Customer Reviews

Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As I'm sure many others did, I purchased this book after hearing the interview with John Lash on Coast to Coast with Ian Punnett. Punnett was critical of Lash, stating that his book did not reflect a tolerant attitude towards people of faith. After reading the book though, I believe that Lash's attitude towards the Christian world is ultimately one of compassion. The book is essentially a lamentation for a paradise lost to all of humanity. But it's the in-depth examination of HOW the Gaian Paradise of the Gnostics/Pagans was lost to Christianity that is the most riveting (and incendiary) part of this book. From the ancient Hebrew cult called the Zaddikim come the origins of what Lash calls "The Redeemer Complex", of which there are four components: the creation of the world by the male creator god; the selection of the righteous few to fulfill a divine plan; the mission of the creator's son (the messiah) in the plan; and the final, apocalyptic judgment in which the world is destroyed so that the righteous can be saved by the accomplishment of divine retribution. Unlike the Pagan divinities, this salvationist creator god is a wrathful, vindictive "off-planet landlord". The earth is void of any divinity and is simply spinning dead rock from which resources may be extracted. And so, this anti-human, corrosive ideology is rightly labeled by Lash as a peculiar kind of mental virus. And as Christianity comes on the scene, the virus goes pandemic.

But what of the Christian virtues of love, charity and good will? Lash illustrates how this was never what the Gnostics were against when they wrote of the destructive influence of the Christian Cult. In fact, the Gnostics considered the Christian Beatitudes as self-evident - not something that should be written down as commandments to be followed. These Beatitudes are the sugary coating on Christianity that allows millions to swallow the Salvationism virus, and even makes being "anti-Christian" seem anti-human. I was very impressed that Lash draws from the work of two personal heroes of mine, Alan Watts and Terence McKenna. But Lash does an exceptional job of synthesizing the essential messages of these two individuals; the longing for McKenna's "Archaic Revival" and the insanity of the monarchical image of God, spoken about by Watts. Lash shows how the Gnostics ripped off the mask of the monarch to reveal his true identity - the Demiurge, or the Archons. The subject of the Archonistic influence on humanity is one that will stretch credulity with many of the readers of this book. However, it is an important part of the Gnostic mythology nonetheless.

Sadly, what we have today is what Lash calls a "Remote-controlled morality". Divorced from our essential goodness, the moral dictates of Christianity are necessary for millions to simply be able to act humanely. However, this utilitarian function does not justify the ultimate harm done by Christianity. Lash shows that indeed, "Faith can be evil when it is invested in beliefs that blind humanity to nature, and impede the genius innate to our species."

I first encountered the work of John Lamb Lash through his website, (...), when he posted a series of pieces on "2012" -- the end of the Long Count of the Mayan Calendar -- from astrological and historical perspectives. In his essays, he defined the characteristics of various "end-time tribes" that were embodying aspects of futuristic consciousness. I began a dialogue with him on this subject, and he sent me his new book, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief (Chelsea Green, 2006). This work is a tremendous achievement that reframes the debate about monotheism, offering a radical perspective on the destructive effects that have been unleashed by religious ideologies over the last two millennia.

Not In His Image attacks the salvationist theology of the Judeo-Christian tradition from a Gnostic perspective, making a devastating critique of the moral conditioning and deep-buried suppositions of this heritage, which has shaped the modern Western psyche. As substitute, Lash presents a counter-myth and alternative cosmology drawn from the tradition of Gnosticism, featuring the goddess Sophia, who plunged from the Pleroma to become the physical and generative Earth, and the Archons, soulless off-planet entities who use the human propensity for error to lead us into increasingly destructive deviations from our evolutionary path.

The populist and academic conception of Gnosticism considers it a radical offshoot from Christianity that was stamped out as the Holy Roman Empire gave way to the Dark Ages. Lash has a different perspective. In his view, the Gnostics were the inheritors of the wisdom and initiatory training of the Mystery Schools that flourished across the Classical World. This learned, pagan tradition had roots in the shamanic practices that predated the rise of Greece and Rome, and could be considered the indigenous spirituality of Europe. In some respects similar to Buddhism, the Gnostic tradition valued philosophical debate and direct mystical experience over received wisdom and authority vested in religious hierarchy. Lash connects Sophia to the modern "Gaia hypothesis," developed by the scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, and argues that the Gnostic seers of the Mystery Schools were "deep ecologists" who taught "coevolution with Gaia." The alienation from the natural world and the body that developed in Christianity was the result of a deception, leading to the "enslavement of humanity to an alien, off-planet agenda." The Gnostics understood the basis of this error, and were persecuted for voicing their opposition to it.

Lash is ruthless in analyzing the moral precepts and core concepts of the Old and New Testament. He shows the ways in which these texts were designed to appeal to the highest aspirations and ideals of humanity, but subtly twisted to create impossible incongruities. Humans were tricked into trying to conform to an inhuman code of perfection, which doomed them to continual failure in relation to an absolutist abstraction. Borrowing a concept from Tibetan Buddhism, Lash suggests substituting the concept of "basic goodness" for "original sin," and argues that Gnostics were horrified by the Christian belief in the redemptive value of suffering.

He argues that the moral ethos expressed by Jesus Christ -- the "Divine Victim" -- in the New Testament has the unfortunate effect of aiding what he calls our "victim/perpetrator" bond. The concept of "turning the other cheek," for instance, only makes sense in world without aggressors. This precept instills a sense of otherworldly superiority in the victims of violence, while it helps the agenda of those who seek to dominate. "The ethic of cheek turning is utterly wrong because it obliges people who are not inclined to harm others to rely on those who do harm to embrace the same practice of nondefense."

The commandmant to "love thy God with all thy heart" is similarly distorted: "Who really needs to be commanded to love?" Lash asks. "We love spontaneously, through the power of love itself, which cannot be commanded." Throughout the Gospels, Lash finds "a monumental effort to convert the human mind to the bad faith of betrayed humanity." In our secular culture, it seems, the belief in a salvationist power that will liberate humanity at some future point has been transferred, unconsciously, from divinity to technology. In order to reconnect with our earthly powers, we have to deprogram ourselves from all concepts of a redemptive or divine force waiting outside of this realm.

While Lash evinces a tendency to romanticize traditional and indigenous cultures, while ignoring some of the progress made by modern civilization, his critique still goes to the heart of the crisis of our current world, where disconnection from nature and entrenched belief systems have brought us to the brink of global chaos. It seems that we can't find our way forward until we find our way back, utilizing that discriminatory intelligence -- what the Gnostics called "nous" -- that is our particular human gift.

(...)

John Lash has very lucidly cleared the dust off of our religious history to reveal the true nature of the Gnostics. More tellingly, he reveals the true nature of Abrahamic religions and Salvationist Doctrine, and the toll this patriarchal view has taken on our society.

While many people attempting to leave their fundamental backgrounds behind have tried to give Jesus and the Gospels a facelift, Lash suggests the entire program be altogether scrapped. He delves deeply into what the Gnostics, or telestes, as they called themselves, had to say about their ecstatic religion. Strangely, reading the words of their enemies seems to show them in an equally refreshing light.

This is a truly scholarly work, and yet it's accessible to the lay person as well. The occasional dryness is necessary given the topic. If you have any interest at all in understanding how Western religion has brought us to this dark place filled with war, intolerance, and bigotry, read this book. You may be surprised to find it's not a deviation from religion, but a natural outgrowth of it.

This book will change your life.

It will change your world vision.

This book is the culmination of 40 years of research into mythology, theology, anthropology, and many other "ologies". Blended into a unique vision of the pre-christian world and served up with numerous notes and references for further studies.

This book is as much an end of a journey into the Gnostic world vision, as it is an opening to a plethora of even more extensive investigation into the pagan world. Into the ancient mysteries that permeated the fabric of humankind's daily life, before the rise of redemption driven dogma, and the fall of sanity.

Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, by John Lamb Lash, 2006


There comes a time when change needs to occur. Things need to evolve and grow; people need to learn, rather than to live in a perpetual state of morbid religious beliefs and ideas.

Part of that learning needs to come from history and from the facts of religion - and questioning indoctrinated religious beliefs. We need to investigate not just the bites of history and religion spoon fed to us by political and religious authorities, but from our own careful investigation into these matters.

The 4th century murder of Hypatia, one of the teachers at the great schools of Alexandria, marked the beginning of the dark age of Christianity, a dark age that continues to the present day, though most do not see or recognize this fact.

Jews and Christians murdering in the name of their god is a common theme in Judeo-Christianity's sordid past.

But what and who were they murdering? The so-called pagans and Gnostics were some of the most educated and advanced cultures/peoples on earth that were annihilated by these religious fanatics in the name of their god.

And what kind of psychotic god requires his people to kill his other creations in his name?

Most religious historians tell us that the Gnostic religion developed out of Christianity, not the other way around. But this actually requires us to believe that Christianity, unlike other religions, sprang suddenly from nowhere (as we're told to believe). That the event/advent of Jesus, God's so-called divine son, is what sparked the new, "true" religion. But is that really the truth?

The historical record outside the Bible certainly does not support what we're told to believe by the Church. If, instead, we look at Gnosticism as being far older than most believe, which many scholars have proposed, we suddenly gain a new and clear view of the origins of Christianity.

And what of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Is it true that they had an impact on the evolution of Christianity as John Marco Allegro suggested in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, and argued as one of the original DSS translators?

At the council of Nicaea Emperor Constantine pulled from these and many other religious doctrines to create the Universal creed, the Catholic Church, Christianity.

When we stop putting the cart before the horse, stop putting Christianity in the naïve realm of "sudden godly manifestation," and start realizing the themes and correlations between these ancient, suppressed texts and cultures, and the formation of Christianity, the picture becomes clear.

And it's not a pretty picture. What is revealed is a horrific history of Christians and Church fathers in a systematic effort to destroy all record of Gnosticism and the true facts regarding so-called "pagan" peoples surrounding the Mediterranean region for more than a thousand years. These mass genocides, as they should be called, wiped out untold ancient knowledge and cultures and hid these great truths. The library at Alexandria being only one of many that fanatic Christians destroyed, causing the loss of a thousand years of continued and recorded intellectual tradition in the development of science, religion and mankind, marking these acts as some of the greatest intellectual crimes in all history. The annihilation of the Celtics, Gnostics, and other "pagan" or village folk in the systematic wars of Rome, not to mention the Crusades and inquisitions, the witch hunts, and the sheer ferocity of the "kill them all and let god sort them out" mentality, destroyed the ancient history of these peoples and their records. But did it destroy it completely?

Fortunately the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Library managed to escape the path of Judeo-Christian religious fervor, and we have on record much of what these people truly believed. And it wasn't in a jealous, patristic god as we're told; and the Gnostics and pagans weren't baby killers and eaters - as we now know that this was intentional disinformation spread by the Church to hide the history of their own pagan origins.

So what did these ancient people believe? They believed in a mother goddess, Sophia, and their ties to the Earth. They believed in the use of entheogens or psychedelic drugs, such as the shamans of today. They believed in Archons, an alien like creation that guides those who will be unquestioning and blind in their following of belief. They believed that the Judeo-Christian god, Yahweh, was in fact the angry, jealous god, an Archon, who fooled the masses into believing that he was the creator god, when he (or they), were more demon than God, more devil than Lord, a deception of historic proportions.

Does this sound like a development from Judeo-Christianity? With a careful reading of the ancient texts we find that in fact Christianity heavily plagiarized many of these ancient Gnostic and pagan texts into Christian canon, not the other way around. We know because when we understand all of these documents as a whole, that one is the original, and the other plagiarized. When you have a piece of manuscript from a missing book, it's quite easy to recognize where the passage fits once you find the rest of that book, and it is clear that the Bible came from that source, not the other way around.

Freeing the mind from 2000 years of global patristic, nihilistic, suicidal tendencies will require us as a species to come to terms with this fact, that the father god figure can never be truth, because he's always insecure, jealous, narcissistic, vein, angry and violent - schizophrenic. But there is another way -- the planet-friendly vision of Sophia, the wisdom goddess embodied in Gaia, the living earth.

This book is intellectual and deep. It is well written and well researched. I could go on all day quoting golden nuggets from its pages that Lash has pulled from the archives of history, but instead I'll suggest that you read the whole book.

Excellent! 5 stars.

Lash claims his life's work evolved from orthodontic visits that gave him time to think. [A little like Stephen Hawkings' claim that ALS made him so slow at getting dressed that it gave him time to think.] One third of Lash's book echoes things I've thought over a 72 year lifetime. The other two thirds comprise insights I can't claim to have arrived at before Lash did but which mesh perfectly with the one third just referenced. The book is an amazingly incisive summary of what the JudeoChristianIslamic monotheistic mainstream belief system has done to us all in 2000 years. Someone has finally caught on to the problems but it may be too late for rescue. Systems theorist Ervin Laszlo thinks we may have about 7 years to save ourselves and the others with whom we share the planet. Lash's JudeoChristianIslamic off-planet God definitely won't do it for us. I have serious doubts that we'll make it. But Lash and Laszlo offer rays of hope that younger people might "get it" soon enough to make some powerful corrective moves. If I were still teaching graduate students in psychology and related fields, I would make their books required reading. But I'm not. So I pray that someone will do whatever it takes to get the wisdom of Lash amd Laszlo before the people who can engineer needed changes.

This book is a difficult read for those not familiar with ancient writings. I suggest a good dictionary at hand. There is a glossary which is a big help; too bad there isn't pronouncing aid. I don't have a PHD so the read was a walk over rocky soil. I plowed along to the very end, be sure you do also, as I gathered some diamonds. Whether or not one cuts, polishes, and sets these new found gems in your life as a guide is the question for you to answer.

A word of caution is in order for anyone that follows the Abrahamic teachings. The author doesn't believe that god has equivalent testicles or resides off the planet earth. He explains why kings, dictators, popes, and all domineering types love the bible. He explains why Jesus is cover for male domination and the all consuming patriartical society. As a result, if one has thin skin, don't read this book. But if one wishes to broaden his/her horizons and read a work that is well researched by a brilliant author, jump aboard!

I respect John Lam Lash's attempt to define a spirituality for deep ecology, but to my mind his approach will not serve. His paranoid rant against Christianity and Judaism is as full of holes as a sieve. Lash's overview of Gaia theory at the end of the book is helpful, but I do not see the Sophia Mythos as a "Story to Guide the Species."

To start with the mythos, clearly, Lash has not considered how this story will come across to many women. Let's see: We have a ditsy goddess on an emotional roller-coaster who with inadequate plans impulsively rushes into creating, unintentionally spawning Evil, and getting herself trapped in matter such that a male Savior (Christos) has to be sent to rescue the little woman and organize her creation for her. If Lash's explication of the myth truly represents the Gnostics, they were as patriarchal and misogynist as their Christian confreres. In my view they probably were, since they all came from Mediterranean cultures that are still misogynist in the eyes of this Northern European gal!

Actually, I see Lash as a prime exemplar of the Sophia myth: someone who rushed into creating without sufficient control of the material, who ends up trapped in it. What traps him is the straight-jacket of a Fundamentalist upbringing since although he rejects it, he thinks like a Fundamentalist and his whole approach is steeped in blinkered narrow-mindedness.

One characteristic of Fundamentalism is to cherry pick pieces of the Bible that appear to converge with science thereby "proving" that the whole Bible is literally true and factual. Lash does this with the Sophia myth. He associates pieces of it with known facts of astronomy, thereby intimating that the whole story is factually true, something he obviously believes. In doing this, he has created a belief-system for himself. He would no doubt reject this characterization, but his denial of the right to other people to explain mystery experiences in terms of their own cultural and religious beliefs shows this story is more than a theory to him. From my past experience and reading, the experience of the "Light" is pan-human, and can be explained conceptually in a thousand different ways.

Fundamentalism is essentially a-scholarly, rejecting literary criticism of the Bible, and ignoring as irrelevant any theology but its own. Despite Lash's erudition in areas that interest him, his knowledge of Christian theology is inadequate for his thesis. Tenet no. 3 of his "redeemer complex" (pp. 16, 260) is the centerpiece of Fundamentalist theology that is known elsewhere as Atonement theology, and was invented by St. Anselm in the 12th century C.E. It posits that by sharing in the sufferings of Christ one can further the redemption his death enacted. This became Roman Catholic orthodoxy that Protestantism inherited. Liberal Protestant theologians have been critiquing this over the last thirty years, and increasingly reject it (see Marcus Borg's books, widely read in liberal churches). But it is only one of about a dozen interpretations of what salvation/redemption means, and they are all so different that Lash's rolling them into one "redeemer complex" ball is grossly simplistic. Irenaeus, who Lash quotes for the Sophia myth, believed that the example of Jesus' life was what constituted the redemption. In the New Testament the words "redeemer/redemption" and "savior/salvation" are used, but they are images only, there is no theology attached to them. Who knows what associations people made, but I would guess early on it was mainly "the Passover."

Lash's "redeemer complex" (Atonement theology) critique can apply to the second millennium of Christian history in the west only (not the east), though I am puzzled that he never mentions the Inquisition, the prime example. Perhaps he considers that Christian "perpetrators" killing Jewish "perpetrators" is inconsequential. Applying the "redeemer complex" to any time frame before the 12th century C.E. is anachronistic. Anachronism combined with biblical literalism is behind his argument that Jesus promoted "Perpetrator-victim collusion." "Turning the other cheek," taken non-literally by liberal Christianity, is seen as hyperbole for "Don't get sucked into retaliatory violence." Other statements like the meek inheriting the earth would have been comforting to the victims of Roman (Pagan)oppression.

The dualism of his assertion that everything bad over three thousand years was the fault of Christianity and Judaism, and everything good was Gnostic and Pagan, does not stand up to even a cursory glance at fact. Were the Pagan Roman Emperors before Constantine beacons of tolerance and peace like Hypatia, the head of Alexandria's famed library? Did the German and Celtic tribes establish hegemony over Europe without killing anyone as Lash asserts? This hardly fits the Iron Age archaeological record where the primary artifact is the sword. With respect to human sacrifice, there is an eye-witness account of Vikings on the Volga engaging in a religious ceremony that involved the gang rape of a slave girl, and then her killing as an offering. And then Lash has the gall to say on page 346 that his rendering of the redeemer complex is not a blame game but spiritual discernment!

I do not know enough about the Dead Sea Scrolls or Judaism to be able to assess Lash's argument about the primary place of "Zaddikism" in Judaism, but I suspect it is an overwrought perspective. Certainly the assertion that Paul was not chasing Christians because they did not exist, and that Paul was a Zaddikist convert, can hardly be taken seriously unless one dismisses the New Testament completely as I guess Lash does, describing it as "Hellenistic romance." His understanding of Jesus has never got beyond the childhood prayer, "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look on me a little child," from a Wesley hymn. According to Marcus Borg, Jesus confronted the rulers of Judea by criticizing them to huge crowds at Passover so that plans to kill him went into high gear.

Fundamentalism tends to emphasize the Old Testament over the New, but Lash knows nothing of the development of thought about the deity in the Old Testament. He associates Gnosticism's roots with shamanism, but fails to see the history of Hebrew shamans - the Prophets - in the Old Testament. Some of them posited the relationship of God to Israel as a Lover to his beloved (Hosea, Song of Songs). Jesus, the Great Shaman, extended that to Lover of all. He learned this through his encounter with a Syro-Phoenician woman who responded to his assertion that his message was only for Israel by saying, "Even the dogs can eat the crumbs under the master's table." It was a moment of enlightenment for Jesus.

Yahweh grew out of being a tribal God, and Lash's association of Yahweh with Yaldabaoth does not work. Yahweh never claimed to be the creator instead of Sophia; he was simply "there" in the Garden of Eden. A much better fit for the Demiurge is Satan, and for the Archons, the Fallen Angels. There is not much myth about them in the New Testament, but they are often mentioned, and Jesus says that Satan will be seen falling from the sky at the end of the world so he clearly thought of him as an extra-terrestrial being. At the beginning of Genesis, the "Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters" is female. This is the only reference to a female creator except for the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, but at least it is something.

Lash's desire to get back to the "natural man" free of religion is understandable but naïve. As someone who grew up in a largely atheist family in a secular society, I have no trouble knowing that one can be moral without being religious. He asserts Christian morality is all about reward and punishment ignoring the possibility of altruism that in my experience is the only motivation operating. And other things besides religion, such as economic pressures, affect behavior. I think Lash's example of Native American genocide is really economic - a grab for land, and the natives were in the way. Columbus promised the kings of Spain gold, and when he could not deliver, switched to land. It was his head or the natives'. Lash is desperate to be free of Fundamentalism, but he expresses its mirror image in his thinking, and operates out of a very unattractive negative polarity. His insistence that we need him as guide to the opaque Gnostic writings is very patriarchal and Fundamentalist.

In my view, the failure of Gnosticism had less to do with persecution than with its having become irrelevant as the religion of an elite educated minority. Most men were farmers and had to understand nature to grow food. They did not need a mystical experience of union with it like the elite who depended on slaves to grow their food. Under Roman domination it seems to me many would have found the Christian message of life after death and treating others well appealing. This would account more for its success than Constantine's power. In fact the Mystery of Mithras, the god who rose from the dead, was popular with the Roman army. Soldiers especially needed a belief in life after death. Closeness to nature through farming did not really change until the development of 19th century industrialism that also created pollution on a huge scale. The Romantic poets exalting nature no doubt responded to an emotional need for Nature at that time.

While I found little to appreciate, the connection Lash makes between Gnostics and learning/universities in the ancient world I found interesting, and is likely to be true. What he says about evil on page 289 ff makes sense. His image of the Archons as cyborg mimics and deceivers is engaging particularly in this computer age. But I much prefer another attempt to provide a spirituality for deep ecology written in 1983. It is Matthew Fox's "Original Blessing." He also criticizes Atonement theology, but his book is written out of the positive polarity and is a re-statement of the Christian Mystical tradition for the 21st century that includes insights from other religions. It seems that Lash knows nothing of that tradition. About the same time, Fox was editor of a series of booklets, "Meditations with the Mystics," that use quotes that emphasize the connections those mystics felt with nature. "Original Blessing" does not provide a mythos, but it emphasizes all the principles of an engaged life with the whole of creation. We do now need a nature myth or cosmology that is not dryly a-personal. Emotions including love are part of nature and since we have them, they are also a part of the Great Mystery, whether the image is His or Hers or belongs to both genders.

A very intelligent man I know raved about this book saying if I didn't like it he would personally refund the purchase price. He has sent copies to a dozen of his friends. Most reviews on Amazon are very positive. So why do I think this is a bad, mishmash, disaster of a book? Just like Lash I have no belief in the vindictive Big-Daddy-In-The-Sky idea of God. I also respect deep ecology and the Gaia hypothesis. I think we believe many things that aint so, and am open to new ideas. But not to this book.
First of all Lash attempts too much. You can't just cram all this material into 400 pages, you need to develop your ideas,have a good structure, and you need to be selective. If you pretend to write an at least quasi-scholarly book you can't take the liberties Lash takes. For example, Lash says the Gnostics said this or objected to that or believed this when the truth is that the term "Gnostic" is almost meaningless. This was a term that Christian scholars, hung on widely disparate "heretical" groups, some of which had truly weird beliefs. About the only thing they had in common was that orthodox Christians tried to extinguish them. So to say Gnostics this and Gnostics that is like saying philosophers say this and philosophers believe that. Totally meaningless, unless you want to flog your agenda. If you must generalize you might say many Gnostics had a generally dark view of the world, believing it was a vale of tears and injustice and the sooner you could free yourself from it the better. Many groups claimed secret knowledge that would help you do this. But this goes contrary to Lash's respect for deep ecology and Gaia philosophy which honors and respects the earth and nature. The efforts here are to save the planet, not flee it.
Lash would take Christianity, Judaism and Islam and dump all of it in the garbage bin. Not only does he feel these are false religions but actually malevolent, having done a great deal of damage to the world. Certainly, the Bible's injunction to "subdue the earth" and the fact that we haven't heard many high Muslim clerics condemn suicide bombers, leads some weight to his argument. But it is simplistic. Lash mentions the Nag Hamadi Library many times, discovered in 1945 in Egypt, but his take on what I think is the most important book in this library, the Gospel of Thomas, is that it is a collection of "banal platitudes". If you want to see how absurd this statement is read Stevan L. Davies' fine book "The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom". Not only that, but Davies also has a powerful explanation on the meaning of "Sophia" or Wisdom which in Lash is just an abstraction. The Gospel of Thomas is not a Gnostic book, although it was found with a bunch of gnostic texts.(I hope what I said doesn't discourage you from investigating Gnosticism in such excellent books as those by Elaine Pagels or from browsing the website of the Gnostic Society in Los Angeles. The Secret Book of John, a gnostic gospel, reads in part as if it was taken out of some Taoist volume.)
I think I know why some readers rave about the book, and here I can join them. They intuitively sense that the Abrahamic religions, the Big Daddy In The Sky ones, are false and have alienated us from our world and our bodies. In contrast today's refurbished Gnostic type teachings try to restore our unity with the world and connect us with our spirit. This is what William Blake and Jacob Boehme were about. Some pagans also had this understanding, as did America's Navajos. And so does the Book of Thomas, which some scholars believe contains the first recorded words of Jesus.

I came to this book with high hopes, as there are all too few works which take full blooded `anti-Abrahamic' approach to the subject, preferring to try and amalgamate Gnosticism and mystery religions to some grand new age vision shared by Greeks and Jews, Hindus and Christians. And Lash starts off doing a pretty good job, showing just how crazy and evil the Jewish `god' is, along with his later Christian and Islamic transformations.

In his picture, (compatible with the approach of de Benoist and the other European neo-pagans, who are not mentioned in the text) the destruction of the Second Temple led to the creation of the Jewish mentality, in which temporal triumph (a la Rome and other normal people) is replaced by an eventual otherworldly triumph after the destruction of `this world' -- i.e., apocalypse. Like his hero D. H. Lawrence, he suggests that the Jews co-opted the personal transformation offered by pagan mysteries into an endlessly pre-empted national triumph and fleshly rebirth in a new world. His analysis of `the redeemer complex' is intriguing, as is his use of it to explain how Christianity `triumphed' -- by first violently destroying pagan cultures, "turning them into victims," then offering a "reformulated justification of the victim role" which promised that "they would ultimately be saved," a brilliant way to co-opt victims into future victimizers. And his suggestion that the origins of contemporary suicide terror lie in the Jewish Dead Sea cultists is profound, not cheap and easy sensationalism. As my friend Alisdair Clarke has speculated on his Aryan Futurism blog, is there not the suggestion of something deadly, radioactive perhaps, an ageless evil, almost Lovecraftian, sleeping under the sand of that quarrelsome land with its dead sea and endless tribal violence?

Alas, although I obviously endorse much of this book, I find that it fails utterly, when judged as a work of scholarship. Lash, whatever his real qualifications might be, writes like an autodidact, with all of the related faults. No wonder the King of Autodidacticism, Colin Wilson, contributes a blurb saying `Lash's historical and anthropological erudition are [sic!] breathtaking." I'm afraid that grammatical solecism is typical of the book's problems.

First, Lash exhibits the bad habit of citing only evidence that supports him, rather than dealing with (apparent) anomalies. Thus, he suggests that the patriarchal god arises from the Jewish patriarchal family, as if most, if not all, pagan societies were not. Tell that to the Roman pater familias!

More seriously, Lash avoids all discussion or mention (although I'm going by his unreliable index here, see below) of the mysteries of Mithras, even though this was an official religion of the Empire (before Christianity), gave Christianity a run for its money, and last left us the most extensive records of all the mystery religions (such as the famous Mithraic Liturgy, available in the Mead anthology Lash constantly refers to). Could this omission be due to the fact that the Mithras cult does not fit into his simple patriarchal Christianity vs. Goddess/Gaian mystery paradigm?

However, I lost all confidence in Mr. Lash after turning to his `suggestions for reading and research' at the end. First, I only found this at the back because Lash fails to include the bibliography I was looking for, thus making it impossible to track down what editions he's using. The page numbering of my Penguin edition of Lawrence is certainly not his, for instance. I might let that scholarly flaw pass, however, if the "suggestions" were not so flawed as to be insulting. I don't mind his self-described "idiosyncratic" approach to selection and evaluation. I mean that he fails the basic test of being correct about things I know about, thus raising the issue of what he's wrong about elsewhere, where I have to rely on him.

Thus, we read the following incredible claim: "Unfortunately, the sole existing English translation [is] by the English Platonist Thomas Taylor....' Now I have only to half turn to my bookshelf to see the pricey but available paperback of the Clarke/Dillon/Hershell translation, along with a number of works, such as Shaw's Theurgy and the Soul which give quite adequate accounts and many excerpts from Iamblichus. This is not buried in obscure scholarly publications. All Mr. Lash needed to do to verify this claim, or to find himself a better translation, was to do what I did: search Amazon.com! How lazy and incompetent is this guy?

Later, Lash asserts that Harold Bloom gives a "brief, sober, no discounting passage on ... entheogenic practices." Now this intrigues me, so I consult Lash's index to find what he has to say himself. No entries on etheo-anything! And yet, here is at least one right before me. Did it slip by, because Lash in fact never discusses entheogens elsewhere in the text? No, in fact, a few pages later is a whole section of "suggestions" on the subject!

And here is where I throw the book aside onto the `read when bored and nothing else is around` pile. The section is entitled "Entheogenic Theory of Religion" and states "There are hundreds of text-heavy sites and heady forums dedicated to entheogenics on the Internet, but, unfortunately [there's that word again, always a clue to a howler on the way -- Lash mistakes his laziness for empirical restraint], they are all orientated toward recreational use of drugs and sacred plants, rather than sacramental use."

All? All? Now in elementary logic, I learned I could refute an `all' statement by finding one counterexample. Again, is it some obscure site? Well, how obscure is something on the Internet going to be? Get on the Google, as our president would say, and 9 hits come up for "entheogenic theory of religion" (the title of his section, remember), two of which lead to Michael Hoffman's Ego Death website, where his epochal article "Entheogenic Theory of Religion and Ego Death" can be found, along with hundreds of pages of articles and links to similar material. And needless to say, all the really new and useful books are unmentioned as well. Clark Heinrich, anyone?

Alas, Mr. Lash, as Housman said of incompetent textual critics, "the world is no feather bed for the repose of sluggards." If you want convince anyone but the most credulous, or the already convinced, you will have to do more work than this.

Three stars, but only for the Hebrew-bashing!