Theosophy - Gnosis of the Mind by G.R.S.Mead
GNOSIS OF THE MIND
by G.R.S.
Mead
1906
Under this
general title of Gnosis is now being published a series of small volumes, drawn
from, or based upon, the mystic, theosophic and gnostic writings of the ancients,
so as to make more easily audible for the ever-widening circle of those who
love such things, some echoes of the mystic experiences and initiatory lore
of their spiritual ancestry. There are many who love the life of the spirit,
and who long for the light of gnostic illumination, but who are not sufficiently
equipped to study the writings of the ancients at first hand, or to follow unaided
the labours of scholars. These little volumes are therefore intended to serve
as introduction to the study of the more difficult literature of the subject;
and it is hoped that at the same time they may become for some, who have, as
yet, not even heard of the Gnosis, steppingstones to higher things.
G. R. S. Mead
The references in this
volume are to the recently-published work Thrice Greatest Hermes:
Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis. Being a Translation of the
Extant Sermons
and Fragments of the Trismegistic Literature, with Prolegomena, Commentaries
and Notes, 3 vols. (London, 1906).
For
long I have been spending much of my time in a world of great beauty of thought
and purity of feeling, created by the devotion and intelligence of one of the
many theosophical fraternities of the ancient world. They called themselves
disciples of Thrice-greatest Hermes, and sometimes spoke of their faith as the
Religion of the Mind. They were prior to and contemporary with the origins and
earliest centuries of Christianity, and they lived in Egypt.
What remains of their scriptures
and what can be gleaned of their endeavour has recently been made accessible
in the English tongue, in such fashion as I have been able to reproduce their
thought and interpret it. The labour of many months is ended; the task of reproduction
is accomplished, and the echoes of the Gnosis of Thrice-greatest Hermes are
audible across the centuries for English ears in fuller volume than before,
and I hope in greater clarity.
It is no small thingthis
Gnosis of ten-thousand-times-great Hermes, as Zosimus in an ecstasy of enthusiasm
calls Him; for it has as its foundation the Single Love of God, it endeavours
to base itself upon the True Philosophy and Pure Science of Nature and of Man,
and is indeed one of the fairest forms of the Gnosis of the Ages. It is replete
with Wisdom (Theosophia) and Worship (Theosebeia) in harmonythe
Religion of the Mind. It is in its beginning Religion, true devotion and piety
and worship, based on the right activity and passivity of the Mind, and its
end is the Gnosis of things-that-are and the Path of the Good that leads man
unto God.
Do I claim too much for
the Gnosis of Thrice-greatest Hermes? I do but echo what He teaches in His own
words (or rather those of His disciples) turned into English speech. The claim
made is for the Gnosis, not for the forms of its expression used by its learners
and hearers. All these forms of expression, the many sermons, or sacred discourses,
of the disciples of this Way, are but means to lead men towards the Gnosis;
they are not the Gnosis itself. True, much that is set forth appears to me to
be very beautifully expressed, and I have been delighted with many a thought
and phrase that these nameless writers and thinkers of years long ago have handed
down to us in the fair Greek tongue; all this however, is as a garment that
hides the all-beautiful natural form and glory of the Truth.
What is of importance is
that all these Theosophists of the Trismegistic tradition declare with one voicea
sweet voice, that carries with it conviction within, to the true knower in our
inmost soulthat there is Gnosis and Certitude, full and inexhaustible,
no matter how the doubting mind, opinion, the counterfeit mind, may weave its
magic of contrary appearances about us.
Seeing, then, that I have
now much in mind of what has been written of this Religion of the Mind, I would
set down a few thoughts thereon as they occur to me, an impression or two that
the contemplation of the beautiful sermons of the disciples of the Mastermind
has engraved upon my memory.
And first of all I would
say that I regard it as a great privilege to have been permitted by the Gods
to be a hander-on in some small way of these fair things; for indeed it is a
great privilege and high honour to be allowed in any fashion to forward the
preparation for the unveiling of the beauties of the Gnosis in the hearts of
one's fellows,even in so insignificant a way as that of translating
and commenting on that which has already been set forth by greater minds in
greater beauty centuries ago. The feeling that so pleasant a task has been granted
by the Providence of God as a respite on the way (to use a phrase of Plotinus').
And so, as in all sacred acts, we begin with praise and thankfulness to God,
as Hermes teaches us.
But when is there (the disciple
of the Master will interject) an act that is not sacred for one who is a "man"
and not a "procession of Fate"? He who is coming unto himself, who
from the unconscious and the dead is beginning to return to consciousness and
rise into life, self-consecrates his every act for ever deeper realisation of
the mystery of his divine nature; for now no longer is he an embryo within the
womb, nourished in all things by the Mother-Soul, but a man-babe new born, breathing
the freer spirit of the greater life, the cosmic airs of the Father-Mind. And
so it is that every act and function of the body should be consecrated to the
Soul and Mind; the traveller on this Way should pray unceasingly, by devoting
his every act unto his God; thinking when eating: As this food nourishes the
body, so may the Bread of Wisdom nourish the mind; or when bathing: As this
water purifies the body, so may the Water of Life vivify the mind; or when freeing
the body of impurities: As these impurities pass from the body, so may the refuse
of opinion pass from the mind!
Not, however, that he should
think that anything is in itself unclean or common, for all is of the divine
substance and of mother-matter; this he already knows in his heart of hearts,
but his lower members are not as yet knit together in right harmony; they are
as yet awry, not centred in the perfect whole. He as yet sees things from only
one point; he has not yet realised that the Point is everywhere, and that for
everything there is a point of view whence it is true and right and beautiful
and good. That all-embracing point of view is the one sense, all-sense, the
common sense, the sense of the intelligence, in which the sensible and the intelligible
are identical and not apart. It is the little mind, the mind in man, the fate-procession,
that creates external duality; the Great Mind knows that the without and the
within are twain in one, are self-conditioned complements, the one within the
other and without the other at one and the same time.
In this Religion of the
Mind there is no opposition of the heart and head. It is not a cult of intellect
alone, it is not a cult of emotion alone; it is the Path of Devotion and Gnosis
inseparably united, the true Sacred Marriage of Soul and Mind, of Life and Light,
the ineffable union of God the Mother and God the Father in the Divine Man,
the Logos, the Alone-Begotten of the Mystery of Mysteries, the All and OneIneffability
and Effability eternally in simultaneous Act and Passion.
And if you should object
to the word Mind as excluding other names of equal dignity, know that this also
has been spoken of again and again by the disciples of Thrice-greatest Hermes.
He has no name, for He is
the One of Many names, nay, He is the One of all names, for He is Name itself
and all things else, and there is naught that is not He. Nor is He One alone,
though He is the One and Only One, for He is All and Nothing, if such a thing
as nothing there can be.
But we, because of our ignorance,
call Him Mind, for Mind is that which knows, and ignorance seeks ever for its
other self, and the other self of ignorance is Gnosis. And seeking Gnosis, whether
it love or hate its own false view of what it seeks, ignorance is ever changing
into some form of knowing, experiencing some novelty or other as it thinks,
not knowing that it is experiencing itself. But Mind is not only that which
knows, but also the object of all knowledge; for it knows itself alone, there
being nothing else to know but Mind. It self-creates itself to know itself,
and to know itself it must first not know itself. Mind thus makes ignorance
and Gnosis, but is not either in itself. It is itself the Mystery that makes
all mysteries in order that it may be self-initiate in all.
Thus we are taught that
Mind, the Great Initiator, is Master of all masterhood, Master of all ignorance
as well as knowledge. And so we find the Supreme addressing one of His Beloved
Sons, one who has won the mastery of self, as "Soul of my Soul and Mind
of My own Mind."
The Religion of the Mind is pre-eminently one of initiation, of perpetual perfectioning.
The vista of possibility opened up to the mind's eye of the neophyte into these
sacred rites transcends credibility. One asks oneself again and again: Can this
be true? It seems too good to be true.
But how can it be "too
good" (the Master smiles in reply) when the inevitable end of everything
is the Perfection of perfection, The Good Itself?
It cannot be too good, for
that which is too good is out of its own self; but with the Good there is neither
too little nor too much, it is Perfection.
What then, we feebly ask,
is imperfection? And in the Master-Presence we cannot but reply: It is the doubt
"It is too good" that is the imperfection of our nature; we fear it
cannot be for us, not knowing that the "little one" who catches some
glimpse of the vista, the earnest of the Vision Glorious, sees not something
without, but that which is within himself. It is all there potentially, the
full Sonship of the Father. It is there and here and everywhere, for it is the
nature of our very being.
The first glimpse of this
Divine possibility is brought to the consciousness of the prepared disciple
by the immediate Presence and Glory of the Master, according to the records
of the followers of the Religion of the Mind. But who is the Master? Is He someone
without us; is He some other one; is He some teacher who sets forth a formal
instruction?
Not so. "This race,"
that is to say, he who is born in this natural way, "is never taught, but
when the time is ripe, its memory is restored by God." It is not therefore
some new thing; it is not the becoming of something or other; it is a return
to the same, we become what we have ever been. The dream is ended and we wake
to life.
And so in one of the marvellous
descriptions of initiation handed on in the Trismegistic sermons, in which the
disciple is reborn, or born in Mind, he is all amazed that his "father"
and initiator here below should remain there before him just as he ever was
in his familiar form, while the efficacious rite is perfected by his means.
The "father" of this "son" is the link, the channel of the
Gnosis; the true initiation is performed by the Great Initiator, the Mind.
And that this is so may
be learned from another sermon, in which a disciple of a higher grade is initiated
without any intermediate link; by himself, alone as far as any physical presence
of another is concerned, he is embraced by the Great Presence and instructed
in the mystery.
The office of the "father"
is to bring the "son" to union with himself, so that he may be born
out of ignorance into Gnosis, born in Mind, his Highest Self, and so become
Son of the Father indeed.
What is most striking in
the whole of the tradition of the Mind-doctrine is its impersonal nature. In
this it stands out in sharp contrast with the popular Christianity and other
saving cults contemporary with it. It is true that the sermons are set forth
mostly in the form of instruction of teacher to pupil. We learn to love Hermes
and Asclepius and Tat and Ammon, and become friends with all of them in turn;
they seem to be living men, with well-marked characters. But they are not historical
characters; they are types. There is an Ammon, a Tat, an Asclepius, and a Hermes,
in each one of us, and that is why we learn to love them. The "holy four"
are in the shrine of our hearts; but transcending all, embracing all, is the
Shepherd of all men, the Love Divine that through the lips of our Hermes teaches
usas Asclepius or Tat or Ammonas we have ears to hear
the words of power, or eyes to see the gnostic splendour of the teaching.
Nay, more than this; such
instruction, beautiful and true as it may be, is not the highest teaching of
the Mind. They who are born in Mind, are taught by Mind by every act and every
thought and every sensation. The Mind eternally instructs the man through body,
soul and mind; for now the man begins to know through all of these, for he is
changing from the little mind and soul and body that he was to the Great Body
and Great Soul and Mind of the Great Man. He no longer seeks a teacher, for
all things teach him, or rather the One Teacher teaches him through all. All
that there is transforms itself for him into the nature of the Gnosis of the
Good.
No longer is he a hearer,
but the Hearer; for he has ears on all sides to hear the voice of Nature, Spouse
of the Divine, in everything that breathes and all that seems to have no lifethe
simultaneous winter and summer of the Lord.
No longer is he a seer,
but the Seer; for he has eyes on all sides to see the beauty of the whole, and
fairest things in things that are most foul.
No longer is he a doer,
but the Doer; for all he does is consecrated to the Lord who dedicates Himself
to acting in the man.
And so all of his senses
and his energies are set on the Great Work of self-initiation in the Mysteries
of God; his life becomes illumined by the glory of perpetual perfectioning,
and he no longer thinks that he has ever been other than now he is. For memory
is ever present with him, and the memory of the Mind is of the nature of eternity,
which transcends all time and sees all past and future and all present in the
instant that endures for evermore.
And what does the Religion
of the Mind teach us of God, the universe and man? It teaches us many things
of great solemnity and joyous presage; but one thing especially it seems to
teach, and that is the impossibility of human speech to tell the mystery. For
every man is but a letter in the language of the Gods; so that all that a man
may write, no matter how well stocked his mind may be with systems of the world
or of theology, or with the science of the human state, no matter how exactly
he may reproduce his thought and trick it forth in fairest human languageall
that he can express is but a single letter of his Word. The Words of God are
written with the general purposed acts of men, and are not uttered by their
individual spoken speech or penned with written words. The Words of God are
spoken by the energies of Nature, and are not written on the surfaces of things;
the surfaces of things are scribbled over with the false appearances that men
project from their unknowing minds.
How then can men describe
the universe, except by their inscribing of themselves upon the fields of space?
To describe the universe as it is they must become the universe, and then they
will describe themselves; and to describe themselves they will be able to discover
no better way than that in which the universe gives utterance to itself. It
speaks perpetually the Language of the Gods, the Universal Tongue, for it is
God for ever giving utterance unto Himself.
The Tongue of the Eternal
is the Mind of God. It is by Mind, the Reason of His Self-subsistence, that
He perpetually speaks forth all things.
Thus we learn that the Religion of the Mind is pre-eminently the Religion of
the Logos, and throughout the whole of our Trismegistic tractates no name comes
more frequently before us than the word Logos. For the Logos is the Word of
God, not in the sense of a single Word, but the Word in the sense of the Universal
Scripture of all worlds and of all men.
And so it is that Hermes
is the Scribe of the Gods. Not that Hermes is one of the Gods who is a scribe
for the rest, as though they could not write themselves; but Hermes is the Logos
of God, and the Words he writes are Gods.
We men are letters of our
Word or our God; for man has the glorious destiny before him, nay, the actuality
even now in his universal nature, of being a God, a Divine Being, of the nature
of Gnosis and Joy and Subsistence. That Word has written itself many times in
the world, now one letter and now another; it spells itself in many ways, in
sequences of lives of men, and of other lives as well.
And time will be when each
and every God-Word, in its own proper turn, will sound forth in all its glory,
not letter by letter, but the whole Word simultaneously on earth; and a Christ
will be born and all Nature will rejoice, and the world of men will know or
be ignorant according to the nature of the times and the manner of the utterance
of the Word.
Such are some of the ideas aroused by some of the leading conceptions 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 that fairest wordGnosis.
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 Juda
was the Holy 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, 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 or 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 centered 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 expressing the living ideas
that came to birth in their hearts and heads, made use of the philosophy and
science and art of their day. It is, in very deed, one of the stories 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 garments 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 infrequently remain in the paths of clear reason, and offer us
an unimpeded view of vistas of the Plain of Truth. But even when they hold most
closely to the world-representations and man-knowledges of their own day they
are not without interest; for it may be that in their notions of living naturethe
very antipodes of our modern day opinions based on the dead surfaces of thingsthey
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 many 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 that 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 himselfa
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 thata monad. And the destiny of man is that he should become
the Monad of monads, or the Mind of Godthe 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 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 on, 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 incompletenessthe 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 Pl' r ma when set over against the conception of
space, and the on 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 BodyLight, Life and Substance, co-eternal together
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 Divinethe 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 of 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 himselfmeaning 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 pedantic 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, many 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 greatness of their spiritual intuitions;
yet 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 atheism, 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 dovethe
Father of Light brooding over the sacred vessel, or 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 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
watertight 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 yourselves.
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
Superman 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 world 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 on 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
on.
It therefore follows, if
I am right in my premises, that the illusion of all illusions which we must
strive to transcend is that of the Lord of the Hour; it is just the general
opinions 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" backwards, so to speak. It is precisely this absurdity
which so many literalists attempt in theology, only to find themselves stranded
among 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 books, 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 belong 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 the Hermes-Gnostics
with the theosophy of the Christian Gnostics, or of the Buddhist or Brahmanical
lovers of the Gnosis.
In conclusion, I would add
a few quotations touching the Gnosis from the Trismegistic sermons; for, as
Lactantius, the Church Father, tells us of the Holy Scribe who inspired these
scriptures:
"He wrote books,
indeed many of them, treating of the Gnosis of things divine, in which he
asserts the Greatness of the Highest and One and Only God" (iii., 233).
Yes, He wrote many books,
whether we call Him "Hermes" or by any other of His many names. For
as He says in another scripture of that Day of Sunshine, writing of the inner
history of the Christ-Mystery, most probably before even there were as yet any
Christian scriptures:
"Wherefore, send
me, O Father!
Seals in my hands, I will descend;
Through eons universal will I make a Path;
Through mysteries all I'll open up a Way!
All Forms of Gods will I display;
The Secrets of the Holy Path I will hand on,
And call them Gnosis" (i., 192).
Yes, He wrote many books,
many sermons and sacred discourses, entitled by many names, one of them called
precisely: "An Introduction to the Gnosis of the Nature of All Things"
(ii., 68).
Not that there is any precise
beginning of the Gnosis or any definite introduction confined to any formal
instruction; it may be presented in infinite modes to the learner and hearer,
for it is like unto its Great Original.
And so we read:
"For to the Good
there is no other shore; It hath no bounds; It is without an end; and for
Itself It is without beginning, too, though unto us It seemeth to have onethe
Gnosis.
"Therefore to It Gnosis is no beginning; rather is it that Gnosis doth
afford to us the first beginning of Its being known" (ii., 90).
And so again we find a Jewish
mystic, who wrote just prior to the days of Paul, quoting from some scriptures
of the Gnosis (in all probability from one of the lost sermons of our School)
which sets forth the matter in still greater clarity in the striking aphorism:
"The beginning
of Perfection is Gnosis of Man; but Gnosis of God is Perfect Perfection"
(i., 178).
Thus Hermes in teaching
his beloved son, the seeker, the suppliant and hearer, how to set his feet upon
the path of self-realisation, points out the way in the wise and gentle words:
"Seek'st thou
for God, thou seekest for the Beautiful. One is the Path that leadeth unto
ItDevotion joined with Gnosis" (ii., 114).
And again he sets forth
the boundary-marks of the Way of the Good Commandments in admirable instruction,
saying:
"The Seeds of
God, 'tis true, are few, but vast and fair and goodvirtue and
self-control, devotion. Devotion is God-Gnosis; and he who knoweth God, being
filled with all good things, thinks godly thoughts and not thoughts like the
many think.
"For this cause
they who Gnostic are, please not the many, nor the many them. They are thought
mad and laughed at; they're hated and despised, and sometimes even put to
death. . . .
"But he who is
a devotee of God, will bear with allonce he has sensed the Gnosis.
For such an one all things, e'en though they be for others bad, are for him
good; deliberately he doth refer them all unto the Gnosis. And, thing most
marvellous, 'tis he alone who maketh bad things good.'" (ii., 131).
The devotee of God is the
Gnostic, and "they who are Gnostic" stand in the original as "they
who are in Gnosis." It is of more than ordinary interest to compare this
simple statement of fact addressed to "those in Gnosis" with the well-known
words adapted from some early collection of "Logoi of the Lord" for
the comfort of "those in Faith." What the Sayings preserved by the
first and third evangelists may have been in their original form, we do not
know, though any day the Oxhyrhynchus "rubbish-heaps" may yield us
a clue. Some of these "Sayings of the Lord" which in their original
form circulated in the inner communities, were, in the highest probability,
subsequently adapted to the prophetical mood by a Christian evangelist prior
to our first and third synoptists. Thus we find the writer of our First Gospel
handing on one of these Sayings as:
"Blessed are ye
when they shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil
against you, lying, for My sake."
Here the "lying"
is evidently the gloss of some scrupulous scribe who knew there were some things
that could be said against them justly; whereas the third evangelist keeps closer
to his original, writings:
"Blessed are ye
when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you forth (from them),
and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of
the Man."
But even so there still
seems to be a blend of two traditions before the Saying reached the hands of
our third evangelist. The antithesis between "men" and "Son of
the Man" is familiar to us in our Trismegistic sermons, and would be understood
by all who knew of the "Myth of Man in the Mysteries" (i., 139-198);
it is clearly to be distinguished from the "My sake" of the first
evangelist. Whereas the separating forth and the casting forth of the name as
evil are, I believe, to be understood as expulsion of members of a community
and the removal of their names from the list of the brethren.
But to return to the Gnosis.
Devotion is God-Gnosis. True Piety is "nothing else than the Gnosis of
God"as Lactantius, quoting Hermes, phrases it in Latin (ii.,
243). This piety, however, is something other than pious exercise and the practice
of devotional worship; it leads unto "the complete or all-perfect contemplation,"
and embraces the "learning of the things-that-are, the contemplating of
their nature and the knowing God"; or, in other words, the "being
taught the nature of the all and the Supreme Vision" (ii., 264). And that
Supreme Vision, if I understand aright, is no rapt into regions beyond the sky,
but a Seeing of the Good in everything. For the Master of this Way teaches his
disciple concerning the Gnosis of the Good, that is the Gnosis of God, saying:
"For only then
wilt thou upon It gaze when thou canst say no word concerning It. For Gnosis
of the Good is holy silence and a giving holiday to every sense." It
is the gaining of the "all sense," the "common sense,"
the "sense of the intelligence."
"For neither can
he who perceiveth It, perceive aught else, nor he who gazeth on It, gaze on
aught else; nor hear aught else... And shining then all round his mind, It
shines through his whole soul, and draws it out of body, transforming all
of him to essence."
"For it is possible,
my son, that a man's soul should be made like to God, e'en while it still
is in a body, if it doth contemplate the Beauty of the Good" (ii., 144).
This is the "deification"
or "apotheosis" of a man; he becomes like unto God, in that he becomes
a God. The Beauty of the Good is the Cosmic Order; and the mode of meditation
was that of self-realisation whereby the soul is brought into sympathy with
the Cosmic Soul.
And so speaking of such
a soul, of one gnostic in true piety, Hermes writes:
"But on the pious
soul the Mind doth mount and guide it to the Gnosis' Light. And such a soul
doth never tire in songs of praise to God and pouring blessing on all men,
and doing good in word and deed to all, in imitation of its Sire."
(ii., 155).
And so again in the outer
preaching, in warning the multitude against the "fierce flood" of
ignorance, the missionary of the Gnosis and evangelist of Salvation exhorts
them, saying:
"Be then not carried
off by the fierce flood, but using the shore-current, ye who can, make for
Salvation's port, and, harbouring there, seek ye for one to take you by the
hand and lead you unto Gnosis' Gates.
"Where shines
clear Light, of every darkness clean, where not a single soul is drunk, but
sober all they gaze with their hearts' eyes on Him who willeth to be seen.
"No ear can hear
Him, nor can eye see Him, nor tongue speak of Him, but only mind and heart."
(ii., 121).
And from this preaching
we learn the very interesting fact that there was some great association that
the Gnostic evangelist regarded as Salvation's port, a harbour of refuge for
many; but even when safe within the quiet of the discipline that could calm
the waves of the fierce flood of passion and ignorance, there was still a further
adventure for the soul before the Light of the New Day dawned. A guide who knew
the Way to the Gates of the Spiritual Sun must be found, one who was "in
Gnosis" and not only "in Faith."
For faith is conditioned
upon feeling, upon sense, and not knowledge; as Hermes says:
"But Gnosis is
far different from sense. For sense is brought about by that which hath the
mastery o'er us, while Gnosis is the end of science, and science is God's
gift" (ii., 147).
It is true that a refuge
can be found in the Harbour of Salvation by means of Faith; but Salvation itself
is Gnosis.
"This is the sole
Salvation for a manGod's Gnosis. This is the Way up to the Mount.
"By Him alone
the soul becometh good, not whiles is good, whiles evil, but good out of necessity."
(ii., 150).
And again He says:
"The virtue of
the soul is Gnosis. For he who knows, he good and pious is, and still while
on the earth Divine." (ii., 146).
For in this view of the
mystery, in consonance with the teaching of the Buddha, and with Indian theosophy
in general, "the soul's vice is ignorance." And so we find Gnosis
heading the list of virtuesGnosis, Joy, Self-control, Continence,
Righteousness, Sharing-with-all, Truth; a septenary consummated in the divine
triad of Life, Light and the Good (ii., 246). For Gnosis is that which doth
distribute life to all, and light to all, and good to all (ii., 296). And so
the Master, in the spiritual theurgic rite at which he consecrates his beloved
son to the holy life, declares:
"Gnosis of God
hath come to us, and when this comes, my son, not-knowing is cast out.
"Gnosis of Joy
hath come to us, and on its coming, son, sorrow will flee away to them who
give it room." (ii., 225).
For it is by this "enformation
according to Gnosis" that the man is made like unto the Great Man, the
Good Mind or Reason of God. This Gnosis is not only Light and Life, the father-motherhood
of God, but also Love. It is this Love of the Gnosis, of that which gives light
and life to all, that urges on the disciple; it is the Breath of God Himself
energizing in the heart, inspiring us. It is the Providence or Foresight of
God, the Holy Spirit. And so in one of the sacred discourses, called "The
Perfect Sermon," we read:
"To them, sunk
in fit silence reverently, their souls and minds pendent on Hermes' lips,
thus Love Divine began to speak" (iii., 260).
To be Knowers we must be
Lovers; we must have "the Single Love, the Love of wisdom-loving, which
consists in Gnosis of Divinity alonethe practice of perpetual contemplation
and of holy piety" (ii., 330).
Of such Lovers and such
Gnostics we read:
"But they who
have received some portion of God's gift, these, son, if we judge by their
deeds, have from Death's bonds won their release; for they embrace in their
own mind all things, things on the earth, things in the heaven, and things
above the heavenif they be aught.
"And having raised
themselves so far they sight the Good; and having sighted It, they look upon
their sojourn here as a mischance; and in disdain of all, both things in body
and the bodiless, they speed their way unto that One and Only One.
"This is, my son,
the Gnosis of the Mind, vision of things Divine; God-knowledge is it, for
the Mind is God's." (ii., 88).
Hard as it may be to leave
the "things we have grown used to," the things habitual, it must be
done if we are to enter into the Way of the Gnosis. But no new Path is this,
no going forth into new lands (though it may have all the appearance of being
so). The entrance on the Path of the Gnosis is a Going Home; it is a Return
a Turning-Back (a true Repentance of the whole nature). "We
must turn ourselves back into the Old, Old Way" (ii., 98).
And for those who will thus
"repent," there are promises and words of fair comfort spoken by the
Mind Himself in the Gospel of the Gnosis called "The Shepherd of Men":
"I, Mind, Myself
am present with holy men and good, the pure and merciful, men who live piously.
"To such my Presence
doth become an aid, and straightway they gain Gnosis of all things, and win
the Father's love by their pure lives, and give Him thanks, invoking on Him
blessings and chanting hymns, intent on Him with ardent love." (ii.,
14).
And to the truth of this,
testimony is borne by one of those in Gnosis who had heard and had believed
and had known, when he writes:
"But I, with thanks
and blessings unto the Father of the universal Powers, was freed, full of
the Power He had poured into me, and full of what He'd taught me of the nature
of the all and of the loftiest vision" (ii., 17).
And so he begins to preach
to men "the Beauty of Devotion and of the Gnosis"; for he cannot refrain
from uttering the Word, now that he has become a knower, a doer, and not a hearer
only. He prays no longer for himself, but that he may be the means whereby the
rest of human kind may come to Light and Life, saying:
"Give ear to me
who pray that I may ne'er of Gnosis fail, Gnosis which is our common being's
nature; and fill me with Thy Power, and with this Grace of Thine, that I may
give the Light to those in ignorance of the Race, my brethren and Thy sons"
(ii., 20)
With these brief indications
of the Gnosis of the Mind, drawn from a wealth of like noble teachings, we bring
to an end the first volume of these "Echoes from the Gnosis," in the
hope that there may be some who will turn to the fair originals, and "read,
mark, learn and inwardly digest them."
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