The Gnostic religion features a Divine (pre-human) Fall, like the vessel-breaking in Kabbala, like symmetry breaking in the early Big Bang, in contrast to the Judeo- Christian human Fall in Eden. Yet they all start with a primeval Golden Age before the Fall into Kali Yuga. In Greek mythology too, the reign of Saturn preceded the reign of Jupiter. (I do not apologize for the mixing of religious traditions. It is deliberate, to foster super-ecumenism and reconcile religion and science.)

Another relevant metaphor: The broken mirror carried by angels who dropped it; a splinter got into little Kay’s eye, making him follow the Snow Queen into the frozen desert, away from Gerda, and unable to spell “Eternity” with ice blocks, until Gerda came, made him cry, and washed the glass fragment from his eye. (This also features Redemption from the Fall.)

The book by Stuart Holroyd “The Elements of Gnosticism” cites other relevant stories: Goethe’s story about Faust, who is alternately exalted in seeking knowledge (gnosis) and sinking to grossly immoral conduct (seduction and murder), but is finally saved from surrendering his soul to Mephistopheles through the entreaties of the very girl he had seduced and who had suffered as a result, Gretchen. (Is it a coincidence that Gerda and Gretchen are similar names?)

Holroyd also cites the story of captain Ahab in Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick”. Ahab pursued the white whale, which personified for him the basic evil of the world, until Ahab himself and his boat were destroyed.

While the gnostic philosophy also resonates with certain aspects of Carl Jung’s depth psychology, as well as Kierkegaard’s and Sartre’s existentialism, yet I think that Gnosticism is fundamentally wrong in its most important view: I would hold that this universe, this earth, this flesh is not evil, it is wonderful, the very abode of God Immanent. If God Immanent, the GoDdess of Nature and of Life, the Eternal Tao, is the Demiurge, I will still worship Him/Her. Sophia made no mistake in producing the Demiurge; she was Wisdom Herself. I should call myself an anti-gnostic (not agnostic).

A passage from Holroyd’s book (pp. 12-13), citing Carl Jung’s “Seven Sermons to the Dead”, shows why: “The created world is the differentiated world, as distinct from the world of sameness of the Pleroma. Man discriminates qualities in the Pleroma which are really projections from his own being. Differentiations between light and dark, energy and matter, time and space, good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, and so forth, are cancelled out in the Pleroma, but in human beings they are active.”

This makes it clear that the Pleroma, the Divine realm of the Godhead and the Aeons, is equivalent to the equilibrium state, from which life and the living world deliberately deviate. I much prefer the multicolored rainbow to the White Hole of pure but immovable Being.

Yet I feel in touch with the Collective Unconscious and its numinous heroes and demons.