Lecture I

[^4]: Gnosticism. The word is derived from the Greek gnosis—knowledge. The name “Gnostics” is used to designate widely different sects which flourished in the second and third centuries. They speculated on problems of human destiny and professed to teach a knowledge of God and man. Our knowledge of Gnosticism was for long confined to criticisms by its opponents: Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, St. Epiphenius and others. The leading exponents of Gnosticism were the Ophites, Simon Magnus, Carpocrates, Basildes, Marcion and Valentinus. Many documents are lost or were destroyed as heretical. Today our knowledge is based upon the Pistis Sophia (fourth century), the Bruce Codex (fifth century), the Codex Berulensis (now lost), the Manichaean writings found at Turfan in Chinese Turkistam (early in this century), the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic writings in Coptic translation discovered in 1945 at NagHammadi in Egypt, the ancient Chenoboskion. Valuable for further study are: The Gnostics and their remains, ancient and mediaeval, C. W. King, 1887, with descriptive plates of talismans, gems, sigils, etc; The Secret Book of the Egyptian Gnostics, Jean Doresse (from the French), 1960. Very important: The Gnostic Religion, Hans Jonas, Paperback 1963. In Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Erster Teil, lectures VIII and IX, Dr. Steiner tells us that Gnosis was a wisdom knowledge, a “survival of ancient wisdom derived from the old clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world. It was suppressed by dogmatic Christianity from motives of hostility to Mystery wisdom, for Gnosis declared that Christ had descended upon earth through the realms of the spiritual Hierarchies and incarnated in the physical body of Jesus which had been prepared for 30 years to receive the Christ Being.”