I’d love to say “I told you so,” but I don’t especially enjoy being proven right on this kind of thing. About a week ago I “totally called it” that gnosticism is just about ripe to get picked up and consequently get twisted all around by mainstream pop culture. And here is the opening shot in the war: Ridley Scott has directed a four minute commercial for a new Prada perfume which uses one of the gnostic Nag Hammadi texts, unearthed in 1945.

The poem is Thunder Perfect Mind, and can be read online without any advertising connotations if you’re interested. If you’re more interested in the commercial, you’re welcome to go read about that as well.

Incidentally, this poem is from the same set of texts which Philip K. Dick believed unleashed the plasmate (living information = Holy Spirit = Sophia) back into the world, spawing a new set of resistance fighters against the corrupt prison world. Of course, the archons, the rulers of the prison world, are going to do everything in their power to smash the rebellion before it can even catch on. Or at least, that’s the gnostic perspective on this whole thing. Fantastic Planet summed it up very well earlier today:

Now that the plasmates are once again being spread throughout society, the Rulers of the World know it and are redoubling their efforts to squelch the ideas contained in Gnosticism. This time their efforts are more subtle, and more pernicious. Instead of just killing off the Gnostics, the Archons are assuming the forms taken by the plasmates, becoming counterfeit deliverers of “salvation,” confusing and muddling the minds of the already-occluded by distracting them from the Way.

As much as I think religious (especially gnostic) stuff getting coopted by the mainstream is a travesty, it’s also inevitable. We can sit around wringing our hands about it. Or we can realize that the whole reason texts like “Thunder Perfect Mind” were written was because that early gnostics believed that creativity was a mark of spiritual growth and maturity.

Rather than holding one text as uniquely sacred, they believed that each person could bring out the divine wisdom within, and share it with others through stories and poems like this. No matter how quickly they can be stolen from us and used to mindlessly sell products, they will never prevail if we keep adapting and inventing. We should only take this as a challenge to create even more powerful original works.

(Also, according to traditional gnostic thought, archons can only ever put out counterfeit creations in the first place, since they lack the divine spark. So it’s small wonder they can only survive through pillaging creations of others.)

[Via Fantastic Planet & Ralph The Sacred River]

UPDATE!

Also check out FP’s excellent follow-up post to this.