confident social movement expanding into widely available niches. This de-
scribes the various Gnostic sects and the secret societies that promulgated the
many versions of pagan Hermeticism. Occultist secret societies and more open
religious organizations were the expanding structures of this period, and they
underwent the doctrinal splintering characteristic of their strength. Their doc-
trines were usually only marginally philosophical: they did not typically oper-
ate with very abstract concepts or conceptual and logical self-reflectiveness,
but they asserted particularistic symbols—good and evil gods, demons—all
with rather concrete characteristics and modes of ritual propitiation. Intellec-
tual territory per se began where these concepts were rationalized, typically by
association with some version of idealist philosophy.
The structure of the Gnostic and occultist groups may be inferred from the
proliferation of anonymous and pseudonymous manuscripts claiming to rep-
resent the ancient wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus, of Pythagoras, of the
Chaldeans (Babylonian priests) or Egyptians. The form and content of the texts
imply a series of small secret groups, based on transmission from a revered
master to initiates (Fowden, 1986: 156–160, 189–193). But secrecy was often
broken, and the organizational chains were rarely sustained beyond the lifetime
of particular charismatic leaders. Some of the Gnostic organizations did better,
such as those of Valentinus or Mani, which widened out beyond little circles
of the “elect” to build churches encompassing ordinary people (Fowden, 1986:
189). This gave them greater staying power, and also put them into direct
competition with the Christian Church, which typically treated them as hereti-
cal rivals.
Whereas the Gnostic sects and other occultist movements were usually
small-scale secret societies, the Christians concentrated on building an organ-
izational hierarchy, with centralized procedures for appointing priests and a
unified discipline and doctrine (Jones, [1964] 1986: 873–933; Chadwick, 1967:
54–66; Telfer, 1962). The fact that Christian texts are not anonymous but are
attributed to persons whose names are tied to the church’s hierarchical succes-
sion represents the routinization of charisma and the bureaucratic continuity
which the Gnostics lacked. The crucial inheritance from Judaism was not
merely monotheism but the fact that, in contrast to other monotheisms such
as the cult of Mithras or a universal goddess such as Isis or Cybele, it was a
religion of the book. The scripture itself was the focus of holy ritual, and the
organization necessarily had a core of literate specialists, providing a base for
its own intellectuals. Even if the contents of the original scriptures were
particularistic histories and mythologies, the combination of the focus on a
text plus the centralizing organization provided key elements of a rational-legal
bureaucracy, and hence the basis for more abstract and universalistic interpre-
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^121