EPILOGUE 779
had already thrashed out the docetist notion of the phantom Christ with more
than a dozen other early sects. The docetist heresy would take the humanity,
the generous suffering, and the miracle from the gospel Jesus. Jesus has to be
both man and god, and not an apparent man-god. Secondly, and equally im-
portant, in gnosticism Jesus does not hold that strange relation of being both
son of god and, surely in popular perception, god himself. For the gnostics
Jesus is only one of the divine emanations of the invisible father of all, and not
near the top of the hierarchy in the pleroma. The Greek word for angel is an-
gelos, a translation of the Hebrew maVach, meaning "messenger" or "envoy"
and originally applied to Hermes, the messenger of the gods. In gnosticism
Jesus is frequently referred to as a mere angel (messenger) of god, and this low
station is counter to basic Christian doctrine. In Christianity, as said, the Jew-
ish messiah has become the divine Christ, and Christ or Jesus often replaces
god in icon and prayer. So the gnostic Jesus who mocks the clergy for suppos-
ing him human, vulnerable to pain, and mortal definitely has no place in the
church.
PAGAN GNOSTICS
There were also classical gnostics who did not derive from Judaism or Chris-
tianity. These were the pagan gnostics. Largely in Alexandria, they adapted
neoplatonism and local hermetic mystery religion into a new mythical dual-
ism in which flesh is dark temporal matter while mind (nous) is knowledge
and sunlike. Knowledge will make us better than the gods, for once we have
acquired it we are both mortal and immortal. The pagans believed that the
great hermetic philosopher is Hermes Trismegistos (the thrice greatest), who
sprang from the Egyptian god Thoth and Greek Hermes. In Poimandres
(Shepherd), a superb literary tractate attributed to this Hermes, he gives his
severely dualistic view of the cosmos, expressed as visionary experience. The
demiurge is the maker who originally emanates from the androgynous father
of all. The maker makes humans, whom he sets in the prison of the material
earth. But an androgynous primal person (anthropos) descends to earth and
mingles with the cosmos, offering spiritual promise. He carries in him a spark
of holy light. The human creature, by the act of gnosis in his or her life, can
rise from the body through interior light to join the light-body of god.
Long after the myth of cosmic return to the light principle has disappeared,
the technique of spiritual ascent, while alive and in the body, lives on as a later
development of neoplatonic and Christian mysticism. In addition to the