Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations (17 page)

Gnostic Simon Magus, who gave his name to an unpopular act, fell to the Roman Forum while attempting to ascend to heaven.

He later personified his vision of God's femininity in Helen, a woman from Tyre who some Christians claimed was a prostitute and others described as “a shameless slut” lured by Simon away from the bed of Dositheos, Simon's former mentor. Whatever carnal attraction Helen may have represented to Simon, she apparently inspired him at a somewhat higher level because he claimed to see the Spirit of God within her. While this supported many Gnostic beliefs, including the idea that the Spirit of God existed in all matter, Simon's claim that it took a fallen woman to reveal the deity to him outraged Christians.

Christians may have become his enemies, but Simon had friends as well. One of them was the Roman emperor, Nero, who appointed him court magician and was amused by Simon's skill at causing furniture to move without being touched, and walking through a wall of fire to emerge unscathed on the other side.

Simon's magical skill, according to legend, had its limits, and he met his end in one of two ways, depending upon the source. One account claims that Simon boasted he would be buried alive as Christ had been and after three days he would rise from his grave hale and hearty. The burial took place; the resurrection did not.

In the other account, Simon bragged that he would rise into heaven from the Forum, with the apostles Peter and Paul observing the event as witnesses. Employing his levitation skills, he began to soar into the sky while Peter and Paul fell on their knees, praying fervently for Simon to fall. Their prayers were answered and Simon dropped to the Forum, dashed to pieces near the Via Sacra. Adherents of this version delight in visiting the Church of Santa Francesca Romana in the Roman Forum, where the stone on which Peter and Paul knelt to pray remains on display, the mark of their knees pressed into the marble surface.

This stone in the Church of Santa Francesca Romana bears the knee marks of Peter and Paul, who knelt to pray for Simon's fall.

The death of Simon Magus and other Gnostic sect leaders produced neither the collapse of the religion nor its elevation, as occurred with Christianity. The Gnostic core belief continued to evolve, spurred on by new leaders, and while the creed did not want for constant renewal over several centuries, the result was an often bewildering range of variations when it came to values and practices.

In fact, along with the concept of a true, ultimate and transcendent God and a faulty world in which humans dwell, the only constant factor among Gnostic sects was the notion of Aeons, intermediate beings filling the void between humans and God. Aeons and God comprise the realm of
Pleroma
, or Fullness, because they enjoy the full potency of divinity. Simon Magus's Helen, renamed Sophia in honor of her wisdom, was an Aeon in Gnostic teachings. Humans, as long as the spirit remains trapped within its flawed and evil body, are merely existential according to Gnostics. Instead of the Fullness we are promised, we live in Emptiness.

The spirit's most valuable ingredient is a Divine Spark, the element that separates us from other forms of life and remains trapped within the prison of the body. Unless the required degree of Gnosis is gathered during life, the spark will be re-embodied upon death in another flawed and evil form of earthly life.

Not every human is capable of achieving the goal of retaining the spiritual element beyond earthly existence. Those whose spirituality is strong enough to make the transformation are called
pneumatics
; they will achieve Gnosis and liberation. A second group, identified as
psychics
, have little awareness of the spiritual world beyond matter and mind; they may, through sufficient
effort and insight, rise to the level of pneumatics. Most people, labeled
hyletics,
are earthbound and materialistic. Their dedication to physical reality, and their inability to achieve gnosis, dooms them to remain forever in a flawed and evil existence.

As Christianity grew in strength it became less tolerant of Gnosticism. In the Christian view, Gnostics were basically Christians who had wandered so far from the path that their beliefs became heretical. Whether or not Gnostics suffered abuse at the hands of Christians, their numbers shrank and they began to exhibit classic behavior associated with secret societies, including the use of initiations, passwords, secret handshakes and communication via codes and symbols. By the end of the third century ad, Gnosticism ceased to be an influential movement, although segments of its central teachings can be found among the dualist religion Manichaeism as well as medieval religious groups like the Albigenses, Bogomils and Paulicians. Students of the Kabbalah perceive kernels of Gnosticism within that philosophy, and a small non-Christian sect, the Mandaeans, reportedly exist in some corners of Iraq and Iran. Otherwise, for almost 1700 years, Gnosticism became something of a shadowy footnote to the rise and domination of Christianity in the Western world, its near-anonymity broken only by efforts by people such as Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) to revive the movement, and echoes of its philosophy in the writings of William Blake.

Gnosticism received two injections of renewed interest during the twentieth century. The first occurred in 1945 near the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi when twelve codices containing over fifty writings on Gnosticism were discovered by a peasant digging an irrigation ditch, their origins traced back to the fourth century ad. Likely prepared by monks at the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius, and hidden to escape destruction by the emerging Orthodox Church, the scriptures provided a wealth of information on Gnostic teachings and values.

The Gnostic texts, retrieved in 1945 from their desert hiding place near Nag Hammadi in Egypt.

Meanwhile, psychologist Carl Jung was evaluating Gnosticism as a source of inspiration for his ground-breaking experiments and writings on the workings of the mind. On that subject, he found traditional Christianity lacking in insight compared with Gnosticism. “In the ancient world,” Jung wrote, “the Gnostics, whose arguments were very much influenced by psychic experience, tackled the problem of evil on a broader basis than the Church Fathers.”

These events, plus the drug-induced frenzy to explore mystical practices and beliefs that swept North America during the 1960s, restored another wave of interest in Gnosticism. For the most part, however, the Gnostics represent bit players in an ecclesiastical drama extending over 2000 years, their secrecy more a means of protection from attacks from Christians than a means of carrying out acts against society.

FIVE

KABBALAH

ORIGINS OF THE APOCALYPSE

HERE IS THE FABLE
:

A man in search of universal truths travels to Israel, where he studies an ancient school of mysticism based on the same Hebrew texts from which the Bible evolved. Absorbing this wisdom of the ages from an elderly Jewish scholar, the man achieves a degree of enlightenment he had not been able to attain through other systems of belief. With each revelation of this ancient knowledge he feels his soul elevated, his powers expanded, his insight honed and his horizons broadened.

Upon the death of his mentor, the man vows to carry his acquired wisdom to a select group of people who are prepared to engage in the sacrifices necessary to absorb the knowledge and benefit from the teachings. He will spread his message to the ends of the earth, providing humanity with secrets hidden for several millennia. He will convey this power as a means of alerting humanity to its destiny. He will become the new source of the ancient wisdom known as the Kabbalah.

Neither a religion nor an organization, Kabbalah is a system of thought drawn from Jewish theosophy, philosophy, science and mysticism. Various interpretations (and spellings) of the word exist, but they all relate to the notion of a secret oral tradition handed down through generations to a select few students by scholars and wise men. The exclusivity of knowledge and closed structure of Kabbalah gave rise to the English word
cabal
, meaning a private intrigue of a sinister nature. Over time, this definition reversed its flow to the point where these traits are
now applied to the root word regardless of its original intent. Kabbalah, many believe, functions according to the definition of
cabal
, suggesting a group of Semitic conspirators working in the shadows to achieve devious ends through secretive means.

Kabbalah began as an oral tradition, an interpretation of the word of God as expressed in the first five chapters of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In the Torah, also known as The Five Books of Moses, these books represent a general philosophical basis for Kabbalah, including historical descriptions of the origin of Judaism and over 600 specific laws.

Those familiar with the Old Testament chapters will recognize that laws are almost nonexistent in them, with the exception of Deuteronomy. The other books, especially Genesis and Numbers, consist primarily of stories and analogies as a means of presenting ideas that could be translated into laws.

Where laws were concerned, ancient Hebrew theology was divided into three sections. First was general Biblical law, taught to all children of Israel. Next was
Mishna
, the soul of the law, granted to rabbis and teachers. Finally came
the soul of the soul of the law
—the Kabbalah—concealed from all but the most perceptive and worthy Jews.

Beyond this definition, things become confusing to the uninitiated. On the one hand, followers of Kabbalah and Jews generally believe that every word and every letter of every word in the Torah conveys special significance, requiring wisdom and insight to decode its true meaning. On the other hand, stories in the Torah do not follow strict chronological order; the location of one story versus the other may have more to do with the concept of the belief structure than its relationship to tales preceding and following it. With such an enormous range of interpretations, it's not surprising that various factions have seized on their own explanation of messages supposedly hidden within the Torah. One faction even suggests that the entire content of the Torah represents the true name of God, broken into stories in order that mortals, lacking divine discernment, can absorb it.