Gnostic and Pagan Worldviews

For insiders the distinctions between Pagan and New Age practices and beliefs are clear, but from a distance these movements often appear similar. While they certainly share some things in common from a sociological viewpoint, for instance the lack of any governing or central source of authority, New Age is a predominantly Gnostic movement, seeking improvement of the human condition, while Paganism remains largely a venerative gesture towards things as they already are.

In a world where everything is for sale, including enlightenment, with many contemporary spiritualities it's important to distinguish between the consumer-friendly sound-bite shortcuts favoured by the mass-media and tailored towards marketability, and look deeper beneath surface impressions

GNOSTIC PERSPECTIVES

Gnosis is a Greek term referring specifically to experiential knowledge, and a Gnostic is one who believes one can attain direct knowledge, experience, of God or the divine. A gnostic spiritual path is one which seeks to attain divine knowledge, implicating a fault with consciousness and perception as it currently is. The quest for gnosis can be seen as relative to a quest for enlightenment, the idea that awareness without the light of divinity is somehow at fault, and one can only become complete through the apprehension of divine truths. The particular system which enables one to reach Gnosis or enlightenment we can call a teleology, originally referring to the means to salvation in a Christian sense, but this idea of salvation is itself routed in Gnostic ideas of experience with God and completeness of being and is a useful term to refer to any system, like either the human potential movement or even magickal paths, whose practice is designed to change situations, most markedly human consciousness and perception.

While the vast majority of scholarship in the past two-thousand years mentioning Gnosticism sourced its studies in historical documents that presented Gnosticism as 'heresy' against the Christian church, many contemporary authors, starting perhaps with Elaine Pagels' studies of the Nag Hammadi library, present a more balanced view of Gnosticism, presenting it as both a source and a contemporary of early Christian practice, rather then merely its enemy. Gnosticism is then, a means by which the human can experience the divine, and refers to any system that purports to bridge the gap between human and divine experience, rendering the practitioner with a refined sense of self and the universe. Seminal spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff's description of the True and the False centre is one example of this teleology at play, as his teachings, communicating a system he termed The Work, encourage the practitioner to move away from the False Centre through the manipulation of attention during mundane tasks, and thereby come to know and embody the True Centre. Here is a clear example of a Gnostic teleology, a practice whereby the student refines consciousness towards a currently unperceived truth.

In this way, Gnosticism is concerned with means towards an end. An end which almost universally results in improvement of the human condition.

PAGAN PERSPECTIVES

Pagan worship and lifestyle tends not to have a teleology, or look beyond the now towards a time when things will be perfect. Everything is already perfect, what's necessary is to recognise the sacredness of Nature and her cycles, and find means of connecting with them. There is no drive towards Enlightenment, or Gnosis as an end. While goals of understanding and bonding with nature and receiving communion with and favour from spirits is one goal of paganism, there is no particular teleological scheme.

What might complicate these particular divisions are certain streams of Hinduism which involve pagan worship but often, particularly with Tantric traditions, evidence a teleology moving towards Moksha, or liberation, again corollary with the idea of Gnosis, seeing things as they truly are and not as they appear to be to the unrefined senses. Another difficult hurdle in the clear division between the Gnostic and the Pagan are the modern Wiccan movements, grown from such occult orders as the Ordo Templi Orientis, whose central tenets and practices are again, Gnostic. Within the three grades present in most Wiccan systems is encoded a teleology and initiate schema modeled along the lines of the eleven degree, psuedo-masonic grade structure of the OTO. Wicca even shares the term 'Craft' with Freemasonry to refer to its practices. A perusal of Freemasonic doctrine hints towards Freemasonry being a Gnostic spirituality, with a wide open teleological structure. It is with movements such as Wicca that Neo-pagan serves as a useful description. I would even volunteer the description Crypto-Gnostic to refer to such movements as Wicca and Druidry, as they present a pagan face while maintaining a definite Gnostic teleology. This places a further division possible within the modern pagan revival, championed by Graham Harvey in his study of contemporary paganism, Listening People, Speaking Earth, that views pagan religiosity in terms of a Mystery Religion, focusing upon initiation and revelation of divine truths, and a Nature Religion, centering upon the worship of nature as divinity embodied.

The most clear-cut 'pagan' religions are the remaining indigenous traditions of scattered tribes, from the tundras of Siberia to the Amazonian rainforest. The vast majority of modern pagan religions in the west have developed from the same streams as the New Age movement itself, in some cases being a continuation of the Occult tradition which as a practice in history possesses an unbroken line from Ancient Egypt (at least!) into the present day.

THE NEO-GNOSTIC AND THE NEO-PAGAN

While acknowledging that some paganism is gnostic, and that some gnosticism is pagan, we can perhaps see how the terms Neo-Gnostic and Neo-Pagan come into use to describe the particular eccentricities and eclecticism of new forms of these old ways. As spirituality is often deeply interwoven with cultural identity, some practitioners remain picky about what particular description is ascribed to them, but these divisions are tools for understanding rather than stone-set meta-descriptions of contemporary faiths and practices. They can assist in the important task of finding where a practice came from, and further clarify the kind of spirituality one is talking about without recourse to vague umbrella terms which at first describe too much, then proceed to describe far too little.

N.B. Thanks to Prof. Michael York who as far as I know pioneered this useful classification between pagan and New Age.

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