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THE GNOSTIC CRUCIFIXION




WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

                                      _Net._

  THRICE GREATEST HERMES (3 vols.)      30/-

  FRAGMENTS OF A FAITH FORGOTTEN        10/6

  DID JESUS LIVE 100 B.C.?               9/-

  THE WORLD-MYSTERY                      5/-

  THE GOSPEL AND THE GOSPELS             4/6

  APOLLONIUS OF TYANA                    3/6

  THE UPANISHADS (2 vols.)               3/-

  PLOTINUS                               1/-




  ECHOES FROM THE GNOSIS

  BY G. R. S. MEAD

  VOL. VII.


  THE GNOSTIC CRUCIFIXION


  THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY
  LONDON AND BENARES
  1907


  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




ECHOES FROM THE GNOSIS.


Under this general title is now being published a series of small volumes,
drawn from, or based upon, the mystic, theosophic and gnostic writings of
the ancients, so as to make more easily audible for the ever-widening
circle of those who love such things, some echoes of the mystic
experiences and initiatory lore of their spiritual ancestry. There are
many who love the life of the spirit, and who long for the light of
gnostic illumination, but who are not sufficiently equipped to study the
writings of the ancients at first hand, or to follow unaided the labours
of scholars. These little volumes are therefore intended to serve as
introduction to the study of the more difficult literature of the subject;
and it is hoped that at the same time they may become for some, who have,
as yet, not even heard of the Gnosis, stepping-stones to higher things.

G. R. S. M.




THE GNOSTIC CRUCIFIXION




CONTENTS

                             PAGE

  PREFACE                       9

  THE VISION OF THE CROSS      12

  COMMENTS                     20

  POSTCRIPT                    69


TEXTS

Bonnet (M.), _Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha_ (Leipzig, 1898).

James (M. R.), _Apocrypha Anecdota, T. & S._, v. i. (Cambridge, 1897).


_F._ = _Fragments of a Faith Forgotten_, 2nd. ed. (London, 1906).

_H._ = _Thrice Greatest Hermes_ (London, 1906).




ECHOES FROM THE GNOSIS


  VOL. I.   THE GNOSIS OF THE MIND.
  VOL. II.  THE HYMNS OF HERMES.
  VOL. III. THE VISION OF ARIDAEUS.
  VOL. IV.  THE HYMN OF JESUS.
  VOL. V.   THE MYSTERIES OF MITHRA.
  VOL. VI.  A MITHRIAC RITUAL.
  VOL. VII. THE GNOSTIC CRUCIFIXION.


SOME PROPOSED SUBJECTS FOR FORTHCOMING VOLUMES

  THE CHALDAEAN ORACLES.
  THE HYMN OF THE PRODIGAL.
  SOME ORPHIC FRAGMENTS.




THE GNOSTIC CRUCIFIXION.




PREFACE.


The Gnostic Mystery of the Crucifixion is most clearly set forth in the
new-found fragments of _The Acts of John_, and follows immediately on the
Sacred Dance and Ritual of Initiation which we endeavoured to elucidate in
Vol. IV. of these little books, in treating of _The Hymn of Jesus_.

The reader is, therefore, referred to the "Preamble" of that volume for a
short introduction concerning the nature of the Gnostic Acts in general
and of the Leucian _Acts of John_ in particular. I would, however, add a
point of interest bearing on the date which was forgotten, though I have
frequently remarked upon it when lecturing on the subject.

The strongest proof that we have in our fragment very early material is
found in the text itself, when it relates the following simple form of the
miracle of the loaves.

"Now if at any time He were invited by one of the Pharisees and went to
the bidding, we used to go with Him. And before each was set a single loaf
by the host; and of them He Himself also received one. Then He would give
thanks and divide His loaf among us; and from this little each had enough,
and our own loaves were saved whole, so that those who bade Him were
amazed."

If the marvellous narratives of the feeding of the five thousand had been
already in circulation, it is incredible that this simple story, which we
may so easily believe, should have been invented. Of what use, when the
minds of the hearers had been strung to the pitch of faith which had
already accepted the feeding of the five thousand as an actual physical
occurrence, would it have been to invent comparatively so small a wonder?
On the other hand, it is easy to believe that from similar simple stories
of the power of the Master, which were first of all circulated in the
inner circles, the popular narratives of the multitude-feeding miracles
could be developed. We, therefore, conclude, with every probability, that
we have here an indication of material of very early date.

Nevertheless when we come to the Mystery of the Crucifixion as set forth
in our fragment, we are not entitled to argue that the popular history was
developed from it in a similar fashion. The problem it raises is of
another order, and to it we will return when the reader has been put in
possession of the narrative, as translated from Bonnet's text. John is
supposed to be the narrator.

(The Arabic figures and the Roman figures in square brackets refer
respectively to Bonnet's and James' texts. I have added the side figures
for convenience of reference in the comments.)




THE VISION OF THE CROSS.


1. [97 (xii.)] And having danced these things with us, Beloved, the Lord
went out. And we, as though beside ourselves, or wakened out of sleep,
fled each our several ways.

2. I, however, though I saw the beginning of His passion could not stay to
the end, but fled unto the Mount of Olives weeping over that which had
befallen.

3. And when He was hung on the tree of the cross, at the sixth hour of the
day darkness came over the whole earth.

And my Lord stood in the midst of the Cave, and filled it with light, and
said:

4. "John, to the multitude below, in Jerusalem, I am being crucified, and
pierced with spears and reeds, and vinegar and gall is being given Me to
drink. To thee now I speak, and give ear to what I say. 'Twas I who put it
in thy heart to ascend this Mount, that thou mightest hear what disciple
should learn from Master, and man from God."

5. [98 (xiii.)] And having thus spoken, He showed me a Cross of Light set
up, and round the Cross a vast multitude, and therein one form and a
similar appearance, and in the Cross another multitude not having one
form.

6. And I beheld the Lord Himself above the Cross. He had, however, no
shape, but only as it were a voice--not, however, this voice to which we
are accustomed, but one of its own kind and beneficent and truly of God,
saying unto me:

7. "John, one there needs must be to hear those things, from Me; for I
long for one who will hear.

8. "This Cross of Light is called by Me for your sakes sometimes Word
(Logos), sometimes Mind, sometimes Jesus, sometimes Christ, sometimes
Door, sometimes Way, sometimes Bread, sometimes Seed, sometimes
Resurrection, sometimes Son, sometimes Father, sometimes Spirit, sometimes
Life, sometimes Truth, sometimes Faith, sometimes Grace.

9. "Now those things [it is called] as towards men; but as to what it is
in truth, itself in its own meaning to itself, and declared unto Us, [it
is] the defining (or delimitation) of all things, both the firm necessity
of things fixed from things unstable, and the 'harmony' of Wisdom.

10. "And as it is Wisdom in 'harmony,' there are those on the Right and
those on the Left--powers, authorities, principalities, and daemons,
energies, threats, powers of wrath, slanderings--and the Lower Root from
which hath come forth the things in genesis.

11 [99]. "This, then, is the Cross which by the Word (Logos) hath been the
means of 'cross-beaming' all things--at the same time separating off the
things that proceed from genesis and those below it [from those above],
and also compacting them all into one.

12. "But this is not the cross of wood which thou shalt see when thou
descendest hence; nor am I he that is upon the cross--[I] whom now thou
seest not, but only hearest a voice.

13. "I was held [to be] what I am not, not being what I was to many
others; nay, they will call Me something else, abject and not worthy of
Me. As, then, the Place of Rest is neither seen nor spoken of, much more
shall I, the Lord of it, be neither seen [nor spoken of].

14. [100 (xiv.)] "Now the multitude of one appearance round the Cross is
the Lower Nature. And as to those whom thou seest in the Cross, if they
have not also one form, [it is because] the whole Race (or every Limb) of
Him who descended hath not yet been gathered together.

15. "But when the Upper Nature, yea, the Race that is coming unto Me, in
obedience to My Voice, is taken up, then thou who now hearkenest to Me,
shalt become it, and it shall no longer be what it is now, but above them
as I am now.

16. "For so long as thou callest not thyself Mine, I am not what I am. But
if thou hearkenest unto Me, hearing, thou, too, shalt be as I [am], and I
shall be what I was, when thou [art] as I am with Myself; for from this
thou art.

17. "Pay no attention, then, to the many, and them that are without the
mystery think little of; for know that I am wholly with the Father and the
Father with Me.

18. [101 (xv.)] "Nothing, then, of the things which they will say of Me
have I suffered; nay that Passion as well which I showed unto thee and the
rest, by dancing [it], I will that it be called a mystery.

19. "What thou art, thou seest; this did I show unto thee. But what I am,
this I alone know, [and] none else.

20. "What, then, is Mine suffer Me to keep; but what is thine see thou
through Me. To see Me as I really am I said is not possible, but only what
thou art able to recognise, as being kin [to Me] (or of the same Race).

21. "Thou hearest that I suffered; yet I did not suffer: that I suffered
not; yet I did suffer: that I was pierced; yet was I not smitten: that I
was hanged; yet I was not hanged: that blood flowed from me; yet it did
not flow: and in a word the things they say about Me I had not, and the
things they do not say those I suffered. Now what they are I will riddle
for thee; for I know that thou wilt understand.

22. "Understand, therefore, in Me, the slaying of a Word (Logos), the
piercing of a Word, the blood of a Word, the wounding of a Word, the
hanging of a Word, the passion of a Word, the nailing (or putting
together) of a Word, the death of a Word.

23. "And thus I speak separating off the man. First, then, understand the
Word, then shalt thou understand the Lord, and in the third place [only]
the man and what he suffered."

24. [102 (xvi.)] And having said these things to me, and others which I
know not how to say as He Himself would have it, He was taken up, no one
of the multitude beholding Him.

25. And when I descended I laughed at them all, when they told Me what
they did concerning Him, firmly possessed in myself of this [truth] only,
that the Lord contrived all things symbolically, and according to [His]
dispensation for the conversion and salvation of man.




COMMENTS.


The translation is frequently a matter of difficulty, for the text has
been copied in a most careless and unintelligent fashion, so that the
ingenuity of the editors has often been taxed to the utmost and has not
infrequently completely broken down. It is of course quite natural that
orthodox scribes should blunder when transcribing Gnostic documents, owing
to their ignorance of the subject and their strangeness to the ideas; but
this particular copyist is at times quite barbarous, and as the subject is
deeply mystical and deals with the unexpected, the reconstruction of the
original reading is a matter of great difficulty. With a number of
passages I am still unsatisfied, though I hope they are somewhat nearer
the spirit of the original than other reconstructions which have been
attempted.

It is always a matter of difficulty for the rigidly objective mind to
understand the point of view of the Gnostic scripture-writers. One thing,
however, is certain: they lived in times when the rigid orthodoxy of the
canon was not yet established. They were in the closest touch with the
living tradition of scripture-writing, and they knew the manner of it.

The probability is that paragraphs 1-3 are from the pen of the redactor or
compiler of the _Acts_, and that the narrative, beginning with the words
"And my Lord stood in the midst of the Cave," is incorporated from prior
material--a mystic vision or apocalypse circulated in the inner circles.

The compiler knows the general Gospel-story, and seems prepared to admit
its historical basis; at the same time he knows well that the story
circulated among the people is but the outer veil of the mystery, and so
he hands on what we may well believe was but one of many visions of the
mystic crucifixion.

The gentle contempt of those who had entered into the mystery, for those
unknowing ones who would fain limit the crucifixion to one brief historic
event, is brought out strongly, and savours, though mildly, of the
bitterness of the struggle between the two great forces of the inner and
spiritualizing and the outer and materializing traditions.

1. The disciples flee after beholding the inner mystery of the Passion and
At-one-ment as set forth in the initiating drama of the Mystic Dance which
formed the subject of our fourth volume.

2. Yet even John the Beloved, in spite of this initiation, cannot yet bear
the thought that his Master did actually suffer historically as a
malefactor on the physical cross. In his distress he flees unto the Mount
of Olives, above Jerusalem.

But to the Gnostic the Mount of Olives was no physical hill, though it was
a mount in the physical, and Jerusalem no physical city, though a city in
the physical. The Mount, however it might be distinguished locally, was
the Height of Contemplation, and the bringing into activity of a certain
inner consciousness; even as Jerusalem here was the Jerusalem below, the
physical consciousness.

3. The sentence "when He was hung on the tree of the Cross" contains a
great puzzle. The word for "tree" in the original is _batos_; this may
mean the "bush" or "tree" of the cross. But the Cross for the Gnostics was
a living symbol. It was not only the cross of dead wood, or the dead trunk
of a tree lopped of its branches--a symbol of Osiris in death; it was also
the Tree of Life, and was equated with the "Fiery Bush" out of which the
Angel of God spake to Moses--that is the Tree of Fiery Life, in the
Paradise of man's inner nature, whence the Word of God expresses itself to
one who is worthy to hear. And this Tree of Life was also, as the Cross,
the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; indeed, both are but one Tree, for
the fruit of the Tree of Life is the knowledge of good and evil, the cross
of the opposites.

But seeing that the word _batos_ in Greek had also another meaning, the
Gnostics, by their method of mystical word-play, based on the power of
sound, brought this further meaning into use for the expansion of the
idea. The difference of accentuation and of gender (though the reading of
the Septuagint is masculine and not feminine as is usual with _batos_ in
the sense of bush or tree) presented no difficulty to the word-alchemy of
these allegorists.

Hippolytus, in his _Refutation of all Heretics_, attempts to summarize a
system of the Christianized Gnosis which is assigned to the Docetae; and
Docetism is precisely the chief characteristic of our _Acts of John_, as
we have already pointed out in Vol. IV. In this unsympathetic summary
there is a passage which throws some light on our puzzle. It would, of
course, require a detailed analysis of our haeresiologist's "refutation" of
the Docetic system to make the passage to which we refer (_op. cit._,
viii., 9) fully comprehensible; but as this would be too lengthy an
undertaking for these short comments, we must content ourselves with a
bald statement.

The pure spiritual emanations or ideas or intelligences of the Light
descend into the lowest Darkness of matter. For the moulding of vehicles
or bodies for them it is necessary to call in the aid of the God of Fire,
the creative or rather formative Power, who is "Living Fire begotten of
Light."

Hippolytus summarizes, doubtless imperfectly, from the Docetic document
that lay before him, as follows:

"Moses refers to this God as the Fiery God who spake from the _Batos_,
that is to say, from the Dark Air; for _Batos_ is all the Air subjected to
Darkness."

That is, presumably, the material Air, Air of the Darkness, as compared
with the spiritual Air or Air of the Light. The Docetic writer, Hippolytus
says, explained the use of the term as follows:

"Moses called it _Batos_, because, in their passing from Above, Below, all
the Ideas of the Light [that is, the Light-sparks or spirits of men] used
the Air as their means of passage (_batos_)."

In other words _Batos_, as Air, was the link between Light and Darkness,
which Darkness was regarded as essentially a flowing or Watery chaos. The
Batos was the Way Down and the Way Up of souls.

We are not, however, to suppose that the origin of this idea was the text
of _Exodus_. By no means; the idea came first, indeed was fundamental with
the Gnosis; the mystic exegesis of the "burning bush" passage was an
exercise in ingenuity. For the Gnosis, the that which at once separated
and united the Light and the Darkness was the Cross. The Angel of God
speaking to Moses out of the Fiery Batos was for the Christian Gnostics
one of the most striking apocalypses of ancient Jewish scripture; and it
was primarily one of the chief functions of the Gnosis to throw light on
the under-meaning. This the Docetic exegete does in his own fashion, using
the reading of the Greek Targum or Translation of the Seventy, in this
wise: "_Batos?_ _Batos_ does not mean 'bush' really, but'medium of
transmission,'" It is by means of this that the Word of God comes unto
us--namely, by the mystery of the uniter-separator in one, which was
called by many names.

For instance, in setting forth the Sophia-mythus, or Wisdom-story, or
mystery of cosmogenesis, of the Valentinian school, Hippolytus (_op.
cit._, vi. 3), treats of the Cross as the final mystery of all. With
original documents before him, he writes:

"Now it is called Boundary, because it bounds off the Deficiency from the
Fullness [so as to make it] exterior to it; it is called Partaker because
it partakes of the Deficiency as well; and it is called Cross (or Stock)
because it hath been fixed immovably and unchangeably, so that nothing of
the Deficiency should be able to approach the eternities within the
Fullness."

Here it is useless to tie oneself to the physical symbol of a cross. The
Stauros (Cross) in its true self is a living idea, a reality or
root-principle. It is the principle of separation and limit, dividing
entity from non-entity, being from non-being, perfection from
imperfection, fullness or sufficiency from deficiency or
insufficiency--Light from Darkness. It is the that which causes all
opposites. At the same time it shares in all opposites, for it is the
immediate emanation of the Father Himself, and therefore unites while
separating. It is, therefore, the principle of participation or sharing
in, sharing in both the Fullness and the Deficiency. Finally, it is the
Stock or Pillar as that which "has stood, stands and will stand"--the
principle of immobility, as the energy of the Father in His aspect of the
supreme Individuality that changes not, because he is Lord of the
ever-changing.

That such a master-idea is difficult to grasp goes without saying; it was
confessedly the supreme mystery. From it the mind, the formal mind of man,
"falls back unable to grasp it"; for it is precisely this personal mind
that creates duality, and insinuates itself between cause and effect. The
spiritual Mind alone can embrace the opposites.

But to return to our text. "When He was hung on the _batos_ of the
Cross"--when He had reached the state of balance, was in the mystic
centre--then at the sixth hour, that is mid-day, when there was greatest
light, there was also greatest darkness.

And then when the Lord, the Higher Self of the man, was balanced and
justified, the man, the disciple, became conscious, in the cave of his
heart--that is to say, in his inmost substantial nature--of the Presence
of Light.

4. Thereon follow the illumination and the explanation of the familiar
drama of appearance taught to those "without the mystery."

"The multitude below in Jerusalem" is the lower nature of the man, his
unillumined mind. "Jerusalem Below" is set over against "Jerusalem Above,"
the City of God. Jerusalem Below is that nature in him that is still
unordered and unpurified; while Jerusalem Above is that ordered and
purified portion of his substance that can respond to the immediate
shining of the Light, which further orders it according to the Ordering of
Heaven.

And yet the drama below is real enough; there are ever crucifixion and
piercing and the drinking of vinegar and gall, before the triumphant
Christ is born. It is by such means that His Body is conformed; it is the
mystery of the transformation of what we call evil into good. The Body of
the Christ is perfected by the absorption of the impersonal evil of the
world, which He transmutes into blessing.

"'Twas I who put it in thy heart to ascend this Mount." I am thy Self, thy
true God; 'twas I energizing in thee who enabled thee to rise to the
height of contemplation, where thou canst "hear what disciple should learn
from Master and man from God." The man has now reached the stage of Hearer
in the Spiritual Mysteries.

5. There then follows the vision of the great Cross of Light, fixed firm,
and stretching from earth to heaven. Round its foot on earth is a vast
multitude of all the nations of the world; they resemble one another in
that they are configured according to the Darkness, their "Spark burns
low." On the Cross, or in it, for doubtless the seer saw within as well as
without, was another multitude of various grades of light, being formed
into some marvellous Image like unto the Divine, but not yet completed--as
it might be the