This summer holiday I have had a book in my knapsack, a book I read a great many years since now, a book which I for various reasons did not think I would read again: Monsieur or the Prince of Darkness, by the English author Lawrence Durrell.
In the novel whose kernel is the suspected suicide of Piers de Nogaret, the assembly of disassociated and enstranged old friends and associates, and a massive recollection, in no less than four of his former aquiantances – we encounter a certain gentleman by the name of Akkad. Akkad is Durrell’s “wise old man” archetypal figure, only his persona and vocabulary is slightly sinister, and he is apparently younger than the protagonists.
About Gnostics such as himself, Akkad said:

“People of our persuasion gradually learn to refuse all rights to so-called God. They renounce the empty world, not like ascetics or martyrs, but like convalescents after suicide.”(pp13)

This is the fare that Akkad gives us, his universe, while host to many most beautiful forms, reminders – still is unpopulated by any other spark of light or presence but the cold calculating stare of human consciousness, the only way to deal with it is to recognize all that keeps one bound to a condition of slavery, and in fear of Death and God, the authorities par excellence in this world.

“What really dies is the collective image of the past – all the temporal selves which have been present in a serial form focused together now in an instant of perfect attention, of crystal-clear apprehension which could last forever if one wished.”(pp14)

“Even death has its own precise texture and the big philosophers have always entered into the image of the world it exemplifies while still alive, so to become one with it while their hearts were still beating. They colonised it.”(pp23-24)

A few words on Lawrence Durrell, while sometimes his format verges upon traditional mystery novels they never really make the transition, he is a thoroughly modern (or “modernist”) author who are, as is wont to care more about a consistency to interior psyche than conventions of narrative and continuity. I do not feel I exaggerate if I say Durrell’s novels is even literarily challenging, in the sense that it is difficult to follow, to grasp in the sense we would indeed do so with the popular mystery novels, for example.
That marred my reading experience with regards to Monsieur because the author has allowed a great ambiguity with regards to the narrative first person of his novel, eventually even the format of the novel is dissolved, not only in longer excerpts from journals and letters, but poetry and long stream-of-consciousness passages without discernable beginning and end. To many critics, these things are not only interesting, but so endearing as to be some kind of stamp of eloquence and genius – to others, the author has performed, by them, a mortal sin against the conventions of literature pure and proper.
Durrell’s literary universe is populated by feverish,haunted lovers who have long since lost touch with the contemporary standard of propriety. They are somehow tainted, even the protagonists, they have no heroic strain left in them, they have succumbed to emptyness, to emotional chaos – to decadence. The backdrop of colonial Alexandria and deprecit Avignon in the decades between the world wars, serve up a mystique of its own, but Durrell’s characters have minds which filters out the exterior world, outside their rivalries, romances, friendships and antipathies. In Monsieur, Durrell lets us in on a secret thrust between old friends and lovers – at one time they all went to Macabru to meet the illustrious 20th century Gnostic Akkad, a man of mixed Syrian and French heritage who had decamped into some alternative civilization, allowed to do so from living on his inheritance from wealthy, but decadent ancestors – and from his strange combination of business partners and spiritual disciples.
At one time Akkad allows his most recent convert to his “Ophite Gnostic” group to discover an article which unveils his group and his person as nothing but charlatans, dangerous as such – planting the magazine with the barber he knows Piers Lagouret would visit.

Bruce Drexel, the protagonist of Durrell’s novel, trying to digest the abrupt death of his friend Piers, the heir of the infamous
traitor of the French Templars- who supposedly had given them away to the ambitious King of France, Philip le Bel, as a form of revenge for the death of his forefathers who had been Cathars –

PP10-11.
“I wondered if in dying he (Piers) remembered the initiation which we had shared in Egypt long ago – at the hands of Akkad, distilled patiently from the doctrines of the desert gnostics? I know he had been deeply marked by them. In the matter of death, I mean, they were crucial and unequivocal. For after that initiation it was impossible to attach any profound importance to the notion of dying. All individual deaths had been resumed by the death of God! I remember how the idea terrified me at the time! When we said goodbye to tender, smiling Akkad he told us:”Now don’t give a thought to what you have learned. Simply become it as fast as you can – for what one becomes one forgets.” Obviously this belonged to the other kind of death, the gnostic one which would henceforward always overshadow the death of mere time in man; the death which for Akkad and his sect was simply one form of the body’s self-indulgence, a lack of fastidiousness.”Dying can be a mere caprice if one allows it to happen before discovering the big trick which enables one to die with profit”, he said.”

My own journey upon the Gnostic path has indeed been much informed about death, more than perhaps what is considered proper by some. The conclusion of this introspection is for me the understanding that I need to embrace the responsibility which I have, on account of the new relationship I have, not with an abstract, not with an authority, not a bloodless prinsciple – but a God alive and spiritual; but it is not only God who formerly were a precarious ghost haunting the subconscious psychic strata in me and my fellow Gnostics, it is the Persona itself, dispossessed of its own, exiled from the “Temple” as it were, wherein it is possible to give thought to, or choose any action with regards to any reality; the world has hijacked us from the day of our birth into this world.

James Gifford and Stephen Osadetz has published an article in the online Journal Agora titled Gnosticism in Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur: New Textual Evidence for Source Materials . They point out quite a few problems with determining both Durrell’s access to information on classical Gnosticism, method of using sources and relationship to Jacques Lacarriere, who wrote a rather popular book on the Gnostics in the 70’s, named fittingly “The Gnostics”, to which Lawrence Durrell wrote the foreword, he considered the book “more a work of literature than of scholarship” and had some reservations about his colleagues’ theories. Anyways, they did a better job than I could hope to do with regards to this severly limited area. But I do have some remarks myself with regards to Durrell’s “contemporary” Gnostics who according to the plot in his books encamped in the oasis named Macabru annually to go through an initiatory process – Akkad appears as a kind of Max Theon-character who spins an incredible amount of mystique around his own person and the way by which he has received some kind of revelatory license to be a purveyor of Gnosis in the 20th century. His calculated cynicism and “method”, however, looks stamped decidedly with Gurdijeff’s characteristics. To a limited amount of British people both Max Theon and G.I.Gurdijeff played a significant role in their awakening to a kind of spiritualized intellectualism, alternatively intellectual spirituality. Another aspect to Akkad’s personality is his rather sincere and naked nihilism, especially with regards to questions such as Suicide, human sexuality and society; whatever angle I look at it, from having been “socialized” into understanding my visions and interior dialogues in light of classical Gnosticism through first-hand sources, to wit, the Nag Hammadi Library – the ethos of the Egyptian Gnostics has a different, yet as radical, view of these matters. Suicide is not an eleutherian catalyst for salvation at all, it is not even considered a voluntary action but a conditioned response to the incalculatable low odds for an awakened, conscious Self within the dissolving chaos which nevertheless is all this Universe elicits as a description, at least not from “us”.
This is also the observation of J.Gifford and S.Osadetz in their article, they compare Durrell’s gnostic Akkad’s view on suicide with that of the gnostics described in Lacarriere’s book on them:

As Akkad explains to Sylvie, Piers and Bruce during their initiation into the heresy, “But then death… What is it after all? It is not enough! We will all die. Yet to the pure Gnostic soul the open gesture of refusal is necessary, is the only poetic act” (Durrell, Monsieur 139). Nevertheless, this tenet of Akkad’s Gnosticism, that certain forms of suicide are acceptable, is anything but the belief of a “pure gnostic soul” as Lacarrière describes it; rather, Lacarrière writes, suicide

“is the absolute antithesis of the Gnostic attitude. Not one of them, at any time, preached suicide. The aim of the Gnostic is not the conjugate extinction of life and of consciousness, but the mastering of the one and the other, the attainment of a hyper-life and a hyper-consciousness.” (Lacarriere:The Gnostics)

Ignaz von Dollinger wrote:”If I were asked to name the _dies nefastus_ in the history of the world, the day that would come to my mind would be none other than October 13th, 1307.”

(the day when Philip the Fair ordered the arrest of the French Templars). (cited in

Pierre Mariel:Guide…des Templiers. Table Ronde, Paris, 1973.

A few pages further on, the same work makes mention of “a legend whose setting is the amphitheatre of

Gavarnie in the Pyrenees, where six knights of the Temple lie at rest in a chapel.

Every year, on March 18 – the birthday of the last Grand Master of the Order (Jacques de Molay) –

a Knight of the Temple is seen to appear, whose shroud is replaced by the famous white cloak with the four triangled red cross. He is in battle apparel and holds his lance in rest. He walks slowly towards the centre of the Chapel and utters a piercing call, which re-echoes

around the ampitheatre of the mountains:”Who will defend the Holy Temple? Who will deliver the tomb of Christ?” At his call the six entomed Templars come alive and stand up, to answer three times:

“No one! No one! No one! The Temple is destroyed!”

…echoing the lamentations of the Talmudic Sages, each of them sets the same catastrophe at the centre

of world history: The destruction of the Temple, the same Temple.

Occuring and recurring – opposing this dispair with the tenacity of permanent defiance: the image of the rebuilding of the Temple, the coming of the New Temple, which assumes the dimensions of Cosmic Restoration.(pp263).

Henri Corbin,The Imago Templi in Confrontation with Secular Norms

Paris, July 25th 1974.

Published in Henry Corbin:Temple and Contemplation.Islamic Publications Ltd. Routledge&Kegan,London,1986.

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22nd July was the feastday and commemoration of Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene is perhaps the most specific and unique manifestation of Gnostic discipleship to the Christ one can imagine. We are reminded in the reports of the Canonical Gospels that Jesus associated people of all levels in society, especially from different degrees of paria-hood with regards to what his contemporaries, each in their own particular sect or branch, considered Orthodox Jewry. We hear that this arrogance also had polluted his male disciples, that they contested amongst themselves for attention and status – and when he reported he would depart from them, for the first time, they immediately began thinking about who would succeed him. All this was prior to quite extraordinary encounters they would have with the Christ, whose revelation to them accorded a change of heart.

Mary Magdalene quitely went into her cell to meditate and pray, to be present spirituality – instead of rushing into the street and see the spectacle of Lazarus’ resurrection. Likewise, without flinching, she insisted on treating the body of Christ, upon his testimony that he from then on would be as if dead already, as if it was dead, anointing it, not on account of royalty, but according to custom. The disciples could not bear, physically, to have their feet washed by Jesus, in total contrast to this. The male disciples were becoming accustomed to Mary as being this person who was always present around Jesus, who did not open her mouth in company of others, who meekly faded into the background – but whose actions and attitude greatly pleased Jesus. When she finally began speaking and insist on being heard, they, especially Peter, was outraged; he must have thought she had forgot the lesson the Master had taught her. But it was he, rather, that had not understood what it was she had been taught.

Jesus had not told Mary to act according to the consensus appreciation of what is proper for young Jewish women – he had taught her, by example, in silence, to act what she knew, to respond directly, bodily – to embody the Gnosis in herself.

Henry Corbin, in The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism (pp.15-16), writes:

“it is…the man of light who speaks through the mouth of Mary Magdalene when, in the course of the initiatic conversations between the Resurrected Christ and his disciples, she assumes the predominant role conferred on her in the book of the Pistis Sophia, the New Testament of the religion of the man of light
:”The Power which issued from the Saviour and which is now the man of light within us…My Lord! Not only does the man of light in me have ears but my soul has heard and understood all the words that thou has spoken…The man of light in me has guided mel he has rejoiced and bubbled up in me as if wishing to emerge from me and pass into thee.” Just as Zosimos places on the one hand Prometheus-Phos opposite his guide of light who is “the son of God” and on the other the earthly Adam opposite his guide, the Antimimos, the “counterfeiter”, so in the book of the Pistis Sophia:
“It is I, declares the Resurrected One, who brought thee the power which is in thee and which issued from the twelve saviours of the Treasury of Light”

By the same inversion and reciprocity which in Sufism makes the “heavenly Witness” simultaneously the one Contemplated and the Contemplator, the man of light appears both as the one guided and the guide: this communicatio idiomatum forewarns us that the bi-unity, the dialogic unity, cannot be taken as the association of Phos and carnal Adam,who follows another guide.The Light cannot be compounded with the demonic Darkness; the latter is Phos’ prison, from which hs struggles to separate himself and which will return to its primordial negativity. The syzygy of light is Prometheus-Phos and his guide, the “son of God.” This very fact also points clearly to a structure, which has nevertheless been subject to all kinds of misunderstandings. “The power which is in thee,” in each one of you, cannot refer to a collective guide, to a manifestation and a relationship identical for each one of the souls of light.

Nor, a fortiori, can it be the macrocosm or Universal Man (insan kolli) which assumes the role of heavenly counter-part of each microcosm. The infinite price attached to spiritual individuality makes it inconceivable that salvation could consist in its absorption into a totality, even a mystical one. What is important is to see that it refers to an analogical relationship presupposing four terms, and this essentially is just what is so admirably expressed in the angelology of Valentinian Gnosis: Christ’s Angels are Christ himself, because each Angel is Christ related to individual existence.

What Christ is for the souls of Light as a whole, each Angel is for each soul.Every time one of these conjunctions of soul and Angel takes place, the relationship which constitutes the Pleroma of Light is reproduced.The relationship is in fact so fundamental that it is found again in Manicheism, and is also what, in Suhravardi‘s “Oriental Theosophy”, makes it possible for us to conceive the relationshop between the Perfect Nature of the mystic and the archetypal Angel of humanity (identified with the Holy Ghost; the Angel Gabriel of Qoranic Revelation, the active Intelligence of the Avicennan philosophers.” What this Figure represents in relation to the totality of the souls of light emanated from itself, each Perfect Nature represents respectively for each soul.

In his late Paper, finished July 25th 1974, in Paris : Imago Templi in confronation with Secular Norms (published in Henry Corbin:Temple and Contemplation.) , Henry Corbin writes:

Faced with a Church which had become a historical power and a society in the time of this world, the longing for the Temple is a longing for a “place” where, during the liturgical mystery and at the

“meeting-place of the two seas”, eschatology was realized in the present, a present which is not the

limit of past and future in historical time, but the time of an eternal presence.

This “realized eschatology” was the restoration of Paradise, the restoration of the human condition to its Celestial status. The longing found and finds a response in “Christian esotericism”, because this esotericism is unable to conform to the norms of official ecclesiology, to accept that “all is finished”,and hence cannot accept the norms of Sociological religion. And it is in its broadest sense – that is to say,

as implying some link or other with the recurrence of the Imago Templi that we must grasp the recurrences

of the word “templars”.

The Community at Qumran felt itself to be the New Temple, felt itself to be involved alongside the Angelic powers that were invisibly present in its midst, in the fight of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. This aspect of the Community makes it a perfect example of “Templar Knighthood“.

An previous example had been furnished by the companions of Zerubbabel when building the Second Temple;

they also confronted the demonic counter-powers. An affinity has rightly been shown to exist between the

ethic of Qumran and that of Zoroastrian knighthood. Ormazd could not defend the ramparts of the City

of Light without the help of the Fravartis. The ethic of battle is the same in both cases; it does not consist in waiting for an eschatological event that will take place later, on some distant day.

The battle fought by the beings of Light is eschatology itself in the process of being accomplished, and the Ezekelian Vision

of the Celestial Temple: the defenders of the Holy City are defending the Imago Templi that embraces both

the Celestial and earthly Temples, and connects heaven with earth.

In this way, we do not deviate from our initial hermeneutic, according to which the destruction of the Temple signified our entry into this world, and its rebuilding signified our departure from exile, our return to the original world whence we came.

pp339

The Imago Templi polarized the Western Esoteric Tradition, and this is also why the Image of the Temple Knighthood, of the Order of the Temple, remains indissolubly linked to the concept of Initiatic Knighthood.
pp340

…the transition, since the time of Montanist crisis, from eschatological Christianity – the Christology of

the Christos Angelos- to a Christianity and Christology within History, must surely strike us as fateful,

a sign of the process of corruption. Does not this sign coincide with the refusal of gnosis? And is it not

then the case that the secret of Israel, the secret of the “New Temple”, communicated impartially to all nations, is a siogn that the difference between the “temple” and the profane has been abolished?

Unfortunately, all too frequently one hears people say that the Christian Revelation has no secrets about it, nothing esoteric that needs interpretation. “All is finished”, as we were reminded earlier, in accordance with this attitude these same people oppose the Christian revelation to gnosis and to the hermeneutic that accompanies gnosis. In compensation, we are told that the Christian mystery is unprofanable because it requires one to be present at this mystery through the sacramental communion of faith.

Any gnostic would see this contrast both as fragile and as painfully artificial, for it starts out by forgetting that

in this same sense gnosis itself is also and par excellence unprofanable.

It is not enough to hear the esoteric meaning uttered; it is necessary to be present at it through a new birth.

Gnosis and palingenesis are inseparable, and this is also the sacramental sense of communion through Gnosis.

On the other hand, to separate the Christian revelation from gnosis is precisely what lays the former open to profanation.

The overwhelming desacralization that is occuring in our times gives us ample food for thought.

pp341

A hostile attitude towards gnosis has led to forgetfulness and ignorance of the original relationship between the

Christian community at Jersualem and Jewish Gnosis. The same hostile atitude has inspired the statement that

all Christian esotericism is doomed to defeat. Unfortunately, what we are witnessing today is the defeat to which

we are condemned by the absence or the refusal of gnosis.

Good News, fellow Gnostics! The Internet Sacred Texts Archive has recently published

The Pistis Sophia in G.R.S Mead’s translation. It is the

first complete text of the Coptic Gnosticmanuscript which came to light in the mid-19th century among the possessions of a certain Doctor Askew in England.

It should interest all who are intrigued by the Gnostics, especially

An aside to this, im going off-blog for a week or so, vacation in Sweden again (sigh).

I also happened upon Laura Jane’s Weblog The Rhipidon Society, through Jeremy at Fantastic Planet. Another one for the Gnostic Blogosphere… Looking forward to follow your contribution to it, Jane.

I cannot seem to get beyond checking out the other blogs these days.

Perhaps its too sloppy of me, but I blame an exceptional warm and sunny Summer.

I was happy to see that Justin Courtier, who has commented on Jordan’s Posts over at EGiNA, has his own blog, Nascent Gnosis.

Things are looking up for “Gnostic Blogging”.

Welcome to the blogroll of this humble site, Justin.