The north-London based Canonbury Masonic Research Centre was established to encourage scholarship on the symbolic expression of the sacred, and matters related to Freemasonry. This year’s conference concerned Gnosticism, a term that derives from the Greek word gnosis - meaning knowledge, although not the sort that could be acquired through intellectual study. Gnosis referred to an intuitive or mystical form of knowledge that allowed a special insight into the mysteries of matters spiritual thereby assisting Man in his quest for redemption.
    Classically, the term Gnostic is taken to denote a group of Christian sects which flourished from the second to the fourth centuries A.D., sects that combined Judeo- Christian ideas with those of Platonic, Egyptian and Hermetic philosophies; although it should be stressed that gnosticism was not an exclusively Christian phenomenon. The Gnostic world view was essentially dualist, that is, they perceived the spiritual or good world as separate from the material world which they believed was the work of a lesser or malevolent creative force - the demiurge. For the Christian Gnostics, such beliefs inevitably set them on a collision course with what later became orthodox Christianity, not least because some believed that Christ was a spiritual being - the quintessence of good and therefore he could not have been crucified. Not surprisingly, the Rome-centred Church branded Gnosticism a heresy and as a result, many writings and practices were suppressed.
    Until relatively recently, scholars who wanted to study Gnosticism had to content themselves with working on texts which were predominantly anti-Gnostic critiques. However, in December 1945 all that changed when two brothers discovered a number of ancient papyri – thirteen Gnostic codices written in Coptic comprising some of the earliest Christian writings ever discovered - not far from the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. After a series of trials and tribulations, these ancient texts were finally translated into English during the 1970s, by a team of more than forty scholars. The project was supported by UNESCO and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, and it was led by one of the key speakers of this year’s Canonbury conference, James M. Robinson, Emeritus Professor of Claremont Graduate University, California.
    Intriguingly, the subject of Professor Robinson’s talk was on the recent discovery of another Gnostic text, the Gospel of Judas, which is of a similar age and provenance to those found at Nag Hammadi. Written around the middle of the second century, it was discovered in central Egypt around 1980, but it only gained public attention in April 2006, when it was the subject of a documentary produced by the National Geographic television channel. As Professor Robinson explained, the Gospel of Judas is a Sethian Gnostic text, which is the branch of gnosticism most prevalent in the Nag Hammadi collection, and it presents Judas as one of Jesus’ most trusted disciples, who was privy to an inner, esoteric teaching, not given to the rest of the apostles. As such, Judas is depicted as the only apostle who possessed the ‘hidden Gnostic knowledge’, a figure who was supposed to betray the bodily Jesus to the Romans so that his master’s imprisoned spirit could be freed.
    Robert Gilbert, a past master of Quatuor Coronati Research Lodge, spoke about how the word ‘Gnostic’ has, since the early nineteenth century, often been used in a loose and pejorative way, so as to bring together a wide range of eclectic and unorthodox beliefs. He noted that this had usually been done by those eager to defend more traditional forms of Christianity, and that it was only in the last two decades that a precise definition of the word has been sought.
    Dr. Madeleine Scopello, a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, who also worked on the English translation of the Nag Hammadi codices, then spoke on a particular aspect of the texts. Dr. Scopello highlighted how several of the Gnostic texts pay particular attention to the symbol of the Temple as an allegorical symbol of the soul – a theme that is especially relevant to modern Freemasonry. And she also pointed out that these trends of interpretation are not confined to Christian Gnosticism, as they find more than an echo in Jewish pseudopigrapha, the speculations of Philo of Alexandria, and the Dead Sea Scrolls which were found just two years after the discovery at Nag Hammadi.
    Philip Davies, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield and one of the world’s leading authorities on the Dead Sea Scrolls, also endorsed this view. In a paper read in his absence by John Wade of the University of Sheffield, he pointed out how most scholars have tended to view Gnosticism as an exclusively Christian phenomenon, the result being, they have ‘overlooked’ the possible existence of a Jewish Gnostic tradition. He argued that if one examines the scrolls in the context of what is now known about the contemporary religious rituals, there is ‘quite clear evidence’ that shows a Jewish Gnosticism did exist, and this tradition may well lie at the root of the Judeo-Christian mystical tradition itself.
    Bearing this intriguing possibility in mind, it was interesting to listen to Roelof van den Broek, Emeritus Professor at the University of Utrecht, who gave an elucidatory address on two distinct forms of hermetic initiation as described in both the Greek and Coptic Gnostic sources. These sources, he stated, clearly speak about the aspirant undergoing the experience of being deified, and he dismissed the idea that these descriptions of spiritual transformation were simply a literary phenomenon. On the contrary, they appear to reflect a process of spiritual transformation that had ‘a lasting influence on the recipient’s personality’.
    Dr. Peter Forshaw of Birkbeck College, London University, then spoke on the influence of the Corpus Hermeticum on renaissance and early-modern Europe. These works had a tremendous influence on thinkers who were keen to rediscover the lost wisdom of antiquity, figures such as the alchemist and revolutionary physician, Paracelsus. And although Dr. Forshaw stressed that these Hermetic texts were not strictly gnostic, he explained that this did not prevent their detractors from accusing of being so.
    Several of the weekend’s presentations also expounded on the theme of mysticism in general. Richard Crane, of Quatuor Coronati Research Lodge, spoke on the tripartite nature of the Christian mystical experience: the purgative, the illuminative and the unitive life, before comparing it to Sufism – the mystical side of Islam. The author Colin Wilson, who first rose to prominence in the 1950s with his bestseller, The Outsider, spoke about the importance of religious ritual for a healthy civilisation and he argued that it was perfectly designed to help individuals achieve what the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, called – ‘peak experiences’. And in a similar vein, Dr. Leon Schlamm, a lecturer at the University of Kent, questioned whether the pioneering psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, was either a Gnostic or a Kabbalist. As he pointed out, Jung did not like to be pigeon-holed and merely confessed to a non-partisan approach to the subjects he studied. Nevertheless, Dr Schlamm highlighted key aspects of Jung’s work that, post-1945, betray the tell-tale signs of Kabbalistic influence.
    Three speakers also dealt directly with the theme of Freemasonry. Tobias Churton, Hon. Fellow of Exeter University, writer, filmmaker, and founding Editor of Freemasonry Today, examined whether Freemasonry was in fact gnostic. After pointing out that several early eighteenth-century Freemasons joined lodges in the hope that they might experience a remnant of the ancient mystery schools, he concluded that ‘Freemasonry was, and is, a gnostic tradition’. Roger Dachez, a University lecturer, Director of the French masonic review Renaissance Traditionnelle, and President of the Masonic Institute of France, also delivered a fascinating presentation on ‘Martinism and Freemasonry in France since Papus’ time’.
    Papus, alias Gerard Encausse (1865-1916), was a Theosophist and occult revivalist who, together with his friend Stanislaus de Guaita (1867-1897), founded a new kind of ‘super-masonry’ based on the teachings of the eighteenth century mystic and mason, Louis-Claude de Saint Martin (1743-1803). As Dr. Dachez explained, several orders are still very active in France and a sizeable number of Freemasons are also Martinists although there is no official link between the two orders.
    But of all the weekend’s talks, the paper presented by Thierry Zarcone, Professor at the CNRS, Paris, was, for me, the most poignant. In a well-illustrated presentation on ‘Gnostic and Sufi symbols and ideas in Turkish and Persian Freemasonry’, Professor Zarcone cast valuable light on the little-known interaction between Freemasonry and Islamic Sufi orders during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Freemasonry was accepted into the Ottoman Empire as the equivalent of an Islamic Sufi society and it was seen as having particular similarities to the Bektashi Sufi order. In fact, the phrase ‘masonic rite’ was translated as ‘Sufi path’: the ‘Ancient and Accepted Rite’ became the ‘Ancient and Accepted Sufi Path’ - a path which in Sufism had seven stages. Professor Zarcone revealed a truly ‘esoteric Freemasonry’ that appears to have existed in both Turkey and Iran; a Freemasonry which, in his own words, ‘was concerned with Gnosticism, mysticism and Hermetism’.
    It was a fitting way to show how an ancient tradition is still of profound relevance to our modern world.

© Matthew Scanlan