The Secret Doctrine of Anahuac 

CHAPTER X

GNOSTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

In view of the fact that Gnostic Studies have progressed extraordinarily in recent years, no knowledgeable person of today will fall into the simplistic error, as in the past, of maintaining that Gnostic currents arise from some exclusive spiritual latitude.  Although it is true that we must take into account the Eastern Hellenistic elements in any Gnostic system, including those of Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, India, Palestine, Egypt, etc., we should never ignore the Gnostic principles perceptible in the sublime Indo-American religious cults of the Nahuas, Toltecs, Aztecs, Zapotecs, Mayas, Chibchas, Incas, Quechuas, etc. 

Speaking frankly and getting right to the point we will say that Gnosis is a very natural functionalism of the consciousness, a “philosophia perennis et universalis”.  Unquestionably, Gnosis is the enlightened knowledge of the divine mysteries reserved for an elite.

Contained within the grammatical structure of the word “Gnosticism” is the idea of systems or currents dedicated to the study of Gnosis.  This Gnosticism implies a series of clear, coherent and precise basic elements that are verifiable through direct mystical experience: the Curse from a scientific and philosophical point of view; the Adam and Eve of the Hebraic Genesis; the original sin and the departure from Paradise; the mystery of the Nahua Lucifer; the death of the Myself; the creative Powers; the essence of the Salvator Salvandus; the sexual mysteries; the inner Christ; the fiery serpent of our magical powers; the descent into the infernos; the return to Eden; and the gift of Mephistopheles. Only Gnostic doctrines that imply the ontological, theological and anthropological foundations cited above are part of authentic Gnosticism.

“Pre-gnostic” is that which shows in a concrete, clear and specific form some trait that in a certain way can be detected in Gnostic systems but integrated in a conception altogether outside of revolutionary Gnosticism.  It is thought that is not, and yet is, Gnostic.  “Proto-gnostic” is what every Gnostic system is in an incipient and germinal state; movements directed by a very similar attitude to that which characterizes defined Gnostic currents.  The adjective “gnostic” can and even must be intelligently applied as much to conceptions that in one form or another are related with Gnosis, as it is to Gnosticism. The term “gnosticizing” is unquestionably very near in meaning to “pre-gnostic”, since the word really is sensu strictu related with intrinsic aspects that possess a certain similarity to Universal Gnosticism, but integrated in a current not defined as Gnosis.

Having firmly established these semantic clarifications, let’s move on now to define Gnosticism with full, complete clarity.

It is not superfluous in this treatise to emphatically clarify that Gnosticism is a very intimate, natural and profound religious process. It is authentic, essential esotericism, unfolding from moment to moment with very particular mystical experiences, with its own doctrine and rites. It is extraordinary doctrine that fundamentally adopts mystical and sometimes mythological form. It is ineffable magical liturgy with living instruction for the superlative consciousness of the Being.

Without question, Gnostic knowledge always escapes the normal analysis of subjective rationalism. The correlate of this knowledge is the Being, the infinite innermost part of a person. The reason for being of the Being is Being itself. The Being can only be known to itself. The Being, therefore, knows itself in Gnosis.

The Being revaluating itself and knowing itself is Self-Gnosis.  Without a doubt, this in itself is Gnosis.  The self-knowledge of the Being is a suprarational movement that depends on Him, and that has nothing to do with intellectualism. The abyss that exists between the Being and the Ego is impassable and for this reason the Pneuma, the Spirit, recognizes itself and this self-recognition is an autonomous act for which the intellectual mammal’s subjective reasoning is inefficient, insufficient, and terribly poor.

Self-knowledge, Self-Gnosis, implies the annihilation of the ego as a previous, urgent and undelayable work. The self, the ego, is made up of additions and subtractions of subjective, inhuman and bestial elements that unquestionably have a beginning and an end. The Essence, the consciousness, stuffed into, bottled up in, immersed within the different elements that constitute the “myself”, the ego, unfortunately is painfully processed by virtue of its own conditioning. When the ego is dissolved, the Essence, the Consciousness, awakens, is enlightened, is liberated. Then, as a consequence or corollary, comes Self-Knowledge, Self-Gnosis.

Legitimate revelation undoubtedly has its irrefutable, indisputable foundations in Self-Gnosis. Gnostic revelation is always immediate, direct and intuitive. It radically excludes intellectual operations of a subjective kind and it has nothing to do with the experience and assemblage of basically sensorial data.  Intelligence or Nous in its gnoseological sense, although it can indeed serve as a basis for enlightened intellection, roundly rejects falling into vain intellectualism. The ontological, pneumatic and spiritual characteristics of Nous (Intelligence) are clear and evident. In the name of truth, I solemnly declare that the Being is the only real existence, before whose ineffable and terribly divine transparence that which we call I, ego, “myself”, “oneself”, is merely outer darkness, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Self-gnosis or the self-gnostic recognition of the Being, given the anthropological aspect of the Pneuma or Spirit, turns out to be something decidedly savioristic.

To know oneself is to have achieved identification with one’s own divine Being. Knowing oneself to be identical with one’s own Pneuma or Spirit, directly experiencing the identification between the known and the knower, is that which we can and should define as Self-Gnosis. Clearly, this extraordinary unveiling invites us to die in ourselves in order for the Being to manifest in us. On the other hand, to move away from the Being, continuing as ego within the heresy of separateness, means condemning oneself to the submerged involution of the infernal worlds.

This evident reflection brings us to the theme of the Gnostic “free election.” Serious Gnostics are unquestionably an a posteriori elect.

The Gnostic experience permits sincere devotees to know themselves and to completely self-realize. Understand that self-realization means the harmonious development of all of the infinite human possibilities. It is not about capriciously shared intellectual data, nor is it about mere insubstantial wordiness of ambiguous chatter. Translate everything we are saying in these paragraphs as authentic, lived, real experience.

The orthodox dogma of predetermination, which will lamentably bottle us up in the narrow conception of the anthropomorphic Deity, does not exist in Gnostic currents. 

In Greek, God is Theos, in Latin, Deus, and in Sanskrit Div or Deva, this word that is translated as “Angel” or “Angels”. Even among the most conservative Semitic peoples, El or Ilu, the most ancient God of Light, appears in the first chapters of Genesis in its synthetic plural form of Elohim. God is not any particular human or divine individual, God is Gods. He is the Army of the Voice, the Great Word, the Word of the Gospel of St. John, the Creator Logos, multiple perfect Unity. To know oneself and realize oneself in the horizon of infinite possibilities implies the entrance or readmission to the creative Host of the Elohim.  And this is the surety of the Gnostic: that the Being has been fully discovered and its marvelous splendors radically destroy every illusion.

All things soteriological are included in the opening of the “Pneuma,” or divine Spirit of man. If we still possess the Gnosis of the archaic great Mysteries, it is because some very holy men, due to their loyalty to the doctrine, were able to draw near to the revelatory dynamism of the Being.

The rigorous study of the diverse anthropological pieces of the cultures of the Aztecs, Toltecs, Mayans, Egyptians, etc., would be something more than impossible without any previous information about Gnostic anthropology. When it comes to secular anthropology—please excuse the comparison—if one wants to know what the results will be, give a monkey, simian, chimp or ape the full run of a laboratory and observe what happens.

The Mexican codices, Egyptian papyruses, Assyrian clay tablets, Dead Sea scrolls and strange parchments, just like certain very ancient temples, sacred monoliths, old hieroglyphics, pyramids, millenary sepulchers, etc., offer in their symbolic depth a Gnostic sense that definitively escapes literal interpretation and that has never had an explanatory value of an exclusively intellectual nature. Instead of enriching Gnostic language, speculative rationalism lamentably impoverishes it, since Gnostic stories, written or allegorized in any artistic form, are always oriented toward the Being. And it is in this most interesting semi-philosophical and semi-mythological language of Gnosis that a series of extraordinary constants are presented, symbols with a transcendental esoteric depth that, in silence, speak volumes.

Both Divinity and humanity well know that silence is the eloquence of wisdom.

The following are the traits that clearly specify the Gnostic myth and mutually complement each other:

1. Supreme Divinity; 2. Emanation and pleromatic fall; 3. Demiurge Architect; 4. Pneuma in the world; 5. Dualism; 6. Savior; 7. Return.

The Gnostic Supreme Divinity can be characterized as Agnostos Theos, absolute abstract Space. It is the nameless or unknown God, the One Reality from which the Elohim emanate at the dawn of any universal Creation. Remember that Paranishpanna is the Summum Bonum, the Absolute, and therefore, the same as Paranirvana. Later, everything that seems to exist in this Universe will come to have real existence in the state of Paranishpanna.

Without question, the faculties of human cognition could never go beyond the cosmic empire of the Male-Female Logos, the Demiurge creator, the Army of the Voice (the Word). Jah-Hovah, the secret Father-Mother of each one of us, is the real Jehovah. As a Hebrew letter, Jod is the membrum virile, the masculine principle. Eve, Heve, Eva, the same as Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth and the Olympic bride of Hercules, is the Yoni, the divine Chalice, the Eternal Feminine. The divine Rabbi of Galilee, instead of worshipping the anthropomorphic Jehovah of the Jews, adored his divine Male-Female (Jah-Hovah), the inner Father-Mother. The Blessed One, crucified on the Mount of Calvary, cried out with a great voice, saying, “My Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Ram-Io, Isis, his Divine Mother Kundalini, accompanied him on his Via Crucis.

The first God or Gods of all nations are androgynous. Given that they considered their distant ancestors, their predecessors of double sex, as Divine Beings and holy Gods, the same as the Chinese do today; it couldn’t be any other way.

In effect, the artificial conception of an anthropomorphic, exclusivist Jehovah--independent of His own work, seated there above on his throne of tyranny and despotism, hurling thunder and lightning against this sad human swarm--is the result of ignorance, mere intellectual idolatry. This erroneous conception of Truth has unfortunately taken possession as much of western philosophy as it has of religion affiliated to any sect that is completely devoid of Gnostic elements. It is not the unknown God, One and always present in nature, or in nature in abscondito, that Gnostics of all times have rejected, but the God of orthodox dogma, the frightful, vengeful deity of the law of talion (eye for eye and tooth for tooth).

The Absolute Abstract Space, the Unknowable God, is neither a limitless void nor a conditioned fullness, but both at the same time. The Gnostic esotericist accepts revelation as coming from divine Beings, manifested lives, but never from the unmanifestable One Life. The unknowable Deity is the Absolute Abstract Space, the rootless root of all that was, is or will be. This infinite and eternal Cause is, needless to say, devoid of any type of attributes. It is negative light, negative existence; it is outside the reach of all thought or speculation. The Valentinian Gnostic myth, which in a specific way shows us the thirty pleromatic aeons mysteriously arising from within the Absolute Abstract Space through successive emanations and orders in perfect pairs, can and must serve as an archetype model of a monistic myth that is found to be present in a more or less manifest form in every defined Gnostic system.

This transcendental point of the probolé is classically oriented toward the ternary division of the divine: the Agnostos Theos (the Absolute), the Demiurge, the Pro-Father, etc. The divine world, the glorious sphere of the Pleroma, arose directly from the negative Light, from negative Existence.

Finally, Nous, Spirit or Pneuma, contains in itself infinite possibilities susceptible to unfolding during manifestation.

Within the extraordinary boundaries of philosophy’s Being and non Being, the multiplicity or fall has been produced. The Gnostic myth of the fall of Sophia (Divine Wisdom) solemnly allegorizes this terrible disorder in the heart of the Pleroma. Desire, fornication, the desire to stand out as Ego, originates misfortune and disorder. It produces an adulterated work that unquestionably remains outside of the sphere of the Divine, even though the Essence, the Buddhatta, the psychic matter of the human creature remains trapped in that adulterated work. The impulse towards the unity of life free in its movement can be diverted towards the I, and forge in that separation a world of complete bitterness.

The fall of the degenerated human being is the foundation of the theology of all ancient nations. According to Philo the Pythagorean (5th century B.C.), the ancient philosophers said that the psychic material, the Essence, was interred in the Ego as if in a tomb, as punishment for some sin. Plato also testifies to this, that such was the doctrine of the Orphites and that he himself professed it.

Boundless desire, the alteration of the system of emanation, leads to failure. The desire to be distinguished as Ego always gives rise to the disorder and fall of any angelic rebellion.

The Author of the world of forms is, then, a mystical group of Male-Female creators or double Gods such as Tlaloc, the god of rain and lightning, and his jade-skirted wife Chalchiutlicue of the pantheons of the Maya, Aztecs, Olmecs, Zapotecs, etc., etc.

In the word “Elohim” we find a transcendental key that invites us to reflection. Elohim is certainly translated as “God” in the different authorized and revised versions of the Bible. It is an incontrovertible fact, not just from the esoteric point of view but from the linguistic as well, that the term Elohim is a feminine name with a plural masculine ending. In a strict sense, the correct translation of the name Elohim is “Gods and Goddesses.”

“And the spirit of the masculine and feminine principles moved on the face of deep and creation took place.”

Unquestionably, a religion without goddesses is halfway to complete atheism. If we truly want perfect equilibrium of psychological life we must worship Elohim (the gods and goddesses of the ancient times) and not the anthropomorphic Jehovah rejected by the great Kabir Jesus. The idolatrous worship of the anthropomorphic Jehovah instead of Elohim is certainly a powerful obstruction to the achievement of supernormal conscious states.

As Gnostic anthropologists, instead of laughing skeptically—as the secular anthropologists do—before the representations of Gods and Goddesses of the diverse pantheons of the Aztecs, Mayans, Olmecs, Toltecs, Chibchas, Druids, Egyptians, Hindus, Chaldeans, Phoenicians, Mesopotamians, Persians, Romans, Tibetans, etc., we fall prostrate at the feet of those Divinities, because we recognize in them the creator Elohim of the universe. “He who laughs at what he does not know is on the way to being a fool.”

The aberration of the Creator Demiurge, the antithesis, what is fatal, is the inclination towards egoism, the real origin of so much bitterness. Undoubtedly, the egoical consciousness identifies with Jahvé who, according to Saturnine of Antioch, is a fallen Angel, the genie of evil.

The Essence, the Consciousness bottled in the Ego, is painfully processed in time by virtue of its own conditioning. The situation, certainly not very pleasant, incessantly repeated in Gnostic stories of the Pneuma cruelly submitted to the powers of the law, the world and the abyss, is too obvious as to insist on it here. The disconcerting weakness and powerlessness of the poor intellectual mammal mistakenly called man is evident when he wants to raise himself from the mud of the earth without the help of the Divine.

There is a common proverb in these parts that goes like this: "A Dios rogando y con el mazo dando" [most often translated as “God helps those who help themselves”].  Only the imperishable, fiery Ray, contained in the dark, formless and frigid substance, can reduce the psychological Ego to cosmic dust in order to liberate the Consciousness, the Essence. With fervent words we declare this: Only the divine Breath can reincorporate us into the Truth. Nonetheless, this is only possible on the basis of conscious works and voluntary sufferings.

The specific possession of Gnosis is always accompanied by a certain attitude of estrangement or alienness in the face of this mayavic, illusory world.  Authentic Gnostics want a definitive change. They feel intimately the secret impulses of the Being and from this comes their anguish, rejection and embarrassment in the face of the diverse inhuman elements that make up the Ego.  Those who long to lose themselves in the Being carry condemnation and fright in the face of the horrors of the myself.  To contemplate oneself as one moment of the totality is to know oneself to be infinite and to reject with all the forces of the Being the nauseating egoism of separateness.

Two psychological states are opened to the defined Gnostic:

0. That of the Being; transparent, crystalline, impersonal, real and true; 
0. That of the Ego, a conjunction of psychic aggregates personifying defects whose only reason for existence is ignorance.

Higher Self and lower self are nothing but two sections of the same thing, distinct aspects of the myself, varied facets of the infernal.  The sinister, left-hand and tenebrous higher, middle or lower self is then the continuous addition, subtraction and multiplication of inhuman psychic aggregates.  The so-called Higher Self is most certainly a ruse of the myself, a very subtle form of self-deception, an intellectual scheme of the Ego that searches for escapes in order to continue existing.

The Ego is a horrifying book of many volumes, the result of innumerable yesterdays, a fatal knot that must be untied. Egoical self-praise, the worship of the Ego, the overestimation of the myself, is paranoia, idolatry of the worst kind. Gnosis is revelation or unveiling, refined aspiration, conceptual synthesis, maximum achievements.

As much in essence as in accident, Gnosis and grace are clearly phenomonologically identifiable.  Without divine grace, without the extraordinary aid of the sacred Breath, Self-Gnosis, the intimate Self-realization of the Being, would turn out to be something more than impossible.

Self-salvation is what is needed and this demands full identification of what saves and what is saved. The Divine, which lives in the depth of the soul, the authentic and legitimate cognizant faculty, annihilates the Ego and absorbs the Essence in its paropsia and, in total illumination, saves it. This is the theme of the Salvator Salvandus.

The Gnostics that have been saved from the waters have closed the cycles of endless bitterness, have crossed the barrier that separates the ineffable field of the Pleroma from the ineffable regions of the universe, have valiantly escaped from the Empire of the Demiurge because they have reduced the Ego to cosmic dust.

The passage through the different worlds, the successive annihilation of the inhuman elements, affirms this reincorporation into the sacred Absolute Sun, and then, having become tremendously divine creations, we pass beyond good and evil.