Word: gnostics
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...companion, Valentinus, travels to Lucifer to regain the memory of his past life, that of a second-century seer of the Gnostic sect. Valentinus is equally faceless, and takes no interest in the fate of his friend. The two travel from world to world courtesy of Olam--an Aeon, one of the super-natural beings of the Gnostic mythos. Curiously, Olam is the most well-characterized of the three, revealing touches of peevishness that are the only human moments in the book...
...true God, the Gnostics reasoned, could not have created anything so despicable as the material world. Another supreme being emerges in Gnostic tracts: an abstract figure who embodies absolute truth and light and rules an invisible, heavenly realm. The lowest being in this realm is a woman, Sophia (Greek for wisdom), who offends the supreme being by producing a child without a mate; her offspring, a malevolent false god named Yaldabaoth, created the material world. He is thus an evil parody of the Old Testament creator revered by Jews and Christians...
Tree Secrets. Other elements of the Bible are similarly warped in the Gnostic scriptures. For example, the Gnostics viewed the serpent of the Garden of Eden as a hero rather than a villain, because he helped reveal the secrets of the Tree of Knowledge that Yaldabaoth had jealously kept from Adam and Eve. Yaldabaoth, working in league with Noah, tried to exterminate the knowledge-seeking Gnostics with a worldwide flood. Later on, he attacked them with brimstone when they sought refuge in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah...
...Gnostics believed that a spark of divine Light was imprisoned in some men's bodies, and that redemption meant union with the supreme being through possession of the mystical, Zen-Like gnosis; a Gnostic could thus achieve gnosis and partial redemption long before corporeal death. The Gnostic creed left no room for the Christian belief in redemption through Christ's atonement on the cross for the sins of mankind. In fact, Nag Hammadi texts depict a Jesus who did not die on the cross at all. In their version, Simon of Cyrene carried the cross to Golgotha...
...Today Gnosticism survives as a living religion only among the Mandaean marsh dwellers of Iraq. But Robinson believes that the Gnostic world view has had a kind of underground existence throughout Western civilization, surfacing in such classics of existential despair as Albert Camus' The Stranger as well as among today's alienated youths. Says Robinson: "The Gnostics were colossal dropouts who opted for an otherworldly escape...