EPILOGUE 775
Egyptian antiquity. From these sources they formed their own cosmogony
(creation of the world) and theogony (creation of the gods) and their fantas-
tic symbolic legends.
While confined to the earth, the gnostics believed, each human being
consists of a vital trinity of material body, temporal soul, and eternal spirit.
Within that physical and mental trinity, one is free to ascend from body and
soul to eternal spirit, even before death, from darkness to the freedom of full
illumination. These powerful, radical ideas opened interior ways of endless
possibility. Nothing is all new, yet the specific articulation of gnosticism was
a new, alluring alternative to the normative religion that locked ideas into
dogma, bureaucracy, and worldly power to defeat infidels and banish cre-
ative solitude. The attractive equation of knowledge, light, spirit, and god
was at the heart of gnosticism as it developed in differing modes all over the
ancient world.
Around the time of the crucifixion, gnosticism rose in the Near East,
Egypt, and the European Roman Empire. In this turbulent period of dias-
pora, dispirit, intense speculation, and self-proclaimed prophets and messi-
ahs, the gnostics chose the meditative gaze. Their dualism was not only of
two conflicting gods but of external flesh and internal spirit, and these two
human attributes lived in absolute separation. There is nothing new about
the Cartesian split of mind and matter, but in the instance of the gnostics
mind is all and the rest an encumbrance. The body is matter. Their turn from
the body is not Asian asceticism or flesh-loathing puritanism. It is simply
that mind is the only reality that can turn into light. In this sense we see how
close the gnostics are to Plotinian immersion in the all, the sun, the good,
where all the rest is illusion. In gnosticism (which Plotinos derided) the as-
cent is inward to the fullness, to a glimpse of and participation in the light of
the pleroma. Other than the jargon and metaphor, there is little difference in
the mystical leap to immediate salvation in gnosticism and the Plotinian way.
Both offer salvation now in one's life, in contrast to the three orthodox Abra-
hamic religions, which hold out some form of salvation as a reward after
death. The Kabbalist and Christian mystics, who have operated on the bor-
ders of heresy, also report ascension and adhesion to or immersion in god,
and their voyage is immediate and presumably outside time. The meaning of
their experience differs specifically from that of the gnostic, however, in that
their communion or union with god is not consummated as a confirmation
of eternal salvation—all that must occur as a reward in the afterlife—while
the gnostic does find eternal salvation in the now, which even later death will