Toto

Hip Gnostics

avi

Thank you very much Toto, for this link to one of my most favorite newspapers, the Toronto Globe and Mail.

What an excellent review by Michael Kaler.

I am obliged to add, to your several useful quotes from his review, this short passage:
I learned something here. I had thought that gnosticism predated christianity, and represented the thinking man's alternative to supernatural interpretation, two millenia before the present day... Guess I was wrong!!!

avi

Clivedurdle

Doesn't Zarathustra and Plato predate Xianity?

premjan

Knowledge over faith.

show_no_mercy

And I'd like to give a little shout-out to John The Baptists' Mandaeans, who also might have been "gnostics".

mountainman

The river card has not yet been played avi. Pagels is simply following Eusebius in her chronology. What she says needs to be qualified by this one simple fact.

IMO the gnostics had a collegiate presence known as the Sacred College of Pontifices who reported to the Pontifex Maximus in Rome and in Alexandria. This collegiate included the philosophical academies such as that of Plato and thus also the lineage of the neopythagorean / neoplatonic philosophers until Sopater. Sponsorship of the gnosticism of the Greek priesthood who preserved all that was important of Greek civilisation was continuously adhered to by most Roman emperors of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries. Some directly assert Diocletion (4th century) to have also so sponsored the Greek civilisation.

With Constantine, the Roman tolerance of the Greek civilisation ended. Constantine disbanded the Greek priesthood, destroyed their temples, executed Sopater. Eusebius was Constantine's heresiologist. I find it intriguing why those who study the history of the gnostics accept the backbone of their chronology from an utterly biased "Christian" heresiologist.

mountainman

The gnosticism referred to in the article and in stuff related to Galilaeanism refers to a specific epoch in ancient history in the Roman empire. In general it is evident that the Indian gnostics first attempted to record this field in the Vedas, and later in the Upanishads. It is an interesting subject.

Compliments of the seasons.

avi

Thank you.

How does this "Gnostic" concept differ from the 5th to 3rd Century BCE "atomists", specifically, Democritus and a century later, Epicurus? Can they also be considered "Gnostics"?

Thanks Pete.

So, then, are we to understand that the "Hindus" invented Gnosticism, and the Greeks adopted it, or vice versa? I was under the impression that the Upanishads were composed about the same time as LaoZi, and Siddhartha, i.e. about 500 BCE.

Is there any linguistic correlation between the Upanishads' "individual soul", i.e. atman and the Greek "atomists"?

avi

mountainman

I'd be inclined towards the former "opinion" since the Hindu civilisation is older than the Greek, because India was given reverence by the followers of Pythagoras, and because many ideas passed from India to the west which were instrumental -- mathematical and astronomical and medical knowledge included.

There is controversy over the antiquity of the Indian literature particularly the Vedas which may have predated the Upanishads by many centuries if not millenia.

Someone here (was it GuruGeorge?) pointed me to the works of Richard Kingsley related to the concept of nonduality. In the same sense that Buddism is often seen as neither a religion, metaphysics or philosophy, the Greek conception of divinity (as espoused by Plato to Plotinus) may also be so perceived.

There is also a small window of opportunity in the early 6th century BCE for Buddhist (Hindu) ideas to pass to Greece. C.515 BCE Therapeutae were sent by Buddha as emmissaries to the four directions. Were the ancient Pythagoreans influenced by Indian ideas – vegetarianism, communal property, 'transmigration of souls.' and the principles of Ayurvedic medicine (Pythagoras' four humours).

gurugeorge

That's Peter Kingsley, and yeah it's an interesting angle. He posits, basically, that the Phoceans borrowed from the shamanism indigenous to their previous home in Asia Minor, and took it to Italy in Greek-i-fied form, where it was mixed with Hindu/Egyptian ideas, became Pythagoreanism, fomented the Eleatic school, and then retired away from the spotlight for a while, only to return with Neo-Pythagoreanism (which probably actually was Pythagoreanism, contrary to what earlier scholars thought), and also influenced the closely-related Hermetic teachings, as well as Middle Platonism and Gnosticism (which, if Plotinus was engaged with in its philosophical aspect, must have been quite big, especially in Alexandria). The stream of indigenous European non-dualism then ended up in Akhmim in Egypt, from whence it spread, along with the closely-related Alchemy, to Sufism, and, ironically, back to roughly the same regions it started from, in Persia. Basically, it was non-dual "meditation" (very similar to the Tibetan Dzogchen, and may possibly be distantly related) and exercise in "dying before you die".

You only have to look at what Parmenides' teacher is noted to have taught him, to cotton on to what it was really all about: silence.