Pynchon and Gnosis (was: Re: gnostic esoterica)

[Mark Kohut]

Other historical Big Labels: pantheism and the nice variation I learned
after reading Against the Day: Panentheism.





Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 19, 2017, at 11:25 AM, Seymour Landnau <seymourlandnau at gmail.com>
wrote:

The sort of overarching project of Pynchon is more of a reminding, a
pointing out, a turning, a reaching out for, a becoming aware of the
underlying consciousness of the phenomena of this world, than it is to
understand the presences of various forms consciousness takes within this
secular technological age.  I keep trying to remind myself of the term for,
what's it called, where you point out the underlying truth of all religions
and voila, they're one thing.  He's doing that.  It's consciousness.  But
it's much more than just "in the religions".  Consciousness is all things,
and it's all there is, it is everywhere.  It is, isness.  Pynchon seems
quite clearly hyperaware of this, as nearly every scene gets around to
hinting at it.  It's so thick in the fabric, structure, scents of the text
that I, or anyone, could easily claim that conscoiusness is all that is and
that you learned it, realized it, remembered it, from reading Pynchon.

As far as gnosticism goes, it doesn't take much to realize that if
everything that is, is consciouness, then consciousness is divine, and if I
am a part of everything, then I am divine.  Which is what Slothrop lacks,
right, that realization.  The very premise of the Rainbow is, how does
Slothrop do it?  Incipit comedeia.  A bunch of mid-20th century "experts"
trying "to figure it out".   Slothrop is sensing something, sensing his
divine nature a little bit perhaps, but he's becoming paranoid, man!
Because obviously if he is consciousness, and consciousness is everything
and can do anything, if it is limitless, then he...too...is...limitless!
Then fuck yes his dick can precognate V2s.  But not being much of a
gnostic, he becomes disturbed and mistakes his higher consciousness for the
They.  et Soforthia.



On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 10:29 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I don’t remember reading Eddins the way Howard describes him. Did Eddins
> really imply gnostics were sadistic anti-human forces seeking to
> dominate/manipulate humans? Bceause this sounds like a perfect gnostic
> description of the demiurge and hardly an aspiraton of gnosis.
> On the other hand I was not overkeen on all of Eddins either, and remember
> thinking his way of describing gnosicism didn’t match that well with others
> I had read. (I Have not read Eddins recently)
>
> But Eddins was was on to something important that corresponds with a core
> insight about Pynchon that seems glaringly obvious to some and patently
> absurd to others, that P has a love hate relationship with mysticism and
> its consequent religious/philosophical/linguistic/political ordering of
> culture,  and that relationship is more complicated than secular relativism
> or meaningless term like post-modernism. He does not take up these themes
> to dismiss them. No matter how vicious and hilarious his assault on
> religious madness he seems to find  even greater dangers in the soullessly
> technocratic. In fact it seems to me that the worst aspects of
> technological hubris and destruction are shown to bequite similar to the
> worst aspect of religious imperialism where the human priesthood of the
> system becomes demiurgic, dominating, power obsessed.
>
>  Pynchon inhabits myths of all kinds in a mad quest to fully understand
> their enduring presence within  the most catastrophic and mundane aspects
> of the modern trajectory. His references to Dante, Orpheus, channeling,
> Kabbala, Pythagoras, Catholicism, Puritanism, Taoism are not throwaways;
> they are basic to the story structure. Reading the satiric P it becomes
> obvious that no matter how sophisticated our attempt to distance ourselves
> from these myths they are embedded deeply into how we think and talk. But
> not only as holdovers. It is often when characters  leave the security of
> culture, religion, home, nation that they find mystical experience and are
> pried open to the naked cosmos. The degree of gnosis seems related to
> whether the character is chasing power  and security or leaving both, often
> leaving because the toxicity of those systemic environments becomes obvious.
>
> Which brings us to paranoia and the the demi-urge that haunts gnosticism,
> but also haunts the fiction of Thomas Ruggles.   Paranoia and rebellion can
> act in 2 different ways in a world where humans are forever struggling
> between the authority of culture/religion/inherited-truth and an
> un-prescribed awakened state in the now( in Pynchon this second takes many
> forms and can be facilitated by near death experience, sex, entering
> unknown territory, direct contact with another reality, love). Paranoia can
> be simply awareness of the predatory nature of a given culture that
> liberates the character from loyalty to something intrisically abhorrent,
> or it can veer into delusional fears. In itself it is not a diseased state
> and can obviously be a rational response to a surveillance state . Also, It
> is as likely to be the mindset of true believers and the ambitious
> careerists as it is of the skeptic or escapee. This paranoia about either
> maintaining control on behalf of a deity, ruler or nation state or about
> evading that control is in many ways the natural response to perceiving
> something that has been called the demi-urge, a great power which may be
> mostly the nexus of delusion but does exercise life and death power,
> creating pervasive and often ant-human social order. For the gnostic this
> is a power which conceals the true nature of divinity and stands in the way
> of liberating understanding-gnosis.
>
> Historically gnosticism has a particular attachment to the monotheism of
> Judaism and its carryover in Christianity. Because these religions have a
> direct connection to the idea of the chosen nation state, the gnostic
> resistance  frequently appears, often with a political spin, in what is
> called  Judaeo-Christian Civilization.
>
> The notion of the monadic divine is more divisive within the branches of
> Gnosticism and I don’t see Pynchon in any way aligned with some particular
> sect of this idea. The core idea seems to be what he finds useful in
> thinking about and giving narrative structure to large issues. Also he has
> an inherent critique of the simplistic idea that liberation from a given
> line of bullshit equals union with divine freedom. We see his characters
> move from one delusion to another quite often; some seem to find a
> satisfying escape from the cycle, some not.  Whether the world itself can
> escape hangs in the balance.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> n
> > On Jul 10, 2017, at 4:16 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >
> >
> > We've been discussing this since the 1990s at least four or five times.
> It's not that there's nothing to learn from Eddins' book, but still ...
> >
> > "Dwight Eddins's The Gnostic Pynchon bases its argument on a
> terminological error resulting from an inadequate understanding of the
> Gnostic hatred and resistance to power. Eddins mistakenly argues that
> Pynchon uses the Gnostics to represent sadistic, 'anti-human' forces that
> manipulate and dominate human beings, lust to transform life into inanimate
> objects, and worship death (4-5, 8, 12). Despite Eddins' s many
> interpretative insights into the novel, his use of 'gnosticism' as an
> explanatory model runs against the grain of the actual religious Gnostics
> of the secondary century and the historical tradition of commentary on
> them. [Here follows a footnote from which this sentence is most important:
> "Because Control occupies an analogous position to the archons in the
> Gnostic cosmos, Eddins's association of Control with 'gnosticizing cults'
> themselves in misleading and inaccurate (130)." - kfl]. Eddins also
> disregards or inadequately reads many of the direct references to
> Gnosticism in Gravity's Rainbow, which indicate Pynchon's association of
> Gnosticism and heresy with rebellion against the oppressive forces of a
> technocratic orthodoxy."
> > (pp. 24-25; pdf: 31-32)
> >
> > Jeffrey Lamar Howard --- Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and
> Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy.
> >
> > https://www.lib.utexas.edu/etd/d/2007/howardj93632/howardj93632.pdf
> >
> > Which discusses Pynchon together with Nabokov and PKD.
> >
> > Howard also published an excellent article on M&D.
> >
> > "Magic is a means of re-opening metaphysical possibilities,
> re-enchanting the world, that counters the loss of possibilities lamented
> by Cherrycoke and documented throughout Mason & Dixon. Magic is thus a form
> of what Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow calls "counterforce," something that
> opposes the dominant cultural forces of decadence and entropy. It functions
> both as a metaliterary trope for the fictional processes that lead to
> recovered metaphysical potential and as a metaphor for the attempts of
> characters within the narrative to re-enchant their worlds. This
> re-enchantment is, however, partial and fragmentary in that it results in
> ambiguous pockets or islands of possibility within a larger context of
> politico-economic domination and manipulation. Magic in Mason & Dixon takes
> the form primarily of feng shui, kabbalism, and magical signs or sacred
> glyphs. It can be both(,) black magic, investing history with a sense of
> malevolent but otherworldly conspiracy, and white magic, granting aspects
> of America('s) tentative hope and lyric beauty." (Jeffrey Howard: The
> Anarchist Miracle and Magic in Mason & Dixon. Pynchon Notes 52/53, 2003,
> pp. 166-184, here 176.)
> >
> >
> > Am 09.07.2017 um 20:51 schrieb Allan Balliett:
> >> Description
> >> The appearance of Vineland, his first novel in seventeen years, has
> rekindled critical debate on Thomas Pynchon. Written before the publication
> of the new novel, but remarkably prescient about its themes, The Gnostic
> Pynchon is a provocative reading of Pynchon's work.
> >>
> >> Where most critics find in Thomas Pynchon a postmodern writer of
> indeterministic, relativistic, contingent fiction, Dwight Eddins also finds
> a man on a religious quest. Pynchon's quest, Eddins shows, is for some
> principle of organic order that will provide an alternative to hopeless
> ambiguity, or an equally hopeless choice between total chaos and total
> control.
> >>
> >> The Gnostic Pynchon is a profoundly revisionist view of one of this
> century's most important writers.
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 1:39 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> https://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-Pynchon-Dwight-Eddins/dp/
> 0253319072/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499621885&sr=8-1-
> fkmr0&keywords=eddins+on+gnosticism
> >>
> >> On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 1:34 PM, Tomas De Minos <tomasdemino at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> Gnosticism has experienced a huge surge in popularity these last couple
> years, owing to public intellectuals like Graham Hancock and psychedelics,
> I think.
> >>
> >> I myself read the Nag Hammadi library on a whim back in October. It's
> become apparent to me that the Jesus was more like Mani and Zoroaster than
> he was a Jew.
> >>
> >> e.g. The Water of Life is misunderstood unless it is associated with
> the Avestan apas.
> >>
> >> When Jesus mentions Truth, he clearly means Ma'at, Ma, and Satya.
> Indeed, his Mary is his consort and a manifestation of the feminine deity
> Sophia/Ayahuasca.
> >>
> >> As it is said in the Gospel of Thomas, the scribes and the pharisees
> are holding the keys of Gnosis. Once we unlock the symbols, see Amen as
> Amun-Ra, Christ as Horus and Osiris, we see Christianity as it was meant to
> be read.
> >>
> >> On Jul 9, 2017 12:02, "Keith Davis" <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I've been to Claymont...
> >>
> >> Www.innergroovemusic.com
> >>
> >> On Jul 9, 2017, at 11:58 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> "The Planetization of the Esoteric". Phrase of the day.
> >>>
> >>> I remember Lindisfarne Books. No planetization, so to speak.
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 10:24 AM, Allan Balliett <
> allan.balliett at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> To drift further away, here's some info on William Irwin Thompson's
> now defunct Lindisfarne Association
> >>>
> >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne_Association
> >>>
> >>> from Wikipedia
> >>>
> >>> Goals and doctrine[edit]
> >>> The Lindisfarne doctrine is closely related to that of its founder,
> William Thompson. Mentioned as part of the Lindisfarne ideology are a long
> list of spiritual and esoteric traditions including yoga, Tibetan Buddhism,
> Chinese traditional medicine, Hermeticism, Celtic animism, Gnosticism,
> cabala, geomancy, ley lines, Pythagoreanism, and ancient mystery
> religions.[8]
> >>>
> >>> The group placed a special emphasis on sacred geometry, defined by
> Thompson as "a vision of divine intelligence, the logos, revealing itself
> in all forms, from the logarithmic spiral of a seashell to the hexagonal
> patterns of cooling basalt, from the architecture of the molecule to the
> galaxy."[9] Rachel Fletcher, Robert Lawlor, and Keith Critchlow lectured at
> Crestone on the application of sacred geometry, Platonism, and
> Pythagoreanism to architecture.[10] The exemplar of these ideas is the
> Grail Chapel in Crestone (also known as Lindisfarne Chapel), which is built
> to reflect numerous basic geometrical relationships.[11]
> >>>
> >>> Lindisfarne's social agenda was exemplified by the "meta-industrial
> village", a small community focused on subsistence and crafts while yet
> connected to a world culture. All members of a community might participate
> in essential tasks such as the harvest. (Thompson has speculated that the
> United States, 40% of the population could work at agriculture, and another
> 40% in social services.) The villages would have a sense of shared purpose
> in transforming world culture. They would combine "the four classical
> economies of human history, hunting and gathering, agriculture, industry,
> and cybernetics", all "recapitulated within a single deme."[12]
> >>>
> >>> (The "Meadowcreek Project" in Arkansas, begun in 1979 by David and
> Wilson Orr, was an effort to actualize a meta-industrial village as
> envisioned by the Lindisfarne Association. This project received funding
> from the Ozarks Regional Commission, the Arkansas Energy Department, and
> the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation.)[13][14]
> >>>
> >>> The villages would be linked together by an electronic information
> network (i.e., what today we call the internet). Thompson called for a
> counter-cultural vanguard "which can formulate an integral vision of
> culture and maintain the high standards of that culture without compromise
> to the forces of electronic vulgarization." [15]
> >>>
> >>> According to the Lindisfarne Association website, Lindisfarne's
> fourfold goals are:
> >>>
> >>> The Planetization of the Esoteric
> >>> The realization of the inner harmony of all the great universal
> religions and the spiritual traditions of the tribal peoples of the world.
> >>> The fostering of a new and healthier balance between nature and
> culture through the research and development of appropriate technologies,
> architectural settlements and compassionate economies for meta-industrial
> villages and convivial cities.
> >>> The illumination of the spiritual foundations of political governance
> through scholarship and artistic communications that foster a global
> ecology of consciousness beyond the present ideological systems of warring
> industrial nation-states, outraged traditional societies, and ravaged lands
> and seas.
> >>> Thompson has also stated the United States has a unique role to play
> in the promotion of planetary culture because people from all over the
> world mingle there.[16]
> >>>
> >>> Lindisfarne sought to spread its message widely, through a mailing
> list and through book publications of the Lindisfarne press.[17]
> >>>
> >>> Journalist Sally Helgesen, after a visit in 1977, criticized
> Lindisfarne as confused pseudo-intellectuals, citing for example their
> attempt to build an expensive fish "bioshelter" while overlooking a marsh
> with fish in it.[18]
> >>>
> >>> Allan in WV who hopes that this post doesn't open the door for a
> discussion of the Claymont Society
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 10:19 AM, Allan Balliett <
> allan.balliett at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> The Schumaker College has made a bunch of  conference tapes related to
> William Irwin Thompson available for FREE at mp3s at
> >>>
> >>> https://archive.org/search.php?query=william%20irwin%20thompson
> >>>
> >>> I don't see anything directly addressing the Gnostics but a lot of
> lectures on Man and Nature, Man and Industrialism and similar topics.
> >>>
> >>> Seems like it's potentially a great find!
> >>>
> >>> -allan in WV
> >>>
> >>> On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 5:29 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Gnosis has always been important to me because therein the question of
> theodicy can be answered better than with the Lutheran Protestantism I grew
> up with. The Gnostic teaching also provided a psychonautic map for
> navigating through the psychedelic experience. In recent years, however, my
> ways led me to India ... Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha ...
> >>>
> >>> http://gnosis.org/gnintro.htm
> >>>
> >>> > ... Gnostics do not look to salvation from sin (original or other),
> but rather from the ignorance of which sin is a consequence. Ignorance --
> whereby is meant ignorance of spiritual realities -- is dispelled only by
> Gnosis, and the decisive revelation of Gnosis is brought by the Messengers
> of Light, especially by Christ, the Logos of the True God. It is not by His
> suffering and death but by His life of teaching and His establishing of
> mysteries that Christ has performed His work of salvation.
> >>> The Gnostic concept of salvation, like other Gnostic concepts, is a
> subtle one. On the one hand, Gnostic salvation may easily be mistaken for
> an unmediated individual experience, a sort of spiritual do-it-yourself
> project. Gnostics hold that the potential for Gnosis, and thus, of
> salvation is present in every man and woman, and that salvation is not
> vicarious but individual. At the same time, they also acknowledge that
> Gnosis and salvation can be, indeed must be, stimulated and facilitated in
> order to effectively arise within consciousness. This stimulation is
> supplied by Messengers of Light who, in addition to their teachings,
> establish salvific mysteries (sacraments) which can be administered by
> apostles of the Messengers and their successors.
> >>>
> >>> One needs also remember that knowledge of our true nature -- as well
> as other associated realizations -- are withheld from us by our very
> condition of earthly existence. The True God of transcendence is unknown in
> this world, in fact He is often called the Unknown Father. It is thus
> obvious that revelation from on High is needed to bring about salvation.
> The indwelling spark must be awakened from its terrestrial slumber by the
> saving knowledge that comes “from without” ... <
> >>>
> >>> For a longer read I recommend "A History of Gnosticism"  by Giovanni
> Filoramo.
> >>>
> >>> Then there's "The Gnostic Religion" by Hans Jonas. The study is the
> English version of the dissertation he wrote as a student of Heidegger
> whose existential categories from "Being and Time" Jonas uses for the
> explication of the Gnostic teaching. This works because there's a genuinely
> Gnostic element in Heidegger's thinking.
> >>>
> >>> Those reading German should also check out the 1031 pages reader
> "Weltrevolution der Seele. Ein Lese- und Arbeitsbuch der Gnosis von der
> Spätantike bis zur Gegenwart", edited by Peter Sloterdijk and Thomas Macho,
> where you'll also find texts from people like Samuel Beckett, Stanislav
> Grof or Jorge Luis Borges.
> >>>
> >>> https://petersloterdijk.net/werk/weltrevolution-der-seele/
> >>>
> >>> Some ancient source texts can be read in the Nag Hammadi Library:
> >>>
> >>> http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/books/nhl.pdf
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Am 08.07.2017 um 03:28 schrieb David Morris:
> >>>> I never studied Gnosticism.  It always seemed to be negating, but
> then so does Zen.  Nothing is real.  The common thread is that our shared
> fallen/illusory state is transcendable.  A return is possible via
> disciplined practice.  The return is to experience our source, gnosis,
> consciousness.  We are not primarily physical beings.  That illusion is our
> fallen state.
> >>>>
> >>>> All religions have their mystical paths, probably always discovered
> by accident by real devotees.  Sufism, Kaballaism, Mystical Christianism,
> all sorts of Budism, Hinduism, and Shamanism.  My list is too short.  Their
> common thread is personal transcendent experience, not dogma.
> >>>>
> >>>> David Morris
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 7:25 PM L E Bryan <lebryan at sonic.net> wrote:
> >>>> Ah yes. The good old days of 20 years ago when Pagel’s "The Gnostics”
> came out. About the same time William Irwin Thompson’s “the Edge of
> History” came out. It was in the latter I first came across the demiurge,
> Ialdabaoth. Hadn’t thought about old Iald in years. The book is still
> available on Amazon. I wonder if I would still be impressed with his
> eruditeness.
> >>>>
> >>>> Lawrence
> >>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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