Split Images of God
Jews, Gnostics & Christians, Through a Prism Lightly
To cease to place oneself above anyone is the only way not to be forever placing oneself beneath someone else.
The highest, most “enlightened” perspective = that which does not allow for an isolated identity to be the be-all and end-all of our experience (though it is still in there).
Judas the Twin
This week, I read The Gospel of Judas—what’s left of it. The Codex Tcharos itself was found in Egypt in the 1970s, but not placed in the hands of responsible scholars until the 2000s, by which time it had deteriorated to a handful of crumbling pages. It was published in 2006 by National Geographic, edited by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst. I never even heard about it, and only came across it by chance, while book-hunting in London this last October.
The fragmentary text echoes and confirms an idea that is also propagated by another book I read this week, The Second Coming of Reb Yhshwh, by Carlo Suarès—the idea that Judas, far from being the betrayer of Jesus, was really “the beloved disciple” who understood him the best. This is an idea I have entertained, even subscribed to, since my twenties. I even wrote a speculative passage about Judas being Jesus’ twin, crucified in his place, for The Mess Age, which later became The Lucid View, published in 2004.
I left that part out, along with about half of the original MS. (You can find the excised segment here.)
Thinking about it now, this idea of Judas being the misunderstood, maligned hero of the Gospel goes as far back, for me, as seeing Jesus Christ Superstar as a child. In that hugely successful musical, Judas is probably the most interesting and sympathetic character; at least, I clearly remember thinking and saying so, back when I saw it at the tender age of 9 or 10.
Carlo Suarès writes:
You will never receive “Jesus” if you don’t receive “Judas.” It is Judas who is on the cross. The passion is his. The traitors are those who mistranslated the Gospels from the Greek and used the word betray to describe his “handing over” of the Light to the Darkness. There was no betrayal. This so-called “son of perdition” (John 17:12) who is imagined “damned” (as if the word damnation has any sense or meaning at all!) is one of the fundamental aspects of Cosmic Energy—the aspect of penetration into the existing world where it “loses” itself in a process of degradation (p. 132).
I was unimpressed by The Gospel of Judas, however, even if it clearly confirms that this idea goes back almost as far as the canonical gospels themselves. Still less was I taken in by the gnostic ideas in the text, and the interpretations of it, for example, that Christ needed Judas to turn him in to the Romans so he could die and escape this material realm!
Ye gods! Couldn’t he just wait for old age to catch up with him, like the rest of us?
Gnosticism Good & Bad
Once, in my twenties, I considered myself a Gnostic as the only truly Christ-ian affiliation. Later, in my forties, I renounced that affiliation, and began to equate Gnosticism, big G, with occultism, little o, and worse. Now I am ready to be “liminal” about it again.
The good of gnosticism, for me, is the idea of a divine spark within us (at least in some of us), and of direct knowledge of God, at an inner level, being more essential than either faith or good works.
The bad of gnosticism is the rejection of the body and of Nature as evil, and the association of escape from physicality with salvation (whereas, in Christianity, salvation-through-crucifixion implies a full submission to physicality).
The primary gnostic idea of a demiurge, that Yahweh is a lesser god responsible for an evil creation, seems to partake of—even be foundational to—both the best and the worst of gnosticism.
In part, gnosticism seems to have arisen as a reaction-rebellion against an overly literal reading of the Hebrew doctrine of the Tanakh—a rebellion that “doubled down” by presenting an even more literalized version of the same basic myth. It attempted to address the incongruities (and hypocrisies) of Yahweh-ism, by making a more literally coherent narrative (closer to science fiction than theology).
It is possible the idea was to create a counter-myth, as a way to loosen the hold of (a literal-minded interpretation of) “Yahweh” over the Jewish psyche. If so, the gnostic “heresy” fell prey to the very same forces of petrification, binding with its left hand what it loosed with the right. (At least, insofar as it has become another form of ideological dogma—with its demiurge, its archons, and its “B-reality”—that, to this day, holds sway over occultists, transhumanists, and artist-rebels like P. K. Dick).
Rudolf Steiner on Yahweh
Also this week, I returned to listening to Rudolf Steiner audios, starting with The Fifth Gospel (after I heard Are Thoresen talk about it in an interview). I found some particularly interesting material in the last few lectures, including the following on Yahweh (from 13th January, 1914; audio here):
The whole of ancient Hebrew culture looks upon Jehovah as the God of the Earth, conceives that this Divine-Spiritual Regent is interwoven with the Earth and that men who aspire to be conscious of their connection with the Universe as beings of Earth must cleave to Jehovah, the God of the Earth. . . .
It was inherent in the nature of the ancient Hebrews to think of themselves as connected wholly and entirely with what comes from the Earth. . . .
We must conceive the pillar of fire to be a phenomenon produced by the forces of the interior of the Earth. In the same way the column of water or mist must be thought of as originating in the wilderness, not in the upper atmosphere. We must also look for the origin of the Great Flood itself in forces which surge in and through the Earth; the Flood was the result of tellurian, not of cosmic causes.
This was at the bottom of the protest put up by the ancient Hebrews against the neighbouring peoples—for the God of Hebrew antiquity was the God of the Earth. The ancient Hebrews felt that everything coming from above, from outside the Earth, did not really belong to the mission of Earth-evolution; they conceived it as having been preserved in Earth-evolution by the Being who had remained at a backward stage during the Old Moon-period, namely, Lucifer. . . . The ancient Hebrews felt that what came from above was symbolised in the Serpent of Paradise. . . .
It seems incredible today that men can ever have looked towards the centre of the Earth when they spoke of their God, but it was indeed so. . . .
But as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha approached, Hebrew culture was veering more and more from its original direction and looking upwards for the Gods. . . . John the Baptist . . . felt it his mission to bring home to the Jews, where their true strength lay. . . .
What is the expression “generation of vipers” taken to mean today? . . . John the Baptist was striving to bring home to the Jews: “You no longer understand your true mission; you no longer call upon the forces of the Earth but upon the forces of the Serpent, upon what has been made known to you as the Serpent.”
[After the crucifixion], Christ had now passed into the Aura of the Earth and was living in the Aura of the Earth. That is the great truth concerning which so many who lived in the early centuries of Christianity uttered such strange words. They said: “Christ is the true Lucifer.” They understood: In former times it was right to adhere to the Serpent; since the Mystery of Golgotha, He Who is the Conqueror of the Serpent has come, and He is now the Lord of the Earth.