by Erik Davis
Wiener’s words remind us that though the information age can be considered as a major leg up in the Augustinian battle with entropy and ignorance, we cannot ignore the Manichaean element of the real world, the blood-red darkness mixed into virtual light. Wiener would like to believe that the enemy is dumb and blind, but he cannot shake the malevolent genies from his mind nor ignore the nasty games that our information machines—and the individuals and systems that control them—can play with the masses of humanity. Even a scientific and essentially optimistic humanist like Wiener could not ignore the dark gnostic mythos that saturates the postwar world, a mythos that, as we will see, insists upon the vital difference between the knowledge that frees and the delusions that reduce us to programmed machines.
Priming the Spark
Gnosticism is such a fragmentary and suggestive patchwork of texts, hearsay, myth, and rumor that you can label almost any contemporary phenomenon “gnostic” and get away with it. Existentialism, William S. Burroughs, Jungian psychology, Marxism, Thomas Pynchon, psychedelics, American religion, the European banking elite, even the Sex Pistols—all have been saddled at one time or another with the gnostic name. I admit that by teasing out the gnostic threads from the webwork of technoculture, I am perhaps only making a further mess of things, and it seems best to remind the reader that we are dealing with psychological patterns and archetypal echoes, not some secret lore handed down through the ages. For this reason, I will reserve the capital-G term Gnostic for those religious groups and texts of antiquity that most scholars recognize as such.
Not that old-timey Gnosticism was significantly more coherent than its supposed contemporary manifestations. The Nag Hammadi codices, for one, scrape together quite a heterogeneous collection of writings. There are mystical instruction manuals, chunks of Plato, bits of the Corpus Hermeticum, Christian texts canonical and not, and wild-eyed space opera cosmologies. The authors of these texts were “heretics” according to their institutional rivals; as far as the authors themselves were concerned, they were for all intents and purposes Christian. Some may have adhered to esoteric cults along the lines of mystery religions, while others may have been philosophical types belonging to a small intellectual elite. Gnostic notions also fed directly into Manichaeism, which spread as far as Eastern China and at one point rivaled the broadcast power of the Roman Church. Given all these divergent and fragmentary religious forms, some scholars have come to use the word Gnostic as a description of certain philosophical and spiritual tendencies found throughout late antiquity, rather than a term referring to a particular sectarian movement.
One of the most essential Gnostic characteristics was a hardcore Platonism that amplified the otherworldliness of the old Greek metaphysician into a severe dualism that pitted the spirit against flesh and the world. Taking the widespread human intuition that something is amiss to new levels of cosmic crankiness, the Gnostics insisted that life on our heavy ball of sex and death was not just an unmitigated disaster—it was a cosmic trap. The central myth of Gnosticism’s byzantine cosmologies held that the creator of this world is not the true god, but an inferior demiurge who ignorantly botched the job. Plato also spoke of a worldly demiurge in the Timaeus, though he characterized this craftsman as a basically benevolent fellow. The Gnostic demiurge is not necessarily evil, but he and his ministers (known as archons, or rulers) are at the very least arrogant blowhards who mistakenly consider themselves to be lords of the universe. Humans are imprisoned in the material universe of fate that the archons control, though we carry within ourselves the leftover sparks of the divine and precosmic Pleroma (Fullness) that existed before the demiurgic construction company took over. Human beings are thus, in essence, absolutely superior to the ecosystem—not stewards or even masters, but strangers in a strange land.
In contrast to orthodox Christianity, with its guilt-ridden doctrine of original sin, the Gnostics held that the sorry state of the world is not our fault. The error lies in the structure of the universe, not within our essential selves. We don’t need to expiate any crimes, but simply to discover or recall the way back home—a way out that is also, mystically speaking, the way inside. Unlike the Church, which encased the spiritual autonomy of the individual believer within an elaborate corporate hierarchy founded on the ruins of the Roman state and the magical transmission of apostolic authority, the Gnostics recognized instead the supreme authority of esoteric gnosis: a mystical breakthrough of total liberation, an influx of knowing oneself to be part of the genuine godhead, of knowing oneself to be free. In one of his few surviving fragments, the great Alexandrian Valentinus—a second-century Gnostic Christian who was once in the running for Bishop of Rome—wrote: “What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, where into we have been thrown; whereto we speed, where from we are redeemed; what birth is and what rebirth.”12 The primary polarity of Gnostic psychology is not sin and redemption, but ignorance and gnosis, forgetting and memory, sleep and the awakening of knowledge. The Gnostic sought the pure signal that overrides the noise and corrosive babel of the world—an ineffable rush tinged with the Platonic exaltation of mind, a first-person encounter with the Logos etched into the heart of the divine self within.
From another angle, however, gnosis appears less like a mystical moment of satori than an occult rite of passage. The Gnostics were accused of believing that Jesus passed on secret truths to an esoteric elite, and this more encrypted and fetishized form of knowledge influenced their vision of transcendent awakening. Like the Freemasons and other later secret societies, some Gnostics were apparently fond of doling out mysterious words, strange sigils, and mysterious hand gestures—information that the soul would need in its journey through the afterlife, which the Gnostics imagined as a kind of multilevel computer game inhabited by demonic gatekeepers and treacherous landscapes.
This more magical and alchemical approach to gnosis particularly informs the pagan Corpus Hermeticum, a portion of which made it into the Nag Hammadi library. In the eleventh treatise of the Hermetica, Mind—one of the grand old pontificators in the Neoplatonic playhouse—makes an extraordinary suggestion to Hermes Trismegistus, whom he addresses not as a mortal man but as a virtual being whose “incorporeal imagination” gives him the keys to the universe:
Having conceived that nothing is impossible to you, consider yourself immortal and able to understand everything, all art, all learning, the temper of every living thing.… Collect in yourself all the sensations of what has been made, of fire and water, dry and wet; and be everywhere at once, on land, in the sea, in heaven; be not yet born, be in the womb, be young, old, dead, beyond death. And when you have understood all these at once—times, places, things, qualities, quantities—then you can understand god.13
On one level, this illumination penetrates to the subtlest spheres of consciousness—the call to “be not yet born” recalls the Zen koan that asks the practitioner to recall her original face, the face “before you were born.” But unlike the Zen quest, which proceeds largely by emptying the mind of its obsession with mental bric-a-brac, the budding Promethean Gnostic is here encouraged just to keep loading it up. Hermes is not told to merge with the great ineffable Oneness, but to expand the conceptual and empirical mind, the mind that knows and understands the things of this world, quantities as well as qualities, information as well as wisdom. Gnosis enables the mystic not only to know God, but to know what God knows. Even more important, this cognitive ecstasy is not characterized as something that happens to the aspirant through God’s infinite grace, but as a feat that the aspirant produces through his own mystical, magical, and intellectual labor—in a word, self-divinization.
The Corpus Hermeticum’s mystic hymn to information overload should serve as a reminder to contemporary infonauts that they are hardly the first humans to fall in love with the prospect of having all the data of the world at their fingertips. Indeed, I would wager that part of the rnillennialist intensity of our technologies, part of what�
�s driving our hardwired ecstasy of communication, is the subliminal hunch that our increasingly incorporeal information machines may be altering and expanding consciousness itself. We complain about information overload, and yet we also get an almost eschatological thrill from the glittering glut, as if the acceleration of communication and the bandwidth-bursting density of the datastream can somehow amplify the self and its capacities. As the literary and religious critic Harold Bloom reflects in The American Religion, “Gnosticism was (and is) a kind of information theory. Matter and energy are rejected, or at least placed under the sign of negation. Information becomes the emblem of salvation; the false Creation-Fall concerned matter and energy, but the Pleroma, or Fullness, the original Abyss, is all information.”14
Though Bloom is being somewhat ironic here, he’s also on to something. The ancient “Hymn of the Pearl,” one of the most beautiful and paradigmatic Gnostic texts, is all about the saving power of incorporeal communications, and it may aid our techgnostic quest to read the tale, also somewhat playfully, through the eyes of information. In the beginning of the story, an unnamed prince, who is often identified with Mani, is told by his royal parents that he must journey to Egypt to retrieve a pearl from the clutches of a serpent. The prince chooses to accept the mission and soon finds himself in a tavern in Egypt, where he encounters a fellow “anointed one.” The two high and holy confidants whisper about the mission and the nefarious ways of the Egyptians, and the prince grows so afraid of the locals that he dons an Egyptian cloak to disguise himself. “But somehow [the Egyptians] learned / I was not their countryman, / and they dealt with me cunningly / and gave me their food to eat.” Drugged by the meal, the prince falls into the sleep of ignorance, and forgets both his mission and his true identity.
Aware of this turn of events, the prince’s father and mother send him a letter, sealed against “the evil ones, the children of Babel.” The missive flies to the prince in the form of an eagle; arriving, it “became speech.”
At its voice and the sound of its rustling
I awoke and rose from my sleep.
I took it, kissed it,
broke its seal and read.
And the words written on my heart
were in the letter for me to read.
I remembered that I was a son of Kings
and my free soul longed for its own kind.15
Besides shaking the prince out of his stupor, the letter also provides him with the magic data—the true names of his father and mother—which he uses to spellbind the serpent while he plucks the pearl from its scaly grasp. Wandering east toward home, the prince finds the same letter lying in the road. “And as it had awakened me with its voice / So it guided me with its light.” Guided by the radiating text, the hero returns home; there he changes into a stunning robe that “quiver[s] all over / with the movements of gnosis.” Draped with the living texture of spiritual knowledge, he ascends to greet the king.
Though ostensibly an action-packed tale of serpents and treasure, the “Hymn” is really a story about messages and communication; the hero’s information processing takes up far more lines than the battle with the beast or the description of the prized pearl. Information is exchanged in the bar, ruses are hatched, and conversation is overheard. Memory loss sets in until a letter arrives, a piece of writing that unleashes all the consciousness-bending powers of the alphabet. The letter transforms into a speaking voice; along with a noisy bit of rustling (whether of the papyrus or the bird’s wings remains unclear), this voice awakens the hero. Then the letter triggers the knowledge already written in the heart of our hero—a classic media metaphor for the Platonic recollection of true origins and true destiny.
Expanding on Bloom’s ironic comment, we might note that in this allegory of the soul’s fall into matter and subsequent redemption, the internal spark behaves like one of those radio transponders found on satellites, instruments that lie dormant until they receive a specific transmission that activates them. Gnosticism is full of such signals. As one Mandaean Gnostic text puts it, “One call comes and instructs about all calls”; the second level of the Manichaean hierarchy was known as “Listeners.”16 The Gnostic signal must penetrate the thick interference of the world, a world that is not only flawed but ruled by a conspiracy of ignorance—of intentional noise. When the prince disguises himself, he takes on the flesh and its hungers; when the thugs slip him a Mickey, the worldly archons overwrite his memory, drowning his cosmic identity in the sleep of matter and the trance of “consensus reality.” The Logos that saves the prince is an informing light embodied in a technology of communication, and its transmission echoes the archetypal scenario of information theory: a sender, a receiver, and a message that must protect itself from the demon of noise—the “children of Babel” against which the king’s letter is sealed.
Gnosis always depends on the transmission of secrets, and the clandestine battle of messages and hidden doings runs throughout Gnostic lore. Some Gnostic creation myths tell us that agents of the Pleroma, working behind the scenes, trick the archons into unknowingly building a spiritual escape hatch into their false creation. According to Hans Jonas, the German scholar who found in Gnosticism an anticipation of existentialism,
Through [the Demiurge’s] unknowing agency the spiritual seed was implanted in the human soul and body, to be carried there as if in a womb until it had grown sufficiently to receive the Logos. The pneuma sojourns in the world in order to be pre-formed there for the final “information” through the gnosis.17
As the embodiment of universal order and mystic knowledge, the Gnostic Logos obviously means much more than mere “information.” And yet this Logos sometimes appears in the quivering form of an informational signal, giving the call an almost viral quality that allows it to penetrate an occluded world.
As the winged letter in the “Hymn” suggests, Gnostic mysticism must also be viewed within the context of the writing machine. The singular self-knowledge sought by the Gnostic, which reveals the self to belong to a transcendent order estranged from the mundane world, can be seen partly as a Platonic by-product of the phenomenology of alphabetic reading, whose artificial shapes are, as we discussed earlier, essentially alien to the natural order. For the mystically inclined, the voice of the alphabet may act as an analogy of the far more otherworldly wisdom that sometimes arises from the core of consciousness. The Gnostics also got a lot of mileage out of exploiting the necessary ambiguity of text. By somewhat cantankerously rereading texts that already held some spiritual authority, they allegorized them to fit their own needs. As Couliano writes, “Gnosticism is Platonic hermeneutics so suspicious of tradition that it is willing to break through the borders of tradition, any tradition, including its own.”18
This hermeneutics of suspicion, which restlessly seeks the cracks in every story, reaches its most audacious peak with certain Gnostic interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve. As everyone knows, God gives the newborn couple the run of the place, insisting only that they refrain from munching the famous fruit—a treat popularly imagined as an apple but which medieval art sometimes portrayed, perhaps tellingly, as a mushroom. Surprising no human parent then or now, Adam and Eve disobey, with a little prompting from a serpentine trickster who promises Eve that she and her beau will “be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Once God discovers their trespass, he hands down a sentence that seems a touch on the harsh side: death, toil, and suffering for them and their entire progeny until the end of time. Conventionally interpreted, the tale implies that in our willful rebellion against the commandments of the Lord, we literally dug our own graves. We are at fault for our faulty world.
The Gnostics were having none of this. Concocting the world’s first metaphysical conspiracy theory, the anonymous authors behind Nag Hammadi’s “Secret Book of John” read Genesis against the grain, arguing that Eden was actually a low-rent reality fabricated by an incompetent and ignorant tyrant. In one of Gnosticism’s most startling revisions, Christ (a.k.a. the L
ogos) secretly enters the garden disguised as the serpent, and thus manages to unload some redemptive knowledge on the original hoodwinked couple. The knowledge is basically what the snake promised: knowledge that wakes us up to our own divine essence, and that liberates us from the chains of ignorance. As such, the quest to know, and through knowing to become “as gods,” becomes a leitmotif of Gnosticism. As we will see in the next chapter, the urge to overcome the natural limits of body through a divinized or omniscient mind remains one of the most characteristic “gnostic” traits, one that plays itself out today in strongly technocultural terms.
For the Gnostics, Eden was not a lost paradise but an allegory of the material world, a world many of them rejected with a dualist hostility that makes the Catholic Mass seem like a Dionysian keg party. Some Gnostics referred to our planet as an “abortion of matter,” composed of pain and suffering; the Manichaeans held the particularly sword-and-sorcery notion that the cosmos was built from the rotting corpses of demons. Not surprisingly, your typical Gnostic’s body image was not what we would now consider healthy. Marcion believed that we were made in the image of the evil demiurge, and that this “flesh stuffed with excrement” was so repugnant that procreation could not be justified on any account.
Though the Gnostics certainly sipped from the same pool of Platonic body-loathing that came to characterize anchoritic Christianity, their hostility to the material world and its archons cannot be reduced to a bad case of ascetic ressentiment against the ravages of time. They abhorred the world partly because they abhorred those powers—physical, institutional, or psychological—that prevented the self from realizing its potential, a potential they associated with liberation, with the dropping of all shackles. Embedded within their almost paranoid hostility to the ecosystem lay an incandescent yearning for freedom, and though this yearning may have gotten out of hand, then as now, its essence speaks to the new sense of autonomy that came to define the self in late antiquity just as it came to define the individual subject of the modern world. This self fancies itself as free, a knowing spark that struggles against external forces of limit and oppression. For all their paganish occultism, many Gnostics also ranted against the astrological archons who were almost universally believed to hold the fate of men and nations in their sidereal hands. Instead of accepting the Zodiac’s rule of fate, the Gnostics insisted on the mind’s ability to overcome such strictures through psychological depth, intelligence, and mystical will. In a word, the Gnostic struggle is libertarian.
