Theos-Talk Archives (April 1996 Message tl00433)

Rich,
What you have to say about the gnostics is of course mostly true, except I
would remind you that when something like the Nag Hammadi Library hits it
tends to create a new fashion in scholarship which may not be any more
accurate than the older views.  The Gnostics were divided between the
ascetics and the libertines, much as we theosophists are today.  Both were of
the opinion that there was a strict duality between matter and spirit and the
argument between them was how best to get away from the rule of matter, which
was the province of the demiurge.  And as you must be aware the gnostics were
not above going to extremes to do this.  In truth, much of what their
Christian enemies had to say about them was true and had to be in order to
persuade the gnostics they were trying to convert to listen.
The gnostics were real characters in their day, in many ways much like modern
pentecostals in their worship, with many of the long, incomprehensible
invocations being the glossalalia of the worshipers written down and ossified
in text form.
HPB admired the gnostics for at least two discernable reasons.  First, she
liked anyone the Christians hated.  Second, she recognized in their ideas a
fundamental part of nature, as expressed in the Mahatma Letters (and don't
ask me which one, it's been too many years since I read it) that "all
manifestation is dual."
Now that leads us to materialistic determinism.  The words are confusing
because it leads people not familiar with Lucullus' De Rerum Naturum to think
it means nineteenth century materialism, which HPB was most certainly not
into.  Rather it refers to a general view of the world, which is not going to
be found in any specific text, but rather as an overarching theme.
In its essence, and the bandwidth available to me is too small to make an
overly detailed dissertation on the subject so I may have to create an
attachment with more stuff when I have a few spare days, materialistic
determinism views the cosmos as a closed system.  In such a system, there is
no leeway for action and the view of Karma as expressed in the Key to
Theosophy is a perfect example of such a cosmology.
The problem is that the gnostics, no matter what there stripe, were not
materialistic determinists and did not see the cosmic all that way at all.
 So we have a problem in interpreting the thought of HPB, because she seems
to be advocating two mutually exclusive concepts, a universe where everything
is tightly close, in which case a strict behavioral code is essential to
spiritual progress on one hand (which would make the good Victorians in their
red flannel waistcoats very happy) and a system of duality in which matter is
temporary and the despised creation of the demiurge, existing to be either
put down or outraged as the path to spiritual liberation.
Now we know, from our science alone, that materialistic determinism does not
hold sway.  If it did, there could be no quantum mechanics, but the good
Victorians did not know this.  So, facing the discernable reality that God
does play at dice, we are forced into the gnostic mode of trying to see what
relation this world of matter has to the world of spirit.  If we assume that
HPB was a genuine mystic and, as she has also been interpreted, a genuine
magician, she was capable of soaring in her spirit far beyond the reaches of
her physical self  and such illumination would have put her in a position to
see that the actions of a single lifetime count for nothing in the great
scheme of existence.  It is simply too short.

Chuck the Barbarian MTI, FTSA
Heretic
Troublemaker