”We do speak wisdom (sophia) among the initiates (or mature, teleioi), but not the wisdom of this age or of the archons of this age, who are passing away; we speak the hidden wisdom of God in a mystery (μυστηρίῳ - mystēriō), which God ordained for our glory before the aeons.”
- 1 Corinthians 2:6-7
An Introduction
to The Gnostic Reclamation on Substack.
Hello, dear reader, and thank you for your time. I’m Jason Bickford, a gnostic Christian charged with aim to help restore to public knowledge the existence of a previously lost multi-disciplinary method of perceiving and understanding ourselves and the world we co-create, while introducing an esoteric system for decrypting art and media at the heart of a previously unknown form of divination purposefully designed to reveal what I call ‘the co-creative faculty’, a concept with which I seek to upend what we know about human creativity. To accomplish this I will flesh out a working model of ‘Gnostic Idealism’ (GI) largely comprising elements of early Valentinian Christianity [1] informed by the Rudolph Steiner / Owen Barfield overlap concerning the ‘evolution of human consciousness’ [2], and something akin to a model of reality popularized lately by serious non-materialist scientists like Rupert Sheldrake and Bernardo Kastrup [3] to explain a myriad of bizarre precognitive phenomena I’ve studied for a decade with a GI model where our brain receives and co-creates consciousness- where angels and demons are ‘beings of light’ - ambiguous sources of bright and bad ideas in conflict; here, art is the stuff of pre-cognitive magic.
In this model, our inherent ‘co-creative faculty’ is recognized within ourselves and others through a thinly veiled manifold language of symbol and pattern first embedded during a work’s creation and now made known and manifest thanks to the mysterious source of inspiration sparking our symbolic and poetic creative imaginations which we knew, then forgot, were truth-bearing faculties [4]. Among other intentional tells we find encoded in the creative human output of the ages millennia-spanning double entendres made possible through an inspired and guided evolution of our consciousness and language - here, time sensitive colloquialisms and popular speech are unearthed in a Barfieldian excavation of our older collective consciousness and its evolution. Like evidence of a mysterious culture editor, we see the inspired language of old and our modern colloquialisms appear of the same mind or influence, and embed knowledge of one another. Christian scripture sets up a framework for how a Holy Spirit or Paraclete of Truth can function as this mysterious muse or editor.
Other embedded fingerprints of this deep mind stack up, pointing towards a vast influence, a signpost towards an active participatory gnosis where ultimately apprehending an intelligent designer is thee entry point towards an encounter with a communicative and even personal aspect to a capital G God akin to what 20th century philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich called “the ground of being”; a vast substrate Mind having a dissociative experience as and with us. The emergent gestalt of my esoteric research, itself inspired by a significant spiritual event, suggests this substrate God / Mind whom I understand and learn from via a Gnostic (Christian*) Idealism, has facilitated an evolution of human consciousness in order to re-open an atrophied line of dialogue with the sleepy creative imagination of a humanity perhaps humbling, ready to re-learn, one more time, the origin of the word genius after taking itself too seriously for too long.
Artwork by Jeff Koons | Reelin in The Years, Steely Dan, lyrics by Donald Fagen
“This is the year of the expanding man.”
Genius, as a noun, didn’t mean an extremely clever human until our modern era of insanity and innovation (our age of Loco-Motion) lost need for things spiritual, declaring itself beyond good and evil, before becoming comfortably numb, and eventually limitless. Western civilization went from ‘having a genius’ to being geniuses. Our relationship to this word is indicative of our collective cognitive evolution, or we could say devolution. This is the stuff of Barfield as well as the architects of our understanding of group psychology and the ego like Lebon, Schopenhauer, and Freud.
“How is it that the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it? This is a paradox that has often been noted, and has sometimes been attributed to a fundamental perversity, a sort of 'pure cussedness', in human nature.”
20th century philosopher, and member of The Inklings, Owen Barfield apparently journaled those words sometime in the mid 1960’s, publishing them a decade later, yet they seem to have a particular urgency now, after nearly sixty years.
A decade later, in 1983’s Compassion: A Reflection on Christian Life, authors Nouwen, McNeill, and Morrison, in a subchapter titled ‘Bombarding The Senses’, write even more presciently:
“One of the most tragic events of our time is that we know more than ever before about the pains and sufferings of the world and yet are less and less able to respond to them. Radio, television, and newspapers allow us to follow from day to day— even from hour to hour—what is happening in the world. We hear about terrorism, armed conflicts and wars, assassinations, earthquakes, droughts and floods, famines and epidemics, concentration camps and torture chambers, and countless other forms of human suffering close to home or far away. Not only do we hear about them but also we are daily presented with pictures of starving babies, dying soldiers, burning houses, flooded villages, and wrecked cars. The news seems to have become an almost ceaseless litany of human suffering. The question is, do these highly sophisticated forms of communication and this increasing amount of information lead to a deeper solidarity and a greater compassion?” [5]
Forty years later, amidst the ubiquity of internet connected devices emitting memethink social contagion born of a wave of social media influencers’ (influenzas) nurturing of both collective narcissism and the weaponization of victimhood- not to mention it’s seeming ability to induce self-fulfilling prophecies with something of an inverted placebo effect, these words don’t just ring more prescient than ever- they sound to me like a gradually clarifying message, potentially from that very Ground of Being echoing through inspired co-creative human output.
Don’t worry, I’ll get you up to speed on how I arrived here in far less than the ten years I’ve charted esoteric pattern maps on my older mostly de-platformed outlets. Speaking of which- My first platform, est. 2011, Polarization Nation Media, is returning…
Coming very soon
DeepMind State Universe: excavating semantically-anagogical layers of signification
An etymological excavation of our ‘fossils of consciousness’, as Owen Barfield called them, can illuminate our evolving collective understanding of, and relationship with, a co-created symbol and pattern-laced world awakening with us as we currently experience incredible yet undeniable synchronicities in the rhetoric we casually employ to describe and understand a myriad of modern phenomena we typically assume are unrelated- like devastating oil spills, the Covid pandemic, rising opioid addiction, biological chemistry, the trans movement, media and data over-saturation, The Old Man and The Sea, the alarming rise of suicide and mental dishealth, Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground, possibly the greatest archeological discovery of the 20th century, mysterious renaissance art, quantum theory, what curators of high strangeness call ‘predictive programming’, and even precognitive codes in the Bible, to name just a few.
It will take a series of heavily illustrated interlinked essays here, but I wholeheartedly believe it’s worth the effort to follow me as I put that all together.
For Now
Consider that the Greek word in the New Testament for wisdom is Sophia, an alternate modern spelling of which is Sofia. Sofia spelled backwards is AI fos, fos being Latin for light. Sophia is also the name of the AI robot famously given Saudi Arabian citizenship in 2017 shortly after their prince purchased a controversial painting of the Salvatore Mundi, allegedly a lost DaVinci, for a record setting $149 million dollars. That painting, the Valentinian myth of Sophia, and the rise of artificial intelligence will feature prominently in some future studies of precognitive symbolism encoded in renaissance art, but I digress. For now- the take away is that spelling this New Testament word for God’s wisdom backwards results in, basically, AI illumination. One could arrive at seeing A.I. an anti-Christ or anti God symbol there.
Patterns will emerge, stay with me.
Jimmy James and The Blue Flames ( Co-Cain and Co-Cain Accessories )
Before the 20th century a ‘genius’ was known as an attendant spirit working with a gifted person from birth- it’s etymology leads us to the Arabic jinni- Islam’s word for created beings similar to daemons, of lower rank than angels, who can appear in human or animal form, and influence (or be influenced by) humans. Jinn (or djinn) were understood to possess free will like humans [6] and, as such, could be Muslim, atheist, or hold some other belief. They could be tricksters - and are the inspiration for legends of the genie in a bottle or lamp. Their Native American analog is the mercurial coyote. The classic sci-fi archetype of ‘the evil genius’ - sometimes a ‘mad scientist’ - is a platform to examine the troubled individual “burning the midnight oil” - working with and possibly tormented by a jinn/genius. Lamp oil itself is often made from hydrocarbons dredged up from below the earth- the Tartarus of scripture. And stable carbon, the building block of man, beast, and all life on earth, contains 6 protons, 6 electrons, and 6 neutrons. Consider rubbing a genie lamp the wrong way could result in what corporate headquarters may call ‘a negative genie interaction’ and that, in recent times, Donald Trump has made viral the slogan ‘Drain The Swamp’. If one stirs up a swamp, one can then drain it of a flammable hydrocarbon called methane (CH4) by lighting the agitated swamp aflame. 4Chan, Pepe the Frog, BBC Channel 4, and Gaslighting comes to mind.
Fun Facts and Pattern Maps:
Many hydrocarbons produced from the black sludge of the underworld burn with a blue flame, and Muslims describe the djinn as made of a smokeless blue flame. According to Richard Prum, ornithologist at Yale University, the djinn/genie is existing in a gaseous state. [7]
James Marshall Hendrix, better known as Jimi Hendrix, was discovered while performing in NYC’s Cafe Wha? down in The Village by Chaz Chandler of The Animals while fronting his band Jimi James and The Blue Flames. [8]
Chaz Chandler of the Animals symbolically maps onto the misunderstood and co-opted number 666- as he is both man (Chaz) and beast (The Animals), while Jimi is the Djinn/Genius. The man and beast bleeds red, while Jimi’s a blue flame. Together you get… wait for it…. Purple Haze !
One can anagram the names ‘Jimi Hendrix’ and ‘Sean Carter’ (Jay-Z) to spell Djinn saith, ‘Remix Career’. [9]
Anagrammer* courtesy and copyright of Scrabble
Following the order of the English alphabet, before we encounter the letters J-Z, we must cross A-I. This reminds one perhaps of Jay-Z’s popular song “D.O.A (death of auto-tune)”. Jay-Z’s nickname ‘Jova’ is short for Jehovah.
In the forty days of temptation the Devil (lived spelled backwards) first temps Christ to break his fast by turning a rock into bread. Think dinner roll: Rock n Roll ! Now think bread as in money: Let’s cook up this rock- Co-Cain money! Now think making bread as a quick money gimmick: My Pet Rock! Now think ‘stones’ as in testes: I’m busting your Baals.
The word quarantine comes to us from the Italian quarantina, meaning forty days. This is the amount of time Moses spends on the mountain, Noe in The Ark, and Christ, upon baptism, in the wilderness.
Christ in the Desert, Ivan Kramskoi, 1871
THE BIG RIG:
‘Let He Who Has Sophia Decipher It’s Meaning’
Digging up and burning these old 666-embedded patterns taints the air - our earth’s wind or pneuma - and in this classical sense we literally and symbolically fill our lungs with patterns and particles of Tartarus / the late greats / “dinosaurs” / reptile brains / inflated egos of a bygone era. St Paul warns in Ephesians, the most succinct of his letters, of a spiritual warfare and announced the need to tell the archons of the manifoldness of God’s Sophia. Remember - spiritual means of spirit and pneuma could mean wind as well- a wind warfare. Consider this is also a warning of a warfare of a tainted wind amidst a time of unveiling the 666- stable carbon. In order to put that into proper context we need to disabuse ourselves of the ridiculous misconceptions of the Bible Belt vs Heavy Metal-inspired ‘satanic panic’ view of this cryptic number / cypher from ‘The Apocalypse of John the Divine’, the New Testament’s psychedelic final chapter commonly known today as the Book of Revelations, and consider that this collection of stories and letters commonly known as The New Testament, written in the early centuries of our common era and collated almost 1700 years ago, seems to heavily embed knowledge, in it’s ‘number of a man and beast’ requiring a ‘man with Sophia’ to decipher, of biological chemistry emergent in the 19th century, not to mention the dipole structure of the water molecule in Christ’s ‘Harrowing Of Hell”, what we call now the ‘carbon crisis’, the era of Trump; Fake News; Wars; and rumors of wars, and even Nobel prize-winning work like Planck’s quantum theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
More on that later; for now, remember PEN 666- 6 protons, 6 electrons, and 6 neutrons.
So we are here now, revising patterns of history’s ‘dinosaurs’, old reptile brains- huffing hot breath - a bad carbon-loaded pneuma / spirit, hashtagging old conflicts resurrected like family ghosts with collective incantations [10], and getting sick (and sic) in Jurassic Park. Dredging up ‘black tar’ hydrocarbons and heroin alike to take the easy way out- a loco-motion. In this light, when Jesus teaches one not to hide their light under a basket but hold it where others can see, he’s teaching, on one level, not to manufacture internal combustion engines but to use the spirit (wind), the light (sun and solar), and the ‘water of life’ (hydro power) to benefit all. Getting modern man off petrol is not the be all end all interpretation of that symbolism, which is manifold (see Ephesians 3:10), but just one of many fractal-like unfoldings. In John 20:22 a resurrected Jesus breathes out the Pentecostal pneuma/spirit that kickstarts the spiritual libertarian movement we would come to call Christianity - a phenomena reappropriated - unfortunately more associated with pagan symbolism like curious weekly cannibal rites, and megachurch clearinghouses for canned politically-infused dog whistle preaching. I’ll mention here it was in 2022 we saw the bad spirit / breath restrictions lifted across the world.
“You’re a pretty bright boy, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” said George.
“Well, you’re not,” said the other little man. “Is he, Al?”
“He’s dumb,” said Al. He turned to Nick. “What’s your name?”
“Adams.”
“Another bright boy,” Al said. “Ain’t he a bright boy, Max?”
“The town’s full of bright boys,” Max said.
The Killers, Ernest Hemingway
Hard-wired
Interestingly, in Japanese bonsai, jinn are the intentionally cultivated dead branches on a tree. Jinned branches are typically stripped of bark with special pliers then bleached a light grey with an incredibly pungent sulfur-based ‘jinn seal’. The Japanese word Jin means bright, beautiful, and gold. In bonsai, a naturally jinned branch symbolized an act of the gods, typically by being struck by lightening or broken by strong wind. Images of Kintsugi with its jagged golden repair, proverbs of wabi sabi, and the sulfur-scented hellfire and brimstone of folklore come to mind.
The 72 Versions
In Luke 10:18, speaking to his 72 apostles upon their return, Jesus warns them not to get prideful of their power of demons and illness, saying “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” Satan is chief archon, or ruler, of the demons. The modern English word anarchy literally means without archons. In Ephesians St. Paul calls the Prince of this world, Chief of archons Kosmokrator, the tempter, slanderer, architect of evil- a king of bad ideas. Meanwhile, in the Quran, a holy book composed of 114 surrahs, it’s Surrah 72 that is dedicated to The Djinn. The month of September, as the name implies, is the seventh zodiac month. On the infamous day of September 11, 2001, we were told attacks by Islamic extremists destroyed three skyscrapers in New York City- the Twin Towers as well as WTC Tower 7 aka the ‘Salamon Brothers Building’. The date of September 11th then embeds 7/11, which is itself a pictographic icon for the names and numbers of the lost towers. Islamic extremism is sometimes said to be the work of wayward Muslims working with or under the influence of dangerous djinn.
Extremist Muslims are promised 72 virgins in paradise upon dying in battle.
While considering all of this let’s look briefly at Albrecht Dürer’s famous print of Cain slaying Able. We see in the tree stump behind him … a shrubbery! Better yet- a jinned branch. Here Cain is under the influence of a very bad idea. In Jewish scripture, the people marked by Cain’s sin will be shown by propagating fallen angels’ warcraft. The date of the drawing, writ in a rather disturbed, edgy-looking script associated with heavy metal album and horror novel/ movie poster design, reads 1511- and can be interpreted as a pictograph for ISIL- American intelligence’s other name for the curiously named radical Islamic group ISIS. Members of ISIS/ ISIL often dressed up in uniforms westerners and Japanese alike associate with Ninja. It’s worth noting that ninja is an anagram for A Jinn. Ninja, historically known to be feudal Japan’s elite black ops, would spy, commit theft, and assassinate for hire. The best ninja were never seen, like shadows or ghosts.
In modern Japanese anime mythologized ninja are often shown almost flying through the forest, leaping from limb to limb and over rooftops- carried by the wind- a spirit of death. In both Hebrew and Greek the word for wind is also the word for spirit and breath. Here we have a jinn - powerful spirit let out a lamp - moving ninja through the trees and onwards to kill softly, in secret. It’s also worth noting, in service of sketching out this massive intricate pattern-based language - that the radical Muslims typically come from the non-Sunni / minority Shia group, and in Japanese- the word for the number 4 and death are one in the same- Shi. Through this lens we see hai- Japanese for yes, and shi - 4 and death, embedded in the name of a violent death cult dressed like ninja and, from a Muslim perspective, possibly influenced by malevolent djinn. There’s a fecund manifoldness yet to unpack there, and I’ll return in dedicated threads to do just that.
A Jinn Spirit / Ninja Wind - Scene from highly influential anime Ninja Scroll, 1993
Once is phenomena - twice coincidence. Thrice, however, is a pattern...
I will gradually make my case briefly unpacked here- that a recurrent series of symbols, patterns, and stories embedded throughout world mythologies, religions, scientific advancements, engineering innovations, famous fine art, folklore, and modern pop culture entertainments- not to mention years worth of accurate timestamped predictions I’ve made decoding these frequently precognitive patterns and symbols - constitute as tangible evidence I’ll illustrate here of a reality understood with help from the Monomyth ideas of Joseph Campbell and the inherited collective unconscious and synchronicity of psychoanalyst and gnostic seeker Carl Jung (himself fascinated with Christianity’s gnostic origins and divination through art-making). I will also, at times, view through a somewhat psychedelic lens a neo-gnostic quasi-paranoid world like that of Phillip K Dick.
Fun Fact:
The Nag Hammadi codex known as Codex I was originally nicknamed The Jung Codex, by Jung’s friend, the Dutch theologian and historian Gilles Guispell, who acquired the codex illegally, later returning it to Egypt.
“The so-called “scientific view of the world” … can hardly be anything but a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.”
Carl Jung , Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principal, 1952
Whereas Jung speculated on the collective unconscious and sought to personally co-create art with a spiritual collaborator - I’ve spent a decade co-creating my own precognitive works of visual art while also decoding messages embedded throughout a panoply of creative human output to decipher what I now can claim is a quantifiable language used in communication with and through humanity via inspired creative activity. In this light, all human creativity likely presents potential opportunities to collaborate with the mysterious substrate of consciousness through which we receive those ideas we collectively revere as brilliant and inspired.
Consider here, Maimonides on Angels:
“For all forces are angels! How blind, how perniciously blind are the naive ?! For the naive person does not understand that the true majesty and power are in the bringing into being of forces which are active in a thing although they cannot be perceived by the senses...
Thus the Sages reveal to the aware that the imaginative faculty is also called an angel; and the mind is called a cherub. How beautiful this will appear to the sophisticated mind, and how disturbing to the primitive."
In this light we can see ‘angels and demons’ as deliverers of divine inspiration and temptation for the gnostic and the pagan alike. Emissaries to the contemplative gnostic spiritual libertarians and hive-mind architects for the pagan memethink. Those who get some space and do Zen, and those who come together to dozen, if you will.
In Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, Hans Jonas clears up a misconception regarding gnostics view of what they saw as a somewhat flawed human nature and world:
“There is no overlooking one cardinal difference between the gnostic and the existentialist dualism: Gnostic man is thrown into an antagonistic, anti-divine and therefore anti-human nature, modern man into an indifferent one. Only the latter case represents the absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit.”
The early Valentinian Christians saw the Yahweh of Torah as something of a regional bureaucrat, not the evil god atrributed to Gnosticism so-called, a 19th century term that’s become overwhelmingly troublesome for scholars and theologians. [11]
Embedded within Epiphanius’ Panarion is The Letter to Flora, by Ptolemy- an early student of the gnostic teacher Valentinus. Referring to the gnostic Christian’s relationship and stance on Jewish law in light of the Jesus event, Ptolemy tells the would be Gnostic student Flora regarding Jewish law :
“For some say that it was ordained by God and Father, but others, turning toward the opposite path, maintain confidently that it was established by the opposite, the destructive devil, just as they also credit him with the creation of the world, claiming that he is the father and maker of this entirety.”
Ptolemy continues, carving out something of a middle path :
“… they are [utterly] mistaken, refuting one another, and each of them failing utterly to find the truth of the subject. For it is apparent that the law was not established by the Perfect God and Father, for it is derivative, being imperfect and in need of fulfillment by another, since it includes ordinances foreign to the nature and opinion of such a God.
Nor can one attribute the law to the unjust of the opposite one, since it abolishes what is unjust. It is fitting of those who do not understand the things said by the Savior: "For a house or city divided against itself is not able to stand," our Savior proclaimed.”
An Inverted World
In the second part to Luke’s gospel, commonly called Acts, the apostle Jason’s home is raided-
Acts 17:6-7 reads:
“And when they could not find them (Paul and Silas), they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, ‘These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.’ “
Jason’s fined before he and ‘the brothers’ are released. Paul describes these apostles as kinsmen ( σμγγενηδ - sungenēs) - a word translated sometimes as cousin, sometimes as fellow tribesmen. It’s this spirit of political resistance and disobedience rooted in a notion of divine personal sovereignty received through an emissary of The Creator announcing one’s place in this extended family / tribe that’s at the heart of the gnostic origins of Christianity. This group of ‘heretics’, originally derided as a mere school of thought more like Platonists than what Rome deemed true Christians, were the heart of a spiritual revolution that threatened the pagan Roman Empire [13], leading to the widespread persecution of gnostic Christians who, seeking a parallel structure and society separate from Caesar’s rule, were hunted and slaughtered, sometimes burned alive by the thousands, as is the case with the Cathar genocides of Southern France during the 12th century.
We remember and immortalize witch hunts and forget the gnostic genocides.
MemethInc. The Hive Mind
or How (otherwise) decent men come to do evil
“I will now let Le Bon speak for himself…”, writes Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of The Ego:
…”The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological group is the following. Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a group puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group. The psychological group is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.”
New Amazon hand scanners at Whole Foods read unique palmprints and underlying vein structure.
Like an inversion of the lowest common denominator acquiescent group member / group-mind described by Le Bon, and quoted by Freud in Group Psychology and The Analysis of The Ego, the receiver of gnosis, spiritually delivered and ascertained knowledge, has walked a contemplative path of introspection and solitude- of finding a quiet stillness within so as to cultivate a dialogue with a higher power away from the patterns of worldly people. Not so much a mystic seeking epiphany as an esotericist in for a long haul, finding their bearings in occasional signposts made legible with something not unlike Gnostic Idealism.
In 1 Corinthians 11:17-20 Paul warns the discordant believers:
“But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you...”
Jesus is quoted in Matthew’s gospel:
“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
A TANGLED WEB UNWEAVING…
Through a series of linked illustrated essays, videos, and podcasts posted here I will show how phenomena like emergent yet curiously obfuscated neuroscience of the cerebellum, preferred patterns of the human imagination, and a collective evolution of consciousness have helped prepare us for something of a spiritually-facilitated sophianic gestalt view in an era of emergent hindsight discerning a cognitive dissonance-inducing simulacrum world inverted, like a transparency, superimposed over the one we knew.
Largely unknown yet incredibly active in our everyday lives, this embedded symbolic language is expressed through esoteric iconography and pattern in myriad forms of creative human output- from holy books to Hollywood- evidence of which I will examine and ‘decode’ using a previously unseen form of divination to translate intelligent designs embedded as millennia-spanning messages from a distinctive voice functioning as a co-creative faculty, a substrate root of consciousness, quantifiably precognitive and seemingly beyond time and space, operating vastly and collectively as a spiritually-fortifying albeit mysteriously manifold substrate to our constant conscious experience with waking reality. Sincerely, and in humility, what I’ve been shown and will illustrate and document for you here, among other things, upends what we know about human creativity, re-introduces a legitimate form of Christian divination, and opens the door for potentially fascinating discussions about the very nature of reality and consciousness.
That’s the basic mission statement- the reclamation part. It’s time an actual gnostic esotericist set the akashic record straight, so to speak.
Join me in coming post as we unpack the co-creative faculty and explore the tricky term gnosis and the curious cottage industry of gnosticism* so-called.
I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, an insightful look at labor unions striking in a California orchard in the mid 1930’s:
"Revolution and communism will cure social injustice."
"Yes, and disinfection and prophylaxis will prevent the others."
"It's different, though; men are doing one, and germs are doing the other."
"I can't see much difference, Mac."
"Well, damn it, Doc, there's lockjaw every place. You can find syphilis in Park Avenue. Why do you hang around with us if you aren't for us?"
"I want to see," Burton said. "When you cut your finger, and streptococci get in the wound, there's a swelling and a soreness. That swelling is the fight your body puts up, the pain is the battle. You can't tell which one is going to win, but the wound is the first battleground. If the cells lose the first fight the streptococci invade, and the fight goes on up the arm. Mac, these little strikes are like the infection. Something has got into the men; a little fever had started and the lymphatic glands are shooting in reinforcements. I want to see, so I go to the seat of the wound."
"You figure the strike is a wound?"
"Yes. Group-men are always getting some kind of infection. This seems to be a bad one. I want to see, Mac. I want to watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn't himself at all; he's a cell in an organism that isn't like him any more than the cells in your body are like you. I want to watch the group, and see what it's like. People have said, 'mobs are crazy, you can't tell what they'll do? Why don't people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob."
"Well, what's this got to do with the cause?"
"It might be like this, Mac: When group-man wants to move, he makes a standard. 'God wills that we re-capture the Holy-Land' or he says, 'We fight to make the world safe for democracy'; or he says, 'we will wipe out social injustice with communism? But the group doesn't care about the Holy Land, or Democracy, or Communism. Maybe the group simply wants to move, to fight, and uses these words simply to reassure the brains of individual men. I say it might be like that, Mac."
"Not with the cause, it isn't," Mac cried.
"Maybe not, it's just the way I think of things.”
Photo-illustrations and artwork by Jason Bickford unless otherwise noted
copyright The Gnostic Reclamation, 2024
Artificial Intelligence was not used in the production of this content.
[NOTES & SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY]
[1] See Di Fuccia, Michael Vincent, Owen Barfield : philosophy, poetry, and theology, 2016, Cascade Books
[2] See Owen Barfield, History In English Words, 1953, Faber & Faber. And for an intro to Barfield, check out Malcolm Guite at The Tenemos Academy here.
[3] See Rupert Sheldrake The Science Delusion, and Bernardo Kastrup Why Materialism is Baloney . It’s also worth noting that a non dualist idealism is already present in Gnostic texts like The Secret Book of John.
[4] See Malcolm Guite on the precognitive imagination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge here
[5] Nouwen, McNeill, and Morrison, Compassion: A Reflection on Christian Life, 1982, Image / Doubleday
[6] I will revisit the issue of Free Will again under attack by fashionable public intellectuals; it appears New Atheist Sam Harris has recently passed the baton to professor of psychology Robert Sapolsky.
[7] For the definitive take on the life of Jimi Hendrix see Charles R Cross, Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix, 2005, Hachette Books
[8] Scrabble’s Anagrammer tool can be found here.
[9] BLM co-founder describes hashtag propaganda as occult work here
[10] I’ll continue to unpack the curious cottage industry of “Gnosticism” so-called, and the ongoing obfuscation of Christian origins in academia and publishing.
In the meantime, literature on Valentinian Christians worth your time include the excellent synopsis from Ismo Dunderberg- Beyond Gnosticism: Myth, Lifestyle, and Society in the School of Valentinus, 2008, Columbia University Press and for translation of Valentinian texts there’s Geoffrey S Smith, Valentinian Christianity: Text and Translaslation, 2020, California University Press.
[11] Ultimately I’m briefly suggesting here, and will flesh out further, the concept that the gnostic origins of what we call Christianity are more like a spiritually-minded philosophical school of thought who’s patterns and active ingredients were ground into the pagan sausage of the Roman Empire.
Did Anybody Keshet ?
Regarding the last painting above posted July 4th.
Abraham weaves a tangled web while using a Keshet ( war bow - also the word for rainbow) to miss the mark.
In both Hebrew and Greek - the archery term for the missing of the target / mark is the word for sin. Hatah in Hebrew and hamartia in Greek.
Here, Abraham weaves a tangled web and cuts his own ear with a rainbow / Bow. Those following my work have seen this image before as I occasionally worked on it here and there for a couple years now.
The Bow is also cutting lines of co-Cain.
The hands are weaving a specifically Muslim decoration.
Blue background , a white star , and red stripes are also embedded.
I wish I could spell it out more, but there’s a war on…
I’ll be uploading a podcast transcript of this approx 25 min read w/ commentary soon. Cheers!
-JB