Osmosis & P's Gnostic Cosmoses

[Terrance]

I agree with the point that Gnosticism is just one more
religious system that P has fun with in his fiction,
consider for example the "Slothropite heresy" (GR 554-56)
Here P introduces the Cainest Light, but there are no Light
stories associated with the Cainests who held Judas in high
esteem because they believed that he only betrayed Christ so
that "the truth could not be betrayed." In other words,
Judas helped save mankind by betraying the Savior. However,
P is more playful, the heresy he brings to his fiction
postulates that Judas ought to be revered as the Messias of
the "preterite." 

Not under the sway of the Polish Peter Maria Marxist Messias

In any event, P's novels, the themes of his fiction include
a gnosticizing, for example the conviction that the material
universe and its God are evil,  that temporality is slavery;
that salvation, being contingent cannot be sought (David
Morris); that humans are now forced to lead an inauthentic
life in a treacherous dream world, like the "Oneirine
hauntings"(GR 703) or the reference to the "Dark Dream" (GR
697) suggest; that by despising such a world they experience
an existential estrangement (GR 660) and the
"bitterest of freedoms" (GR 704); finally, that they suffer
a self-destructive licentiousness, as in the moral
deviations through which the Hereros attempt to commit
racial suicide (GR 319). 

Another point, from the Gnostic perspective in P's fiction,
moral laws are "Their" laws, the product of a conspiracy
against man, so human beings are free to ignore them and may
even violate them rebelliously. In fact, the case with a
rebellious character like Blicero is much the same as that
of Melville's Ahab whose mad rantings, as many a Melville
scholar has argued,  only become intelligible when seen rom
a Gnostic perspective.

See Thomas Vargish, "Gnostic Mythos in Moby-Dick," PMLA 81,
No.3 (June 1966) , pp. 272-77.