Gnostic and Mystical Brotherhoods: Theosis Through Secret Knowledge

Gnosticism is a term used by historians of religion to describe a group of religious and philosophical movements that flourished in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world in the 1st through 4th centuries CE, and that taught, at the heart of their various systems, that salvation comes through a kind of saving knowledge — gnosis in Greek — of the true nature of the divine, of the cosmos, and of the human self. The Gnostic movements were condemned as heretical by the early Christian church, and most of their texts were lost or destroyed; what survived did so, mostly, in the writings of their opponents. In 1945, however, a cache of Coptic Gnostic texts, the so-called Nag Hammadi library, was discovered in Upper Egypt, and the modern scholarly study of Gnosticism was born.

The question of whether there is a continuous “mystery tradition” running from the ancient Gnostics through the medieval Cathars and the Renaissance Hermeticists and into the modern Western esoteric orders is a controversial one, and it is one of the most important questions in the history of esoteric traditions and mystical orders. The mainstream scholarly position, articulated by scholars such as Michael Williams and Karen King, is that there is no such continuous tradition, and that the various “Gnostic” elements in the modern Western esoteric tradition are reinterpretations rather than survivals. The alternative position, often associated with older or more traditionalist writers, is that there is such a tradition, and that the Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and alchemical orders of the 19th century are, in some sense, its heirs. The reader who wants to understand the history of secret societies needs to understand both positions.

The Historical Gnostic Movements

The historical Gnostic movements of the 1st through 4th centuries were a diverse group of religious and philosophical systems, with significant differences between them. The most important schools include the Sethians, the Valentinians, the Basilideans, the Mandaeans, the Manichaeans, and a long list of other, less well-known groups named for their founders or for their central mythological figures. What they had in common was a set of themes: a sharp distinction between the supreme, unknowable God and the inferior creator of the material world; a doctrine of the divine spark imprisoned in matter; a mythology of the soul’s fall and ascent; a valuation of esoteric knowledge as the means of salvation; and a deep suspicion of the material world and of the body.

The Sethians, who took their name from the third son of Adam and Eve, taught that the true God is utterly transcendent and that the material world is the creation of a lesser, ignorant, or malevolent being sometimes called the Demiurge. The supreme God sent a series of saviors, including Seth, to awaken the divine sparks imprisoned in human bodies. The Sethian texts are among the most beautiful and elaborate of the Gnostic corpora, and they include the famous Apocryphon of John, which narrates the structure of the Pleroma, the divine fullness, and the tragic fall of Sophia, the lowest aeon, whose error produces the material world.

The Valentinians, who took their name from the 2nd-century teacher Valentinus, were the largest and most philosophically sophisticated of the Gnostic schools. Valentinus taught that the Pleroma, the divine fullness, is composed of 30 aeons arranged in pairs, and that the human self is composed of a material body, a soul, and a divine spirit, the last of which can be awakened by the saving knowledge disclosed in the Valentinian initiation. The Valentinian system is, in many ways, a Christianized and elaborated form of the older Platonic and Middle Platonic traditions, and it is one of the most important examples of the way in which Gnostic thought drew on the larger Greek philosophical world.

The Basilideans, who took their name from the 2nd-century teacher Basilides, were an Alexandrian school that combined elements of Gnosticism with the philosophy of the pre-Socratic thinkers. The Manichaeans, founded by the 3rd-century prophet Mani in Mesopotamia, were a major world religion in their own right, with a complex cosmological system that combined Christian, Zoroastrian, and Gnostic elements, and that survived in Central and East Asia for more than a thousand years after Mani’s death. The Mandaeans, who survive in small numbers in Iraq, Iran, and the diaspora, are a still-existing Gnostic religion, and their literature includes some of the most important extant Gnostic texts.

The Nag Hammadi Library

In December 1945, an Egyptian peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman, digging sabakh (a type of fertilizer) near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, discovered a sealed jar containing 13 codices of Coptic Gnostic texts. The texts had been copied in the 4th century, and they had been hidden, probably by a nearby monastic community, in the late 4th or 5th century, when the destruction of Gnostic texts by the now-dominant Christian church was well advanced. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi library is one of the most important manuscript finds of the 20th century, and it has transformed the scholarly study of ancient Gnosticism.

The library includes the only surviving copies of the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, the Tripartite Tractate, the Hypostasis of the Archons, the Apocryphon of Adam, the On the Origin of the World, and dozens of other texts, some of them known before only by their titles in ancient catalogues or in the writings of the heresiologists, and many of them previously completely unknown. The texts are in a Coptic translation from the Greek, and the original Greek versions, where they can be reconstructed, are typically dated to the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

The Nag Hammadi library is important for the present article because it is the single most important body of evidence for the religious content of the historical Gnostic movements, and because it has been, since its discovery, a major resource for the modern Gnostic and esoteric revivals.

The Cathars as Medieval Inheritors

The question of whether the medieval Cathars, who flourished in southern France and northern Italy in the 11th through 13th centuries, were the heirs of the ancient Gnostics is one of the most debated in the history of medieval religion. The mainstream scholarly position, argued in detail by the historians of the Cathar heresy R. I. Moore and Malcolm Lambert, is that the connection is not direct, and that the Cathars were, in their theology, dualist Christians whose doctrine derived from the Bogomils of the Balkans and, ultimately, from Paulician and Mesopotamian sources. The older 19th-century view, that the Cathars were the direct heirs of the Manichaeans and the ancient Gnostics, has been largely abandoned.

The Cathars, however, are a major chapter in the history of medieval secret societies, and they have been, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the object of intense interest on the part of the modern Western esoteric revival. The story of the Cathar “perfecti,” the austere Gnostic-style initiates of the Cathar church, and of the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) in which the Cathars were suppressed, has been a powerful source of inspiration for a long line of modern esoteric writers, and the Cathar romance is one of the most persistent elements of the mythology of Western esotericism.

The Mystery Tradition Hypothesis

The “mystery tradition” or “perennial philosophy” hypothesis, which holds that there is a single, ancient, and continuous esoteric tradition running from the ancient mystery cults through the historical Gnostics, the Cathars, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the modern Freemasonic orders, and the 19th-century Hermetic revival, is one of the most important and most contested claims of the modern Western esoteric tradition. The hypothesis is associated with a number of 19th- and 20th-century writers, including the Theosophical leader Annie Besant, the Freemasonic writer Albert Pike, the French esoteric René Guénon, and the British Traditionalist school more generally.

The mainstream academic position, argued by historians of religion such as Wouter Hanegraaff and Kocku von Stuckrad, is that the mystery tradition hypothesis is a modern construction, that there is no continuous institutional or doctrinal chain of transmission from antiquity to the present, and that the various “Gnostic,” “Hermetic,” and “alchemical” elements in the modern Western esoteric tradition are reinterpretations of older materials rather than survivals of an ancient tradition. The academic critique of the mystery tradition hypothesis is, however, not a refutation of the existence of a real Western esoteric tradition — that tradition certainly exists — but a critique of the claim that it is ancient and continuous in the way that the traditionalist writers have claimed.

Theosophical Readings of Gnosticism

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gnostic themes became central to the Theosophical tradition. Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888) and Isis Unveiled (1877) drew extensively on Gnostic mythological themes, and the Theosophical reading of the historical Gnostics as “adepts” of an ancient “Wisdom Religion” became a major part of the Theosophical tradition. Theosophy’s reading of Gnosticism has, in turn, been a major source of the modern “Gnostic” revival, and many of the 20th-century Gnostic and Theosophical bodies draw on both traditions.

The Gnostic churches of the 20th and 21st centuries are, in large measure, a Theosophical product. The Ecclesia Gnostica, the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the Gnostic Church of France, the Church of the Gnosis, and many other bodies all draw on Theosophical and Hermetic readings of Gnosticism, and they use Theosophical vocabulary and imagery in their liturgies and initiations.

Modern Gnostic Churches and Brotherhoods

In the 20th and 21st centuries, a number of Gnostic churches and mystical brotherhoods have been founded, of which the most important include:

• The Ecclesia Gnostica, founded by the French-born Theosophist Jules Doinel in 1890, and re-founded under various leaderships since. The Ecclesia Gnostica is the oldest continuously existing Gnostic church of the modern period, and it has been an important model for later Gnostic bodies.
• The Mandaean diaspora, especially in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The Mandaeans are a real, ancient, surviving Gnostic religion, and the modern Mandaean diaspora has its own religious and cultural life.
• The Church of the Gnosis, founded in the United States in the 20th century, which blends Theosophical and Hermetic readings of Gnosticism with a Christian theological frame.
• The Gnostic Church of France, founded in the 20th century, which has produced a number of scholarly and liturgical works in French.
• The Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the Gnostic Catholic Church, which was founded as a ceremonial-magic order by the Theosophical magician Aleister Crowley in the early 20th century, and which exists today in a number of independent jurisdictions. The E.G.C. uses a Gnostic Christian liturgy, the “Gnostic Mass,” which is one of the most striking modern ritual works in the Western esoteric tradition.

The Mandaeans deserve special mention, because they are the one Gnostic religion that has an uninterrupted institutional history from antiquity to the present. The Mandaeans are a small ethno-religious community, traditionally located in southern Iraq and southwestern Iran, who have, in the 20th and 21st centuries, been forced into a large-scale diaspora by war, persecution, and the collapse of the Iraqi state. The Mandaean religion includes a complex system of ritual baptism, a Gnostic cosmology, and a sacred literature in a dialect of Aramaic. The survival of the Mandaean community into the present is one of the most important pieces of evidence for the historical reality of ancient Gnostic religion, and it is a reminder that the history of esoteric and mystical traditions is not just a history of texts and ideas but also a history of real, living, religious communities.

Theosis and the Gnostic Idea of Salvation

The central religious claim of the Gnostic movements is that salvation comes through a kind of direct, transformative knowledge of the divine — theosis in the Greek theological tradition, deification in the Latin, and gnosis in the Gnostic tradition. The Gnostic idea of theosis is distinct from the Christian orthodox idea of theosis (the doctrine that the human person can, by grace, be united with God and participate in the divine nature) and from the more general mystical idea of union with the divine. The Gnostic theosis is a knowledge that the divine spark within the human person is, in fact, the supreme God, and that the awakening of this knowledge is the salvation of the self.

The Gnostic theosis is the prototype, in the Western tradition, of the esoteric idea of “initiation” — the idea that there is a secret knowledge available only to the few, and that the possession of this knowledge is, in some way, the condition of salvation. This idea is one of the most important conceptual links between the ancient Gnostic movements and the modern Western esoteric tradition, even where the institutional chain of transmission is not demonstrable.

Sources and Further Reading

The scholarly debate is well-served by two contrasting books: Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (1996), the most influential critique of the “Gnosticism” category itself; and Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (2003), the standard introduction. For the Nag Hammadi library, the indispensable reference is James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (1977, 4th ed. 2000). For the Mandaeans, Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People (2002). For the Cathars as medieval Gnostics, R.I. Moore, The War on Heresy (2012). For the modern Gnostic churches, Wouter Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2013), ch. 8, and the academic journal Aries.

The ancient mystery cults, medieval secret societies, Hermetic orders and Theosophy, and esoteric traditions and mystical orders cover the surrounding context. The history of secret societies treats the larger arc.