Word: gnostics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...18th century Gnostic activists became openly anti-Christian.* The French Revolution, crowning a Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame and proclaiming man's ability to achieve his salvation on earth, established Gnosticism as the religion of a large part of Western intellectuals and people...
Thereafter, Gnostic influence on thought snowballed. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), whose mark still lies heavily upon the social sciences, set up a system of three states of knowledge; in his Third Realm, called positivism, the scientists would take over "the general direction of this world." Intellectuals who advanced the world toward perfection would achieve immortality in the memory of mankind. Providence was the "Great Being," not God, but a personification of humanity. (A great and in some ways typical 20th century positivist was H. G. Wells, who believed that man was progressing through science to Utopia; Wells's last...
...resemble a sorcerer rather than a psychiatrist. He loves to sprinkle his writing with scholastic terms from the Middle Ages. His home is filled with strange Asiatic sculptures. He wears a curious ring, ornamented with an ancient effigy of a snake, the bearer of light in the pre-Christian Gnostic cult. When hard at work, he often disappears for days into a towered, castlelike hideaway across the Lake of Zurich, where he does his own cooking, and diverts himself by chopping wood and carving esoteric inscriptions on large blocks of granite. Jung has long since given up his psychiatric practice...