From New Age to New Gnosis

In a divided world, the connection between religion and rulership, spirituality and politics is clear for all to see. "Gnosticism" is an ancient underground tradition of politically subversive spirituality that has always recognised this connection.

The "Gnostic Gospels" discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 were both a spiritual and a political challenge to the ruling gods or "archons" of their age - the egotistical and envious god of the Old Testament, the pagan gods of Greece and Rome, and the "New-Age" style marketplace of cults that preceded the birth of Christianity.

Today's "New Age" spirituality is a commercialised "spirituality" whose gods are impersonal cosmic "energies", whose sacraments are healing "technologies", whose religions are new "therapies", whose "word" is the worldwide marketing of holistic health products - and whose festivals are the trade fairs of "Body, Mind and Spirit".

"From New Age to New Gnosis" presents a theo-political history of gnostic spirituality, and with it, a theo-political critique of all the ruling god-concepts of our age - "energy", the "eternal gene", and above all "globalisation" - the worship of economic values over all deep spiritual values. The temples of these secular religions are the global stock markets. Their theologies are new technologies.

In the first century of the second millenium AD, just as in the first centuries AD, true spiritual knowledge or gnosis has been replaced by adherence to superficial sciences or religious fundamentalisms. Similarly, true spiritual powers or "charismata" have been replaced with the military might and evangelical mission of new imperial superpower - not Rome but Washington.

What our divided world now calls for is not a revival of ancient gnosticism but a spirituality rooted in the very essence of "gnosis" as inner knowing - a intuitive knowing that is also the spiritual bond or inner connection between human beings of all cultures and religious traditions.

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