grgr (25): second sheep & bad reputation

[Terrance]

Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:
> 
>  " ... william argued holiness for these 'second sheep,' without whom there'd be
>  no elect. you can bet the elect in boston were pissed of off about that. and it
>  got worse. william felt that what jesus was for the elect, judas iscariot was
>  for the preterite. everything in the creation has its equal and opposite
>  counterpart. how can jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but
>  horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? well, if he is the
>  son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love
>  judas too. right?" (555)
> 
>  the other - i've mentioned here before that there was a gnostic sect called the
>  judaists who worshipped judas iscariot because without him the salvation action
>  could not have taken place - is what jungians call the integration of the
>  shadow. indeed, everything in creation has its opposite counterpart. if one
>  always runs away from the inner judas one will not  r e a l i z e  the true
>  weight of the cross ...

Judas was he held in very high esteem by
certain Gnostic sects, as Caine was, etc.? I think Judas was
revered because it was held that he betrayed (Betrayal,
btw, in Dante gets you a place close to the bottom and one
of Pynchon's main themes in GR is Betrayal, remember Pirate,
Mexico and Slothrop and two girls or two
men, Betrayal is introduced early in GR)  Jesus so that the
Truth could not be
betrayed. In any event, as is Pynchon's bent, we don't get
Gnosticism
in GR as Gnosticism that we can understand from tradition or
the extant texts or the comments on these traditions by the
church fathers and scholars like Jonas. So, for example, a
typical example I think, the bogus citation
from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, not in GR from the MS
found in
Nag Hammadi, but "thought to be" from a fragment discovered
in Behnsa, the so called oxyrthynchus (named after the Greek
name for the village). Pynchon, as (sorry can't remember,
but I think the editor of the Wanda Letters or the Intro. or
something) says, loves arcane detail and esoteric tid bits,
and his habit is to adapt, idiosyncratically, all his
sources to his own manic purposes, ironically, black
humorously.  The fragment was in fact published in the early
part of the 20th century, before W.W.I, I'm sure, but in GR
it appears "number classified." Clever, sneaky guy. So we
need to be careful with this Pynchon guy, when he writes, 
"Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in Hell
today..." who is he quoting? Certainly not the Son of Mary.
A-and how does Pynchon apply Dante and Eliot's "Who would
have thought so many would be here?"?? Well, that's another
Dylan song, but here we have Old William's heresy. Again it
is a Pynchon original and it tells us a whole bunch. The
Gnostic world, (remember one of the essential ideas of
Gnosticism is Dualism--a dualistic view of the world), but
here, William does not hold to the Gnostic view of the Earth
(actually this evil earth extends to the lower heavens.
A-and
although it was a bit early for Newton, what is Isaac doing
here in the air, in the wind I guess, with  "feelings about
action and reaction" and William is waiting
for validation, one pig, one lemming perhaps, possessed not
by a
demon but by "trust in men, which the men [keep]
Betraying..."
So William is not a Judaist or Cainite or any other Gnostic,
wouldn't make sense would it? But he is like the Gnostics
historically in that he is treated as a heretic, 
and he refuses to give in to the dominant Puritanism of the
day. 
Perhaps it has something to do with Geli and some Puritan
folks in RI who  stressed the value of the Individual over
the corporate? But these folks never attempted to invert
Christian doctrine, as Pynchon has it here in the
"Slothropite heresy." 


Britannica on the Cainite


The Cainite were members of a Gnostic sect mentioned by
Irenaeus and other early Christian writers as flourishing in
the 2nd century  AD, probably in the eastern area of the
Roman Empire. The Christian theologian Origen declared that
the Cainites had "entirely abandoned Jesus." Their
reinterpretation of Old Testament texts reflected the view
that Yahweh (the God of the Jews) was not merely an inferior
demiurge, as many Gnostics believed, but that he was
positively evil because his creation of the world was
perversely designed to prevent the reunion of the divine
element in man with the unknown perfect God. The Cainites
also reversed
biblical values by revering such rejected figures as Cain
(whence their name), Esau, and the Sodomites, all of whom
were considered to be bearers of an esoteric, saving
knowledge (gnosis). These biblical persons were said to have
been punished by a jealous, irrational creator called
 Hystera (Womb). The Cainites also honoured Eve and Judas
Iscariot and had gospels bearing their names.

 The Cainites are sometimes called libertine Gnostics for
believing that true perfection, and hence salvation, comes
only by breaking all the laws of the Old Testament. The
violation of biblical prescriptions was, therefore, a
 religious duty. Because it was difficult to violate all
biblical laws during a single lifetime, the Cainites did not
look  for salvation in the created world but rather escape
from it. Their subversion of biblical stories allowed them
to use Sacred Scripture to support their dualistic view of
existence.

"Watch your step!" Canto XXXII.19