Description
Book SynopsisIn Gnostic Countercultures, fourteen scholars investigate countercultural aspects associated with the gnostic which is broadly conceived with reference to the claim to have special knowledge of the divine, which either transcends or transgresses conventional religious knowledge. The papers explore the concept of the gnostic in Western culture from the ancient world to the modern New Age.
Table of ContentsContents Introduction Part 1: Antiquity The Countercultural Gnostic: Turning the World Upside Down and Inside Out April D. DeConick “I Turned away from the Temple”: Sethian Counterculture in the Apocryphon of John Grant Adamson Transgressing Boundaries: Plotinus and the Gnostics John D. Turner Forbidden Knowledge: Cognitive Transgression and “Ascent Above Intellect” in the Debate Between Plotinus and the Gnostics Zeke Mazur The Apocalypse of Paul (NHC V,2): Cosmology, Anthropology, and Ethics Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta Gnosis Undomesticated: Archon-Seduction, Demon Sex, and Sodomites in the Paraphrase of Shem (NHC VII,1) Dylan M. Burns Gnostic Self-Deification: The Case of Simon of Samaria M. David Litwa Demon est Deus Inversus: Honoring the Daemonic in Iamblichean Theurgy Gregory Shaw The Coming of the Star-Child: The Reception of the Revelation of the Magi in New Age Religious Thought and Ufology Brent Landau Part 2: Modernity The Great God Pan Sarah Iles Johnston Alan Moore’s Promethea: Countercultural Gnosis and the End of the World Wouter J. Hanegraaff Children of the Light: Gnostic Fiction and Gnostic Practice in Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy Victoria Nelson Symbolic Loss, Memory, and Modernization in the Reception of Gnosticism Matthew J. Dillon Gnostic and Countercultural Elements in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Hoodoo in America” Margarita Simon Guillory Index 317
