma when set over
against the conception of space, and the Æon when set over against the idea of
time, and the Good when contrasted with the notion of fate.
But Being is the Three in
One, Mind, Soul and Body—Light, Life and Substance, co-eternal and co-equal.
It therefore follows that he
who would be Gnostic, must not foolishly divorce within himself the mystery of
the triple Partners, the Three Powers, or the Divine Triad. For him the object
of his endeavour is to consummate the Sacred Marriage within himself, where
Three must “marry” to create; that so he may be united to his Greatest Self and
become at-one with God. Body, soul, and mind (or spirit, for in this Gnosis
spirit is frequently a synonym of mind) must all work together in intimate union
for righteousness.
The body of man must be
regarded as a holy temple, a shrine of the Divine—the most marvellous House of
God that exists, fairer far than the fairest temple raised with hands. For
this natural temple which the Divine has wrought for the indwelling of His
beloved sons, is a copy of the Great Image, the Temple of the Universe in which
the Son of God, the Man, dwells.
Every atom and every group of
atoms, every limb and joint and organ, is laid down according to the Divine
Plan; the body is an image of the Great Seal, Heaven-and-Earth, male-female in
one.
But how few know or even
dream of the possibilities of this living temple of the Divine! We are
sepulchres, tombs of the dead; for our bodies are half-atrophied, alive only to
the things of Death, and dead to the things of Life.
The Gnosis of the Mind thus
teaches us to let the Life flow into the dead channels of our corporeal nature,
to invoke the Holy Breath of God to enliven the substance of our
frames. That so the Divine Quickener may first bring to birth in us our divine
complement, our other self, our long-lost spouse; and then we may ourselves
with ungrudging love and fair wooing of her bring our true selves to birth, so
becoming regenerate or reborn—a trinity of Being, not a unit of vegetative
existence, or a duality of man-animal nature, but the Perfect Triangle jewelled
with all three sparks of perfected manhood.
It is very evident, then,
that if the idea of this Gnosis be carried out logically, the hearer of this
Mathesis must strive ever to become a doer of the Word, and so
self-realise himself in every portion of his being. The object that he has in
view is intensification of his whole nature. He does not parcel out his
universe or himself into special compartments, but he strives ever to refund
himself into ever more intimate union with himself—meaning by this his
ever-present consciousness; for there is nothing really that He is not.
Indeed it is one of the
pleasantest features of the Trismegistic Gnosis, or rather, one may say its
chief characteristic, a characteristic which should specially endear it to our
present age, that throughout it is eminently reasonable. It is ever
encouraging the pupil to think and question and reason; I do not mean that it
encourages criticism for the sake of criticism or carping, or questioning for
the sake of idle curiosity, but that it is ever insisting on a right use of the
purified reason, and the striving to clarify the mind and soul and body, so
that they may become a crystal prism through which the One Ray of the Logos,
the All-Brilliancy, as Philo calls it, may shine with unimpeded lustre in clean
and clear colours according to the nature of the truth in manifestation.
And here we may attempt to
compare, though not with any idea of contrasting to the disparagement of
either, the greater simplicity of the Gnosis of the Mind with the dazzling
multiplicity and endless immensities of the, perhaps for my readers, more
familiar revelations of the Christianised Gnosis. They are two aspects of the
same Mystery; but whereas the former is conditioned by the clear thinking of
philosophic reason as set forth pre-eminently in the Logic of Plato, and
refuses to sever its contact with the things-that-are “here” as well as
“there,” the latter soars into such transcendent heights of vision and
apocalypsis, that it loses itself in ecstasies which cannot possibly be
registered in the waking consciousness.
I, for my part, love to try
to follow the seers of the Christian Gnosis in their soaring and
heaven-storming, love to plunge into the depths and greatnesses of their
spiritual intuitions; but it cannot but be admitted that this intoxication of
the spirit is a great danger for any but the most balanced minds. Indeed, it
is highly probable that such unrestrained outpourings of divine frenzy as we
meet with in some of the Christian Gnostic Apocalypses, were never intended to
be circulated except among those who had already proved themselves
self-restrained in the fullest meaning of the term.
The Trismegistic sermons show
us that such rapts and visions were also the privilege of “them who are in
Gnosis”; but they did not circulate the revelations of such mysteries; and
though they taught the disciple to dare all things in perhaps more daring terms
than we find recorded in any other scripture, they again and again force him to
bring all to the test of the practical reason, that so the vital substance
received from above may be rightly digested by the pure mind and fitly used to
nourish the nature below.
But as for us who are hearers
of the Gnosis, of Theosophy, wherever it is to be found, it would be unwise to
reject any experience of those who have gone before upon the Way. Whether we
call it the Gnosis of the Mind with the followers of Thrice-greatest Hermes, or
the Gnosis of the Truth as Marcus does, or by many another name given it by the
Gnostics of that day, it matters little; the great fact is that there is
Gnosis, and that men have touched her sacred robe and been healed of the vices
of their souls; and the mother-vice of the soul is ignorance, as Hermes says.
But this ignorance is not ignorance of the arts and sciences and the rest, but
ignorance of God; it is the true a-theism, the root-superstition of the human
mind and heart—the illusion that prevents a man realising the oneness of his
true self with the Divine.
The dawning of this sacred
conviction, the birth of this true faith, is the beginning of Gnosis; it is the
Glad Tidings, the Gnosis of Joy, at whose shining Sorrow flees away. This is
the Gospel, as Basilides the Gnostic conceived it, the Sun of Righteousness
with healing in His wings; that is to say, the Father in the likeness of a
dove—the Father of Light brooding over the sacred vessel, of divine chalice, or
cup, the awakened spiritual nature of the new-born son.
This is the true baptism, and
also the first miracle, as in the Gnosis of the Fourth Gospel, when the water
of the watery spheres is turned into the wine of the spirit at the first
marriage.
But perhaps my readers will
say: But this is the Christian Gnosis and not the Gnosis of the Mind! My dear
friends (if you will permit me, I would reply), there is no Christian Gnosis
and no Trismegistic Gnosis; there is but One Gnosis. If that Gnosis was for
certain purposes either associated with the name and mystic person of the Great
Teacher known as Jesus of Nazareth, or handed on under the typical personality
of Great Hermes, it is not for us to keep the two streams apart in heart and
head in water-tight compartments. The two traditions mutually interpret and
complete one another. They are contemporaneous; they are both part and parcel
of the same Economy. Read the fragments of these two forgotten faiths, or
rather the fragments of the two manifestations of this forgotten faith, and you
will see for yourself.
But again, some one may say
(as a matter of fact not a few have already said): What do we want with a
forgotten faith, fragmentary or otherwise? We are living in the twentieth
century; we do not want to return to the modes of thought of two thousand years
ago; we can create a new Gnosis that will interpret the facts of present-day
science and philosophy and religion.
I too await the dawn of that
New Age; but I doubt that the Gnosis of the New Age will be new. Certainly it
will be set forth in new forms, for the forms can be infinite. The Gnosis
itself is not conditioned by space and time; it is we who are conditioned by
these modes of manifestation. He who is reborn into the Gnosis becomes, as I
have heard, the lord of time and space, and passes from man into the state of
super-man and christ, or daimon and god, as a Hermes would have phrased it two
thousand years ago, or of bodhisattva and buddha, as it was phrased five
hundred years before that.
Indeed, if I believe rightly,
the very essence of the Gnosis is the faith that man can transcend the limits
of the duality that makes him man, and become a consciously divine being. The
problem he has to solve is the problem of his day, the transcending of his
present limitations. The way to do so is not, I venture to submit, by exalting
his present-day knowledge in science or philosophy or religion at the expense
of the little he can learn of the imperfect tradition of the religion and
philosophy and science of the past, handed on to us by the forgetfulness of a
series of ignorant and careless generations. The feeding of our present-day
vanity on the husks from the feasts of other days is a poor diet for one who
would be Gnostic. It is very true that, speaking generally, we do know more of
physical observation, analysis and classification, we do know more of the
theory of knowledge, and many other things in the domain of the lower memory
of appearances; but do we know more of religion as a living experience than the
great souls of the past; do we know more of the Gnosis than the Gnostics of
other days? I doubt it.
We are beginning once more to
turn our attention in the direction of the Greater Mysteries; the cycles of the
Æon are, I believe, once more set in a configuration similar to the mode of the
Time-Mind when such illumination is possible for numbers of souls, and not for
stray individuals only. But the conditions of receiving that illumination are
the same now as they have ever been; and one of the conditions is the power to
rise superior to the opinions of the Hour into the Gnosis of the Eternal Æon.
It therefore follows, if I am
right in my premises, that the illusion of all illusions that we must strive to
transcend is that of the Lord of the Hour; it is just the general opinion and
presuppositions and prejudices of our own day against which we must be on our
watch with greatest vigilance. There are certain forms of knowledge, forms of
religion, and forms of philosophy, that dominate every age and every hour;
these forms are most potent, for they are alive with the faith of millions; and
therefore it follows that it may be we shall find less difficulty in our
endeavour to pierce through the clouds of opinion to the living ideas beyond if
we study forms that are no longer charged with the passions of mankind—with
that storage of the hopes and fears of incarnated minds, the shock of which few
are strong enough to withstand. It may thus be that the forms of the Gnosis of
the past may be read more dispassionately and seen through more clearly.
However this may be, it would
be manifestly absurd to go back to the past and simply pour ourselves once more
into these ancient forms; this would be death and a mental and spiritual
reincarnation backward, so to speak. It is precisely this absurdity which so
many literalists attempt in theology, only to find themselves sticking in the
mud of dead forms with the tide of the spiritual life far out.
On the other hand, there may
be some who feel that in what has been said above the artist and lover of the Beautiful
in us risk to be sacrificed entirely to the Philistine. There is such a thing
as scripture; there are such things as the best books. Non refert quam
multos sed quam bonos libros legas; it is not the quantity but the quality
of the books we read that is of importance. The Gnosis is enshrined in
scripture, in bibles and not in books. And I doubt not that even today there
are enough bible-lovers, in the wider sense of the word, among us to appreciate
the beautiful and permanent in literature.
The Trismegistic sermons have
a common language with the writers of the New Testament book, and they also use
the language of Plato. They can, therefore, hardly be said to be out of date
even as to their form; while as to their content, as far as their main ideas
are concerned, I venture to say that they pertain to the great books of the
world, they are part of the world scripture.
If, then, any would learn of
the Gnosis of the Mind, they will not lose anything by reading what the
disciples of this form of the Wisdom-Tradition have handed on to us. They may
prefer more modern expositions, or they may find some other scripture of the
past more suitable to their needs; but if they are lovers of comparative
theosophy, and are persuaded that he who is acquainted with one mode of
theosophy only does not know theosophy truly, even as he who is acquainted with
one language only knows no language really, they may learn much by comparing
the theosophy of Hermes-Gnostics with the theosophy of the Christian Gnostics,
or of the Buddhist or Brahmanical lovers of the Gnosis.
The Theosophical Society in Australia
THE GNOSIS OF THE MIND