Back when it was night, I started reading the book you see pictured below, The Politics of Myth. When I got to the part I'm going to quote here -- from a section titled "Modern Gnosticism" -- I decided it was time to blog. Now it's morning.

This gnostic "monomyth," to borrow Joseph Campbell's term, was then populated with numerous colorful if not bizarre names and details. Gnosticism speaks the language of myth even as it helps one understand the modern fascination with myth. But the fundamental point is always the same: salvation is essentially inward or intrapsychic, and entails the possession of secret, saving knowledge. It's assumptions then are:

1. We are inwardly of a different nature from the surrounding evil world, in which we are entrapped through no fault of our own.
2. Salvation must come from a source outside the present evil environment, which cannot overcome its contradictions on its own terms.
3. Salvation is in the form of secret knowledge or gnosis.

The "secret" aspect meant that gnosticism was often taken to be, in the words of a modern authority, "a knowledge of divine secrets which is reserved for an elite."

---

Now you know why I put the cockroaches in there. Besides, I had a few left over from yesterday. Unlike those in yesterday's post, however, these cockroaches do not represent Frank Paynter (who really is quite a good fellow), but are rather a comment on the ideas described above. Gnosticism, with it's twisted notions of "the evil world" and its divine secrets reserved for a privileged elect, can, in short, kiss my serene Illinois ass.

It must seem, from some of these posts, that my real concerns are far from the web, the internet, even from the books I've written about these wonders in the past. I struggle with how I can connect my current research (I know that sounds a bit lofty, but it is that) with the sorts of things I was writing about four or five years ago. An easy answer, if not a very satisfying one, is that if one continues to write about the sorts of things one was writing about four or five years ago, one may find -- usually rather painfully -- that one has long since run out of useful things to say. And though the familiar is easier to categorize, and thus take in, and thus be recognized as... well, the familiar -- because that's what familiar means -- one finds oneself not wanting to be quite that predictable. Not least because of what we all know familiarity breeds.

A better answer, if not quite as curiously circular, is that those things I was writing about four or five years ago -- voice, communities of discourse, stories, power via command-and-control vs. attraction via bottom-up engagement... all the sorts of things that populated the original-flavor cluetrain manifesto (the website) and Gonzo Marketing (the book that only 14 people ever read; "79 used & new from $0.47") -- well pardners, none of those things are quite unequivocal "things." I mean, all are constructed of other bits and pieces, other concepts, and all depend on myriad assumptions and points of view for their interpretation. What, for instance, is a "conversation"? As it turns out, the more you think you know the answer to that one, the less you can actually have one.

What stands in the way is a little item called ideology. Call them belief systems if it makes you more comfortable. Americans, especially, seem to be made easily uncomfortable by talk of ideology. Like class, ideology is what other  people -- people somewhere "over there" -- have. Not us. What we have is the plain vanilla truth. This charming naivete quickly shades into the kind of unconscious arrogance that makes those other people over there want to blow up our buildings and give us all anthrax. Nasty, yes. Despicable, yes. Understandable? Unfortunately, yes. Because if you say you have no ideology, only the truth of the "way things are," then there is no possibility of having a conversation. Because if you say you have no "system of belief" but rather perceive reality as it truly is, then there's no use talking.

So I'm interested in breaking things down a bit more (pick any semantics you like). We do have ideologies and belief systems, and they're built up historically. None of em jus' grew like Topsy. But because we don't tend to see them this way -- i.e., as ideologies or belief systems -- they tend to be invisible. Or totally opaque. One extremely large and potent ideological complex is cobbled together from various vaguely defined ideas that constitute "New Age thinking." What some perceive as its positives -- no boundaries, no dogma, no requirements nor stringent prohibitions -- are what make New Age thinking so hard to pin down. Conveniently so. Very few people, in my experience, want to cop to being New Age. It's got a tacky rep. For good reason. But this sort of thinking has so permeated American life and thought, it's all but invisible -- which, strangely or not, equals opaque. It's right there in front of you but you can't see it. It's masking your ability to recognize what it is, but you can't see through it. Convenient too, because it's whatever anyone who wears it wants it to be, communicated in coy insider code phrases like "body, mind, and spirit" and "spiritual but not religious."

But hell, live and let live, right? Hero with a thousand faces. A thousand points of Light.

Yeah well, maybe not.

So that -- roughly stated, with a lot of handwaving thrown in -- is part of what I've been working on lately. The thrust and substance of conversations on the web today didn't spring to life concurrent with the invention of TCP/IP or the HyperText Transport Protocol. We are living too much in the moment, or we'd see more clearly the historical roots of the various ways we envision the world, and the hallucinatory quality of much of that vision.

One thread in the fabric of New Age thought seems to be gnosticism. The following indented bits are all from the same review of Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Resurrection by Harold Bloom, who is a big fan. Of gnosticism, that is, not of yours truly. Nor yours truly of him.

Gnosis means true knowledge... It is recognizing that as my true self is already divine, I should put aside the fear, guilt, resentment, and frustration belonging to the lower, material existence, which only enshrouds and obscures my true reality.

from: Gnosticism and American Religion by Andrew Wilson
source: The World & I, January 1, 1997
via: HighBeam Research

In Gnosis, the search for a God "out there" gives way to finding God within. I need not seek the blessings of God above, because my true self is already a spark of God: eternal, uncreated, and one with the universe.

Gnosticism is pervasive in late twentieth-century American spirituality. Bloom finds its traces in such New Age pastimes as fascination with angels and yearning for the millennium. Nevertheless, he denigrates modern American religion as Gnosticism of a debased sort. Gnosticism historically has been an elitist's faith.

Oh, that's so groovy, baby!

More to come on this score. Which score, in my thinking of late, is the spiritualization of pathological narcissism. ("But Bloom's's at Yale!" you may protest. Uh huh.) Perhaps it will all start to come together soon. I don't want it to be too clear, though, and risk getting the whole freaking world yelling at me.