PAGANS AND GNOSTICSsinful and corrupt and anything that perpetuated material existence,
such as human procreation, was perverted. Gnostics worked to over-
come the material world, to release the particle of spiritual light caught
in the human body, and to reunite it with the world of light. They
were told how to do it by a messenger sent from the realm of light
who informed the soul of its origin and revealed the secret knowledge
(Gk. gnosis) it would need to get need to get past the demonic planets
in its ascent.
Not everyone was capable of profiting from the message. Gnostics
tended to be elitist and divided humanity into categories according to
the amount of divine light people had in them by accident or by fate
at birth; those born with the most light could be saved, and gnostics
included both women and m.en among the elect. Those with less light
could improve their fate through good works and might hope to be
reborn as one of the elect. Those with little or no light in them belonged
to this world and had no hope of escape.
Early gnostics in the Hellenistic period were organized as mystery
communities with redemptive sacraments, baptism, and sacred meals
to purify the soul. They also performed feats of asceticism and magic
as proof of their liberation from the world. This could also lead into
an amoral libertinism that was a radical, antinomian form of dualism.
To the extent that law was part of this temporal world, it, too, was
either inferior or evil. The imagery of light and darkness probably
came from the cult of Mithra, the only mystery religion that was
frankly dualist and was probably also the source for gnostic imagery
of cosmic warfare between good and evil. Since an evil world could
not have been created by a good deity, gnostics in Jewish and Christian
circles identified the god of the Bible as a malicious demiurge. Gnostic
ideas had a deep impact on early Christianity and influenced neo-
Platonism,77
The greatest vogue of gnostic themes occurred in the second and
third centuries during the crisis at the end of antiquity and emerged
in the three major movemt,!nts of the third century: Mithraism, Man-
ichaeism, and neo-Platonism. The popularity of such a world-denying
outlook was an expression of widespread alienation and the desire to
escape from an evil world. As society reconstructed itself from the
fourth century on, world-affirming ideologies tended to be employed
by the representatives of authority in the new order: Mazdaean priests,
77 S. Runciman, The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy
(Cambridge, 1969), pp. 6-10, 19; Tarn, Hellenistic Civilization, p. 351.