What Is Gnosticism?

[R. Fiero]

Vineland pg. 382
"When the Earth was still a paradise, long long ago, two great 
empires, Hell and Heaven, battled for its possession. Hell won, 
and Heaven withdrew to an appropriate distance. Soon citizens 
of the Lower Realm were flocking up to visit Occupied Earth on 
group excursion fares, swarming in their asbestos touring cars 
and RV's all over the landscape, looking for cheap-labor 
bargains in the shops, taking pictures of each other in a blue 
and green ambience that didn't register on any film you could 
buy down in Hell — till the novelty wore off, and the visitors 
began to realize that Earth was just like home, same traffic 
conditions, unpleasant food, deteriorating environment, and so 
forth. Why leave home only to find a second-rate version of 
what they were trying to escape? So the tourist business began 
to dwindle, and then the Empire was calling back first its 
administrators and soon even its troops, as if drawing inward, 
closer to its own chthonian fires. After a while, the tunnel 
entrances began to grow over, blur, and disappear behind poison 
oak and berry bushes, get covered by landslides, silted up in 
floods, till only a few lone individuals — children, 
neighborhood idiots — now and then would stumble on one, out in 
a deserted place, but dare inside only as far as the first 
turnings and loss of outdoor light. And then all the gateways 
to Hell were finally lost to sight, surviving only in local 
tales handed down the generations, sad recitals that asked why 
the visitors never came anymore, and if they would again, 
stories as congested and dark as UFO stories are ethereal and 
luminous. And always shamefaced, with an air not of UFO elation 
but of guilt, at having somehow not been good enough for them, 
the folks who lived in Hell. So, over time, Hell became a 
storied place of sin and penitence, and we forgot that its 
original promise was never punishment but reunion, with the 
true, long-forgotten metropolis of Earth Unredeemed."