The Gnostic Gospels

By Elaine H. Pagels
1979; Vintage Books/Random House; 182 pages
ISBN 0-679-72453-2

I wasn't seeking religious enlightenment when I started reading this book. I bought it mainly because I'm interested in archaeology and history. But I got much more than I bargained for.

First, as to the archaeology and history which so intrigued me: in 1945 an Egyptian peasant discovered a jar buried in the desert near the town of Naj Hammadi. In it were 13 papyrus books, bound in leather. Sold on the black market through antiquities dealers in Cairo, some were eventually acquired by a Dutch biblical scholar. The first line he translated was: "These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down." 

He recognized this as the first line of the Secret Gospel of Thomas. Written by a gnostic Christian sect in the second century AD, this was one of many texts that early church leaders excluded from the New Testament. As Pagels put it:

"What we call Christianity – and what we identify as Christian tradition – actually represents only a small selection of specific sources, chosen from among dozens of others. Who made that selection, and for what reasons? Why were these other writings excluded and banned as 'heresy'?"

Pagels makes a convincing argument that what we know as Christianity was influenced not only by competing religious beliefs, but also by church politics in the first two centuries AD. What follows is a summary of Pagels' key ideas.

The roots of this conflict lay in disagreements over the nature of the creator, and how one gains  access to the supreme being. Some of the gnostic Christians who wrote these gospels believed that the self and the divine were identical. They believed that to know oneself at the deepest level is simultaneously to know God. 

The gnostic Christians believed in a supreme being who started the process of creation - brought the universe into existence out of nothingness. But they also believed that a lesser and imperfect divine being, the demiurge, took what the supreme being created and fashioned it into the form and substance of the universe - an artisan god, if you will. Since the demiurge was not perfect, this explained why the universe is not perfect.

Gnostics believed that orthodox Christians were mistakenly worshipping the demiurge, believing it to be supreme being. They also believed that the bishops and priests of the established church understood only the elementary doctrines. The gnostic Christians claimed to offer access to secret mysteries and higher teachings, which came from the supreme being. 

Thus, for the gnostics, the established church could not be the ultimate religious authority. The individual gnostic did not need the established church hierarchy in order to attain self-knowledge, and thereby to know God.  

This brought the gnostic Christians into conflict with the orthodox church, which insisted that there is only one God. Orthodox Christians believed their church's legitimacy came directly from the 12 apostles, who had direct contact with Jesus during his lifetime.  The apostles' successors, and the inheritors of their authority, were the bishops, priests and deacons of the established church. Therefore, according to orthodox church thought, theirs was the one true faith, and none could come to the father except through Jesus, who died to save the world from sin and thereby redeem all believers.

In contrast, gnostic Christians viewed Jesus as a spiritual instructor who came from the supreme being to show the path to God, which proceeded through self-knowledge. Once the individual had attained this gnosis (usually translated as "knowledge"),  Jesus was no longer the instructor, but an equal.

For these reasons, gnostic Christian beliefs represented a threat to both the doctrine and the authority and hierarchy of the established church at Rome. That, Pagels says, is probably why the gnostic gospels were called heresy, suppressed, and excluded from the New Testament.

I was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church. But I have never been a person of faith, because the church's concept of God has internal contradictions that I can't accept. I cannot accept the idea of a creator, king of the universe, who loves us but also stands ready to judge each and every one of us for doing or thinking the wrong things. I can't bring myself to believe that a supreme being with the power to create all things visible and invisible would also watch us and insist that we worship and obey him. But to this reader, what Pagels has written is nuanced and acceptable. History is written by the victors. Christianity is a doctrine shaped by the victors in a dispute over fundamental matters of theology. The gnostic scriptures put the early church in a less than divine light. 

Further Reading

The New York Times, June 14, 2003 - The Heresy That Saved A Skeptic (interview with Pagels)

Gnosis.org -  The Gnostic World View: A Brief Summary of Gnosticism 

The Catholic Encyclopedia - Gnosticism

Wikipedia - Catharism (two Gods, one good and the other evil)

The Internet Classics Archive - Timaeus, by Plato (demiurge as a craftsman who created the visible and tangible world as a model of something greater)

Bitches Crystal

I've long thought that "Bitches Crystal" is one of the best tracks on Emerson Lake & Palmer's 1971 LP Tarkus.  It has the familiar ELP formula, with a brisk tempo, a genre-bending piano solo, cool washes of synthesizer and interesting lyrics. It's hard to forget a line like "Heretic priestess dwells on the weakness she sees."

Heady stuff. But there are several issues here. First of all, the title: is there an apostrophe missing? Shouldn't the title be Bitch's Crystal or Bitches' Crystal?

And, as with Karn Evil 9, we face the old problem: what do the lyrics (written by Greg Lake) mean - if anything?

Bitches crystal notes how you twist all the lines
Fortune teller, future seller of time 

Chorus:
Tortured spirits cry
Fear is in their eyes
Ghostly images die 

Witch's potion mixed in the ocean of tears
Mystical powers emerge from the towers of fear
[Chorus]  

Evil learning, people burning
Savage blasting, no one lasting
Witchcraft, sadness, madness turn in their minds 

Ritual killings that swear in the [shillings?] to be
Heretic priestess dwells on the weakness she sees
[Chorus]

Groping for meaning, it occurred to me that the lyrics could be describing television. The bitch’s crystal is your television set. The song describes the programs shown thereon. When you turn off the set, “ghostly images die.”

But this is tortured reasoning. We must accept the possibility that the lyrics have no deeper meaning. Perhaps this is just a song about a witch looking into her crystal ball, the spells she casts, and the images she sees.  Or perhaps these are merely clever phrases strung together in free association, a loosely connected series of cool-sounding words that rhyme and fit the song's cadence, like some Moody Blues tunes.

That may be how the song actually came to be. But I have imagined a scenario that is much more satisfying. It's an extension of an experience I had some years ago at a late-night street fair in Las Vegas.

It was well after midnight, and the crowd was thinning out. The only street performer that interested me was a woman dressed like a gypsy, standing beside a cleverly painted gypsy wagon. She was darkly handsome, and looked haughty and cruel, and rather dangerous as well. Inside the wagon, I could see a small table and two chairs.  Stay away, my inner voice told me.

But had I entered that wagon, what might the fortune teller have seen in her bitch's crystal? She would be a heretic priestess that dwells on the weakness she sees. Her words would be dark and disturbing, foretelling suffering and a frustrated life of thwarted plans which never come to fruition.  In her crystal ball tortured spirits cry, fear in their eyes. Then the ghostly images die, and darkness overcomes me. I awake in an alley, with my watch and wallet missing and a pounding headache from the witch's potion (mixed in an ocean of tears) she slipped into my drink. Before the sun comes up, I stagger home and write the lyrics to Bitches Crystal.

There is in fact a gypsy fortune teller in Las Vegas on Fremont Street. I never went into the wagon, so most of this never happened. If you don't like this fevered fantasy, I challenge you to submit a better one.

Further Reading:

• Wikipedia - Tarkus
• Tarkus page on Emerson Lake & Palmer web site
• Discogs - Tarkus