In addition to his work as principal author at Metahistory.org, John Lamb Lash is the author of several books covering a variety of spiritual and mythological topics. I put together this email interview with Lash to explore more deeply our shared interest in the gnostic myth and it’s application in the modern world. He has an interesting and unique vision that he’s been gracious enough to share with us here. Thanks for the time you put into this John!

PS. You may also be interested in reading my companion interview with Joanna Harcourt Smith, who also works on the Metahistory team.

[Note About Formatting: My questions are in bold, and Lash’s responses are in normal text]

On the Metahistory bio page, you’re called the “true successor to Mircea Eliade”. Could you elaborate on your connection to this religious scholar, as well as give us a little background about yourself, especially in regards to spiritual practice, etc?

That’s quite a compliment to live up to. It was made some years ago by Robert Sardello of the Dallas Institute of Arts and Humanities. Eliade achieved a vast and, I reckon, unsurpassable overview of mythology and religion. Where do you go after that? I am not his peer in scholarship by any account, but in my work and writings I strike a path toward the experiential sources of religious and mystical experience, the root factors. That is the best direction to go after the great overview has been formulated. I think this is what Robert Sardello meant by suggesting that I am Eliade’s successor.

I had no personal connection with Mircea Eliade. As to spiritual practice, he made the journey to India and got involved in yoga, as did I briefly in my late teens. On the whole, however, I have not followed any formal spiritual practices in my life. I don’t meditate. I have not joined spiritual or occult groups. I have never followed a guru. My path has been a private, idiosyncratic one involving a process of trial and error, questioning and exploring. The stumblebum method. From the age of four I have been deeply affected by spontaneous mystical experiences, lucid dreaming, jolts of Kundalini, encounters with dark predatory forces, and baffling plunges into the Nahual, and in adult life I have been inspired by sexual adventures with women. Dakinis who drink blood from skulls have been my teachers. Strange, overpowering things just happened to me, and then I had to work through them, discovering a good many treasures in the process. I guess I’m like a terton, a treasure-finder, in Dzogchen tradition. In large measure my “practice” has been whatever it takes to stay sane. (With a c.v. like that, you may well wonder how I define sanity.)

The purpose of the Metahistory project seems to be to encourage people to critically examine their beliefs, and the stories on which they are founded. Yet, the site seems largely devoted to contemporary interpretations of gnosticism. What drew you to study gnosticism? How does this ancient story-system correlate with the goals and techniques of Metahistory?

Metahistory.org is a site dedicated to critical examination of beliefs, as you say. But bear in mind that belief-change is neither an option nor a desideratum for most people. 99.9 percent of the folks can’t hack it. In setting up the site, I gradually suspected I might be throwing a fabulous party to which no one would come. Nevertheless, I am continually surprised at the positive and ever-growing response to the site. I see individual flashes of dissent, but no societal or mainstream recognition of the urgent necessity to question beliefs, especially religious beliefs.

The Gnostic element is prominent in Metahistory for two reasons. First, because the Gnostics opposed certain Judeo-Christian beliefs such as creation by the father god and divine forgiveness. They launched a powerful critique of redeemer theology, the core of J-C religion, at the moment of its emergence. Their protest against the insane and inhumane features of salvationist faith is consistent with the focus of Metahistory. The second reason is that the radical Gnostic message is Gaia-oriented. In the creation story transmitted in the Mysteries, the earth is a metamorphosis of a cosmic divinity or goddess called Sophia, whose name means wisdom. The planet we inhabit is the disguised or morphed body of that goddess. Gnostic seers who directed the Mystery Schools had a perspective on life on earth comparable to what we see emerging today in deep ecology. I call this the Sophianic Vision. The spiritual or visionary dimension of deep ecology, if you will.

Metahistory can be defined by what it is against – namely, unexamined beliefs such as belief in a male creator god who makes the human species “in his image” - but also by what it is for. Additional to the critique of belief, the site presents a future myth (or story-system, as you aptly call it) imbued with values ignored and discounted by the mainstream religions that drive the behavior of most people on the planet: kinship of all species, reverence for the sacred presence of the earth, our dependence on nature to teach us how to live, the divinity of intelligence, the body as an instrument of illumination, recognition of the intrinsic value of non-human life (a principle of deep ecology), entheogenic learning, emphasis on beauty and healing, ecstasy, co-evolution, human potential, sobriety, tenderness, play, and personal love as a religious force in its own right. Such are the elements that define the positive and futuristic message of Metahistory.

Personally, I was drawn to the Gnostic message by a series of clues that life presented to me from the age of sixteen, leading to a long-term quest. My commitment to this message has deepened in recent years as I have come to understand the terminal insanity of human belief systems. As I say in the site, it remains to be seen which is more dangerous: to question these belief systems, or to let them go unquestioned.

If there’s one thing I’ve come across in my own study of gnosticism, it’s that there is a lot of disagreement as to what gnosticism actually is historically. Where do you stand in this debate? Is gnosticism Christian, pre-Christian, pagan, Hebrew, Zoroastrian, etc? How much of what we call gnosticism comes from the Western Hermetic and esoteric practices? I think I’ve also heard you call it a shamanic tradition as well. Why is there so much confusion around it’s definition?

You will note that on Metahistory.org I avoid the word “Gnosticism.” This “–ism” is a construct of scholars, and an unreliable one at that. I use other terms – Gnostic teachings, Gnostic materials, the Gnostic message or Sophianic vision – but I still run afoul of the huge problems surrounding the subject. As I explain in Approaching Gnosticism (the best single, introductory piece on the site, and mercifully brief!), there is no consensus among scholars on what Gnosis means. I differ from scholars in that my goal is not to analyze Gnostic texts to gain a better understanding of how Christianity originated. Rather, I seek to recover the original knowledge of the Gnostic seers and outline the method of Gnosis as a path of higher knowing aligned to the intelligence of the living earth. I propose the term ecognostic for this approach. Arne Naess, founder of deep ecology, uses the terms ecosophy and ecosophical, which are also applicable.

I have problems with the word Gnostic, as the Gnostics themselves did. In fact, the teachers in the Mysteries did not call themselves gnostokoi. This term implies “know it alls, smart-asses,” and was used to insult them. They called themselves telestai, “those who are aimed, or directed.” Their goal was the education and guidance of humanity according to its true inner potential. Their way of guiding was to teach self-direction and foster the innate genius of each individual. No scholar would agree with what I’m saying here, of course.

There are also deeper reasons why the telestai, the Mystery School initiates, did not like to be called gnostokoi, but it takes a long time to explain all this. In my book in progress I explain that the Gnostics of the classical, Hellenistic world descended from shamanic adepts of the Magian Order, originating in Persia around 6000 BCE. Gnosis is a shamanic path of heightened perception. (Curiously, it has many points in common with the “new sorcery” of Carlos Castaneda, and these parallels can be textually verified.) As such, Gnosis predates the Western Hermetic tradition. There is now a slight tendency to see in Gnosis a perennial form of sophisticated or high-end shamanism. From “archaic techniques of ecstasy” (Eliade’s famous term), the Magian seers developed advanced techniques of ecstasy and transmitted them in the Mystery Schools.

The best and briefest definition of Gnosis is: the method of cognitive ecstasy. The subject is mired in disinformation stemming from the attacks of the Church Fathers and hopelessly muddled by scholars who have no direct mystical experience (or wouldn’t admit it if they did). No scholar would say what I do about Gnosis and the Mysteries, but then, no scholar can say what I say, because conventional scholars lack the evidence of direct experience of their subject matter. My goal, however, is not to be accepted in their sandbox, but to get a clear signal out to some courageous and questioning souls.

Gnosticism seems to be gaining in popularity these days, thanks in large measure to pop culture references. To what would you credit this sudden resurgence? What does gnosticism have to offer people in today’s world? If we want to look at pop culture through gnostic eyes, what criteria would you use to discern whether or not a modern story is truly gnostic?

Good question. The pop cultural fix on Gnosticism needs to be carefully assessed, I think. For instance, Erik Davis’ Techgnosis is a brilliant book, a work of genius, yet Davis mindlessly repeats the usual disinformation on the Gnostics – they asserted the creation of the material world by an evil demiurge, they hated matter, rejected physical embodiment, etc. I sense that Gnostic ideas will be rapidly absorbed and utterly perverted in pop culture.

Frankly, I don’t think that Gnosis as a spiritual path will appeal to many people today, mainly because of stupidity, currently at record levels, and still rising. It takes exceptional intelligence, a certain kind of deep, intuitive and poetic intelligence, to grasp the Gnostic message. The degeneration of human intelligence is not a fact of nature, but the result of long-term conditioning by religion and culture, including scientific culture. Mass-scale stupefaction is a humanly designed and directed event. Any serious involvement in Gnosis requires a deep love of learning, a passionate desire to know. The capacity to learn with passion, and to take learning to a genius level, has been gravely damaged in the human species – but Gnostics already warned us about this trend 2000 years ago. They taught that nous, the precious dose of divine intelligence endowed in humanity, can be undermined by forces that alienate us from our true potential. These forces, called Archons or “authorities” in Gnostic writings, are of an alien, extraterrestrial character, but they depend heavily on human accomplices.

I am extremely wary of how Gnostic ideas will be adopted in pop culture, especially in cybernetics and the cyberpunk genre. Gnosis is ecstatic knowing of how life works in the symbiotic miracle of Gaian intelligence, but “flowers don’t grow in cyberspace,” as Dale Pendell says. I found some outstanding Gnostic elements in the Matrix trilogy (reviewed on site). Those films recall the Gnostic teaching that the perceived social world we inhabit – not the natural world itself – is like a prison system run by hostile forces. But the final message of those films is about belief. In fact, the third film ends with a glowing endorsement of belief. Belief has little or nothing to do with getting out of the matrix of human conditioning, but it has a lot to do with what got us into the matrix. The rebels in the film believed in Neo, and their support helped him to challenge the Matrix, but it was knowledge that liberated them all. What Neo knew about himself, his own powers, and about the simulations of the Matrix, enabled him to defeat it. To believe in each other is essential, but what is it in each other that is worth believing in? Belief creates nothing, but it acts as a filter on all that we can imagine and create. Knowledge frees – that is the essential Gnostic message.

My own interest in gnosticism is particularly as a methodology of spiritual inquiry, rather than as a firm belief system. I think it was Irenaeus who Elaine Pagels quotes as saying that back in old days, no gnostic was considered initiated unless they had generated some “enormous fictions”. Is this creative/imaginative playfulness a part of your own gnostic practice?

I think from what I’ve said so far that we see eye to eye on this: Gnosis is a method of spiritual inquiry, not a belief system. However, there is another aspect to the Gnostic path, indicated in your allusion to Irenaeus: the creative-imaginative dimension of heightened awareness. The Gnostic myth of the fallen goddess says that when Sophia realized humanity would have to face and overcome the deviating influence of the Archons, she designated her daughter Zoe (divine life-force) to imbue humanity with “the luminous epinoia” for that purpose. This is what we call the faculty of imagination.

Certainly, creative/imaginative playfulness is part of Gnostic practice, you could even say that it is the apex of the practice, but it takes great discipline to develop and express imagination. Gnostic seers in the Mysteries were constantly accessing the source of divine inspiration, and consequently, they were continually elaborating mythopoetic expressions of what they saw, heard, felt, and learned in mystic contemplation and paranormal states. Gnosis is an open, on-going revelation of the mysterious universe we inhabit, but it is not a game of new age mythmaking or a cyberpunk fantasy fair in which anything goes. Imaginative play- the mystico-ludic factor, as it has been delightfully called – is like playfulness in downhill skiing. Only those who are highly adept at skiing can play around without getting hurt, or posing a risk to others. The question of how imagination works as a visionary instrument and tool to guide the human species is a legacy of the Romantics, and remains unresolved.

One of your ideas that has made a big splash, landing you a spot on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast even, is this possible connection between what the gnostics called “archons” and what we today might call aliens. What is the nature of this connection, and what evidence do you have to support it? Also, just how literally do you believe this alien connection, or any of the gnostic cosmology, for that matter?

I understand that Gnostic/ET theory is getting some circulation on the Internet since that interview in March. This is good, because it brings an entirely new element into the ET/UFO debate. Gnostic materials contain a clear, coherent description of the origin, appearance, methods and motives of alien predatory beings called Archons. There is ample textual evidence in the Nag Hammadi codices and elsewhere (for instance, in the polemics written against the Gnostics) for the existence of aliens comparable to the Greys and reptilians of contemporary lore. I believe that Gnostics acquired this information through direct experience in paranormal states, remote viewing, astral projection, and lucid dreaming. The NHC texts describe face to face encounters with Archons (See A Gnostic Catechism on site), and, most significantly, they explain how to resist alien intrusion – mainly through the use of Kundalini, the serpent power.

Now, as to the question: Do the Archons literally exist? In my interpretation of the Gnostic myth of the fallen goddess, Sophia, I assume that the events described in the myth actually did happen in the cosmos, and, in some respect, they are still happening. This is how I read myths, as descriptions of actual events. I call this the dynamic approach to mythology. So, I would say yes, the Archons really are an alien, extraterrestrial species, a type of inorganic cyborg. But they are not only that. They are also, simultaneously, programs operating in the human psyche. They are both independent of us, and embedded in our minds. This may sound strange, but think of an advertising jingle or pop song. Think of “Yesterday” by the Beatles. The song is independent of us, yet it is embedded in our minds and emotions.

Not everything that happens in our minds originates there. It takes a deep look into the dual nature of reality to understand the Archons. In the literal sense, Archons are inhabitants of the solar system exclusive of the earth, sun and moon. They live in the celestial clockworks of the planetary system, subject to laws of inorganic chemistry. But in the psychodynamic sense, they also inhabit our minds. The main symptom of Archontic intrusion is ideological infection. Gnostics taught that Salvationist religion is an ideological virus planted in the human mind by the Archons. They saw in Judeo-Christian religion both the evidence and instrument of alien intrusion. And they warned that the religious beliefs insinuated in our minds by the Archons do not operate for our benefit but, on the contrary, these beliefs work against our true spiritual potential and undermine our connection to the earth and other species. This is the warning for humanity contained in the ET/Archon theory.

As for evidence of the physical existence of the Archons, there is plenty of that, of course. There are countless accounts of close encounters, abductions, etc. While some of this testimony is delusional, and some it hypnotically constructed, much of it is genuine, I believe. I myself have repeatedly encountered entities of the type of “mud shadow” described by Castaneda. However, Gnostics taught that the danger we face with the Archons is not physical assault – the aliens are incapable of entering the biosphere except for short forays - but mental deviation, the war in our minds. The “advanced technology” they possess is simulation, called hal in Coptic. For instance, they use virtual reality (VR) techniques to simulate abductions. Gnostic texts stress that imitation and simulation are the Archons’ most developed skills. I believe that Archontic simulation is now unfolding through VR technologies, the extension of video games. Those who produce and promote such technologies are contributing to alienation from our world, our natural habitat, and the loss of our sense of humanity. I would say that the Archons have migrated into cyberspace. Needless to say, this is the ideal medium through which they can access the human mind. The central threat in the entire ET/UFO scenario is not invasion of the earth by alien powers, but the self-betrayal of humanity.

I’ve seen you make the claim that the Jesus Christ written about in certain gnostic texts may not be the same entity as referred to in the canonical New Testament sources. On what are you basing this claim? Didn’t canonical Coptic manuscripts also make use of codes and shortcuts to refer to Jesus? How can we ever really be sure about such an interpretive issue as this? What is gained and what is lost by assuming that they are two different beings? Do you personally believe in a historical person of Jesus?

The names Jesus and Christ never appear in the Coptic Gnostic materials. Instead, there are codes, which scholars call nomina sacra: XRS, XS and IS, written in Coptic lettering with a bar over the top. Scholars never mention these codes and routinely fill in the blanks: XRS and XS become Christ, and IS becomes Jesus. But there is no firm ground for assuming that these codes ought to be converted in that way. I argue that nomina sacra were used deliberately to indicate that Christ and Jesus, as understood in conventional terms, were not meant. The codes were intended to warn us off literal associations. The scribes who translated the Gnostic materials into Coptic were, I believe, instructed to use these codes, probably without knowing why.

Few people realize that into the 5th century the name “Chrestos” was widely used, instead of “Christos.” In some cases, NHC scholars are uncertain if XRS means Chrestos or Christos, but the average reader never hears about such nuances. In any case, these names did not indicate to Gnostics what we today understand by Christ. Chrestos, “the good one, benefactor,” was the generic name for the avatar expected to come in the Piscean Age. This expectation was held by many people of non-Christian orientation. Christos in Gnostic teachings is a god or Aeon of the Pleroma who does not incarnate in human form. Gnostics denied the divinity of Jesus. The Gnostic Christos is not Jesus Christ as understood in Pauline and Johannine theology.

As for the historical Jesus, we are diving into another vat of worms. The claim I make is twofold. First, as just noted, Gnostics understood Christos/Chrestos in ways that cannot be equated with the Christ of orthodox doctrine. Second, allusions to Jesus in Gnostic writings cannot be read as straightforward references to the Jesus character in the New Testament. The entire issue is a terrible mess, of course, and you are right in asking what is the point of all this quibbling. To me the important thing is that we allow that Gnostic materials are not merely out takes of the Cecil B. DeMille blockbuster called “The New Testament”: they are glimpses of a completely different movie. Gnostics denied that Jesus or anyone else could be the single and exclusive embodiment of the Divine. If the historical Jesus really existed, he could have been several characters: a rebel rabbi with a message about social justice, a Jewish Zen master, an Judean freedom fighter, a pagan miracle worker, a hippie-type guru-healer, an Egyptian mystic, a master from the Mystery Schools, or even a mysterious psychic presence (called the Mesotes in Gnostic texts). All these profiles have some evidential basis in history, but the portrait in the New Testament is a contradictory and confusing pastiche.

I do not personally believe in the historical existence of the divine persona depicted in the New Testament. To my mind, the most historically probable and existentially convincing profile of Jesus – here I rely on the works of Robert Eisenman and Hugh Schonfield - is the Zealot, the Jewish guerilla leader who opposed Roman occupation of Palestine. The historical Jesus was most likely a messianic terrorist, a first century Yasar Arafat.

Sometimes it seems like gnosticism offers a much more “far out” cosmology than even the most conservative Christian groups. It’s even been called a “sci-fi theology”. How do you see gnosticism fitting into the modern day Christian landscape of Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism, Catholicism, etc? Is there a place for it or should it try to divorce itself from Christianity? It seems to me that the Emerging Church movement has a lot of principles and approaches which might be very compatible with gnostic thought. Have you spent much time researching this, or interacting with those communities? Are you interested at all in gnostic evangelism, and if so, what’s the ultimate goal?

I don’t see the Gnostic message fitting into that landscape, because anyone who gets the radical message of Gnosis wouldn’t go anywhere near that crowd. Should modern Gnosticism try to divorce itself from Christianity, you ask? Well, Christianity is what it is in the world today because it destroyed Gnostic wisdom and demolished the Mysteries. If the Gnostic critique of Salvationist doctrines had survived and had a fair hearing, Christianity as we know it would never have come to be. So what is going to happen now? Kiss and make up? Let Gnostic ideas be absorbed by the perpetrator religion so that we get a new, improved brand of Christianity? Why should those of Gnostic conviction reconcile with the legacy of the perpetrators who destroyed their sacred tradition?

I don’t know anything about the Emerging Church, but I find it hard to imagine how a popular religious movement of any kind could be compatible with genuine Gnostic experience. Gnosis is anti-authoritarian and anti-institutional. Gnosis as maintained for centuries in the Mysteries was not only not a religion, it was an anti-religion. Gnostic spirituality is elitist in the same way that, say, pro tennis is elitist. No one is forbidden from playing tennis or trying to achieve pro status, but in reality very few people have the capacity and determination to reach that status.

Evangelism is totally alien to Gnostic practice. Gnosis can only spread one to one, through intimate sharing of the core experiences, egodeath, ecstasy, silent knowing, and sacramental devotion to the Earth. Religion is a trap. Faith is a fantasy system. I do not interact with people in religious communities, that way I spare them grief and I spare myself frustration. People identified with religious beliefs, including New Age beliefs, tend to have a hard time around me. I have no intention to convert anyone to Gnostic ways. Metahistory.org is a teaching site. I teach the Sophianic vision, I do not preach Gnostic religion.

Why was gnosticism seen as such a threat to the Catholic Church in it’s earlier days? Pope Benedict XVI is known through his writings to be a rather outspoken anti-gnostic as well. Do you think there’s any inherent danger in the gnostic philosophy, or are they all just blowing smoke out their hats?

I think the answer to this question will be pretty clear from what I’ve already said. You have to figure that the Gnostic protest against Judeo-Christianity must have been really potent and focused, and must have represented a tremendous threat – otherwise, why did it take a concerted effort over many centuries to suppress it, not only to eliminate all original writings that contained the Gnostic message, but to spread a massive smokescreen of disinformation around that message? I would argue that the power of the threat was proportionate to the effort it took to eliminate it.

Today, however, the Catholic Church has nothing to fear from Gnostic message and the Sophianic vision. Roman Catholic patriarchy is dying of its own internal diseases. Not a pretty picture. There will be no replay of the Gnostic protest, because those dedicated to Gnosis in our time have their attention elsewhere - and, besides, they have enough common sense not to engage with vicious and deviant people.

What’s your take on the modern gnostic revival, particularly such groups as Stephen Hoeller’s Ecclesia Gnostica?

I’m quite anarchistic in my spiritual views. I am against cultic formulations of Gnosis and the Mysteries, although I can see how Gnosis might be incorporated into the frame of small intentional communities. I met Hoeller back in LA in the 1970s. We were introduced by a renegade Anthroposophist named Rick Mansell. I attended Hoeller’s Gnostic church in Los Feliz, at the end of Hollywood Boulevard, a few times, but the ambience did not suit me. To me the pursuit of Gnosis has no religious tonality at all. It’s a shamanic quest, highly individualistic, a path of singularity without hierarchy, pomp or piety. I find little or nothing that appeals to me in Gnostic revivalism, but I do see genuine Gnostic elements in entheogenic and neoshamanic disciplines, exemplified in the work of Ralph Metzner, Terence McKenna, Dan Russell, Dale Pendell, and ethnobotanist Jonathan Ott.

You’ve mentioned the importance of the “Gaia Mythos” to your own strain of gnosticism. What’s so important about it for the modern gnostic conversation? How does it add to or depart from “traditional” gnosticism?

What I call the Gaia Mythos is the core of traditional Gnostic teaching and Mystery School initiation. The GM is my best attempt at a modern, mythopoetic reworking of the Gnostic story of the fallen goddess, Sophia, whom I equate with Gaia. This myth was the core vision taught in the Mysteries as a story-system to guide the human species. I am attempting to recover and make available this story.

I believe that the material I am developing on Metahistory.org is a clear and faithful rendition of Pagan, non-Christian Mystery teachings, and a viable reworking of the Sophianic vision of the Gnostics. Metahistory.org is a teaching site. My intention is to present a modern, upscaled version of the Gnostic vision, closely aligned to Gaia theory and deep ecology. I do not depart from the core experience of Gnosis, I point back to it.

Could you recommend any books or other resources for people who want to learn more about gnosticism?

The best introductory book on Gnosticism is The Gnostics by Jacques Lacarriere. It contains some deep and wonderful poetic insights. After that, there is The Gnostics by Tobias Churton, which only treats Gnosticism in the first three chapters, then it goes into Hermetics, Catharism, and other European underground traditions that preserve some Gnostic elements. I would also recommend Ancient Mystery Cults by Walter Burkert. The main resource I would recommend for Gnostic studies is, of course, Metahistory.org. It presents a pagan, anti-salvationist strain of Gnosticism, squarely based on Coptic sources and my lifelong research in comparative mythology and the phenomenology of religions. A “Reading Plan” for the Nag Hammadi library us in progress. Approaching Gnosticism, When the Mysteries Died, and the Introduction to the Reading Plan, are the main introductory essays on the site.

You’re working on a new book about gnosticism, is that correct? When’s it coming out, where can it be purchased? What can people expect from this book?

The working title is “Dreaming Sophia.” (Pronounced Sof-EYE-uh, to distinguish the name of the goddess from a woman’s name.) To be published by Chelsea Green, a well-known publisher of books on ecology and sustainable living, in spring next year. The book describes the massive campaign of religious, cultural, and racial genocide, perpetrated by the advocates of Roman Catholic and Protestant religion, that destroyed the wisdom of the indigenous people of Europe. It shows how, before Europeans went forth to commit genocide in the New World, they had already been devastated on their home territory by the infection of the Palestinian redeemer complex. It describes the direct experience of the Mysteries, including the initiatory secret of instruction by the Light. The book proposes how the Sophianic vision of the Gnostics might provide the religious dimension to deep ecology, aligning us to a sane path for a sustainable future.

Readers can expect to be shown that the earth and the entire non-human world have a magical and sacred value independent of human purposes, but human participation can effect the magic. It can touch the sacredness that is already there, always there.

Special thanks again to John Lash for this informative and interesting interview on Metahistory and contemporary gnostic thought.