the timboucher experience

Infoprophecy put together an interesting post on the conceptual similarities between Taoism and Gnosticism. Hopefully he’ll develop it into a series of articles. I’ve always been really interested in Taoist thought, way before I knew anything about Gnosticism - so it’s nice to see the two of them fused together. The thing that mainly strikes me when you compare the two of them side by side is not just that they are so similar, but that Gnosticism is sort of like a version of Taoism where all the forces and patterns are given names and attributes and personalities. For me, this is part of what makes gnosticism so fun: that it’s sort of like playing with action figures and scale models. You get to run everybody around, pose them, give them different adventures and storylines of how they all fit together.

But underneath it all, you’re really talking about relationships between forces. It’s not so much about archons or Sophia, or the demiurge, or all the rest. If you think that’s all that gnostic thought entails, then you’ve fallen into the trap of literalism, from which escape is difficult but essential. For this reason, I think a good understanding of the theoretical basis of gnosticism (rather than just the stories) and its similarity with religious-systems like Taoism will be extraordinarily helpful.

• Is Gnosticism Corruptible?
• The Sethian Gnostics
• Wu-Wei
• Catholics on Gnosticism
• Running Toward the Bomb