Competing Mysteries to be Revealed
The Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts represent a lacuna in the Christian faith of which had previously only been hinted at since the early AD schism that sealed their fate (and ours)...not for the better.
Everyone is born into a religion depending on their geography. My upbringing happened to be Christian. I remember crossing my fingers behind my back, in full view of the congregation, as the Presbyterian priest dabbed my forehead with the sacrament of baptism. Now I’m wondering if this foolish act of rebellion nullified the whole operation, and why no one called me out for such a bratty-brash silent comment on the situation, or if the Lord would forgive me because I clearly did not know what I was doing.
Now, standing on the brink of WWIII for no apparent reason that I can see other than the blood god of TPTB is getting thirsty again, I’ve finally put some things together concerning Christianity’s role in aiding and abetting ancient and quotidian atrocities. Despite Jesus exhortation for people who have eyes to see to actually and finally use them, whether thousands of years ago or this very second, people have always seen what they’ve been told they want to see, by way of the very real coping mechanism of sympathizing with one’s oppressor.
I have just written a book1 detailing the patterns that keep repeating in the American experience on matters of war, whether false flags or political assassination, the corporate media plays its part by keeping us busy with so many brutal distractions we don’t know if we’re coming or going and never able, and therefor never bother, to get to the bottom of the most recent outrage before becoming consumed by the irrational fear response of the next one.
The dynamic these latter daze can be seen this very moment where a little genocide (but don’t worry it’s only a few hundred thousand, not 6 million!) is continuing to go on by a hundred or so Palestinian’s slaughtered per day…
🚨144 Killed, 560 Injured in Gaza Over Past 24 Hours
Gaza’s Health Ministry reports that 144 Palestinians were killed and 560 injured in the past 24 hours, as Israeli strikes continue across the Strip. The toll includes four bodies recovered from under the rubble.
Many victims remain trapped in the streets or beneath collapsed buildings, with ambulances and civil defense teams unable to reach them due to ongoing bombardment.
Since March 18, when Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire and resumed attacks, its forces have killed an additional 5,334 Palestinians and injured 17,839 more.
…which has been all but forgotten by the unprovoked bombing of the evil Mudslimes of Iran by the most Moral Army in the World of the Good Ship Israel, who the corporate media would have you know and insist you believe, were actually defending themselves from the mythic thermo-nuclear bomb Iran’s been microseconds away from developing and simultaneously dropping for 30 years now. Just ask Old Netanyahu.
He’ll tell you. It’s the Iranians, stupid! It’s the dirty mullahs doing! It’s their fault Netanyahu cried out in pain after he struck them!
But I’m getting too worked up and falling farther away from this essay’s reason, which is to say there could have been a way to avoid all this civilizational obfuscation predicated on never questioning authority and trusting the motives of your leaders. That opportunity went out the window 1800 years ago or so when the Christian Church opted for the calumny of Eve’s Original Sin and the regimented dogma of said Orthodoxy over the decentralized and soon-to-be-heretical notion of the Logos Pleroma,2 that is to say, The Fullness of the Word.
I am not certain of which council of bishops or whatever it was where and when the schism was made official…could have been Emperor Constantine’s Nicea thing or something a bit earlier or even later. Regardless, Gnostic thought gradually became a serious offense and it’s popularity buried along with its doctrine and accoutrements and those who had championed the enlightenment of inner truth through the exhaustive pursuit of knowledge.
Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St. Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction—in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.
—Elaine Pagels, THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS
Uncovered accidentally by an arab named Muhammad Ali, the Gnostic scriptures were found incidentally and somewhat intriguingly shortly before Ali and his brothers avenged his father’s murder in an ingoing blood feud with a rival family. As he was digging on a hill near the town of Nag Hammadi to procure a special soil to fertilize his crops and, while digging around a boulder, he hit upon a red earthenware jar that, once dug up, measured nearly a meter long. Worried that it may imprison an evil spirit, but curious that it could just as well contain gold, the possibility of gaining riches bested any caution he was feeling for his immortal soul. Though possibly disappointed that it contained neither, the papyrus codices it did contain would eventually—after years of political intrigue and no doubt pushback from those doctrinaire forces that wished these documents remain hidden forever.
Gradually and grudgingly, these texts became a window into the contradictory teachings of the early believers and the alternative narrative of its origins that the power structures of Father Church never wanted anybody to be allowed to see again—-save the vestiges of the Gnostics’ existence in Iraq, the Mandeans,3 before being scattered to the wind by the invading American armies in and after 2003. Coincidentally or/and ironically and/or sadly, many of their number resettled in Iran. But that’s a whole another story that may be playing out for the worse as we speak—once the scriptures were translated and let out of academic purgatory by being published in their entirety for the people. The alternative form of Christianity they prescribed was purer and more introspective than anyone had thought Christianity had a right to be. Calling into question the nature of the Old Testament God and the purpose of JC’s sojourn in the world as the living, breathing, bleeding Word, their arrival on the scene has understandably overturned the tables of some charlatans still reaping profits from their moneyed ventures disguised in the vestments of a temple, a church or multi-faceted war machine dedicated to the blood god Moloch, oiled by the blood of our children.
Promoting the dogged pursuit of knowledge over blind faith as the key to salvation, Gnostic Christianity does not leave me feeling that emptiness Orthodoxy leaves in the pit of my stomach, screaming at me from the depths of my being that something is not right here and most definitely missing. But for 1700 years or so now it’s been a well-kept secret and an outright heresy. Why? Seems the early Christian Church had evolved into, for our purposes, two competing stories: one that breached no dissent and made its bones on top down unquestioned external authority that would hoard and interpret the divine knowledge it received from some impersonal and unknowable God for you and the other on the idea you had the agency to find the divinity latent within you just waiting for our lower selves to actualize through hard work and hard-earned revelation; a doctrinal anathema that is yet deemed heretical to this very day.
According to logic and reason it is easy to realize which story is better, but who said logic and reason was anybody’s strong suit these latter daze? So please join me as we explore this brave new world, er, bad choice of an expression to be sure…please join me as we explore a space no man, nor woman, nor androgyne of an ignorant archon has gone before as we flow point to point through the LOGOS PLEROMA.
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Wikipedia: Mandaeans
Mandaeans (Mandaic: ࡌࡀࡍࡃࡀࡉࡉࡀ) (Arabic: المندائيون al-Mandāʾiyyūn), also known as Mandaean Sabians (الصابئة المندائيون al-Ṣābiʾa al-Mandāʾiyyūn) or simply as Sabians (الصابئة al-Ṣābiʾa),[b] are an ethnoreligious group who are followers of Mandaeism. They believe that John the Baptist was the final and most important prophet.
They may have been among the earliest religious groups to practice baptism, as well as among the earliest adherents of Gnosticism, a belief system of which they are the last surviving representatives today.[25][26]: 109 The Mandaeans were originally native speakers of Mandaic, an Eastern Aramaic language, before they nearly all switched to Mesopotamian Arabic or Persian as their main language.
After the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies in 2003, the Mandaean community of Iraq, which before the war numbered 60,000–70,000 persons, collapsed with most of the community relocating to Iran, Syria and Jordan, or forming diaspora communities beyond the Middle East.