The Philosophical History and Gnostic Mission of Contemporary Paganism

Gerald Gardner is the acknowledged father of this religion, which was originally said to have been a surviving strain of mankind’s oldest faith. Gardner, Sanders, and others relied on the theories of Egyptologist and feminist Margaret Murray. Later, Murray’s theories were disproved, as other scholars successfully argued she had not been able to establish proof of an uninterrupted tradition. Aidan Kelly, in Crafting the Art of Magic, produced several successive drafts of Gardner’s Book of Shadows, pointing out that genuinely ancient material is not subject to revision. Gardner’s apologists were quick to redefine Wicca as a reconstructionist attempt to recover Europe’s nearly lost indigenous mysteries. I would like to offer another perspective: that Wicca is actually a recent incarnation of the Gnostic tradition. While not the continuation of an ancient religion, it is the continued preservation of the mysteries underlying all faiths.

Gnostics have never been well-liked among the power elite of any religion, and Gnostic populists have always been particularly despised by both factions. Religious power mongers prefer to cultivate fundamentalism. After all, reducing the sacred teachings to their lowest common denominator and robbing the plebs of its last hope of critical thought, ensures that the coffers of the powerful remain filled while minimizing the risk of the deity running interference. Eliphas Levi, in his book Transcendental Magic: Dogma and Ritual, decried the cruel treatment of Paracelsus and Apollonius, while Machiavelli grimly presented Savonarola’s fate as a dire warning of what happens to those who place their faith in God above their fear of the powers that be. All three men led their earthly existences ostracized by society, only to end them in poverty or at the hands of executioners. But if the Son of Man could not win against the Pharisees, what hope dared these noble souls nurture?

Is it any wonder that those who understand the universal truths shared by all faiths choose to keep these secret, in order that they remain safe from the grasp of those who would misuse them? And is it any wonder that those who have sworn to keep the mysteries secret and undespoiled look upon those who proliferate them for personal gain -- or out of prophetic vision -- with scorn? No twentieth century magus was more despised among his peers than Aleister Crowley. His crime was not that he was bisexual or that he was a heroin addict. It was not that he had a flamboyant, perhaps arrogant personality. His crime was that he published the secrets of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn -- and his insistence that it was the birthright of every man, woman, and child to have access to this knowledge.

Crowley was one of Gardner’s chief influences. In fact, Gardner was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, or O.T.O., a fraternal organization born of English John Yarker Masonic Rites of Memphis-Misraïm and founded by Karl Kellner and Theodor Reuss in 1906. After the death of Reuss, Crowley became chief of the order until his own death in 1947. Gardner is said to have attained the fourth degree, and he published his novel High Magick‘s Aid under the pseudonym “Scire 4=7,” the numbers being an indication of his degree.

Gardner’s original Book of Shadows draws strongly from the mystery traditions of the West, primarily from the O.T.O. and the Golden Dawn. Certain Gardnerian liturgies, such as The Great Rite, have been lifted right out of O.T.O. ritual, while others, such as The Charge of the Goddess, are close paraphrases of O.T.O and related material. These organizations, in turn, lay claim to sacred knowledge that reaches back to the wisdom of Ancient Egypt and, perhaps, still further in the past.

“Amongst the Egyptians Hermes Trismegistus holds the highest place; then come Chaldaeans, Greeks, Arabs, Italians, Gauls, Englishmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Hebrews, and many others,” writes the anonymous author of that alchemical treatise “The Golden Tract.”

In the brief space allotted, I will attempt to establish these points: that there are significant spiritual and ideological commonalities between Wicca and Gnosticism, that an examination of Wiccan key liturgies establishes this religion’s roots in the Hermetic societies which continued Gnostic thought from antiquity throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the French Occult Revival and from there to the present, and finally, that Wicca is simply a new incarnation of a very old tradition.

Gnosticism is a philosophical and religious movement which has as its goal the knowledge of God, or gnosis. This movement originated in the pre-Christian cultures of the Mediterranean, and gained a fair amount of notoriety one or two centuries after the death of Christ. Gnosticism ceased to be an openly practiced form of spirituality by the Sixth Century A.D. when it became a curiosity to be studied by heresiologists.

The wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, defines gnosis as follows:

Among Gnostics, gnosis was the “knowledge of the heart” or “insight” about the spiritual nature of the cosmos that brought about “salvation” … Among heresiologists gnosis denotes different belief systems of esoteric nature, such as, first and foremost, gnosticism and other dualist systems the first two centuries AD, but also Rosicrucianism, Christian Kabbalah, etc.

Secret knowledge, kept and preserved by its wardens and bestowed upon those ready to receive it, was the key to spiritual attainment.

It is a similar matter with Wicca, which is an initiatory religion. Here, initiates pass sacred knowledge to those candidates who have proven themselves worthy of it. This may appear strange, considering Wiccans are such antiauthoritarian personalities; even Gerald Gardner’s Book of Shadows can be downloaded by anyone who so chooses. That is how it is with any initiatory organization. Despite all warnings, there is always someone to be found who will let the cat out of the sack, and Levi‘s words that the best way to protect the mysteries is to proclaim them offer little consolation. But these desecrations are ultimately useless.

As Peter Dawkins, FBRT, in his discussion of the Cabala points out, there four levels at which any scripture or secret must be understood, in order to be spiritually useful.

The consciousness or sphere of Cabala, which is knowledge of the divine, is reached via four methods of interpretation. Cabalistically they are represented by the initials of the four words used to describe the four methods, which initials form the Hebrew word PRDS, meaning ‘Paradise’. The first method is Peshat, the ‘simple’ or literal interpretation of the scriptures. The second is Remez, ‘allusion’ to the hidden meanings. The third is Derash, the ‘homiletic exposition’ of doctrinal truths. The fourth and final method is that of Sod, the ‘mystery’, which is ‘revelation’ or initiation into the divine wisdom. No method can be missed out, and when one has successively completed them all then one is in Paradise!

Having read a book about yoga makes a person no more a yogi, than merely copying the talismans out of Francis Barrett’s The Magus enables him or her to control the energies expressed thereby. And merely having read Ray Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft or Farrar and Farrar’s A Witch’s Bible, Complete does not make one a Third Degree Witch. Countless hours of study and practice are required, and interaction with knowledgeable and competent individuals, who must, of course, deem the seeker’s company worth their time. Further, Gnostic insights may be intellectualized with comparative ease. They are, however, very difficult to internalize. Consider the final words of “The Charge of the Goddess:”

And thou who thinkest to see me, know that thy seeking and yearning shall avail thee not unless thou knowest the mystery, that if that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without thee, for behold; I have been with thee from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.

It is one thing to know and intellectually understand these words; it is a completely different matter to live them. To proclaim these words without having or providing a context in which they can be lived is as hollow and meaningless as hearing a street preacher shout about ‘personal relationships with Jesus.’ After all, not many people have the fortitude to live in the wilderness like John the Baptist, to reject the world and eat wild honey and locusts, and fewer still are blessed with the dramatic God-encounters of Saul of Tarsus or St. Theresa. To cultivate a direct relationship with the divine is a Herculean task, and the deadly Nessus-shirt is just as likely an outcome as the redeeming fires of Mt. Oeta.

This is why Gnostic leaders such as Carpocrates further advocated the belief in reincarnation, a belief also found in Wicca. According to St. Irenaeus in Against Heresy, they believed that “Man cannot be saved until they have gone through all kinds of experience.” Unlike Wiccans, however, Carpocratians, despised creation, and to them reincarnation served as a means to purify the soul through a series of transmigrations.

Wiccans do not view creation as being in conflict with the creator. Their view is much like Mircea Eliade’s observation of Hermeticism, “In one Hermetic text, we read: ‘I know thee, and thou knowest me: I am thou, and thou art I.’ Similar expressions we find in Christian writings. As Clement of Alexandria says, the true (Christian) Gnostic has already become God.” Eliade was not writing about apotheosis, the process whereby the sky opens and the Heavenly messengers spirit the ennobled soul away to imbue him or her with divinity. Gnosis is rather a matter of walking with God, of reading His heart, of being in harmony with the Creator. Wiccans view deity as both, immanent, residing within creation, and transcendent, greater and more beatific than the self to which one must aspire.

The Carpocratians were further known for their lack of discrimination against women as well as their libertine attitude toward sexuality. These things have been said about Wiccans, as well. Wiccans revere women, but not in the sense Christians, Muslims, or Jews do. To Wiccans, women are representatives of the Goddess, and the Wiccan Goddess is neither meek nor coy. To the contrary, She is strong, powerful, wise, and sensual. The sex act, to Wiccans, is a sacrament, and the care of life thereby created a Grail quest. The Carpocratians had communal wives, a practice Wiccans generally eschew.

The Goddess and the God, in Wicca, create the Universe through sexual union. In Wiccan ceremonies, this union is reenacted through a liturgy called “The Great Rite.” Until the 1970s, when Wicca emerged on the radar screen of the mainstream media, the sexual union of the Gods, or hieros gamos, was reenacted by the High Priestess and the High Priest having sexual intercourse during the service. Sometimes, the assembled remained present; usually, they were sent out of the temple area. Nowadays this practice has been replaced by the “symbolic” Great Rite, where the Athame, the ceremonial dagger used to draw the circle and inscribe the pentagrams, takes to role of the lingam, and the Chalice, filled with wine, replaces the yoni.

Clement of Alexandria, a second century Christian catechist and apologist, recognized Carpocrates’s concern for the righteousness of God and consequently held a more benign view of him. Carpocratians understood justice to be “a kind of sharing along with equality” among all creatures.

“For all see alike,” he observed. “since here is no distinction … between rich and poor, people and governor, stupid and clever, female and male, free men and slaves. Even the irrational animals are not accorded any different treatment (Stromateis III.2.6)”

This sentiment is echoed beautifully in Doreen Valiente’s poem “The Witches’ Creed:

The birth and rebirth of all nature,

The passing of winter and spring,

We share with the life universal,

Rejoice in the magical ring

The realization that we only share the world with our fellow creatures, rather than lord over them, that God cherishes and loves all living things, is central to Wicca. Because we are the most powerful species and because our actions can rebuild or destroy entire biomes, we share the greatest burden of responsibility toward our fellow creatures. This does not mean that Wiccans need to become vegans, people who shun all animal products. It does mean that we must treat our environment with respect, and that we honor those who have made sacrifices for us. Very few Pagans say grace. In my view they miss an important chance to honor the source that sustains them.

Coleridge, in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner beautifully explains humankind’s responsibility toward its fellow creatures:

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

Wiccans view the circle of life, and the sharing in it, as only one of many sacred cycles. The universe, in the Wiccan view, moves in cycles.

Simon Magus, another early Gnostic, is best known for having been refused baptism by Peter because he tried to purchase the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:9-11). He also taught that the accounts of the Garden of Eden and Exodus were allegories. Tau Apiryon, of the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, summarizes Magus’s cosmology in a way that harmonizes beautifully with the Wiccan idea of polarities in harmony:

Fire (corresponding to the Orphic Phanes) is the first principle of all things. This fire, like Phanes, is bisexual, having both sexes within itself. Its male aspect was hidden, and its female aspect was manifested in the name Silence (Corresponding to the Orphic Nux). The Cosmos came into being from the unbegotten Fire through Silence by means of six aspects of the Fire … in three male-female polarities or syzygies: Nous (Mind), also called Dynamis (Power), and Ennoia (Thought); Phone (Voice) and Onoma (Name); Logismos (Reason) and Enthymesis (Reflection or Plan).

Nous-Ennoia divided from each other and became two separate beings, Nous and Ennoia, forming an infinite “Middle Space” between them. Ennoia beheld Nous from her individual point of view and named his image Father (JHVH).

It is easy to recognize parallels to the Wiccan notion of the Goddess and the God creating the universe. Fire impregnates Silence, bringing into existence three fecund, creative polarities. Of these, Thought empowered by Mind/Force, fashions the cosmos. All of these polarity-pairs are placed opposite one another, thus energizing the universe, giving life to it. Those familiar with the Cabalistic Tree of Life may also recognize the Twin Pillars Jachin and Boaz, crowned by Kether. The polarities here are Wisdom-Understanding, Mercy-Power, and Victory-Splendor. Doreen Valiente’s “The Witches‘ Creed” mentions and describes the functions of these Twin Pillars, although the poem does not list the specific polarity-pairs.

For two are the mystical pillars,

That stand at the gate of the shrine,

And two are the powers of nature,

The forms and the forces divine.

The dark and the light in succession,

The opposites each unto each,

Shown forth as a God and a Goddess,

Of this did our ancestors teach.

A figure who enjoyed a tremendous amount of popularity among medieval Gnostics, mystics, and alchemists was Hermes Trismegistus. It was then that a body of 42 books, known as the Hermetica, drew the attention of these circles. Not much is known about this figure. He may have been a contemporary of Moses. He even may have been Moses himself, the theory saying that Moses was a truncated form of Thothmoses. He may not even have been an actual person, but a literary composite: The Egyptian god Thoth, ruler of writing and knowledge, having been given a human shape by persons like Artapanus, a Jewish romancier who lived in the Second century B.C.E. Indeed, Hermes Trismegistus, or Thrice Great Hermes, was the name the Greeks gave to Thoth. He is supposed to have been the creator of 36,535 scrolls “that were hidden under the heavenly vault (the sky) which could only be found by the worthy, who would use such knowledge for the benefit of mankind,” wrote Knight and Lomas in The Hiram Key: Pharaos, Freemasons, and the Discovery of the Hidden Doctrine of Jesus.

Gnostics tended to be tolerant of different belief systems, both within and outside of gnostic circles. Each faith, after all, contained the truth about God, but in a different garment. Writing at the close of the nineteenth century, Alphonse Louise Constance, better known as Eliphas Levi, wrote in his seminal work Transcendental Magic: Its Dogma and Ritual about the undercurrent guiding all major religions, calling it, for lack of a better term a religion in its own. He asserted, “This religion has always existed, under various names, and it has always been the only and ruling religion in the world (310).” Levi tried to define as spiritual dogma what someone like Jung would have called archetype. In fact, some one hundred years later, Aleister Crowley’s biographer Israel Regardie, a Reichian therapist, commented that the language of psychotherapy made it possible for Gnostic and hermetic terms to be translated into terminology more universally applicable. All through his life, Levi was a struggling Catholic. As a young man, he left the seminary, because he found himself too constrained by what he perceived to be the Church’s unwillingness to explore Gnostic and esoteric teachings. Yet by the time of his death, he had reconciled with the Catholic Church and was given the last rites.

Levi understood that the outward appearance of a religious system harbored spiritual truths that could be found in that religion’s previous incarnations:

Through their faith in Man’s progress and the eternity of God, free men may honor religion in its previous forms and blaspheme Jupiter no more than Jehovah. They will greet the radiant likeness of the Pythian Apollo with love, recognizing a fraternal similarity to the ecstatic visage of the Risen Christ (292).

Wiccans are henotheists. Henotheism, according to the wikipedia is “a term coined by Max Müller, meaning belief in, and possible worship of, multiple gods, one of which is supreme.” Examples of henotheistic faiths, where a pantheon of deities is governed by a supreme deity are Hellenism, Hinduism, and the Nordic faiths. Applied to contemporary paganism, this means that Wiccans are in general very tolerant to people of other faiths, and sometimes even go as far as to adopt their deities into their religious system. But deities so adopted change in this process to fit into the Wiccan belief system, usually by being translated into an aspect of the Goddess or the God. Thus, the Greek Goddess Rhea may be translated into a form of the Mother aspect of the Goddess, while the Nordic Baldur may be interpreted as the slain lord of the Summer Solstice. Even Christ can be thus incorporated into Wicca, and there actually is a Messianic Wiccan tradition.

Wiccan key liturgies share common theological ground with Gnostic teachings in significant aspects. The doctrines of Hermes Trismegistus and Simon Magus do much to illuminate the Wiccan understanding of the universe as being composed of harmonizing polarities, of it moving in cycles. Carpocrates offers much insight into Wiccan ethics and notions of reincarnation.

The teachings of these Gnostics and Hermetics were perpetuated and preserved in the Middle Ages by occultists and groups such as the Cathars. Combing through the writings of the ancient Greeks, occultists found an image of divine femininity, now widely celebrated by modern Wiccans. That image was called Sophia, the World Soul.

Modern day Gnostic Alice Ouzounian explains:

The Hellenistic world identified is of the Myriad Names with every other female divinity. Medieval occultists in turn found her glorified in the writings of Plutarch and identified her with the World Soul, or Sophia. She appeared in numerous occult books as the Naked Goddess crowned with stars, her dominion over land and sea symbolized by her right foot on the earth, her left foot in water. Her vulva was marked by a precisely positioned crescent moon.

It is therefore not very surprising that the beginning of the Wiccan “Charge of the Goddess” is an invocation of female deities associated with the earth, the sea and the moon, “Listen to the words of the Great Mother, who was of old also called among men, Artemis, Astarte, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Diana, Arianrhod, Bride, and by many other names.”

Throughout the Renaissance, Gnostic and Hermetic teachings were preserved by such scholars and mystics as Cornelius Agrippa, Theoprastus Paracelsus, and Valentin Weigel. It is in this time period that most of the Hermetic texts available today were written.

The Secret Societies of the Enlightenment, such as the Rosicrucians, the O.T.O., The Golden Dawn, and perhaps the Freemasons, carried the Gnostic teachings and traditions to the threshold of the Twentieth Century.

The practices and liturgies of Wicca are not ancient by any stretch of the imagination. Gardner’s Crotona Fellowship, a group Rosicrucians and freethinkers who haunted England’s New Forest, did not begin to congeal into anything resembling Wicca until 1939. The term Wicca was not even used to describe his practices until 1951 with the publication of Witchcraft Today. But if one is to call Gardner a fraud simply because he said Wicca was a great deal older than it really was, then by doing so he participated in a truly time-honored tradition: virtually all religions claim they are older than they are. What Gardner did manage to do was to find a means to perpetuate and propagate sacred knowledge that is indeed ancient.

It is no coincidence that all the deities listed in the Charge of the Goddess describe Sophia; that Carpocrates, the Cathars, and Crowley found their way into Gardner’s writing and thinking; or that Simon Magus’s creation story corresponds so beautifully to the Wiccan notion of polarities in harmony. It is the litmus test of genuinely sacred knowledge that it will find means to survive the trials of history, tyranny, and bigotry -- no matter how names, appearances, deities, rituals and writings, or any external manifestations may change. Truly sacred knowledge will always survive, and it will find many different garments in which to clothe itself. God will always reach out to humankind, and humankind will always aspire to God. Those individuals who succeed are called Master, Messiah, Prophet, Boddhisatva, Avatar, and so forth. And God manifested is called Sophia, Prometheus, Messiah, Jesus, Aradia, and so on. Levi knew that the man of his century “honors the venerable age of the Church, but he does not fear Her death. He knows that Her apparent demise is merely a transformation, a glorious apotheosis (293).” The material, the outer shell is transformed and dies, but the spirit continues. Thus it is with all religions. Thus it is even with ourselves. I will end this sermon with this thought: Over four hundred years after his being burned at the stake, Giordano Bruno’s observation still holds true, “We suffer a perpetual transformation, whereby we receive a perpetual flow of fresh atoms, while those that we have received are leaving us.”