EPILOGUE 799
involvement. Then, free of matter, the liberated spirit can rise and be reinte-
grated into the unknowable god.
Man and woman of the earth were originally eternal spirits, aeons, who fell
tragically from the acosmic pleroma, the spiritual realm of light, into a cosmos
of sensation where they are completely alien to their real being. Each spirit is
invested in a decaying body. To escape from that declining flesh, the gnostic's
gaze is directed inward to the spark, to the intuited mystery of the uncon-
scious self that was once consubstantial with the unknown god. In this split of
mind and body lies the conflictive dualism between spiritual good and mate-
rial evil, and ultimately between the self and the planetary world, whose dis-
cord yields the human condition of alienation. Only knowledge (gnosis) of
spiritual light—not faith prescribed by clergy—offers escape from the earthly
dominion and return to the realm from which we have fallen.
Gnosis is a personal activity, and through reading, meditation, and search,
its instant of appearance is probably as wordless as it is revelatory. Such is the
nature of mystical experience, of ecstatic information, of epiphany wherever it
is found—whatever previous information has been fed into the instant and
however the ineffable is then translated back into speech, reason, or myth. In
gnostic and other mystical meditations, there is a distinctive and different
preparatory word, a darkness, illumination, and union, and after the oblivion
of absence a new translation of the mystical experience for the world.
The gnostics were, like the Kabbalists, irredeemably bookish, and both
engaged in elaborate mythology to map their transcendental journey. The
Kabbalists even had god create the alphabet before creating the world so he
would have speech to call the world into being. The gnostics were obsessed
with recording the experience of gnosis and were prolific in creating, copy-
ing, and preserving libraries of scripture. Unfortunately, rival sects erased
their books, just as they burned or obscured the heretical nine books of Sap-
pho's poems to her ally, the god Aphrodite, or time and neglect effaced the
music and number theory of the pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras. But
now, with the existence and wide translation of the Nag Hammadi library of
gnostic scriptures and other seminal texts from China to Mesopotamia, from
Alexandria to Languedoc, we have at last an intimate garden with its tree of
gnosis and a pleroma of scripture detailing the gnostic word of return. We
have the writings of a gnostic bible. Perhaps these books may generate an-
other, preferable bible, without sect or text, without cipher or sound, which is
the light in the book of the mind.