Gnostic Post-Postmodernism (Part 2)

Gnosticism is an esoteric system of theology that claims salvation can be obtained through gnosis (secret knowledge). It consists of various religious, philosophical and mythological sources that are mixed with esoteric wisdom derived from magical, alchemical and astrological traditions, including the early treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum. Gnostics subverted Christian doctrine through their reinterpretations of Scripture. They believed that the material world was created by a demiurge (lesser god), and that through secret knowledge they could escape the bonds of this earthly prison.

 

Critics of Gnosticism from the ancient world noted that Gnosticism led to immorality and the forsaking of traditional moral values: Gnostics reside in the heights beyond every power, free to do anything, without any fear. Indeed, their gnosis trumped that of the ignorant demiurge who created the world.

 

Joachim of Fiore was a mystic and theologian who believed that he had been granted the gift of spiritual understanding. He created a Trinitarian (dialectical) system of history. Then came Paracelsus, a physician and alchemist, who created a panvitalistic system. Afterward came Giordano Bruno, a philosopher, occultist and messianic figure, who created his own Hermetic religious system. Next came Jacob Boehme, a mystic and theologian, who created a system that was centered on the dialectical unity of opposites. Some consider Boehme to be the inventor of modern dialectic.

 

Like Paracelsus and Bruno, Boehme considered the imagination as a vital means of accessing the spiritual world. Bruno said that the imagination is “the sole gate to all internal affections and the link of links.” Indeed, one feature of Renaissance Gnosticism was the magical power of Imagination. Paracelsus asked, “What else is Imagination, but a sun in man which acts throughout his circle?” This circle refers to a “dialectical process of separation and reconciliation which occurred throughout the circle of being.”

 

The gnostic traditions of the Renaissance contributed to the dawn of the modern scientific mindset. With the scientific advances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came expectations of a new age of unlimited advances that would produce unparalleled achievements of excellence. Francis Bacon’s reformation of the scientific method also had elements of Renaissance Gnosticism. “In another gnostic key, Bacon presented himself as the restorer of man’s lost Adamic status; in the impending new age, he wrote, ‘a blessed race of Heroes or Supermen… will overcome the immeasurable helplessness and poverty of the human race, which cause it more destruction then all giants, monsters and tyrants, and will make you peaceful, happy, prosperous and secure.”

 

Galileo Galilei’s mathematical work was also “marked by a similar assurance that it would yield superhuman knowledge and power.” Many of the Great mathematical and scientific thinkers of the seventeenth century were influenced by Renaissance traditions of esoteric thinking. The Enlightenment also had strands of gnostic traditions that came out of Renaissance culture. The Romantic and Idealist movements also had these gnostic strands.

 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the famous German philosopher, has had a profound influence on the Western intellectual tradition. Hegel also created his own Gnostic system. During Hegel’s lifetime, a German scholar (Ferdinand Christian Baur) argued that Hegel’s philosophical system was a modern-day version of the early Gnostic heresies—specifically those of the second-century Valentinians. Gerald Hanratty claimed that Hegel’s vision of material nature as ‘self-alienated’ or ‘fallen’ Spirit follows the same train of thought as the early Valentinian Gnostics. He said that Hegel replicated the Valentinian gnosis when he claimed that the attainment of the goal of absolute knowledge coincided with the completion of Spirit’s self-development. He stated that Hegel’s attribution of ‘fallenness,’ ‘self-alienation’ or ‘negation’ to the life of Spirit, lined up with the theological concepts of the Valentinian Gnostics. Hegel, in his gnostic reconstruction of the Christian Trinity, created a triadic dialectical process: Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. “The Phenomenology of Mind, which was completed in 1807, was Hegel’s first attempt to expound his essentially gnostic viewpoint in a detailed and systematic form.”

 

When Hegel associated “the first man, Adam, with the ‘moving Spirit’ of God, and with the second man or the eternal Logos,” it was just another spin on a gnostic theme.

 

Hegel’s system incorporated ideas from the speculative mysticism of Meister Eckhart, the late-medieval mystic, theologian and philosopher, who reinterpreted the incarnation of Christ: “Why did God become man? So that I might be born the same God.” And, “In my eternal birth all things were born, and I was cause of myself and of all things. If I had willed it, neither I nor any things would have come to be. And if I myself were not, God would not be either. That God is ‘God,’ of this I am the cause. If I were not, God would not be ‘God.’” Hegel’s ideas laid the ground for the mystical atheism of the Young Hegelians, which laid the foundations for Marxism. Ludwig Feuerbach, a young Hegelian, in his usage of “‘anthropology,’ referred to man’s knowledge of himself, not as an individual, but rather as a ‘universal’ or ‘species’ being. It was due to this consciousness of himself as a universal or species being that man transcended his limitations and achieved an awareness of an unconditioned or infinite nature.” Then came Karl Marx with his species being—his socialist man/communist man. Communism: heaven on earth! In communism, Marx sought the deification of the collective species—mankind as a collective superbeing. Just think, Marx modeled his ideas of science and philosophy on Hegel, the greatest of the speculative gnostics. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Marx himself was a speculative gnostic. “Marxism is a circular theory of Man’s self-creation.”

 

Friedrich Nietzsche came up with the most striking version of modern mystical atheism. Eckhart’s ideas definitely influenced Nietzsche’s mystical atheism. Joseph Bernhart wrote: “More than any other mystic, willingly or unwillingly, Eckhart was the herald of the divinization of man or—what amounts to the same thing—the humanization of God. The transition from Eckhart’s position to that of Nietzsche was not only theoretically possible, it actually occurred as the outcome of an identifiable historical development.” We can see the divinization of man with Nietzsche’s superman. We also see the same with Marx and his socialist man, the Soviets with their new Soviet man, the Nazi’s with their Aryan race, and our age with transhumanism. The seeds of mystical atheism produced the twentieth-century totalitarian movements of fascism and communism, which caused the suffering of hundreds of millions of people.

 

Not only is there a Gnostic element to Hegel, but also a Hermetic element. I used the book ‘Studies in Gnosticism and in the Philosophy of Religion’ for this first part on Hegel and Gnosticism. Now I will use the book ‘Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition’ for this next part on Hegel and Hermeticism. It would be favourable to do this in two write-ups, but Hegel is too boring. If you wish to do a deep dive into these topics, then read the books cited above. The occult is intertwined with various esoteric ideas. Therefore, some of the names listed in this Hermetic section will sound familiar. Now, let’s examine Hegel’s system from a Hermetic standpoint.

 

Hermeticism is an esoteric religious tradition based on the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes, Thrice Great), a figure that embodies the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. His writings are called the Corpus Hermeticum. It “emphasizes the belief that esoteric knowledge brings oneness with God and the idea of Prisca theologia, a doctrine stating that a single, true theology is in all religions (all religions are equal).” If all religions are equal, then why not merge them into a one-world religion?

 

There are many similarities between Hegelian philosophy and the Hermetic tradition. Hegel drew on various themes and concepts from Jacob Boehme. Boehme was inspired by Paracelsus, and by the Kabbala, alchemy, and Hermetic theosophy. Ferdinand Christian Bauer, a Protestant theologian in Hegel’s day, said this about Boehme: he was a modern Gnostic, and Hegel is Boehme’s intellectual heir, which makes him a Gnostic.

 

Hegel’s writings incorporate many other Hermetic elements. “These include, in broad strokes, a Masonic subtext of ‘initiation mysticism’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit; a Boehmean subtext to the Phenomenology’s famous preface; a Kabbalistic-Boehmean-Lullian influence on the Logic; alchemical-Paracelsian elements in the Philosophy of Nature; an influence of Kabbalistic and Joachimite millennialism on Hegel’s doctrine of Objective Spirit and theory of world history; alchemical and Rosicrucian images in the Philosophy of Right; an influence of the Hermetic tradition of pansophia on the system as a whole; an endorsement of the Hermetic belief in philosophia perennis; and the use of perennial Hermetic symbolic forms (such as the triangle, the circle, and the square) as structural, architectonic devices.” Hegel’s use of these symbols was similar to the Hermetic “memory magic” of Bruno and Boehme.

 

Proclus was the first major philosopher who showed signs of Hermetic influence. Hegel became interested in the dialectic and triadic forms that Proclus had created. Some of Hegel’s language has a striking resemblance to that of mystic Meister Eckhart. Eckhart claimed that when all creatures pronounce God’s name, He comes into being. Therefore, God needs mankind to complete the circle of His being. Moreover, we too are the Son, thus we possess a divine spark within us. Hegel also drew on an alchemist called Paracelsus, who had created a Hermetic system, in composing his Philosophy of Nature. Hegel also devoted a section of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy to a man named Giordano Bruno. Bruno’s views on cosmology and theology got him burned at the stake. Imagination plays an important role in esotericism, including Hermetic thought: “Imagination is the divine process of bringing forth images and forms, through which the cosmos is created and experienced.” As stated previously, Bruno’s ideas also involved Imagination.

 

Ehregott Daniel Colberg, a Lutheran theologian, spoke against Boehme and Paracelsus, and against astrology, alchemy, and mysticism. He saw one thing in common with all of them: the desire of man to make himself God. Boehme was discovered by Schelling, Hegel, Franz von Baader, and many others. Franz von Baader was one of the most significant and influential Hermeticists of the nineteenth century. “Hegel was an avid reader of Baader and even stated in print that he and Baader shared the goal of translating Boehme’s theosophy into ‘scientific’ terms.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s alchemical color-theory also had a great influence on Hegel’s Naturphilosophie.

 

A man named Friedrich Christoph Oetinger combined various theosophic ideas, such as the Hermetic and panvitalistic systems of Bruno and Paracelsus, the Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and Boehme’s theology. “Oetinger identifies the fully realized God with the Geist and treats Geist as what he calls an Intensum. An Intensum is a complex whole, which cannot be divided into separable pieces. …Oetinger holds, in a manner identical to Hegel, that in the case of an Intensum such as Geist, the whole is immanent in every part.” Oetinger’s ideas have many similarities to those of Hegel’s.

 

Glenn Magee said this: “Hegel rejects a transcendent Absolute and claims to have achieved Absolute Knowing. By Greek standards, Hegel is undeniably guilty of hubris. His Absolute is Spirit or Idea come to consciousness of itself through the activity of speculation: the divine (the Absolute) cannot be without humanity. It is man who ‘actualizes’ God, and thus man becomes, if not God, then certainly a demigod. …He employs mythic circumscription, and uses concepts in a quasi-aesthetic manner, but by closing the circle he turns mytho-poetic circumscription into an absolute science.”

 

Glenn Magee also states that Hegel’s Encyclopedia delivers what its title promises: “an ‘encirclement’ of the whole of Being. It is thus the true encyclopedia. …setting the stage for the coming of the Age of the Holy Spirit and the end of history. …It is the recovery of the Wisdom of Adam—the intimate knowledge Adam had of God ‘in Himself,’ ‘in His eternal essence’—and thus the vindication of the nostalgia of the Kabbalists, of Agrippa, Boehme, Bacon, Jungius, Leibniz, Helmont, and others.”

 

Hegel’s theory of history is comparable to Joachim’s as far as being Trinitarian. Unlike Joachim, however, Hegel does not use the Trinity for making predictions concerning the future. Hegel, instead, uses it to make sense of the past. It is Karl Marx who is the modern disciple of Joachim, not Hegel. The Order of Sophianic Marxists said, “The core of Marx’s philosophy—which, one might say, coincides with the core of Gnosticism/Hermeticism—is the central place given to humanity’s self-activity or self-actualization. Marx (like Hermeticists generally) construes the act of perfection as man’s task, his work.” Cyril Smith states that “Marx takes the side of the heretics and Hermetics… he knows that humanity is collectively self-creating.”

 

Hegel’s system is a Gnostic-Hermetic system. The system of Karl Marx is also a Gnostic-Hermetic system. Wokeism, with its social(ist) justice, is a repackaging of these Gnostic-Hermetic ideas through the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Wokeism is neo-Marxism (Cultural Marxism). They swapped out economics for culture. Now they’re trying to seize the means of cultural production, in order to destroy capitalism. Therefore, they must subvert politics, education, entertainment, arts, and faith. Instead of sowing dissent among the proletariat, the neo-Marxists are sowing dissent among the minorities. Wokeism is totalitarian socialism, which is based on identity. Oppressed vs. oppressor: what oppressed minority group do you identify with? Neo-Marxism has produced Critical Race Theory and Queer theory. “Transgenderism is a return to the religion of Gnosticism, in its latest iteration as 21st-century Wokeism.”

 

I have linked transgenderism, in the past, to cults that centered around ancient gods. “Transgender refers to people who transcend biological gender.” With Gnosticism, salvation comes from the inside. From within, you must find your true identity. ‘You must find yourself.’ A demiurge (lesser god) created the world. Therefore, salvation means escaping the physical world, because it’s flawed—it’s a mistake. The body belongs to this material world, and so it’s no good. The body is the prison of the true self—the true spirit within. Transgenders are trapped in the wrong body. They are imprisoned by a gender binary. Their gender identity, the real them, trumps biology. They can ‘imagine’ their identity, and it will come to pass (so to speak). Due to being imprisoned in a defective world and trapped in the wrong body, they must seek salvation through gnosis (esoteric knowledge). Indeed, there should be no distinction between male and female, because the gender binary is part of this corrupt world. Michael Cook says that “transgenderism is a materialist reworking of the euphoria of escaping from the ‘trap’ of sexuality. The Skoptsy [a Russian Gnostic sect] believed that before the Fall, in the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were not gendered; a sexed body was a punishment for eating the apple. Salvation lay in restoring this Edenic state, even at the cost of extreme mutilation. Similarly, according to trans ideology, salvation—trans joy or gender euphoria—is found by living in accordance with one’s true gender, even if it requires mastectomies, castration, and lifelong infertility.” Eric Voegelin remarked, “Not until the gnostic revolt of the Roman era do Prometheus, Cain, Eve, and the serpent become symbols of man’s deliverance from the power of the tyrannical god of this world.”

 

“When you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male is not male and the female is not female… then you will enter the kingdom.” ‒ The (Gnostic) Gospel of Thomas

 

Like transgenderism, transhumanism is Gnostic in nature. In fact, “transgenderism is the stepping-stone to transhumanism.” Furthermore, transhumanists will evolve into genderless posthumans. In Gnosticism, liberation is presented as transcending one’s mortal limitations. Is the merging of man and machine really perfection? Would we not become imprisoned by our own technologies? “Anti-realism is the belief that reality is a matter of perception, that reality exists only in the mind. It is the philosophical foundation for Marxist critical pedagogy, which uses the Hegelian dialectical process to reject objective reality and embrace subjective reality.”

 

Some transhumanists hope to someday upload human consciousness to computers. The brain is connected to the body through various systems. Can a machine replicate all the functions and senses that occur in conjunction with our brains and the various parts of our bodies? Will there be a loss of human sensations and emotions? “Transhumanism is eugenics in disguise.” In the evolutionist framework of transhumanism, man is not created in the image of God; he is a “meaningless by-product of greater evolutionary processes.” Technognosticism: man becomes data in a computer-simulated world. “We will experience technosalvation through virtual bodies in the worlds we create.” Data? Virtual bodies? So basically, you’re just dead! Humanity, then, devolves into a digital simulation.

 

Murray Rothbard made this statement: “To Marx, religion was only one of the problems. The entire world of man (the Menschenwelt) was alienating, and had to be radically overthrown, root and branch. Only apocalyptic destruction of this world of man would permit true human nature to be realized. Only then would the existing un-man (Unmensch) truly become man (Mensch). As Marx thundered in the fourth of his ‘theses on Feuerbach,’ ‘One must proceed to destroy the “earthly family” as it is both ‘in theory and in practice.’”

 

I have seen some common threads in the various books I’ve read over the past two years: 1) We have been kicked out of the Garden of Eden, so we either need to get back to Eden or create our own Eden. 2) Society (particularly Christianity) has imposed rules on us. Our true nature must be restored to what it was in the past, when we had the freedom to do as we pleased, like when we were hunter-gatherers. 3) We must fix or recreate man, society, and the world (they want to be the saviours of man and the world). 4) We can be either like God or be a god. 5) First, we use our ‘imagination’ to create the world we desire; second, we work towards our goal; and third, it will come to pass.

 

All these threads/ideas have been exposed in this write-up. It’s not hard to see that the occult is tied to philosophy, the Enlightenment, liberalism, psychology, and modern science. “Some have said,” an old preacher remarked. “You think there’s a demon hiding behind every bush.” He declared, “No! I believe there are two demons behind every bush.”

 

When using the word post-postmodernism, I mean two things. First: I am speaking about the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School, which went through the dialectic with postmodernism, and in turn produced wokeism. This wokeism will evolve towards sustainability and climate change, because the powers that be need to introduce the Green Economy, which will revolve around carbon footprints and carbon credits. It will also evolve towards (universal) human rights, because the powers that be need to introduce a one-world government. Wokeism will go through the dialectic with a universal spiritual movement, because the powers that be need a one-world religion. A one-world religion will need a god to unite the people (global citizens) together to live under a one-world government. As the Georgia Guidestones stated, humanity must be united with a new language. A one-world government will need a one-world language. Some transhumanists have mentioned creating a future language for humanity, using some sort of computer code. Does this not remind you of the Tower of Babel? They are trying to undo what happened at the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel. A one-world government must push for world peace and unity. In turn, they will say, all religions must also come together to promote world peace and unity. Wokeism, with its sustainability, climate change, and human rights, will go through the dialectic with this religious message of world peace and unity in order to produce Antichristism. Indeed, the Antichrist will declare himself to be God. His contribution to the world will be a religious, political, authoritarian system that will supposedly be heaven on earth.

 

Second: I am referring to the post-postmodern era. “Post-postmodernism seeks to temper reason with faith.” This post-postmodern era will be a spiritual era, in which humanity collectively embraces transhumanism. This will happen through the Mark of the Beast system. All transhumans will worship the Beast (Antichrist). He will be the man-god of the one-world government. Like Babel, their attempts to fully implement this one-world government will fail.

 

Cash is a product of this corrupt world, and it’s hard to track. In the digital world, digital currencies can be efficiently tracked. This will supposedly fight corruption. Indeed, society must transcend cash. Yet the Beast’s Gnostic currency ‘666’ or ‘god’s money,’ will replace the flawed systems of the various digital currencies. The Beast system will centralize all currency and data into one system, creating a perfect currency system.

 

The whore in Revelation, which embodies all false religions and spiritual beliefs, is symbolic of the one-world religion. The Antichrist will destroy this one-world religion, and he will declare that he is god. Those with gnosis will worship the Beast, and they will transcend to the godhood of transhumanism. You will own nothing—not even your body—yet you’ll be happy. (The communist utopia: you will own nothing and be happy). Indeed, you will be a patented entity of the Beast. Hegel was the man-god of his system, Marx was the man-god of his system, the transhumanist thinks that he will be the man-god of his system, and Satan thinks that he will be the god of his system, yet all these systems will fail! In the end, Jesus Christ will be King of kings and Lord of lords.

 

Revelation 17:14 “These will wage war against the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, because He is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those who are with Him are the called and chosen and faithful.”

 

I added Hermeticism to this write-up, because I could. I hope to write more articles about Gnosticism and how it is intertwined with our society. God Bless!

 

 

Done