Gnosticism and the Otherself

A follow-up to "Otherworlds" with David Bentley Hart

David,

I am kicking myself that, in our recent conversation on gnosticism, I did not mention that, in my humble opinion, The Dark Crystal is probably the senior gnostic fantasy of quality to be produced in our age, cinematically speaking. Several factors coalesced to secure this outcome, but most of them are simply different auspices under which to speak of the multifaceted genius of Jim Henson, who conceived the film while looking at artwork inspired by Lewis Carroll and through a long fascination with the Seth Material of Jane Roberts—in that sense, one could say The Dark Crystal is Sethian, though not in the ancient sense of that term.

I presume you will remember the fundamental premise of the story, if you have seen it, and if your love of The Muppets translates across Henson’s voluminous oeuvre: on another world, in another time, another age, the planet Thra is dying. Millennia ago, the Urskeks—otherworldly beings of astral quality—arrived on Thra, and befriended Thra’s female avatar, the witch Aughra, who showed them the Crystal of Truth, the planet’s heart. The Urskeks were in fact exiled from their home-world for arrogance, and that arrogance followed them to Thra, where through experimentation on the Crystal they cracked it and were themselves each separated into two metaphysically conjoined beings: the Mystics or urRu, natural wizards devoted to reverence for nature and learning its secrets, and the vulture-like Skeksis. The Skeksis are not so much evil as they are entirely carnal: their capitalist dominion over Thra is a product of their need to secure food and fleshly comfort, and only later turns to actual consumption of the life force of their native subjects to preserve their unnaturally long life. By the time of the original film, however, the Skeksis have all but run out of the resources to continue sapping the life of Thra for their selfish ends: and Jen, the last Gelfling, is sent by the Mystics to restore the lost shard of the Crystal of Truth, thereby enabling the Mystics to reabsorb their Skeksis other halves and be restored as the Urskeks—thereby also healing the planet.

Of course, one of the fundamental ideas in ancient gnostic systems is the concept of the Heavenly Other, the twin who is in some sense oneself as much as a counterpart.

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In mainstream Judaism and Christianity, this survives, of course, as the doctrine of the guardian angel, who is in some sense both one’s warden and in some sense one’s telos of personal becoming. And as we had the chance to discuss a bit, closely related is the widespread idea of antiquity that each person had a personal guardian daimon, which, as Greek-speaking Jews and Christians developed their demonology in conversation with the Greek world, could come to be understood as the dark other.

The conceptual framework of the human being’s possible metaphysical trajectories towards the infernal and the celestial, dragging all of nature in its wake, is fundamental to the apocalyptic traditions and their gnostic receptions in later antiquity. Yet already in some ancient sources, the spiritual and moral struggle of the gnostic is not merely to reject the dark in favor of the light, but to face it: it is no accident that from the Apocalypse of Zephaniah all the way to Dante and much later to Jung (whose understanding of gnosticism as an ancient system is of course somewhat tenuous, and the path is by no means direct), the only way up is down: the seer must first confront the underworld, both the cosmic and the psychic, before he can ascend to the empyrean. In this sense, too, the stratification or fragmentation of the hypostatic subject across multiple psychocorporeal entities—a guardian daimon, a human, an angelos, etc.—seems to serve the purpose of that encounter.

This theme would seem to pull together threads from both of our conversations, as well as some of what is said in Roland regarding rebirth or gilgul or whatever one wants to call it. It would also seem to lend itself handily towards the universalism of St. Gregory Nyssen as laid out, for example, in the relevant meditation of That All Shall Be Saved: beyond the fact that our persons are intractably wrapped up in one another beyond any ability to be parted, could it further be that our hypostaseis are in fact scattered across time and space, across the hierarchy of being in ways we are typically ignorant of and could not imagine?

I realize that I am preaching to the choir here, if not the choirmaster. Of interest to the way we began our conversation, however, and to your forthcoming book, I wonder if perhaps the literary value of phantasia as a genre is not its intrinsically apocalyptic and gnostic quality. Every piece of fantasy is an act of seeing as much as it is an act of creating: the two are really the same, of course, just as for God to contemplate all that subsists in the Logos in the delight of the Spirit is not other than to create it. Because God is qualitatively infinite, I cannot see how the number of such things which God beholds in the eternal Word are not also quantitatively infinite,

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and therefore how our own acts of phantasia are not simply acts of communion with God, and insofar as seeing is creating, therefore acts of theurgy. God has long since eternally seen all that we see, at least insofar as what we see in the imaginal realm is true, good, and beautiful, or reflective thereof; and God permits, however temporarily, the twisting of the imaginal world to include the demonic underworlds that our souls contain and project into the cosmos beyond us. Even dark fantasies, then—the ghoulish and the horrific—reflect something of the infinite divine creativity even as they also reflect the special pathologies of the soul. Just as, after all, kaiju—in biblical literature, Leviathan and Behemoth—are variously God’s primeval enemies from the watery chaos considered from the perspective of oikonomia and his beloved pets as regards theologia, so are the beings which proliferate in what to us seem the dark regions of other worlds from one gnostic vantage enemies of God’s and ours and, from another, manifest aspects of the divine beauty who only have yet to be revealed in the encompassing light that God is.

A spectral October to you,
David

1. See, e.g., M. David Litwa, “I Will Become Him: Homology and Deification in the Gospel of Thomas,” JBL 133 (2015): 427-447; Andrei Orlov, Dark Mirrors: Azazel and Satanel in Early Jewish Demonology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012); idem, The Greatest Mirror: Heavenly Counterparts in the Jewish Pseudepigrapha (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017)

2. I wrote on this here: https://www.mercyonall.org/posts/words-in-the-word-on-the-multiverse.