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STRANGE FIRE: FREE SAMPLE
"Now Aaron's sons (entered the Tabernacle)... and they offered a strange
fire to the Lord, such as the Lord had not commanded them. And fire came
out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them and they died before
the Lord."
Leviticus 10:1-3
Like the sons of Aaron, there have always been those whose spiritual quest has
taken them outside the bounds of conventional religion. Strange Fire is a
journal for those who follow that path no matter where it leads - be it the
extradimensional spaces of the Cthulhu mythos, the sweetly decaying depths of
Gothic culture, or the cutting edge of Modern Magick. Follow the fire... if
you dare.
--
Strange Fire is available in a subscriber-only area on our web pages.
Subscribers may access this material through passwords supplied in our
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Introduction to The Book of Eight Aeons
by Dennis Stevens
Gnosticism belongs to a class of words, like "Spirituality" and
"Truth" that are often used but rarely well defined. This is hardly
new; until the discovery of actual Gnostic texts in 1945 in Egypt, the only
source of knowledge about the Gnostics came from those orthodox Church
Fathers who fulminated against their Gnostic opponents. Writers such as
Irenaeus occasionally dropped tantalizing quotes and clues of what these
mysterious, early sects believed Even after these heretical movements which
flourished in 1st-3rd centuries CE had (apparently) been destroyed,
replaced by what we know today as Roman Catholicism, various new Gnostic
sects continued to survive into the Middle Ages, such as the Cathars and
Bogomils. Like other suppressed groups in history, enough is known to make
educated guesses as to what they did and thought, but enough gaps exist
that many people can project on to them their own agendas.
The picture is only made more unclear by the plethora of different
Gnostic sects which apparently existed. However, they all share
certain characteristics which allows them to be grouped together.
Gnostic beliefs centered around the idea that the perceptible,
material world is in some sense inherently "bad". Many Gnostic texts
tell the story that the Creator of our world- identified at times with the
God of the Old Testament - is not the ultimate deity but an impostor, an
inferior being who either split off from ultimate reality, called the
Pleroma (the "Fullness", or "Completeness"). This being, called by Gnostics
the Demiurge or Craftsman, created a fallen world in an flawed attempt to
imitate the true God of the Pleroma. The exact myth varies widely according
to different texts, and thus there are many different reasons given as to
how such a state of affairs could come to pass. In some stories the Pleroma
consists of various levels of reality, which are
describedanthropomorphically. The lowest level is Sophia, Wisdom. She tries
to imitate the highest level, which produces each level below it. However,
she does not possess this power, and can only create misshapen creature,
the Demiurge. This creature is ignorant of its own origin, and believes it
to be the only being in existence. It then repeats its' mother's mistake
and creates the material realm including human beings. Sophia takes pity on
humanity and sends her spirit forth into Adam and Eve, the first humans.