Scribd
Upload
32 views2 pages

Episteme Vs Gnosis

Uploaded by

Astral Phantom
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
32 views2 pages

Episteme Vs Gnosis

Uploaded by

Astral Phantom
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

1.

The Religion of the Mind


If there is one idea we need to grasp in order to understand the Hermetic
‘Religion of the Mind’, it is gnosis. This is at the centre of not only the
Corpus Hermeticum and other Hermetica; it is at the heart of practically
all spiritual, esoteric, mystical, and occult literature and practice. It is a
Greek word meaning knowledge, but it is a knowledge different from, but
not necessarily exclusive of episteme, another Greek word meaning
knowledge. But while episteme refers to the body of ideas arrived at
through reason and experience — what we usually refer to when we
speak of knowledge — and from which the discipline of epistemology,
the philosophical analysis of how we know what we know, arises, gnosis
is something different. That 2 + 2 = 4, that water is composed of two
atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and that the earth circles round
the sun, are items of knowledge that fall under episteme. We may argue
about these things, question whether they are true, and, as some
philosophers have done, come up with reasons why we can’t possibly
know them or anything else, but they are all items of knowledge that
have been arrived at through reason and empirical observation. What
one knows with gnosis isn’t. A dictionary definition of gnosis gives us
‘intuitive knowledge of spiritual truths’. A more forceful definition might
be ‘immediate, direct, non-discursive cognition of reality’. In this sense
gnosis is as immediate and direct an experience as being thirsty and
drinking cold water on a hot day. What one knows in gnosis isn’t arrived
at by argument, logic, or empirical — that is, sensory — observation. It
can’t be taught in schools, although the means of arriving at gnosis have
been, and continue to be, not in universities and colleges, but in groups
dedicated to esoteric practice, as the Hermetic groups who sought the
Hermetic gnosis did. I should mention that ‘esoteric’, ‘Hermetic’, and
‘occult’ are often used interchangeably, to refer to studies and
disciplines that fall outside the mainstream organs of orthodox religion,
philosophy, and science, and deal with extra-sensory reality. While
‘Hermetic’ refers specifically to Hermetic philosophy — although it too is
often used very loosely — ‘occult’ is a more broad umbrella term, and
‘esoteric’ indicates an ‘inner’, not necessarily secret but, let’s say, less
advertised aspect of a religion, spiritual teaching or school of thought.
While in the knowledge that falls under episteme we may be subject to
doubt and uncertainty, in gnosis we are not. There, as G.R.S. Mead, a
great modern Hermetic scholar, remarked, ‘is certitude, full and
inexhaustible, no matter how the doubting mind … may weave its magic
…’1 The doubting mind, Mead tells us, knows ‘discursive knowledge’, the
‘noise of words’, and ‘the appearance of things’. This, Mead continues,
‘the followers of Hermes left to the “Greeks.” For the Hermeticist ‘only
“wisdom” would do’.2 And that wisdom was Egyptian.
The ‘Greeks’ in this instance stand for the dialectical reasoning of the
Platonic dialogues. By the time the Corpus Hermeticum was being
written, this had reached, as Frances Yates argued, a standstill from
which nothing new could be expected. Although initially driven by Plato’s
original and searching mind, it had hardened into a kind of empty
exercise, a wheel of arguments that led nowhere. Egyptian wisdom,
gnosis, was a way of escaping this dead end and arriving at a direct
apprehension of reality. Not the reality of the senses, which was shifting,
changing, and unreliable, but the true, eternal, and living reality that lay
beneath appearances. Its essence was the irrefutable insight that ‘the
individual is fundamentally no different from the Supreme’,3 a
realization common to many forms of mysticism. For example, it is the
Tat tvam asi, ‘Thou art that’, of Vedantic Hinduism, the recognition that
the Self, in its fundamental form, is identical with the ultimate reality, the
ground of all phenomena. In both Vedanta and Hermeticism, this
knowledge, this gnosis, is a form of liberation and salvation. It was this
identification of the human self and the divine, found in Christian
mystics such as Meister Eckhart, that the Church balked at, even though
for some time Hermes Trismegistus was considered an important
precursor of and fellow-traveller with Christianity.

You might also like