Running Late With A Side Order Of Gnosticism

Hi hello happy September! As I am writing this, it is September 15th, approximately 15 days later than when I wanted this newsletter to go out.

I could list off just about everything that happened, this month has been hell for me! Between work and my Master's courses starting and my neighbor deciding that he does have enough balls to enact a hate crime on me and my roommate at least once a week I just haven't had a lot of time to do anything. I don't want to spend too long talking about everything, but I do want to touch on my Master's program if y'all will let me!

I started a Master's in Creative Writing at the end of August through Tiffin University. This program is one that is designed for students with a full time job, something that I really need with my current 50 hour/week workload. Over the next 18 months, I will be in all kinds of writing-centric courses! Two courses I am taking this fall, Writing Workshop 1 & 2, even end with a full draft of a novel!

I'm using this chance to revise a draft of CMI book 2 with the intentions of having that out by the end of next year. However, this does mean that DESECRATE is getting pushed back... again.

DESECRATE is a labor of love for me, a stand alone story outside of the Call Me Icarus universe. One that heavily draws on my upbringing in Catholicism. My friends and I affectionately refer to it as Catholic Trauma: The Book. So as you can imagine, it is a very heavy story for me to write. When I started my Master's program, I had to make a decision on which story I thought I could write at least 50k on by December and which one I wanted to focus on, and honestly my return to Icarus is long overdue.

That said, I am shooting to have DESECRATE finalized next year. I could publish it later in the year if I can convince myself to give up on the idea of releasing on Ash Wednesday, but if not then we're aiming for the year after.

Even still, I will continue to work on it throughout this program and complete research for it. Speaking of research, this month's newsletter topic is the Gnostics!

The Gnostics & Gnosticism

Before we can talk about Marcion and his beliefs (which are the core of DESECRATE), we have to discuss his predecessor: the Gnostics.

Gnosticism is an ancient sect of Christianity that has kinda evolved into it's own thing, if we're going to be simple about it. However, y'all know me at this point and I'm not going to be simple about it. The believe in knowledge above all else (where they get their name from, as γνῶσὶς [gnosis] in ancient Greek means knowledge or wisdom), though I'm pretty sure that's tied more to modern Gnostic belief and is not what I am academically familiar with.

What I am familiar with is how they intersected with Ancient Christianity. I was taught that the Gnostics are distinctly tied to Christianity, but I remember us discussing that it is possible they existed far before the creation of the religion. Either way, not my cup of tea still, and we will be discussing them as inherently linked with the creation of Christianity.

At its core, Gnosticism is inherently antisemitic (and honestly, it's more anti-Judaic than it is antisemitic, since it targets Judaism as a religion not ethnically Jewish people). This is because they believe that the material world is flawed, that the being who created it is just as flawed. Where this becomes antisemitic is when they place blame for the flaw and inherent evil in the world on the creator God.

They believe there is a True God from which all came (but not in a creation sense, kinda just that everything is a part of this God without him ever having to create it, if that makes sense?), and that there is a fake God that is evil who created all physical matter. Not sure why I'm calling this antisemitic? It's because this creator God is the God of the Tanakh. Not only that, but from what I recall of Judaism there is an emphasis placed on the worth of the created and the material. The world and it's creations have value, so marking those items as evil is straight up anti-Judaic.

The Gnostics also believe that there is sin inherent to every material being and the only way to reach salvation is to gain the knowledge of that sin. I suppose a simpler way to put it is that the Gnostics believed that ignorance was the greatest sin. It ties back to the "knowledge above all else" portion from earlier, yeah?

The thing with Gnostic salvation, though, is that it isn't the same is it's syncretic Christian salvation. In Christianity, anyone can be saved so long as they repent. As the "end times" approach (and boy, do I have an essay in me about the "end times" and how it's been the end of times since the beginning of time) Christians go out of their way to convert as many people as they can in an effort to save their eternal soul, right? We see it in our daily lives in America, especially if we are in rural Evangelical areas.

The Gnostics didn't do this, though. There was no real conversion seeking behaviors from them, and part of this is because of their views on salvation. The only people who would be saved when the rapture came (re: my end times essay mentioned earlier, I really would love to talk about the rapture and apocalyptic sects) were those who had the knowledge of Gnosticism. That was it. If you were not a Gnostic, then that sucks. Nothing you can do about it now 🤷

I believe this has changed from the ancient times, mostly because I keep running into "as within, so without" style messaging about Gnostic salvation in my studies if I'm not super careful in searching within certain time periods. This would make sense, as I'm pretty sure I remember professor Larson talking about a lot of the Gnostic beliefs we studied being a natural result of Christian persecution.

The Christians were unsafe in ancient times, and even within that the Gnostic sects were more unsafe. They had to blend in where they could, so there wasn't a lot of evangelizing on their behalf at the time. It would have been a "well, there's no saving your soul. sucks to suck" mentality in order to keep themselves and their families safe.

A lot of what we know about the ancient Gnostics comes from the Nag Hammadi library, something that people who follow my work might recognize. I talk about the Nag Hammadi library frequently as it pertains to DESECRATE. It's where the Myth of Adonai was found! It is also our largest cache of heretical texts.

The Nag Hammadi library was found in 1945 in, you guessed it, Nag Hammadi, Egypt. It's also known as the Gnostic Gospels, containing 12 codices and some fragments that were found buried in the desert. These texts include: The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Truth, The Apocryphon of James, The Second Apocalypse of James, and more! They cover a wide variety of topics, from the creation myth to the foundation of heaven on Earth and the future of humanity. One theory is that the documents survived because a heretic sealed them in a jar and buried them instead of letting the church destroy them, which would make sense with Gnosticism being declared a heresy and all!

Anyways, all this to say: Gnosticism is a buck wild heretical syncretism of early Christianity that I have barely even scraped the top of as I've researched the beginning of Christianity for this novel. Next month imma talk about how Marcionism branched off these beliefs and how I modeled the Catholic Church off of that in DESECRATE!

Until then, I will leave y'all to have an amazing week <3 If you're sticking around for the writing snippet, it'll be under the cut as per usual

See y'all in 15ish days (if I don't come back sooner with more revelations from my Master's program),
Andi