“Who were the Gnostics? Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, most of our knowledge about them came from prejudiced sources, the church fathers who railed against and condemned them as the first “heretics”, a word that derives from the Greek hairetikos, which means “able to choose.” Heretics are those who choose something other than the received church dogma. What the Gnostics chose was gnosis over belief and experience over faith.”
―Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Image: Damnation by Daniel Valaisis

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.”
― Robert Jordan

Image: The Path of Daggers by Darrell K Sweet

“Yaldabaoth himself chose a certain man named Abraham…and made a covenant with him that if his seed would continue to serve him he would give to him the earth as an inheritance. Later through Moses, he brought forth from Egypt the descendants of Abraham, gave them the law, and made them Jews.”
―Irenaeus, Against Heresies: On the Section & Overthrow of the So-Called Gnostics, 120 AD

Notes: Due to the Abrahamic eradication of the mysteries until the discovery of the Library of Nag Hammadi in 1945, Against Heresies was the best surviving denoscription of Gnosticism despite it being the case of the prosecution. In the passage above; the Abrahamic deity, Yahweh, is identified as being the Lord Archon Yaldabaoth; a delusional extraterrestrial entity who believes he created all that he beholds. By pointing out this fact and the nature of the Mosaic covenant in which the Earth is promised as an ‘inheritance' we can begin to see why these teachings were annihilated.

Image: Moses receives Commandments by Giora Eshkol

"The university intellectuals play an important role in carrying out the System's trick. Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated, the most pampered, dependent, and spineless group today. As a result, their impulse to rebel is particularly strong. But, because they are incapable of independent thought, real rebellion is impossible for them. Consequently, they are suckers for the System's trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System's basic values."
—Ted Kaczynski

Image: Jordan Peterson, Lobster Dominance Hierarchy by Skai

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
― H.L. Mencken

Image: Sick Media by Bob Moran

"The majority of men ‘without religion’ still hold to pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies. There is nothing surprising in this, for, as we saw, profane man is the descendant of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history—that is, the behavior of his religious ancestors which has made him what he is today. This is all the more true because a great part of his existence is fed by impulses that come to him from the depths of his being, from the zone that has been called the "unconscious," A purely rational man is an abstraction; he is never found in real life. Every human being is made up at once of his conscious activity and his irrational experiences.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

Image: Sacred Love and Profane Love by Giovanni Baglione

“A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed. If it works, that is, if it forces us to change our minds and hearts, gives us new hope, and compels us to live more fully, it is a valid myth. Mythology will only transform us if we follow its directives. A myth is essentially a guide; it tells us what we must do in order to live more richly. If we do not apply it to our own situation and make the myth a reality in our own lives, it will remain as incomprehensible and remote as the rules of a board game, which often seem confusing and boring until we start to play.”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

Image: Lawrence Alma-Tadema by A Reading from Homer

“Tolerance is a precious human attribute, and no society can survive without it. But what happens when tolerance allows intolerance? Pondering this question may yield some insight into how it was possible for the Pagan world, where tolerance was everywhere the norm, to be destroyed by a relatively small number of adherents of a novel and utterly intolerant creed.”
― John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

Image: Saint Paul and the burning of pagan books at Ephesus by Lucio Massari

“In the absence of The King the Warrior becomes a mercenary, the Magician becomes a sophist (able to argue any position and believing in none), and the Lover becomes an addict.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

Image: King Leoric by Richi Marella

“They began the year with December 25, the day we now celebrate as Christmas; and the very night to which we attach special sanctity they designated by the heathen mothers’ night — a name bestowed, I suspect, on account of the ceremonies they performed while watching this night through.”
― Saint Bede, The Reckoning of Time

Notes: We are somehow supposed to believe that these prior pagan celebrations falling on the exact same day (now shifted over the centuries) as the birth of the Hebrew ‘messiah’ is simply a ‘coincidence’ rather than evidence to suggest the dating of Christmas (by Pope Julius I in the 4th century) was decided upon largely for Machiavellian reasons. The Church decided it would be easier to convert Pagans in Europe through a process of co-opting and gradual assimilation leading them away from Paganism by reinventing their customs as Christian ones.

For more information on ‘Christmas Before Christ’, check out this excellent video by Fortress of Lugh.

Image: Yule Spirits by Sam Flegal

“Pope Gregory I (in 601) laid the church’s strategy out quite plainly. As he wrote to Mellitus, his missionary in England, “[Do] not…stop such ancient pagan festivities…adapt them to the rites of the Church, only changing the reason of them from a heathen to a Christian impulse.”
― David Kyle Johnson, The Myths That Stole Christmas: Seven Misconceptions That hijacked the Holiday

Image: Pope Saint Gregory I by Mattia Preti

“To those Romans December twenty-fifth was the birthday of the sun. They wrote that in gold letters in their calendar. Every year about that time, the middle of winter, the sun was born once more and it was going to put an end to the darkness and misery of winter. So they had a great feast, with presents and dolls for everybody, and the best day of all was December twenty-fifth. That feast, they would tell you, was thousands of years old- before Christ was ever heard of.”
― John G. Jackson, Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth

Image: The Chariot of Apollo or Phoebus-Apollo by Gustave Moreau

"Oh, Greatest Of Kings, indulge me in this friendly Christmas game. Let whichever of your knights is boldest of blood and wildest of heart step forth, take up arms, and try with honor to land a blow against me. Whomsoever nicks me shall lay claim to this, my arm. It's glory and riches shall be thine. But thy champ must bind himself to this. Should he land a blow, then one year and Yuletide hence, he must seek me out yonder, to the Green Chapel six nights to the North. He shall find me there, and bend the knee, and let me strike him in return. Be it a scratch on the cheek, or a cut on the throat, I will return what was given to me, and then in trust and friendship we shall part. Who, then, who is willing to engage with me?"
― Anon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Image: The Green Knight by Herbert Cole

"When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealise those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain."
―Richard Wagner

Image: Parsifal by Jean Delville

“The misleading effect of books like George Orwell's 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, 1951

Image: 1984 by Jonathan Burton

“I believe that as we look toward the end of this century (20th), this Grail mystery will become more important in public awareness, becoming identified with the living esoteric body of the Earth planet itself.”
― Adam McLean, Alchemical Transmutation in History and Symbol, At the Table of the Grail

Image: The Round Table experiences a vision of the Holy Grail by Évrard d'Espinques (c. 1475)

Additional notes on Gnosticism and the Mystery of the Grail

Gnosticism and the Mystery of the Grail

The Grail mystery is often falsely placed inside a heavily Christianised framework. However, the myth itself can be said to have been Christianised rather than beginning as a Christian myth. Julius Evola in his book ‘The Mystery of the Grail’ is clear that The Grail is not a Christian story but a Hyperborean mystery that deals with an initiatory rite.

The Grail myth has been influenced by a range of sources; Christian legend (at least in the later period), Celtic folklore and the eleventh book of Apuleius's Metamorphosis (which describes ‘the opening of the way’ in the Isis Mystery), as well as the Corpus Hermeticum. The myths cited origins range from the Western world to the Islamic and Persian East.

One thing appears to be certain; the myth of the Grail does not deal with mere fantasies in a purely aesthetic-poetic sense.

Within the myth, it is always men who go off in search of the Grail, because women, by nature, already possess it. Therefore in all versions of the myth women are referred to as carriers of the Grail.

Within Gnosticism, the Grail myth serves a unique purpose removed from the relic-oriented Christianised mythos which frames The Grail as a physical object to seek for in the exterior world. The Gnostic understanding also rejects the Jungian psychological analysis of the myth in which The Grail is simply a psychological state that must be discovered within. Gnosticism while rejecting both of these premises actually fuses these concepts together. The Grail is very much a physical object and a necessary psychological transfiguration is required to encounter it yet it is purely neither one nor the other.

Joseph Campbell said that the Grail Legend presents, “the earliest definition of secular mythology that is today the guiding spiritual force of the European West” (Creative Mythology, p.564). As the West can be said to determine the fate of the global community this also then applies to the entire planet. Given its great importance, I highly recommend you familiarise yourself with this text; I recommend the Wolfram von Eschenbach edition translated by Cyril Edwards.

The Grail is a vast topic that I intend to cover in more detail, hopefully, this serves as a taster to excite the imagination for the new year ahead.

Happy New Year one and all.

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“In Wolfram's story of Parzival, the Grail Castle is situated in the Wasteland, la Terre Gaste. This is a powerful metaphor for modern Western culture with its dead-end narcissism, going hand in hand with the wholesale devastation of the natural world. In Where the Wasteland Ends, Theodore Roszak applied the same metaphor in his lucid critique of "how the urban-industrial revolution generated an artificial environment, and what style of politics and consciousness has followed from that environment." Artificial is the operative word here. The Wasteland of the 12th Century was not, of course, the one we are facing today, within and without. In that time and setting, the artificial environment was the lifestyle of the top stratum of the feudal hierarchy, the Nobility.”
― John Lamb Lash, An Alternative History of the Grail

Image: Lohengrin, The Swan Knight by Ernst Fuchs

“The waking share a common world; sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into a darkness of their own.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

Image: Consumption by Miko Maciaszek

“Observe the persistence, in mankind’s mythologies, of the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us. The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense—not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing—that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek—which is yours for the taking.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Image: Mercury by Nick Gaetano

“It is undeniable that the political influence of the Church has been harnessed on almost every occasion to be used against the traditionalist worldview, whether by supporting mass migration or providing aid to peoples far beyond our shores. The reason for this is that, at the heart of modern Christianity, the doctrine of universalism has been placed on a pedestal above all other values; and universalism is in actuality simply a euphemism for the total equality for which atheism advocates. It is for this reason that flocking back to our local Church will neither enlighten us nor shield us from the ravages of modernity; it will merely grant legitimacy to another tainted, destructive force and add voices to the deafening chorus demanding more equality, more nothingness.”
― Veiko Hessler

Image: Christ Washing Peter’s Feet by Ford Madox Brown