1861. The growing power of the infant Gnosticism acting with inspiration upon the quick warm nature of the Jordan Nazarenes laid the seed which, nourished by the accumulated wisdom of the illustrious teachers of the Pharisees, ultimately ripened into the New Testament - the priceless pearl of the Jewish conception. The earliest Gnosticism in Irenaeus extends a hand to the Gnosticism of the Kaball. Irenaeus's Gnostica, the Codex Basareus, the oldest parts of the Kabbala, the first three chapters of Genesis, the New Testament theology, Hippolytus, and some extracts from the Rabbins, are all brought together. See other works by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

An endeavor to systematize and elucidate the Corpus Hermeticum. This volume emphasizes the more primary and fundamental truths of the Pymander so the reader may gain a comprehensive survey of the entire field it covers.

Peter Wilberg presents a political history of the subversive 'gnostic' theologies of the first century, and with it, a theo-political critique of the ruling god-concepts of the 21st century. 'From New Age to New Gnosis' is spiritual Marxism and a powerful spearhead aimed at the 'New World Order' of economic 'liberalism', neo-conservatism and military imperialism. It challenges all four faces of its famous dollar pyramid - the 'i-dollartry' of new technologies, the reduction of the human being to a genetic machine, the politically illiterate platitudes of New Age 'spirituality' - and the spiritual illiterate 'literalism' of Christian biblical fundamentalism and racist Zionazism - which now see their own zealotry mirrored and confronted by militant Islam. What Peter Wilberg's recognises is that what our divided world now calls for is not a revival of fundamentalisms of any sort but a New Gnostic spirituality that understands the "wordless knowledge within the word" (Seth).

Early Christian mystical groups were called Gnostics, meaning those who know, because of their spiritual knowledge. Their teachers were persecuted and most documents destroyed because the Church desired a uniform set of beliefs to operate under. "Pistis Sophis" was the most important Gnostic work until the discovery and publication of "The Nag Hammadi Library." It remains an important milestone in Gnostic research and should be part of any serious study. It is the story of how we, as spiritual beings, have fallen into the physical world. The soul is asleep, unaware of its true nature, but the purpose of this gospel is to help awaken us.

This fascinating book presents for the first time a complete introduction to Mandaeanism, a branch of Gnosticism that has survived to the present day.

In an engaging style that mirrors the interesting nature of his subject, Edmondo Lupieri portrays the traditional way of life of the Mandaeans, still found living today in Iraq and Iran, and introduces readers to the world of Mandaean ideas -- including the view that they are the only ones on earth who possess the true and oldest faith.

Lupieri reconstructs the history of the interaction between Mandaeanism and the Western world, beginning with Ricoldo da Montecroce, a thirteenth-century Italian monk who is the first known European to write about the Mandaeans, and continuing on to present scholarship. He also offers a critical analysis of the Mandaean written and oral traditions concerning their origin, history, and self-understanding.

The book is made even more valuable by the inclusion of an extensive anthology of translated Mandaean texts, complete with notes. This collection of writings presents the spiritual world of Mandaeanism with fragments of mythicaltheological texts and pages of ethical and historical meditations.

The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity

If Jesus Christ is not God, of the same essence with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, having all the attributes of the Trinity while on earth as well as while He reigned in Heaven, then we, of all men, are most miserable. And how do we know that He is, and always has been, God from eternity? It is written in the Holy Scriptures.

But what if the version of the Bible we read is ambivalent, in one place saying He is co-equal with God, and in another place denying Him one or more of the attributes that are essential to God? Read this book and you will see that all but three of the new versions are guilty of denying Christ's goodness, sinlessness, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, and a dozen more of the attributes of God. You will see it written in black and white, with exact quotations from eight of the new versions.

This important challenge to the trend so evident in the new versions (the despising of the words God-breathed out through the prophets and apostles, and the mixing in of the corrupt wisdom of men), ought to be supported by every one of you who love God and His Word as HB wrote it.

The Naming of St. John Baptist; The Parables in St. Matthew; The Mathematical Symbolism of the Gnosis; Words of Power used with the Miracles; Vision of St. Peter and the Geometrical Symbol of the Church; Epistle of Apollos to the Hebrews; Examples from the Holy Scriptures; Gematria of the Greek Scriptures; plus more!

Volume 3 of Boris Mouravieff's Gnosis contains ancient keys to a tradition of Christian esotericism that was necessarily hermetized 1800 years ago and has since remained unpublished, surviving to the present only in unwritten form.

A long-awaited illumination of the mystical movement that teaches 'Gnosis' - knowledge of God as opposed to unquestioning faithAcclaimed author Andrew Phillip Smith delves into the myths and practices of this ancient movement, exploring its early popularity, its subsequent decline under the weight of orthodoxy in the Church, and its present-day resurgence.Gnosticism has travelled a fascinating path, from the Manichaeans in Persia between the 3rd and 7th centuries, to the triumphs and tragedies of the Cathars in southern Europe between the 12th and 14th centuries, to, finally, today's Mandaeans in Iraq. However the revival of Gnosticism extends further than these sects, offering inspiration to a legion of literary figures, including Dan brown and Philip Pullman. Gnostcisim's emphasis on personal over organized religion, in keeping with the doctrine of the early Christian era during which it thrived, has found particular resonance with today's multicultural world.The Secret History of the Gnostics is not simply an authoritative account of one sect's practical beliefs and customs - it is, in effect, a manifesto, an appeal to those inspired by or drawn to the Gnostic faith not to forget its origins.

GNOSTICISM / MYSTICISMGnosticism was a contemporary of early Christianity whose demise can be traced to Christianity's efforts to silence its teachings. The Gnostic message, however, was not destroyed but simply went underground. Starting with the first emergence of Gnosticism, the author shows how its influence extended from the teachings of Neoplatonists and the magical traditions of the Middle Ages to the beliefs and ideas of the Sufis, Jacob Bohme, Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, and the Rosicrucians and Freemasons. In the language of spiritual Freemasonry, "gnosis" is the rejected stone necessary for the completion of the Temple, a temple of a new cosmic understanding that today's heirs to Gnosticism continue to strive to create.The Gnostics believed that the universe embodies a ceaseless contest between opposing principles. Terrestrial life exhibits the struggle between good and evil, life and death, beauty and ugliness, and enlightenment and ignorance: "gnosis" and "agnosis." The very nature of physical space and time is an obstacle to humanity's ability to remember its divine origins and recover its original unity with God. Thus the preeminent Gnostic secret is that we are God in potential, and the purpose of bona fide Gnostic teaching is to return us to our godlike nature.TOBIAS CHURTON is a filmmaker and the founding editor of the magazine "Freemasonry Today." He studied theology at Oxford University and created the award-winning documentary series and accompanying book "The Gnostics," as well as several other films on Christian doctrine, mysticism, and magical folklore. He lives in England.

The people we've come to call gnostics were passionate advocates of the view that salvation comes through knowledge and personal experience, and their passion shines through in the remarkable body of writings they produced over a period of more than a millennium and a half. Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer have created a translation that brings the gnostic voices to us from across the centuries with remarkable power and beauty--beginning with texts from the earliest years of Christianity--including material from the Nag Hammadi library--and continuing all the way up to expressions of gnostic wisdom found within Islam and in the Cathar movement of the Middle Ages. The twenty-one texts included here serve as a compact introduction to Gnosticism and its principal ideas--and they also provide an entree to the pleasures of gnostic literature in general, representing, as they do, the greatest masterpieces of that tradition.

Building on critical work in biblical studies, which shows how a historically-bounded heretical tradition called Gnosticism was 'invented', this work focuses on the following stage in which it was "essentialised" into a sui generis, universal category of religion. At the same time, it shows how Gnosticism became a religious self-identifier, with a number of sizable contemporary groups identifying as Gnostics today, drawing on the same discourses. This book provides a history of this problematic category, and its relationship with scholarly and popular discourse on religion in the twentieth century. It uses a critical-historical method to show how and why Gnosis, Gnostic and Gnosticism were taken up by specific groups and individuals - practitioners and scholars - at different times. It shows how ideas about Gnosticism developed in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, drawing from continental phenomenology, Jungian psychology and post-Holocaust theology, to be constructed as a perennial religious current based on special knowledge of the divine in a corrupt world. David G. Robertson challenges how scholars interact with the category Gnosticism, and contributes to our understanding of the complex relationship between primary sources, academics and practitioners in category formation.