Why astrology is at the center of Gnosticism, and why you still don't need to believe it, to be a Gnostic ...

Gnosticism originated in Antiquity for 1500 to 1800 years ago, so understanding real Gnosticism requires one to study what the real Gnostics thought and make your own personal modernization, uninfluenced by any modern "prophet" that superimposes the Gnostic message with their own stuff.

The central representation of the archons in Gnosticism is seven high archons and twelve low archons. Seven is the number of classical planets, and twelve is the number of calendar months. There might be other meanings too, but you may research that yourself – I don't know.

The seven classical planets represents pagan gods: Moon = Horaeus, Mercury = Aiolaeus, Venus = Astaphaeus, Sun = Adonaeus, Mars = Sabaoth, Jupiter = Iao, Saturn = Ialdabaoth ("Practicing Gnosis", April D DeConick, page 55).

The twelve low archons represents star signs, but without established associations to the twelve lower archons: Athoth, Harmas [called the eye of flame], Kalilaumbri, Yabel, Adonaiu [called Sabaoth], Cain [called the sun], Abel, Abrisene, Yobel, Armupiel, Melcheir-adonein, Belias. If you want to know, research it yourself! Learn astrology, read the Secret Book of John!

If you want to know the obscure symbols of Gnosticism, astrology is one guidance beside the symbology presented in the Secret Book of John. Just remember that modern astrology makes a lot of compromises towards psychology which makes the symbols "reasonable" – the astrology of the antiquity was more simplistic, and the symbollogy was more naive, Aries rushed on and butted his/her head, Gemini was split in two persons, etc.. Research it yourself!

Astrology relies on the four "elements" of Empedocles fire, earth, air and water, who use to be associated with the "personality types" of choleric, melancholic, sanguinic and phlegmatic. It has a vague counterpart in the MBTI class personality traits developed by C G Jung (NB: not a Gnostic according to himself!), Katharine Briggs, and Isabelle Myers. The connection between MBTI and the four "elements" should be SP/artisan = air, NF/idealist = fire, SJ/guardian = earth, NT/rational = water according to Jung.

Note however: MBTI has 16 personality types, the zodiacal signs amount to 12, and the archons/planets amount to 7. Also note: psychologists avoid MBTI. They prefer using the personality metric Big 5, which gives an unlimited number of personality characterizations that yet has a low explanation value according to the same psychologists.

Also note: There are scientific studies of the efficacy of astrology, and they generally tend to indicate that it isn't. This is no problem for Gnosticism however, we don't need effective horoscopes to decode symbols, and one of the goals of Classical Gnosticism was to use magic formulae to get rid of the influence of the evil planets and thereby liberate us from Fate. We can simply reinterpret these planets as mental (or societal?) forces that trap us into the matter (or a materialist world view?), while the Gnostic prayers make us get rid of that imprisonment by "programming up" our independence from those forces.

The Hidden History in the New Testament

Hidden History in NT

(A preliminary result of personal research, not sourced)

I'm writing this in discord with apocalypticism. The real end times is when humankind violates the nature so that ecological collapse follows, and the existence of the civilization is at stake. Anyone trying to conjure other catastrophies and supernatural rescue operations are committing grave evil by replacing truth by fantasies. This story is to debunk all destructive and dangerous interpretations of the Book of Revelation.

I write this in discord with the interpretation methods of the Book of Revelation maintained by the Millerites, i.e. Adventists, Jehovas Witnesses, Christadelphians, the Baha'i and the Ahmadiyyas - their method is far, far wrong and dangerous. I also write this in discord with the interpretation methods popular among the Evangelicals, who predict a global catastrophy where they will go to heaven and everybody else will go to hell in the end times. There are no such end times, the only real end times can be avoided if humanity arms itself with knowledge as the sharpest weapon against destruction.

Prophecies in general

Prophecies are not:

• drug hallucinations,
• hallucinations by an insane person,
• a year-day coded map of the future.

Prophecies are:

• "meditations" on the near future, and when gematria and symbols are used, they are used to hide the real message from the rulers who may kill you for the message.

This is the prescribed correct method for any prophecy:

1. identify who wrote the prophecy at what time,
2. map the historical situation when the prophecy was formulated, and identify what real the symbols refer to,
3. identify the political meaning of the message: who wrote it? for whom? intending what action?
4. if you want to use the prophecy yourself, you should not propose the same literal action against a similar enemy according to your interpretations (the Evangelical way), you should use it as an allegorical description of spiritual forces ruling our lives (the Gnostic way) and not cause any mess and trouble that you didn't intend to cause.

The Book of Revelation

The Book of Revelation consists of six parts:

1. Rev 1-3 (7CA): the seven churches of Asia,
2. Rev 4-11 (7S7T): seven seals, seven trumpets, THE END!
3. Rev 12-19 (PZ): the woman clad in the Sun, with her son taken to heaven, the supernatural Beast menagery, and the wreckage of the great Babylon, and THE END!
4. Rev 20 (SR): Satan/Dragon returns, then THE END again!
5. Rev 21-22 (CPJ): the cubic planet New Jerusalem, and The Lucky END (yet again),
6. Rev 22:6+ (JWH): "John" was here!

There are two times discussed for writing Revelation: short after the death of emperor Nero 68 AD, and after the death of emperor Domitian 97 AD. I presume that part 3 is written at the earlier time point, and the rest at some other time.

I presume that Rev 12-19 was a rally for rebellion against the romans, so it must have been written shortly after the death of emperor Nero, before the end of the Jewish Rebellion of 66-71 AD, implying that it was written in 68 or 69 AD. There was nothing such around the death of emperor Domitian, the first mention of a Domitian persecution occurred with the notoriously unreliable church historian Eusebius of Caesarea in the early 4th century.

I'll call the Rev 12-19 the "Prophecy of the Zealot" (PZ).

I decode PZ in the following way:

Rev 12: a Messiah pretender is killed by rulers in Judea, probably the Romans. The "Church" is persecuted and move out into the desert for a time. They find "water" there, which might be interpreted as water, as guerilla resistance, or as revelatory experiences by asketic living. This covers the years before 68 AD, probably the persecution dates to about 52–60 AD under Judean curator Antonius Felix (WJ II:13:4).

Rev 13: the first Beast the Roman Empire with seven heads one of whom had gotten a fatal wound (Nero is that head). 42 months left uninterpreted, except 42 = 7·6 and 7 use to be significant.

The second Beast is 666 which is gematria for nrwn qsr (Neron Kaisar), but another discovered variant is 616 which is gematria for nrw qsr (Nero Kaisar).

Nero was very popular among the poor Romans, so short after his very fatal death, he was prophecied to return - the so called Nero Redivivus myth; the emperor Otho was claimed to be Nero Redivivus.

Rev 15: seven angels - God is predicted to destroy all offensive peoples with seven plagues and a back-reference to Moses's ten plagues against Farao and the Egyptians to convince readers of the veracity of PZ.

Rev 16: seven angels with seven bowls of God’s Wrath, vaguely similar to the ten plagues of Exodus, but mismatched in number and order, the last one contains lightning and earthquakes splitting the Great City (Rome) in three parts.

Rev 17: the punishment of "Babylon the great" (Rome), seven hills on which she sits (seven hills of Rome), a prediction of the destruction of the Beast (the Roman Empire), seven kings - the Roman Emperors again waging war on the Lamb (the Messiah movement), and a prediction about all the peoples in the Roman Empire uprising against Rome. Here is where PZ fails the most: the entire chapter constitutes a false prophecy.

Rev 17 predicts:		the reality became:
1.	Augustus	1.	Augustus
2.	Tiberius	2.	Tiberius
3.	Caligula	3.	Caligula
4.	Claudius	4.	Claudius
5.	Nero	5.	Nero
6.	noname	6.	Galba
7.	noname	7.	Otho – Nero Redivivus
8.	Nero Redivivus	8.	Vitellius
–	the Roman Empire has ceased	9.	Vespasian
–	the Roman Empire has ceased	10.	Titus
–	the Roman Empire has ceased	11.	Domitian
–	the Roman Empire has ceased	12.	Nerva
–	the Roman Empire has ceased	13+	Trajan, Hadrian and 65 more

There was no grand multinational rebellion in the Roman empire in the 1th century.

Rev 18: poetry and predictions about the fall of Rome and aftermath.

Rev 19: more antiroman poetry.

The Word of God and his heavenly armies erects an eternal worldwide empire by stroking all other nations, exterminating all competing powers, enemy peoples and all misbehaving elements.

The supernatural menagery of Rev 13 are here thrown into a fiery lake of burning sulfur, the rest are simply killed by swords out of the Word of God, so that vultures can gorge on the flesh.

Rev 19 is the final failure of PZ - the Jews didn't win, they lost, so there were never a Zealot empire of Terror erected. The great Jewish rebellion was crushed, the Zealots, the Essenes and the Zaddokees disappear - probably because their teachings were now moot, the rebellion of the Zealots and Essenes failed, and the temple that the Zaddokees earned their living from was razed.

Rev 19 is also the one most hateful and violent chapter in the New Testament. It could not be considered being in accord with the peace teachings of Christianity of the 2nd century, hence it reveals that there was another violent rebellious Christianity before the end of the great Jewish rebellion, something that is hinted at by apologetic reinterpretations in the Gospels. I presume that this earlier Christianity was Zealotism.

Conclusions

In short:

• The Book of Revelation is written in six parts, whereof chapters 12-19 is a Zealot rally for rebellion against the Romans - this I call the "Prophecy of the Zealot" (PZ).

• PZ is a 68-69 AD prophecy about the 70-75 AD disintegration and fall of the Roman empire and an erection of a worldwide Zealot empire led by a spiritual Messiah - not necessarily Jesus - this prophecy failed and is therefore false. All usages must be symbolic, and they must symbolize "Roman," "Whore of Babylon," "Beast," etc. to mental states or else endangering the sanity and morals of the user.

• The violence and hate of PZ either contradicts Christianity, or points to an earlier violent Christianity intended to make revolution against the Romans. I prefer the later theory and this earlier violent Christianity is probably what is known as Zealotry.

Papias-wrote-it theories

The following are my own theories: I thought they were needed, because they use the earliest "testimonies" properly, and don't dismiss Church Fathers on flimsy grounds. Also: they accept both the onomastic argument for the Gospels as biographies, and they are based on the Markan Priority theory.

Papias-wrote-it theories

The Gospels are biographies, not pure fiction, according to the onomastic argument. That doesn't imply that everything about the Gospels must then be perfectly true, which appears to be claimed by the inventors of the argument, it just means that there is a historical background wherein the personage refers to people that for the most part were real people, but we must also have a biographer. What indications do we have about a historical biographer on the life of Jesus? We have Papias of Hierapolis, who wrote a commentary on the logions of Matthew and John Mark! According to the history Papias used logia from Matthew and John Mark to write his commentaries. These logia sets were not written down in order, nor did they provide a coherent biography. Matthew wrote his logia set in chronological order, but not as anecdotes, and he wrote them in Hebreew, or more likely in Aramaic. John Mark wrote his logia set in Greek, and he wrote them as short stories that he allegedly recorded from the apostle Peter, but they were not arranged in chronological order. What did then Papias do? He interviewed elders and other persons with indirect knowledge about the Jesus events. Why? Probable answers: 1. he wanted to identify important persons in the Jesus movement, 2. he wanted to establish a context for the logia of Matthew, in order to interpret them, 3. he wanted to establish a chronology and context also for the logia of John Mark.

Papias-Mark theories

To accomplish that, he wrote a sketch of the life of Jesus, and this sketch is the most original proto-Mark. It may have contained Matthew statements that are absent from our Gospel of Mark, but they may also have been absent, because Papias kept the Matthew logia in a separate set. So in essence Papias is the collator of Gospel of Mark, which was called the Memoirs of the Apostles.

Papias-Matthew theories

Papias translated Matthew's logia from Aramaic to Greek that he kept in a series which is now regarded as Q. Papias' list contained more logia than our currently known Q, and this list was the basis for the additions to our Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Now Papias redacted the Gospel of John Mark – which he himself, or someone else wrote/collated – by adding the statements of Q where he saw fit. So in essence Papias is the collator of the Gospel of Matthew from earlier sources.

Papias-Mark-Matthew theory

Papias wrote the Gospel of Mark based on John Mark's logia. That was the first edition of the Memoirs of the Apostles. Next he amended the Gospel of Mark with logia of Matthew that he had translated in a later stage, and that book now constitutes the Gospel of Matthew. That was the second edition of the Memoirs of the Apostles. He used them as short stories to analyse the Logia sets of John Mark and Matthew, with no intent that they should constitute eye-witness accounts.

• Papias and the Gospels, © 6 oct 2012, Richard Bauckham
• The Gospel of Matthew, John the elder, and the Papias tradition: A response to R H Gundry, David C Sim

Homily about the archons

(the following is my personal opinion)

The archons are "demons" ruling this "evil" or entropic universe of death according to Gnostic mythology. They are either regarded as fallen angels or creations by the soulless demiurge (Yaldabaoth, Sammael etc.). There is a general confusion about those archons, sometimes they are represented as real evil forces that persecute us and create troubles for us in our lifes, like a giant conspiracy. This is not a proper understanding of the archons. The point is this: 'Gnosis' is associated with knowledge about how to overcome negative passions, and conspiracy theories of a demonic persecution are negative passions, i.e. exactly the trap that Gnosticism warns us against! A Gnostic that have experienced real 'Gnosis' have experienced an inner calmness that makes 'Error' go away. 'Error' is a kind of colored world view filled with passions of one's own self-import and the evil of the world around oneself. That's the paradox of Gnosticism: it informs us that the universe is in a sense evil, while understanding the world makes the evil go away in ourselves, by a detachment from (negative) passions and dedication to knowledge. And by knowledge I mean knowledge, not "knowledge". 'Gnosis' is experiential knowledge, so a part of mastering the All is ... experiential knowledge about the All. Where the All includes the universe. A starkly vivid example of a passion-ridden person from history is Adolf Hitler: everything in his world was circulating around his own self-import: he was "the savior of the German people" leading it to "greatness", and everything around him was "enemies" or tools of the "German folk spirit". He was extreme, but the pattern of self-import and black and white world view of narcissist persons are clear signs that they are archon-ridden and trapped into matter. Cults are like that too, and therefore if a movement is a cult, it is by definition not Gnostic, but if it is Gnostic it is not a cult. By definition.

Now, what's the reason this universe is "evil" and to what degree? My personal opinion is that there are five qualitative degrees of "evil":

1. entropy: all energy spreads in the energy spectrum, and in the whole all structure disappear, (if I got the definition from Boltzmann right),
2. death follows from entropy as applied on living bodies, life is when the entropy is kept low, and there are just a few energy levels kept up by certain chemical biocatalytic reactions in clusters of cells,
3. predation is when an organism to survive kills another organism and absorbs its nutritional contents, just to keep itself alive, predation could be directed against you individually, but only as a nonpersonal need for the other's survival,
4. persecution is when a human recognizes you individually for what you are, and tries to make your life sour and perhaps kill you,
5. cults are groups of evil people that keeps an archon-ridden world view, and persecutes everybody that threatens the integrity of the cult, as well as any internal dissenter.

Gnosis according to the original Gnostics (my opinion)

Gnosticism was a trend in the antiquity to combine heretical Judaic mythology with Mesoplatonic concepts. Gnosis according to this original model, was enlightenment of one's own divine nature, usually the inborn ethics and the inborn attitude to the world. When being elected gnostic (on some level) one "married" the heavenly twin in Pleroma, an angel representing the true self. Some Gnostics maintained the monogamous marriage to this perfect twin, some other didn't regard this "monogamy".

The Platonic cosmology claims that there is a perfect eternal world of "Ideas" which is more real than the physical world wherein we live, and in comparison of which this world is just a defect shadow. Mesoplatonism (middle platonism before Plotinus) also borrowed a lot of concepts from the Peripatetics (Aristotle) and the Stoics (Zeno of Citium) and the science of the time, among others Ptolemy's geocentric cosmology of planetary bodies, and the earliest known alchemy. According to the Gnostics and most Platonics, this material world is fundamentally "evil" - so when Plotinos the Neoplatonic attacks the Gnostics for regarding this world as evil, he deviates from the standard Platonic position by adopting the pompous God-powerism shared by Hermetics, Jews and (non-Gnostic) Christians. The "evil" of this world is not the satanic evil from a predator that have selected its victim, or a hateful dictators murderlust against opponents, but rather a fundamentally corrupt quality of the creation that corrupts, decomposes and kills, and that indirectly creates predation and hateful dictators through the action of Error which is kind of a violation against the rules of the divine existences in the World of Ideas or Pleroma. In modern physical terms this "evil" can be compared to entropy. This world inevitably leads to death, and our only way to get eternal life is to emulate the qualities upheld by our heavenly twins who already have eternal life - according to Mani (the founder of Manichaeism) and probably the Valentinians, through the so called Bridal Chamber. Irenaeus reports that some "heretics" admitted through the Bridal Chamber ("nuptial couch" section 3), some through the baptism, and some through incomprehensible formulae. According to the Mandeans a newborn baby will get a secret constellation name (malwasha) to get a connection to the Pleroma above.

The archons, the evil rulers of this world, are a symbol for passions, and strong uncontrolled feelings. Evil rulers affect us and manipulate us through our feelings. Pleroma - the Gnostic counterpart of the Christian Heaven is free from emotions, we are there purely intellectual light beings (page 78) acting perfectly logical according to reason. The Living water (page 89) is a symbol for streams of energy that provides us nourishment in our intellectual form.

Life itself is, according to Gnostic theology, a holy entity (section 2.1.1. Pira), otherwordly and divine, and it turns evil only in contact with the matter, where predation emerges as a mechanism to temporarily avoid death, which in the long run is unavoidable nevertheless, an unchangeable force that drags us down to the center of earth. It is reasonable to imagine Pleroma as a number of Aeons (heavens) of increasing brightness, permanency and purity, but they are full of life that doesn't perish. After the death we have to pass the planets of this Universe, and these are regarded as evil archons keeping us trapped in this world trying to keep us in control astrologically using emotional affect. Mandeans (page 153 and forth) and Ophites are clear with this, and provide secret formulae to pass each planet on our road to Pleroma. This was the established scientific cosmology during the antiquity.

The big revelation of Gnosis

This article is obsoleted for the following one: Gnosis according to the original Gnostics (my opinion))

(Imagine an ironic tone in this post)

At last the grand revelation of what Gnosis is, is finally here:

"Gnosis" is Greek for (experiental) knowledge. Or for experience.

...

...

...

... just kidding ...

Again: at last the grand revelation of what Gnosis is, is finally here:

"Gnosis" in the original Gnostic contexts meant: "the recognition of the divine heritage of oneself", or "knowledge that saves you from (committing) evil (acts)." Or perhaps: "knowledge of the perfection of the platonic ideal highest heaven, and since we are instantiations of the ideal man in the highest heaven, we are ultimately of divine heritage."

And that's probably it. Nothing more.

The real Gospels of Matthew and Mark, my hypothesis

Addition 180204: I regard this theory as improbable – I just need the theory to be formulated

There are a lot of theories of how the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) were written and how they relate to each other. The academics proposing those theories are making a lot of text analyses, comparing Greek language with the language of certain centuries in the Antiquities. I have no competence to contest anything of that, but I can make a simple skip-the-academics-go-to-the-sources operation and propose some theories of my own that nobody else seem to have conjured up. If my theory is good, somebody really has, but I haven't discovered it yet. If my theory is bad, then nobody will ever accept my theory for being crack-pot balderdash.

Nevertheless: the source I'm boldly invoking is Papias of Hierapolis, speaking through the citation of Eusebius the Christian historian:

[John] The Elder used to say: Mark, in his capacity as Peter’s interpreter, wrote down accurately as many things as he recalled from memory—though not in an ordered form—of the things either said or done by the Lord. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him, but later, as I said, Peter, who used to give his teachings in the form of chreiai, but had no intention of providing an ordered arrangement of the logia of the Lord. Consequently Mark did nothing wrong when he wrote down some individual items just as he related them from memory. For he made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard or to falsify anything.

Naïve interpretation (according to wikipedia on chreia): John Mark wrote a list of logia like the Gospel of Thomas, of the form followers asks, Jesus answers, or Jesus says, without context in either case. Mark wrote the logia in the order that he remembered them, and he wrote them down remembering Simon Kaifas (Peter) speeches. If this text is to be taken for true, then John Mark didn't write the Gospel of Mark, at the very best he wrote fragments that later was extended and reordered to become the "Gospel of Mark".

Furthermore Papias writes:

Therefore Matthew put the logia in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew language, but each person interpreted them as best he could.

The only clear thing here is that Matthew also wrote something like the Gospel of Thomas, but his logia were 1. written in some order, possibly chronological, or perhaps alphabethical, 2. wrote them in the Hebrew language. Scholars use to assume that Matthew wrote in Greek, but I think this is unwarranted, given that Eusebius's citation of Papias is correct, and that Papias correctly relates to truthful sources that know what they speak about.

My bold addition to this scheme is that Papias himself either collated the "modern" Gospel of Mark or the "modern" Gospel of Matthew, or both. He wrote a (now lost) five book comment on the Gospels according to later sources. He also interviewed a lot of elders, including the daughters of Philip. It is reasonable to believe that he collated the original Gospels of Matthew and Mark with the stories of his interviewed persons, so as to bring the original Gospels in chronological order and make reasonable interpretations of the chreiai and the logia. This constituted what was initially called the "Memoirs of the Apostles", but which later came to develop to the synoptic Gospels.