Stephan Hoeller’s lectures have followed me around the past ten years or so now… I studiously borrowed the dear cassettes from my friend Jan Valentin Saether, since I had such a long bus rides home everytime I had business in the big city. I live about an hour’s drive north of Oslo, so I usually got to listen to a lecture each visit on my Walkman. Times are changing and I remember the topic was dicussed that perhaps it would be more rational to create archives of the specific lecture series, in for example CD-RW or CD-Rom format, so that it would be all in one place and also accessible through more than one medium. Cherished as the old cassette players where, it was fading out.

I now notice that Bruce Campbell at BC recordings have decided to make a compromise that at least some people will find useful. BC Recordings is digitizing and making mp3 versions of Stephan Hoeller’s lectures. This may help preserve both the existing collection as well as the new additions for the future.

In addition to the free Real Audio format lectures that Lance Owens in Utah has formatted and published on the Gnosis Archive, – you can now find a growing assortment of more recent lectures held by Stephan Hoeller at the Gnostic Society, Philosophical Research Society &c, which you may purchase through their new online store.

I for one has paid attention to the Friday lecture schedule for years thinking it is a damn shame I live so far away, like for instance, last month he held a series on the Apocryphon of John, a Gnostic scripture I think is quite unique among the remains after the Alexandrian school of Christian Gnosticism because it contains a complete account of the Gnostic myth as well as an extensive soteriology. I’ll be checking out BC Recordings store occasionally to see if some of the semi-old lectures (the Gnostic Library in Oslo has a few hundred cassettes which spans the late 80’s and onwards to the late 90’s or somesuch, along with lectures by Roger Weir, modern renaissance man and hermetic philosopher.. who I feel complement Stephan Hoeller’s work quite brilliantly.) from 2000 and onwards is available for purchase.

I’d like to see John Goeltz, Lance Owens, Jan Valentin Saether and others who have guest lectured at the Gnostic Society represented as well, but thats another issue.

This might not mean much to people who are not familiar with the work of Stephan Hoeller, who is the Director of Studies at the Gnostic Society as well as a respected Bishop in the English Gnostic lineage.

I recommend checking out the lecture section of the Gnosis Archive which is the official homepage for the Gnostic Society.

On the Internet there is no telling what you will find. Ricardo Franco has recently been very active posting links to the Manichaean discussion forum at Yahoogroups, a lot of what he offers I have seen or read before, but Die Buddhistische Spätantike in Mittelasien–Die manichaeischen Miniaturen – by A. Von Le Coq is a new one for me. I have studied, rather than read, Hans Joachim Klimkeit’s monography on Manichaean calligraphy and iconography and got an impression of the “field” of Manichaean iconography – but the name Le Coq was new to me. Apparently it was published in Berlin in 1923.
The book in question is in German, but with tools like Babelfish it is possible to get an arbitrary impression of the contents, if you like me do not understand the language. It is presented in high resolution scans of the pages, but it features a useful OCR representation of the contents.
The book was published by the Digital Silk Road Project in Japan which has made a lot of material from the two centuries of archeological digs in the wide cultural and geographical area of the ancient Silk Road.The illustrations, of which there are few, but which are rare indeed, is nevertheless worth a tour of the book.

From the First Book of Ieu, Chapter 3

The living Jesus said : “Blessed is the man who has known these things. He has brought heaven down, he has lifted the earth and has sent it to heaven, and he has become the Midst for it is nothing.”
The apostles answered, saying : “Jesus , thou living one, Lord , interprete for us how we may bring heaven down, for we have followed thee in order that thou shouldst teach us the true light.”
The living Jesus answered and said : “The Word which existed in heaven before the earth came into existence – this which is called the world – but you, when you know my Word, you will bring heaven down, and it will dwell in you. Heaven is the invisible Word of the Father; but when you know these things you will bring heaven down. As to sending the earth up to heaven, I will show you what it is , that you may know it : to send the earth to heaven is that he who hears the word of gnosis has ceased to have the understanding mind of man of earth, but has become a man of heaven. His understanding mind has ceased to be earthly, but it has become heavenly. Because of this you will be saved from the archon of this aeon, and he will become the Midst, because it is nothing.”
The living Jesus said again : “When you become heavenly you will become the Midst because it is nothing, for the .. . .. rulers and the wicked powers (exousiai) will you and they will envy you because you have known me, because I am not from the world, and I do not resemble the rulers and the powers (exousiai) and all the wicked ones. They do not come from me. And furthermore he who (is born) in the flesh of unrighteousness has no part in the Kingdom of my Father, and also he who know me according to the flesh has no hope Kingdom of God the Father.”

You are Axis Mundi. You are the centre of a myriad worlds. But who are you? When you have received knowledge of the Kingdom of Heaven no geography tracing its contours over the entire universe can attract an undue attention, an admiration, an awe, a worshipful pose from you. No crafted image giving off the most beautiful lustre, swaddled in the delicate of forms does your thought any justice. No jumble of words, however well phrased, will satisfy your hearing or your reading. No answer will address itself to the question you have finally deared to ask, which is the entirety of the Fullness from the entirety of Fullness, no longer a similitude, but the most intimate and the most far-reaching of all questions, which lays waste all answers given by all preceeding generations. Your fathers are dust, your mothers are ashes, their forefathers a sentimental notion, no particle left. They are mist. If you look, you are apostate of the generations which came – where are your blood running off for now?

What a problem. The credo is consistent enough, “May I be one who assist in the transfiguration of the earth.” But what manner of work is this transfiguration? A Kosmos is and will always remain a confined term, it is confinement and limitation in itself – if the law of languages allows me or anyone else to say “All”, to say “Everything”, to say “God” and with those words, according to the limitation which is the only remaining witness, resistance, obstacle -cloud before the Pleroma, what prohibits our words to signify the nothing according to the flesh, which never was, and never is, and never will be more than a lifeless corpse. The Kosmos is a lie. It is not that which raises up. It is not that which gives substance to anything else. It is not some magnification of the gods of our forefathers into an absolute panentheistic democratic anemic divinity beyond theology, myth or philosophical abstraction. The Kosmos is the system, the everything of the insuffiencient grasp, the imperfect knowing, the miscomprehension, the failing glance,the mishearing.. hamareithia, Sin – Missing the target; intending without contact with that which intelligently intends, intelligently and authentically wills. The Gnostic understands he goes nowhere to seek refuge, sanctuary. He understands that while there are many places, there is no space hospitable, wide, beautiful enough for him to dwell, there is no day like today, there is no day like yesterday, there is no day like tomorrow. There are no travelling here, the paths have left horizontality, there are no maps. There are no landscapes for maps to portray. This is where it begins. You bring that which were before existence into existence, you shape it before and above the creation, the universe, the world, the universe, Cosmos.. Chaos, call it what you will. In this twilight, the unborn God is born.

Then the day which has no today, no yesterday and no tommorrow will die forever, not to have been – time folds upon itself to become an attempt to interrupt eternity, to silence consciousness, stop breath, arrest motion, still the pulse, which now, before the beginning of all beginnings, has failed and cease to be.

Gnosis is Holy Silence and a rest for every inquiry.