thread, the ancient, charismatic praxis of shamanism is essentially, in the ancient
Gnostic sense, that one’s deepest self is not part of the Creation, but is as old as
God, being a spark or particle of God (Bloom, 1996:165). ... we are fragments of
what once was a fullness [ participation mystique] , the Pleroma, as the ancient
Gnostics called it (Bloom, 1996:226).
2.5 Gnosticism
Gnosticism is definable in various ways; it is both Christian and pre-Christian.
One definition recognizes it as the heresy that arose out of Christianity in the
second century and then died out. The other can be seen in the work of the
Jungian, Robert Segal, who points out that the political philosopher and Gnostic
scholar Eric Voegelin believed that modern Gnosticism informed such movements as
progressive positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism and national
socialism; all of which are founded on the Gnostic attitude that essentially reflects
the postmodern preoccupation with immediate consciousness of reality and “ ... its
opposition to the world,” in brief, a radical alienation of human beings from the
world (Segal, 1992:4). Those movements cited share with Gnosticism six
characteristics: dissatisfaction with the world, confidence that the ills of the world
stem from the way it is organized, certainty that amelioration is possible, the
assumption that improvement must evolve historically, the belief that humanity can
change the world and, the conviction that knowledge, gnosis, is the key to change
(Segal, 1992:4-5).
The discovery of the Nag Hammadi (scrolls) established that Gnosticism was
pre-Christian in its belief in the antithetical dualism of immateriality, which is good,
and matter, which is evil. Gnosticism espouses the same dualism reflected in
human beings, the cosmos and divinity: the primordial unity of all immateriality; the
yearning to restore that unity; the present entrapment of a portion of immateriality
in human beings; the need for knowledge to reveal to humans that entrapment. I n
its modern expression Gnosticism constitutes the belief in the alienation of human
beings from their true selves. (Segal, 1992:4)
Harold Bloom, a devoted student of Gnosis both ancient and modern,
ponders over the “ ... recurrent images of human spirituality” that have their own
persistence and testify to “ ... a transcendent frontier that marks either a limit to the
human, or a limitlessness that may be beyond the human” (Bloom, 1996:11). Here