Sacred Texts  Gnosticism 

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The Gnostics and Their Remains by Charles William King [1887]

In the mid-19th century, eighty years before the chance discovery of a treasure trove of Gnostic manuscripts in a dump in Egypt, C.W. King collected what was known about the Gnostics in this book. At that time there were only three sources of information on Gnosticism: polemics against them by early Christian writers, the Pistis Sophia, and a jumble of confusing images and cryptic inscriptions on Roman-era gems and amulets.

In spite of all of the missing jigsaw pieces, King managed to assemble a picture of the Gnostics which is still cited today as authoritative. Rather than one monolithic group, the Gnostics had very diverse beliefs. Some thought that Jesus was a man, while others thought that he was a God, and some believed that he became a God only after he was baptized. Some believed in a struggle between good and evil, others were non-dualistic. Most had widely-varying intricate systems of intermediaries between the ultimate deity and humanity. On the face of it, this looks polytheistic, but instead was an attempt to solve the problem of how a perfect God could create an imperfect world. Many of these Aeons later became the demons and angels of Medieval and Renaissance magic.

King seeks links to Gnostic symbols and beliefs far afield, from India, to the Templars, Rosicrucians and Illuminati. He discusses Mithra and Serapis worship, and gives many examples of Roman and Greek magical spells and talismans. He discusses the fudged birthdate of Jesus, Masons' marks, and Simon Magus. The book is a fascinating tour of hidden knowledge.

Production Notes: This text uses Unicode extensively, so you should consult the sacred-texts Unicode help page if the Greek and Hebrew text in this text is not displayed correctly in your browser. There are many quotations of Greek and Latin text from inscriptions. These are printed in a non-serif font in the book; in this etext, these are displayed in a bold font. These quotations contain unusual letters, particularly hooked upsilons and lunate omegas, sigmas and epsilons. Because Unicode currently lacks some of the required alternate capital Greek letters, I have inserted image files of these letters instead. Note that these will not scale accordingly if you increase the size of the font, and will create spurious word breaks. In the final part of the book, there were no sub-sections. To break up this long part of the book into files, I have inserted logical sub-section headings. As usual, these are in green type.

--J. B. Hare, 5/28/2006

Part I. Gnosticism and its Sources

Part II. The Worship of Mithras and Serapis

Part III. Abraxas, Abraxaster, And Abraxoid Gems

Part IV. The Figured Monuments of Gnosticism

Part V. Templars, Rosicrucians, Freemasons

Description of the Plates