What I find most exciting about these recovered documents, is the opportunity to get a different perspective on the kinds of issues our ancestors grappled with. Where did we come from? How did this great, wide, complex world around me come into being? What drives us humans to do the incomprehensible things we do? As a human being and as a social scientist, I have struggled to find meaningful answers to these same questions. I’m well aware of evolutionary theory and its supporting evidence. This is quite sufficient to satisfy my need to understand how human came to exist, but it was clearly unknown to ancient authors.
Ancient authors of the Nag Hammadi texts, scriptures, and learned works outlined several explanations which seemed plausible to them based on the knowledge and beliefs of their contemporaries. Reading the texts from a 21st century perspective may understandably leave the modern reader scratching their head over how anyone could ever have believed any of the narratives presented. Furthermore, we may ask ourselves what any of it has to do with us today. Quite a bit, I think.
Today, on the secular side of life, we are more comfortable using physics to understand the cosmic forces of creation & destruction. Back in the days before the laws of physics were sufficiently fleshed out to provide the cognitive structure we needed, ancient metaphysicians had their own grasp of how things come into being or are destroyed. In this text, the author expounds on precisely how Faith and Wisdom (from the Greek: Pistis and Sophia) came to be the primary forces of creation. Wisdom is here understood as the expression of the will of Faith. This is an important idea because this very force is what is described as accountable for dividing the human realm from the realm of the divine/perfect immortals (above) and the infinite chaos of the abyss (below). The author spent considerable effort on detailing the order of events (what came first and why) as well as how that order impacted the will and faith of subsequent creations.
“And when Pistis Sophia desired to cause the thing that had no spirit to be formed into a likeness and to rule over matter and over all her forces, thereFrom: James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library, rev. ed. Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1990.
appeared for the first time a ruler, out of the waters, lion-like in appearance, androgynous, having great authority within him, and ignorant of whence he had
come into being. Now when Pistis Sophia saw him moving about in the depth
of the waters, she said to him, “Child, pass through to here,” whose equivalent
is ‘yalda baoth’. Since that day, there appeared the principle of verbal expression, which reached the gods and angels and mankind. And what came into being as a result of verbal expression, the gods and the angels and mankind finished.”
In 21st century terms, we can understand that verbal expression is here proposed to be a force of creation accessible to some degree by gods, angels and humans. Like much of ancient writing, including the events portrayed in the bible, these bizarre and unsubstantiated descriptions of unseen realms and events are vigorously expounded as the truth. This ancient author is clearly well educated, and refers with comfortable familiarity to several other scholarly works throughout his opus. Why does the scholar seem to believe these things?
Like most conclusions which can only be reached through deductive reasoning, we will want to examine the assumptions which provided the foundation for the author’s logic. We understand the author believed that verbal expression gives humans the power to create. We know that very few people were literate – thus only these educated elite would be able to create or receive this form of verbal & visual communication. Therefore, whatever the author wants to be true, real, and of material substance; s/he has only to express it verbally as a deliberate act of will and faith, and it will be so. It’s an important concept. It implies whatever anyone of us consciously calls into being by word and deed is literally born into reality as a physical manifestation of the Faith-Will creative force. What these authors never mention, of course, is that these “creations” are completely arbitrary constructions.
This assumption has been with us for a very, very long time. Think for a moment of the earliest cave paintings. The hungry hunter wants to catch a nice juicy deer, so he enters a womb-like environment (cave) to speak the magic words, and paint the image on the wall. Sure enough, when next he goes hunting (or eventually) he does indeed find the very deer he had magically created in the cave! The ultimate Life Imitating Art! This assumption is at the very core of several world religions and belief systems.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the verbal expression of the mantra “om mani padme hum” in combination with the contemplation of its full meaning, is the source of power which transforms a normal person into an enlightened (god-like) being.
“Thus the six syllables, om mani padme hum, mean that in dependence on the
practice of a path which is an indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can
transform your impure body, speech, and mind into the pure exalted body, speech,
and mind of a Buddha. It is said that you should not seek for Buddhahood outside
of yourself; the substances for the achievement of Buddhahood are within."From: http://www.tibet.com/Buddhism/om-mantra.html
If we speak and act like god – we become god-like in our ability to transform
ourselves and our environment. Amulets, spells, charms, and the entire field
of alchemy are rooted in the directed expression of faith and will.
Can anyone think of other examples in magic or religion
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