Re: The discovery and subsequent translation of -a- Gospel of Judas (Iscarioth).

The I-News Wire recently released a press release about the find of a hithero unknown Gospel of Judas in Coptic, in Basel, Switzerland.

It is the first official “word” on the status of the Gospel of Judas whose rumoured find in Egypt and covert witholding from public and scholarly notice have circulated over the internet the last few years.

According to the churchfather Ireneaus of Lyons a specific group among the ancient Gnostics venerated the person of Judas of Iscarioth, along with Cain, Nimrod,Esau, Koram and a score of such persons who in the Old Testament were the enemies of the friends of God; Prophets, Patriarchs and Kings. These Gnostics, if they were, were nicknamed Cainites and appears to have held a very strong antinomian ethic which basically made it a virtue to transgress against the Commandments, no transgression evaluated baser than another.

These Cainites, in my view, could very well have been the group of Christians who according to the polemic of the 4th century Coptic Gnostic text Pistis Sophia were accused of performing Masses wherein female menses and male sperm were mixed with Barley and ingested in the name and to the glory of Esau and Koram. The resentment and revision of myth found in the system of Menander, a supposed disciple of Simon Magus, along with a certain Saturninus or Satornil – wherein the God of Israel are specifically referred to as a fallen angel, has found a ritual expression, perhaps, in the breaking of the commandment, by partaking of the impure with the pure(sic!), and invoking the name of enemies and villains of one’s own cultural and religious history and mythos.

The Cainites were also known to celebrate their functions called by them Agape, as did the early Judeo-Christian groups in Palestine in the nude, while holding all property, including women (…) in common. A very controversial bit this, but the Cainites have been subject to, and prototype, for many accusations past and contemporary. These views and practices have not found a passive audience, they are indeed subject to much polemic, also among Gnostics proper, as was seen in the inclusion of a specific condemnation ascribed to the Saviour himself in the 4th century text

Pistis Sophia and obliquely in the Books of Ieou.

To wit, a very great divide existed between the Gnostic groups represented by the first-hand accounts we have from the Chenoboskion (Nag Hammadi) find, as well as the Codex Berlin, Codex Bruce, Codex Askew and so forth. What these shared where at the very least a redaction with a very strong ascetic or encratic orientation – and these Cainites, or others like the Phibiontes (named after “dirt”, according to Epiphanius of Salamis these had so uncouth habits about their persons that ordinary pagan citizens in their townships refused to have anything to do with them..a very Tantric-sounding group, if for anything but association with taboo-restricted areas in their respective cultures), contrary to the general confused image of the Gnostics en generis – there are no actual cult of Cain, apart from Ireneaus and Epiphanius report on the rural “Cainites”, in Gnostic literature which has found its way to us. Neither are Judas of Iscarioth counted in the canon of Apostolic age saints among any known Gnostic group. With the exception, of course, of these Cainites. Both the Cainites and the legend of their veneration of both Cain and Judas of Iscarioth has featured prominently among themes chosen by modern authors who have written with reference to the ancient Gnostics – one should mention Swiss author Hermann Hesse, who in his novel Demian lets his protagonist, a certain Max Demian, teach his friend Emil Sinclaire, the hero of the story, about the famed “Mark of Cain” and its soteriological and existencial implications – this type of person is always a stranger, in any company, an enigma, someone shunned by the good people of any town. This situation is replayed in Count de Lautramont’s Maldoror, in the work of Lawrence Durrell, who puts the “Ophite” ritual of the serpent “blessing the sacraments” in the post-world war 1 Egyptian colony of more or less decadent British, Belgian and French intellectual functionaries of the Colonizing powers.The same with certain other French poets of the Romantic area. Above all, to persons with a liberal, libertarian and perhaps even libertine sentiments and orientation, feel at home with the briefly described heretics with the strongest controversiality with conventional Christendom,or Judaism for that matter. But little has been heard from them.None of the Nag Hammadi texts hint at the practices, or even the attitudes, of these ancient antinomians, the closest we come are the 17th century Antinomians with a prophetic penchant in Cromwellian Great Britain, or Utopian experiments in the wilderness of America, such as the Oneida Creek Community lead by the visionary and somewhat ambigious character John Henry Noyes.

Now, the first page translated into English from what appears to be an authentic Coptic codex containing the Gospel of Judas(Iscarioth – not Judas Didymos Thomas) make use of the very name, in Coptic – Allogenes,predictably as the name for Jesus.

The first fragment translated by Charles W.Heidrick (No less) appears to speak about the humiliation of Jesus, which is more or less a taboo in itself – to the ancient Gnostic Christian groups we know of that is – and a more desperate invocation of aid from God than we are used to. I will look closer into this later.. so this is the first of several posts on this press release.

Briefly Reviewing Arthur Versluis’ Wisdoms Book:The Sophia Anthology.

being a kind of introduction

The last two decades has seen the emergence of a wide array of literature discussing the ancient veneration for the Divine Feminine.

As a contemporary Gnostic oriented towards the every-day enigma of our modernity, I sure hope it is not just another trend – but that it will remain a literary and philosophical stimulation upon the imagination and consciousness of our age throughout many decades still.I am not prone to make prophecies and even avoid putting my stamp of approval on rather sober prognostifications for the future, but I have a hunch, call it an intuition, perhaps even an educated guess – that the potentional of Sophia is yet to be mined completely in this post-modern age.

At the intersection between our own modernity – with its beginnings, so far as a move from a terra-centric,flat earth,”vertical” hierarchical consciousness through the midwifery of the european renaissance, towards the anthropocentric (sic!),humanistic,”planar” orientation in the “enlightenment” and onwards – and the antiquity, we find evidence, literary at most, sometimes barely accessible – of a continued undercurrent, an awareness among the very few of the workings of an invisible Grace which fills all things with meaning, even the meaningless. She assumed many names and these names fulfilled many roles and had many implications and consequences on that which is outside and inside the minds of us individual human beings. If we for a moment pause from our projections – we find the sapientia with its methods,crafts,approaches and ratios alive and kicking in the cryptical writings of the Alchemists. There is a measure which is difficult to grasp but easy to see applied everywhere, in the Hebrew Kabbalah. There is an appreciation, a sensitivity towards the mechanisms of emotional and intellectual stimulus and the consequence of withdrawal among the Sufis. Added to which is all the influences from the East which has no doubt contributed to the birth of a “New West”. Most important of all these, for reasons I hope has come clear through my series on the Fravartis – for a Gnostic, a reoriented voyager, is Our Lady Sophia.

Wisdom. A synonym has been applied to it:Wit. Pentecost is called Whitsunday, and this refers directly to Wisdom. An image emerges from this conjunction in Christian vocabulary: The Pentecost may be asserted to be the collective reception of the sense, the sensitivity and affiliation with Wisdom just as much as it can be considered the occasion of a descent of the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, the Comforter of post-incarnation Christianity. As Versluis explains in the introduction to his Anthology of Sophianic writings from the 17th to 20th century within the Christian tradition of Theosophia, Sophia or Wisdom, is not exclusive to said tradition but enters center stage for a specific reason. The reason for this, in my view – is that Christian lore suggests the event of a rupture which makes acquiantance of things divine and godly a personal responsibility.

Take for instance the event alluded to by the synoptic evangelists when they state that the Temple veil tore upon the terminal exhalation of Jesus. The exact location interior, of the crucifixion, Golgatha, the crucified one, and the three last words is subject to introvert contemplation in generations of Christian mystics and esoterics and many will come, even though Christianity crystallizes itself in different forms and expressions in this our day and age. A possible “reading” of this act of violence on the part of revealing grace – can be found in the Gospel of Philip, unearthed to the world in the August 1945 find of the Nag Hammadi Library

:

The mysteries of truth are revealed, though in type and image. The bridal chamber, however, remains hidden. It is the Holy in the Holy. The veil at first concealed how God controlled the creation, but when the veil is rent and the things inside are revealed, this house will be left desolate, or rather will be destroyed. And the whole (inferior) godhead will flee from here, but not into the holies of the holies, for it will not be able to mix with the unmixed light and the flawless fullness, but will be under the wings of the cross and under its arms.”

The connotations to the rending of the veil and the destruction or desoplation of the place has precisely to do with the Temple. In actual historical course, the Temple was left desolate at the onslaught of the Roman occupiers as a means to break the back of the once-proud people they had oppressed throughout many centuries. In theological course, the selfsame has happened repeatedly throughout the stories of the prophets and friends of God. The two stories merge together around the theme of Shekinah, and of Wisdom – in the Western mystical tradition, especially those of a judeo-christian orientation.

When Jacob Boehme enters the stage, so to speak, the location of the Temple or Sanctuary of Spiritual Reality has moved into mankind: it is to be found in the interior of living human beings. Not only did the Protestant reformation and its precursors, among which one can assuredly count the Albigensian Church – contribute to shatter, or at the least disturb, the assumed role of a human, mortal organisation with its own legislature and architechture, almost becoming identical to the organization of the Temple at the time of Jesus: it provided with a renewed interest in the Wisdom traditions of ancient Judaism.The first text in Versluis collection is not participant with the “modern” revival of Sophianity or the Ancient Wisdom, but one of its foundation documents: The Book of Wisdom. Wherein the ancient king (Solomon)’s voice is heard to speak about the finding and winning of the heart of Wisdom:

“Wisdom shines brightly and fades not; she is quickly discerned by those who lo ve her, and those who seek her find her. She is quick to make herself known to those desiring knowledge of her; he who rises early in search of her will find her seated at his door.”

Near all the Theosophers (I intend no likeness of Madame Blavatsky’s at all, think 17th century and who ennobled the term so that it became attractive for the Madame and her successors to apply to themselves)

agrees with the truth of this discovery – once resolved to seek a deeper acquiantance with being, one of careful attention and compassionate yet stern love, with the flow of the Holy Spirit, they discovered that it was She who moved them towards such new and troubling values. Valuables so precious they no longer could serve as legal tender in a world grown corrupt from uniformly not paying attention. Arthur Versluis has written an engaging survey of the impact and importance of these anonymous (at times to almost all, not only the world at large – such as Robert Ayshford and Anne Bathurst) where he remarks on the apparent disinterest of the feminists and controversialists who have adopted Sophia as one of the many names for their monolithic Goddess – in the more recent and immediate expressions of the Sophian tradition; the Christian Theosophia of the 16th to early 20th century; spanning from Jacob Boehme to Nicolai Berdyaev, from Protestant mysticism to passionate, yet mystagogic Eastern Orthodox philosophy;,

“..as we look closely at these books, we discover something rather surprising; they have absolutely no references whatever to the actual Sophianic tradition as represented in this book. How could this be? How could numerous books emerge on the figure of Sophia, even on Sophia as the future of spirituality, yet there appears not an inkling of the preexistent theosophic tradition of Boehme, Gichtel, Pordage or Leade?”

Arthur Versluis:Wisdom’s Book:The Sophia Anthology, Paragon Press,Minnesota,2000. pp18, introduction.

One reason is that the Sophia found in the Theosophia is not a personal projection of conventional worship; another may well be that the orientation of the theosophers, male as well as female, went beyond simple gender politics as their tendency might be – Sophia is depicted in prose,poetry and art as equally male, but above all, in either manifestation to the recipients, the visionaries, the voyagers and contemplatives (which all depend on own interior disposition, ability – and discipline)-Virginal. I have actually found reference to the romantic,renaissance and theosophic Sophia in other literary contexts and found there that the reason is even more focused: The Sophia of the Theosophers, while entering man rather than the remains of a geo-political architecture such as the Temple of Jerusalem, a romantic depiction of the original as it was from the very beginning;

populate a Christian cosmology prior either to its destruction or to its reversal; they assert the same about the Sophia of the Gnostics and therefore, if there is any help, their Sophia can only be the anonymous and anemic replica of something far more ancient, from the elder cultures of the West, or wholly from the East. Yet, even Daena signifies something radically different and completely inacessible to the propagandic consciousness of these latter-day radicals.

I feel Arthur Versluis are doing in this anthology the noble favour to the Christian Theosophical tradition and its Sophianity, as did Henry Corbin with his anthology with commentaries Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth for the Ismailian and Mazdaean Gnoses.

I recommend it thoroughly. You will find excerpts from the works of Jacob Boehme, Thomas Bromley, John Pordage,Johann Georg Gichtel,Gottfried Arnold, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Franz von Baader and many others who are not as of yet fully represented in English translation.

I just discovered a website which represents a Traditionalist (Guenon,Schuon,Evola,Pallis,Ware etc. Traditionalist) take on the Cathars and their lasting influence on modernity.

Religio Perennis is a website which gives an overview of the Perennialist School of philosophy and its approach to many traditions – not only from the Christian and Abrahamite religions.

It even has its own section on the Cathar Tradition.

The section is comprised chiefly of excerpts from a book by Philippe Roy which has been translated by Patricia Reynaud.

A longer excerpt titled “Katharis and Gnosis in Catharism” discusses the importance of katharsis, purification, on the path of the Cathars. This is his introduction to the topic:

Purification as a means to receive spiritual baptism was an active element of Cathar spirituality. Purification followed a progression and was upheld by several vehicles, described in the first chapter. Truly it was a progression toward a spiritual awakening.

It was based upon two principles: the development of a gnosis and an inner metamorphosis.

No access to baptism was possible without a previous katharsis and an authenticated ripening of spiritual aptitude. Cathar initiation was not meant to form a cleric but to give rise to a genuine Christian, one proven along his path. In the same way that spiritual baptism was the very heart of Catharism, katharsis remained the concept that best summarized its unfolding. The name “Catharism” thus comes from the Greek word for “purification.” For the adept, the meaning and the goal of Katharsis were “