A GUIDE FROM THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE
Ina Hicks
Gret Baumann-Jung suggests the Aquarian Age began with Russia’s first space probes. If it was earlier with the explosion of the atomic bomb, it was perfect timing for the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic texts. The earthen pots containing Gnostic writings were found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in December, 1945.
It did not take very long for the Dead Sea Scrolls to come to our attention bringing new knowledge of the Essenes. That knowledge had a strong influence on the counter-culture movement and the massive raising of consciousness regarding the importance of diet. We have not become all that capable of communal living nor all that convinced of eating whole grain and raw plants, but we have come a long way in the trying.
The journey from Nag Hammadi’s pots to easily available translations took about thirty years and again the timing was perfect. Those years were characterized by change and openings that brought increased receptivity to our minds.
I first heard of the Nag Hammadi scrolls in an article by Alex Jack in East West Journal, April, 1978. From having read The Nag Hammadi Library, Alex Jack wrote of a new way to look at the feeding of the multitudes. The nourishment came from the message Jesus brought. The two fishes were the opposing energies and Jesus was teaching the union of opposites. “Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor the evil evil, nor is life life nor death death.”1
The second teaching in the feeding of the multitudes is symbolized in the loaves of bread. The four elements are represented by grain (earth), heat for baking (fire), liquid (water), and leavening (air). The fifth and most important element is the attitude of the baker, that which is added which is of the self. I wanted to know more.
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, one of the international team translating the Coptic into today’s languages, was published in 1979. From this book I learned the Gnostic view of God the Father/God the Mother. “From the power of the Silence appeared a great power, the Mind of the Universe, which manages all things, and is a male … the other … a great Intelligence … is a female which produces all things.”2
Images from the Gnostic writings have astounding meaning for me, that I have only begun to internalize or, in some cases, have experienced before. Sethian Gnostics explain that heaven and earth have a shape similar to the womb. Last winter at Wellspring3 Raye Mathis spoke of solar wind, how a picture of the sun with its wind currents trailing behind would be egg-shaped with the solar system encased in the albumen, as it were. A protective, embracing enclosure in space or “the space vessel of lights” that Keith Kinsolving wrote of in the fall 1980 issue of Inward Light.
One short tractate found at Nag Hammadi that is not directly attributed to the Gnostics or any other group is “The Thunder, Perfect Mind.” Each reader will find a particular part of it more powerful than the rest, I suspect. For me it is:
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
Recently someone asked me the significance of Jungian psychology and Quaker religion in our Conference on Religion and Psychology. “Is there some connection between the two?” she asked. Given the insight of our blessed founders I would have to say that Gnosis is the connection. George Fox and C. G. Jung each had visions of Light within the Darkness. George Fox beseeched the clergy to tell him what they knew, not what the Bishop or the Book said. Jung worked at drawing from his clients what they knew about themselves from the unconscious. In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus is quoted, “The Kindgom is inside of you and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you will dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.” Also from the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is quoted, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
Now that I am studying The Nag Hammadi Library, I feel a growing certainty that Gnosticism was not just a rejected faction of early Christianity. It is a movement through time of a way that has touched poets and seers and those who respond to the poetry and the visions. The fecund seeds lay buried under heavy Piscean materialism until Aquarius picked up the pots.
Through Keith Kinsolving we learned at Wellspring that we are in a period of transition between Pisces and Aquarius, symbolized by a shadowy mandorla, which I see as a feminine symbol of emergence or birth. We are neither here nor there but moving, often in two directions at once, knowing on one level, doing on another, feeling stress from our inability to be what we know. If we can learn to live with this “cosmic itch” within ourselves, the unity of opposites might be nearer at hand than it ever has been.
By its nature Gnosticism seems unorganizable, an intolerable trait by Piscean standards, but by Aquarian … ?
1. The Nag Hammadi Library, James M. Robinson, Ed. N.Y. Harper and Row, 1977, p. 132.
2. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels. N.Y. Random, 1979, p. 50-51
3. Wellspring: meeting place for the Washington, D.C. regional FCRP.
East West Journal. April. 1978.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels. N.Y. Random, 1979; Vintage, 1981, paper.
James M. Robinson, Ed., The Nag Hammadi Library. N.Y. Harper and Row, 1977.
INA HICKS, member of Adelphi Meeting, is a former member of the FCRP Executive Committee, and participant in the Washington, D.C. regional conferences at Wellspring. While she continues her interest in the Gnostic Gospels and the Nag Hammadi Library, much of her time and energies are spent as a homesteader on an old farm in Maryland.