Philip K. Dick’s Alien God of Anarcho-Gnosticism

Gnosticism is, in a sense, a tradition of anti-tradition and, historically, a collection of loosely encamped seekers and syncretic movements stemming from the early Christian era and drawing upon Hellenic, Jewish, Persian, and Eastern religious currents. A major question in scholarly research is the qualification of Gnosticism as either an interreligious phenomenon or as an independent religion. Scholars have acknowledged the influence of sources such as Hellenistic Judaism and Platonism, and some have noted possible links to Buddhism and Hinduism. In that regard, the gnostic thread has much in common with the recent culture of New Age spirituality. New Age is another term that has become largely amorphous but, in my view, can be defined very simply as a radically ecumenical late-twentieth and early twenty-first culture of therapeutic spirituality. The variants of New Age spirituality, which include mystical, psycho-spiritual, and physical methods, are, in many ways, indirect but not wholly unaligned descendants of late-ancient gnostic attitudes and thought.

Gnosticism is a collection of ancient religious ideas and systems which originated in the first century AD. These various groups, labeled "gnostics" by their opponents, emphasised personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) over orthodox teachings, traditions, and ecclesiastical authority. They considered the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the supreme divinity, experienced as intuitive or esoteric insight. Generally, Gnostic cosmogony presents a distinction between a supreme, transcendent God and a blind, evil demiurge responsible for creating the material universe, thereby trapping the divine spark within matter. Many Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance, but with illusion and enlightenment.

Philo Judaeus wrote that God created and governed the world through mediators. Logos is the chief among them, the next to God. Logos is immaterial, an adequate image of God, his shadow, his firstborn son. Being the mind of the Eternal, Logos is imperishable. He is neither uncreated as God is, nor created as men are, but occupies a middle position. He has no autonomous power, only an entrusted one. 

Philo was the first philosopher who attempted to reconcile Biblical religion with Greek philosophy. It was Philo who introduced the concept of logos. His purpose was to overcome the disparity between a totally infinite God’s and a totally finite universe. He accomplished this by declaring that God’s infinite will does not act directly but instead indirectly through an intermediary - the logos. In other words, the logos is the creative power that brings spontaneous order to the world. 

Philo used philosophical allegory to harmonize Jewish scripture, mainly the Torah, with Greek philosophy. His method followed the practices of both Jewish exegesis and Stoic philosophy. His allegorical exegesis was important for some Christian Church Fathers. He adopted allegorical instead of literal interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. Some scholars hold that his concept of the Logos as God's creative principle influenced early Christology. 

Philo's allegorical interpretation of scripture allows him to grapple with morally disturbing events and impose a cohesive explanation of stories. Specifically, Philo interprets the characters of the Bible as aspects of the human being, and the stories of the Bible as episodes from universal human experience. For example, Adam represents the mind and Eve the senses. Noah represents tranquility, a stage of "relative" incomplete but progressing righteousness.

Philo probably was the first philosopher who identified Plato's Ideas with Creator's thoughts. These thoughts make the contents of Logos; they were the seals for making sensual things during world creation. An architect's design before the construction of a city serves to Philo as another simile of Logos. Since creation, Logos binds things together. As the receptacle and holder of ideas, Logos is distinct from the material world. At the same time, Logos pervades the world, supporting it. Logos has the function of an advocate on behalf of humanity and also that of a God's envoy to the world. He puts human minds in order. The right reason is an infallible law, the source of any other laws.

The term Logos was widely used in the Greco-Roman culture and in Judaism. Through most schools of Greek philosophy, this term was used to designate a rational, intelligent and thus vivifying principle of the universe. This principle was deduced from an understanding of the universe as a living reality and by comparing it to a living creature.

Philo made a synthesis of the two systems and attempted to explain Hebrew thought in terms of Greek philosophy by introducing the Stoic concept of the Logos into Judaism. In the process the Logos became transformed from a metaphysical entity into an extension of a divine and transcendental anthropomorphic being and mediator between God and men.

In certain places in his writings Philo accepts the Stoic theory of the immanent Logos as the power or Law binding the opposites in the universe and mediating between them, and directing the world. For example, Philo envisions that the world is suspended in a vacuum and asks, how is it that the world does not fall down since it is not held by any solid thing. Philo then gives the answer that the Logos extending himself from the center to its bounds and from its extremities to the center again, runs nature's course joining and binding fast all its parts.

The Logos, mediating between God and the world, is neither uncreated as God nor created as men. So in Philo's view the Father is the Supreme Being and the Logos, as his chief messenger, stands between Creator and creature. The Logos is an ambassador and suppliant, neither unbegotten nor begotten.

The Stoics spoke of the logos spermatikos (the generative principle of the Universe) which foreshadows related concepts in Neoplatonism. Stoic philosophy began with Zeno of Citium c. 300 BC, in which the logos was the active reason pervading and animating the Universe. It was conceived as material and is usually identified with God or Nature. The Stoics also referred to the seminal logos ("logos spermatikos"), or the law of generation in the Universe, which was the principle of the active reason working in inanimate matter. Humans, too, each possess a portion of the divine logos.

The Stoics took all activity to imply a logos or spiritual principle. As the operative principle of the world, the logos was anima mundi to them, a concept which later influenced Philo of Alexandria, although he derived the contents of the term from Plato.

Philo, a Hellenized Jew, used the term logos to mean an intermediary divine being. Philo followed the Platonic distinction between imperfect matter and perfect Form, and therefore intermediary beings were necessary to bridge the enormous gap between God and the material world. The logos was the highest of these intermediary beings, and was called by Philo "the first-born of God". Philo also wrote that "the Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated".

Plato's Theory of Forms was located within the logos, but the logos also acted on behalf of God in the physical world. In particular, the Angel of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was identified with the logos by Philo, who also said that the logos was God's instrument in the creation of the Universe. The Gospel of John identifies Jesus as the Logos. 

Marcion was an important figure in early Christianity. Marcion preached that the god who sent Jesus into the world was a different, higher deity than the creator god of Judaism. Marcion concluded that many of the teachings of Jesus were incompatible with the actions of Yahweh, the belligerent god of the Hebrew Bible. Marcion responded by developing a ditheistic system of belief around the year 144. This notion of two gods—a higher transcendent one and a lower world creator and ruler—allowed Marcion to reconcile his perceived contradictions between Christian Old Covenant theology and the Gospel message proclaimed by the New Testament.

According to Marcion, the god of the Old Testament, whom he called the Demiurge, the creator of the material universe, is a jealous tribal deity of the Jews, whose law represents legalistic reciprocal justice and who punishes mankind for its sins through suffering and death. In contrast, the God that Jesus professed is an altogether different being, a universal God of compassion and love who looks upon humanity with benevolence and mercy. Marcion also produced a book titled Antitheses, which is no longer extant, contrasting the Demiurge of the Old Testament with the Heavenly Father of the New Testament.

However, Marcionism conceptualizes God in a way which cannot be reconciled with broader Gnostic thought. For Gnostics, some human beings are born with a small piece of God's soul lodged within their spirit (akin to the notion of a Divine Spark). God is thus intimately connected to and part of his creation. Salvation lies in turning away from the physical world (which Gnostics regard as an illusion) and embracing the godlike qualities within oneself. Marcion, by contrast, held that the Heavenly Father (the father of Jesus Christ) was an utterly alien god; he had no part in making the world, nor any connection with it. Although this ultimately aligns with the Unknowable God of anarcho-gnosticism. 

In Gnosticism and other Western mystical traditions, the divine spark is the portion of God that resides within each human being. In these theologies, the purpose of life is to enable the Divine Spark to be released from its captivity in matter and reestablish its connection with or simply return to God who is perceived as being the source of the Divine Light. In the Gnostic Christian tradition, Christ is seen as a wholly divine being which has taken human form in order to lead humanity back to the Light. This idea expressed most powerfully in the opening words of the Gospel of St John.

Marcionites held that the God of the Hebrew Bible was inconsistent, jealous, wrathful and genocidal, and that the material world he created was defective, a place of suffering; the God who made such a world is a bungling or malicious demiurge. Marcion called the Heavenly Father God, the Stranger God, or the Alien God, in some translations, as this deity had not had any previous interactions with the world, and was wholly unknown. This is also a reference to the Unknown God of Hellenism based on the Christian Apostle Paul's Areopagus speech in Acts 17:23, that in addition to the twelve main gods and the innumerable lesser deities, ancient Greeks worshipped a deity they called "Agnostos Theos", that is: "Unknown God.” Because the Jewish God could not be named, it is possible that Paul's Athenian listeners would have considered his God to be "the unknown god par excellence".

In gnosticism, Sophia is a feminine figure, analogous to the human soul but also simultaneously one of the feminine aspects of God. Gnostics held that she was the syzygy (female twin divine Aeon) of Jesus (i.e. the Bride of Christ), and Holy Spirit of the Trinity. In the Nag Hammadi texts, Sophia is the lowest Aeon, or anthropic expression of the emanation of the light of God. She is considered to have fallen from grace in some way, in so doing creating or helping to create the material world.

Almost all Gnostic systems of the Syrian or Egyptian type taught that the universe began with an original, unknowable God, referred to as the Parent or Bythos, or as the Monad by Monoimus. From this initial unitary beginning, the One spontaneously emanated further Aeons, being pairs of progressively 'lesser' beings in sequence. Together with the source from which they emanate they form the Pleroma, or fullness, of God, and thus should not be seen as distinct from the divine, but symbolic abstractions of the divine nature. The transition from the immaterial to the material, from the noumenal to the sensible, is brought about by a flaw or a passion in one of the Aeons- which is Sophia.

In most versions of the Gnostic mythos, it is Sophia who brings about this instability in the Pleroma, in turn bringing about the creation of materiality. According to some Gnostic texts, the crisis occurs as a result of Sophia trying to emanate without her syzygy or, in another tradition, because she tries to breach the barrier between herself and the unknowable Bythos. After cataclysmically falling from the Pleroma, Sophia's fear and anguish of losing her life (just as she lost the light of the One) causes confusion and longing to return to it. Because of these longings, matter and soul accidentally come into existence. The creation of the Demiurge (also known as Yaldabaoth) is also a mistake made during this exile. The Demiurge proceeds to create the physical world in which we live, ignorant of Sophia, who nevertheless manages to infuse some spiritual spark or pneuma into his creation.

In the Pistis Sophia, Christ or Logos, the paired aeon to Sophia is sent from the Godhead in order to bring Sophia back into the fullness (Pleroma). Christ enables her to again see the light, bringing her knowledge of the spirit. Christ is then sent to earth in the form of the human Jesus to give humans the Gnosis needed to rescue themselves from the physical world and return to the spiritual world. In Gnosticism, the Gospel story of Jesus is itself allegorical: it is the Outer Mystery, used as an introduction to Gnosis, rather than it being literally true in a historical context. For the Gnostics, the drama of the redemption of the Sophia through Christ or the Logos is the central drama of the universe. The Sophia resides in all of us as the Divine Spark.

But whereas, according to the Platonic philosophy, fallen souls still retain a remembrance of their lost home, this notion was preserved in another form in Gnostic circles. It was taught that the souls, having lost the remembrance of their heavenly derivation, required to become once more partakers of Gnosis, or knowledge of their own God-like essence, in order to make a return to the realm of light. In the impartation of this Gnosis consists the redemption brought and vouchsafed by Christ to souls. But the various fortunes of such souls were wont to be contemplated in those of Sophia, and so it was taught that the Sophia also needed the redemption wrought by Christ, and will, at the end of the world's development, be again brought back to her long lost home, the Upper Pleroma, into which this mother will find an entrance along with all souls her children, and there, in the heavenly bridal chamber, celebrate the marriage feast of eternity.

Sophia’s mistake formed the lower world and the production of its rulers the Archons; and along with this they also ascribed to her the preservation and propagation of the spiritual seed or Divine Spark. Archons are, in Gnosticism, the Demiurge and the daimons subordinate to the Demiurge. Among the Archontics, Ophites, Sethians and in the writings of Nag Hammadi library, the archons are rulers, each related to one of seven planets; they prevent souls from leaving the material realm.

Probably originally referring to the Greek daimons of the planets, in Gnosticism they became the demonic rulers of the material world, each associated with a different celestial sphere. As rulers over the material world, they are called Archons (“principalities" or "rulers"). As with ancient astronomy, which thought of a sphere of fixed stars, above the spheres of the seven planets, beyond the spheres of the Archons, there were the supercelestial regions which a soul must reach by gnosis to escape the dominion of the Archons. This place is thought of as the abode of Sophia. Thus by way of the Logos, the Divine Spark of our souls left by Sophia is able to overthrow the Archons and reunite with the Cosmic Consciousness. 

The months of February and March of 1974 (also known as 2-3-74) was a period in which a dose of sodium pentathol led to Philip K. Dick’s 8,000-page “Exegesis.” So, what is the nature of the true reality that Dick claims to have intuited during psychedelic visions of 2-3-74? In the very first lines of “Exegesis” Dick writes, “We see the Logos addressing the many living entities.” Logos is an important concept that litters the pages of “Exegesis.” It is a word with a wide variety of meaning in ancient Greek, one of which is indeed “word.” It can also mean speech, reason, or giving an account of something. For Heraclitus, to whom Dick frequently refers, logos is the universal law that governs the cosmos of which most human beings are somnolently ignorant. But the core of Philip K. Dick’s vision is Gnostical: it is the mystical intellection, at its highest moment a fusion with a transmundane or alien God who is identified with logos and who can communicate with human beings in the form of a ray of light or, in Dick’s case, hallucinatory visions.

Christianity, lest it be forgotten, is a metaphysical monism where it is the obligation of every Christian to love every aspect of creation because it is the work of God. Evil is nothing substantial because if it were it would have to be caused by God, who is by definition good. Against this, Gnosticism declares a radical dualism between the false God who created this world – who is usually called the “demiurge” – and the true God who is unknown and alien to this world. But for the Gnostic, evil is substantial and its evidence is the world.

The novelty of Dick’s Gnosticism is that the divine is alleged to communicate with us through information. This is a persistent theme in Dick, and he refers to the universe as information and even Christ as information. Such information has a kind of electrostatic life connected to the theory of what he calls orthogonal time. The latter is rich and strange idea of time that is completely at odds with the standard, linear conception, which goes back to Aristotle, as a sequence of now-points extending from the future through the present and into the past. Dick explains orthogonal time as a circle that contains everything rather than a line both of whose ends disappear in infinity. 

“The Gnostic Religion” by Hans Jonas played a large inspiration for Philip K. Dick. Jonas shows the force and persistence — both historical and conceptual — of the idea of enlightenment by the ray of divine light, the mystical gnosis theou (knowledge of God, a Gnostic doctrine), the direct beholding of the divine reality. The core of Gnosticism is this direct contact with the divine, which itself divinizes the soul and allows it to see the vile world for what it is: nothing. At the core of Gnosticism, for Jonas, is an experience of nihilism, namely that the phenomenal world is nothing and the true world is nothing to be seen phenomenally but requires the divine illumination that is reserved for the enlightened. 

The core of the heresy of Gnosticism consists in the denial of original sin: sin does not lie within us but within the world, which is not the creation of the true God but of the malevolent demiurge, whom St. Paul calls in one quasi-gnostical moment “the God of this world.” Therefore, we must see through the evil illusion of this world to the true world of the alien God. The phenomenal world is the creation of a bad God and governed over by those agents of the demiurge that the gnostics called the “archons,” the rulers or governors, those whom Dick ominously calls “Empire.”

When we learn to identify the Archons as the true worldly source of sin, then we can begin the process of unifying with the divine by divorcing ourselves from the phenomenal world. At the end of this process, we become divine ourselves and can throw off the rule of the evil empire that governs the world. This link between mystical experience and political insurgency is constantly suggested throughout “Exegesis.” This is the idea that we are slaves to Empire, and the world is a prison from which we need to free ourselves. It is what Dick calls the BIP, the Black Iron Prison, which is opposed to the spiritual redemption of the PTG, the Palm Tree Garden. It is by open rebellion against the Archons, that one reaches true spiritual anarchy.