by John Lamb Lash
Finally someone has taken on the heavy topics of shamanism, ecofeminism, Gnosticism, ecopsychology, Paganism and sacred ecology and has given us not only a critique of the salvationist ideology of Christianity, Judaism and Islam but a roadmap to a sustainable future.
If the human species is to survive in the near future, it will have to live in Gaia’s way, not in the demented, self-centered willfulness to which we are accustomed. But what do we know, so far, of Gaia’s way?
With the eradication of the Mysteries, humanity lost the most important spiritual resources of the Western world, and this loss has allowed the West to lead the entire planet toward excess and self-destruction. The process that began six thousand years ago, perhaps triggered by a vast climatic catastrophe in North Africa and the Near East, led to monotheistic religion with its suppression of the Goddess, and then, through the transference effectuated by Saint Paul, to the triumph of salvationism as the spiritual paradigm of the Western world. The history of Western civilization was written to record the victory of patriarchy and legitimate its program. There is no more powerful ideology for oppression than redemptive religion.
The pandemic ideological virus is not incurable, however. The Sophianic vision is the planet medicine able to resist patriarchy and heal the primal wound from which it erupted.
If the veteran sages of the Pagan Mysteries were right, the highest religious ideals of humanity do not offer the remedy for evil but make us complicit in it. The salvation narrative that Gnostics exposed and resisted was embraced by people who murdered them, destroyed all their works, and then attempted to make it look as if they had never existed. But the Gnostic legacy still lives. It can be reclaimed and reinvented. Even the small flake of recorded teachings, flawed and incomplete as it is, contains enough primal wisdom to inspire a spiritual awakening and return us to our divine resources.
The Sophia mythos does not belong in the past or to the past. It is a once and future myth, the timeless and insuperable alterative to the salvation narrative. It is a myth that nurtures and sustains those who embrace it, and fosters authenticity through direct experience of its subject matter: the passion of the Goddess. It does not ask, as the redemption story does, to be constantly legitimated, justified, reinstated. The redeemer complex is unredeemable. There is nothing in it that can be saved, nothing worth saving. But the lethal compulsion of the complex is formidable, using pain to reinforce guilt, and vice versa. Because the complex is so insidious, and the prior wounding runs so deep into the collective psyche, its power must be dispelled indirectly. To overcome the salvationist lie is possible by renouncing the story that makes the lie appealing. Break the patriarchal narrative and humanity can enter a future worth living, a future where optimal human promise is the everyday norm, just as it was in the Mysteries of the Great Goddess.
This adventure is about how we enter the imagination of the earth by dreaming Sophia.
A Crucial Generation
Today, many factors are converging that optimize the possibility of recovering the Sophianic vision of the Mysteries. Deep ecology, ecopsychology, shamanism and entheogenic practices, ecofeminism, nature mysticism, ecospirituality, Neopaganism, and the Goddess mystique— all are tributary to that vision. But these are only terms, trendy catchwords. What matters is the reality of experience behind these terms. With the incorporation of Gnosis into deep ecology, the way is open toward ecognosis: intimate perception of the life force of the earth, such that brings humanity into alignment with Sophia’s correction.
However one wishes to imagine this alignment, there can be no doubt that in just one generation of thirty years Western society has acquired a new spiritual dimension centered on the image of Gaia. Consider this sequence:
- 1972 James Lovelock published a one-page statement on the Gaia hypothesis in the journal Atmospheric Environment, followed by two brief papers coauthored with Lynn Margulis. The same year saw the publication of Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens, edited by Peter Furst, an important anthology that figured in the shamanic revival, and Hallucinogens and Shamanism by Michael Harner. Both books make the key connection between “archaic techniques of ecstasy” in ancient times and modern psychopharmacological knowledge.
- 1973 Arne Naess defined deep ecology in an article in the journal Inquiry. This year also saw the founding of the Institute of Noetic Sciences with the aim to expand knowledge of the nature and potential of the mind and apply it to the health and well-being of humanity. Gnosis is the ancient prototype of the noetic sciences.
- 1974 Goddess and Gods of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas was published in English. This single book provides the most complete and reliable framework for tracing the rise of patriarchy, and presents solid archaeological evidence of the widespread existence of human-scale Goddess-based societies millennia before the rise of urban civilization. In In Search of the Primitive, published in the same year, anthropologist Stanley Diamond wrote that “the search for the primitive is the attempt to define a primary human potential.” In this phrase, he set the course for an adventure of learning that can link our remote past with a sane, sustainable future.
- 1975 Majorie M. Malvern published Venus in Sackcloth, still the best book on Mary Madgalene, contributing an important human element of the Goddess mystique.
- 1976 Where the Wasteland Ends by Theodore Roszak presented a brilliant critique of Western pathology, including crucial insight into how the salvation narrative of Judeo-Christianity has wounded human imagination. Invoking the Romantics, especially William Blake, Roszak called for the revival of “the Old Gnosis” and the undertaking of “revolutionary mysticism.” He warned against technological cocooning and the terminal narcissism of the Piscean Age, a couple of decades before the world fell totally under the spell of cybernetic mimicry. In the same year, The Paradise Papers (later published as When God Was a Woman) by Merlin Stone defined the leading edge of “Goddess reclamation.” Her research confirms the role of women in the empowerment of kings and tribal chieftains prior to the rise of patriarchy.
- 1978 The Nag Hammadi Library in English was published, making firsthand Gnostic writings available to the English-speaking world for the first time. In the same year, The Road to Eleusis by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck proposed and proved the entheogenic basis of the Mysteries. Mary Daly published Gyn/Ecology, an outrageous manifesto of ecofeminism that contains a scathing frontal attack on patriarchy.
- 1979 James Lovelock published his first complete book on the new theory, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Simultaneously, there appeared the seemingly unrelated Messengers of Deception by Jacques Vallee and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth by John Allegro. The former is perhaps the best single book ever written on the ET/UFO enigma, and the latter is a stunning plunge into the pathology of the Zaddikim, with many references to the Mysteries that were driven into oblivion with the rise of Christianity. Vallee’s characterization of the ET/UFO phenomenon as a “spiritual control system” accords with that Gnostics said about the Archontic nature of redemption theology. When he predicted that contactee cults may become the basis of future religions, he could hardly have imagined that the dominant world religions are themselves the outgrowth of such a cult. Thus, both Vallee and Allegro made vital contributions to the mythic and religious dimensions of the Sophia mythos at the very moment that Lovelock was elaborating its biosystemic dimension.
The list is highly selective and could easily be expanded threefold. But as it stands this brief inventory demonstrates how all the key factors that might contribute to reclaiming the Sophianic vision emerged, incredibly, within a seven-year period. The same period brought to light much essential knowledge regarding how and why the Pagan Mysteries were destroyed. We are now living just one generation on from the 1970s. Who knows what might be achieved in Gaia theory and ecognostic practice in the generation ahead? Perhaps the present generation will be the first to acknowledge the great, world-wrenching tragedy I have attempted to describe in this book: how and why the Western, Euro- American way of life has led the entire planet toward a nonsustainable future.
Renowned environmentalist René Dubos insisted that “our salvation depends on our ability to create a religion of nature.” We may now assert that we once had a religion of nature, millennial in duration, vast in scope, and profound in its insight into the very secrets of life, but it was destroyed by belief in off-planet salvation. Having destroyed the indigenous spiritual wisdom of Europa and imposed the patriarchal norms of the Abrahamic religions in its place, how can Euro-American society do anything but engender more chaos, inflict more harm, and lead humanity even further astray from its own true potential? The moment has come to realize that the lack of spiritual direction of the West is not a mysterious malaise but the consequence of a massive, longterm historical program of religious and cultural genocide.
The longing for Sophia stirs in many hearts today, but the spell of divine paternalism retains a strong hold. Those who belong to the tradition of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, tend to look toward their own religious roots for ways to recognize and recover Sophianic values. Particularly in the Christian fold there is an assumption that some kind of Gaia-centered “ecotheology” can be extracted or extrapolated from salvation narrative and the beliefs associated with it. Many intelligent, socially concerned people continue to think that we can get a viable ecotheology out of divine paternalism. The temptation to reconcile Sophianic principles with perpetrator religion is irresistible to all those whose cultural identity is stronger than their attraction to surrendering self and merging with the planetary life force, Eros. Every excuse made for the victim-perpetrator syndrome reinforces the ages-old repression of the wisdom goddess. Every reversion to redeemer theology and the ethics of Jesus undermines the quest for sacred ecology.
The most common argument for reconciliation invokes the caretaker clause: the father god created the natural world and gave it over to human caretaking. But this is patronizing cant. The earth takes care of itself. Wilderness does fine on its own. The Garden of Eden is a misleading trope. The planet is a paradise even without gardens. Agriculture is not the sacred calling of the human species. We are not indispensable custodians of Gaia. The Goddess is not a feeble crone in need of geriatric services. We are at best temps in the Great Work, provisional migrant workers who may or may not acquire a permanent niche, a “creative fit” as Lynn Margulis calls it.
Unfinished Animal
Looking around the planet, it does seem that the immense majority of people are still firmly entrenched in patriarchal religion. Perhaps the weakest point in the ethical agenda of deep ecology is this: People are not easily convinced that human nature is essentially good and that we need no exhortation or off-planet moral commandments to make us care about each other and the earth. But this view of the human condition is not really typical of the human condition per se; rather, it is the result of human conditioning. Those who embrace patriarchal religion as the sole source of morals must already have been corrupted by it. By setting up a superhuman ideal to mirror our humanity, salvationism dehumanizes us. Patriarchy has to break down the human spirit before redeemer religion can have any appeal as an answer to life. This is what the spurious message of love in the New Testament does. The double-bind ethic of Jesus is so demoralizing that if it did not have the entrapment of victimperpetrator collusion working behind it, common sense would reject it as self-evidently absurd and dangerous to human sanity.
Patriarchy persists because it has produced generations of people whose wounded, undermined humanity compels them to stick to its program, and enlist others to the cause. Those who really need to have their morals dictated by an off-planet god must have already betrayed their bond with the web of symbiosis that could teach them the morality of reciprocity, respect, and self-regulation. The option to “Made in His Image” is not difficult to imagine, however. Theodore Roszak proposed the term “unfinished animal” to describe humanity in the process of becoming, rather than a creature ready-made by an absent creator and ready to follow preformulated orders. The unfinished animal is a singularity in process, you could say. Cultural critic Neil Evernden strikes a similar note with his notion of “the natural alien.” He points out that the human being is the one creature in nature that does not fit into a niche already provided by nature.
Each organism has its world, and that enables it to function and persist. Each lives within that world to which it is made. The variability of the human world makes it very difficult to speak of humans having an environment, for the human surroundings vary with their world. It is this strange flexibility that makes it possible for us to believe in an abstract reality which pits us against, or more correctly separates us from, the earth that houses all organic worlds.
We have to create our own niche, a “creative fit,” and that is why we are unfinished animals. But that is also why we are the outstanding expression of singularity among all species.
Throughout this book [Not in HIS Image], I hope to have shown that the concordance of Gaian notions with some elements of the Sophianic vision merits deep reflection. Gnostics used the term allogenes, “someone from elsewhere,” “a stranger,” to epitomize the human condition. The word carries two meanings joined on a trenchant edge. On the one hand, it clearly alludes to the preterrestrial origin of humanity: the human genome on earth was seeded from elsewhere. On the other hand, it points to the way human beings can become alienated from their own reality by the Archontic factor. It does not mean that we are strangers to the earth and don’t really belong here. It warns about the unique tendency we have, because of our designing and goal-directive capacities, that causes us to misrepresent and misperceive the world, so that we end up believing that we don’t fit into it. So believing, we will tend to look beyond the earth to be rescued from our plight and released into another, better life. Hence the promise of off-planet salvation becomes credible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his Only-Begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life,” the Gospel of John assures us. But the Gnostics had another credo:
A great power was emanated to you, which the All-Originator, the Eternal, endowed in you before you came to this place, in order that those things that are difficult to distinguish you might distinguish, and those things that are unknown to the multitude you might know, and that you might be released sane and whole to the One who is yours, in you, who was the first to save and who does not need to be saved. Allogenes (NHL XI, 3.50)
Salvation is not the crucial issue for humanity. Adaptation is. We do fit into the natural world, but not in any way that Gaia predetermines for us, as she does for other creatures. We are the novelty in Her nature. We are the singularity in Sophia’s Dreaming, the exception upon which she relies in some way, if the seers in the Mysteries were right:
And the luminous epinoia was hidden in Adam, in order that the Archons might not reach that power, but that the epinoia might be a correction to the deficiency of Sophia. (Apocryphon of John, 20.25)
From time before reckoning indigenous people all around the world have observed the ways of nature and other species, and by doing so learned how to fit into their environment. By coercing us to “believe in an abstract reality which pits us against the earth that houses all organic worlds,” patriarchy and perpetrator religion have almost totally destroyed the precious legacy of native wisdom, and the natives along with it. There are still some threads of indigenous sanity to weave into a future worth living, but in the end it may not be native savvy alone that ensures the survival of the unfinished animal. Loving observation, empathy, and respect for nature and other species can teach us a lot about how to live, but to resolve the question of our niche something more is needed: imagination, the luminous epinoia.
Imagination is the genius of humanity, and in each people of each region of the world it manifests a particular creative and innovative spirit—the genius loci, the local genius, or spirit of place. The Sophia mythos tells us that the Goddess charged Zoe, the immortal life force, with the task of implanting epinoia in humanity. To put it another way, we carry divine imaginative force as a somatic capacity, evident in the phenomenon of bioluminescence, as already noted. Imagination and vitality are crucially wedded in the human psyche and mutually anchored in the body. No ideology can ever defeat or deracinate this union.
Reprinted with permission from Chelsea Green Publishing (www.chelseagreen.com ; 800-639-4099).
