[Prepare yourself for an interesting ride. The piece below is an extract from the upcoming wholly updated Second Edition of “The Serpent and the Cross”, which was originally published in 1994 and will be republished in its Second Edition expansion by 40% to a 960-page volume later this Summer. The piece below is extracted from Chapter 2, which is entitled “In the Wake of the Cross: Spiritual Subterfuge Post Annum Domini”. This chapter shows what developed spiritually in the religious and church scene after all the Apostles had passed away and how Satan’s defeat through Christ’s victory on the cross led to an unprecedented outbreak of spiritual opposition to the Church through both physical persecution and spiritual perversion. In particular, this chapter shows how the heresy of Gnosticism developed in the second century and engulfed the churches of the day. The extract below concentrates on that development and shows how — despite Gnosticism’s apparent disappearance in the 4th century — it was preserved in wisdom traditions and then re-emerged in an occult revival from the seventeenth century to the present day, affecting both the secular world and, in the past century and more, the visible church. This extract is 5,800 words in length and is a 30-minute read].

EARLIER IN THIS CHAPTER we examined the effect that the sinless life, sacrificial death and victorious ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ had on the work of Satan in the world. We saw that the devil has been put under severe restriction from being able to achieve his ultimate goal of complete anti-Jehovah dominion over all the kingdoms of the world — an event which he will temporarily be permitted to achieve in the Endtimes after the restraint has been removed. However, although the restraining of Satan ensured that there could not be a premature eclipse of the work of the Gospel in the world, we should not underestimate the influence which the demonic realm has been able to exert on the affairs of human history during the past two millennia. Satan’s aim in history is to have a confederated power-base among the nations of the world and, ultimately, to destroy the Church. The very existence of the Church in this world is a torment to Satan and his followers, which he is hellbent on  obliterating (cf. Revelation 11:7-10).

During the first three centuries after the victory of Christ, Satan certainly stirred up a great degree of persecution of the Church through the governing authorities under his control. However, because of the severe restriction on his activities in the present age, this had exactly the opposite effect to that which he intended. One of the great facts in Church history is that the more the Church has been persecuted, the more it has thrived. Unbelieving people who lived during the first three centuries of the Church saw the faith exercised by the saints in the face of persecution and liquidation, and their witness of this deep dedication moved them to embrace that faith for themselves. Not only did such persecution lead to the enlargement of the Church, but the Scripture shows that it actually worked to the eternal benefit of the Lord’s people (Revelation 2:10). As has been well-said: “Whatever poison Satan produces, God turns it into medicine for his elect”.

Alongside this phase of persecution during the early centuries of Church history, Satan also brought into being a form of counterfeit Christianity, known as Gnosticism, which threatened to destroy the true witness of the Church. This was Satan’s first mighty assault on Christian teaching, the primal hammer-blow in a theological battle which has never abated. The word “gnostic” is derived from the Greek word, γνωστικός, gnostikos, meaning “knowing one”, from the noun, γνῶσις, gnosis, “knowledge”. The term has come to be applied to a broad religious movement which posed a major threat to the purity of the truth in the period of the early Church.

Although there was an incipient Gnosticism around during the first century, the stream of gnosis did not become properly established until the second century, by which time Gnosticism had become the first and foremost heresy in the Christian Church. The most clearly organised systems were those of Basilides (AD 130), who claimed that his doctrine came from Peter, and Valentinus (AD 150), who claimed to have received Pauline teaching via a man named Theudas. Needless to say, their claims were totally unfounded.

“Christianity Perverted by Learning and Speculation”

A Gnostic is a person who claims to have received esoteric knowledge (gnosis) by special revelation — either through direct experience or initiation into an occult tradition — which can then be transmitted to others, through personal teaching and training, or in doctrines handed down through the workings of an initiated group or organisation. Gnosticism, as it has flowered in the Gospel Age, has been well defined as “Christianity perverted by learning and speculation” (H.M. Gwatkin, Early Church History, Macmillan, 1909, Vol. II, p.73.). As one heresiologist has put it:

“The gnostic position was a response to the widespread desire to understand the mystery of being: it offered detailed secret knowledge of the whole order of reality, claiming to know and to be able to explain things of which ordinary simple Christian faith was entirely ignorant. It divided mankind into various classes and reserved its secret wisdom for those who were recognized as belonging to the highest, most spiritual call, a religious elite. Thus, it naturally appealed to many who felt that they were above mingling with the common herd of ordinary Christians who were content with the simple Gospel” (Harold O.J. Brown, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy from the Apostles to the Present, Baker Book House, 1984, pp.39-40).

There is, however, a vast gulf between Christian truth and Gnostic knowledge. The gnostically-inclined person will always desire a “higher” form of knowledge which will tune him or her into the world of spirit. Such a person will look down his or her nose at “simple and pure devotion to Christ” and the truth of the Gospel (2 Corinthians 11:3), believing that authentic truth could not possibly be so naive and so widely attainable. The Christian Gospel is freely proclaimed to all, regardless of their class, education, intelligence quotient, financial status, and psychological condition, whereas Gnosticism always develops an elitist system.

The Gnostic views the ‘ordinary’ Christian believer as one who has merely received the outer husk of Christianity, whereas he regards the one with the ‘gnosis’ as having been endowed with something far deeper and more meaningful. Spiritual pride and elitism will always rear their ugly heads when the human being seeks spiritual knowledge and enlightenment outside of the context in which it has been ordained by God. Here we are reminded of the desire of the woman in Eden for wisdom beyond that with which she had been endowed by the Lord, at the suggestion of Satan — one of the threefold lies of the ‘Satanic Initiation’ that was exposed in detail in the first chapter of this book.

“Gnosis Puffs Up”

There are a number of indications that Paul the Apostle was aware of the religious tendency to Gnosticism, about which he warned the recipients of his letters. Writing to the Corinthians, he was especially careful to highlight the difference between forbidden gnosis and genuinely-Christian knowledge. When he tells the Christians at Corinth that “This ‘knowledge’ [Greek: gnosis] puffs up, but love [Greek: ἀγάπη, agape] builds up” (1 Corinthians 8:1), it is obvious that he is not referring to all knowledge. In fact, in another letter he makes it clear what kind of knowledge it is that should be avoided by those who would embrace true spirituality. Concluding his first letter to Timothy, the Apostle writes:

“O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid irreverent, empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called ‘knowledge’, [Greek: ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως, pseudonumou gnoseos], which some have professed and thus deviated from the faith” (1 Timothy 6:20-21).

For Paul to speak of those asserting “what is falsely called ‘knowledge’” (or ‘knowledge falsely so-called’) as having “deviated from the faith” is most appropriate. The actual words “pseudonymous gnosis” formed the basis of the title for a massive work by Irenaeus of Lyon (c. AD 130-200) entitled, “Against Heresies or A Refutation and Overthrow of Falsely Named Knowledge”, in which he exposed the deception of the many Gnostic schools of his time (This work is well worth obtaining as it constitutes an exhaustive first-hand exposé of the second century equivalent of today’s New Consciousness/Neo-Gnosticism).

There are other New Testament Scriptures which appear to take issue with incipient Gnostic teachings. In his letter to the Colossians, Paul warns against being taken in by those who have an interest in speculative and esoteric matters, who have an appearance of spirituality, but who worship angelic beings and practise asceticism (Colossians 2:18-23). In his second letter to Timothy, he speaks of a time coming when people:

“will not tolerate healthy teaching, but with itching ears they will gather around themselves teachers to suit their own desires. So, they will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths” (2 Timothy 4:3-4).

When one examines the theological systems of the Gnostics, one is certainly confronted with myths on a vast scale! Other Scriptures also appear to refer to the incipient Gnosticism of the second half of the first century. In John’s first letter, the Apostle identifies the ‘spirit of the Antichrist’ as disbelief in the fact that Jesus is the Christ and a refusal to accept the fact that He was a real man of flesh (1 John 2:22; 4:1-3; 5:1). This suggests that John was well aware of Gnostic-type doctrine when he wrote these words. Many Gnostic sects were “Docetic” (from the Greek, δοκέω, dokeo, to seem), that is, they believed that Jesus was not a real man but was a kind of spirit-entity who only appeared to be a human being. Because they believed that matter was inherently evil, they could not accept that Jesus would partake of it in the flesh. It is highly significant that the Apostle actually makes the rejection of this view a litmus test of true Christianity (1 John 4:2-3; 2:22-23). In their opposition to these Gnostic beliefs, the faithful of the early Church were laying down perennial principles for us to follow. As the ultimate snub to the Gnostic mindset, Paul said that even if people claim to understand “all mysteries and all knowledge” (Greek: γνῶσις, gnosis), this experience in itself is worthless (1 Corinthians 13:2).

The Gnostic Seeks Personal Divinity

At this point, let us discover what sort of ‘knowledge’ it is that the Gnostic is seeking. What exactly is the gnosis which forms the basis of his spiritual ambition? Occult researcher, James Webb, states that

“The Gnosis, the knowledge which ensures salvation, is the realization by man that he contains a spark of God, and of the necessity of awakening from the half-life he leads on earth — described variously as ‘numbness’, ‘sleep’, or ‘intoxication’ — to a full consciousness of his divinity and of how it has been ensnared in matter” (James Webb, The Occult Underground, Open Court, 1974, p.199). [NB: You will notice that occultists and Gnostics invariably use a capital “G” when using the word “gnosis”. That is because they are infusing it with an almost divine quality. I will not generally be capitalising that word for the opposite reason, though I will usually italicise it because it is the transliteration into English of a Greek word].

The Gnostic is, therefore, seeking a special knowledge which will bring him into an awareness of himself as God. In short, he is seeking to attain personal divinity. This idea of humans discovering their true divinity is a phenomenon which will confront us again and again in this book that you are now reading, as it constitutes one of the major components of all corrupt religious enterprise and has been so from the beginning when, as part of the ‘Satanic Initiation’, Satan told our first parents that they would be like God if they took on board that initiation. For this is the same “knowledge” which our first parents saw as having the potential to make them at least as wise as their Creator, and certainly wiser than He had originally intended (Genesis 3:4-6). In other words, having the gnosis is just another form of the Initiation which our first parents received from Satan at the dawn of history which we looked at in detail in the first chapter. Thus, in a sense, one can say that Adam and Eve were the first Gnostics! It is in Eden that the gnosis, the satanic antithesis of true knowledge, made its first entrance on the world stage, and it has haunted God’s people ever since. The Hebrew word for “wizard”, or “spiritist”, is יִדְּעֹנִי, yiddeoni, which means “knowing one” (derived from the root word, יָדַע, yada, meaning “to know”, that is, one who has secret knowledge (gnosis). The children of Israel were commanded to avoid the yiddeoni (Deuteronomy 18:10-12), just as the Christian is counselled to turn away from the gnosis which is “falsely called knowledge” (1 Timothy 6:20-21).

In support of their concept of gnosis, Gnostics will often quote Jesus as saying: “You shall know (Greek: γνώσεσθε, gnōsesthe) the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). But this is to remove these words from their context. The full quotation is prefixed by the statement “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed” and suffixed by Jesus showing that the bondage from which the Christian is removed has nothing to do with being “ensnared in matter” but is a reversal of his or her enslavement to sin (see John 8:30-35). Christian freedom is about obedience to the words of Christ and liberation from the lawlessness and lies (which include the gnosis) which Satan introduced into world history at the beginning. Christian freedom is not about techniques of consciousness-raising in order to achieve divinity but is about a relationship with a Person. When Jesus prayed, concerning His disciples, “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3), He was proclaiming a personal knowledge of the Living God in the Man, Christ Jesus. Surely, that is the greatest ‘gnosis’ one could receive — and it requires no technique, no system, and no practices in order to achieve it, but faith alone, which is a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8-9).

Cleverly Mingling Truth and Falsehood

What made the Gnostic heresy so different from other false teachings was that to the gullible and undiscerning believer, it could appear to carry more spiritual weight than the teaching of the Church of the Living God, which is “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). However, it is most important for the development of our Christian discernment to realise that Satan, rather than substituting outright falsehood for truth, has generally sought to mingle the two together in a display of deceptive harmony. As Irenaeus of Lyon wrote:

“For no false teaching desires to offer itself to our view openly, lest such exposure should lead to conviction; but, craftily putting on a plausible dress, makes itself by its outward form appear to the simpler sort to be truer than Truth itself” (Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies or A Refutation and Overthrow of what is Falsely Called Knowledge, Preface, §2).

One of the great claims of the perpetrators of early Gnosticism was that their religion was actually the true kernel of Christianity — that Jesus and the Apostles were really Gnostics upholding Gnostic ideals but whose teaching was later distorted into mere religious forms, a lifeless husk, by those who came after them. But this claim just does not stand up at a number of crucial points. Jesus predicted that the Apostles would be persecuted (Matthew 24:9; John 15:18-21), as indeed they and many others in the first two centuries were, by the Roman Empire. But if it is true that they had been Gnostics, they would have suffered no persecution at the hands of the Rome of that period, for Rome was a syncretistic dustbin for every cult with which the empire came in contact!

It was precisely because Christianity was entirely new and offered something radically different from any other form of spiritual expression in the world (which Gnosticism did not) that it was subject to so much persecuting zeal by the Roman authorities! If Christianity had been another Gnostic-style cult, it would simply have been swallowed up into the morass of syncretic Gnostic-style religion along with Valentinism and the teaching of Cerinthus and would never have been preserved through the ages. Moreover, if Jesus and the Apostles had been preaching a Gnostic gospel such as, “Tune into your divine consciousness”, or “Don’t just worship Christ, be one!”, or “The Jehovah-God of the Old Testament is not the Supreme Being”, they would have been most acceptable to the religious thought of the time and would never have been subject to persecution. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that the early Christians were persecuted precisely because they were not Gnostics!

The Gnostic — “No Longer a Christian but a Christ”

The claim that Jesus was a Gnostic-style teacher is not only held by advocates of Gnosticism today, but it is also the view of many in the field of comparative religion who contend that Jesus was associated with the incipient Gnostic sect and ascetic fraternity called the Essenes, who did not mix with those outside their communities. However, as I showed in the last section of the first chapter that the worldview of the Essenes was very different from the doctrine of Christ, and as Nesta Webster corroboratively points out in her informative work on secret societies,

“Christ did not live in a fraternity but…associated with publicans and sinners. The Essenes did not frequent the Temple, [but] Christ was there frequently. The Essenes disapproved of wine and marriage, whilst Christ sanctioned marriage by His presence at the wedding of Cana in Galilee and there turned water into wine… One of the principal traits of the Essenes which distinguished them from the other Jewish sects of their day was their disapproval of ointment, which they regarded as defiling, whilst Christ…commended the woman who brought the precious jar of ointment” (Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, Bloomfield Books, f.p. 1924, p.24).

It is not only the scholars and comparative religionists who want to fashion the Lord Jesus into a Gnostic and Christianity into Gnosticism. Even the former Beatle, rock musician and neo-Gnostic John Lennon, wearing his writer’s hat, summed up this concept in a chapter entitled “The Mysterious Smell of Roses” in his surrealist anthology, Skywriting by Word of Mouth:

“It seems to me that the only true Christians were (are?) the Gnostics, who believe in self-knowledge, i.e., becoming Christ themselves, reaching the Christ within” (John Lennon, Skywriting by Word of Mouth, Harper & Row, 1986, p.35).

In saying this, John Lennon — who, in 1966, had claimed that the Beatles “were bigger than Jesus” — was simply echoing the ancient gnostic scripture which goes by the title of the “Gospel According to Philip” (a false gospel), which includes within its pages the claim that the person who achieves “gnosis” is “no longer a Christian, but a Christ” (R. McL. Wilson, [ed.], The Gospel According to Philip, Mowbrays, 1962, 67:26-27, p.43). This is a classic Gnostic statement, suggesting that the person who has simple faith in Christ is only an ordinary boring old Christian; whereas the one who realises his or her Christ-consciousness through gnosis is in an altogether-higher class of spirituality. That has always been the appeal of Gnosticism — especially to those too sophisticated to accept the simplicity (childlikeness, ‘doveness’) of Christian faith.

The Gnostic ‘Gospels’ and ‘Epistles’

Throughout the first few centuries of the life of the Church, many Gnostic writings began to appear with titles which were very similar to those which had been written by Divine revelation. Works with names such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel According to Philip, the Epistle of Peter to Philip, the Acts of Peter, the Apocalypse of Paul, and so on, were a great confusion of the time and must have seduced many into a syncretic mix of Gnosticism and Christianity. Indeed, the proliferation of such literature being falsely ascribed to the Christian faith was a major influence encouraging the Church to finalise an authoritative ‘canon’ of New Testament Scriptures. Many New Age/neo-Gnostic people typically claim that the Bible is corrupt because books had been wrongfully excluded from it. However, the reality is that those books were deliberately and rightly excluded from the canon of Scripture because they are not only falsely attributed to Apostles but their Gnostic teachings are light years away from those found in the true biblical canon.

Some of these Gnostic writings were discovered in Egypt in 1945. Known as the Nag Hammadi Texts, they have set the comparative religion scene alight with the promise of showing that the teaching of Jesus and much of early Christianity was really a Gnostic phenomenon. In 1990, a series of programmes called “The Gnostics” was made for UK Channel Four television by the Gnostic sympathiser Tobias Churton. On the back cover of the accompanying book is written:

“The Gnostic Gospels were discovered in the sands of Upper Egypt in 1945. They comprise a golden string of secret teachings — an alternative tradition to conventional Christianity” (Tobias Churton, The Gnostics, Channel 4 with Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990, back cover).

This parading of Gnosticism as being a viable “alternative tradition to conventional Christianity” represents the wet-dream of the vast majority of teachers and academics in the comparative religion scene today. For such people, these writings appear to show that the Church can no longer lay any claim to exclusivity. The threat to the original purity of Christian doctrine by these writings was not lost on the fathers of the Church. For example, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria in North Egypt, specifically warned about bogus writings in his 39th Festal Letter to Theodore, head of the monastery at Tabinnisi, which was not too far from where the Nag Hammadi texts were found. Athanasius had himself lived among the monastic communities which were being suffused with false scriptures, and he wrote in AD 367:

“I fear lest, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, some few of the simple should be beguiled from their simplicity and purity, by the subtlety of certain men, and should afterwards read other books — those called apocryphal — led astray by the similarity of their names with the true books… Forasmuch as some have taken in hand, to reduce into order for themselves the books termed apocryphal, and to mix them up with the divinely inspired Scripture, concerning which we have been fully persuaded, as they who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, delivered to the fathers” (Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal Letter #39. See the whole thing at this link: https://ia801605.us.archive.org/23/items/FestalEpistlesOfStAthanasiusEnglishTranslation/The_festal_epistles_of_S_Athanasius_Engl-Transl_text.pdf ).

“Every Day They Invent Something New”

It is certainly no coincidence that these Gnostic works have been found in Egypt at this particular stage of world history. Such a discovery could not have occurred at a more ‘opportune’ moment in the unfolding of Satan’s assault on the Church and the building of his kingdom. In his introduction to Irenaeus’ work, “Against Heresies”, A. Cleveland Coxe stated that the principal task of Irenaeus in this great work was two-fold:

“1) To render it impossible for anyone to confound Gnosticism with Christianity, and 2) to make it impossible for such a monstrous system to surface, or ever to rise again” (A. Cleveland Coxe, “Introductory Note to Irenaeus’ Against Heresies” in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson [eds.] The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to AD 325, Eerdmans, 1977, Vol. I, p.310).

However, although Irenaeus’ work was a valiant effort which could not have been bettered at the time, it is a demonstration of the hardiness of satanic doctrine and the inherent evil of this present age that the Church has never been able to finally overthrow the Gnostic stream of religion. There are two primary reasons for this: first, the ever-ready willingness of the world to receive such doctrine; and second, its chameleon-like nature. This ability of Gnosticism to reproduce itself in an ever-multiplying array of variations has been a major key to its survival, manifesting itself according to the situation in which it flowered. This is shown in the following statement from a heresiologist of the last century:

“Two elements thus combined towards the development of the Gnostic; first, a desire to form a philosophy of Christianity; and secondly, the craving after a philosophy of religion to which Christianity and the old faiths of the world should each contribute their share of truth and theory. Hence arose three principal types of intellectual speculation, the Judaizing, the Oriental, and the Greek. All three had the common feature of eclecticism, but the eclecticism of each was influenced by local colouring; and hence the general speculative tendency which produced Gnosticism produced a Cabbalistic, a Zoroastrian, or a mythological Gnostic, according to his antecedent habits of thought and the intellectual atmosphere in which he lived” (John Henry Blunt, Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, Ecclesiastical Parties, and Schools of Religious Thought, Rivingtons, 1874, pp.176-177. This is a most interesting work and well worth obtaining).

Even in the second century, Irenæus of Lyon could claim that “every day every one of them invents something new” (Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies or A Refutation and Overthrow of what is Falsely Called Knowledge, I.18.1). In common with so many other man-made religious beliefs, Gnosticism was (and still is) a wax nose which can point in any direction. For this reason, it has never been a single identifiable religion as such — although there are certain essential features which tend to repeat themselves in whatever situation it occurs, as I will show throughout the course of this book, even in the visible church, right down to the present day.

In addition to the individual variations, Gnosticism has always been the product of wave after wave of syncretism. It is a well-documented fact that the first Gnostic sects which arose in the post-Christian Roman Empire had, as their doctrines, “an admixture of Indian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Christian creeds, astrology and magic, with much of the Jewish Kabbala also” (Leslie A. Shepard (ed.), Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, Gale Research Co., 1979, Vol.1, p.378). Another writer sums up this endemic syncretism by concurring that:

“the Gnostic systems compounded everything — oriental mythologies, astrological doctrines, Iranian theology, elements of Jewish tradition (whether biblical, rabbinical or occult), Christian-salvation eschatology, Platonic terms and concepts…” (Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press, 1963, p.25).

Gnosticism as a Manifestation of Satanic Rage

This admixture of many varieties of the ancient satanic religion was the driving force behind the Gnostic stream at the commencement of the Gospel Age. It is as if the Gnostic movement of the first and second centuries burst upon the Church as a manifestation of the rage of the defeated and thwarted Satan (Revelation 12:17). This was so marked that Church historian A.M. Renwick has noted that:

“by the beginning of the third century AD most of the intellectual Christian congregations throughout the Roman empire were to some degree affected by it” (G.W. Bromiley (ed.), The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Eerdmans, 1982, Vol.2, p.484).[Emphasis added]

That is an extraordinary revelation! Many Christians imagine that the early church was 100% kosher and utterly devoted to Christ. That was true in the time of the Acts of the Apostles, but it did not last long. Paul even predicted to the Ephesian Christians: “After my departure, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock” (Acts 20:29). This downgrade in the churches was like an infection in the midst of the people of God. If one wishes to look for a doctrine which could “seduce the elect”, one need look no further than Gnosticism. Its fundamental tenets have never had any difficulty seducing the vast numbers of professing Christians who, because of an over-reliance on human wisdom and subjective experience, find themselves unable to rest in the simplicity of the Gospel. As Robert Law puts it:

“Of all the forces with which Christianity had to do battle for its career as the universal religion — Jewish legalism, pagan superstition, Greek speculation, Roman imperialism — none, perhaps, placed it in sharper hazard than Gnosticism, that strange, obscure movement, partly intellectual, partly fanatical, which, in the second century, spread with the swiftness of an epidemic over the Church from Syria to Gaul” (Robert Law, The Tests of Life: A Study of the First Epistle of St. John, T. & T. Clark, 1909, p.26).[Emphasis added]

This veil of the gnosis over the global churches of the first two or three centuries AD should not be underestimated. As the German scholar, Professor Kurt Rudolph, notes in his authoritative study:

“The gnostic trauma of the first post-Christian centuries goes deeper than that of the bloody persecutions. One can almost say that Gnosis followed the Church like a shadow; the Church could never overcome it, its influence had gone too deep. By reason of their common history, they remain two – hostile – sisters” (Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, Harper & Row, 1987, p.368).

The Temporary ‘Disappearance’ of Gnosticism

As this book you are now reading progresses, we will come to see that the threat of Gnosticism to the purity of the Church and its epidemic proportions, are no less serious today than they were eighteen hundred years ago. However, there came a point in history when the Gnostic schools which had so widely plagued the Church in the first three centuries mysteriously disappeared from view. Concerning this phenomenon, Professor Rudolph states that:

“the beginning and end of Gnosis in late antiquity cannot be pinpointed exactly. It makes its appearance at the beginning of the Christian era and disappears again at the latest in the sixth century” (Ibid., p.367).

In fact, the bulk of these groups had disappeared between AD 300-400, although a further two hundred years were to pass before they had died away entirely. Humanly speaking, one of the primary reasons that Gnosticism disappeared from view at this time was the fact that once the Church had become intertwined with the secular ruling powers, the legal enforcement of Christianity came into being. This occurred with the professed conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in AD 312. Within a few years, decrees were issued prohibiting magic and divination (AD 318 and 320), and after AD 330, Neoplatonism fell under the same condemnation. In the Eastern Empire in AD 380-381, all non-Christian religions were outlawed by Emperor Theodosius, and it was declared illegal to depart from the Nicene Creed. This trend was soon followed in the West a couple of years later with the invasion of Italy.

With the Christian profession of Emperor Constantine, the monolithic State-Church had come into being, using every means at its disposal to repress those who would not conform to the new religious regime. However repugnant we may find such crude repression, and whether we agree or not with the “Constantine Factor” as a valid manifestation in the life of the Church in the New Covenant, the fact remains that the prevention, by the Roman authorities, of the Gnostic stream (in whatever form) from spreading across the globe gained for the Church, in the providence of God, an extra twelve hundred years during which the divinely-inspired Scriptures (and the true Gospel) could be preserved. Perhaps this intervention of the Emperor Constantine and other national leaders is part of what is being prophesied by the Apostle John when he tells us that:

“the earth helped the woman [i.e., the Church], and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood [i.e., false teachings] which the dragon had spewed out of his mouth” (Revelation 12:16).

Until the time of Constantine’s profession of Christianity, vicious persecution and doctrinal perversions of the faith had indeed been the experience of Christians throughout the empire. Suddenly all this was changed and, although there would come an increasing institutionalisation and ritualisation of Christianity, the contents of the true Scriptures could be spread throughout the world as exploration and travel opened up. Let us always remember that whatever conceits man dreams up, the Lord always turns such evil to work for the good of His people and to the glory of His holy name. It is a marvellous thing that in spite of the crass and often perverted forms in which the Bible and its Christian teachings have been introduced into many places in the world, somehow the truth has been preserved for those who have the God-given discernment to cut through the veil to the Light behind it.

However, the fading from sight of the Gnostic schools between the fourth and sixth centuries was by no means the end of the story. Although the binding of Satan meant that the major lines of his opposition to the progress of the Gospel (e.g., the various strains of Gnosticism and repressive persecution by the Roman authorities) had been severely restricted, this merely heralded a fresh initiative on Satan’s part. In the following ten chapters, I will show that the collapse of ancient Gnosticism in the third and fourth centuries and its apparent disappearance for the ensuing twelve hundred years was merely to be a lengthy hiatus while it gathered strength for a major onslaught which first emerged into the light of day in the seventeenth century, began to flower in the late eighteenth century, and eventually came to major fruition during the last four decades of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first.

As we shall come to appreciate by the conclusion of this present work, the concepts which lie at the heart of Gnosticism in all its forms — if they can be inculcated far and wide enough throughout the world — will easily fulfil all the despotic earthly ambitions of “the rulers… the authorities… the powers of this world’s darkness… the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). One of the primary theses of this book you are now reading — and one which I will repeatedly demonstrate — is that although the outward schools of the Gnostics died away between the third and sixth centuries, their doctrine was preserved by a great many individuals and monastic communities in the Middle East before being disseminated in a westward direction through various mystics and the secret teachings of a number of occult organisations — including the Jewish Kabbalah which thrived in South-Western Europe in the Middle Ages. As one researcher of occult history puts it:

“Gnosticism did not survive as organised opposition to Christianity: but Gnostic tenets were to prove among the hardest to eradicate from the ranks of heresy. Similarly, the mass of magical and debased Neo-Platonic literature like the Hermetica could be excluded from the sphere of influence of the Christian Church, but not destroyed. Among the Arabs, such traditions of thought lingered on, and were gradually re-introduced into Europe” (James Webb, The Occult Underground, Open Court, 1974, p.201).

Today, a New Gnosticism is thriving in a multitude of ways as a result of an ‘occult revival’, of which most people — especially many of those professing Christianity — are entirely unaware, not least because a part of that ‘occult revival’ has been the manifestation of it at the heart of the visible church. As we find ourselves in the twenty-first century after the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, we are living in the midst of a world-culture which is essentially Gnostic in its aims and concepts, as now are large swathes of modern churches. In the following three chapters, under the broad section heading “The Gods of the Nations: Religious Corruption in the World-System Today”, I will be uncovering this phenomenon and tracing it back through its forebears. In doing so, we will begin to understand the significance and purpose of the spiritual battle in which every man, woman and child on this planet is involved.

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© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2025
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]

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