The Gnostics by Sean Martin

Like "romantic", "surreal", "existential" and "post-modern", "Gnostic" and "gnosticism" are by now almost practically useless terms, applied to so many things in so many contexts that it's difficult to pin a specific meaning to them. In the case of the Gnostics proper - the early Christian sects - this may not be a bad thing. As Sean Martin points out, they were accused by the growing Christian orthodoxy of writing "a new gospel every day". Martin himself, however, often applies Gnostic where "gnostic" would better suit, and doesn't really specify the difference between the two. Gnostic refers to the several groups historically placed in the first and second centuries, following Christ's crucifixion; "gnostic" indicates a sensibility shared by a variety of figures up to the present day. Given the constraints of producing a brief, readable and stimulating book about a complex subject, which Martin does, it's understandable that the distinction would get blurred. But if you're talking about a world view including early Christian cults, medieval heretics, Jungian psychology, Philip K Dick, The Matrix and Tori Amos, it helps to know when we mean direct contact, and when similarities and parallels.

Gnostic comes from gnosis, Greek for "knowledge", and this is what separated the early Christian Gnostics from what became the official church. Where the church followers had faith in Christ, the Gnostics had direct knowledge of him - or, to be more precise, shared the experience of spiritual awakening that led to becoming equal with Christ. Other differences, such as taking the gospels metaphorically, rejecting the crucifixion, believing Jehovah was an idiot tinker who created a false world, and admiring biblical villains such as Cain and Judas, set them apart from the burgeoning mainstream. For a religion organising itself into an hierarchical authority, such free-form spirituality was threatening, and the Gnostics were, predictably, stamped out. The fact that they were pro-feminine didn't help either. Yet their sensibility remained a powerful if subterranean influence in Western culture and, as Martin points out, in recent times has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence. Hence, the widespread use of the term.

For a long time, what was known about the Gnostics came from the anti-Gnostic propaganda cranked out by the church. Then in 1945, the Nag Hammadi texts were found in a jar in Egypt. They had been buried for centuries, and their discovery was little short of a revelation, radically altering the picture of the early days of Christianity. Perhaps most illuminating was "The Gospel of Thomas", which provides a verbatim record of Christ's teaching. With gnomic aphorisms like "If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you", he sounds more like a Zen roshi than a disaffected rabbi. The beautiful and poetic "Thunder: Perfect Mind" evidences the authority the feminine voice had among the Gnostics; the woman speaker declares "I am the first and the last. I am the honoured and the scorned. I am the whore and the holy..." This last paradoxical remark reminds us that one of the earliest Gnostics, Simon Magus, bad boy of the Bible, discovered Sophia, wisdom, embodied in Helen, whom he met in a brothel in Tyre. Subversion of the norm wasn't absent among these deep thinkers.

Martin presents good accounts of the central ideas of important Gnostic figures, such as Basilides of Alexandria, and Valentinus who almost became Pope - one wonders what the history of Christianity would have been like if he had - and he deftly distils the often bewildering cosmologies of the different Gnostic creation myths into digestible summaries. Some of his linkages, though, made me hesitate, and would, I think, have profited from a tighter use of Gnostic in the "strong" sense. For example, as he says, Hermeticism shares several themes with Gnosticism, but it's also very different. Importantly, it doesn't see existence as a "trap" from which we must "escape", an idea common in Gnosticism, giving it an air of spiritual paranoia. Mentioning Yeats' involvement in the "Gnostically inclined Order of the Golden Dawn", Martin strangely excises "Hermetic" from the society's title. There are other omissions. Novelists such as Hermann Hesse and films like The Truman Show are rightly included, but absent is the most gnostic work of fiction in the 20th century, David Lindsay's fantasy masterpiece A Voyage to Arcturus. And why no mention of G I Gurdjieff, whose teaching is based on the very Gnostic idea that we are asleep, living in a dream world?

Space limitations, of course; the book is a Pocket Essential and I was left wishing Martin had more room to manoeuvre. Most likely he did as well. Yet these points aside, anyone wishing to be in the know - and what Gnostic doesn't? - can get a good start from this well written, informative account.